FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTERS

TO THE WORKMEN AND LABOURERS OF GREAT BRITAIN.

BY
JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.,
HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND SLADE PROFESSOR OF FINE ART.

Vol. II.
GEORGE ALLEN,
SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON, KENT.
1872.

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XIII.

My Friends,

1st January, 1872.

I would wish you a happy New Year, if I thought my wishes likely to be of the least use. Perhaps, indeed, if your cap of liberty were what you always take it for, a wishing cap, I might borrow it of you, for once; and be so much cheered by the chime of its bells, as to wish you a happy New Year, whether you deserved one or not: which would be the worst thing I could possibly bring to pass for you. But wishing cap, belled or silent, you can lend me none; and my wishes having proved, for the most part, vain for myself, except in making me wretched till I got rid of them, I will not present you with anything which I have found to be of so little worth. But if you trust more to any one else’s than mine, let me advise your requesting them to wish that you may deserve a happy New Year, whether you get one or not.

To some extent, indeed, that way, you are sure to get it: and it will much help you towards the seeing such way if you would make it a practice in your talk always to say you “deserve” things, instead of that you “have a right” to them. Say that you “deserve” a vote,—“deserve” so much a day, instead of that you have “a right to” a vote, etc. The expression is both more accurate and more general; for if it chanced, which heaven forbid,—but it might be,—that you deserved a whipping, you would never think of expressing that fact by saying you “had a right to” a whipping; and if you deserve anything better than that, why conceal your deserving under the neutral term, “rights”; as if you never meant to claim more than might be claimed also by entirely nugatory and worthless persons? Besides, such accurate use of language will lead you sometimes into reflection on the fact, that what you deserve, it is not only well for you to get, but certain that you ultimately will get; and neither less nor more.

Ever since Carlyle wrote that sentence about rights and mights, in his “French Revolution,” all blockheads of a benevolent class have been declaiming against him, as a worshipper of force. What else, in the name of the three Magi, is to be worshipped? Force of brains, Force of heart, Force of hand;—will you dethrone these, and worship apoplexy?—despise the spirit of Heaven, and worship phthisis? Every condition of idolatry is summed in the one broad wickedness of refusing to worship Force, and resolving to worship No-Force;—denying the Almighty, and bowing down to four-and-twopence with a stamp on it.

But Carlyle never meant in that place to refer you to such final truth. He meant but to tell you that before you dispute about what you should get, you would do well to find out first what is to be gotten. Which briefly is, for everybody, at last, their deserts, and no more.

I did not choose, in beginning this book a year since, to tell you what I meant it to become. This, for one of several things, I mean,—that it shall put before you so much of the past history of the world, in an intelligible manner, as may enable you to see the laws of Fortune or Destiny, “Clavigera,” Nail bearing; or, in the full idea, nail-and-hammer bearing; driving the iron home with hammer-stroke, so that nothing shall be moved; and fastening each of us at last to the Cross we have chosen to carry. Nor do I doubt being able to show you that this irresistible power is also just; appointing measured return for every act and thought, such as men deserve.

And that being so, foolish moral writers will tell you that whenever you do wrong you will be punished, and whenever you do right rewarded: which is true, but only half the truth. And foolish immoral writers will tell you that if you do right, you will get no good; and if you do wrong dexterously, no harm. Which, in their sense of good and harm, is true also, but, even in that sense, only half the truth. The joined and four-square truth is, that every right is exactly rewarded, and every wrong exactly punished; but that, in the midst of this subtle, and, to our impatience, slow, retribution, there is a startlingly separate or counter ordinance of good and evil,—one to this man, and the other to that,—one at this hour of our lives, and the other at that,—ordinance which is entirely beyond our control; and of which the providential law, hitherto, defies investigation.

To take an example near at hand, which I can answer for. Throughout the year which ended this morning, I have been endeavouring, more than hitherto in any equal period, to act for others more than for myself: and looking back on the twelve months, am satisfied that in some measure I have done right. So far as I am sure of that, I see also, even already, definitely proportioned fruit, and clear results following from that course;—consequences simply in accordance with the unfailing and undeceivable Law of Nature.

That it has chanced to me, in the course of the same year, to have to sustain the most acute mental pain yet inflicted on my life;—to pass through the most nearly mortal illness;—and to write your Christmas letter beside my mother’s dead body, are appointments merely of the hidden Fors, or Destiny, whose power I mean to trace for you in past history, being hitherto, in the reasons of it, indecipherable, yet palpably following certain laws of storm, which are in the last degree wonderful and majestic.

Setting this Destiny, over which you have no control whatsoever, for the time, out of your thoughts, there remains the symmetrical destiny, over which you have control absolute—namely, that you are ultimately to get—exactly what you are worth.

And your control over this destiny consists, therefore, simply in being worth more or less, and not at all in voting that you are worth more or less. Nay, though you should leave voting, and come to fighting, which I see is next proposed, you will not, even that way, arrive any nearer to your object—admitting that you have an object, which is much to be doubted. I hear, indeed, that you mean to fight for a Republic, in consequence of having been informed by Mr. John Stuart Mill, and others, that a number of utilities are embodied in that object. We will inquire into the nature of this object presently, going over the ground of my last January’s letter again; but first, may I suggest to you that it would be more prudent, instead of fighting to make us all republicans against our will,—to make the most of the republicans you have got. There are many, you tell me, in England,—more in France, a sprinkling in Italy,—and nobody else in the United States. What should you fight for, being already in such prevalence? Fighting is unpleasant, now-a-days, however glorious, what with mitrailleuses, torpedoes, and mismanaged commissariat. And what, I repeat, should you fight for? All the fighting in the world cannot make us Tories change our old opinions, any more than it will make you change your new ones. It cannot make us leave off calling each other names if we like—Lord this, and the Duke of that, whether you republicans like it or not. After a great deal of trouble on both sides, it might, indeed, end in abolishing our property; but without any trouble on either side, why cannot your friends begin by abolishing their own? Or even abolishing a tithe of their own? Ask them to do merely as much as I, an objectionable old Tory, have done for you. Make them send you in an account of their little properties, and strike you off a tenth, for what purposes you see good; and for the remaining nine-tenths, you will find clue to what should be done in the ‘Republican’ of last November, wherein Mr. W. Riddle, C.E., “fearlessly states” that all property must be taken under control; which is, indeed, precisely what Mr. Carlyle has been telling you these last thirty years, only he seems to have been under an impression, which I certainly shared with him, that you republicans objected to control of any description. Whereas if you let anybody put your property under control, you will find practically he has a good deal of hold upon you also.

You are not all agreed upon that point perhaps? But you are all agreed that you want a Republic. Though England is a rich country, having worked herself literally black in the face to become so, she finds she cannot afford to keep a Queen any longer;—is doubtful even whether she would not get on better Queenless; and I see with consternation that even one of my own personal friends, Mr. Auberon Herbert, rising the other day at Nottingham, in the midst of great cheering, declares that, though he is not in favour of any immediate change, yet, “if we asked ourselves what form of government was the most reasonable, the most in harmony with ideas of self-government and self-responsibility, and what Government was most likely to save us from unnecessary divisions of party, and to weld us into one compact mass, he had no hesitation in saying the weight of argument was in favour of a Republic.”[1]

Well, suppose we were all welded into a compact mass. Might it not still be questionable what sort of a mass we were? After any quantity of puddling, iron is still nothing better than iron;—in any rarity of dispersion, gold-dust is still gold. Mr. Auberon Herbert thinks it desirable that you should be stuck together. Be it so; but what is there to stick? At this time of year, doubtless, some of your children, interested generally in production of puddings, delight themselves, to your great annoyance, with speculative pudding in the gutter; and enclose, between unctuous tops and bottoms, imaginary mince. But none of them, I suppose, deliberately come in to their mothers, at cooking-time, with materials for a treat on Republican principles. Mud for suet—gravel for plums—droppings of what heaven may send for flavour;—“Please, mother, a towel, to knot it tight—(or, to use Mr. Herbert’s expression, “weld it into a compact mass”)—Now for the old saucepan, mother; and you just lay the cloth!”

My friends, I quoted to you last year the foolishest thing, yet said, according to extant history, by lips of mankind—namely, that the cause of starvation is quantity of meat.[2] But one can yet see what the course of foolish thought was which achieved that saying: whereas, though it is not absurd to quite the same extent to believe that a nation depends for happiness and virtue on the form of its government, it is more difficult to understand how so large a number of otherwise rational persons have been beguiled into thinking so. The stuff of which the nation is made is developed by the effort and the fate of ages: according to that material, such and such government becomes possible to it, or impossible. What other form of government you try upon it than the one it is fit for, necessarily comes to nothing; and a nation wholly worthless is capable of none.

Notice, therefore, carefully Mr. Herbert’s expression “welded into a compact mass.” The phrase would be likely enough to occur to any one’s mind, in a midland district; and meant, perhaps, no more than if the speaker had said “melted,” or “blended” into a mass. But whether Mr. Herbert meant more or not, his words meant more. You may melt glass or glue into a mass, but you can only weld, or wield, metal. And are you sure that, if you would have a Republic, you are capable of being welded into one? Granted that you are no better than iron, are you as good? Have you the toughness in you? and can you bear the hammering? Or, would your fusion together,—your literal con-fusion—be as of glass only, blown thin with nitrogen, and shattered before it got cold?

Welded Republics there indeed have been, ere now, but they ask first for bronze, then for a hammerer, and mainly, for patience on the anvil. Have you any of the three at command,—patience, above all things, the most needed, yet not one of your prominent virtues? And, finally, for the cost of such smith’s work,—My good friends, let me recommend you, in that point of view, to keep your Queen.

Therefore, for your first bit of history this year, I will give you one pertinent to the matter, which will show you how a monarchy, and such a Republic as you are now capable of producing, have verily acted on special occasion, so that you may compare their function accurately.

The special occasion that I choose shall be the most solemn of all conceivable acts of Government; the adjudging and execution of the punishment of Death. The two examples of it shall be, one under an absolutely despotic Monarchy, acting through ministers trained in principles of absolute despotism; and the other in a completely free Republic, acting by its collective wisdom, and in association of its practical energies.

The example of despotism shall be taken from the book which Mr. Froude most justly calls “the prose epic of the English nation,” the records compiled by Richard Hakluyt, Preacher, and sometime Student of Christchurch in Oxford, imprinted at London by Ralph Newberie, anno 1599, and then in five volumes, quarto, in 1811, two hundred and seventy copies only of this last edition being printed.

These volumes contain the original—usually personal,—narratives of the earliest voyages of the great seamen of all countries,—the chief part of them English; who “first went out across the unknown seas, fighting, discovering, colonizing; and graved out the channels, paving them at last with their bones, through which the commerce and enterprise of England has flowed out over all the world.”[3] I mean to give you many pieces to read out of this book, which Mr. Froude tells you truly is your English Homer; this piece, to our present purpose, is already quoted by him in his essay on England’s forgotten worthies; among whom, far-forgotten though they be, most of you must have heard named Sir Francis Drake. And of him, it now imports you to know this much: that he was the son of a clergyman, who fled into Devonshire to escape the persecution of Henry VIII. (abetted by our old friend, Sir Thomas of Utopia)—that the little Frank was apprenticed by his father to the master of a small vessel trading to the Low Countries; and that as apprentice, he behaved so well that his master, dying, left him his vessel, and he begins his independent life with that capital. Tiring of affairs with the Low Countries, he sells his little ship, and invests his substance in the new trade to the West Indies. In the course of his business there, the Spaniards attack him, and carry off his goods. Whereupon, Master Francis Drake, making his way back to England, and getting his brother John to join with him, after due deliberation, fits out two ships, to wit, the Passover of 70 tons, and the Swan of 24, with 73 men and boys (both crews, all told,) and a year’s provision; and, thus appointed, Master Frank in command of the Passover, and Master John in command of the Swan, weigh anchor from Plymouth on the 24th of May, 1572, to make reprisals on the most powerful nation of the then world. And making his way in this manner over the Atlantic, and walking with his men across the Isthmus of Panama, he beholds “from the top of a very high hill, the great South Sea, on which no English ship had ever sailed. Whereupon, he lifted up his hands to God, and implored His blessing on the resolution which he then formed, of sailing in an English ship on that sea.” In the meantime, building some light fighting pinnaces, of which he had brought out the material in the Passover, and boarding what Spanish ships he can, transferring his men to such as he finds most convenient to fight in, he keeps the entire coast of Spanish America in hot water for several months; and having taken and rifled, between Carthagena and Nombre de Dios (Name of God) more than two hundred ships of all sizes, sets sail cheerfully for England, arriving at Plymouth on the 9th of August, 1573, on Sunday, in the afternoon; and so much were the people delighted with the news of their arrival, that they left the preacher, and ran in crowds to the quay, with shouts and congratulations.

He passes four years in England, explaining American affairs to Queen Elizabeth and various persons at court; and at last in mid-life, in the year 1577, he obtains a commission from the Queen, by which he is constituted Captain-general of a fleet of five ships: the Pelican, admiral, 100 tons, his own ship; the Elizabeth, vice-admiral, 80 tons; the Swan, 50 tons; Marigold, 30; and Christopher (Christbearer) 15; the collective burden of the entire fleet being thus 275 tons; its united crews 164 men, all told: and it carries whatever Sir Francis thought “might contribute to raise in those nations, with whom he should have any intercourse, the highest ideas of the politeness and magnificence of his native country. He, therefore, not only procured a complete service of silver for his own table, and furnished the cook-room with many vessels of the same metal, but engaged several musicians to accompany him.”

I quote from Johnson’s life of him,—you do not know if in jest or earnest? Always in earnest, believe me, good friends. If there be jest in the nature of things, or of men, it is no fault of mine. I try to set them before you as they truly are. And Sir Francis and his crew, musicians and all, were in uttermost earnest, as in the quiet course of their narrative you will find. For arriving on the 20th of June, 1578, “in a very good harborough, called by Magellan Port St. Julian, where we found a gibbet standing upon the maine, which we supposed to be the place where Magellan did execution upon his disobedient and rebellious company; … in this port our Generall began to inquire diligently of the actions of M. Thomas Doughtie, and found them not to be such as he looked for, but tending rather to contention or mutinie, or some other disorder, whereby (without redresse) the successe of the voyage might greatly have bene hazarded; whereupon the company was called together and made acquainted with the particulars of the cause, which were found, partly by Master Doughtie’s owne confession, and partly by the evidence of the fact, to be true; which when our Generall saw, although his private affection to M. Doughtie (as hee then in the presence of us all sacredly protested) was great, yet the care he had of the state of the voyage, of the expectation of her Maiestie, and of the honour of his countrey, did more touch him (as, indeede, it ought) than the private respect of one man: so that, the cause being thoroughly heard, and all things done in good order, as neere as might be to the course of our lawes in England, it was concluded that M. Doughtie should receive punishment according to the qualitie of the offence: and he, seeing no remedie but patience for himselfe, desired before his death to receive the Communion, which he did at the hands of M. Fletcher, our Minister, and our Generall himselfe accompanied him in that holy action: which being done, and the place of execution made ready, hee having embraced our Generall, and taken his leave of all the companie, with prayer for the Queen’s Maiestie and our realme, in quiet sort laid his head to the blocke, where he ended his life. This being done, our Generall made divers speaches to the whole company, persuading us to unitie, obedience, love, and regard of our voyage; and for the better confirmation thereof, willed evry man the next Sunday following to prepare himselfe to receive the Communion, as Christian brethren and friends ought to doe, which was done in very reverent sort, and so with good contentment every man went about his businesse.”

Thus pass judgment and execution, under a despotic Government and despotic Admiral, by religious, or, it may be, superstitious, laws.

You shall next see how judgment and execution pass on the purest republican principles; every man’s opinion being held as good as his neighbour’s; and no superstitious belief whatsoever interfering with the wisdom of popular decision, or the liberty of popular action. The republicanism shall also be that of this enlightened nineteenth century: in other respects the circumstances are similar; for the event takes place during an expedition of British—not subjects, indeed, but quite unsubjected persons,—acknowledging neither Queen nor Admiral,—in search, nevertheless, of gold and silver, in America, like Sir Francis himself. And to make all more precisely illustrative, I am able to take the account of the matter from the very paper which contained Mr. Auberon Herbert’s speech, the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ of 5th December last. In another column, a little before the addresses of the members for Nottingham, you will therein find, quoted from the ‘New York Tribune,’ the following account of some executions which took place at “the Angels” (Los Angeles), California, on the 24th October.

“The victims were some unoffending Chinamen, the executioners were some ‘warm-hearted and impulsive’ Irishmen, assisted by some Mexicans. It seems that owing to an impression that the houses inhabited by the Chinamen were filled with gold, a mob collected in front of a store belonging to one of them named Yo Hing with the object of plundering it. The Chinamen barricaded the building, shots were fired, and an American was killed. Then commenced the work of pillage and murder. The mob forced an entrance, four Chinamen were shot dead, seven or eight were wounded, and seventeen were taken and hanged. The following description of the hanging of the first victim will show how the executions were conducted:—

“Weng Chin, a merchant, was the first victim of hanging. He was led through the streets by two lusty Irishmen, who were cheered on by a crowd of men and boys, most of Irish and Mexican birth. Several times the unfortunate Chinaman faltered or attempted to extricate himself from the two brutes who were leading him, when a half-drunken Mexican in his immediate rear would plunge the point of a large dirk knife into his back. This, of course, accelerated his speed, but never a syllable fell from his mouth. Arriving at the eastern gate of Tomlinson’s old lumber yard, just out of Temple Street, hasty preparations for launching the inoffensive man into eternity were followed by his being pulled up to the beam with a rope round his neck. He didn’t seem to ‘hang right,’ and one of the Irishmen got upon his shoulders and jumped upon them, breaking his collar-bone. What with shots, stabs, and strangulation, and other modes of civilized torture, the victim was ‘hitched up’ for dead, and the crowd gave vent to their savage delight in demoniac yells and a jargon which too plainly denoted their Hibernian nationality.

“One victim, a Chinese physician of some celebrity, Dr. Gnee Sing, offered his tormentors 4,000 dollars in gold to let him go. His pockets were immediately cut and ransacked, a pistol-shot mutilated one side of his face ‘dreadfully,’ and he too was ‘stretched up’ with cheers. Another wretched man was jerked up with great force against the beam, and the operation repeated until his head was broken in a way we cannot describe. Three Chinese, one a youth of about fifteen years old, picked up at random, and innocent of even a knowledge of the disturbance, were hanged in the same brutal manner. Hardly a word escaped them, but the younger one said, as the rope was being placed round his neck, ‘Me no ’fraid to die; me velly good China boy; me no hurt no man.’ Three Chinese boys who were hanged ‘on the side of a waggon’ struggled hard for their lives. One managed to lay hold of the rope, upon which two Irishmen beat his hands with clubs and pistols till he released his hold and fell into a ‘hanging position.’ The Irishmen then blazed away at him with bullets, and so put an end to his existence.”

“Weng Chin, a merchant, was the first victim of hanging. He was led through the streets by two lusty Irishmen, who were cheered on by a crowd of men and boys, most of Irish and Mexican birth. Several times the unfortunate Chinaman faltered or attempted to extricate himself from the two brutes who were leading him, when a half-drunken Mexican in his immediate rear would plunge the point of a large dirk knife into his back. This, of course, accelerated his speed, but never a syllable fell from his mouth. Arriving at the eastern gate of Tomlinson’s old lumber yard, just out of Temple Street, hasty preparations for launching the inoffensive man into eternity were followed by his being pulled up to the beam with a rope round his neck. He didn’t seem to ‘hang right,’ and one of the Irishmen got upon his shoulders and jumped upon them, breaking his collar-bone. What with shots, stabs, and strangulation, and other modes of civilized torture, the victim was ‘hitched up’ for dead, and the crowd gave vent to their savage delight in demoniac yells and a jargon which too plainly denoted their Hibernian nationality.

My republican friends—or otherwise than friends, as you choose to have it—you will say, I presume, that this comparison of methods of magistracy is partial and unfair? It is so. All comparisons—as all experiments—are unfair till you have made more. More you shall make with me; and as many as you like, on your own side. I will tell you, in due time, some tales of Tory gentlemen who lived, and would scarcely let anybody else live, at Padua and Milan, which will do your hearts good. Meantime, meditate a little over these two instances of capital justice, as done severally by monarchists and republicans in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; and meditate, not a little, on the capital justice which you have lately accomplished yourselves in France. You have had it all your own way there, since Sedan. No Emperor to paralyze your hands any more, or impede the flow of your conversation. Anything, since that fortunate hour, to be done,—anything to be said, that you liked; and in the midst of you, found by sudden good fortune, two quiet honest and brave men; one old and one young, ready to serve you with all their strength, and evidently of supreme gifts in the way of service,—Generals Trochu and Rossel. You have exiled one, shot the other,[4] and, but that, as I told you, my wishes are of no account that I know of, I should wish you joy of your “situation.”

Believe me, faithfully yours,

JOHN RUSKIN.

[1] See ‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ Dec. 5th, 1871. [↑]

[2] Letter IV. p. 21. Compare Letter V. p. 5; and observe, in future references of this kind I shall merely say, IV. 21; V. 5, etc. [↑]

[3] J. A. Froude, ‘Short Studies on Great Subjects.’ Longmans, 1867. Page 297. [↑]

[4] “You did not shoot him”? No; my expression was hasty; you only stood by, in a social manner, to see him shot;—how many of you?—and so finely organized as you say you are! [↑]

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XIV.

Denmark Hill,
1st February, 1872.

My Friends,

In going steadily over our ground again, roughly broken last year, you see that, after endeavouring, as I did last month, to make you see somewhat more clearly the absurdity of fighting for a Holy Republic before you are sure of having got so much as a single saint to make it of, I have now to illustrate farther the admission made in page 8 of my first Letter, that even the most courteous and perfect Monarchy cannot make an unsaintly life into a saintly one, nor constitute thieving, for instance, an absolutely praiseworthy profession, however glorious or delightful. It is indeed more difficult to show this in the course of past history than any other moral truth whatsoever. For, without doubt or exception, thieving has not only hitherto been the most respected of professions, but the most healthy, cheerful, and in the practical outcome of it, though not in theory, even the honestest, followed by men. Putting the higher traditional and romantic ideals, such as that of our Robin Hood, and the Scottish Red Robin, for the time, aside, and keeping to meagre historical facts, could any of you help giving your heartiest sympathy to Master Francis Drake, setting out in his little Paschal Lamb to seek his fortune on the Spanish seas, and coming home, on that happy Sunday morning, to the unspeakable delight of the Cornish congregation? Would you like to efface the stories of Edward III., and his lion’s whelp, from English history; and do you wish that instead of pillaging the northern half of France, as you read of them in the passages quoted in my fourth Letter, and fighting the Battle of Creçy to get home again, they had stayed at home all the time; and practised, shall we say, upon the flute, as I find my moral friends think Frederick of Prussia should have done? Or would you have chosen that your Prince Harry should never have played that set with his French tennis-balls, which won him Harfleur, and Rouen, and Orleans, and other such counters, which we might have kept, to this day perhaps, in our pockets, but for the wood maid of Domremy? Are you ready, even now, in the height of your morality, to give back India to the Brahmins and their cows, and Australia to her aborigines and their apes? You are ready? Well, my Christian friends, it does one’s heart good to hear it, providing only you are quite sure you know what you are about. “Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labour.” You are verily willing to accept that alternative? I inquire anxiously, because I see that your Under Secretary of State for India, Mr. Grant Duff, proposes to you, in his speech at Elgin, not at all as the first object of your lives to be honest; but, as the first, to be rich, and the second to be intelligent: now when you have all become rich and intelligent, how do you mean to live? Mr. Grant Duff, of course, means by being rich that you are each to have two powdered footmen; but then who are to be the footmen, now that we mustn’t have blacks? And granting you all the intelligence in the world on the most important subjects,—the spots in the sun, or the nodes of the moon, as aforesaid,—will that help you to get your dinner, unless you steal it in the old fashion? The subject is indeed discussed with closer definition than by Mr. Grant Duff, by Mr. William Riddle, C.E., the authority I quoted to you for taking property “under control.” You had better perhaps be put in complete possession of his views, as stated by himself in the ‘Republican,’ of December last; the rather, as that periodical has not had, according to Mr. Riddle, hitherto a world-wide circulation:—

“THE SIMPLE AND ONLY REMEDY FOR THE WANTS OF NATIONS.”

“It is with great grief that I hear that your periodical finds but a limited sale. I ask you to insert a few words from me, which may strike some of your readers as being important. These are all in all. What all nations want, Sir, are—1, Shelter; 2, Food; 3, Clothes; 4, Warmth; 5, Cleanliness; 6, Health; 7, Love; 8, Beauty. These are only to be got in one way. I will state it. 1.—An International Congress must make a number of steam engines, or use those now made, and taking all property under its control (I fearlessly state it) must roll off iron and glass for buildings to shelter hundreds of millions of people. 2.—Must, by such engines, make steam apparatus to plough immense plains of wheat, where steam has elbow-room abroad; must make engines to grind it on an enormous scale, first fetching it in flat-bottomed ships, made of simple form, larger than the Great Eastern, and of simple form of plates, machine fastened; must bake it by machine ovens commensurate. 3.—Machine looms must work unattended night and day, rolling off textile yarns and fabrics, and machines must make clothes, just as envelopes are knocked off. 4.—Machinery must do laundress work, iron and mangling; and, in a word, our labour must give place to machinery, laid down in gigantic factories on common-sense principles by an International leverage. This is the education you must inculcate. Then man will be at last emancipated. All else is utter bosh, and I will prove it so when and wherever I can get the means to lecture.

“Wm. Riddle, C.E.

“South Lambeth, Nov. 2.”

Unfortunately, till those means can be obtained, (may it be soon), it remains unriddled to us on what principles of “international leverage” the love and beauty are to be provided. But the point I wish you mainly to notice is, that for this general emancipation, and elbow-room for men and steam, you are still required to find “immense plains of wheat abroad.” Is it not probable that these immense plains may belong to somebody “abroad” already? And if not, instead of bringing home their produce in flat-bottomed ships, why not establish, on the plains themselves, your own flat-bottomed—I beg pardon,—flat-bellied, persons, instead of living here in glass cases, which surely, even at the British Museum, cannot be associated in your minds with the perfect manifestation of love and beauty? It is true that love is to be measured, in your perfected political economy, by rectangular area, as you will find on reference to the ingenious treatise of Mr. W. Stanley Jevons, M.A., Professor of Logic and Political Economy in Owens College, Manchester, who informs you, among other interesting facts, that pleasure and pain “are the ultimate objects of the calculus of economy,” and that a feeling, whether of pleasure or pain, may be regarded as having two dimensions—namely, in duration and intensity, so that the feeling, say of a minute, “may be represented by a rectangle whose base corresponds to the duration of a minute, and whose height is proportioned to the intensity.”[1] The collective area of the series of rectangles will mark the “aggregate of feeling generated.”

But the Professor appears unconscious that there is a third dimension of pleasure and pain to be considered, besides their duration and intensity; and that this third dimension is to some persons, the most important of all—namely, their quality. It is possible to die of a rose in aromatic pain; and, on the contrary, for flies and rats, even pleasure may be the reverse of aromatic. There is swine’s pleasure, and dove’s; villain’s pleasure, and gentleman’s, to be arranged, the Professor will find, by higher analysis, in eternally dissimilar rectangles.

My friends, the follies of Modern Liberalism, many and great though they be, are practically summed in this denial or neglect of the quality and intrinsic value of things. Its rectangular beatitudes, and spherical benevolences,—theology of universal indulgence, and jurisprudence which will hang no rogues, mean, one and all of them, in the root, incapacity of discerning, or refusal to discern, worth and unworth in anything, and least of all in man; whereas Nature and Heaven command you, at your peril, to discern worth from unworth in everything, and most of all in man. Your main problem is that ancient and trite one, “Who is best man?” and the Fates forgive much,—forgive the wildest, fiercest, cruellest experiments,—if fairly made for the determination of that. Theft and blood-guiltiness are not pleasing in their sight; yet the favouring powers of the spiritual and material world will confirm to you your stolen goods; and their noblest voices applaud the lifting of your spear, and rehearse the sculpture of your shield, if only your robbing and slaying have been in fair arbitrament of that question, “Who is best man?” But if you refuse such inquiry, and maintain every man for his neighbour’s match,[2]—if you give vote to the simple, and liberty to the vile, the powers of those spiritual and material worlds in due time present you inevitably with the same problem, soluble now only wrong side upwards; and your robbing and slaying must be done then to find out “Who is worst man?” Which, in so wide an order of merit, is, indeed, not easy; but a complete Tammany Ring, and lowest circle in the Inferno of Worst, you are sure to find, and to be governed by.

And you may note that the wars of men, in this winnowing or sifting function, separate themselves into three distinct stages. In healthy times of early national development, the best men go out to battle, and divide the spoil; in rare generosity, perhaps, giving as much to those who tarry by the stuff, as to those who have followed to the field. In the second, and more ingenious stage, which is the one we have reached now in England and America, the best men still go out to battle, and get themselves killed,—or, at all events, well withdrawn from public affairs,—and the worst stop at home, manage the government, and make money out of the commissariat. (See § 124 of ‘Munera Pulveris,’ and my note there on the last American War.) Then the third and last stage, immediately preceding the dissolution of any nation, is when its best men (such as they are)—stop at home too!—and pay other people to fight for them. And this last stage, not wholly reached in England yet, is, however, within near prospect; at least, if we may again on this point refer to, and trust, the anticipations of Mr. Grant Duff, ‘who racks his brains, without success, to think of any probable combination of European events in which the assistance of our English force would be half so useful to our allies as money.’

Next month I will give you some farther account of the operations in favour of their Italian allies in the fourteenth century, effected by the White company under Sir John Hawkwood;—(they first crossed the Alps with a German captain, however,)—not at all consisting in disbursements of money; but such, on the contrary, as to obtain for them—(as you read in my first Letter) the reputation, with good Italian judges, of being the best thieves known at the time. It is in many ways important for you to understand the origin and various tendencies of mercenary warfare; the essential power of which, in Christendom, dates, singularly enough, from the struggle of the free burghers of Italy with a Tory gentleman, a friend of Frederick II. of Germany; the quarrel, of which you shall hear the prettiest parts, being one of the most dramatic and vital passages of mediæval history. Afterwards we shall be able to examine, more intelligently, the prospects in store for us according to the—I trust not too painfully racked,—brains of our Under Secretary of State. But I am tired to-day of following modern thought in these unexpectedly attenuated conditions; and I believe you will also be glad to rest, with me, by reading a few words of true history of such life as, in here and there a hollow of the rocks of Europe, just persons have sometimes lived, untracked by the hounds of war. And in laying them before you, I begin to give these letters the completed character I intend for them; first, as it may seem to me needful, commenting on what is passing at the time, with reference always to the principles and plans of economy I have to set before you; and then collecting out of past literature, and in occasional frontispieces or woodcuts, out of past art, what may confirm or illustrate things that are for ever true: choosing the pieces of the series so that, both in art and literature, they may become to you in the strictest sense, educational, and familiarise you with the look and manner of fine work.

I want you, accordingly, now to read attentively some pieces of agricultural economy, out of Marmontel’s ‘Contes Moraux,’—(we too grandly translate the title into ‘Moral Tales,’ for the French word Mœurs does not in accuracy correspond to our Morals); and I think it first desirable that you should know something about Marmontel himself. He was a French gentleman of the old school; not noble, nor, in French sense, even “gentilhomme;” but a peasant’s son, who made his way into Parisian society by gentleness, wit, and a dainty and candid literary power. He became one of the humblest, yet honestest, placed scholars at the court of Louis XV., and wrote pretty, yet wise, sentimental stories, in finished French, which I must render as I can in broken English; but, however rudely translated, the sayings and thoughts in them deserve your extreme attention, for in their fine, tremulous way, like the blossoming heads of grass in May, they are perfect. For introduction then, you shall have, to-day, his own description of his native place, Bort, in central south France, and of the circumstances of his child-life. You must take it without further preamble—my pages running short.

“Bort, situated on the river Dordogne, between Auvergne and the province of Limoges, is a frightful place enough, seen by the traveller descending suddenly on it; lying, as it does, at the bottom of a precipice, and looking as if the storm torrents would sweep it away, or as if, some day, it must be crushed under a chain of volcanic rocks, some planted like towers on the height which commands the town, and others already overhanging, or half uprooted: but, once in the valley, and with the eye free to wander there, Bort becomes full of smiles. Above the town, on a green island which the river embraces with equal streams, there is a thicket peopled with birds, and animated also with the motion and noise of a mill. On each side of the river are orchards and fields, cultivated with laborious care. Below the village the valley opens, on one side of the river, into a broad, flat meadow, watered by springs; on the other, into sloping fields, crowned by a belt of hills whose soft slope contrasts with the opposing rocks, and is divided, farther on, by a torrent which rolls and leaps through the forest, and falls into the Dordogne in one of the most beautiful cataracts on the Continent. Near that spot is situated the little farm of St. Thomas, where I used to read Virgil under the blossoming trees that surrounded our bee-hives, and where I made delicious lunches of their honey. On the other side of the town, above the mill, and on the slope to the river, was the enclosure where, on fête days, my father took me to gather grapes from the vines he had himself planted, or cherries, plums, and apples, from the trees he had grafted.

“But what in my memory is the chief charm of my native place is the impression of the affection which my family had for me, and with which my soul was penetrated in earliest infancy. If there is any goodness in my character, it is to these sweet emotions, and the perpetual happiness of loving and being loved that I believe it is owing. What a gift does Heaven bestow on us in the virtue of parents!

“I owed much also to a certain gentleness of manners which reigned then in my native town; and truly the sweet and simple life that one led there must have had a strange attraction, for nothing was more unusual than that the children of Bort should ever go away from it. In their youth they were well educated, and in the neighbouring colleges their colony distinguished itself; but they came back to their homes as a swarm of bees comes back to the hive with its spoil.

“I learned to read in a little convent where the nuns were friends of my mother. Thence I passed to the school of a priest of the town, who gratuitously, and for his own pleasure, devoted himself to the instruction of children; he was the only son of a shoemaker, one of the honestest fellows in the world; and this churchman was a true model of filial piety. I can yet remember, as if I had seen it but a moment since, the air of quiet courtesy and mutual regard which the old man and his son maintained to each other; the one never losing sight of the dignity of the priesthood, nor the other of the sanctity of the paternal character.”

I interrupt my translation for a moment to ask you to notice how this finished scholar applies his words. A vulgar writer would most probably have said “the sanctity of the priesthood” and “the dignity of the paternal character.” But it is quite possible that a priest may not be a saint, yet (admitting the theory of priesthood at all) his authority and office are not, therefore, invalidated. On the other hand, a father may be entirely inferior to his son, incapable of advising him, and, if he be wise, claiming no strict authority over him. But the relation between the two is always sacred.

“The Abbé Vaissère” (that was his name), “after he had fulfilled his duty at the church, divided the rest of his time between reading, and the lessons he gave to us. In fine weather, a little walk, and sometimes for exercise a game at mall in the meadow, were his only amusements. For all society he had two friends, people of esteem in our town. They lived together in the most peaceful intimacy, seeing each other every day, and every day with the same pleasure in their meeting; and for fulfilment of good fortune, they died within a very little while of each other. I have scarcely ever seen an example of so sweet and constant equality in the course of human life.

“At this school I had a comrade, who was from my infancy an object of emulation to me. His deliberate and rational bearing, his industry in study, the care he took of his books, on which I never saw a stain; his fair hair always so well combed, his dress always fresh in its simplicity, his linen always white, were to me a constantly visible example; and it is rare that a child inspires another child with such esteem as I had for him. His father was a labourer in a neighbouring village, and well known to mine. I used to walk with his son to see him in his home. How he used to receive us, the white-haired old man,—the good cream! the good brown bread that he gave us! and what happy presages did he not please himself in making for my future life, because of my respect for his old age. Twenty years afterwards, his son and I met at Paris; I recognized in him the same character of prudence and kindness which I had known in him at school, and it has been to me no slight pleasure to name one of his children at baptism.

“When I was eleven years old, just past, my master judged me fit to enter the fourth class of students; and my father consented, though unwillingly, to take me to the College of Mauriac. His reluctance was wise. I must justify it by giving some account of our household.

“I was the eldest of many children; my father, a little rigid, but entirely good under his severe manner, loved his wife to idolatry; and well he might! I have never been able to understand how, with the simple education of our little convent at Bort, she had attained so much pleasantness in wit, so much elevation in heart, and a sentiment of propriety so just, pure, and subtle. My good Bishop of Limoges has often spoken to me since, at Paris, with most tender interest, of the letters that my mother wrote in recommending me to him.

“My father revered her as much as he loved; and blamed her only for her too great tenderness for me: but my grandmother loved me no less. I think I see her yet—the good little old woman! the bright nature that she had! the gentle gaiety! Economist of the house, she presided over its management, and was an example to us all of filial tenderness, for she had also her own mother and her husband’s mother to take care of. I am now dating far back, being just able to remember my great-grandmother drinking her little cup of wine at the corner of the hearth; but, during the whole of my childhood, my grandmother and her three sisters lived with us, and among all these women, and a swarm of children, my father stood alone, their support. With little means enough, all could live. Order, economy, and labour,—a little commerce, but above all things, frugality” (Note again the good scholar’s accuracy of language: “Economy” the right arrangement of things, “Frugality” the careful and fitting use of them)—“these maintained us all in comfort. The little garden produced vegetables enough for the need of the house; the orchard gave us fruit, and our quinces, apples, and pears, preserved in the honey of our bees, made, during the winter, for the children and old women, the most exquisite breakfasts.”

I interrupt again to explain to you, once for all, a chief principle with me in translation. Marmontel says, “for the children and good old women.” Were I quoting the French I would give his exact words, but in translating I miss the word “good,” of which I know you are not likely to see the application at the moment. You would not see why the old women should be called good, when the question is only what they had for breakfast. Marmontel means that if they had been bad old women they would have wanted gin and bitters for breakfast, instead of honey-candied quinces; but I can’t always stop to tell you Marmontel’s meaning, or other people’s, and therefore if I think it not likely to strike you, and the word weakens the sentence in the direction I want you to follow, I omit it in translating, as I do also entire sentences, here and there; but never, as aforesaid, in actual quotation.

“The flock of the fold of St. Thomas, clothed, with its wool, now the women, and now the children; my aunt spun it, and spun also the hemp which made our under-dress; the children of our neighbours came to beat it with us in the evening by lamp-light, (our own walnut trees giving us the oil,) and formed a ravishing picture. The harvest of our little farm assured our subsistence; the wax and honey of our bees, of which one of my aunts took extreme care, were a revenue, with little capital. The oil of our fresh walnuts had flavour and smell, which we liked better than those of the oil-olive, and our cakes of buck-wheat, hot, with the sweet butter of Mont Dor, were for us the most inviting of feasts. By the fireside, in the evening, while we heard the pot boiling with sweet chestnuts in it, our grandmother would roast a quince under the ashes and divide it among us children. The most sober of women made us all gourmands. Thus, in a household, where nothing was ever lost, very little expense supplied all our further wants; the dead wood of the neighbouring forests was in abundance, the fresh mountain butter and most delicate cheese cost little; even wine was not dear, and my father used it soberly.”

That is as much, I suppose, as you will care for at once. Insipid enough, you think?—or perhaps, in one way, too sapid; one’s soul and affections mixed up so curiously with quince-marmalade? It is true, the French have a trick of doing that; but why not take it the other way, and say, one’s quince-marmalade mixed up with affection? We adulterate our affections in England, now-a-days, with a yellower, harder, baser thing than that; and there would surely be no harm in our confectioners putting a little soul into their sugar,—if they put in nothing worse?

But as to the simplicity—or, shall we say, wateriness,—of the style, I can answer you more confidently. Milkiness would be a better word, only one does not use it of styles. This writing of Marmontel’s is different from the writing you are accustomed to, in that there is never an exaggerating phrase in it—never a needlessly strained or metaphorical word, and never a misapplied one. Nothing is said pithily, to show the author’s power, diffusely, to show his observation, nor quaintly, to show his fancy. He is not thinking of himself as an author at all; but of himself as a boy. He is not remembering his native valley as a subject for fine writing, but as a beloved real place, about which he may be garrulous, perhaps, but not rhetorical. But is it, or was it, or could it ever be, a real place, indeed?—you will ask next. Yes, real in the severest sense; with realities that are to last for ever, when this London and Manchester life of yours shall have become a horrible, and, but on evidence, incredible, romance of the past.

Real, but only partially seen; still more partially told. The rightnesses only perceived; the felicities only remembered; the landscape seen as if spring lasted always; the trees in blossom or fruitage evermore: no shedding of leaf: of winter, nothing remembered but its fireside.

Yet not untrue. The landscape is indeed there, and the life, seen through glass that dims them, but not distorts; and which is only dim to Evil.

But now supply, with your own undimmed insight, and better knowledge of human nature; or invent, with imaginative malice, what evil you think necessary to make the picture true. Still—make the worst of it you will—it cannot but remain somewhat incredible to you, like the pastoral scene in a pantomime, more than a piece of history.

Well; but the pastoral scene in a pantomime itself,—tell me,—is it meant to be a bright or a gloomy part of your Christmas spectacle? Do you mean it to exhibit, by contrast, the blessedness of your own life in the streets outside; or, for one fond and foolish half-hour, to recall the “ravishing picture” of days long lost? “The sheep-fold of St. Thomas,” (you have at least, in him, an incredulous saint, and fit patron of a Republic at once holy and enlightened), the green island full of singing birds, the cascade in the forest, the vines on the steep river-shore;—the little Marmontel reading his Virgil in the shade, with murmur of bees round him in the sunshine;—the fair-haired comrade, so gentle, so reasonable, and, marvel of marvels, beloved for being exemplary! Is all this incredible to you in its good or in its evil? Those children rolling on the heaps of black and slimy ground, mixed with brickbats and broken plates and bottles, in the midst of Preston or Wigan, as edified travellers behold them when the station is blocked, and the train stops anywhere outside,—the children themselves, black, and in rags evermore, and the only water near them either boiling, or gathered in unctuous pools, covered with rancid clots of scum, in the lowest holes of the earth-heaps,—why do you not paint these for pastime? Are they not what your machine gods have produced for you? The mighty iron arms are visibly there at work;—no St. Thomas can be incredulous about the existence of gods such as they,—day and night at work—omnipotent, if not resplendent. Why do you not rejoice in these; appoint a new Christmas for these, in memory of the Nativity of Boilers, and put their realms of black bliss into new Arcadias of pantomime—the harlequin, mask all over? Tell me, my practical friends.

Believe me, faithfully yours,

JOHN RUSKIN.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I must in future reserve a page, at the end of these Letters, partly for any chance word of correspondence; partly to give account of what I am doing, (when it becomes worth relating,) with the interest of the St. George’s Fund.

To-day I wish only to invite the reader’s attention to the notice, which is sent out with each volume of the revised series of my works, that I mean to sell my own books at a price from which there shall be no abatement—namely, 18s. the plain volumes, and 27s. 6d. the illustrated ones; and that my publisher, Mr. G. Allen, Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent, will supply them at that price without abatement, carriage paid, to any person in town or country, on remittance of the price of the number of volumes required.

This absolute refusal of credit or abatement is only the carrying out of a part of my general method of political economy; and I adopt this system of sale, because I think authors ought not to be too proud to sell their own books, any more than painters to sell their own pictures.

I intend the retail dealer to charge twenty shillings for the plain volumes, and thirty shillings for the others. If he declines offering them for that percentage, it is for the public to judge how much he gets usually.

[1] I quote from the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ of January 16th. In the more elaborate review given in the ‘Fortnightly,’ I am glad to see that Professor Caird is beginning to perceive the necessity of defining the word “useful;” and, though greatly puzzled, is making way towards a definition: but would it not be wiser to abstain from exhibiting himself in his state of puzzlement to the public? [↑]

[2] Every man as good as his neighbour! you extremely sagacious English persons; and forthwith you establish competitive examination, which drives your boys into idiotcy, before you will give them a bit of bread to make their young muscles of! Every man as good as his neighbour! and when I told you, seven years ago, that at least you should give every man his penny of wages, whether he was good or not, so only that he gave you the best that was in him, what did you answer to me? [↑]

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XV.

Denmark Hill,
1st March, 1872.

My Friends,

The Tory gentleman whose character I have to sketch for you, in due counterbalance of that story of republican justice in California, was, as I told you, the friend of Friedrich II. of Germany, another great Friedrich preceding the Prussian one by some centuries, and living quite as hard a life of it. But before I can explain to you anything either about him, or his friend, I must develop the statement made above (XI. 6), of the complex modes of injustice respecting the means of maintenance, which have hitherto held in all ages among the three great classes of soldiers, clergy, and peasants. I mean, by ‘peasants’ the producers of food, out of land or water; by ‘clergy,’ men who live by teaching or exhibition of behaviour; and by ‘soldiers,’ those who live by fighting, either by robbing wise peasants, or getting themselves paid by foolish ones. Into these three classes the world’s multitudes are essentially hitherto divided. The legitimate merchant of course exists, and can exist, only on the small percentage of pay obtainable for the transfer of goods; and the manufacturer and artist are, in healthy society, developed states of the peasant. The morbid power of manufacture and commerce in our own age is an accidental condition of national decrepitude; the injustices connected with it are mainly those of the gambling-house, and quite unworthy of analytical inquiry; but the unjust relations of the soldier, clergyman, and peasant have hitherto been constant in all great nations;—they are full of mystery and beauty in their iniquity; they require the most subtle, and deserve the most reverent, analysis.

The first root of distinction between the soldier and peasant is in barrenness and fruitfulness of possessed ground; the inhabitant of sands and rocks “redeeming his share” (see speech of Roderick in the ‘Lady of the Lake’) from the inhabitant of corn-bearing ground. The second root of it is delight in athletic exercise, resulting in beauty of person and perfectness of race, and causing men to be content, or even triumphant, in accepting continual risk of death, if by such risk they can escape the injury of servile toil.

Again, the first root of distinction between clergyman and peasant is the greater intelligence, which instinctively desires both to learn and teach, and is content to accept the smallest maintenance, if it may remain so occupied. (Look back to Marmontel’s account of his tutor.)

The second root of distinction is that which gives rise to the word ‘clergy,’ properly signifying persons chosen by lot, or in a manner elect, for the practice and exhibition of good behaviour; the visionary or passionate anchorite being content to beg his bread, so only that he may have leave by undisturbed prayer or meditation, to bring himself into closer union with the spiritual world; and the peasant being always content to feed him, on condition of his becoming venerable in that higher state, and, as a peculiarly blessed person, a communicator of blessing.

Now, both these classes of men remain noble, as long as they are content with daily bread, if they may be allowed to live in their own way; but the moment the one of them uses his strength, and the other his sanctity, to get riches with, or pride of elevation over other men, both of them become tyrants, and capable of any degree of evil. Of the clerk’s relation to the peasant, I will only tell you, now, that, as you learn more of the history of Germany and Italy in the Middle Ages, and, indeed, almost to this day, you will find the soldiers of Germany are always trying to get mastery over the body of Italy, and the clerks of Italy are always trying to get mastery over the mind of Germany;—this main struggle between Emperor and Pope, as the respective heads of the two parties, absorbing in its vortex, or attracting to its standards, all the minor disorders and dignities of war; and quartering itself in a quaintly heraldic fashion with the methods of encroachment on the peasant, separately invented by baron and priest.

The relation of the baron to the peasant, however, is all that I can touch upon to-day; and first, note that this word ‘baron’ is the purest English you can use to denote the soldier, soldato, or ‘fighter, hired with pence, or soldi,’ as such. Originally it meant the servant of a soldier, or, as a Roman clerk of Nero’s time[1] tells us, (the literary antipathy thus early developing itself in its future nest,) “the extreme fool, who is a fool’s servant;” but soon it came to be associated with a Greek word meaning ‘heavy;’ and so got to signify heavy-handed, or heavy-armed, or generally prevailing in manhood. For some time it was used to signify the authority of a husband; a woman called herself her husband’s[2] ‘ancilla,’ (handmaid), and him her ‘baron.’ Finally the word got settled in the meaning of a strong fighter receiving regular pay. “Mercenaries are persons who serve for a regularly received pay; the same are called ‘Barones’ from the Greek, because they are strong in labours.” This is the definition given by an excellent clerk of the seventh century, Isidore, Bishop of Seville, and I wish you to recollect it, because it perfectly unites the economical idea of a Baron, as a person paid for fighting, with the physical idea of one, as prevailing in battle by weight; not without some attached idea of slight stupidity;—the notion holding so distinctly even to this day that Mr. Matthew Arnold thinks the entire class aptly describable under the term ‘barbarians.’

At all events, the word is the best general one for the dominant rank of the Middle Ages, as distinguished from the pacific peasant, and so delighting in battle that one of the most courteous barons of the fourteenth century tells a young knight who comes to him for general advice, that the moment war fails in any country, he must go into another.

“Et se la guerre est faillie,

Départie

Fay tóst de cellui païs;

N’arresté quoy que nul die.”

“And if the war has ended,

Departure

Make quickly from that country;

Do not stop, whatever anybody says to you.”[3]

But long before this class distinction was clearly established, the more radical one between pacific and warrior nations had shown itself cruelly in the history of Europe.

You will find it greatly useful to fix in your minds these following elementary ideas of that history:—

The Roman Empire was already in decline at the birth of Christ. It was ended five hundred years afterwards. The wrecks of its civilization, mingled with the broken fury of the tribes which had destroyed it, were then gradually softened and purged by Christianity; and hammered into shape by three great warrior nations, on the north, south, and west, worshippers of the storms, of the sun, and of fate. Three Christian kings, Henry the Fowler in Germany, Charlemagne in France, and Alfred in England, typically represent the justice of humanity, gradually forming the feudal system out of the ruined elements of Roman luxury and law, under the disciplining torment inflicted by the mountaineers of Scandinavia, India, and Arabia.

This forging process takes another five hundred years. Christian feudalism may be considered as definitely organized at the end of the tenth century, and its political strength established, having for the most part absorbed the soldiers of the north, and soon to be aggressive on those of Mount Imaus and Mount Sinai. It lasts another five hundred years, and then our own epoch, that of atheistic liberalism, begins, practically necessitated,—the liberalism by the two discoveries of gunpowder and printing,—and the atheism by the unfortunate persistence of the clerks in teaching children what they cannot understand, and employing young consecrated persons to assert in pulpits what they do not know.

That is enough generalization for you to-day. I want now to fix your thoughts on one small point in all this;—the effect of the discovery of gunpowder in promoting liberalism.

Its first operation was to destroy the power of the baron, by rendering it impossible for him to hold his castle, with a few men, against a mob. The fall of the Bastile is a typical fact in history of this kind; but, of course long previously, castellated architecture had been felt to be useless. Much other building of a noble kind vanishes together with it; nor less (which is a much greater loss than the building,) the baronial habit of living in the country.

Next to his castle, the baron’s armour becomes useless to him; and all the noble habits of life vanish which depend on the wearing of a distinctive dress, involving the constant exercise of accurately disciplined strength, and the public assertion of an exclusive occupation in life, involving exposure to danger.

Next, the baron’s sword and spear become useless to him; and encounter, no longer the determination of who is best man, but of who is best marksman, which is a very different question indeed.

Lastly, the baron being no more able to maintain his authority by force, seeks to keep it by form; he reduces his own subordinates to a fine machinery, and obtains the command of it by purchase or intrigue. The necessity of distinction of character is in war so absolute, and the tests of it are so many, that, in spite of every abuse, good officers get sometimes the command of squadrons or of ships; and one good officer in a hundred is enough to save the honour of an army, and the credit of a system: but generally speaking, our officers at this day do not know their business; and the result is—that, paying thirty millions a year for our army, we are informed by Mr. Grant Duff that the army we have bought is of no use, and we must pay still more money to produce any effect upon foreign affairs. So, you see, this is the actual state of things,—and it is the perfection of liberalism,—that first we cannot buy a Raphael for five-and-twenty pounds, because we have to pay five hundred for a pocket pistol; and next, we are coolly told that the pocket pistol won’t go off, and that we must still pay foreign constables to keep the peace.

In old times, under the pure baronial power, things used, as I told you, to be differently managed by us. We were, all of us, in some sense barons; and paid ourselves for fighting. We had no pocket pistols, nor Woolwich Infants—nothing but bows and spears, good horses, (I hear, after two-thirds of our existing barons have ruined their youth in horseracing, and a good many of them their fortunes also, we are now in irremediable want of horses for our cavalry,) and bright armour. Its brightness, observe, was an essential matter with us. Last autumn I saw, even in modern England, something bright; low sunshine at six o’clock of an October morning, glancing down a long bank of fern covered with hoar-frost, in Yewdale, at the head of Coniston Water. I noted it as more beautiful than anything I had ever seen, to my remembrance, in gladness and infinitude of light. Now, Scott uses this very image to describe the look of the chain-mail of a soldier in one of these free[4] companies;—Le Balafré, Quentin Durward’s uncle:—“The archer’s gorget, arm-pieces, and gauntlets were of the finest steel, curiously inlaid with silver, and his hauberk, or shirt of mail, was as clear and bright as the frost-work of a winter morning upon fern or briar.” And Sir John Hawkwood’s men, of whose proceedings in Italy I have now to give you some account, were named throughout Italy, as I told you in my first letter, the White Company of English,—‘Societas alba Anglicorum,’ or generally, the Great White Company, merely from the splendour of their arms. They crossed the Alps in 1361, and immediately caused a curious change in the Italian language. Azario lays great stress on their tall spears with a very long iron point at the extremity; this formidable weapon being for the most part wielded by two, and sometimes moreover by three individuals, being so heavy and huge, that whatever it came in contact with was pierced through and through. He says, that[5] “at their backs the mounted bowmen carried their bows; whilst those used by the infantry archers were so enormous that the long arrows discharged from them were shot with one end of the bow resting on the ground instead of being drawn in the air.”

Of the English bow you have probably heard before, though I shall have, both of it, and the much inferior Greek bow made of two goats’ horns, to tell you some things that may not have come in your way; but the change these English caused in the Italian language, and afterwards generally in that of chivalry, was by their use of the spear; for “Filippo Villani tells us that, whereas, until the English company crossed the Alps, his countrymen numbered their military forces by ‘helmets’ and colour companies, (bandiere); thenceforth armies were reckoned by the spear, a weapon which, when handled by the White Company, proved no less tremendous than the English bayonet of modern times.”

It is worth noting as one of the tricks of the third Fors—the giver of names as well as fortunes—that the name of the chief poet of passionate Italy should have been ‘the bearer of the wing,’ and that of the chief poet of practical England, the bearer or shaker of the spear. Noteworthy also that Shakespeare himself gives a name to his type of the false soldier from the pistol; but, in the future, doubtless we shall have a hero of culminating soldierly courage named from the torpedo, and a poet of the commercial period, singing the wars directed by Mr. Grant Duff, named Shake-purse.

The White Company when they crossed the Alps were under a German captain. (Some years before, an entirely German troop was prettily defeated by the Apennine peasants.) Sir John Hawkwood did not take the command until 1364, when the Pisans hired the company, five thousand strong, at the rate of a hundred and fifty thousand golden florins for six months. I think about fifty thousand pounds of our money a month, or ten pounds a man—Sir John himself being then described as a “great general,” an Englishman of a vulpine nature, “and astute in their fashion.” This English fashion of astuteness means, I am happy to say, that Sir John saw far, planned deeply, and was cunning in military stratagem; but would neither poison his enemies nor sell his friends—the two words of course being always understood as for the time being;—for, from this year 1364 for thirty years onward, he leads his gradually more and more powerful soldier’s life, fighting first for one town and then for another; here for bishops, and there for barons, but mainly for those merchants of Florence, from whom that narrow street in your city is named Lombard Street, and interfering thus so decidedly with foreign affairs, that, at the end of the thirty years, when he put off his armour, and had lain resting for a little while in Florence Cathedral, King Richard the Second begged his body from the Florentines, and laid it in his own land; the Florentines granting it in the terms of this following letter:—

“To the King of England.

“Most serene and invincible Sovereign, most dread Lord, and our very especial Benefactor—

“Our devotion can deny nothing to your Highness’ Eminence: there is nothing in our power which we would not strive by all means to accomplish, should it prove grateful to you.

“Wherefore, although we should consider it glorious for us and our people to possess the dust and ashes of the late valiant knight, nay, most renowned captain, Sir John Hawkwood, who fought most gloriously for us, as the commander of our armies, and whom at the public expense we caused to be entombed in the Cathedral Church of our city; yet, notwithstanding, according to the form of the demand, that his remains may be taken back to his country, we freely concede the permission, lest it be said that your sublimity asked anything in vain, or fruitlessly, of our reverential humility.

“We, however, with due deference, and all possible earnestness, recommend to your Highness’ graciousness, the son and posterity of said Sir John, who acquired no mean repute, and glory for the English name in Italy, as also our merchants and citizens.”

It chanced by the appointment of the third Fors,[6] to which, you know, I am bound in these letters uncomplainingly to submit, that, just as I had looked out this letter for you, given at Florence in the year 1396, I found in an old bookshop two gazettes, nearly three hundred years later, namely, Number 20 of the ‘Mercurius Publicus,’ and Number 50 of the ‘Parliamentary Intelligencer,’ the latter comprising the same “foraign intelligence, with the affairs now in agitation in England, Scotland, and Ireland, for information of the people. Publish’d by order, from Monday, December 3rd, to Monday, December 10th, 1660.” This little gazette informs us in its first advertisement, that in London, November 30th, 1660, was lost, in or about this city, a small paper book of accounts and receipts, with a red leather cover, with two clasps on it; and that anybody that can give intelligence of it to the city crier at Bread Street end in Cheapside, “shall have five shillings for their pains, and more if they desire it.” And its last paragraph is as follows:—“On Saturday (December 8), the Most Honourable House of Peers concurred with the Commons in the order for the digging up the carkasses of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, John Bradshaw, and Thomas Pride, and carrying them on an Hurdle to Tyburn, where they are to be first hang’d up in their Coffins, and then buried under the Gallows.”

The ‘Public Mercury’ is of date Thursday, June 14th, to Thursday, June 21st, 1660, and contains a report of the proceedings at the House of Commons, on Saturday, the 16th, of which the first sentence is:—

“Resolved,—That his Majesty be humbly moved to call in Milton’s two books, and John Goodwin’s, and order them to be burnt by the common hangman.”

By the final appointment of the third Fors, I chanced just after finding these gazettes, to come upon the following passage in my ‘Daily Telegraph’:—

“Every head was uncovered, and although among those who were farthest off there was a pressing forward and a straining to catch sight of the coffin, there was nothing unseemly or rude. The Catafalque was received at the top of the stairs by Col. Braine and other officers of the 9th, and placed in the centre of the vestibule on a rich velvet pall on which rested crowns, crosses, and other devices, composed of tuberoses and camellias, while beautiful lilies were scattered over the corpse, which was clothed in full regimentals, the cap and sword resting on the body. The face, with the exception of its pallor, was unchanged, and no one, unless knowing the circumstances, would have believed that Fiske had died a violent death. The body was contained in a handsome rosewood casket, with gold-plated handles, and a splendid plate bearing the inscription, ‘James Fiske, jun., died January 7th, 1872, in the 37th year of his age.’”

In the foregoing passages, you see, there is authentic account given you of the various honours rendered by the enlightened public of the fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries to the hero of their day or hour; the persons thus reverenced in their burial, or unburial, being all, by profession, soldiers; and holding rank in that profession, very properly describable by the pretty modern English word ‘Colonel’—leader, that is to say, of a Coronel, Coronella, or daisy-like circlet of men; as in the last case of the three before us, of the Tammany ‘Ring.’

You are to observe, however, that the first of the three, Colonel Sir John Hawkwood, is a soldier both in heart and deed, every inch of him; and that the second, Colonel Oliver Cromwell, was a soldier in deed, but not in heart; being by natural disposition and temper fitted rather for a Huntingdonshire farmer, and not at all caring to make any money by his military business; and finally, that Colonel James Fiske, jun., was a soldier in heart, to the extent of being willing to receive any quantity of soldi from any paymaster, but no more a soldier in deed than you are yourselves, when you go piping and drumming past my gate at Denmark Hill (I should rather say—banging, than drumming, for I observe you hit equally hard and straightforward to every tune; so that from a distance it sounds just like beating carpets), under the impression that you are defending your country as well as amusing yourselves.

Of the various honours, deserved or undeserved, done by enlightened public opinion to these three soldiers, I leave you to consider till next month, merely adding, to put you more entirely in command of the facts, that Sir John Hawkwood, (Acuto, the Italians called him, by happy adaptation of syllables,) whose entire subsistence was one of systematic military robbery, had, when he was first buried, the honour, rarely granted even to the citizens of Florence, of having his coffin laid on the font of the House of his name-saint, St. John Baptist—that same font which Dante was accused of having impiously broken to save a child from drowning, in “mio bel San Giovanni.” I am soon going to Florence myself to draw this beautiful San Giovanni for the beginning of my lectures on Architecture, at Oxford; and you shall have a print of the best sketch I can make, to assist your meditations on the honours of soldiership, and efficacy of baptism. Meantime, let me ask you to read an account of one funeral more, and to meditate also on that. It is given in the most exquisite and finished piece which I know of English Prose literature in the eighteenth century; and, however often you may have seen it already, I beg of you to read it now, both in connection with the funeral ceremonies described hitherto, and for the sake of its educational effect on your own taste in writing:—

“We last night received a piece of ill news at our club, which very sensibly afflicted every one of us. I question not but my readers themselves will be troubled at the hearing of it. To keep them no longer in suspense, Sir Roger de Coverley is dead. He departed this life at his house in the country, after a few weeks’ sickness. Sir Andrew Freeport has a letter from one of his correspondents in those parts, that informs him the old man caught a cold at the county-sessions, as he was very warmly promoting an address of his own penning, in which he succeeded according to his wishes. But this particular comes from a Whig justice of peace, who was always Sir Roger’s enemy and antagonist. I have letters both from the chaplain and Captain Sentry, which mention nothing of it, but are filled with many particulars to the honour of the good old man. I have likewise a letter from the butler, who took so much care of me last summer when I was at the knight’s house. As my friend the butler mentions, in the simplicity of his heart, several circumstances the others have passed over in silence, I shall give my reader a copy of his letter, without any alteration or diminution.

“ ‘Honoured Sir,—Knowing that you was my old master’s good friend, I could not forbear sending you the melancholy news of his death, which has afflicted the whole country, as well as his poor servants, who loved him, I may say, better than we did our lives. I am afraid he caught his death the last county-sessions, where he would go to see justice done to a poor widow woman, and her fatherless children, that had been wronged by a neighbouring gentleman; for you know, Sir, my good master was always the poor man’s friend. Upon his coming home, the first complaint he made was, that he had lost his roast-beef stomach, not being able to touch a sirloin, which was served up according to custom: and you know he used to take great delight in it. From that time forward he grew worse and worse, but still kept a good heart to the last. Indeed we were once in great hope of his recovery, upon a kind message that was sent him from the widow lady whom he had made love to the forty last years of his life; but this only proved a lightning before death. He has bequeathed to this lady, as a token of his love, a great pearl necklace, and a couple of silver bracelets set with jewels, which belonged to my good old lady his mother. He has bequeathed the fine white gelding that he used to ride a hunting upon, to his chaplain, because he thought he would be kind to him, and has left you all his books. He has moreover bequeathed to the chaplain a very pretty tenement with good lands about it. It being a very cold day when he made his will, he left for mourning to every man in the parish, a great frize-coat, and to every woman a black riding-hood. It was a most moving sight to see him take leave of his poor servants, commending us all for our fidelity, whilst we were not able to speak a word for weeping. As we most of us are grown grey-headed in our dear master’s service, he has left us pensions and legacies, which we may live very comfortably upon the remaining part of our days. He has bequeathed a great deal more in charity, which is not yet come to my knowledge, and it is peremptorily said in the parish, that he has left money to build a steeple to the church; for he was heard to say some time ago, that if he lived two years longer, Coverley church should have a steeple to it. The chaplain tells every body that he made a very good end, and never speaks of him without tears. He was buried, according to his own directions, among the family of the Coverleys, on the left hand of his father Sir Arthur. The coffin was carried by six of his tenants, and the pall held up by six of the quorum. The whole parish followed the corpse with heavy hearts, and in their mourning suits; the men in frize, and the women in riding-hoods. Captain Sentry, my master’s nephew, has taken possession of the Hall-house, and the whole estate. When my old master saw him a little before his death, he took him by the hand, and wished him joy of the estate which was falling to him, desiring him only to make a good use of it, and to pay the several legacies, and the gifts of charity, which he told him he had left as quit-rents upon the estate. The captain truly seems a courteous man, though he says but little. He makes much of those whom my master loved, and shews great kindness to the old house-dog, that you know my poor master was so fond of. It would have gone to your heart to have heard the moans the dumb creature made on the day of my master’s death. He has never enjoyed himself since; no more has any of us. It was the melancholiest day for the poor people that ever happened in Worcestershire. This is all from,

“ ‘Honoured Sir,

“ ‘Your most sorrowful servant,

“ ‘Edward Biscuit.

“ ‘P.S. My master desired, some weeks before he died, that a book, which comes up to you by the carrier, should be given to Sir Andrew Freeport in his name.’

“This letter, notwithstanding the poor butler’s manner of writing it, gave us such an idea of our good old friend, that upon the reading of it there was not a dry eye in the club. Sir Andrew opening the book, found it to be a collection of acts of parliament. There was in particular the Act of Uniformity, with some passages in it marked by Sir Roger’s own hand. Sir Andrew found that they related to two or three points which he had disputed with Sir Roger the last time he appeared at the club. Sir Andrew, who would have been merry at such an incident on another occasion, at the sight of the old man’s hand-writing burst into tears, and put the book into his pocket. Captain Sentry informs me that the knight has left rings and mourning for every one in the club.”

I am obliged to give you this ideal of Addison’s because I can neither from my own knowledge, nor, at this moment, out of any domestic chronicles I remember, give you so perfect an account of the funeral of an English squire who has lived an honourable life in peace. But Addison is as true as truth itself. So now, meditate over these four funerals, and the meaning and accuracy of the public opinions they express, till I can write again.

And believe me, ever faithfully yours,

JOHN RUSKIN.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

A cutting was sent me the other day, from a provincial paper, apparently well meant and conducted, but which in its column of ‘aphorisms,’ having, unfortunately, ventured to lead off with one on political economy, enunciated itself as follows:—

“All capital comes back at last, though sometimes by a roundabout road, to the pocket of the labourer, in the shape of wages. Consumable produce, however, may be dissipated in a thousand ways, in none of which is either the capitalist or the prolétaire benefited at all.”

I don’t happen to know, at this moment, what a ‘prolétaire’ is, and can’t find it in my French dictionary; but will ascertain, by next month; and, meantime, I keep the ‘aphorism,’ being a very curious one, for future comment.

A letter from “a working woman” has given me much pleasure. She says she does not understand my plans; but can trust me. She may be pleased to know that I don’t yet understand some of my plans myself, for they are not, strictly speaking, mine at all, but Nature’s and Heaven’s, which are not always comprehensible, until one begins to act on them. Then they clear as one goes on, and, I hope, my expression of what I can see of them, for her, and all true workers, will, also.

I have an interesting letter from Glasgow, but have not been able to read it yet. A slip of the ‘Glasgow Chronicle’ was enclosed, containing the Editor’s opinions on my modes of selling my books. Not having any occasion for his opinions on the subject, I threw the slip into the fire. The letter, which I have just glanced at, says my comparison of the price of my books to a doctor’s fee is absurd, for the poor don’t pay guinea fees. I know that, and I don’t want any poor people to read my books. I said so long ago, in ‘Sesame.’ I want them to read these letters, which they can get, each for the price of two pots of beer; and not to read my large books, nor anybody else’s, till they are rich enough, at least, to pay for good printing and binding. Even oracular Mr. Grant Duff says they are all to be rich first, and only next to be intelligent, and I am happy in supposing it needs a great deal of intelligence to read ‘Modern Painters.’ But, by the way, if the Editor of the ‘Glasgow Chronicle’ will tell me, why, in these fine manufacturing counties of his, and mine, I can only, with the greatest possible difficulty, or by mere good luck, and help of the Third Fors, now get a quarter of a yard of honest leather to stitch my leaves into, I shall be greatly obliged to him, and will reprint his communication in my best type, instead of throwing it into the fire.

[1] Cornutus, quoted by Ducange under the word ‘Baro.’ [↑]

[2] I am told in the north such pleasant fiction still holds in the Teesdale district; the wife calling her husband ‘my masterman.’ [↑]

[3] ‘The Book of a Hundred Ballads.’ You shall hear more of them, soon. [↑]

[4] This singular use of the word ‘free’ in baronial times, corresponding to our present singular use of it respecting trade, we will examine in due time. A soldier who fights only for his own hand, and a merchant who sells only for his own hand, are of course, in reality, equally the slaves of the persons who employ them. Only the soldier is truly free, and only the merchants, who fight and sell as their country needs, and bids them. [↑]

[5] I always give Mr. Rawdon Brown’s translation from his work, ‘The English in Italy,’ already quoted. [↑]

[6] Remember, briefly always, till I can tell you more about it, that the first Fors is Courage, the second, Patience, the third, Fortune. [↑]

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XVI.

Denmark Hill,
15th March, 1872.

My Friends,

The meditation I asked you to give to the facts put before you in my last letter, if given, should have convinced you, for one thing, quite sufficiently for all your future needs, of the unimportance of momentary public opinion respecting the characters of men; and for another thing, of the preciousness of confirmed public opinion, when it happens to be right;—preciousness both to the person opined of, and the opiners;—as, for instance, to Sir Roger de Coverley, the opinion formed of him by his tenants and club: and for third thing, it might have properly led you to consider, though it was scarcely probable your thoughts should have turned that way, what an evil trick of human creatures it was to reserve the expression of these opinions—or even the examination of them, until the persons to be opined of are dead; and then to endeavour to put all right by setting their coffins on baptistery fonts—or hanging them up at Tyburn. Let me very strongly advise you to make up your minds concerning people, while they are with you; to honour and obey those whom you consider good ones; to dishonour and disobey those whom you consider bad ones; and when good and bad ones die, to make no violent or expressive demonstrations of the feelings which have now become entirely useless to the persons concerned, and are only, as they are true or false, serviceable, or the contrary, to yourselves; but to take care that some memorial is kept of men who deserve memory, in a distinct statement on the stone or brass of their tombs, either that they were true men, or rascals,—wise men, or fools.

How beautiful the variety of sepulchral architecture might be, in any extensive place of burial, if the public would meet the small expense of thus expressing its opinions, in a verily instructive manner; and if some of the tombstones accordingly terminated in fools’ caps; and others, instead of crosses or cherubs, bore engravings of cats-of-nine-tails, as typical of the probable methods of entertainment, in the next world, of the persons, not, it is to be hoped, reposing, below.

But the particular subject led up to in my last letter, and which, in this special month of April, I think it appropriate for you to take to heart, is the way in which you spend your money, or allow it to be spent for you. Colonel Hawkwood and Colonel Fiske both passed their whole lives in getting possession, by various means, of other people’s money; (in the final fact, of working-men’s money,—yours, that is to say), and everybody praises and crowns them for doing so. Colonel Cromwell passes his life in fighting for, what in the gist of it meant, not freedom, but freedom from unjust taxation;—and you hang his coffin up at Tyburn.

“Not Freedom, but deliverance from unjust taxation.” You call me unpractical. Suppose you became practical enough yourselves to take that for a watchword for a little while, and see how near you can come to its realization.

For, I very positively can inform you, the considerablest part of the misery of the world comes of the tricks of unjust taxation. All its evil passions—pride, lust, revenge, malice, and sloth,—derive their main deadliness from the facilities of getting hold of other people’s money open to the persons they influence. Pay every man for his work,—pay nobody but for his work,—and see that the work be sound; and you will find pride, lust, and sloth have little room left for themselves.

Observe, however, very carefully, that by unjust taxation, I do not mean merely Chancellor of Exchequer’s business, but a great part of what really very wise and worthy gentlemen, but, unfortunately, proud also, suppose to be their business.

For instance, before beginning my letter to you this morning, (the last I shall ever date from Denmark Hill,[1]) I put out of my sight, carefully, under a large book, a legal document, which disturbed me by its barbarous black lettering. This is an R

in it, for instance, which is ugly enough, as such; but how ugly is the significance of it, and reasons of its being written that way, instead of in a properly intelligible way, there is hardly vituperation enough in language justly to express to you. This said document is to release the sole remaining executor of my father’s will from further responsibility for the execution of it. And all that there is really need for, of English scripture on the occasion, would be as follows:—

I, having received this 15th of March, 1822, from A. B., Esq., all the property which my father left, hereby release A. B., Esq., from future responsibility, respecting either my father’s property, or mine, or my father’s business, or mine. Signed, J. R., before such and such two witnesses.

This document, on properly cured calf-skin, (not cleaned by acids), and written as plainly as, after having contracted some careless literary habits, I could manage to write it, ought to answer the purpose required, before any court of law on earth.

In order to effect it in a manner pleasing to the present legal mind of England, I receive eighty-seven lines of close writing, containing from fourteen to sixteen words each, (one thousand two hundred and eighteen words in all, at the minimum); thirteen of them in black letters of the lovely kind above imitated, but produced with much pains by the scrivener. Of the manner in which this overplus of one thousand one hundred and seventy-eight words is accomplished, (my suggested form containing forty only), the following example—the last clause of the document—may suffice.

“And the said J. R. doth hereby for himself his heirs executors and administrators covenant and agree with and to the said A. B. his executors and administrators that he the said J. R. his heirs executors administrators or assigns shall and will from time to time and at all times hereafter save harmless and keep indemnified the said A. B. his heirs executors administrators and assigns from and in respect of all claims and demands whatsoever which may be made upon him or them or any of them for or in respect of the real or personal estate of the said J. R. and from all suits costs charges and damages and expenses whatsoever which the said A. B. his heirs executors administrators or assigns shall be involved in or put unto for or in respect of the said real or personal estate or any part thereof.”

Now, what reason do you suppose there is for all this barbarism and bad grammar, and tax upon my eyes and time, for very often one has actually to read these things, or hear them read, all through? The reason is simply and wholly that I may be charged so much per word, that the lawyer and his clerk may live. But do you not see how infinitely advantageous it would be for me, (if only I could get the other sufferers under this black literature to be of my mind), to clap the lawyer and his clerk, once for all, fairly out of the way in a dignified almshouse, with parchment unlimited, and ink turned on at a tap, and maintenance for life, on the mere condition of their never troubling humanity more, with either their scriptures or opinions on any subject; and to have this release of mine, as above worded, simply confirmed by the signature of any person whom the Queen might appoint for that purpose, (say the squire of the parish), and there an end? How is it, do you think, that other sufferers under the black literature do not come to be of my mind, which was Cicero’s mind also, and has been the mind of every sane person before Cicero and since Cicero,—so that we might indeed get it ended thus summarily?

Well, at the root of all these follies and iniquities, there lies always one tacit, but infinitely strong persuasion in the British mind, namely, that somehow money grows out of nothing, if one can only find some expedient to produce an article that must be paid for. “Here,” the practical Englishman says to himself, “I produce, being capable of nothing better, an entirely worthless piece of parchment, with one thousand two hundred entirely foolish words upon it, written in an entirely abominable hand; and by this production of mine, I conjure out of the vacant air, the substance of ten pounds, or the like. What an infinitely profitable transaction to me and to the world! Creation, out of a chaos of words, and a dead beast’s hide, of this beautiful and omnipotent ten pounds. Do I not see with my own eyes that this is very good?”

That is the real impression on the existing popular mind; silent, but deep, and for the present unconquerable. That by due parchment, calligraphy, and ingenious stratagem, money may be conjured out of the vacant air. Alchemy is, indeed, no longer included in our list of sciences, for alchemy proposed,—irrational science that it was,—to make money of something;—gold of lead, or the like. But to make money of nothing,—this appears to be manifoldly possible, to the modern Anglo-Saxon practical person,—instructed by Mr. John Stuart Mill. Sometimes, with rare intelligence, he is capable of carrying the inquiry one step farther. Pushed hard to assign a Providential cause for such legal documents as this we are talking of, an English gentleman would say: “Well, of course, where property needs legal forms to transfer it, it must be in quantity enough to bear a moderate tax without inconvenience; and this tax on its transfer enables many well-educated and agreeable persons to live.”

Yes, that is so, and I (speaking for the nonce in the name of the working-man, maker of property) am willing enough to be taxed, straightforwardly, for the maintenance of these most agreeable persons; but not to be taxed obliquely for it, nor teased, either obliquely or otherwise, for it. I greatly and truly admire (as aforesaid, in my first letter,) these educated persons in wigs; and when I go into my kitchen-garden in spring time, to see the dew on my early sprouts, I often mentally acknowledge the fitness, yet singularity, of the arrangement by which I am appointed to grow mute Broccoli for the maintenance of that talking Broccoli. All that I want of it is to let itself be kept for a show, and not to tax my time as well as my money.

Kept for a show, of heads; or, to some better purpose, for writing on fair parchment, with really well-trained hands, what might be desirable of literature. Suppose every existing lawyer’s clerk was trained, in a good drawing school, to write red and blue letters as well as black ones, in a loving and delicate manner; here for instance is an R and a number eleven, which begin the eleventh chapter of Job in one of my thirteenth-century Bibles. There is as good a letter and as good a number—every one different in design,—to every chapter, and beautifully gilded and painted ones to the beginning of books; all done for love, and teasing nobody. Now suppose the lawyer’s clerks, thus instructed to write decently, were appointed to write for us, for their present pay, words really worth setting down—Nursery Songs, Grimm’s Popular Stories, and the like, we should have again, not, perhaps, a cheap literature; but at least an innocent one. Dante’s words might then be taken up literally by relieved mankind. “Più ridon le carte.” “The papers smile more,” they might say, of such transfigured legal documents.

Not a cheap literature, even then; nor pleasing to my friend the ‘Glasgow Herald,’ who writes to me indignantly, but very civilly, (and I am obliged to him,) to declare that he is a Herald, and not a Chronicle. I am delighted to hear it; for my lectures on heraldry are just beginning at Oxford, and a Glaswegian opinion may be useful to me, when I am not sure of my blazon. Also he tells me good leather may be had in Glasgow. Let Glasgow flourish, and I will assuredly make trial of the same: but touching this cheap literature question, I cannot speak much in this letter, for I must keep to our especial subject of April—this Fools’ Paradise of Cloud-begotten Gold.

Cloud-begotten—and self-begotten—as some would have it. But it is not so, friends.

Do you remember the questioning to Job? The pretty letter R stopped me just now at the Response of Zophar; but look on to the thirty-eighth chapter, and read down to the question concerning this April time:—“Hath the rain a Father—and who hath begotten the drops of dew,—the hoary Frost of Heaven—who hath gendered it?”

That rain and frost of heaven; and the earth which they loose and bind: these, and the labour of your hands to divide them, and subdue, are your wealth, for ever—unincreasable. The fruit of Earth, and its waters, and its light—such as the strength of the pure rock can grow—such as the unthwarted sun in his season brings—these are your inheritance. You can diminish it, but cannot increase: that your barns should be filled with plenty—your presses burst with new wine,—is your blessing; and every year—when it is full—it must be new; and every year, no more.

And this money, which you think so multipliable, is only to be increased in the hands of some, by the loss of others. The sum of it, in the end, represents, and can represent, only what is in the barn and winepress. It may represent less, but cannot more.

These ten pounds, for instance, which I am grumbling at having to pay my lawyer—what are they? whence came they?

They were once, (and could be nothing now, unless they had been) so many skins of Xeres wine—grown and mellowed by pure chalk rock and unafflicted sunshine. Wine drunk, indeed, long ago—but the drinkers gave the vineyard dressers these tokens, which we call pounds, signifying, that having had so much good from them they would return them as much, in future time. And, indeed, for my ten pounds, if my lawyer didn’t take it, I could still get my Xeres, if Xeres wine exists anywhere. But, if not, what matters it how many pounds I have, or think I have, or you either? It is meat and drink we want—not pounds.

As you are beginning to discover—I fancy too many of you, in this rich country. If you only would discover it a little faster, and demand dinners, instead of Liberty! For what possible liberty do you want, which does not depend on dinner? Tell me, once for all, what is it you want to do, that you can’t do? Dinner being provided, do you think the Queen will interfere with the way you choose to spend your afternoons, if only you knock nobody down, and break nobody’s windows? But the need of dinner enslaves you to purpose!

On reading the letter spoken of in my last correspondence sheet, I find that it represents this modern form of slavery with an unconscious clearness, which is very interesting. I have, therefore, requested the writer’s permission to print it, and, with a passage or two omitted, and briefest comment, here it is in full type, for it is worth careful reading:—

Glasgow,
12th February, 1872.

“Sir,

“You say in your ‘Fors’ that you do not want any one to buy your books who will not give a ‘doctor’s fee’ per volume, which you rate at 10s. 6d.; now, as the ‘Herald’ remarks, you are clearly placing yourself in a wrong position, as you arbitrarily fix your doctor’s fee far too high; indeed, while you express a desire, no doubt quite sincerely, to elevate the working-man, morally, mentally, and physically, you in the meantime absolutely preclude him from purchasing your books at all, and so almost completely bar his way from the enjoyment and elevating influence of perhaps the most” [etc., complimentary terms—omitted].

“Permit me a personal remark:—I am myself a poorly paid clerk, with a salary not much over the income-tax minimum; now no doctor, here at least, would ever think of charging me a fee of 10s. 6d., and so you see it is as much out of my power to purchase your books as any working-man. While Mr. Carlyle is just now issuing a cheap edition of his Works at 2s. per volume, which I can purchase, here, quite easily for 1s. 6d.;” [Presumably, therefore, to be had, as far north as Inverness, for a shilling, and for sixpence in Orkney,] “I must say it is a great pity that a Writer so much, and, in my poor opinion, justly, appreciated as yourself, should as it were inaugurate with your own hands a system which thoroughly barriers your productions from the great majority of the middle and working classes. I take leave, however, to remark that I by no means shut my eyes to the anomalies of the Bookselling Trade, but I can’t see that it can be remedied by an Author becoming his own Bookseller, and, at the same time, putting an unusually high price on his books. Of course, I would like to see an Author remunerated as highly as possible for his labours.” [You ought not to like any such thing: you ought to like an author to get what he deserves, like other people, not more, nor less.] “I would also crave to remark, following up your unfortunate analogy of the doctor’s fee, that doctors who have acquired, either professionally or otherwise, a competence, often, nay very often, give their advice gratis to nearly every class, except that which is really wealthy; at least, I speak from my own experience, having known, nay even been attended by such a benevolent physician in a little town in Kirkcudbrightshire, who, when offered payment, and I was both quite able and willing to do so, and he was in no way indebted or obliged to me or mine, positively declined to receive any fee. So much for the benevolent physician and his fees.

“Here am I, possessed of a passionate love of nature in all her aspects, cooped up in this fearfully crammed mass of population, with its filthy Clyde, which would naturally have been a noble river, but, under the curse of our much belauded civilization, forsooth, turned into an almost stagnant loathsome ditch, pestilence-breathing, be-lorded over by hundreds upon hundreds of tall brick chimney-stacks vomiting up smoke unceasingly; and from the way I am situated, there are only one day and a half in the week in which I can manage a walk into the country; now, if I wished to foster my taste for the beautiful in nature and art, even while living a life of almost servile red-taped routine beneath the too frequently horror-breathing atmosphere of a huge overgrown plutocratic city like Glasgow, I cannot have your Works” [complimentary terms again] “as, after providing for my necessaries, I cannot indulge in books at 10s. 6d. a volume. Of course, as you may say” [My dear sir, the very last thing I should say], “I can get them from a library. Assuredly, but one (at least I would) wishes to have actual and ever-present possession of productions such as yours” [more compliments]. “You will be aware, no doubt, that ‘Geo. Eliot’ has adopted a ‘new system’ in publishing her new novel by issuing it in 5s. ‘parts,’ with the laudable view of enabling and encouraging readers to buy the work for themselves, and not trusting to get it from ‘some Mudie’ or another for a week, then galloping through the three volumes and immediately forgetting the whole matter. When I possess a book worth having I always recur to it now and again. Your ‘new system,’ however, tends to prevent the real reading public from ever possessing your books, and the wealthy classes who could afford to buy books at 10s. 6d. a volume, as a rule, I opine, don’t drive themselves insane by much reading of any kind.

“I beg a last remark and I’ve done. Glasgow, for instance, has no splendid public buildings. She has increased in wealth till I believe there are some of the greatest merchants in the world trading in her Exchange; but except her grand old Cathedral, founded by an almost-forgotten bishop in the twelfth century, in what we in our vain folly are pleased to call the dark ages, when we ourselves are about as really dark as need be; having no ‘high calling’ to strive for, except by hook or by crook to make money—a fortune—retire at thirty-five by some stroke of gambling of a highly questionable kind on the Share market or otherwise, to a suburban or country villa with Turkey carpets, a wine-cellar and a carriage and pair; as no man now-a-days is ever content with making a decent and honest livelihood. Truly a very ‘high calling!’ Our old Cathedral, thank God, was not built by contract or stock-jobbing: there was, surely, a higher calling of some sort in those quiet, old, unhurrying days. Our local plutocratic friends put their hands into their pockets to the extent of 150,000l. to help to build our new University buildings after a design by G. Gilbert Scott, which has turned out a very imposing pile of masonry; at least, it is placed on an imposing and magnificent site. I am no prophet, but I should not wonder if old St. Mungo’s Cathedral, erected nearly six hundred years ago to the honour and glory of God, will be standing a noble ruin when our new spick-and-span College is a total wreck after all. Such being the difference between the work of really earnest God-fearing men, and that done by contract and Trades’ Unions. The Steam Engine, one of the demons of our mad, restless, headlong civilization, is screaming its unearthly whistle in the very quadrangles of the now deserted, but still venerable College buildings in our High Street, almost on the very spot where the philosophic Professors of that day, to their eternal honour, gave a harbourage to James Watt, when the narrow-minded guild-brethren of Glasgow expelled him from their town as a stranger craftsman hailing from Greenock. Such is the irony of events! Excuse the presumption of this rather rambling letter, and apologizing for addressing you at such length,

“I am, very faithfully yours.”

I have only time, just now, to remark on this letter, first, that I don’t believe any of Mr. Scott’s work is badly done, or will come down soon; and that Trades’ Unions are quite right when honest and kind: but the frantic mistake of the Glaswegians, in thinking that they can import learning into their town safely in a Gothic case, and have 180,000 pounds’ worth of it at command, while they have banished for ever from their eyes the sight of all that mankind have to learn anything about, is,—Well—as the rest of our enlightened public opinion. They might as well put a pyx into a pigsty, to make the pigs pious.

In the second place, as to my correspondent’s wish to read my books, I am entirely pleased by it; but, putting the question of fee aside for the nonce, I am not in the least minded, as matters stand, to prescribe my books for him. Nay, so far as in me lies, he shall neither read them, nor learn to trust in any such poor qualifications and partial comforts of the entirely wrong and dreadful condition of life he is in, with millions of others. If a child in a muddy ditch asked me for a picture-book, I should not give it him; but say, “Come out of that first; or, if you cannot, I must go and get help; but picture-books, there, you shall have none!”

Only a day and a half in the week on which one can get a walk in the country, (and how few have as much, or anything like it!) just bread enough earned to keep one alive, on those terms—one’s daily work asking not so much as a lucifer match’s worth of human intelligence;—unwholesome besides—one’s chest, shoulders, and stomach getting hourly more useless. Smoke above for sky, mud beneath for water; and the pleasant consciousness of spending one’s weary life in the pure service of the devil! And the blacks are emancipated over the water there—and this is what you call “having your own way,” here, is it?

Very solemnly, my good clerk-friend, there is something to be done in this matter; not merely to be read. Do you know any honest men who have a will of their own, among your neighbours? If none, set yourself to seek for such; if any, commune with them on this one subject, how a man may have sight of the Earth he was made of, and his bread out of the dust of it—and peace! And find out what it is that hinders you now from having these, and resolve that you will fight it, and put end to it. If you cannot find out for yourselves, tell me your difficulties, briefly, and I will deal with them for you, as the Second Fors may teach me. Bring you the First with you, and the Third will help us.

And believe me, faithfully yours,

JOHN RUSKIN.

ROBERT, COUNT OF FLANDERS, called “The Son of St. George.”

Thus drawn by John Baptist Vrints, of Antwerp.

[1] Between May and October, any letters meant for me should be addressed to Brantwood, Coniston; between October and May, to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. They must be very short, and very plainly written, or they will not be read; and they need never ask me to do anything, because I won’t do it. And, in general, I cannot answer letters; but for any that come to help me, the writers may be sure that I am grateful. I get a great many from people who “know that I must be good-natured,” from my books. I was good-natured once; but I beg to state, in the most positive terms, that I am now old, tired, and very ill-natured. [↑]

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XVII.

Florence,
1st May, 1872.

My Friends,

Have you thought, as I prayed you to think, during the days of April, what things they are that will hinder you from being happy on this first of May? Be assured of it, you are meant, to-day, to be as happy as the birds, at least. If you are not, you, or somebody else, or something that you are one or other responsible for, is wrong; and your first business is to set yourself, them, or it, to rights. Of late you have made that your last business; you have thought things would right themselves, or that it was God’s business to right them, not yours. Peremptorily it is yours. Not, observe, to get your rights, but to put things to rights. Some eleven in the dozen of the population of the world are occupied earnestly in putting things to wrongs, thinking to benefit themselves thereby. Is it any wonder, then, you are uncomfortable, when already the world, in our part of it, is over-populated, and eleven in the dozen of the over-population doing diligently wrong; and the remaining dozenth expecting God to do their work for them; and consoling themselves with buying two-shilling publications for eighteenpence?

To put things to rights! Do you not know how refreshing it is, even to put one’s room to rights, when it has got dusty and decomposed? If no other happiness is to be had, the mere war with decomposition is a kind of happiness. But the war with the Lord of Decomposition, the old Dragon himself,—St. George’s war, with a princess to save, and win—are none of you, my poor friends, proud enough to hope for any part in that battle? Do you conceive no figure of any princess for May Queen; or is the definite dragon turned into indefinite cuttlefish, vomiting black venom into the waters of your life; or has he multiplied himself into an host of pulicarious dragons—bug-dragons, insatiable as unclean,—whose food you are, daily?

St. George’s war! Here, since last May, when I engraved Giotto’s Hope for you, have I been asking whether any one would volunteer for such battle? Not one human creature, except a personal friend or two, for mere love of me, has answered.

Now, it is true, that my writing may be obscure, or seem only half in earnest. But it is the best I can do: it expresses the thoughts that come to me as they come; and I have no time just now to put them into more intelligible words. And, whether you believe them or not, they are entirely faithful words: I have no interest at all to serve by writing, but yours.

And, literally, no one answers. Nay, even those who read, read so carelessly that they don’t notice whether the book is to go on or not.

Heaven knows; but it shall, if I am able, and what I undertook last May, be fulfilled, so far as the poor faculty or time left me may serve.

Read over, now, the end of that letter for May last, from “To talk at a distance,” in page 10.

I have given you the tenth of all I have, as I promised. I cannot, because of those lawyers I was talking of last month, get it given you in a permanent and accumulative form; besides that, among the various blockheadisms and rascalities of the day, the perversion of old endowments from their appointed purposes being now practised with applause, gives one little encouragement to think of the future. However, the seven thousand pounds are given, and wholly now out of my own power; and, as I said, only two or three friends, for love of me, and one for true love of justice also, have, in the course of the year, joined with me.

However, this is partly my own fault, for not saying more clearly what I want; and for expecting people to be moved by writing, instead of by personal effort. The more I see of writing the less I care for it; one may do more with a man by getting ten words spoken with him face to face, than by the black lettering of a whole life’s thought.

In parenthesis, just read this little bit of Plato; and take it to heart. If the last sentence of it does not fit some people I know of, there is no prophecy on lip of man.

Socrates is speaking. “I have heard indeed—but no one can say now if it is true or not—that near Nancratis, in Egypt, there was born one of the old gods, the one to whom the bird is sacred which they call the ibis; and this god or demigod’s name was Theuth.” Second parenthesis—(Theuth, or Thoth: he always has the head of an ibis with a beautiful long bill, in Egyptian sculpture; and you may see him at the British Museum on stone and papyrus infinite,—especially attending at judgments after death, when people’s sins are to be weighed in scales; for he is the Egyptian account-keeper, and adds up, and takes note of, things, as you will hear presently from Plato. He became the god of merchants, and a rogue, among the Romans, and is one now among us). “And this demigod found out first, they say, arithmetic, and logic, and geometry, and astronomy, and gambling, and the art of writing.

“And there was then a king over all Egypt, in the great city which the Greeks called Thebes. And Theuth, going to Thebes, showed the king all the arts he had invented, and said they should be taught to the Egyptians. But the king said:—‘What was the good of them?’ And Theuth telling him, at length, of each, the king blamed some things, and praised others. But when they came to writing: ‘Now, this piece of learning, O king,’ says Theuth, ‘will make the Egyptians more wise and more remembering; for this is physic for the memory, and for wisdom.’ But the king answered:—‘O most artful Theuth, it is one sort of person’s business to invent arts, and quite another sort of person’s business to know what mischief or good is in them. And you, the father of letters, are yet so simple-minded that you fancy their power just the contrary of what it really is; for this art of writing will bring forgetfulness into the souls of those who learn it, because, trusting to the external power of the scripture, and stamp[1] of other men’s minds, and not themselves putting themselves in mind, within themselves, it is not medicine of divine memory, but a drug of memorandum, that you have discovered, and you will only give the reputation and semblance of wisdom, not the truth of wisdom, to the learners: for,’ ” (now do listen to this, you cheap education-mongers), “ ‘for becoming hearers of many things, yet without instruction, they will seem to have manifold opinions, but be in truth without any opinions; and the most of them incapable of living together in any good understanding; having become seeming-wise, instead of wise.’”

So much for cheap literature; not that I like cheap talk better, mind you; but I wish I could get a word or two with a few honest people, now, face to face. For I have called the fund I have established The St. George’s Fund, because I hope to find, here and there, some one who will join in a White Company, like Sir John Hawkwood’s, to be called the Company of St. George; which shall have for its end the wise creating and bestowing, instead of the wise stealing, of money. Now it literally happened that before the White Company went into Italy, there was an Italian Company called ‘of St. George,’ which was afterwards incorporated with Sir John’s of the burnished armour; and another company, called ‘of the Rose,’ which was a very wicked and destructive one. And within my St. George’s Company,—which shall be of persons still following their own business, wherever they are, but who will give the tenth of what they have, or make, for the purchase of land in England, to be cultivated by hand, as aforesaid, in my last May number,—shall be another company, not destructive, called of “Monte Rosa,” or “Mont Rose,” because Monte Rosa is the central mountain of the range between north and south Europe, which keeps the gift of the rain of heaven. And the motto, or watchword of this company is to be the old French “Mont-joie.” And they are to be entirely devoted, according to their power, first to the manual labour of cultivating pure land, and guiding of pure streams and rain to the places where they are needed: and secondly, together with this manual labour, and much by its means, they are to carry on the thoughtful labour of true education, in themselves, and of others. And they are not to be monks nor nuns; but are to learn, and teach all fair arts, and sweet order and obedience of life; and to educate the children entrusted to their schools in such practical arts and patient obedience; but not at all, necessarily, in either arithmetic, writing, or reading.

That is my design, romantic enough, and at this day difficult enough; yet not so romantic, nor so difficult as your now widely and openly proclaimed design, of making the words “obedience” and “loyalty” to cease from the English tongue.

That same number of the ‘Republican’ which announced that all property must be taken under control, was graced by a frontispiece, representing, figuratively, “Royalty in extremis;” the joyful end of Rule, and of every strength of Kingship; Britannia, having, perhaps, found her waves of late unruly, declaring there shall be no rule over the land neither. Some day I may let you compare this piece of figurative English art with Giotto’s; but, meantime, since, before you look so fondly for the end of Royalty, it is well that you should know somewhat of its beginnings, I have given you a picture of one of the companions in the St. George’s Company of all time, out of a pretty book, published at Antwerp, by John Baptist Vrints, cutter of figures in copper, on the 16th April, 1598; and giving briefly the stories, and, in no unworthy imagination, the pictures also, of the first ‘foresters’ (rulers of woods and waves[2]) in Flanders, where the waves once needed, and received, much ruling; and of the Counts of Flanders who succeeded them, of whom this one, Robert, surnamed “of Jerusalem,” was the eleventh, and began to reign in 1077, being “a virtuous, prudent, and brave prince,” who, having first taken good order in his money affairs, and ended some unjust claims his predecessors had made on church property; and established a perpetual chancellorship, and legal superintendence over his methods of revenue; took the cross against the infidels, and got the name, in Syria, for his prowess, of the “Son of St. George.”

So he stands, leaning on his long sword—a man desirous of setting the world to rights, if it might be; but not knowing the way of it, nor recognizing that the steel with which it can be done, must take another shape than that double-edged one.

And from the eleventh century to this dull nineteenth, less and less the rulers of men have known their weapon. So far, yet, are we from beating sword into ploughshare, that now the sword is set to undo the plough’s work when it has been done; and at this hour the ghastliest ruin of all that moulder from the fire, pierced through black rents by the unnatural sunlight above the ashamed streets of Paris, is the long, skeleton, and roofless hollow of the “Grenier d’Abondance.”

Such Agriculture have we contrived here, in Europe, and ploughing of new furrows for graves. Will you hear how Agriculture is now contrived in America?—where, since you spend your time here in burning corn, you must send to buy it; trusting, however, still to your serviceable friend the Fire, as here to consume, so there, to sow and reap, for repairing of consumption. I have just received a letter from California, which I trust the writer will not blame me for printing:—

“March 1st, 1872.

“Sir,

“You have so strongly urged ‘agriculture by the hand’ that it may be of some interest to you to know the result thus far of agriculture by machinery, in California. I am the more willing to address you on this subject from the fact that I may have to do with a new Colony in this State, which will, I trust, adopt, as far as practicable, your ideas as to agriculture by the hand. Such thoughts as you might choose to give regarding the conduct of such a Colony here would be particularly acceptable; and should you deem it expedient to comply with this earnest and sincere request, the following facts may be of service to you in forming just conclusions.

“We have a genial climate and a productive soil. Our farms (‘ranches’) frequently embrace many thousands of acres, while the rule is, scarcely ever less than hundreds of acres. Wheat-fields of 5,000 acres are by no means uncommon, and not a few of above 40,000 acres are known. To cultivate these extensive tracts much machinery is used, such as steam-ploughs, gang-ploughs, reaping, mowing, sowing, and thrashing machines; and seemingly to the utter extermination of the spirit of home, and rural life. Gangs of labourers are hired during the emergency of harvesting; and they are left for the most part unhoused, and are also fed more like animals than men. Harvesting over, they are discharged, and thus are left near the beginning of our long and rainy winters to shift for themselves. Consequently the larger towns and cities are invested for months with idle men and boys. Housebreaking and highway robbery are of almost daily occurrence. As to the farmers themselves, they live in a dreamy, comfortless way, and are mostly without education or refinement. To show them how to live better and cleaner; to give them nobler aims than merely to raise wheat for the English market; to teach them the history of those five cities, and ‘their girls to cook exquisitely,’ etc., is surely a mission for earnest men in this country, no less than in England, to say nothing of the various accomplishments to which you have alluded. I have caused to be published in some of our farming districts many of the more important of your thoughts bearing on these subjects, and I trust with beneficial results.

“I trust I shall not intrude on Mr. Ruskin’s patience if I now say something by way of thankfulness for what I have received from your works.[3] I know not certainly if this will ever reach you. If it does, it may in some small way gladden you to know that I owe to your teaching almost all the good I have thus attained. A large portion of my life has been spent at sea, and in roaming in Mexico, Central and South America, and in the Malaysian and Polynesian Islands. I have been a sailor before and abaft the mast. Years ago I found on a remote island of the Pacific the ‘Modern Painters’; after them the ‘Seven Lamps of Architecture’; and finally your complete works. Ignorant and uncultivated, I began earnestly to follow certain of your teachings. I read most of the books you recommended, simply because you seemed to be my teacher; and so in the course of these years I have come to believe in you about as faithfully as one man ever believes in another. From having no fixed object in life I have finally found that I have something to do, and will ultimately, I trust, have something to say about sea-life, something that has not, I think, hitherto been said—if God ever permits me the necessary leisure from hard railway work, the most hopeless and depressing of all work I have hitherto done.

“Your most thankful servant,
——”

With the account given in the first part of this letter of the results of mechanical agriculture in California, you shall now compare a little sketch by Marmontel of the peasant life, not mechanical, in his own province. It is given, altering only the name of the river, in the “Contes Moraux,” in the story, professing to continue that of Moliére’s ‘Misanthrope’:

“Alceste, discontented as you know, both with his mistress and with his judges, decided upon flying from men, and retired very far from Paris to the banks of the Vologne; this river, in which the shells enclose pearl, is yet more precious by the fertility which it causes to spring on its borders; the valley that it waters is one beautiful meadow. On one side of it rise smiling hills, scattered all over with woods and villages, on the other extends a vast level of fields covered with corn. It was there that Alceste went to live, forgotten by all, free from cares, and from irksome duties; entirely his own, and finally delivered from the odious spectacle of the world, he breathed freely, and praised heaven for having broken all his chains. A little study, much exercise, pleasures not vivid, but untroubled; in a word, a life peacefully active, preserved him from the ennui of solitude: he desired nothing, and regretted nothing. One of the pleasures of his retreat was to see the cultivated and fertile ground all about him nourishing a peasantry, which appeared to him happy. For a misanthrope who has become so by his virtue, only thinks that he hates men, because he loves them. Alceste felt a strange softening of the heart mingled with joy at the sight of his fellow-creatures rich by the labour of their hand. ‘Those people,’ said he, ‘are very happy to be still half savage. They would soon be corrupted if they were more civilized.’ As he was walking in the country, he chanced upon a labourer who was ploughing, and singing as he ploughed. ‘God have a care of you, my good man!’ said he; ‘you are very gay?’ ‘I mostly am,’ replied the peasant. ‘I am happy to hear it: that proves that you are content with your condition.’ ‘Until now, I have good cause to be.’ ‘Are you married?’ ‘Yes, thank heaven.’ ‘Have you any children?’ ‘I had five. I have lost one, but that is a mischief that may be mended.’ ‘Is your wife young?’ ‘She is twenty-five years old.’ ‘Is she pretty?’ ‘She is, for me, but she is better than pretty, she is good.’ ‘And you love her?’ ‘If I love her! Who would not love her! I wonder?’ ‘And she loves you also, without doubt.’ ‘Oh! for that matter, with all her heart—just the same as before marriage.’ ‘Then you loved each other before marriage?’ ‘Without that, should we have let ourselves be caught?’ ‘And your children—are they healthy?’ ‘Ah! it’s a pleasure to see them! The eldest is only five years old, and he’s already a great deal cleverer than his father, and for my two girls, never was anything so charming! It’ll be ill-luck indeed if they don’t get husbands. The youngest is sucking yet, but the little fellow will be stout and strong. Would you believe it?—he beats his sisters when they want to kiss their mother!—he’s always afraid of anybody’s taking him from the breast.’ ‘All that is, then, very happy?’ ‘Happy! I should think so—you should see the joy there is when I come back from my work! You would say they hadn’t seen me for a year. I don’t know which to attend to first. My wife is round my neck—my girls in my arms—my boy gets hold of my legs—little Jeannot is like to roll himself off the bed to get to me—and I, I laugh, and cry, and kiss all at once—for all that makes me cry!’ ‘I believe it, indeed,’ said Alceste. ‘You know it, sir, I suppose, for you are doubtless a father?’ ‘I have not that happiness.’ ‘So much the worse for you! There’s nothing in the world worth having, but that.’ ‘And how do you live?’ ‘Very well: we have excellent bread, good milk, and the fruit of our orchard. My wife, with a little bacon, makes a cabbage soup that the King would be glad to eat! Then we have eggs from the poultry-yard; and on Sunday we have a feast, and drink a little cup of wine’ ‘Yes, but when the year is bad?’ ‘Well, one expects the year to be bad, sometimes, and one lives on what one has saved from the good years.’ ‘Then there’s the rigour of the weather—the cold and the rain, and the heat—that you have to bear.’ ‘Well! one gets used to it; and if you only knew the pleasure that one has in the evening, in getting the cool breeze after a day of summer; or, in winter, warming one’s hands at the blaze of a good faggot, between one’s wife and children; and then one sups with good appetite, and one goes to bed; and think you, that one remembers the bad weather? Sometimes my wife says to me,—“My good man, do you hear the wind and the storm? Ah, suppose you were in the fields?” “But I’m not in the fields, I’m here,” I say to her. Ah, sir! there are many people in the fine world, who don’t live as content as we.’ ‘Well! but the taxes?’ ‘We pay them merrily—and well we should—all the country can’t be noble, our squires and judges can’t come to work in the fields with us—they do for us what we can’t—we do for them what they can’t—and every business, as one says, has its pains.’ ‘What equity!’ said the misanthrope; ‘there, in two words, is all the economy of primitive society. Ah, Nature! there is nothing just but thee! and the healthiest reason is in thy untaught simplicity. But, in paying the taxes so willingly, don’t you run some risk of getting more put on you?’ ‘We used to be afraid of that; but, thank God, the lord of the place has relieved us from this anxiety. He plays the part of our good king to us. He imposes and receives himself, and, in case of need, makes advances for us. He is as careful of us as if we were his own children.’ ‘And who is this gallant man?’ ‘The Viscount Laval—he is known enough, all the country respects him.’ ‘Does he live in his château?’ ‘He passes eight months of the year there.’ ‘And the rest?’ ‘At Paris, I believe.’ ‘Does he see any company?’ ‘The townspeople of Bruyeres, and now and then, some of our old men go to taste his soup and chat with him.’ ‘And from Paris does he bring nobody?’ ‘Nobody but his daughter.’ ‘He is much in the right. And how does he employ himself?’ ‘In judging between us—in making up our quarrels—in marrying our children—in maintaining peace in our families—in helping them when the times are bad.’ ‘You must take me to see his village,’ said Alceste, ‘that must be interesting.’

“He was surprised to find the roads, even the cross-roads, bordered with hedges, and kept with care; but, coming on a party of men occupied in mending them, ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘so you’ve got forced labour here?’ ‘Forced?’ answered an old man who presided over the work. ‘We know nothing of that here, sir; all these men are paid, we constrain nobody; only, if there comes to the village a vagrant, or a do-nothing, they send him to me, and if he wants bread he can gain it; or, he must go to seek it elsewhere.’ ‘And who has established this happy police?’ ‘Our good lord—our father—the father to all of us.’ ‘And where do the funds come from?’ ‘From the commonalty; and, as it imposes the tax on itself, it does not happen here, as too often elsewhere, that the rich are exempted at the expense of the poor.’

“The esteem of Alceste increased every moment for the wise and benevolent master who governed all this little country. ‘How powerful would a king be!’ he said to himself—‘and how happy a state! if all the great proprietors followed the example of this one; but Paris absorbs both property and men, it robs all, and swallows up everything.’

“The first glance at the village showed him the image of confidence and comfort. He entered a building which had the appearance of a public edifice, and found there a crowd of children, women, and old men occupied in useful labour;—idleness was only permitted to the extremely feeble. Childhood, almost at its first steps out of the cradle, caught the habit and the taste for work; and old age, at the borders of the tomb, still exercised its trembling hands; the season in which the earth rests brought every vigorous arm to the workshops—and then the lathe, the saw, and the hatchet gave new value to products of nature.

“ ‘I am not surprised,’ said Alceste, ‘that this people is pure from vice, and relieved from discontent. It is laborious, and occupied without ceasing.’ He asked how the workshop had been established. ‘Our good lord,’ was the reply, ‘advanced the first funds for it. It was a very little place at first, and all that was done was at his expense, at his risk, and to his profit; but, once convinced that there was solid advantage to be gained, he yielded the enterprise to us, and now interferes only to protect; and every year he gives to the village the instruments of some one of our arts. It is the present that he makes at the first wedding which is celebrated in the year.’ ”

Thus wrote, and taught, a Frenchman of the old school, before the Revolution. But worldly-wise Paris went on her own way absorbing property and men; and has attained, this first of May, what means and manner of festival you see in her Grenier d’Abondance.

Glance back now to my proposal for the keeping of the first of May, in the letter on “Rose Gardens” in ‘Time and Tide,’ and discern which state is best for you—modern “civilization,” or Marmontel’s rusticity, and mine.

Ever faithfully yours,

JOHN RUSKIN.

[1] “Type,” the actual word in the Greek. [↑]

[2] “Davantage, ilz se nommoyent Forestiers, non que leur charge et gouvernement fust seulement sur la terre, qui estoit lors occupee et empeschee de la forest Charbonniere, mais la garde de la mer leur estoit aussi commise. Convient ici entendre, que ce terme, forest, en vieil bas Aleman, convenoit aussi bien aux eaux comme aux boys, ainsi qu’il est narré es memoires de Jean du Tillet.”—‘Les Genealogies des Forestiers et Comtes de Flandres’ Ant^P. 1598. [↑]

[3] I accept the blame of vanity in printing the end of this letter, for the sake of showing more perfectly the temper of its writer, whom I have answered privately; in case my letter may not reach him, I should be grateful if he would send me again his address. [↑]

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XVIII.

Pisa, 29th April, 1872.

My Friends,

You would pity me, if you knew how seldom I see a newspaper, just now; but I chanced on one yesterday, and found that all the world was astir about the marriage of the Marquis of B.; and that the Pope had sent him, on that occasion, a telegraphic blessing of super-fine quality.

I wonder what the Marquis of B. has done to deserve to be blessed to that special extent, and whether a little mild beatitude, sent here to Pisa, might not have been better spent? For, indeed, before getting hold of the papers, I had been greatly troubled, while drawing the east end of the Duomo, by three fellows who were leaning against the Leaning Tower, and expectorating loudly and copiously, at intervals of half a minute each, over the white marble base of it, which they evidently conceived to have been constructed only to be spit upon. They were all in rags, and obviously proposed to remain in rags all their days, and pass what leisure of life they could obtain, in spitting. There was a boy with them, in rags also, and not less expectorant; but having some remains of human activity in him still, being not more than twelve years old; and he was even a little interested in my brushes and colours, but rewarded himself, after the effort of some attention to these, by revolving slowly round the iron railing in front of me like a pensive squirrel. This operation at last disturbed me so much, that I asked him if there were no other railings in Pisa he could turn upside down over, but these? “Sono cascato, Signor—” “I tumbled over them, please, Sir,” said he, apologetically, with infinite satisfaction in his black eyes.

Now it seemed to me that these three moist-throated men and the squirrelline boy stood much more in need of a paternal blessing than the Marquis of B.—a blessing, of course, with as much of the bloom off it as would make it consistent with the position in which Providence had placed them; but enough, in its moderate way, to bring the good out of them instead of the evil. For there was all manner of good in them, deep and pure—yet for ever to be dormant; and all manner of evil, shallow and superficial, yet for ever to be active and practical, as matters stood that day, under the Leaning Tower.

Lucca, 7th May.—Eight days gone, and I’ve been working hard, and looking my carefullest; and seem to have done nothing, nor begun to see these places, though I’ve known them thirty years, and though Mr. Murray’s Guide says one may see Lucca, and its Ducal Palace and Piazza, the Cathedral, the Baptistery, nine churches, and the Roman amphitheatre, and take a drive round the ramparts, in the time between the stopping of one train and the starting of the next.

I wonder how much time Mr. Murray would allow for the view I had to-day, from the tower of the Cathedral, up the valley called of “Niévole,”—now one tufted softness of fresh springing leaves, far as the eye can reach. You know something of the produce of the hills that bound it, and perhaps of its own: at least, one used to see “Fine Lucca Oil” often enough in the grocers’ windows (petroleum has, I suppose, now taken its place), and the staple of Spitalfields was, I believe, first woven with Lucca thread.

The actual manner of production of these good things is thus:—The Val di Niévole is some five miles wide by thirty long, and is simply one field of corn or rich grass land, undivided by hedges; the corn two feet high, and more, to-day. Quite Lord Derby’s style of agriculture, you think? No; not quite. Undivided by hedges, the fields are yet meshed across and across by an intricate network of posts and chains. The posts are maple-trees, and the chains, garlands of vine. The meshes of this net each enclose two or three acres of the corn-land, with a row of mulberry-trees up the middle of it, for silk. There are poppies, and bright ones too, about the banks and roadsides; but the corn of Val di Niévole is too proud to grow with poppies, and is set with wild gladiolus instead, deep violet. Here and there a mound of crag rises out of the fields, crested with stone-pine, and studded all over with the large stars of the white rock-cistus. Quiet streams, filled with close crowds of the golden waterflag, wind beside meadows painted with purple orchis. On each side of the great plain is a wilderness of hills, veiled at their feet with a grey cloud of olive woods; above, sweet with glades of chestnut; peaks of more distant blue, still, to-day, embroidered with snow, are rather to be thought of as vast precious stones than mountains, for all the state of the world’s palaces has been hewn out of their marble.

I was looking over all this from under the rim of a large bell, beautifully embossed, with a St. Sebastian upon it, and some lovely thin-edged laurel leaves, and an inscription saying that the people should be filled with the fat of the land, if they listened to the voice of the Lord. The bell-founder of course meant, by the voice of the Lord, the sound of his own bell; and all over the plain, one could see towers rising above the vines voiced in the same manner. Also much trumpeting and fiddling goes on below, to help the bells, on holy days; and, assuredly, here is fat enough of land to be filled with, if listening to these scrapings and tinklings were indeed the way to be filled.

The laurel leaves on the bell were so finely hammered that I felt bound to have a ladder set against the lip of it, that I might examine them more closely; and the sacristan and bell-ringer were so interested in this proceeding that they got up, themselves, on the cross-beams, and sat like two jackdaws, looking on, one on each side; for which expression of sympathy I was deeply grateful, and offered the bell-ringer, on the spot, two bank-notes for tenpence each. But they were so rotten with age, and so brittle and black with tobacco, that, having unadvisedly folded them up small in my purse, the patches on their backs had run their corners through them, and they came out tattered like so much tinder. The bell-ringer looked at them hopelessly, and gave me them back. I promised him some better patched ones, and folded the remnants of tinder up carefully, to be kept at Coniston, (where we have still a tenpence-worth or so of copper,—though no olive oil)—for specimens of the currency of the new Kingdom of Italy.

Such are the monuments of financial art, attained by a nation which has lived in the fattest of lands for at least three thousand years, and for the last twelve hundred of them has had at least some measure of Christian benediction, with help from bell, book, candle and, recently, even from gas.

Yet you must not despise the benediction, though it has not provided them with clean bank-notes. The peasant race, at least, of the Val di Niévole are not unblest; if honesty, kindness, food sufficient for them, and peace of heart, can anywise make up for poverty in current coin. Only the evening before last, I was up among the hills to the south of Lucca, close to the remains of the country-house of Castruccio Castracani, who was Lord of the Val di Niévole, and much good land besides, in the year 1328; (and whose sword, you perhaps remember, was presented to the King of Sardinia, now King of Italy, when first he visited the Lucchese after driving out the old Duke of Tuscany; and Mrs. Browning wrote a poem upon the presentation;) a Neapolitan Duchess has got his country-house now, and has restored it to her taste. Well, I was up among the hills, that way, in places where no English, nor Neapolitans either, ever dream of going, being altogether lovely and at rest, and the country life in them unchanged; and I had several friends with me, and among them one of the young girls who were at Furness Abbey last year; and, scrambling about among the vines, she lost a pretty little cross of Florentine work. Luckily, she had made acquaintance, only the day before, with the peasant mistress of a cottage close by, and with her two youngest children, Adam and Eve. Eve was still tied up tight in swaddling clothes, down to the toes, and carried about as a bundle; but Adam was old enough to run about; and found the cross, and his mother gave it us back next day.

Not unblest, such a people, though with some common human care and kindness you might bless them a little more. If only you would not curse them; but the curse of your modern life is fatally near, and only for a few years more, perhaps, they will be seen—driving their tawny kine, or with their sheep following them,—to pass, like pictures in enchanted motion, among their glades of vine.

Rome, 12th May.—I am writing at the window of a new inn, whence I have a view of a large green gas-lamp, and of a pond, in rustic rock-work, with four large black ducks in it; also of the top of the Pantheon; sundry ruined walls; tiled roofs innumerable; and a palace about a quarter of a mile long, and the height, as near as I can guess, of Folkestone cliffs under the New Parade; all which I see to advantage over a balustrade veneered with an inch of marble over four inches of cheap stone, carried by balusters of cast iron, painted and sanded, but with the rust coming through,—this being the proper modern recipe in Italy for balustrades which may meet the increasing demand of travellers for splendour of abode. (By the way, I see I can get a pretty little long vignette view of the roof of the Pantheon, and some neighbouring churches, through a chink between the veneering and the freestone.)

Standing in this balcony, I am within three hundred yards of the greater Church of St. Mary, from which Castruccio Castracani walked to St. Peter’s on 17th January, 1328, carrying the sword of the German Empire, with which he was appointed to gird its Emperor, on his taking possession of Rome, by Castruccio’s help, in spite of the Pope. The Lord of the Val di Niévole wore a dress of superb damask silk, doubtless the best that the worms of Lucca mulberry-trees could spin; and across his breast an embroidered scroll, inscribed, “He is what God made him,” and across his shoulders, behind, another scroll, inscribed, “And he shall be what God will make.”

On the 3rd of August, that same year, he recovered Pistoja from the Florentines, and rode home to his own Lucca in triumph, being then the greatest war-captain in Europe, and Lord of Pisa, Pistoja, Lucca, half the coast of Genoa, and three hundred fortified castles in the Apennines; on the third of September he lay dead in Lucca, of fever. “Crushed before the moth;” as the silkworms also, who were boiled before even they became so much as moths, to make his embroidered coat for him. And, humanly speaking, because he had worked too hard in the trenches of Pistoja, in the dog-days, with his armour on, and with his own hands on the mattock, like the good knight he was.

Nevertheless, his sword was no gift for the King of Italy, if the Lucchese had thought better of it. For those three hundred castles of his were all Robber-castles, and he, in fact, only the chief captain of the three hundred thieves who lived in them. In the beginning of his career, these “towers of the Lunigiana belonged to gentlemen who had made brigandage in the mountains, or piracy on the sea, the sole occupation of their youth. Castruccio united them round him, and called to his little court all the exiles and adventurers who were wandering from town to town, in search of war or pleasures.”[1]

And, indeed, to Professors of Art, the Apennine between Lucca and Pistoja is singularly delightful to this day, because of the ruins of these robber-castles on every mound, and of the pretty monasteries and arcades of cloister beside them. But how little we usually estimate the real relation of these picturesque objects! The homes of Baron and Clerk, side by side, established on the hills. Underneath, in the plain, the peasant driving his oxen. The Baron lives by robbing the peasant, and the Clerk by blessing the Baron.

Blessing and absolving, though the Barons of grandest type could live, and resolutely die, without absolution. Old Straw-Mattress of Evilstone,[2] at ninety-six, sent his son from beside his death-mattress to attack the castle of the Bishop of Arezzo, thinking the Bishop would be off his guard, news having gone abroad that the grey-haired Knight of Evilstone could sit his horse no more. But, usually, the absolution was felt to be needful towards the end of life; and if one thinks of it, the two kinds of edifices on the hill-tops may be shortly described as those of the Pillager and Pardoner, or Pardonere, Chaucer’s word being classical in spelling, and the best general one for the clergy of the two great Evangelical and Papal sects. Only a year or two ago, close to the Crystal Palace, I heard the Rev. Mr. Tipple announce from his pulpit that there was no thief, nor devourer of widows’ houses, nor any manner of sinner, in his congregation that day, who might not leave the church an entirely pardoned and entirely respectable person, if he would only believe what the Rev. Mr. Tipple was about to announce to him.

Strange, too, how these two great pardoning religions agree in the accompaniment of physical filth. I have never been hindered from drawing street subjects by pure human stench, but in two cities,—Edinburgh and Rome.

There are some things, however, which Edinburgh and London pardon, now-a-days, which Rome would not. Penitent thieves, by all means, but not impenitent; still less impenitent peculators.

Have patience a little, for I must tell you one or two things more about Lucca: they are all connected with the history of Florence, which is to be one of the five cities you are to be able to give account of; and, by the way, remember at once, that her florin in the 14th century was of such pure gold that when in Chaucer’s “Pardonere’s Tale” Death puts himself into the daintiest dress he can, it is into a heap of “floreines faire and bright.” He has chosen another form at Lucca; and when I had folded up my two bits of refuse tinder, I walked into the Cathedral to look at the golden lamp which hangs before the Sacred Face—twenty-four pounds of pure gold in the lamp: Face of wood: the oath of kings, since William Rufus’ days; carved eighteen hundred years ago, if one would believe, and very full of pardon to faithful Lucchese; yet, to some, helpless.

There are, I suppose, no educated persons in Italy, and few in England, who do not profess to admire Dante; and, perhaps, out of every hundred of these admirers, three or four may have read the bit about Francesca di Rimini, the death of Ugolino, and the description of the Venetian Arsenal. But even of these honestly studious three or four we should rarely find one, who knew why the Venetian Arsenal was described. You shall hear, if you will.

“As, in the Venetian Arsenal, the pitch boils in the winter time, wherewith to caulk their rotten ships … so, not by fire, but divine art, a thick pitch boiled there, beneath, which had plastered itself all up over the banks on either side. But in it I could see nothing, except the bubbles that its boiling raised, which from time to time made it all swell up over its whole surface, and presently fell back again depressed. And as I looked at it fixedly, and wondered, my guide drew me back hastily, saying, ‘Look, look!’ And when I turned, I saw behind us, a black devil come running along the rocks. Ah, how wild his face! ah, how bitter his action as he came with his wings wide, light upon his feet! On his shoulder he bore a sinner, grasped by both haunches; and when he came to the bridge foot, he cried down into the pit: ‘Here’s an ancient from Lucca; put him under, that I may fetch more, for the land is full of such; there, for money, they make “No” into “Yes” quickly.’ And he cast him in and turned back,—never mastiff fiercer after his prey. The thrown sinner plunged in the pitch, and curled himself up; but the devils from under the bridge cried out, ‘There’s no holy face here; here one swims otherwise than in the Serchio.’ And they caught him with their hooks and pulled him under, as cooks do the meat in broth; crying, ‘People play here hidden; so that they may filch in secret, if they can.’ ”

Doubtless, you consider all this extremely absurd, and are of opinion that such things are not likely to happen in the next world. Perhaps not; nor is it clear that Dante believed they would; but I should be glad if you would tell me what you think is likely to happen there. In the meantime, please to observe Dante’s figurative meaning, which is by no means absurd. Every one of his scenes has symbolic purpose, down to the least detail. This lake of pitch is money, which, in our own vulgar English phrase, “sticks to people’s fingers;” it clogs and plasters its margin all over, because the mind of a man bent on dishonest gain makes everything within its reach dirty; it bubbles up and down, because underhand gains nearly always involve alternate excitement and depression; and it is haunted by the most cruel and indecent of all the devils, because there is nothing so mean, and nothing so cruel, but a peculator will do it. So you may read every line figuratively, if you choose: all that I want is, that you should be acquainted with the opinions of Dante concerning peculation. For with the history of the five cities, I wish you to know also the opinions, on all subjects personally interesting to you, of five people who lived in them; namely, of Plato, Virgil, Dante, Victor Carpaccio (whose opinions I must gather for you from his paintings, for painting is the way Venetians write), and Shakespeare.

If, after knowing these five men’s opinions on practical matters (these five, as you will find, being all of the same mind), you prefer to hold Mr. J. S. Mill’s and Mr. Fawcett’s opinions, you are welcome. And indeed I may as well end this by at once examining some of Mr. Fawcett’s statements on the subject of Interest, that being one of our chief modern modes of peculation; but, before we put aside Dante for to-day, just note farther this, that while he has sharp punishment for thieves, forgers, and peculators,—the thieves being changed into serpents, the forgers covered with leprosy, and the peculators boiled in pitch,—he has no punishment for bad workmen; no Tuscan mind at that day being able to conceive such a ghastly sin as a man’s doing bad work wilfully; and, indeed, I think the Tuscan mind, and in some degree the Piedmontese, retain some vestige of this old temper; for though, not a fortnight since (on 3rd May), the cross of marble in the arch-spandril next the east end of the Chapel of the Thorn at Pisa was dashed to pieces before my eyes, as I was drawing it for my class in heraldry at Oxford, by a stone-mason, that his master might be paid for making a new one, I have no doubt the new one will be as honestly like the old as master and man can make it; and Mr. Murray’s Guide will call it a judicious restoration. So also, though here, the new Government is digging through the earliest rampart of Rome (agger of Servius Tullius), to build a new Finance Office, which will doubtless issue tenpenny notes in Latin, with the dignity of denarii (the “pence” of your New Testament), I have every reason to suppose the new Finance Office will be substantially built, and creditable to its masons; (the veneering and cast-iron work being, I believe, done mostly at the instigation of British building companies). But it seems strange to me that, coming to Rome for quite other reasons, I should be permitted by the Third Fors to see the agger of Tullius cut through, for the site of a Finance Office, and his Mons Justitiæ (Mount of Justice), presumably the most venerable piece of earth in Italy, carted away, to make room for a railroad-station of Piccola Velocità. For Servius Tullius was the first king who stamped money with the figures of animals, and introduced a word among the Romans with the sound of which Englishmen are also now acquainted, “pecunia.” Moreover, it is in speaking of this very agger of Tullius that Livy explains in what reverence the Romans held the space between the outer and inner walls of their cities, which modern Italy delights to turn into a Boulevard.

Now then, for Mr. Fawcett:—

At the 146th page of the edition of his ‘Manual’ previously quoted, you will find it stated that the interest of money consists of three distinct parts:

• 1. Reward for abstinence.
• 2. Compensation for the risk of loss.
• 3. Wages for the labour of superintendence.

I will reverse this order in examining the statements; for the only real question is as to the first, and we had better at once clear the other two away from it.

3. Wages for the labour of superintendence.

By giving the capitalist wages at all, we put him at once into the class of labourers, which in my November letter I showed you is partly right; but, by Mr. Fawcett’s definition, and in the broad results of business, he is not a labourer. So far as he is one, of course, like any other, he is to be paid for his work. There is no question but that the partner who superintends any business should be paid for superintendence; but the question before us is only respecting payment for doing nothing. I have, for instance, at this moment 15,000l. of Bank Stock, and receive 1,200l. odd, a year, from the Bank, but I have never received the slightest intimation from the directors that they wished for my assistance in the superintendence of that establishment;—(more shame for them.) But even in cases where the partners are active, it does not follow that the one who has most money in the business is either fittest to superintend it, or likely to do so; it is indeed probable that a man who has made money already will know how to make more; and it is necessary to attach some importance to property as the sign of sense: but your business is to choose and pay your superintendent for his sense, and not for his money. Which is exactly what Mr. Carlyle has been telling you for some time; and both he and all his disciples entirely approve of interest, if you are indeed prepared to define that term as payment for the exercise of common sense spent in the service of the person who pays for it. I reserve yet awhile, however, what is to be said, as hinted in my first letter, about the sale of ideas.

2. Compensation for risk.

Does Mr. Fawcett mean by compensation for risk, protection from it, or reward for running it? Every business involves a certain quantity of risk, which is properly covered by every prudent merchant, but he does not expect to make a profit out of his risks, nor calculate on a percentage on his insurance. If he prefer not to insure, does Professor Fawcett mean that his customers ought to compensate him for his anxiety; and that while the definition of the first part of interest is extra payment for prudence, the definition of the second part of interest is extra payment for imprudence? Or, does Professor Fawcett mean, what is indeed often the fact, that interest for money represents such reward for risk as people may get across the green cloth at Homburg or Monaco? Because so far as what used to be business is, in modern political economy, gambling, Professor Fawcett will please to observe that what one gamester gains another loses. You cannot get anything out of Nature, or from God, by gambling;—only out of your neighbour: and to the quantity of interest of money thus gained, you are mathematically to oppose a precisely equal disinterest of somebody else’s money.

These second and third reasons for interest then, assigned by Professor Fawcett, have evidently nothing whatever to do with the question. What I want to know is, why the Bank of England is paying me 1,200l. a year. It certainly does not pay me for superintendence. And so far from receiving my dividend as compensation for risk, I put my money into the bank because I thought it exactly the safest place to put it in. But nobody can be more anxious than I to find it proper that I should have 1,200l. a year. Finding two of Mr. Fawcett’s reasons fail me utterly, I cling with tenacity to the third, and hope the best from it.

The third, or first,—and now too sorrowfully the last—of the Professor’s reasons, is this, that my 1,200l. are given me as “the reward of abstinence.” It strikes me, upon this, that if I had not my 15,000l. of Bank Stock I should be a good deal more abstinent than I am, and that nobody would then talk of rewarding me for it. It might be possible to find even cases of very prolonged and painful abstinence, for which no reward has yet been adjudged by less abstinent England. Abstinence may, indeed, have its reward, nevertheless; but not by increase of what we abstain from, unless there be a law of growth for it, unconnected with our abstinence. “You cannot have your cake and eat it.” Of course not; and if you don’t eat it, you have your cake; but not a cake and a half! Imagine the complex trial of schoolboy minds, if the law of nature about cakes were, that if you ate none of your cake to-day, you would have ever so much bigger a cake to-morrow!—which is Mr. Fawcett’s notion of the law of nature about money; and, alas, many a man’s beside,—it being no law of nature whatever, but absolutely contrary to all her laws, and not to be enacted by the whole force of united mankind.

Not a cake and a quarter to-morrow, dunce, however abstinent you are—only the cake you have,—if the mice don’t get at it in the night.

Interest, then, is not, it appears, payment for labour; it is not reward for risk; it is not reward for abstinence.

What is it?

One of two things it is;—taxation, or usury. Of which in my next letter. Meantime believe me

Faithfully yours,

J. RUSKIN.

[1] Sismondi: ‘History of Italian Republics,’ Vol. III., Chap. ii. [↑]

[2] “Saccone of Pietra-mala.” [↑]

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XIX.

Verona, 18th June, 1872.

My Friends,

What an age of progress it is, by help of advertisements! No wonder you put some faith in them, friends. In summer one’s work is necessarily much before breakfast; so, coming home tired to-day, I order a steak, with which is served to me a bottle of “Moutarde Diaphane,” from Bordeaux.

What a beautiful arrangement have we here! Fancy the appropriate mixture of manufactures of cold and hot at Bordeaux—claret and diaphanous mustard! Then the quantity of printing and proclamation necessary to make people in Verona understand that diaphanous mustard is desirable, and may be had at Bordeaux. Fancy, then, the packing, and peeping into the packages, and porterages, and percentages on porterages; and the engineering, and the tunnelling, and the bridge-building, and the steam whistling, and the grinding of iron, and raising of dust in the Limousin (Marmontel’s country), and in Burgundy, and in Savoy, and under the Mont Cenis, and in Piedmont, and in Lombardy, and at last over the field of Solferino, to fetch me my bottle of diaphanous mustard!

And to think that, besides paying the railway officers all along the line, and the custom-house officers at the frontier, and the original expenses of advertisement, and the profits of its proprietors, my diaphanous mustard paid a dividend to somebody or other, all the way here! I wonder it is not more diaphanous by this time!

An age of progress, indeed, in which the founding of my poor St. George’s Company, growing its own mustard, and desiring no dividends, may well seem difficult. I have scarcely had courage yet to insist on that second particular, but will try to find it, on this Waterloo day.

Observe, then, once for all, it is to be a company for Alms-giving, not for dividend-getting. For I still believe in Alms-giving, though most people now-a-days do not, but think the only hopeful way of serving their neighbour is to make a profit out of him. I am of opinion, on the contrary, that the hopefullest way of serving him is to let him make a profit out of me, and I only ask the help of people who are at one with me in that mind.

Alms-giving, therefore, is to be our function; yet alms only of a certain sort. For there are bedesmen and bedesmen, and our charities must be as discriminate as possible.

For instance, those two steely and stalwart horsemen, who sit, by the hour, under the two arches opposite Whitehall, from ten to four per diem, to receive the public alms. It is their singular and well-bred manner of begging, indeed, to keep their helmets on their heads, and sit erect on horseback; but one may, with slight effort of imagination, conceive the two helmets held in a reversed manner, each in the mouth of a well-bred and politely-behaving dog, Irish greyhound, or the like; sitting erect, it also, paws in air, with the brass instead of copper pan in its mouth, plume downwards, for reception of pence.

“Ready to fight for us, they are, on occasional 18ths of June.”

Doubtless, and able-bodied;—barons of truest make: but I thought your idea of discriminate charity was to give rather to the sick than the able-bodied? and that you have no hope of interfering henceforward, except by money payments, in any foreign affairs?

“But the Guards are necessary to keep order in the Park.”

Yes, certainly, and farther than the Park. The two breastplated figures, glittering in transfixed attitudes on each side of the authoritative clock, are, indeed, very precious time-piece ornamentation. No watchmaker’s window in Paris or Geneva can show the like. Finished little figures, perfect down to the toes of their boots,—the enamelled clasp on the girdle of the British Constitution!—You think the security of that depends on the freedom of your press, and the purity of your elections?

Do but unclasp this piece of dainty jewellery; send the metal of it to the melting-pot, and see where your British Constitution will be, in a few turns of the hands of the faultless clock. They are precious statues, these, good friends; set there to keep you and me from having too much of our own way; and I joyfully and gratefully drop my penny into each helmet as I pass by, though I expect no other dividend from that investment than good order, picturesque effect, and an occasional flourish on the kettle-drum.

Likewise, from their contributed pence, the St. George’s Company must be good enough to expect dividend only in good order and picturesque effect of another sort. For my notion of discriminate charity is by no means, like most other people’s, the giving to unable-bodied paupers. My alms-people are to be the ablest bodied I can find; the ablest minded I can make; and from ten to four every day will be on duty. Ten to four, nine to three, or perhaps six to twelve;—just the time those two gilded figures sit with their tools idle on their shoulders, (being fortunately without employment,) my ungilded, but not unstately, alms-men shall stand with tools at work, mattock or flail, axe or hammer. And I do not doubt but in little time, they will be able to thresh or hew rations for their day out of the ground, and that our help to them need only be in giving them that to hew them out of. Which, you observe, is just what I ask may be bought for them.

“ ‘May be bought,’ but by whom? and for whom, how distributed, in whom vested?” and much more you have to ask.

As soon as I am sure you understand what needs to be done, I will satisfy you as to the way of doing it.

But I will not let you know my plans, till you acknowledge my principles, which I have no expectation of your doing yet awhile.

June 22nd.