Many causes have contributed to the rapid increase of this evil. The ruinous wars of the present reign, and the oppressive system of taxation pursued by the late premier, are among the principal. But the manufacturing system is the main cause; it is the inevitable tendency of that system to multiply the number of the poor, and to make them vicious, diseased, and miserable.
To answer the question concerning the comparative advantages of the savage and social states, as Rousseau has done, is to commit high treason against human nature, and blasphemy against Omniscient Goodness; but they who say that society ought to stop where it is, and that it has no further amelioration to expect, do not less blaspheme the one, and betray the other. The improvements of society never reach the poor: they have been stationary, while the higher classes were progressive. The gentry of the land are better lodged, better accommodated, better educated than their ancestors; the poor man lives in as poor a dwelling as his forefathers when they were slaves of the soil, works as hard, is worse fed, and not better taught. His situation, therefore, is relatively worse. There is, indeed, no insuperable bar to his rising into a higher order—his children may be tradesmen, merchants, or even nobles—but this political advantage is no amendment of his actual state. The best conceivable state for man is that wherein he has the full enjoyment of all his powers, bodily and intellectual. This is the lot of the higher classes in Europe; the poor enjoys neither—the savage only the former. If, therefore, religion were out of the question, it had been happier for the poor man to have been born among savages, than in a civilized country, where he is in fact the victim of civilization.
LETTER XXVII.
Saint Paul’s.—Anecdote of a female Esquimaux.—Defect of Grecian Architecture in cold Climates.—Nakedness of the Church.—Monuments.—Pictures offered by Sir Joshua Reynolds, &c., and refused.— Ascent.—View from the Summit.
The cathedral church of St Paul’s is not more celebrated than it deserves to be. No other nation in modern times has reared so magnificent a monument of piety. I never behold it without regretting that such a church should be appropriated to heretical worship;—that, like a whited sepulchre, there should be death within.
In the court before the grand entrance stands a statue of Queen Anne, instead of a cross; a figure as ill-executed as it is ill-placed, which has provoked some epigrams even in this country, indifferent as the taste in sculpture is here, and little as is the sense of religious decorum. On entering the church I was impressed by its magnitude. A fine anecdote is related of the effect this produced upon a female Esquimaux:—quite overpowered with wonder when she stood under the dome, she leaned upon her conductor, as if sinking under the strong feeling of awe, and fearfully asked him, “Did man make it? or was it put here?” My own sensations were of the same character, yet it was wonder at human power unmingled with any other kind of awe; not that feeling which a temple should inspire; not so much a sense that the building in which I stood was peculiarly suitable for worship, as that it could be suitable for nothing else. Gothic architecture produces the effect of sublimity, though always without simplicity, and often without magnitude; so perhaps does the Saracenic; if the Grecian ever produce the same effect it is by magnitude alone. But the architecture of the ancients is altered, and materially injured by the alteration, when adapted to cold climates, where it is necessary when the light is admitted to exclude the air: the windows have always a littleness, always appear misplaced; they are holes cut in the wall: not, as in the Gothic, natural and essential parts of the general structure.
The air in all the English churches which I have yet entered is damp, cold, confined, and unwholesome, as if the graves beneath tainted it. No better proof can be required of the wisdom of enjoining incense. I have complained that the area in their ordinary churches is crowded; but the opposite fault is perceivable in this great cathedral. The choir is but a very small part of the church; service was going on there, being hurried over as usual in week-days, and attended only by two or three old women, whose piety deserved to meet with better instructors. The vergers, however, paid so much respect to this service, such as it is, that they would not show us the church till it was over. There are no chapels, no other altar than that in the choir;—for what then can the heretics have erected so huge an edifice? It is as purposeless as the Pyramids.
Here are suspended all the flags which were taken in the naval victories of the late war. I do not think that the natural feeling which arose within me at seeing the Spanish colours among them influences me, when I say that they do not ornament the church, and that, even if they did, the church is not the place for them. They might be appropriate offerings in a temple of Mars; but certainly there is nothing in the revealed will of God which teaches us that he should be better pleased with the blood of man in battle, than with that of bulls and of goats in sacrifice. The palace, the houses of legislature, the admiralty, and the tower where the regalia are deposited, should be decorated with these trophies; so also should Greenwich be, the noble asylum for their old seamen; and even in the church a flag might perhaps fitly be hung over the tomb of him who won it and fell in the victory. Monuments are erecting here to all the naval captains who fell in these actions; some of them are not finished; those which are do little honour to the artists of England. The artists know not what to do with their villainous costume, and, to avoid uniforms in marble, make their unhappy statues half naked. One of these represents the dying captain as falling into Neptune’s arms;—a dreadful situation for a dying captain it would be—he would certainly take the old sea-god for the devil, and the trident for the pitchfork with which he tosses about souls in the fire. Will sculptors never perceive the absurdity of allegorizing in stone!
There are but few of these monuments as yet, because the English never thought of making St Paul’s the mausoleum of their great men, till they had crowded Westminster Abbey with the illustrious and the obscure indiscriminately. They now seem to have discovered the nakedness of this huge edifice, and to vote parliamentary monuments to every sea captain who falls in battle, for the sake of filling it as fast as possible. This is making the honour too common. It is only the name of the commander in chief which is always necessarily connected with that of the victory; he, therefore, is the only individual to whom a national monument ought to be erected. If he survives the action, and it be thought expedient, as I willingly allow it to be, that every victory should have its monument, let it be, like the stone at Thermopylæ, inscribed to the memory of all who fell. The commander in chief may deserve a separate commemoration: the responsibility of the engagement rests upon him; and to him the merit of the victory, as far as professional skill is entitled to it, will, whether justly or not, be attributed, though assuredly in most cases with the strictest justice. But whatever may have been the merit of the subordinate officers, the rank which they hold is not sufficiently conspicuous. The historian will mention them, but the reader will not remember them because they are mentioned but once, and it is only to those who are remembered that statues should be voted; only to those who live in the hearts and in the mouths of the people. “Who is this?” is a question which will be asked at every statue; but if after the verger has named the person represented it is still necessary to ask, “Who is he?” the statue is misplaced in a national mausoleum.