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. III.
GEORGE ALLEN,
SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON, KENT.
1873.

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XXV.

Brantwood,
January 4th, 1873.

The Third Fors, having been much adverse to me, and more to many who wish me well, during the whole of last year, has turned my good and helpful printer adrift in the last month of it; and, with that grave inconvenience to him, contrived for me the minor one of being a fortnight late with my New Year’s letter. Under which provocation I am somewhat consoled this morning by finding in a cookery book, of date 1791, “written purely from practice, and dedicated to the Hon. Lady Elizabeth Warburton, whom the author lately served as housekeeper,” a receipt for Yorkshire Goose Pie, with which I think it will be most proper and delightful to begin my economical instructions to you for the current year. I am, indeed, greatly tempted to give precedence to the receipt for making “Fairy Butter,” and further disturbed by an extreme desire to tell you how to construct an “Apple Floating-Island”; but will abide, nevertheless, by my Goose Pie.

“Take a large fat goose, split it down the back, and take all the bones out; bone a turkey and two ducks the same way, season them very well with pepper and salt, with six woodcocks; lay the goose down on a clean dish, with the skin-side down; and lay the turkey into the goose, with the skin down; have ready a large hare, cleaned well, cut in pieces, and stewed in the oven, with a pound of butter, a quarter of an ounce of mace, beat fine, the same of white pepper, and salt to your taste, till the meat will leave the bones, and scum the butter off the gravy, pick the meat clean off, and beat it in a marble mortar very fine, with the butter you took off, and lay it in the turkey; take twenty-four pounds of the finest flour, six pounds of butter, half-a-pound of fresh rendered suet, make the paste pretty thick, and raise the pie oval; roll out a lump of paste, and cut it in vine-leaves or what form you please; rub the pie with the yolks of eggs, and put your ornaments on the walls; then turn the hare, turkey, and goose upside down, and lay them in your pie, with the ducks at each end, and the woodcocks on the sides; make your lid pretty thick, and put it on; you may lay flowers, or the shape of the fowls in paste, on the lid, and make a hole in the middle of your lid; the walls of the pie are to be one inch and a half higher than the lid; then rub it all over with the yolks of eggs, and bind it round with threefold paper, and lay the same over the top; it will take four hours baking in a brown-bread oven; when it comes out, melt two pounds of butter in the gravy that comes from the hare, and pour it hot in the pie through a tun-dish; close it well up, and let it be eight or ten days before you cut it; if you send it any distance, make up the hole in the middle with cold butter, to prevent the air from getting in.”

Possessed of these instructions, I immediately went to my cook to ask how far we could faithfully carry them out. But she told me nothing could be done without a “brown-bread oven;” which I shall therefore instantly build under the rocks on my way down to the lake: and, if I live, we will have a Lancashire goose-pie next Michaelmas. You may, perhaps, think this affair irrelevant to the general purposes of ‘Fors Clavigera’; but it is not so by any means: on the contrary, it is closely connected with its primary intentions; and, besides, may interest some readers more than weightier, or, I should rather say, lighter and more spiritual matters. For, indeed, during twenty-three months, I had been writing to you, fellow-workmen, of matters affecting your best interests in this world, and all the interests you had anywhere else:—explaining, as I could, what the shrewdest of you, hitherto, have thought, and the best of you have done;—what the most selfish have gained, and the most generous have suffered. Of all this, no notice whatever is taken. In my twenty-fourth letter, incidentally, I mentioned the fact of my being in a bad humour, (which I nearly always am, and which it matters little to anybody whether I am or not, so long as I don’t act upon it,) and forthwith I got quite a little mailcartful of consolation, reproof, and advice. Much of it kind,—nearly all of it helpful, and some of it wise; but very little bearing on matters in hand: an eager Irish correspondent offers immediately to reply to anything, “though he has not been fortunate enough to meet with the book;” one working man’s letter, for self and mates, is answered in the terminal notes;—could not be answered before for want of address;—another, from a south-country clergyman, could not be answered any way, for he would not read any more, he said, of such silly stuff as ‘Fors’;—but would have been glad to hear of any scheme for giving people a sound practical education. I fain would learn, myself, either from this practical Divine, or any of his mates, what the ecclesiastical idea of a sound practical education is;—that is to say, what—in weekday schools (—the teaching in Sunday ones being necessarily to do no manner of work)—our clergy think that boys and girls should be taught to practise, in order that, when grown up, they may with dexterity perform the same. For indeed, the constant object of these letters of mine, from their beginning, has been to urge you to do vigorously and dextrously what was useful; and nothing but that. And I have told you of Kings and Heroes, and now am about to tell you what I can of a Saint, because I believe such persons to have done, sometimes, more useful things than you or I: begging your pardon always for not addressing you as heroes, which I believe you all think yourselves, or as kings, which I presume you all propose to be, or at least, if you cannot, to let nobody else be. Come what may of such proposal, I wish you would consider with me to-day what form of “sound practical education,” if any, would enable you all to be Saints; and whether, such form proving discoverable, you would really like to be put through it, or whether, on the contrary, both the clergy and you mean, verily, and in your hearts, nothing by “practical education” but how to lay one penny upon another. Not but that it does my heart good to hear modern divines exhorting to any kind of practice—for, as far as I can make out, there is nothing they so much dread for their congregations as their getting into their heads that God expects them to do anything, beyond killing rabbits if they are rich, and being content with bad wages, if they are poor. But if any virtue more than these, (and the last is no small one) be indeed necessary to Saint-ship—may we not prudently ask what such virtue is, and, at this Holiday time, make our knowledge of the Hos more precise? Nay, in your pleading for perennial Holiday,—in your ten hours or eight hours bills, might you not urge your point with stouter conscience if you were all Saints, and the hours of rest you demanded became a realization of Baxter’s Saints’ Rest?

Suppose we do rest, for a few minutes, from that process of laying one penny upon another, (those of us, at least, who have learned the trick of it,) and look with some attention at the last penny we laid on the pile—or, if we can do no better, at the first of the pile we mean to lay.

Show me a penny—or, better, show me the three pages of our British Bible—penny, shilling, and pound, and let us try what we can read on them together. You see how rich they are in picture and legend: surely so practical a nation, in its most valued Scriptures, cannot have written or pictured anything but with discretion, and to the benefit of all beholders.

We begin with the penny;—not that, except under protest, I call such a thing as that a Penny! Our farthings, when we were boys, were as big as that; and two-pence filled our waistcoat pockets. Who, then, is this lady, whom it represents, sitting, apparently, on the edge of a dish-cover? Britannia? Yes,—of course. But who is Britannia? and what has she got on her head, in her hand, and on her seat?

“Don’t I know who Britannia is?” Not I; and much doubt if you do! Is she Great Britain,—or Little Britain? Is she England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the Indies,—or a small, dishonest, tailoring and engineering firm, with no connection over the way, and publicly fined at the police court for sneakingly supplying customers it had engaged not to? Is she a Queen, or an Actress, or a slave? Is she a Nation, mother of nations; or a slimy polype, multiplying by involuntary vivisection, and dropping half putrid pieces of itself wherever it crawls or contracts? In the world-feasts of the Nativity, can she sit, Madonna-like, saying: “Behold, I, and the children whom the Lord hath given me”? Or are her lips capable of such utterance—of any utterance—no more; the musical Rose of them cleft back into the long dumb trench of the lizard’s; her motherhood summed in saying that she makes all the world’s ditches dirtier with her spawn?

And what has she on her head, in her hand, or on that,—Shield, I believe it is meant for,—which she sits on the edge of? A most truly symbolic position! For, you know, all those armour-plates and guns you pay for so pleasantly are indeed made, when you look into the matter, not at all to defend you against anybody—(no one ever pretends to say distinctly that the newest of them could protect you for twelve hours); but they are made that the iron masters may get commission on the iron, and the manufacturers commission on the manufacture. And so the Ironmongering and Manufacturing Britannia does very literally sit upon her Shield: the cognizance whereof, or—now too literally—the “Bearing,”—so obscured, becomes of small importance. Probably, in a little while, a convenient cushion—or, what not—may be substituted for St. George’s Cross; to the public satisfaction.

I must not question farther what any of these symbols may come to mean; I will tell you, briefly, what they meant once, and are yet, by courtesy, supposed to mean.

They were all invented by the Greeks; and all, except the Cross, some twelve hundred years before the first Christmas; they became intelligible and beautiful first about Theseus’ time.

The Helmet crest properly signifies the adoption by man of the passions of pride and anger which enable nearly all the lower creatures to erect some spinous or plumose ridge upon their heads or backs. It is curiously associated with the story of the Spartan Phalanthus, the first colonist of Tarentum, which might have been the port of an Italia ruling the waves, instead of Britannia, had not the crest fallen from the helmet of the Swabian prince, Manfred, in his death-battle with Charles of Anjou. He had fastened it that morning, he said, with his own hand,—you may think, if his armourer had fastened it, it would have stayed on, but kings could do things with their own hands in those days;—howbeit, it fell, and Manfred, that night, put off his armour for evermore, and the evil French King reigned in his stead: and South Italy has lain desert since that day, and so must lie, till the crest of some King rise over it again, who will be content with as much horse-hair as is needful for a crest, and not wear it, as our English Squires have done lately (or perhaps even the hair of an animal inferior to the horse), on their heads, instead of their helmets.

Of the trident in Britannia’s hand, and why it must be a trident, that is to say, have three prongs, and no more; and in what use or significance it differs from other forks, (as for pitching, or toasting)—we will enquire at another time. Take up next the shilling, or, more to our purpose, the double shilling,—get a new florin, and examine the sculpture and legend on that.

The Legend, you perceive, is on the one side English,—on the other Latin. The latter, I presume, you are not intended to read, for not only it is in a dead language, but two words are contracted, and four more indicated only by their first letters. This arrangement leaves room for the ten decorative letters, an M, and a D, and three C’s, and an L, and the sign of double stout, and two I’s; of which ten letters the total function is to inform you that the coin was struck this year, (as if it mattered either to you or to me, when it was struck!) But the poor fifth part of ten letters, preceding—the F and D, namely—have for function to inform you that Queen Victoria is the Defender of our Faith. Which is an all-important fact to you and me, if it be a fact at all;—nay, an all-important brace of facts; each letter vocal, for its part, with one. F, that we have a Faith to defend; D, that our monarch can defend it, if we chance to have too little to say for it ourselves. For both which facts, Heaven be praised, if they be indeed so,—nor dispraised by our shame, if they have ceased to be so: only, if they be so, two letters are not enough to assert them clearly; and if not so, are more than enough to lie with. On the reverse of the coin, however, the legend is full, and clear. “One Florin.” “One Tenth of a Pound.” Yes; that is all very practical and instructive. But do we know either what a pound is, or what a florin or “Fiorino” was, or why this particular coin should be called a Florin, or whether we have any right to call any coin of England, now, by that name? And, by the way, how is it that I get continually reproved for writing above the level of the learning of my general readers, when here I find the most current of all our books written in three languages, of which one is dead, another foreign, and the third written in defunct letters, so that anybody with two shillings in his pocket is supposed able to accept information conveyed in contracted Latin, Roman numerals, old English, and spoiled Italian?

How practical, and how sentimental, at once! For indeed we have no right, except sentimentally, to call that coin a florin,—that is to say, a “flower (lily-flower) piece,” or Florence-piece. What have we any more to do with Lilies? Do you ever consider how they grow—or care how they die? Do the very water-lilies, think you, keep white now, for an hour after they open, in any stream in England? And for the heraldry of the coin, neither on that, nor any other, have we courage or grace to bear the Fleur-de-Lys any more, it having been once our first bearing of all. For in the first quarter of our English shield we used to bear three golden lilies on a blue ground, being the regal arms of France; (our great Kings being Frenchmen, and claiming France as their own, before England). Also these Fleur-de-Lys were from the beginning the ensigns of a King; but those three Lions which you see are yet retained for the arms of England on two of the shields in your false florin, (false in all things, for heaven knows, we have as little right to lions now as to lilies,) “are deduced onely from Dukedomes[1]: I say deduced, because the Kings of England after the Conquest did beare two leopards (the ensignes of the Dukedome of Normandy) till the time of King Henry the Second, who, according to the received opinion, by marriage of Eleanor, daughter and heire of the duke of Aquitaine and Guyon” (Guienne) “annexed the Lyon, her paternall coate, being of the same Field, Metall, and Forme with the Leopards, and so from thence forward they were jointly marshalled in one Shield and Blazoned three Lyons.” Also “at the first quartering of these coats by Edward the Third, question being moved of his title to France, the King had good cause to put that coat in the first ranke, to show his most undoubted Title to that Kingdom, and therefore would have it the most perspicuous place of his Escocheon.”

But you see it is now on our shield no more,—we having been beaten into cowardly and final resignation of it, at the peace of Amiens, in George III.’s time, and precisely in the first year of this supreme nineteenth century. He, as monarch of England, being unable to defend our Lilies, and the verbal instruction of the pacific angel Gabriel of Amiens, as he dropped his lilies, being to the English accordingly, that thenceforward they were to “hate a Frenchman as they did the Devil,” which, as you know, was Nelson’s notion of the spirit in which England expected every man to do his duty.

Next to the three Lions, however (all of them, you find, French), there is a shield bearing one Lion, “Rampant”—that is to say, climbing like a vine on a wall. Remember that the proper sense of the word “rampant” is “creeping,” as you say it of ground ivy, and such plants: and that a lion rampant—whether British, or as this one Scotch, is not at all, for his part, in what you are so fond of getting into—“an independent position,” nor even in a specifically leonine one, but rather generally feline, as of a cat, or other climbing animal, on a tree; whereas the three French Lions, or Lioncels, are “passant-gardant,” “passing on the look out,” as beasts of chase.

Round the rampant Scottish animal (I can’t find why the Scotch took him for their type) you observe farther, a double line, with—though almost too small to be seen—fleur-de-Lys at the knots and corners of it. This is the tressure, or binding belt, of the great Charles, who has really been to both English and Scottish lions what that absent Charles of the polar skies must, I suppose, have been to their Bear, and who entirely therefore deserves to be stellified by British astronomers.

The Tressure, heraldically, records alliance of that Charlemagne with the Scottish King Achaius, and the vision by the Scottish army of St. Andrew’s cross—and the adoption of the same, with the Thistle and Rue, for their national device; of all which the excellent Scotch clergyman and historian, Robert Henry, giving no particular account, prefers to note, as an example of such miraculous appearances in Scotland, the introduction, by King Kenneth, the son of Alpine, of a shining figure “clothed in the skins of dried fish, which shone in the dark,” to his nobility and councillors, to give them heavenly admonitions “after they had composed themselves to rest.” Of course a Presbyterian divine must have more pleasure in recording a miracle so connected with the existing national interests of the herring and salmon fisheries, than the tradition of St. Andrew’s cross; and that tradition itself is so confused among Rodericks, Alpines, and Ferguses, that the ‘Lady of the Lake’ is about as trustworthy historical reading. But St. Andrew’s Cross and the Thistle—(I don’t know when the Rue, much the more honourable bearing of the two, was dropped)—are there, you see, to this day; and you must learn their story—but I’ve no time to go into that, now.

For England, the tressure really implies, though not in heraldry, more than for Scotland. For the Saxon seven kingdoms had fallen into quite murderous anarchy in Charlemagne’s time, and especially the most religious of them, Northumberland; which then included all the country between the Frith of Forth and the Cheviots commanded by the fortress of Edwin’s Burg, (fortress now always standing in a rampant manner on its hind-legs, as the Modern Athens). But the pious Edwin’s spirit had long left his burg, and the state of the whole district from which the Saxon angels—(non Angli)—had gone forth to win the pity of Rome, was so distracted and hopeless that Charlemagne called them “worse than heathens,” and had like to have set his hand to exterminate them altogether; but the Third Fors ruled it otherwise, for luckily, a West Saxon Prince, Egbert, being driven to Charles’s court, in exile, Charles determined to make a man of him, and trained him to such true knighthood, that, recovering the throne of the West Saxons, the French-bred youth conquered the Heptarchy, and became the first King of “England” (all England);—and the Grandfather of Alfred.

Such belt of lilies did the French chivalry bind us with; the “tressure” of Charlemagne.

Of the fourth shield, bearing the Irish Harp, and the harmonious psalmody of which that instrument is significant, I have no time to speak to-day; nor of the vegetable heraldry between the shields;—but before you lay the florin down I must advise you that the very practical motto or war-cry which it now bears—“one tenth of a pound,” was not anciently the motto round the arms of England, that is to say, of English kings, (for republican England has no shield); but a quite different one—to wit—“Accursed (or evil-spoken of, maledictus, opposed to well-spoken of, or benedictus,) be He who thinks Evil;” and that this motto ought to be written on another Tressure or band than Charlemagne’s, surrounding the entire shield—namely, on a lady’s garter; specifically the garter of the most beautiful and virtuous English lady, Alice of Salisbury, (of whom soon); and that without this tressure and motto, the mere shield of Lions is but a poor defence.

For this is a very great and lordly motto; marking the utmost point and acme of honour, which is not merely in doing no evil, but in thinking none; and teaching that the first—as indeed the last—nobility of Education is in the rule over our Thoughts, on which matter, I must digress for a minute or two.

Among the letters just received by me, as I told you, is one from a working man of considerable experience, which laments that, in his part of the country, “literary institutes are a failure.”

Indeed, your literary institutes must everywhere fail, as long as you think that merely to buy a book, and to know your letters, will enable you to read the book. Not one word of any book is readable by you except so far as your mind is one with its author’s, and not merely his words like your words, but his thoughts like your thoughts.

For instance, the other day, at a bookstall, I bought a shilling Shakespeare. To such degree of wealth, ingenuity, and literary spirit, has the nineteenth century reached, that it has a shilling to spare for its Shakespeare—can produce its Shakespeare in a pocketable shape for that sum—and is ready to invest its earnings in a literature to that extent. Good. You have now your Shakespeare, complete, in your pocket; you will read the greatest of dramatic authors at your leisure, and form your literary taste on that model.

Suppose we read a line or two together then, you and I;—it may be, that I cannot, unless you help me.

“And there, at Venice, gave

His body to that pleasant country’s earth,

And his pure soul unto his Captain, Christ,

Under whose colours he had fought so long.”

What do you suppose Shakespeare means by calling Venice a “pleasant” country? What sort of country was, or would have been, pleasant to him? The same that is pleasant to you, or another kind of country? Was there any coal in that earth of Venice, for instance? Any gas to be made out of it? Any iron?

Again. What does Shakespeare mean by a “pure” soul, or by Purity in general? How does a soul become pure, or clean, and how dirty? Are you sure that your own soul is pure? if not, is its opinion on the subject of purity likely to be the same as Shakespeare’s? And might you not just as well read a mure soul, or demure, or a scure soul, or obscure, as a pure soul, if you don’t know what Shakespeare means by the word?

Again. What does Shakespeare mean by a captain, or head-person? What were his notions of head-ship, shoulder-ship, or foot-ship, either in human or divine persons? Have you yourselves ever seen a captain, think you—of the true quality; (see above, xxii. 18;) and did you know him when you saw him?

Or again. What does Shakespeare mean by colours? The “gaily decorative bunting” of Howe and Cushing’s American Circus? Or the banners with invigorating inscriptions concerning Temperance and Free-trade, under which you walk in procession, sometimes, after a band? Or colours more dim and tattered than these?

What he does mean, in all these respects, we shall best understand by reading a little bit of the history of one of those English Squires, named above, for our study; (xxii. 18,) Edward III. of England, namely; since it was he who first quartered our arms for us; whom I cannot more honourably first exhibit to you than actually fighting under captainship and colours of his own choice, in the fashion Shakespeare meant.

Under captainship, mark you, though himself a King, and a proud one. Which came to pass thus: “When the King of England heard these news” (that Geoffrey of Chargny was drawing near his dear town of Calais, and that Amery of Pavia, the false Lombard, was keeping him in play,) “then the King set out from England with 300 men at arms, and 600 archers, and took ship at Dover, and by vespers arrived at Calais, and put his people in ambush in the castle, and was with them himself. And said to the Lord de Manny: ‘Master Walter, I will that you should be the head in this need, for I and my son will fight under your banner.’[2] Now My Lord Geoffrey of Chargny had left Arras on the last day of December, in the evening, with all his gens-d’-armes, and came near Calais about one in the morning,—and he said to his knights[3] ‘Let the Lombard open the gates quickly—he makes us die of cold.’ ‘In God’s name,’ said Pepin de Werre, ‘the Lombards are cunning folks;—he will look at your florins first, to see that none are false.’ ” (You see how important this coin is; here is one engraved for you therefore—pure Florentine gold—that you may look at it honestly, and not like a Lombard.) “And at these words came the King of England, and his son at his side, under the banner of Master Walter de Manny; and there were other banners with them, to wit, the Count of Stafford’s, the Count of Suffolk’s, My Lord John de Montagu’s, My Lord Beauchamp’s, and the Lord de la Werre’s, and no more, that day. When the French saw them come out, and heard the cry, ‘Manny, to the rescue,’ they knew they were betrayed.[4] Then said Master Geoffrey to his people, ‘Lords, if we fly, we are lost; it is best to fight with good will;—hope is, we may gain the day.’ ‘By St. George,’ said the English, ‘you say true, and evil be to him who flies.’ Whereupon they drew back a little, being too crowded, and dismounted, and let their horses go. And the King of England, under the banner of Master Walter de Manny, came with his people, all on foot, to seek his enemies; who were set close, their lances cut short by five feet, in front of them” (set with the stumps against the ground and points forward, eight or ten feet long, still, though cut short by five). “At the first coming there was hard encounter, and the King stopped under” (opposite) “My Lord Eustace of Ribaumont, who was a strong and brave chevalier. And he fought the King so long that it was a wonder; yes, and much pleasure to see. Then they all joined battle,” (the English falling on, I think, because the King found he had enough on his hands, though without question one of the best knights in Europe;) “and there was a great coil, and a hard,—and there fought well, of the French, My Lord Geoffrey of Chargny and My Lord John of Landas, and My Lord Gawain of Bailleul, and the Sire of Cresques; and the others; but My Lord Eustace of Ribaumont passed all,—who that day struck the King to his knees twice; but in the end gave his sword to the King, saying, ‘Sire Chevalier, I render me your prisoner, for the day must remain to the English.’ For by that time they were all taken or killed who were with My Lord Geoffrey of Chargny; and the last who was taken, and who had done most, was Master Eustace of Ribaumont.

“So when the need[5] was past, the King of England drew back into Calais, into the castle; and made be brought all the prisoner-knights thither. And then the French knew that the King of England had been in it, in person, under the banner of Master Walter de Manny. So also the King sent to say to them, as it was the New-year’s night, he would give them all supper in his castle of Calais. So when the supper time came,” (early afternoon, 1st January, 1349) “the King and his knights dressed themselves, and all put on new robes; and the French also made themselves greatly splendid, for so the King wished, though they were prisoners. The King took seat, and set those knights beside him in much honour. And the gentle[6] Prince of Wales and the knights of England served them, at the first course; and at the second course, went away to another table. So they were served in peace, and in great leisure. When they had supped they took away the tables; but the King remained in the hall between those French and English knights; and he was bare-headed; only wearing a chaplet of pearls.[7] And he began to go from one to another; and when he addressed himself to Master Geoffrey of Chargny, he altered countenance somewhat, and looking askance at him, said, ‘Master Geoffrey,—I owe you by right, little love, when you would have stolen by night what had cost me so dear. So glad and joyous I am, that I took you at the trial.’ At these words he passed on, and let Master Geoffrey alone, who answered no word; and so came the King to Master Eustace of Ribaumont, to whom he said joyously, ‘Master Eustace, you are the chevalier whom in all the world I have seen most valiantly attack his enemy and defend his body: neither did I ever find in battle any one who gave me so much work, body to body, as you did to-day. So I give you the prize of the day, and that over all the knights of my own court, by just sentence.’ Thereupon the King took off the chaplet, that he wore, (which was good and rich,) and put it on the head of My Lord Eustace; and said, ‘My Lord Eustace, I give you this chaplet, for that you have been the best fighter to-day of all those without or within, and I pray you that you wear it all this year for the love of me. I know well that you are gay, and loving, and glad to be among dames and damsels. So therefore say to them whither-soever you go, that I gave it you; and so I quit you of your prison, and you may set forth to-morrow if it please you.’ ”

Now, if you have not enjoyed this bit of historical study, I tell you frankly, it is neither Edward the Third’s fault, nor Froissart’s, nor mine, but your own, for not having cheerfulness, loyalty, or generosity enough in you to understand what is going on. But even supposing you have these, and do enjoy the story as now read, it does not at all follow that you would enjoy it at your Literary Institute. There you would find, most probably, a modern abstract of the matter given in polished language. You would be fortunate if you chanced on so good a history as Robert Henry’s above referred to, which I always use myself, as intelligent, and trustworthy for general reference. But hear his polished account of this supper at Calais.

“As Edward was a great admirer of personal valour, he ordered all the French knights and gentlemen to be feasted by the Prince of Wales, in the great hall of the castle. The king entered the hall in the time of the banquet, and discovered to his prisoners that he had been present in the late conflict, and was the person who had fought hand to hand with the Sieur Ribaumont. Then, addressing himself to that gentleman, he gave him his liberty, presented him with a chaplet adorned with pearls, which he desired him to wear for his sake, and declared him to be the most expert and valorous knight with whom he had ever engaged.”

Now, supposing you can read no other history than such as this, you had—with profoundest earnestness I say it—infinitely better read none. It is not the least necessary for you to know anything about Edward III.; but quite necessary for you to know something vital and real about somebody; and not to have polished language given you instead of life. “But you do enjoy it, in Froissart?” And you think it would have been, to you also, a “pleasure to see” that fight between Edward and the Sieur de Ribaumont? So be it: now let us compare with theirs, a piece of modern British fighting, done under no banner, and in no loyalty nor obedience, but in the independent spirit of freedom, and yet which, I think, it would have been no pleasure to any of us to see. As we compared before, loyal with free justice, so let us now compare loyal with free fighting. The most active of the contending parties are of your own class, too, I am sorry to say, and that the ‘Telegraph’ (16th Dec.) calls them many hard names; but I can’t remedy this without too many inverted commas.

Four savages—four brute beasts in human form we should rather say—named Slane, Rice, Hays, and Beesley, ranging in age between thirty-two and nineteen years, have been sentenced to death for the murder on the 6th of November last, at a place called Spennymoor, of one Joseph Waine. The convicts are Irishmen, and had been working as puddlers in the iron foundries. The principal offender was the ruffian Slane, who seems to have had some spite against the deceased, a very sober, quiet man, about forty years of age, who, with his wife and son, kept a little chandler’s shop at Spennymoor. Into this shop Slane came one night, grossly insulted Waine, ultimately dragged him from the shop into a dark passage, tripped him up, holding his head between his legs, and then whistled for his three confederates. When Rice, Hayes, and Beesley appeared on the scene, they were instructed by the prime savage to hold Waine down—the wretch declaring, “If I get a running kick at him, it shall be his last.” The horrible miscreant did get a “running kick”—nay, more than a dozen—at his utterly powerless victim; and when Slane’s strength was getting exhausted the other three wretches set upon Waine, kicking him in the body with their hob-nailed boots, while the poor agonized wife strove vainly to save her husband. A lodger in the house, named Wilson, at last interfered, and the savages ran away. The object of their brutality lived just twenty-five minutes after the outrage, and the post-mortem examination showed that all the organs were perfectly healthy, and that death could only have arisen from the violence inflicted on Waine by these fiends, who were plainly identified by the widow and her son. It may be noticed, however, as a painfully significant circumstance, that the lodger Wilson, who was likewise a labouring man, and a most important witness for the prosecution, refused to give evidence, and, before the trial came on, absconded altogether.

Among the epithets bestowed by the ‘Telegraph’,—very properly, but unnecessarily—on these free British Operatives, there is one which needs some qualification;—that of “Miscreant,” or “Misbeliever,” which is only used accurately of Turks or other infidels, whereas it is probable these Irishmen were zealously religious persons, Evangelical or Catholic. But the perversion of the better faith by passion is indeed a worse form of “misbelieving” than the obedient keeping of a poorer creed; and thus the word, if understood not of any special heresy, but of powerlessness to believe, with strength of imagination, in anything, goes to the root of the matter; which I must wait till after Christmas to dig for, having much else on my hands.

26th December, 1872, 8, Morning.

The first quiet and pure light that has risen this many a day, was increasing through the tall stems of the trees of our garden, which is walled by the walls of old Oxford; and a bird,—(I am going to lecture on ornithology next term, but don’t know what bird, and couldn’t go to ask the gardener,) singing steady, sweet, momentary notes, in a way that would have been very pleasant to me, once. And as I was breathing out of the window, thrown up as high as I could, (for my servant had made me an enormous fire, as servants always do on hot mornings,) and looking at the bright sickle of a moon, fading as she rose, the verse came into my mind,—I don’t in the least know why,—“Lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting;”—which chanced to express in the most precise terms, what I want you to feel, about Edward III.’s fighting, (though St. Paul is speaking of prayer, not of fighting, but it’s all the same;) as opposed to this modern British fighting, which is the lifting up of unholy hands,—feet, at least,—in wrath, and doubting. Also, just the minute before, I had upset my lucifer-match box, a nasty brown tin thing, containing,—as the spiteful Third Fors would have it—just two hundred and sixty-six wax matches, half of which being in a heap on the floor, and the rest all at cross purposes, had to be picked up, put straight and repacked, and at my best time for other work. During this operation, necessarily deliberate, I was thinking of my correspondent’s query, (see terminal notes,) respecting what I meant by doing anything “in a hurry.” I mean essentially doing it in hurry of mind,—“doubting” whether we are doing it fast enough,—not knowing exactly how fast we can do it, or how slowly it must be done, to be done well. You cannot pack a lucifer-box, nor make a dish of stir-about, nor knead a brown loaf, but with patience; nor meet even the most pressing need, but with coolness. Once, when my father was coming home from Spain, in a merchant ship, and in mid-bay of Biscay, the captain and passengers being at dinner, the sea did something or other to the ship which showed that the steersman was not minding what he was about. The captain jumped straight over the table, went on deck, and took the helm. Now I do not mean that he ought to have gone round the table, but that, if a good captain, as he took the wheel, he would not miss his grasp of the spokes by snatching at them an instant too soon.

And you will find that St. Paul’s “without doubting”—for which, if you like, you may substitute, “by, or in, faith,” covers nearly every definition of right action—and also that it is not possible to have this kind of faith unless one can add—as he does—“having faith and a good conscience.” It does not at all follow that one must be doing a right thing; that will depend on one’s sense and information; but one must be doing deliberately a thing we entirely suppose to be right, or we shall not do it becomingly.

Thus, observe, I enter into no question at present as to the absolute rightness of King Edward’s fighting, which caused, that day, at Calais, the deaths of more than four hundred innocent men; nor as to the absolute wrongness of the four Irishmen’s fighting, which causes only the death of one, (—who also may, for aught I know, have done something really seeming evil to the dull creatures)—but there is no doubt that the King fought wholly without wrath, and without doubting his rightness; and they with vile wrath and miserable consciousness of doing wrong; and that you have in the two scenes, as perfect types as I can put before you of entirely good ancient French breeding, and entirely bad modern British breeding.

Breeding;—observe the word; I mean it literally; involving first the race—and then the habits enforced in youth: entirely excluding intellectual conclusions. The “breeding” of a man is what he gets from the Centaur Chiron; the “beastly” part of him in a good sense;—that which makes him courageous by instinct, true by instinct, loving by instinct, as a Dog is; and therefore felicitously above or below (whichever you like to call it,) all questions of philosophy and divinity.

And of both the Centaur Chiron, and St. George, one, the typical Greek tutor of gentlemen, and the other, the type of Christian gentlemen, I meant to tell you in this letter; and the Third Fors won’t let me, yet, and I scarcely know when; for before we leave King Edward, lest you should suppose I mean to set him up for a saint instead of St. George, you must hear the truth of his first interview with Alice of Salisbury,—(he had seen her married, but not noticed her then, particularly,)—wherein you will see him becoming doubtful, and of little faith, or distorted faith, “miscreant”; but the lady Alice no wise doubtful; wherefore she becomes worthy to give the shield of England its “tressure” and St. George’s company their watchword, as aforesaid.

But her story must not be told in the same letter with that of our modern British courage; and now that I think of it, St. George’s had better be first told in February, when, I hope, some crocuses will be up, and an amaryllis or two, St. George having much interest in both.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

In an interesting letter “for self and mates” a Manchester working man asks me the meaning of “Fors Clavigera” (surely enough explained in II. 4?) and whether I mean by vulgarity “commonness,” and why I say that doing anything in a hurry is vulgar. I do not mean by vulgarity, commonness. A daisy is common; and a baby, not uncommon. Neither are vulgar. Has my correspondent really no perception of the difference between good breeding and vulgarity?—if he will tell me this, I will try to answer him more distinctly: meantime, if in the Salford Library there is a copy of my ‘Modern Painters,’ let him look at Vol. V., Part IX., Chap. VII.

He says also that he and his mates must do many things in a hurry.

I know it. But do they suppose such compulsion is a law of Heaven? or that, if not, it is likely to last?

I was greatly pleased by Mr. Affleck’s letter, and would have told him so; only he gave me his address in Gordon Street, without telling me of what town. His post-mark was Galashiels, which I tried, and Edinburgh; but only with embarrassment to Her Majesty’s service.

Another communication, very naïve and honest, came from a Republican of literary tastes, who wished to assist me in the development of my plans in ‘Fors;’ and, in the course of resulting correspondence, expressed his willingness to answer any questions I might wish to put to him. I answered that I imagined myself, as far as I thought needful for me, acquainted with his opinions; but that perhaps he might wish to know something more definite about mine, and that if he liked to put any questions to me, I would do my best to reply intelligibly. Whereupon, apparently much pleased, he sent me the following eleven interrogations, to each of which I have accordingly given solution, to the best of my ability.

1. “Can the world—its oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, continents, islands, or portions thereof, be rightfully treated by human legislators as the ‘private property’ of individuals?”

Ans. Certainly. Else would man be more wretched than the beasts, who at least have dens of their own.

2. “Should cost be the limit of price?”

Ans. It never was, and never can be. So we need not ask whether it should be.

3. “Can one man rightfully tax another man?”

Ans. By all means. Indeed, I have seldom heard of anybody who would tax himself.

4. “Can a million men rightfully tax other men?”

Ans. Certainly, when the other men are not strong enough to tax the million.

5. “Should not each adult inhabitant of a country (who performs service equivalent in value to his or her use of the service of other inhabitants) have electoral rights granted equal to those granted to any other inhabitant?”

Ans. Heaven forbid! It is not everybody one would set to choose a horse, or a pig. How much less a member of Parliament?

6. “Is it not an injustice for a State to require or try to enforce, allegiance to the State from self-supporting adults, who have never been permitted to share in the framing or endorsing of the laws they are expected to obey?”

Ans. Certainly not. Laws are usually most beneficial in operation on the people who would have most strongly objected to their enactment.

7. “The Parliament of this country is now almost exclusively composed of representatives of the classes whose time is mostly occupied in consuming and destroying. Is this statement true? If true—is it right that it should be so?”

Ans. The statement is untrue. A railway navvy consumes, usually, about six times as much as an average member of Parliament; and I know nothing which members of Parliament kill, except time, which other people would not kill, if they were allowed to. It is the Parliamentary tendency to preservation, rather than to destruction, which I have mostly heard complained of.

8. “The State undertakes the carriage and delivery of letters. Would it be just as consistent and advisable for the State to undertake the supply of unadulterated and wholesome food, clean and healthy dwellings, elementary, industrial, and scientific instruction, medical assistance, a national paper money, and other necessities?”

Ans. All most desirable. But the tax-gatherers would have a busy life of it!

9. “Should not a State represent the co-operation of all the people of a country, for the benefit of all?”

Ans. You mean, I suppose, by “a State” the Government of a State. The Government cannot “represent” such co-operation; but can enforce it, and should.

10. “Is the use of scarce metals as material of which to make ‘currency,’ economical and beneficent to a nation?”

Ans. No; but often necessary: see ‘Munera Pulveris,’ chap. iii.

11. “Is that a right condition of a people, their laws, and their money which makes ‘interest’ for use of money legal and possible to obtain?”

Ans. See ‘Fors Clavigera,’ throughout, which indeed I have written to save you the trouble of asking questions on such subjects.

It might be well if my Republican correspondent for his own benefit, would write down an exact definition of the following terms used by him:—

• 1. “Private property.”
• 2. “Tax.”
• 3. “State.”

[1] Guillim, Ed. 1638. [↑]

[2] The reason of this honour to Sir Walter was that he had been the first English knight who rode into France after the king had quartered the Fleur-de-Lys. [↑]

[3] I omit much, without putting stars, in these bits of translation. By the way, in last ‘Fors,’ p. 21, note, for “insert,” read “omit.” [↑]

[4] Not unfairly; only having to fight for their Calais instead of getting in for a bribe. [↑]

[5] Besogne. “The thing that has to be done”—word used still in household service, but impossible to translate; we have no such concentrated one in English. [↑]

[6] The passage is entirely spoiled in Johnes’ translation by the use of the word ‘gallant’ instead of ‘gentle’ for the French ‘gentil.’ The boy was not yet nineteen, (born at Woodstock, June 15, 1330,) and his father thirty-six: fancy how pretty to see the one waiting on the other, with the French knights at his side. [↑]

[7] Sacred fillet, or “diadema,” the noblest, as the most ancient, crown. [↑]

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XXVI.

Brantwood, Coniston,
3rd January, 1873.

“By St. George,” said the English, “you say true!”

If, by the same oath, the English could still, now-a-days, both say and do true, themselves, it would be a merrier England. I hear from those of my acquaintance who are unhappy enough to be engaged in commercial operations, that their correspondents are “failing in all directions.”

Failing! What business has anybody to fail?

I observe myself to be getting into the habit of always thinking the last blockheadism I hear, or think of, the biggest. But this system of mercantile credit, invented simply to give power and opportunity to rogues, and enable them to live upon the wreck of honest men—was ever anything like it in the world before? That the wretched, impatient, scrambling idiots, calling themselves commercial men, forsooth, should not be able so much as to see this plainest of all facts, that any given sum of money will be as serviceable to commerce in the pocket of the seller of the goods, as of the buyer; and that nobody gains one farthing by “credit” in the long run. It is precisely as great a loss to commerce that every seller has to wait six months for his money, as it is a gain to commerce that every buyer should keep his money six months in his pocket. In reality there is neither gain nor loss—except by roguery, when the gain is all to the rogue, and the loss to the true man.

In all wise commerce, payment, large or small, should be over the counter. If you can’t pay for a thing—don’t buy it. If you can’t get paid for it—don’t sell it. So, you will have calm days, drowsy nights, all the good business you have now, and none of the bad.

(Just as I am correcting this sheet I get a lovely illuminated circular, printed in blue and red, from Messrs. Howell, James, and Co., silk mercers, etc., to the Royal Family, which respectfully announces that their half-yearly clearance sale

COMMENCES JANUARY 27^th.

and continues one month, and that the whole of the valuable stock will be completely overhauled, and large portions subjected to such reductions in price, as will ensure their being disposed of prior to the commencement of the approaching spring season. Each department will present special attractions in the way of bargains, and ladies will have an opportunity of purchasing the highest class of goods at prices quite as low as those of inferior manufacture. What a quite beautiful and generally satisfactory commercial arrangement, most obliging H. and J.!)

If, however, for the nonce, you chance to have such a thing as a real “pound” in your own pocket, besides the hypothetical pounds you have in other people’s—put it on the table, and let us look at it together.

As a piece of mere die-cutting, that St. George is one of the best bits of work we have on our money.[1] But as a design,—how brightly comic it is! The horse looking abstractedly into the air, instead of where precisely it would have looked, at the beast between its legs: St. George, with nothing but his helmet on (being the last piece of armour he is likely to want), putting his naked feet, at least his feet showing their toes through the buskins, well forward, that the dragon may with the greatest convenience get a bite at them; and about to deliver a mortal blow at him with a sword which cannot reach him by a couple of yards—or, I think, in George III.’s piece—with a field-marshal’s truncheon.

Victor Carpaccio had other opinions on the likelihood of matters in this battle. His St. George exactly reverses the practice of ours. He rides armed, from shoulder to heel, in proof—but without his helmet. For the real difficulty in dragon-fights, as you shall hear, is not so much to kill your dragon, as to see him; at least to see him in time, it being too probable that he will see you first. Carpaccio’s St. George will have his eyes about him, and his head free to turn this way or that. He meets his dragon at the gallop—catches him in the mouth with his lance—carries him backwards off his fore feet, with the spear point out at the back of his neck. But Victor Carpaccio had seen knights tilting; and poor Pistrucci, who designed this St. George for us, though he would have been a good sculptor in luckier circumstances, had only seen them presenting addresses as my Lord Mayor, and killing turtle instead of dragon.

And, to our increasing sorrow, modern literature is as unsatisfactory in its picturing of St. George as modern art. Here is Mr. Emerson’s bas-relief of the Saint, given in his ‘English Traits,’ a book occasionally wise, and always observant as to matters actually proceeding in the world; but thus, in its ninth chapter, calumnious of our Georgic faith:

“George of Cappadocia, born at Epiphania in Cilicia, was a low parasite, who got a lucrative contract to supply the army with bacon. A rogue and informer; he got rich, and was forced to run from justice. He saved his money, embraced Arianism, collected a library, and got promoted by a faction to the episcopal throne of Alexandria. When Julian came, A.D. 361, George was dragged to prison. The prison was burst open by the mob, and George was lynched, as he deserved. And this precious knave became, in good time, Saint George of England—patron of chivalry, emblem of victory and civility, and the pride of the best blood of the modern world!”

Here is a goodly patron of our dainty doings in Hanover Square! If all be indeed as our clear-sighted, unimaginative, American cousin tells us. But if all be indeed so, what conclusion would our American cousin draw from it? The sentence is amusing—the facts (if facts) surprising. But what is to follow? Mr. Emerson’s own conclusion is “that nature trips us up when we strut.” But that is, in the first place, untrue absolutely, for Nature teaches all cock-sparrows, and their like (who are many) to strut; and never without wholesome effect on the minds of hen-sparrows, and their like, who are likewise many. But in its relative, if not absolute, truth, is this the conclusion here wisely to be gathered? Are “chivalry, victory, civility, and the pride of the best blood of the modern world,” generally to be described as “strutting?” And is the discovery of the peculations of George of Cilicia a wholesome reproof, administered by Nature, to those unnatural modes of thinking and feeling?

Mr. Emerson does not think so. No modern person has truer instinct for heroism than he: nay, he is the only man I know of, among all who ever looked at books of mine, who had nobleness enough to understand and believe the story of Turner’s darkening his own picture that it might not take the light out of Lawrence’s. The level of vulgar English temper is now sunk so far below the power of doing such a thing, that I never told the story yet, in general society, without being met by instant and obstinate questioning of its truth, if not by quiet incredulity. But men with “the pride of the best blood of England” can believe it; and Mr. Emerson believes it. And yet this chivalry, and faith, and fire of heart, recognised by him as existent, confuse themselves in his mind with effete Gothic tradition; and are all “tripped up” by his investigation, itself superficial, of the story of St. George. In quieter thought, he would have felt that the chivalry and victory, being themselves real, must have been achieved, at some time or another, by a real chevalier and victor,—nay, by thousands of chevaliers and victors. That instead of one St. George, there must have been armies of St. Georges;—that this vision of a single Knight was as securely the symbol of knights innumerable, as the one Dragon of sins and trials innumerable; and no more depended for its vitality, or virtue, on the behaviour of George of Cilicia than the terror of the present temptation depends on the natural history of the rattlesnake. And farther, being an American, he should have seen that the fact of the Christian world’s having made a bishop of a speculating bacon-seller, and afterwards kept reverent record of this false St. George, but only obscure record of its real St. Georges, was by no means an isolated fact in the history of the Christian world,—but rather a part of its confirmed custom and “practical education;” and that, only the other day, St. James Fiske, canonised tearfully in America, and bestrewn with tuberoses and camellias, as above described, (xv. 14), was a military gentleman of exactly the type of the Cilician St. George.

Farther. How did it never occur to Mr. Emerson that, whether his story of the bookcollecting bishop were true or not, it was certainly not the story told to Cœur-de-Lion, or to Edward III., when they took St. George for their Master? No bookcollecting episcopal person, had he been ever so much a saint, would have served them to swear by, or to strike by. They must have heard some other story;—not, perhaps, one written down, nor needing to be written. A remembered story,—yet, probably, a little truer than the written one; and a little older.

It is, above all, strange that the confusion of his own first sentence did not strike him, “George of Cappadocia, born in Cilicia.” It is true that the bacon-selling and book-collecting Arian bishop was born in Cilicia, and that this Arian bishop was called George. But the Arians only contrived to get this bishop of theirs thought of as a saint at all, because there was an antecedent St. George, with whom he might be confused; a St. George, indeed, “of Cappadocia;” and as it chanced that their own bishop came out of Cappadocia to his bishopric, very few years after his death sufficed to render the equivocation possible. But the real St. George had been martyred seventy years before, A.D. 290, whereas the Arian bishop was killed in 361. And this is the story of the real St. George, which filled the heart of the early Christian church, and was heard by Cœur-de-Lion and by Edward III., somewhat in this following form, it, luckily for us, having been at least once fairly written out, in the tenth century, by the best eastern scholar who occupied himself with the history of Saints. I give you an old English translation of it, rather than my own, from p. 132 of the ‘Historie of that most famous Saint and Souldier of Christ Jesus, St. George of Cappadocia, asserted from the fictions of the middle ages of the Church, and opposition of the present, by Peter Heylyn; printed in London for Henry Seyle, and to be sold at his shop the signe of the Tyger’s head in St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1631.’

“St. George was born in Cappadocia, of Christian parents, and those not of the meanest qualitie: by whom he was brought up in true Religion, and the feare of God. Hee was no sooner past his Childhood, but hee lost his father, bravely encountring with the enemies of Christ; and thereupon departed with his afflicted Mother into Palestine, whereof she was a native; and where great fortunes and a faire inheritance did fall unto him. Thus qualified in birth, and being also of an able bodie, and of an age fit for employment in the warres; hee was made a Colonell.” (This word is explained, above, xv. 15.) “In which employment hee gave such testimonies of his valour, and behav’d himselfe so nobly; that forthwith Diocletian, not knowing yet that he was a Christian, advanc’d him to the place and dignitie of his Councell for the warres; (for so on good authoritie I have made bold to render ‘Comes’ in this place and time). About this time his Mother dyed: and hee, augmenting the heroicke resolutions of his mind, with the increase of his revenue, did presently applie himselfe unto the Court and service of his Prince; his twentieth yeere being even then compleat and ended.”

“But Diocletian being soon after compelled into his persecution of the Christians” (Heylyn now gives abstract of his author,) “and warrants granted out unto the officers and rulers of the Provinces to speed the execution, and that done also in frequent senate, the Emperour there himself in person, St. George, though not yet sainted, could continue no longer, but there exposed himself unto their fury and his owne glory:” (Translation begins again.)

“When therefore George, even in the first beginnings, had observ’d the extraordinarie cruelty of these proceedings, hee presently put off his military habiliments, and, making dole of all his substance to the poore, on the third Session of the Senate, when the Imperiall decree was to be verified, quite voide of feare, he came into the Senate-house, and spake unto them in this manner. ‘How long, most noble Emperour and you Conscript Fathers, will you augment your tyrannies against the Christians? How long will you enact unjust and cruell Lawes against them, compelling those which are aright instructed in the faith, to follow that Religion, of whose truth your selves are doubtfull. Your Idols are no Gods, and I am bold to say againe, they are not. Be not you longer couzned in the same errour. Our Christ alone is God, he only is the Lord, in the glory of the Father. Eyther do you therefore acknowledge that Religion which undoubtedly is true: or else disturbe not them by your raging follies, which would willingly embrace it.’ This said, and all the Senate wonderfully amazed at the free speech and boldnesse of the man;” (and no wonder;—my own impression is indeed that most martyrs have been made away with less for their faith than their incivility. I have always a lurking sympathy with the Heathen;) “they all of them turn’d their eyes upon the Emperour, expecting what hee would reply: who beckoning to Magnentius, then Consull, and one of his speciall Favourites, to returne an answere; hee presently applyed himselfe to satisfie his Prince’s pleasure.”

“Further” (says Heylyn) “we will not prosecute the storie in our Authors words, which are long and full of needlesse conference; but will briefly declare the substance of it, which is this. Upon St. George’s constant profession of his Faith, they wooed him first with promises of future honours, and more faire advancements: but finding him unmoveable, not to be wrought upon with words, they tried him next with torments: not sparing anything which might expresse their cruelty or enoble his affliction. When they saw all was fruitlesse, at last the fatall Sentence was pronounced against him in this manner: that, beeing had againe to prison, hee should the following day be drawne through the City and beheaded.

“Which sentence was accordingly performed, and George invested with the glorious Crowne of Martyrdome upon the 23. day of April, Anno Domini nostri, 290.”

That is St. George’s “true” story, how far literally true is of no moment; it is enough for us that a young soldier, in early days of Christianity, put off his armour, and gave up his soul to his Captain, Christ; and that his death did so impress the hearts of all Christian men who heard of it, that gradually he became to them the leader of a sacred soldiership, which conquers more than its mortal enemies, and prevails against the poison, and the shadow, of Pride, and Death.

And above all, his putting off his knight’s armour, especially the military belt, as then taking service with Christ instead of the Roman Emperor, impressed the minds of the later Christian knights; because of the law referred to by St. Golden-Lips (quoted by Heylyn farther on), “No one, who is an officer, would dare to appear without his zone and mantle before him who wears the diadem.” So that having thus voluntarily humbled himself, he is thought of as chiefly exalted among Christian soldiers, and called, not only “the great Martyr,” but the “Standard Bearer,” (Tropæophorus). Whence he afterwards becomes the knight bearing the bloody cross on the argent field, and the Captain of Christian war.

The representation of all his spiritual enemies under the form of the Dragon was simply the natural habit of the Greek mind: the stories of Apollo delivering Latona from the Python, and of Perseus delivering Andromeda from the sea monster, had been as familiar as the pitcher and wine-cups they had been painted on, in red and black, for a thousand years before: and the name of St. George, the “Earthworker,” or “Husbandman,”[2] connected him instantly, in Greek thoughts, not only with the ancient dragon, Erichthonius, but with the Spirit of agriculture, called “Thricewarrior” to whom the dragon was a harnessed creature of toil. Yet, so far as I know, it was not until the more strictly Christian tradition of the armed archangel Michael confused its symbolism with that of the armed saint, that the dragon enters definitely into the story of St. George. The authoritative course of Byzantine painting, sanctioned and restricted by the Church in the treatment of every subject, invariably represents St. George as the soldier Martyr, or witness, before Diocletian, never as victor over the dragon:[3] his story, as the painters tell it, corresponds closely with that of St. Catherine of Sinai;[4] and is, in the root of it, truth, and in the branching of it, beautiful dream, of the same wild and lovely character. And we might as well confuse Catherine of Sinai with Catherine of Siena (or for that matter, Catherine de Medicis!), as St. George of the Eastern Church with George the Arian. And this witness of painting remains simple and unbroken, down to the last days of Venice. St. Mark, St. Nicholas, and St. George are the three saints who are seen, in the vision of the Fisherman, delivering Venice from the fiends. St. George, first “of the seaweed,” has three other churches besides in Venice; and it will be the best work I have ever done in this broken life of mine, if I can some day show you, however dimly, how Victor Carpaccio has painted him in the humblest of these,—the little chapel of St. George on the “Shore of the Slaves.” There, however, our dragon does not fail us, both Carpaccio and Tintoret having the deepest convictions on that subject;—as all strong men must have; for the Dragon is too true a creature, to all such, spiritually. That it is an indisputably living and venomous creature, materially, has been the marvel of the world, innocent and guilty, not knowing what to think of the terrible worm; nor whether to worship it, as the Rod of their lawgiver, or to abhor it as the visible symbol of the everlasting Disobedience.

Touching which mystery, you must learn one or two main facts.

The word ‘Dragon,’ means “the Seeing Creature,” and I believe the Greeks had the same notion in their other word for a serpent, “ophis.” There were many other creeping, and crawling, and rampant things; the olive stem and the ivy were serpentine enough, blindly; but here was a creeping thing that saw!

The action of the cobra, with its lifted and levelled head, and the watchfulness of the coiled viper impressed the Egyptians and Greeks intensely. To the Egyptian the serpent was awful and sacred, and became the ornament on the front of the King’s diadems (though an evil spirit also, when not erect). The Greeks never could make up their minds about it. All human life seems to them as the story of Laocoon. The fiery serpents slay us for our wisdom and fidelity;—then writhe themselves into rest at the feet of the Gods.

The Egyptians were at the same pause as to their Nile Dragon, for whom I told you they built their labyrinth. “For in the eyes of some of the Egyptians, the crocodiles are sacred; but by others they are held for enemies. And it is they who dwell by the Lake Mœris, who think them greatly sacred. Every one of these lake people has care of his own crocodile, taught to be obedient to the lifting of finger. And they put jewels of enamel and gold into their ears, and bracelets on their forefeet, and feed them with the sacred shew-bread daily, and attend upon them, that they may live beautiful lives; and, when they die, bury them, embalmed, in holy tombs.” (Thus religion, as a pious friend, I observe, writes in a Devonshire paper the other day, leads to the love of Nature!) “But they of the city Elephantine eat their crocodiles, holding them nowise sacred. Neither do they call them crocodiles, but champsæ; it is the Ionians who call them “crocodiles,” because they think them like the little crocodiles that live in the dry stone walls.”

I do not know if children generally have strong associative fancy about words; but when I was a child, that word “Crocodile” always seemed to me very terrific, and I would even hastily, in any book, turn a leaf in which it was printed with a capital C. If anybody had but told me the meaning of it—“a creature that is afraid of crocuses!”

That, at least, is all I can make of it, now; though I can’t understand how this weakness of the lizard mind was ever discovered, for lizards never see crocuses, that I know of. The next I meet in Italy, (poor little, glancing, panting things,—I miss them a little here from my mossy walls)—shall be shown an artificial crocus, Paris-made; we will see what it thinks of it! But however it came to be given, for the great Spirit-Lizard, the name is a good one. For as the wise German’s final definition of the Devil (in the second part of Faust) is that he is afraid of roses, so the earliest and simplest possible definition of him is that in spring time he is afraid of crocuses; which I am quite sure, both our farmers and manufacturers are now, in England, to the utmost. On the contrary, the Athenian Spirit of Wisdom was so fond of crocuses that she made her own robe crocus-colour, before embroidering it with the wars of the Giants; she being greatly antagonistic to the temper which dresses sisters of charity in black, for a crocus-colour dress was much the gayest—not to say the giddiest—thing she could possibly wear in Athens.

And of the crocus, vernal, and autumnal, more properly the enchanted herb of Colchis, (see, by the way, White’s ‘History of Selborne’ at the end of its 41st letter) I must tell you somewhat more in next letter; meantime, look at the saffron crest in the centre of it, carefully, and read, with some sympathy, if you can, this true story of a crocus, which being told me the other day by one who, whether I call him friend or not, is indeed friendly to me, and to all whom he can befriend, I begged him to write it for your sakes, which he has thus graciously done:—

A STORY OF A FLOWER.

“It is impossible to describe the delight which I took in my first flower, yet it was only a poor peeky, little sprouting crocus. Before I begin the story, I must, in two lines, make known my needy state at the time when I became the owner of the flower. I was in my eleventh year, meanly clothed, plainly fed, and penniless; an errand boy in receipt of one shilling and sixpence a week, which sum I consumed in bread and shoe leather. Yet I was happy enough, living in a snug cottage in the suburbs of Oxford, within sight of its towers, and within hearing of its bells. In the back yard of my home were many wonders. The gable end of a barn was mantled with ivy, centuries old, and sparrows made their home in its leafage; an ancient wall, old as the Norman tower at the other end of the town, was rich in gilly-flowers; a wooden shed, with red tiles, was covered by a thriving “tea tree,” so we called it, which in summer was all blossom, pendant mauve coloured blossoms. This tree managed to interlace its branches among the tiles so effectively as in the end to lift off the whole roof in a mass, and poise it in the air. Bees came in swarms to sip honey at the blossoms: I noted civilised hive bees, and large ones whose waxen cells were hidden in mossy banks in the woods—these had crimson and saffron tinted bodies, or, for variety, hairy shapes of sombre green and black. I was never weary of my wall-flowers, and bees, and butterflies. But, so it is, I happened one day to get a glimpse of a college garden about the end of February, or the beginning of March, when its mound of venerable elms was lit up with star-like yellow flowers. The dark earth was robed as with a bright garment of imperial, oriental splendour. It was the star-shaped aconite, as I believe, but am not sure, whose existence in flower is brief, but glorious, when beheld, as I beheld it, in masses. Henceforth, if Old Fidget, the gardener, was not at the back gate of St. J—— I peeped through the keyhole at my yellow garden bed, which seemed flooded with sunlight, only broken by patches of rich black earth, which formed strange patterns, such as we see on Japanese screens of laquer and bronze, only that the flowers had a glory of their own. Well, I looked through the keyhole every time I passed, and that was four times daily, and always with increased interest for my flowering aconite. But oh! trouble upon trouble, one day I found the keyhole stopt, and there was an end of my daily joy, and of the interest which had been awakened in me, in a new way, for the wonders of nature. My love of flowers, however, increased, and I found means to feed my love. I had often observed Old Fidget, the head gardener, and his mates, bring out wheelbarrow loads of refuse from the shrubbery and flower beds, and throw them in a heap along the garden wall without, where a long, deep trench had become the well-known receptacle for rubbish. Such places were common in town suburbs in those days. The rubbish consisted of cuttings of shrubs and plants, and rakings of flower-borders, but more bountifully, of elm leaves, and the cast off clothing of chestnut trees, which soon lay rotting in flaky masses, until I happened to espy a fragment of a bulb, and then, the rubbish of the garden, which concealed sprouting chestnuts, knew no rest. I went, one holiday, and dug deep, with no other implement than my hands, into this matted mass. I laboured, till at length, in a mass of closely pressed leaves, I came upon a perfect crocus. It lay like a dead elfin infant in its forest grave. I was enchanted, and afraid to touch it, as one would fear to commit a piece of sacrilege. It lay in its green robes, which seemed spun from dainty silken threads unsoiled by mortal hands. Its blossom of pale flesh tint lay concealed within a creamy opalescent film, which seemed to revive and live when the light penetrated the darksome tomb, contrasting with the emerald robes, and silken, pliant roots. At length I lifted the flower from its bed, and carried it to my garden plot with breathless care. My garden plot, not much larger than a large baking dish, was enclosed by broken tiles, a scrubby place, unsuited to my newly discovered treasure. I broke up the earth and pulverised it with my fingers, but its coarseness was incurable. I abandoned it as I thought of some mole hills in a neighbouring copse, and soon my plot was filled deeply with soft sandy soil, fit for my flower. And then came the necessity of protecting it from the searching March winds, which I did effectually by covering it with a flower pot, and the season wore on, and soft, mild days set in apace, and my flower, which was ever uppermost in my thoughts, whether sleeping or waking, began to show signs of life, as day by day I permitted the sun to look at it, until at length, one sunny, silent, Sunday morning, it opened its glowing, golden, sacramental cup, gleaming like light from heaven—dropt in a dark place, living light and fire. So it seemed to my poor vision, and I called the household and the neighbours from their cares to share my rapture. But alas! my dream was ended; the flower had no fascination for those who came at my call. It was but a yellow crocus to them—some laughed, some tittered, some jeered me, and old Dick Willis, poor man, who got a crust by selling soft water by the pail, he only rubbed his dim eyes, and exclaimed in pity, “God bless the poor boy!”

Little thinking how much he was already blessed,—he—and his flower!

For indeed Crocus and Carduus are alike Benedict flowers, if only one knew God’s gold and purple from the Devil’s, which, with St. George’s help, and St. Anthony’s,—the one well knowing the flowers of the field, and the other those of the desert,—we will try somewhat to discern.

[1] The best is on George III.’s pound, 1820, the most finished in work on George IV.’s crown-piece, 1821. [↑]

[2] More properly ‘named from the husbandman.’ Thus Lycus is ‘a wolf,’ Lycius, ‘named from the wolf,’ or ‘wolfish.’ So, Georgus is ‘a husbandman,’ Georgius, ‘named from the husbandman,’ or ‘husbandmannish.’ [↑]

[3] See the complete series of subjects as given by M. Didron in his ‘Iconographie Chrétienne’ (8vo. Paris, 1845, p. 369), and note the most interesting trace of the idea of Triptolemus, in the attendant child with the water-pitcher behind the equestrian figure of the Saint. [↑]

[4] You will find that in my 19th letter, p. 11, I propose that our St. George’s Company in England shall be under the patronage also of St. Anthony in Italy. And in general, we will hold ourselves bound to reverence, in one mind, with Carpaccio and the good Painters and Merchants of Venice, the eight great Saints of the Greek Church,—namely (in the order M. Didron gives them)—the Archangel Michael, the Precursor (John Baptist), St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Nicholas, St. George, Ste. Catherine of Sinai, and St. Anthony, these being patrons of our chief occupations, (while, over our banking operations we will have for patron or principal manager, the more modern Western Saint, Francis of Assisi;) meaning always no disrespect to St. Jerome or Ste. Cecilia, in case we need help in our literature or music. [↑]

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XXVII.

Brantwood, 27th January, 1873.

“If it were not so, I would have told you.”

I read those strange words of St. John’s gospel this morning, for at least the thousandth time; and for the first time, that I remember, with any attention. It is difficult, if not impossible, to attend rightly without some definite motive, or chance-help, to words which one has read and re-read till every one of them slips into its place unnoticed, as a familiar guest,—unchallenged as a household friend. But the Third Fors helped me, to-day, by half effacing the n in the word Mona, in the tenth century MS. I was deciphering; and making me look at the word, till I began to think of it, and wondered. You may as well learn the old meaning of that pretty name of the isle of Anglesea. “In my Father’s house,” says Christ, “are many monas,”—remaining-places—“if it were not so, I would have told you.”

Alas, had He but told us more clearly that it was so!

I have the profoundest sympathy with St. Thomas, and would fain put all his questions over again, and twice as many more. “We know not whither Thou goest.” That Father’s house,—where is it? These “remaining-places,” how are they to be prepared for us?—how are we to be prepared for them?

If ever your clergy mean really to help you to read your Bible,—the whole of it, and not merely the bits which tell you that you are miserable sinners, and that you needn’t mind,—they must make a translation retaining as many as possible of the words in their Greek form, which you may easily learn, and yet which will be quit of the danger of becoming debased by any vulgar English use. So also, the same word must always be given when it is the same; and not in one place translated “mansion,” and in another “abode.” (Compare verse 23 of this same chapter.[1]) Not but that “mansion” is a very fine Latin word, and perfectly correct, (if only one knows Latin,) but I doubt not that most parish children understand by it, if anything, a splendid house with two wings, and an acre or two of offices, in the middle of a celestial park; and suppose that some day or other they are all of them to live in such, as well as the Squire’s children; whereas, if either “mona” or “remaining” were put in both verses, it is just possible that sometimes both the Squire and the children, instead of vaguely hoping to be lodged some day in heaven by Christ and His Father, might take notice of their offer in the last verse I have quoted, and get ready a spare room both in the mansion and cottage, to offer Christ and His Father immediately, if they liked to come into lodgings on earth.

I was looking over some of my own children’s books the other day, in the course of rearranging the waifs and strays of Denmark Hill at Brantwood; and came upon a catechism of a very solemn character on the subject of the County of Kent. It opens by demanding “the situation of Kent;” then, the extent of Kent,—the population of Kent, and a sketch of the history of Kent; in which I notice with interest that hops were first grown in Kent in 1524, and petitioned against as a wicked weed in 1528. Then, taking up the subject in detail, inquiry is made as to “the situation of Dover?” To which the orthodox reply is that Dover is pleasantly situated on that part of the island of Great Britain nearest the Continent, and stands in a valley between stupendous hills. To the next question, “What is the present state of Dover?” the well-instructed infant must answer, “That Dover consists of two parts, the upper, called the Town, and the lower, the Pier; and that they are connected by a long narrow street, which, from the rocks that hang over it, and seem to threaten the passenger with destruction, has received the name of Snaregate Street.” The catechism next tests the views of the young respondent upon the municipal government of Dover, the commercial position of Dover, and the names of the eminent men whom Dover has produced; and at last, after giving a proper account of the Castle of Dover and the two churches in Dover, we are required to state whether there is not an interesting relic of antiquity in the vicinity of Dover; upon which, we observe that, about two miles north-west from Dover, are the remains of St. Radagune’s Abbey, now converted into a farm-house; and finally, to the crucial interrogation—“What nobleman’s seat is near Dover?” we reply, with more than usual unction, that “In the Parish of Waldershaw, five miles and a half from Dover, is Waldershaw Park, the elegant seat of the Earl of Guildford, and that the house is a magnificent structure, situated in a vale, in the centre of a well-wooded Park.” Whereat I stopped reading; first, because St. Radagune’s Abbey, though it is nothing but walls with a few holes through them by which the cows get in for shelter on windy days, was the first “remaining” of Antiquity I ever sketched, when a boy of fourteen, spending half my best BB pencil on the ivy and the holes in the walls; and, secondly, the tone of these two connected questions in the catechism marks exactly the curious period in the English mind when the worship of St. Radagune was indeed utterly extinct, so that her once elegant mansion becomes a farm-house, as in that guise fulfilling its now legitimate function:—but the worship of Earls of Guildford is still so flourishing that no idea would ever occur to the framers of catechism that the elegant seats of these also were on the way to become farm-houses.

Which is nevertheless surely the fact:—and the only real question is whether St. Radagune’s mansion and the Earl of Guildford’s are both to be farm-houses, or whether the state of things at the time of the Dover Catechism may not be exactly reversed,—and St. Radagune have her mansion and park railed in again, while the Earl’s walls shelter the cows on windy days. For indeed, from the midst of the tumult and distress of nations, fallen wholly Godless and lordless, perhaps the first possibility of redemption may be by cloistered companies, vowed once more to the service of a divine Master, and to the reverence of His saints.

You were shocked, I suppose, by my catalogue, in last Fors, of such persons, as to be revered by our own Company. But have you ever seriously considered what a really vital question it is to you whether St. Paul and St. Pancras, (not that I know myself at this moment, who St. Pancras was,—but I’ll find out for next Fors,)—St. George and St. Giles, St. Bridget and St. Helen, are really only to become the sponsors of City parishes, or whether you mean still to render them any gratitude as the first teachers of what used to be called civilization; nay, whether there may not even be, irrespective of what we now call civilization—namely, coals and meat at famine prices,—some manner of holy living and dying, of lifting holy hands without wrath, and sinking to blessed sleep without fear, of which these persons, however vaguely remembered, have yet been the best patterns the world has shown us.

Don’t think that I want to make Roman Catholics of you, or to make anything of you, except honest people. But as for the vulgar and insolent Evangelical notion, that one should not care for the Saints,—nor pray to them,—Mercy on us!—do the poor wretches fancy that God wouldn’t be thankful if they would pray to anybody, for what it was right they should have; or that He is piqued, forsooth, if one thinks His servants can help us sometimes, in our paltry needs.

“But they are dead, and cannot help us, nor hear!”

Alas; perchance—no. What would I not give to be so much a heretic as to believe the Dead could hear!—but are there no living Saints, then, who can help you? Sir C. Dilke, or Mr. Beales, for instance? and if you don’t believe there are any parks or monas abiding for you in heaven, may you not pull down some park railings here, and—hold public meetings in them, of a Paradisiacal character?

Indeed, that pulling down of the Piccadilly railings was a significant business. “Park,” if you will look to your Johnson, you will find is one of quite the oldest words in Europe; vox antiquissima, a most ancient word, and now a familiar one among active nations. French, Parc, Welsh, the same, Irish, Pairc, “being” a piece of ground enclosed and stored with wild beasts of chase. Manwood, in his Forest Law, defines it thus, “A park is a place for privilege for wild beasts of venery, and also for other wild beasts that are beasts of the forest and of the chase, and those wild beasts are to have a firm peace and protection there, so that no man may hurt or chase them within the park, without licence of the owner: a park is of another nature than either a chase or a warren; for a park must be enclosed, and may not lie open—if it does, it is a good cause of seizure into the King’s hands.” Or into King Mob’s for parliamentary purposes—and how monstrous, you think, that such pleasant habitations for wild beasts should still be walled in, and in peace, while you have no room to—speak in,—I had like to have said something else than speak—but it is at least polite to you to call it ‘speaking.’

Yes. I have said so, myself, once or twice;—nevertheless something is to be said for the beasts also. What do you think they were made for? All these spotty, scaly, finned, and winged, and clawed things, that grope between you and the dust, that flit between you and the sky. These motes in the air—sparks in the sea—mists and flames of life. The flocks that are your wealth—the moth that frets it away. The herds upon a thousand hills,—the locust,—and the worm, and the wandering plague whose spots are worlds. The creatures that mock you, and torment. The creatures that serve and love you, (or would love if they might,) and obey. The joys of the callow nests and burrowed homes of Earth. The rocks of it, built out of its own dead. What is the meaning to you of all these,—what their worth to you?

No worth, you answer, perhaps; or the contrary of worth. In fact, you mean to put an end to all that. You will keep pigeons to shoot—geese to make pies of—cocks for fighting—horses to bet on—sheep for wool, and cows for cheese. As to the rest of the creatures, you owe no thanks to Noah; and would fain, if you could, order a special deluge for their benefit; failing that, you will at all events get rid of the useless feeders as fast as possible.

Indeed, there is some difficulty in understanding why some of them were made. I lost great part of my last hour for reading, yesterday evening, in keeping my kitten’s tail out of the candles,—a useless beast, and still more useless tail—astonishing and inexplicable even to herself. Inexplicable, to me, all of them—heads and tails alike. “Tiger—tiger—burning bright”—is this then all you were made for—this ribbed hearthrug, tawny and black?

If only the Rev. James McCosh were here! His book is; and I’m sure I don’t know how, but it turns up in re-arranging my library. ‘Method of the Divine Government Physical and Moral.’ Preface begins. “We live in an age in which the reflecting portion of mankind are much addicted to the contemplation of the works of Nature. It is the object of the author in this Treatise to interrogate Nature with the view of making her utter her voice in answer to some of the most important questions which the inquiring spirit of man can put.” Here is a catechumen for you!—and a catechist! Nature with her hands behind her back—Perhaps Mr. McCosh would kindly put it to her about the tiger. Farther on, indeed, it is stated that the finite cannot comprehend the infinite, and I observe that the author, with the shrinking modesty characteristic of the clergy of his persuasion, feels that, even the intellect of a McCosh cannot, without risk of error, embrace more than the present method of the Divine management of Creation. Wherefore “no man,” he says, “should presume to point out all the ways in which a God of unbounded resources might govern the universe.”

But the present way—(allowing for the limited capital,)—we may master that, and pay our compliments to God upon it? We will hope so; in the meantime I can assure you, this creation of His will bear more looking at than you have given, yet, however addicted you may be to the contemplation of Nature; (though I suspect you are more addicted to the tasting of her,) and that if instead of being in such a hurry to pull park railings down, you would only beg the owners to put them to their proper use, and let the birds and beasts, which were made to breathe English air as well as you, take shelter there, you would soon have a series of National Museums more curious than that in Great Russell Street; and with something better worth looking at in them than the sacred crocodiles. Besides, you might spare the poor beasts a little room on earth, for charity, if not for curiosity. They have no mansions preparing for them elsewhere.

What! you answer; indignant,—“All that good land given up to beasts!” Have you ever looked how much or little of England is in park land? I have here, by me, Hall’s Travelling Atlas of the English Counties; which paints conveniently in red the railroads, and in green the parks (not conscious, probably—the colourist—of his true expression of antagonism by those colours).

The parks lie on the face of each county like a few crumbs on a plate; if you could turn them all at once into corn land, it would literally not give you a mouthful extra of dinner. Your dog, or cat, is more costly to you, in proportion to your private means, than all these kingdoms of beasts would be to the nation.

“Cost what they might, it would be too much”—think you? You will not give those acres of good land to keep beasts?

Perhaps not beasts of God’s making; but how many acres of good land do you suppose, then, you do give up, as it is, to keep beasts He never made,—never meant to be made,—the beasts you make of yourselves?

Do you know how much corn land in the United Kingdom is occupied in supplying you with the means of getting drunk?

Mind, I am no temperance man. You should all have as much beer and alcohol as was good for you if I had my way. But the beer and alcohol which are not good for you,—which are the ruin of so many of you, suppose you could keep the wages you spend in that liquor in the savings bank, and left the land, now tilled to grow it for you, to natural and sober beasts?—Do you think it would be false economy?—Why, you might have a working men’s park for nothing, in every county, bigger than the Queen’s! and your own homes all the more comfortable.

I had no notion myself, till the other day, what the facts were, in this matter. Get, if you can, Professor Kirk’s ‘Social Politics,’ (Hamilton, Adams, and Co.,) and read, for a beginning, his 21st chapter, on land and liquor; and then, as you have leisure, all the book, carefully. Not that he would help me out with my park plan; he writes with the simple idea that the one end of humanity is to eat and drink; and it is interesting to see a Scotch Professor thinking the lakes of his country were made to be ‘Reservoirs,’ and particularly instancing the satisfaction of thirsty Glasgow out of Loch Katrine; so that, henceforward, it will be proper in Scotch economical circles not to speak of the Lady of the Lake, but of the Lady of the Reservoir. Still, assuming that to eat and drink is the end of life, the Professor shows you clearly how much better this end may be accomplished than it is now. And the broad fact which he brings out concerning your drink is this; that about one million five hundred thousand acres of land in the United Kingdom are occupied in producing strong liquor (and I don’t see that he has included in this estimate what is under the wicked weeds of Kent; it is curious what difficulty people always seem to have in putting anything accurately into short statement). The produce of this land, which is more than all the arable for bread in Scotland, after being manufactured into drink, is sold to you at the rates,—the spirits, of twenty-seven shillings and sixpence for two shillings’ worth; and the beer, of two shillings for threepence-halfpenny worth. The sum you spend in these articles, and in tobacco, annually, is ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX MILLIONS OF POUNDS; on which the pure profit of the richer classes, (putting the lower alehouse gains aside) is, roughly, a hundred millions. That is the way the rich Christian Englishman provides against the Day of Judgment, expecting to hear his Master say to him, “I was thirsty—and ye gave me drink—Two shillings’ worth for twenty-seven and sixpence.”

Again; for the matter of lodging. Look at the Professor’s page 73. There you find that in the street dedicated in Edinburgh to the memory of the first Bishop of Jerusalem, in No. 23, there are living 220 persons. In the first floor of it live ten families,—forty-nine persons; in the second floor, nine families—fifty-four persons; and so on, up to six floors, the ground-floor being a shop; so that “the whole 220 persons in the building are without one foot of the actual surface of the land on which to exist.”

“In my Father’s house,” says Christ, “are many mansions.” Verily, that appears to be also the case in some of His Scotch Evangelical servants’ houses here. And verecund Mr. McCosh, who will not venture to suggest any better arrangement of the heavens,—has he likewise no suggestion to offer as to the arrangement of No. 23, St. James’s Street?

“Whose fault is it?” do you ask?

Immediately, the fault of the landlords; but the landlords from highest to lowest, are more or less thoughtless and ignorant persons, from whom you can expect no better. The persons really answerable for all this are your two professed bodies of teachers; namely, the writers for the public press, and the clergy.

Nearly everything that I ever did of any use in this world has been done contrary to the advice of my friends; and as my friends are unanimous at present in begging me never to write to newspapers, I am somewhat under the impression that I ought to resign my Oxford professorship, and try to get a sub-editorship in the ‘Telegraph’. However, for the present, I content myself with my own work, and have sustained patiently, for thirty years, the steady opposition of the public press to whatever good was in it, (said ‘Telegraph’ always with thanks excepted) down to the article in the ‘Spectator’ of August 13th, 1870, which, on my endeavour to make the study of art, and of Greek literature, of some avail in Oxford to the confirmation of right principle in the minds of her youth, instantly declared that “the artistic perception and skill of Greece were nourished by the very lowness of her ethical code, by her lack of high aims, by her freedom from all aspirations after moral good, by her inability even to conceive a Hebrew tone of purity, by the fact that she lived without God, and died without hope.”

“High aims” are explained by the ‘Spectator,’ in another place, to consist in zeal for the establishment of cotton mills. And the main body of the writers for the public press are also—not of that opinion—for they have no opinions; but they get their living by asserting so much to you.

Against which testimony of theirs, you shall hear, to-day, the real opinion of a man of whom Scotland once was proud; the man who first led her to take some notice of that same reservoir of hers, which Glasgow,—Clyde not being deep enough for her drinking, or perhaps, (see above, xvi. 16) not being now so sweet as stolen waters,—cools her tormented tongue with.

“The poor laws into which you have ventured for the love of the country, form a sad quagmire. They are like John Bunyan’s Slough of Despond, into which, as he observes, millions of cart-loads of good resolutions have been thrown, without perceptibly mending the way. From what you say, and from what I have heard from others, there is a very natural desire to trust to one or two empirical remedies, such as general systems of education, and so forth. But a man with a broken constitution might as well put faith in Spilsburg or Godbold. It is not the knowledge, but the use which is made of it, that is productive of real benefit.

“There is a terrible evil in England to which we are strangers” (some slight acquaintance has been raked up since, Sir Walter,) “the number, to wit, of tippling houses, where the labourer, as a matter of course, spends the overplus of his earnings. In Scotland there are few; and the Justices are commendably inexorable in rejecting all application for licences where there appears no public necessity for granting them. A man, therefore, cannot easily spend much money in liquor, since he must walk three or four miles to the place of suction, and back again, which infers a sort of malice prepense of which few are capable; and the habitual opportunity of indulgence not being at hand, the habits of intemperance, and of waste connected with it, are not acquired. If financiers would admit a general limitation of the alehouses over England to one-fourth of the number, I am convinced you would find the money spent in that manner would remain with the peasant, as a source of self-support and independence. All this applies chiefly to the country; in towns, and in the manufacturing districts, the evil could hardly be diminished by such regulations. There would, perhaps, be no means so effectual as that (which will never be listened to) of taxing the manufacturers according to the number of hands which they employ on an average, and applying the produce in maintaining the manufacturing poor. If it should be alleged that this would injure the manufacturers, I would boldly reply,—‘And why not injure, or rather limit, speculations, the excessive stretch of which has been productive of so much damage to the principles of the country, and to the population, whom it has, in so many respects, degraded and demoralized?’ For a great many years, manufacturers, taken in a general point of view, have not partaken of the character of a regular profession, in which all who engaged with honest industry and a sufficient capital might reasonably expect returns proportional to their advances and labour,—but have, on the contrary, rather resembled a lottery, in which the great majority of the adventurers are sure to be losers, although some may draw considerable advantage. Men continued for a great many years to exert themselves, and to pay extravagant wages, not in hopes that there could be a reasonable prospect of an orderly and regular demand for the goods they wrought up, but in order that they might be the first to take advantage of some casual opening which might consume their cargo, let others shift as they could. Hence extravagant wages on some occasions; for these adventurers who thus played at hit or miss, stood on no scruples while the chance of success remained open. Hence, also, the stoppage of work, and the discharge of the workmen, when the speculators failed of their object. All this while the country was the sufferer;—for whoever gained, the result, being upon the whole a loss, fell on the nation, together with the task of maintaining a poor, rendered effeminate and vicious by over-wages and over-living, and necessarily cast loose upon society. I cannot but think that the necessity of making some fund beforehand, for the provision of those whom they debauch, and render only fit for the almshouse, in prosecution of their own adventures, though it operated as a check on the increase of manufacturers, would be a measure just in itself, and beneficial to the community. But it would never be listened to;—the weaver’s beam, and the sons of Zeruiah, would be too many for the proposers.

“This is the eleventh of August; Walter, happier than he will ever be again, perhaps, is preparing for the moors. He has a better dog than Trout, and rather less active. Mrs. Scott and all our family send kind love. Yours ever. W. S.”

I have italicized one sentence in this letter, written in the year 1817 (what would the writer have thought of the state of things now?)—though I should like, for that matter, to italicise it all. But that sentence touches the root of the evil which I have most at heart, in these letters, to show you; namely, the increasing poverty of the country through the enriching of a few. I told you, in the first sentence of them, that the English people was not a rich people; that it “was empty in purse—empty in stomach.” The day before yesterday, a friend, who thinks my goose pie not an economical dish! sent me a penny cookery book, a very desirable publication, which I instantly sat down to examine. It starts with the great principle that you must never any more roast your meat, but always stew it; and never have an open fire, but substitute, for the open fire, close stoves, all over England.

Now observe. There was once a dish, thought peculiarly English—Roast Beef. And once a place, thought peculiarly English—the Fireside. These two possessions are now too costly for you. Your England, in her unexampled prosperity, according to the ‘Morning Post,’ can no longer afford either her roast beef—or her fireside. She can only afford boiled bones, and a stove-side.

Well. Boiled bones are not so bad things, neither. I know something more about them than the writer of the penny cookery book. Fifty years ago, Count Rumford perfectly ascertained the price, and nourishing power, of good soup; and I shall give you a recipe for Theseus’ vegetable diet, and for Lycurgus’ black and Esau’s red pottage, for your better pot-luck. But what next?

To-day, you cannot afford beef—to-morrow, are you sure that you will be still able to afford bones? If things are to go on thus, and you are to study economy to the utmost, I can beat the author of the penny cookery book even on that ground. What say you to this diet of the Otomac Indians; persons quite of our present English character? “They have a decided aversion to cultivate the land, and live almost exclusively on hunting and fishing. They are men of a very robust constitution, and passionately fond of fermented liquors. While the waters of the Orinoco are low, they subsist on fish and turtles, but at the period of its inundations, (when the fishing ceases) they eat daily, during some months, three quarters of a pound of clay, slightly hardened by fire”[2]—(probably stewable in your modern stoves with better effect).—“Half, at least” (this is Father Gumilla’s statement, quoted by Humboldt) “of the bread of the Otomacs and the Guamoes is clay—and those who feel a weight on their stomach, purge themselves with the fat of the crocodile, which restores their appetite, and enables them to continue to eat pure earth.” “I doubt”—Humboldt himself goes on, “the manteca de caiman being a purgative. But it is certain that the Guamoes are very fond, if not of the fat, at least of the flesh, of the crocodile.”

We have surely brickfields enough to keep our clay from ever rising to famine prices, in any fresh accession of prosperity;—and though fish can’t live in our rivers, the muddy waters are just of the consistence crocodiles like: and, at Manchester and Rochdale, I have observed the surfaces of the streams smoking, so that we need be under no concern as to temperature. I should think you might produce in them quite ‘streaky’ crocodile,—fat and flesh concordant,—St. George becoming a bacon purveyor, as well as seller, and laying down his dragon in salt; (indeed it appears, by an experiment made in Egypt itself, that the oldest of human words is Bacon;) potted crocodile will doubtless, also, from countries unrestrained by religious prejudices, be imported, as the English demand increases, at lower quotations; and for what you are going to receive, the Lord make you truly thankful.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

☞ I hope, in future, to arrange the publishing and editing of ‘Fors,’ so that the current number may always be in my readers’ hands on the first of the month: but I do not pledge myself for its being so. In case of delay, however, subscribers may always be secure of its ultimate delivery, as they would at once receive notice in the event of the non-continuance of the work. I find index-making more difficult and tedious than I expected, and am besides bent at present on some Robinson Crusoe operations of harbour-digging, which greatly interfere with literary work of every kind; but the thing is in progress.

I cannot, myself, vouch for the facts stated in the following letter, but am secure of the writer’s purpose to state them fairly, and grateful for his permission to print his letter:—

1, St. Swithin’s Lane,
London, E. C., 4th February, 1873.

My dear Mr. Ruskin,—I have just finished reading your ‘Munera Pulveris,’ and your paragraph No. 160 is such a reflex of the experience I have of City business that I must call your attention to it.

I told you that I was endeavouring to put into practice what you are teaching, and thus our work should be good work, whether we live or die.

I read in the ‘Quarterly Journal of Science’ that the waste of the Metropolitan sewage is equivalent to three million quartern loaves floating down the Thames every day. I read in the papers that famine fever has broken out in the Metropolis.

I have proved that this bread can be saved, by purifying sewage, and growing such corn with the produce as amazes those that have seen it. I have proved this so completely to capitalists that they have spent £25,000 in demonstrating it to the Metropolitan Board of Works.

‘But nothing of this work will pay.’[3]

We have never puffed, we have never advertised, and hard work I have had to get the Board of Directors to agree to this modest procedure—nevertheless they have done so.

Now, there is a band of conspirators on the Stock Exchange bound to destroy the Company, because, like Jezebel, they have sold a vineyard that does not belong to them—in other words, they have sold ‘bears,’ and they cannot fulfil their contract without killing the Company, or terrifying the shareholders into parting with their property.

No stone is left unturned to thwart our work, and if you can take the trouble to look at the papers I send you, you will see what our work would be for the country, and how it is received.

We are now to be turned out of Crossness, and every conceivable mischief will be made of the fact.

I have fought the fight almost single-handed. I might have sold out and retired from the strife long ago, for our shares were 800 per cent. premium, but I prefer completing the work I have begun, if I am allowed.

From very few human beings have I ever received, nor did I expect, anything but disapproval; for this effort to discountenance the City’s business way of doing things, except Alfred Borwick, and my Brother, R. G. Sillar; but we have been repeatedly told that we must abandon these absurd principles.…

However, with or without encouragement, I shall work on, though I have to do it through a mass of moral filth and corruption, compared with which a genuine cesspit is good company.

Believe me sincerely yours,
W. C. Sillar.

The Third Fors puts into my hand, as I correct the press, a cutting from the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ of September 13th, 1869, which aptly illustrates the former ‘waste’ of sewage referred to by Mr. Sillar:—

“We suffer much from boards of guardians and vestries in and about London, but what they must suffer in remote parts of the country may be imagined rather than described. At a late meeting of the Lincoln board of guardians Mr. Mantle gave a description of a visit he paid with other gentlemen to the village of Scotherne. What they saw he said he should never forget. The village was full of fever cases, and no wonder. The beck was dried up and the wells were filled with sewage matter. They went to one pump, and found the water emitted an unbearable stench. He (Mr. Mantle) asked a woman if she drank the water from the well, and she replied that she did, but that it stank a bit; and there could be no doubt about that, for the well was full of ‘pure’ sewage matter. They went to another house, occupied by a widow with five children, the head of the family having died of fever last year. This family was now on the books of the union. The house was built on a declivity; the pigsty, privy, vault, and cesspool were quite full, and after a shower of rain the contents were washed up to and past the door. The family was in an emaciated state, and one of the children was suffering from fever. After inspecting that part of the village, they proceeded to the house of a man named Harrison, who, with his wife, was laid up with fever; both man and wife were buried in one grave yesterday week, leaving five children to be supported by the union. When visited, the unfortunate couple were in the last stage of fever, and the villagers had such a dread of the disease that none of them would enter the house, and the clergyman and relieving officer had to administer the medicine themselves. Harrison was the best workman in the parish. The cost to the union has already been £12, and at the lowest computation a cost of £600 would fall upon the union for maintaining the children, and probably they might remain paupers for life. This amount would have been sufficient to drain the parish.”

THE TALE OF ADRIANE

As it was told at FLORENCE

[1] “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” Our mona,—as in the [2nd verse] ([John xiv].) [↑]

[2] Humboldt, Personal Narrative, London, 1827, vol. v., p. 640 et seq. I quote, as always, accurately, but missing the bits I don’t want. [↑]

[3] The saying is only quoted in ‘Munera Pulveris’ to be denied, the reader must observe. [↑]

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XXVIII.

Brantwood, 20th Feb., 1873.

I was again stopped by a verse in St. John’s gospel this morning: not because I have not thought of it before, often enough; but because it bears much on our immediate business in one of its expressions,—“Ye shall be scattered, every man to his own.”

His own what?

His own property, his own rights, his own opinions, his own place, I suppose one must answer? Every man in his own place; and every man acting on his own opinions; and every man having his own way. Those are somewhat your own notions of the rightest possible state of things, are they not?

And you do not think it of any consequence to ask what sort of a place your own is?

As for instance, taking the reference farther on, to the one of Christ’s followers who that night, most distinctly of all that were scattered, found his place, and stayed in it,—“This ministry and Apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell, that he might go to his own place.” What sort of a place?

It should interest you, surely, to ask of such things, since you all, whether you like them or not, have your own places; and whether you know them or not, your own opinions. It is too true that very often you fancy you think one thing, when, in reality, you think quite another. Most Christian persons, for instance, fancy they would like to be in heaven. But that is not their real opinion of the place at all. See how grave they will look, if their doctor hints to them that there is the least probability of their soon going there.

And the ascertaining what you really do think yourself, and do not merely fancy you think, because other people have said so; as also the ascertaining, if every man had indeed to go to his own place, what place he would verily have to go to, are most wholesome mental exercises; and there is no objection whatever to your giving weight to that really ‘private opinion,’ and that really ‘individual right.’

But if you ever come really to know either what you think, or what you deserve, it is ten to one but you find it as much the character of Prudence as of Charity, that she “seeketh not her own.” For indeed that same apostle, who so accurately sought his own, and found it, is, in another verse, called the “Son of Loss.” “Of them whom Thou gavest me, have I lost none, but the Son of Loss,” says Christ (your unlucky translation, again, quenches the whole text by its poor Latinism—“perdition”). Might it not be better to lose your place than to find it, on such terms?

But, lost or found, what do you think is your place at this moment? Are you minded to stay in it, if you are in it? Do you mind where it is, if you are out of it? What sort of creatures do you think yourselves? How do those you call your best friends think of you, when they advise you to claim your just place in the world?

I said, two letters back, that we would especially reverence eight saints, and among them St. Paul. I was startled to hear, only a few days afterwards, that the German critics have at last positively ascertained that St. Paul was Simon Magus;—but I don’t mind whether he was or not;—if he was, we have got seven saints, and one of the Magi, to reverence, instead of eight saints;—plainly and practically, whoever wrote the 13th of 1st Corinthians is to be much respected and attended to; not as the teacher of salvation by faith, still less of salvation by talking, nor even of salvation by almsgiving or martyrdom, but as the bold despiser of faith, talk-gift, and burning, if one has not love. Whereas this age of ours is so far contrary to any such Pauline doctrine that, without especial talent either for faith or martyrdom, and loquacious usually rather with the tongues of men than of angels, it nevertheless thinks to get on, not merely without love of its neighbour, but founding all its proceedings on the precise contrary of that,—love of itself, and the seeking of every man for his own,—I should say of every beast for its own; for your modern social science openly confesses that it no longer considers you as men, but as having the nature of Beasts of Prey;[1] which made me more solicitous to explain to you the significance of that word ‘Park’ in my last letter; for indeed you have already pulled down the railings of those small green spots of park to purpose—and in a very solemn sense, turned all England into a Park. Alas!—if it were but even so much. Parks are for beasts of the field, which can dwell together in peace: but you have made yourselves beasts of the Desert, doleful creatures, for whom the grass is green no more, nor dew falls on lawn or bank; no flowers for you—not even the bare and quiet earth to lie down on, but only the sand-drift, and the dry places which the very Devils cannot rest in. Here and there, beside our sweet English waters, the sower may still send forth the feet of the ox and the ass; but for men with ox’s heads, and ass’s heads,—not the park, for these; by no manner of means the Park; but the everlasting Pound. Every man and beast being in their own place, that you choose for yours.

I have given you therefore, this month, for frontispiece, the completest picture I can find of that pound or labyrinth which the Greeks supposed to have been built by Daedalus, to enclose the bestial nature, engrafted on humanity. The Man with the Bull’s head. The Greek Daedalus is the power of mechanical as opposed to imaginative art;[2] and this is the kind of architecture which Greeks and Florentines alike represent him as providing for human beasts. Could anything more precisely represent the general look of your architecture now? When I come down here; to Coniston, through Preston and Wigan, it seems to me that I have seen that thing itself, only built a little higher, and smoking, or else set on its side, and spinning round, a thousand times over in the course of the day.

Then the very writing of the name of it is so like your modern education! You miss the first letter of your lives; and begin with A for apple-pie, instead of L for love; and the rest of the writing is—some little—some big—some turned the wrong way; and the sum of it all to you Perplexity. “Abberinto.”

For the rest, the old Florentine engraver took the story as it ran currently, that Theseus deserted Ariadne (but, indeed, she was the letter L lost out of his life), and besides, you know if he ever did do anything wrong, it was all Titania’s fault,—

“Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night,

And make him with fair Ægle break his faith,

With Ariadne, and Antiopa?”

If you have young eyes, or will help old ones with a magnifying glass, you will find all her story told. In the front, Theseus is giving her his faith; their names, TESEO . ADRIANNA, are written beneath them. He leans on his club reversed. She brings him three balls of thread, in case one, or even two, should not be long enough. His plumed cap means earthly victory; her winged one heavenly power and hope. Then, at the side of the arched gate of the labyrinth, Theseus has tied one end of the clue to a ring, and you see his back and left leg as he goes in. And just above, as the end of the adventure, he is sailing away from Naxos, with his black sail. On the left is the isle of Naxos, and deserted Adriane waving Theseus back, with her scarf tied to a stick. Theseus not returning, she throws herself into the sea; you can see her feet, and her hand, still with the staff in it, as she plunges in backwards. Whereupon, winged Jupiter, GIOVE, comes down and lifts her out of the sea; you see her winged head raised to him. Then he carries her up to heaven. He holds her round the waist, but, strangely, she is not thinking of Jupiter at all, but of something above and more than Jupiter; her hands and head raised, as in some strong desire. But on the right, there is another fall, without such rising. Theseus’ father throws himself into the sea from the wall of Athens, and you see his feet as he goes in; but there is no God to lift him out of the waves. He stays, in his place, as Adriane in hers.

“Such an absurd old picture, or old story, you never saw or heard of? The very blaze of fireworks, in which Jupiter descends, drawn with black sparks instead of white! the whole point of the thing, the ‘terrific combat,’ missed out of the play! and nothing, on the whole, seen, except people’s legs, as in a modern pantomime, only not to so much advantage.”

That is what you think of it? Well, such as it is, that is ‘fine art’ (if you will take my opinion in my own business); and even this poor photograph of it is simply worth all the illustrations in your ‘Illustrated News’ or ‘Illustrated Times’ from one year’s end to another. Worth them all—nay, there is no comparison, for these illustrated papers do you definite mischief, and the more you look at them, the worse for you. Whereas, the longer you look at this, and think of it, the more good you will get.

Examine, for instance, that absurdly tall crest of Theseus. Behind it, if you look closely, you will see that he also has the wings of hope on his helmet; but the upright plumes nearly hide them. Have you never seen anything like them before? They are five here, indeed; but you have surely met with them elsewhere,—in number, Three—those curling, upright plumes?

For that Prince who waited on his father and the French Knights in the castle of Calais, bears them in memory of the good knight and king who fought sightless at Cressy; whose bearings they were, with the motto which you know so well, yet are so little minded to take for your own,—“I serve.” Also the cap of the Knights of St. George has these white plumes ‘of three falls,’ but the Prince of Wales more fitly, because the meaning of the ostrich feather is order and rule; for it was seen that, long and loose though the filaments seemed, no wind could entangle or make them disorderly. “So this plume betokeneth such an one as nothing can disturb his mind or disquiet his spirits, but is ever one and the same.” Do you see how one thing bears out and fulfils another, in these thoughts and symbols of the despised people of old time? Do you recollect Froissart’s words of the New Year’s Feast at Calais?

“So they were served in peace, and in great leisure.”

You have improved that state of things, at any rate. I must say so much for you, at Wolverton, and Rugby, and such other places of travellers’ repose.

Theseus then, to finish with him for this time, bears these plumes specially as the Institutor of Order and Law at Athens; the Prince or beginner of the State there; and your own Prince of Wales bears them in like manner as the beginner of State with us, (the mocking and purposeful lawlessness, of Henry the Fifth when Prince, yet never indeed violating law, or losing self-command, is one of the notablest signs, rightly read, in the world’s history). And now I want you to consider with me very carefully the true meaning of the words he begins his State with:—

“I serve.”

You have, I hope, noticed that throughout these letters addressed to you as workmen and labourers,—though I have once or twice ventured to call myself your fellow-workman, I have oftener spoken as belonging to, and sharing main modes of thought with, those who are not labourers, but either live in various ways by their wits—as lawyers, authors, reviewers, clergymen, parliamentary orators, and the like—or absolutely in idleness on the labour of others,—as the representative Squire. And, broadly speaking, I address you as workers, and speak in the name of the rest as idlers, thus not estimating the mere wit-work as work at all: it is always play, when it is good.

Speaking to you, then, as workers, and of myself as an idler, tell me honestly whether you consider me as addressing my betters or my worses? Let us give ourselves no airs on either side. Which of us, do you seriously think, you or I, are leading the more honourable life? Would you like to lead my life rather than your own; or, if you couldn’t help finding it pleasanter, would you be ashamed of yourselves for leading it? Is your place, or mine, considered as cure and sinecure, the better? And are either of us legitimately in it? I would fain know your own real opinion on these things.

But note further: there is another relation between us than that of idler and labourer; the much more direct one of Master and Servant. I can set you to any kind of work I like, whether it be good for you or bad, pleasant to you or painful. Consider, for instance, what I am doing at this very instant—half-past seven, morning, 25th February, 1873. It is a bitter black frost, the ground deep in snow, and more falling. I am writing comfortably in a perfectly warm room; some of my servants were up in the cold at half-past five to get it ready for me; others, a few days ago, were digging my coals near Durham, at the risk of their lives; an old woman brought me my watercresses through the snow for breakfast yesterday; another old woman is going two miles through it to-day to fetch me my letters at ten o’clock. Half a dozen men are building a wall for me to keep the sheep out of my garden, and a railroad stoker is holding his own against the north wind, to fetch me some Brobdignag raspberry plants[3] to put in it. Somebody in the east end of London is making boots for me, for I can’t wear those I have much longer; a washerwoman is in suds, somewhere, to get me a clean shirt for to-morrow; a fisherman is in dangerous weather somewhere, catching me some fish for Lent; and my cook will soon be making me pancakes, for it is Shrove Tuesday. Having written this sentence, I go to the fire, warm my fingers, saunter a little, listlessly, about the room, and grumble because I can’t see to the other side of the lake.

And all these people, my serfs or menials, who are undergoing any quantity or kind of hardship I choose to put on them,—all these people, nevertheless, are more contented than I am: I can’t be happy, not I,—for one thing, because I haven’t got the MS. Additional, (never mind what number,) in the British Museum, which they bought in 1848, for two hundred pounds, and I never saw it! And have never been easy in my mind, since.

But perhaps it is not the purpose of Heaven to make refined personages, like me, easy in our minds; we are supposed to be too grand for that. Happy, or easy, or otherwise, am I in my place, think you; and you, my serfs, in yours?

‘You are not serfs,’ say you, ‘but free-born Britons’? Much good may your birth do you. What does your birth matter to me, since, now that you are grown men, you must do whatever I like, or die by starvation? ‘Strike!’—will you? Can you live by striking? And when you are forced to work again, will not your masters choose again, as they have chosen hitherto, what work you are to do? Not serfs!—it is well if you are so much as that; a serf would know what o’clock he had to go to his work at; but I find that clocks are now no more comprehensible in England than in Italy, and you also have to be “whistled for like dogs,” all over Yorkshire—or rather buzzed for, that being the appropriate call to business, of due honey-making kind. “Hark,” says an old Athenian, according to Aristophanes, “how the nightingale has filled the thickets with honey” (meaning, with music as sweet). In Yorkshire, your steam-nightingales fill the woods with—Buzz; and for four miles round are audible, summoning you—to your pleasure, I suppose, my free-born?

It is well, I repeat, if you are so much as serfs. A serf means a ‘saved person’—the word comes first from a Greek one, meaning to drag, or drag away into safety, (though captive safety), out of the slaughter of war. But alas, the trades most of you are set to now-a-days have no element of safety in them, either for body or soul. They take thirty years from your lives here;—what they take from your lives hereafter, ask your clergy. I have no opinion on that matter.

But I used another terrible word just now—‘menial.’ The modern English vulgar mind has a wonderful dread of doing anything of that sort!

I suppose there is scarcely another word in the language which people more dislike having applied to them, or of which they less understand the application. It comes from a beautiful old Chaucerian word, ‘meinie,’ or many, signifying the attendant company of any one worth attending to; the disciples of a master, scholars of a teacher, soldiers of a leader, lords of a King. Chaucer says the God of Love came, in the garden of the Rose with ‘his many’;—in the court of the King of Persia spoke a Lord, one ‘of his many.’ Therefore there is nothing in itself dishonourable in being menial: the only question is—whose many you belong to, and whether he is a person worth belonging to, or even safe to be belonged to; also, there is somewhat in the cause of your following: if you follow for love, it is good to be menial—if for honour, good also;—if for ten per cent.—as a railroad company follows its Director, it is not good to be menial. Also there is somewhat in the manner of following: if you obey your Taskmaster’s eye, it is well;—if only his whip, still, well; but not so well:—but, above all, or below all, if you have to obey the whip as a bad hound, because you have no nose, like the members of the present House of Commons, it is a very humble form of menial service indeed.

But even as to the quite literal form of it, in house or domestic service, are you sure it is so very disgraceful a state to live in?

Among the people whom one must miss out of one’s life, dead, or worse than dead, by the time one is fifty-four, I can only say, for my own part, that the one I practically and truly miss most, next to father and mother, (and putting losses of imaginary good out of the question,) was a ‘menial,’ my father’s nurse, and mine. She was one of our many—(our many being always but few), and, from her girlhood to her old age, the entire ability of her life was given to serving us. She had a natural gift and specialty for doing disagreeable things; above all, the service of a sick room; so that she was never quite in her glory unless some of us were ill. She had also some parallel specialty for saying disagreeable things; and might be relied upon to give the extremely darkest view of any subject, before proceeding to ameliorative action upon it. And she had a very creditable and republican aversion to doing immediately, or in set terms, as she was bid; so that when my mother and she got old together, and my mother became very imperative and particular about having her teacup set on one side of her little round table, Anne would observantly and punctiliously put it always on the other; which caused my mother to state to me, every morning after breakfast, gravely, that, if ever a woman in this world was possessed by the Devil, Anne was that woman. But in spite of these momentary and petulant aspirations to liberality and independence of character, poor Anne remained verily servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people’s wills instead of her own, and seeking other people’s good instead of her own: nor did I ever hear on any occasion of her doing harm to a human being, except by saving two hundred and some odd pounds for her relations; in consequence of which some of them, after her funeral, did not speak to the rest for several months.

Two hundred and odd pounds;—it might have been more; but I used to hear of little loans to the relations occasionally; and besides, Anne would sometimes buy a quite unjustifiably expensive silk gown. People in her station of life are always so improvident. Two hundred odd pounds at all events she had laid by, in her fifty-seven years of unselfish labour. Actually twenty ten-pound notes. I heard the other day, to my great satisfaction, of the approaching marriage of a charming girl;—but to my dissatisfaction, that the approach was slow. “We can’t marry yet”—said she;—“you know, we can’t possibly marry on five hundred a year.” People in that station of life are always so provident.

Two hundred odd pounds,—that was what the third Fors, in due alliance with her sisters, thought fit to reward our Annie with, for fifty years of days’ work and nights’ watching; and what will not a dash of a pen win, sometimes in the hands of superior persons! Surely the condition must be a degraded one which can do no better for itself than this?

And yet, have you ever taken a wise man’s real opinion on this matter? You are not fond of hearing opinions of wise men; you like your anonymous penny-a-liners’ opinions better. But do you think you could tolerantly receive that of a moderately and popularly wise man—such an one as Charles Dickens, for example? Have you ever considered seriously what his opinion was, about ‘Dependants’ and ‘Menials’? He did not perhaps quite know what it was himself;—it needs wisdom of stronger make than his to be sure of what it does think. He would talk, in his moral passages, about Independence, and Self-dependence, and making one’s way in the world, just like any hack of the ‘Eatanswill Independent.’ But which of the people of his imagination, of his own true children, did he love and honour most? Who are your favourites in his books—as they have been his? Menials, it strikes me, many of them. Sam, Mark, Kit, Peggoty, Mary-my-dear,—even the poor little Marchioness! I don’t think Dickens intended you to look upon any of them disrespectfully. Or going one grade higher in his society, Tom Pinch, Newman Noggs, Tim Linkinwater, Oliver Twist—how independent, all of them! Very nearly menial, in soul, if they chance on a good master; none of them brilliant in fortune, nor vigorous in action. Is not the entire testimony of Dickens, traced in its true force, that no position is so good for men and women, none so likely to bring out their best human character, as that of a dependent, or menial? And yet with your supreme modern logic, instead of enthusiastically concluding from his works “let us all be servants,” one would think the notion he put in your heads was quite the other, “let us all be masters,” and that you understood his ideal of heroic English character to be given in Mr. Pecksniff or Sir Mulberry Hawk!

Alas! more’s the pity, you cannot all be dependants and menials, even if you were wise enough to wish it. Somebody there must be to be served, else there could be no service. And for the beatitudes and virtues of Masterhood, I must appeal to a wiser man than Dickens—but it is no use entering on that part of the question to-day; in the meantime, here is another letter of his, (you have had one letter already in last Fors,) just come under my hand, which gives you a sketch of a practical landlord, and true Master, on which you may meditate with advantage:

“Here, above all, we had the opportunity of seeing in what universal respect and comfort a gentleman’s family may live in that country, and in far from its most favoured district; provided only they live there habitually and do their duty as the friends and guardians of those among whom Providence has appointed their proper place. Here we found neither mud hovels nor naked peasantry, but snug cottages and smiling faces all about. Here there was a very large school in the village, of which masters and pupils were, in nearly equal proportion, Protestants and Roman Catholics, the Protestant Squire himself making it a regular part of his daily business to visit the scene of their operations, and strengthen authority and enforce discipline by personal superintendence. Here, too, we pleased ourselves with recognising some of the sweetest features in Goldsmith’s picture of ‘Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain;’ and, in particular, we had ‘the playful children just let loose from school’ in perfection. Mr. Edgeworth’s paternal heart delighted in letting them make a playground of his lawn; and every evening, after dinner, we saw leap-frog going on with the highest spirit within fifty yards of the drawing-room windows, while fathers and mothers, and their aged parents also, were grouped about among the trees watching the sport. It is a curious enough coincidence that Oliver Goldsmith and Maria Edgeworth should both have derived their early love and knowledge of Irish character and manners from the same identical district. He received part of his education at this very school of Edgeworthstown; and Pallasmore (the ‘locus cui nomen est Pallas’ of Johnson’s epitaph), the little hamlet where the author of the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ first saw the light, is still, as it was in his time, the property of the Edgeworths.”

“Strengthen authority,” “enforce discipline”! What ugly expressions these! and a “whole hamlet,” though it be a little one, “the property of the Edgeworths”! How long are such things yet to be? thinks my Republican correspondent, I suppose—from whom, to my regret, I have had no further dispatch since I endeavoured to answer his interrogations.[4] Only, note further respecting this chief question of the right of private property, that there are two kinds of ownership, which the Greeks wisely expressed in two different ways: the first, with the word which brought me to a pause in St. John’s Gospel, ‘idios,’ signifying the way, for instance, in which a man’s opinions and interests are his own; ‘idia,’ so that by persisting in them, independently of the truth, which is above opinion, and of the public interest, which is above private, he becomes what we very properly, borrowing the Greek word, call an ‘idiot.’ But their other phrase expresses the kind of belonging which is nobly won, and is truly and inviolably ours, in which sense a man may learn the full meaning of the word ‘Mine’ only once in his life,—happy he who has ever so learnt it. I was thinking over the prettiness of the word in that sense, a day or two ago, and opening a letter, mechanically, when a newspaper clipping dropped out of it (I don’t know from what paper), containing a quotation from the ‘Cornhill Magazine’ setting forth the present privileges of the agricultural labourer attained for him by modern improvements in machinery, in the following terms:—

“An agricultural labourer, from forty to forty-five years of age, of tried skill, of probity, and sobriety, with £200 in his pocket, is a made man. True, he has had to forego the luxury of marriage; but so have his betters.”

And I think you may be grateful to the Third Fors for this clipping; which you see settles, in the region of Cornhill, at least, the question whether you are the betters or the worses of your masters. Decidedly the worses, according to the ‘Cornhill.’ Also, exactly the sum which my old nurse had for her reward at the end of her life, is, you see, to be the agricultural labourer’s reward in the crowning triumph of his;—provided always that he has followed the example of his betters on the stock exchange and in trade, in the observance of the strictest probity;—that he be entirely skilful;—not given to purchasing two shillings’ worth of liquor for twenty-seven and sixpence,—and finally, until the age of forty-five, has dispensed with the luxury of marriage.

I have just said I didn’t want to make Catholics of you; but truly I think your Protestantism is becoming too fierce in its opposition to the Popedom. Cannot it be content with preaching the marriage of the clergy, but it must preach also the celibacy of the laity?

And the moral and anti-Byronic Mrs. B. Stowe, who so charmingly and pathetically describes the terrors of slavery, as an institution which separates men from their wives, and mothers from their children! Did she really contemplate, among the results contributed to by her interesting volumes, these ultimate privileges of Liberty,—that the men, at least under the age of forty-five, are not to have any wives to be separated from; and that the women, who under these circumstances have the misfortune to become mothers, are to feel it a hardship, not to be parted from their children, but to be prevented from accelerating the parting with a little soothing syrup?

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I have kept by me, and now reprint from the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ of July 6th, 1868, the following report of a meeting held on the Labour Question by the Social Science Association in the previous week. It will be seen that it contains confirmation of my statement in p. 4 of the text. The passage I have italicized contains the sense of the views then entertained by the majority of the meeting. I think it desirable also to keep note of the questions I proposed to the meeting, and of the answers given in the ‘Gazette.’ I print the article, therefore, entire:—

THE SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION ON THE LABOUR QUESTION

There would be something touching in the way in which people discuss the question of labour and wages, and in the desperate efforts made by Mr. Gladstone and other persons of high position to make love to the workmen, if there was not almost always a touch of absurdity in such proceedings. Mr. Gladstone, in particular, never approaches such subjects without an elaborate patting and stroking of the working man, which is intelligible only upon the assumption that primâ facie the labourer and the gentleman are natural enemies, and that they must be expected to regard each other as such, unless the higher class approaches the lower with the most elaborate assurances of goodwill and kindness. Such language as the following appears to us very ill-judged. After condemning in strong terms the crimes committed by some trade unions, Mr. Gladstone went on to say:—“Some things the working men required at their hands. In the first place, it was required that they should be approached in a friendly spirit, that they should feel that they were able to place confidence in their good intentions, that they should be assured that they were not approached in the spirit of class, but in the spirit of men who were attached to the truth,” etc., etc. What can be the use of this sort of preaching? Does any human being suppose that any kind of men whatsoever, whether working men or idle men, are indifferent to being approached in an unfriendly spirit; or are disposed to deal with people whom they believe to entertain bad intentions towards them, or to be utterly indifferent to their interests, or to be actuated by interests opposed to their own? Such protestations always appear to us either prosy, patronizing, or insincere. No one suspects Mr. Gladstone of insincerity, but at times he is as prosy as a man must be, who, being already fully occupied with politics, will never miss an opportunity of doing a little philanthrophy and promoting peace and goodwill between different classes of the community. Blessed no doubt are the peacemakers, but at times they are bores.

After Mr. Gladstone’s little sermon the meeting proceeded to discuss a variety of resolutions about strikes, some of which seem very unimportant. One piece of vigorous good sense enlivened the discussion, and appears to us to sum up pretty nearly all that can be said upon the whole subject of strikes. It was uttered by Mr. Applegarth, who observed that “no sentiment ought to be brought into the subject. The employers were like the employed in trying to get as much as possible for as little as they could” Add to this the obvious qualification that even in driving a bargain it is possible to insist too strongly upon your own interest, and that it never can be in the interest either of masters or of men that the profits of any given trade to the capitalist should be permanently depressed much below the average profits of other trades; and nearly all that can be said upon the subject will have been said. If, instead of meeting together and kissing each other in public, masters and men would treat each other simply as civilized and rational beings who have to drive a bargain, and who have a common interest in producing the maximum of profit, though their interests in dividing it when it is produced are conflicting, they would get on much better together. People can buy and sell all sorts of other things without either quarrelling or crying over the transaction, and if they could only see it, there is no reason why they should not deal in labour just as coolly.

The most remarkable feature of the evening was the attack made by Mr. Ruskin on this view of the subject. Replying to Mr. Dering, who had said that whenever it was possible “men would seek their own interests even at the expense of other classes,” he observed[5] that many students of political economy “looked upon man as a predatory animal, while man on the contrary was an affectionate animal, and until the mutual interest of classes was based upon affection, difficulties must continue between those classes.” There are, as it appears to us, several weak points in this statement. One obvious one is that most animals are both predatory and affectionate. Wolves will play together, herd together, hunt together, kill sheep together; and yet, if one wolf is wounded, the rest will eat him up. Animals, too, which as between each other are highly affectionate, are predatory to the last degree as against creatures of a different species or creatures of their own species who have got something which they want. Hence, if men are actuated to some extent at some times, and towards some persons, by their affections, and to a different extent at other times towards the same or other persons by their predatory instincts, they would resemble other animals. Mr. Ruskin’s opposition between the predatory and affectionate animal is thus merely imaginary. Apart from this, the description of man as “an affectionate animal” appears to us not merely incomplete but misleading. Of course the affections are a most important branch of human nature, but they are by no means the whole of it. A very large department of human nature is primarily self-regarding. A man eats and drinks because he is hungry or thirsty, and he buys and sells because he wants to get gain. These are and always will be his leading motives, but they are no doubt to a certain extent counteracted in civilized life by motives of a different kind. No man is altogether destitute of regard for the interests and wishes of his neighbours, and almost every one will sacrifice something more or less for the gratification of others. Still, self-interest of the most direct unmistakable kind is the great leading active principle in many departments of life, and in particular in the trading department: to deny this is to shut one’s eyes to the sun at noonday. To try to change is like trying to stop the revolution of the earth. To call it a “predatory” instinct is to talk at random. To take from a man by force what he possesses is an essentially different thing from driving the hardest of hard bargains with him. Every bargain is regarded as an advantage by both parties at the time when it is made, otherwise it would not be made at all. If I save a drowning man’s life on condition that he will convey to me his whole estate, he is better off than if I leave him to drown. My act is certainly not affectionate, but neither is it predatory. It improves the condition of both parties, and the same is true of all trade.

The most singular part of Mr. Ruskin’s address consisted of a catechism which appears to us to admit of very simple answers, which we will proceed to give, as “the questions were received with much applause,” though we do not appreciate their importance. They are as follows:—

Question.—“1. It is stated in a paper read before the jurisprudence section of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, and afterwards published at their office, that ‘without the capitalist labour could accomplish nothing,’ (p. 4). But for long periods of time in some parts of the world the accumulation of money was forbidden, and in others it was impossible. Has labour never accomplished anything in such districts?”

Answer.—Capital is not merely “an accumulation of money.” It is a general name for the whole stock by and out of which things are made. Labour never accomplished anything without materials or anything important without tools, and materials and tools are capital.

Question.—“2. Supposing that in the present state of England the capital is necessary, are capitalists so? In other words, is it needful for right operation of capital that it should be administered under the arbitrary power of one person?”

Answer.—Yes, it is, unless you do away with the institution of private property. It is necessary for the right operation of capital that some one or other should have arbitrary power over it, and that arbitrary power must either be lodged in individuals, who thereupon become capitalists, or else in the public or its representatives, in which case there is only one capitalist—the State.

Question.—“3. Whence is all capital derived?”

Answer.—From the combination of labour and material.

Question.—“4. If capital is spent in paying wages for labour or manufacture which brings no return (as the labour of an acrobat or manufacturer of fireworks), is such capital lost or not? and if lost, what is the effect of such loss on the future wages fund?”

Answer.—In the case supposed the capital ceases to exist as capital, and the future wages fund is diminished to that extent; but see the next answer.

Question.—“5. If under such circumstances it is lost, and can only be recovered (much more recovered with interest) when it has been spent in wages for productive labour or manufacture, what labours and manufactures are productive, and what are unproductive? Do all capitalists know the difference, and are they always desirous to employ men in productive labours and manufactures, and in these only?”

Answer.—Generally speaking, productive labour means labour which produces useful or agreeable results. Probably no paid labour is absolutely unproductive; for instance, the feats of the acrobat and the fireworks amuse the spectators. Capitalists in general desire to employ men in labours and manufactures which produce gain to the capitalists themselves. The amount of the gain depends on the relation between the demand for the product and the cost of production; and the demand for the product depends principally upon the extent to which it is useful or agreeable—that is, upon the extent to which the labour is productive or unproductive. In this indirect way capitalists are generally desirous to employ men in productive labours and manufactures, and in them only.

Question.—“6. Considering the unemployed and purchasing public as a great capitalist, employing the workmen and their masters both, what results happen finally to this purchasing public if it employs all its manufactures in productive labour? and what if it employs them all in unproductive labour?”

Answer.—This is not the light in which we should consider the “unemployed and purchasing public.” But if they are all to be considered in that light, it is obvious that the result of employing all manufacturers in doing what is useless or disagreeable would be general misery, and vice versâ.

Question.—“7. If there are thirty workmen, ready to do a day’s work, and there is only a day’s work for one of them to do, what is the effect of the natural laws of wages on the other twenty-nine?”

Answer.—The twenty-nine must go without work and wages; but the phrase “natural law” is not ours.

Question.—“8. (a) Is it a natural law that for the same quantity or piece of work, wages should be sometimes high, sometimes low? (b) With what standard do we properly or scientifically compare them, in calling them high or low? (c) And what is the limit of their possible lowness under natural laws?”

Answer.—(a) It is an inevitable result from the circumstances in which mankind are placed, if you call that a natural law.

(b) High wages are wages greater than those which have been usually paid at a given time and place in a given trade; low wages are the reverse. There is no absolute standard of wages.

(c) The limit of the possible lowness of wages is the starvation of the workman.

Question.—“9. In what manner do natural laws affect the wages of officers under Government in various countries?”

Answer.—In endless ways, too long to enumerate.

Question.—“10. ‘If any man will not work, neither should he eat.’ Does this law apply to all classes of society?”

Answer.—No; it does not. It is not a law at all, but merely a striking way of saying that idleness produces want.

[1] See terminal notes. [↑]

[2] Compare XXIII. 12. [↑]

[3] See Miss Edgeworth’s Story, ‘Forgive and Forget,’ in the ‘Parents’ Assistant.’ [↑]

[4] 21st March: one just received, interesting, and to be answered next month. [↑]

[5] I observed nothing of the kind. It was the previous speaker (unknown to me, but, according to the ‘Pall Mall’ Mr. Dering) who not merely ‘observed’ but positively affirmed, as the only groundwork of sound political economy, that the nature of man was that of a beast of prey, to all his fellows. [↑]

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER XXIX.

Brantwood, April 2, 1873.

It is a bright morning, the first entirely clear one I have seen for months; such, indeed, as one used to see, before England was civilized into a blacksmith’s shop, often enough in the sweet spring-time; and as, perhaps, our children’s children may see often enough again, when their coals are burnt out, and they begin to understand that coals are not the source of all power Divine and human. In the meantime as I say, it is months since I saw the sky, except through smoke, or the strange darkness brought by blighting wind (viii. 3), and if such weather as this is to last, I shall begin to congratulate myself, as the ‘Daily News’ does its readers, on the “exceptionally high price of coal,” indicating a most satisfactory state of things, it appears, for the general wealth of the country, for, says that well-informed journal, on March 3rd, 1873, “The net result of the exceptionally high price of coal is in substance this, that the coal owners and workers obtain an unusually large share in the distribution of the gross produce of the community, and the real capital of the community is increased!”

This great and beautiful principle must of course apply to a rise in price in all other articles, as well as in coals. Accordingly, whenever you see the announcement in any shops, or by any advertising firm, that you can get something there cheaper than usual, remember, the capital of the community is being diminished; and whenever you have reason to think that anybody has charged you threepence for a twopenny article, remember that, according to the ‘Daily News,’ “the real capital of the community is increased.” And as I believe you may be generally certain, in the present state of trade, of being charged even as much as twenty-seven pence for a twopenny article, the capital of the community must be increasing very fast indeed. Holding these enlightened views on the subject of the prices of things, the ‘Daily News’ cannot be expected to stoop to any consideration of their uses. But there is another “net result” of the high price of coal, besides the increase of the capital of the community, and a result which is more immediately your affair, namely, that a good many of you will die of cold. It may console you to reflect that a great many rich people will at least feel chilly, in economical drawing-rooms of state, and in ill-aired houses, rawly built on raw ground, and already mouldy for want of fires, though under a blackened sky.

What a pestilence of them, and unseemly plague of builders’ work—as if the bricks of Egypt had multiplied like its lice, and alighted like its locusts—has fallen on the suburbs of loathsome London!

The road from the village of Shirley, near Addington, where my father and mother are buried, to the house they lived in when I was four years old, lay, at that time, through a quite secluded district of field and wood, traversed here and there by winding lanes, and by one or two smooth mail-coach roads, beside which, at intervals of a mile or two, stood some gentleman’s house, with its lawn, gardens, offices, and attached fields, indicating a country life of long continuance and quiet respectability. Except such an one here and there, one saw no dwellings above the size of cottages or small farmsteads; these, wood-built usually, and thatched, their porches embroidered with honeysuckle, and their gardens with daisies, their doors mostly ajar, or with a half one shut to keep in the children, and a bricked or tiled footway from it to the wicket gate,—all neatly kept, and vivid with a sense of the quiet energies of their contented tenants,—made the lane-turnings cheerful, and gleamed in half-hidden clusters beneath the slopes of the woodlands at Sydenham and Penge. There were no signs of distress, of effort, or of change; many of enjoyment, and not a few of wealth beyond the daily needs of life. That same district is now covered by, literally, many thousands of houses built within the last ten years, of rotten brick, with various iron devices to hold it together. They, every one, have a drawing-room and dining-room, transparent from back to front, so that from the road one sees the people’s heads inside, clear against the light. They have a second story of bedrooms, and an underground one of kitchen. They are fastened in a Siamese-twin manner together by their sides, and each couple has a Greek or Gothic portico shared between them, with magnificent steps, and highly ornamented capitals. Attached to every double block are exactly similar double parallelograms of garden, laid out in new gravel and scanty turf, on the model of the pleasure grounds in the Crystal Palace, and enclosed by high, thin, and pale brick walls. The gardens in front are fenced from the road with an immense weight of cast iron, and entered between two square gate-posts, with projecting stucco cornices, bearing the information that the eligible residence within is Mortimer House or Montague Villa. On the other side of the road, which is laid freshly down with large flints, and is deep at the sides in ruts of yellow mud, one sees Burleigh House, or Devonshire Villa, still to let, and getting leprous in patches all over the fronts.

Think what the real state of life is, for the people who are content to pass it in such places; and what the people themselves must be. Of the men, their wives, and children, who live in any of those houses, probably not the fifth part are possessed of one common manly or womanly skill, knowledge, or means of happiness. The men can indeed write, and cast accounts, and go to town every day to get their living by doing so; the women and children can perhaps read story-books, dance in a vulgar manner, and play on the piano with dull dexterities for exhibition; but not a member of the whole family can, in general, cook, sweep, knock in a nail, drive a stake, or spin a thread. They are still less capable of finer work. They know nothing of painting, sculpture, or architecture; of science, inaccurately, as much as may more or less account to them for Mr. Pepper’s ghost, and make them disbelieve in the existence of any other ghost but that, particularly the Holy One: of books, they read ‘Macmillan’s Magazine’ on week days, and ‘Good Words’ on Sundays, and are entirely ignorant of all the standard literature belonging to their own country, or to any other. They never think of taking a walk, and, the roads for six miles round them being ancle deep in mud and flints, they could not if they would. They cannot enjoy their gardens, for they have neither sense nor strength enough to work in them. The women and girls have no pleasures but in calling on each other in false hair, cheap dresses of gaudy stuffs, machine made, and high-heeled boots, of which the pattern was set to them by Parisian prostitutes of the lowest order: the men have no faculty beyond that of cheating in business; no pleasures but in smoking or eating; and no ideas, nor any capacity of forming ideas, of anything that has yet been done of great, or seen of good, in this world.

That is the typical condition of five-sixths, at least, of the “rising” middle classes about London—the lodgers in those damp shells of brick, which one cannot say they inhabit, nor call their “houses;” nor “their’s” indeed, in any sense; but packing-cases in which they are temporarily stored, for bad use. Put the things on wheels (it is already done in America, but you must build them stronger first), and they are mere railway vans of brick, thrust in rows on the siding; vans full of monkeys that have lost the use of their legs. The baboons in Regent’s Park—with Mr. Darwin’s pardon—are of another species; a less passive, and infinitely wittier one. Here, behold, you have a group of gregarious creatures that cannot climb, and are entirely imitative, not as the apes, occasionally, for the humour of it, but all their lives long; the builders trying to build as Christians did once, though now swindling on every brick they lay; and the lodgers to live like the Duke of Devonshire, on the salaries of railroad clerks. Lodgers, do I say! Scarcely even that. Many a cottage, lodged in but for a year or two, has been made a true home, for that span of the owner’s life. In my next letter but one, I hope to give you some abstract of the man’s life whose testimony I want you to compare with that of Dickens, as to the positions of Master and Servant: meantime compare with what you may see of these railroad homes, this incidental notice by him of his first one:

“When we approached that village (Lasswade), Scott, who had laid hold of my arm, turned along the road in a direction not leading to the place where the carriage was to meet us. After walking some minutes towards Edinburgh, I suggested that we were losing the scenery of the Esk, and, besides, had Dalkeith Palace yet to see.

“ ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘and I have been bringing you where there is little enough to be seen, only that Scotch cottage (one by the roadside, with a small garth); but, though not worth looking at, I could not pass it. It was our first country house when newly married, and many a contrivance we had to make it comfortable. I made a dining-table for it with my own hands. Look at these two miserable willow trees on either side the gate into the enclosure; they are tied together at the top to be an arch, and a cross made of two sticks over them is not yet decayed. To be sure, it is not much of a lion to show a stranger; but I wanted to see it again myself, for I assure you that after I had constructed it, mamma (Mrs. Scott) and I both of us thought it so fine, we turned out to see it by moonlight, and walked backwards from it to the cottage door, in admiration of our own magnificence and its picturesque effect. I did want to see if it was still there.’ ”

I had scarcely looked out this passage for you, when I received a letter from the friend who sent me the penny cookery book, incidentally telling me of the breaking up of a real home. I have obtained her leave to let you read part of it. It will come with no disadvantage, even after Scott’s recording as it does the same kind of simple and natural life, now passing so fast away. The same life, and also in the district which, henceforward, I mean to call “Sir Walter’s Land”; definable as the entire breadth of Scots and English ground from sea to sea, coast and isle included, between Schehallien on the north, and Ingleborough on the south, (I have my reasons, though some readers may doubt them, for fixing the limit south of Skye, and north of Ashby-de-la-Zouche.) Within this district, then, but I shall not say in what part of it, the home my friend speaks of stood. In many respects it was like the “Fair-ladies” in “Red Gauntlet”; as near the coast, as secluded, and in the same kind of country; still more like, in its mistress’s simple and loyal beneficence. Therefore, because I do not like leaving a blank for its name, I put “Fair-ladies” for it in the letter, of which the part I wish you to see begins thus:—

“Please let me say one practical thing. In no cottage is there a possibility of roasting more than a pound of meat, if any; and a piece of roast beef, such as you or I understand by the word, costs ten shillings or twelve, and is not meant for artisans. I never have it in this house now, except when it is full. I have a much sadder example of the changes wrought by modern wages and extravagance. Miss ——, who had her house and land for her home-farm expenses (or rather produce), and about —— hundred a year; who entertained for years all her women and children acquaintances; trained a dozen young servants in a year, and was a blessing to the country for miles round; writes me word yesterday that she hopes and intreats that we will go this summer to Fair-ladies, as it is the last. She says the provisions are double the price they used to be—the wages also—and she cannot even work her farm as she used to do; the men want beer instead of milk, and won’t do half they used to do; so she must give it up, and let the place, and come and live by me or some one to comfort her, and Fair-ladies will know her no more. I am so sorry, because I think it such a loss to the wretched people who drive her away. Our weekly bills are double what they used to be, yet every servant asks higher wages each time I engage one; and as to the poor people in the village, they are not a bit better off—they eat more, and drink more, and learn to think less of religion and all that is good. One thing I see very clearly, that, as the keeping of Sunday is being swept away, so is their day of rest going with it. Of course if no one goes to worship God one day more than another,[1] what is the sense of talking about the Sabbath? If all the railway servants, and all the post-office, and all the museum and art-collection servants, and all the refreshment places, and other sorts of amusement, servants are to work on Sunday, why on earth should not the artisans, who are as selfish and irreligious as any one? No! directly I find every one else is at work, I shall insist on the baker and the butcher calling for orders as usual. (Quite right, my dear.) The result of enormous wages will be that I rely more on my own boys for carpentering, and on preserved food, and the cook and butcher will soon be dismissed.”

My poor little darling, rely on your own boys for carpentering by all means; and grease be to their elbows—but you shall have something better to rely on than potted crocodile, in old England, yet,—please the pixies, and pigs, and St. George, and St. Anthony.

Nay, we will have also a blue-aproned butcher or two still, to call for orders; they are not yet extinct. We have not even reached the preparatory phase of steam-butcher-boys, riding from Buxton for orders to Bakewell, and from Bakewell for orders to Buxton; and paying dividends to a Steam-Butcher’s-boy-Company. Not extinct yet, and a kindly race, for the most part. “He told me,” (part of another friend’s letter, speaking of his butcher,) “his sow had fourteen pigs, and could only rear twelve, the other two, he said, he was feeding with a spoon. I never could bear, he said, to kill a young animal because he was one too many.” Yes; that is all very well when it’s a pig; but if it be—Wait a minute;—I must go back to Fair-ladies, before I finish my sentence.

For note very closely what the actual facts are in this short letter from an English housewife.

She in the south, and the mistress of Fair-ladies in the north, both find “their weekly bills double what they used to be;” that is to say, they are as poor again as they were, and they have to pay higher wages, of course, for now all wages buy so much less. I have too long, perhaps, put questions to you which I knew you could not answer, partly in the hope of at least making you think, and partly because I knew you would not believe the true answer, if I gave it. But, whether you believe me or not, I must explain the meaning of this to you at once. The weekly bills are double, because the greater part of the labour of the people of England is spent unproductively; that is to say, in producing iron plates, iron guns, gunpowder, infernal machines, infernal fortresses floating about, infernal fortresses standing still, infernal means of mischievous locomotion, infernal lawsuits, infernal parliamentary elocution, infernal beer, and infernal gazettes, magazines, statues, and pictures. Calculate the labour spent in producing these infernal articles annually, and put against it the labour spent in producing food! The only wonder is, that the weekly bills are not tenfold instead of double. For this poor housewife, mind you, cannot feed her children with any one, or any quantity, of these infernal articles. Children can only be fed with divine articles. Their mother can indeed get to London cheap, but she has no business there; she can buy all the morning’s news for a halfpenny, but she has no concern with them; she can see Gustave Doré’s pictures (and she had better see the devil), for a shilling; she can be carried through any quantity of filthy streets on a tramway for threepence; but it is as much as her life’s worth to walk in them, or as her modesty’s worth to look into a print shop in them. Nay, let her have but to go on foot a quarter of a mile in the West End, she dares not take her purse in her pocket, nor let her little dog follow her. These are her privileges and facilities, in the capital of civilization. But none of these will bring meat or flour into her own village. Far the contrary! The sheep and corn which the fields of her village produce are carried away from it to feed the makers of Armstrong guns. And her weekly bills are double.

But you, forsooth, you think, with your beer for milk, are better off. Read pages 12 to 14 of my second letter over again. And now observe farther:—

The one first and absolute question of all economy is—What are you making? Are you making Hell’s articles, or Heaven’s?—gunpowder, or corn?

There is no question whether you are to have work or not. The question is, what work. This poor housewife’s mutton and corn are given you to eat. Good. Now, if you, with your day’s work, produce for her, and send to her, spices, or tea, or rice, or maize, or figs, or any other good thing,—that is true and beneficent trade. But if you take her mutton and corn from her, and send her back an Armstrong gun, what can she make of that? But you can’t grow figs and spices in England, you say? No, certainly, and therefore means of transit for produce in England are little necessary. Let my poor housewife keep her sheep in her near fields, and do you—keep sheep at Newcastle—and the weekly bills will not rise. But you forge iron at Newcastle; then you build an embankment from Newcastle to my friend’s village, whereupon you take her sheep from her, suffocating half of them on the way; and you send her an Armstrong gun back; or, perhaps not even to her, but to somebody who can fire it down your own throats, you jolterheads.

No matter, you say, in the meantime, we eat more, and drink more; the housewife herself allows that. Yes, I have just told you, her corn and sheep all are sent to you. But how about other people? I will finish my sentence now, paused in above. It is all very well to bring up creatures with a spoon, when they are one or two too many, if they are useful things like pigs. But how if they be useless things like young ladies? You don’t want any wives, I understand, now, till you are forty-five; what in the world will you do with your girls? Bring them up with a spoon, to that enchanting age?

“The girls may shift for themselves.” Yes,—they may, certainly. Here is a picture of some of them, as given by the ‘Telegraph’ of March 18th, of the present year, under Lord Derby’s new code of civilization, endeavouring to fulfil Mr. John Stuart Mill’s wishes, and procure some more lucrative occupation than that of nursing the baby:—

“After all the discussions about woman’s sphere and woman’s rights, and the advisability of doing something to redress the inequality of position against which the fair sex, by the medium of many champions, so loudly protests and so constantly struggles, it is not satisfactory to be told what happened at Cannon-row two days last week. It had been announced that the Civil Service Commissioners would receive applications personally from candidates for eleven vacancies in the metropolitan post-offices, and in answer to this notice, about 2,000 young women made their appearance. The building, the courtyard, and the street were blocked by a dense throng of fair applicants; locomotion was impossible, even with the help of policemen; windows were thrown up to view the sight, as if a procession had been passing that way; traffic was obstructed, and nothing could be done for hours. We understand, indeed, that the published accounts by no means do justice to the scene. Many of the applicants, it appears, were girls of the highest respectability and of unusually good social position, including daughters of clergymen and professional men, well connected, well educated, tenderly nurtured; but nevertheless, driven by the res angustæ which have caused many a heart-break, and scattered the members of many a home to seek for the means of independent support. The crowd, the agitation, the anxiety, the fatigue, proved too much for many of those who attended; several fainted away; others went into violent hysterics; others, despairing of success, remained just long enough to be utterly worn out, and then crept off, showing such traces of mental anguish as we are accustomed to associate with the most painful bereavements. In the present case, it is stated, the Commissioners examined over 1,000 candidates for the eleven vacancies. This seems a sad waste of power on both sides, when, in all probability, the first score supplied the requisite number of qualified aspirants.”

Yes, my pets, I am tired of talking to these workmen, who never answer a word; I will try you now—for a letter or two—but I beg your pardon for calling you pets,—my “qualified aspirants” I mean (Alas! time was when the qualified aspiration was on the bachelor’s side). Here you have got all you want, I hope!—liberty enough, it seems—if only the courtyard were bigger; equality enough—no distinction made between young ladies of the highest, or the lowest, respectability; rights of women generally claimed, you perceive; and obtained without opposition from absurdly religious, moral, or chivalric persons. You have got no God, now, to bid you do anything you don’t like; no husbands, to insist on having their own way—(and much of it they got, in the old times—didn’t they?)—no pain nor peril of childbirth;—no bringing up of tiresome brats. Here is an entirely scientific occupation for you! Such a beautiful invention this of Mr. Wheatstone’s! and I hope you all understand the relations of positive and negative electricity. Now you may “communicate intelligence” by telegraph. Those wretched girls that used to write love-letters, of which their foolish lovers would count the words, and sometimes be thankful for—less than twenty—how they would envy you if they knew. Only the worst is, that this beautiful invention of Mr. Wheatstone’s for talking miles off, won’t feed people in the long run, my dears, any more than the old invention of the tongue, for talking near, and you’ll soon begin to think that was not so bad a one, after all. But you can’t live by talking, though you talk in the scientificalest of manners, and to the other side of the world. All the telegraph wire over the earth and under the sea, will not do so much for you, my poor little qualified aspirants, as one strong needle with thimble and thread.

You do sometimes read a novel still, don’t you, my scientific dears? I wish I could write one; but I can’t; and George Eliot always makes them end so wretchedly that they’re worse than none—so she’s no good, neither. I must even translate a foreign novelette or nouvelette, which is to my purpose, next month; meantime I have chanced on a little true story, in the journal of an Englishman, travelling, before the Revolution, in France, which shows you something of the temper of the poor unscientific girls of that day. Here are first, however, a little picture or two which he gives in the streets of Paris, and which I want all my readers to see; they mark, what most Englishmen do not know, that the beginning of the French Revolution, with what of good or evil it had, was in English, not French, notions of “justice” and “liberty.” The writer is travelling with a friend, Mr. B——, who is of the Liberal school, and, “He and I went this forenoon to a review of the foot-guards, by Marshal Biron. There was a crowd, and we could with difficulty get within the circle, so as to see conveniently. An old officer of high rank touched some people who stood before us, saying, ‘Ces deux Messieurs sont des étrangers;’ upon which they immediately made way, and allowed us to pass. ‘Don’t you think that was very obliging?’ said I. ‘Yes,’ answered he; ‘but by heavens, it was very unjust.’

“We returned by the Boulevards, where crowds of citizens, in their holiday dresses, were making merry; the young dancing cotillons, the old beating time to the music, and applauding the dancers. ‘These people seem very happy,’ said I. ‘Happy!’ exclaimed B——; ‘if they had common sense, or reflection, they would be miserable.’ ‘Why so?’ ‘Could not the minister,’ answered he, ‘pick out half-a-dozen of them if he pleased, and clap them into the Bicêtre?’ ‘That is true, indeed,’ said I; ‘that is a catastrophe which, to be sure, may very probably happen, and yet I thought no more of it than they.’

“We met, a few days after he arrived, at a French house where we had been both invited to dinner. There was an old lady of quality present, next to whom a young officer was seated, who paid her the utmost attention. He helped her to the dishes she liked, filled her glass with wine or water, and addressed his discourse particularly to her. ‘What a fool,’ says B——, ‘does that young fellow make of the poor old woman! if she were my mother, d—n me, if I would not call him to an account for it.’

“Though B—— understands French, and speaks it better than most Englishmen, he had no relish for the conversation, soon left the company, and has refused all invitations to dinner ever since. He generally finds some of our countrymen, who dine and pass the evening with him at the Parc Royal.

“After the review this day, we continued together, and being both disengaged, I proposed, by way of variety, to dine at the public ordinary of the Hôtel de Bourbon. He did not like this much at first. ‘I shall be teased,’ says he, ‘with their confounded ceremony;’ but on my observing that we could not expect much ceremony or politeness at a public ordinary, he agreed to go.