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Title: The Crown of Wild Olive
also Munera Pulveris; Pre-Raphaelitism; Aratra Pentelici; The Ethics of the Dust; Fiction, Fair and Foul; The Elements of Drawing
Author: John Ruskin
Release Date: September 28, 2008 [eBook #26716]
Language: English
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Illustrated Library Edition
THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE
Also
MUNERA PULVERIS
PRE-RAPHAELITISM--ARATRA PENTELICI
THE ETHICS OF THE DUST
FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL
THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING
by
JOHN RUSKIN, M.A.
[Illustration: _Portrait of Carlyle_
Etched by E. A. Fowle--From Painting by Samuel Lawrence]
[Illustration]
Boston and New York
Colonial Press Company
Publishers
CONTENTS.
THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.
PAGE
LECTURE I.
WORK, 17
LECTURE II.
TRAFFIC, 44
LECTURE III.
WAR, 66
MUNERA PULVERIS.
PREFACE, 97
CHAP.
I. DEFINITIONS, 111
II. STORE-KEEPING, 125
III. COIN-KEEPING, 151
IV. COMMERCE, 170
V. GOVERNMENT, 181
VI. MASTERSHIP, 204
APPENDICES, 222
PRE-RAPHAELITISM.
PREFACE, 235
PRE-RAPHAELITISM, 237
ARATRA PENTELICI.
PREFACE, 283
LECTURE
I. OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS, 287
II. IDOLATRY, 304
III. IMAGINATION, 322
IV. LIKENESS, 350
V. STRUCTURE, 372
VI. THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS, 395
THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND, 415
NOTES ON POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA, 435
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
ARATRA PENTELICI.
PLATES FACING PAGE
I. PORCH OF SAN ZENONE. VERONA, 300
II. THE ARETHUSA OF SYRACUSE, 302
III. THE WARNING TO THE KINGS, 302
IV. THE NATIVITY OF ATHENA, 308
V. TOMB OF THE DOGES JACOPO AND LORENZO TIEPOLO, 333
VI. ARCHAIC ATHENA OF ATHENS AND CORINTH, 334
VII. ARCHAIC, CENTRAL AND DECLINING ART OF GREECE, 355
VIII. THE APOLLO OF SYRACUSE AND THE SELF-MADE MAN, 366
IX. APOLLO CHRYSOCOMES OF CLAZOMENÆ, 368
X. MARBLE MASONRY IN THE DUOMO OF VERONA, 381
XI. THE FIRST ELEMENTS OF SCULPTURE, 382
XII. BRANCH OF PHILLYREA. DARK PURPLE, 390
XIII. GREEK FLAT RELIEF AND SCULPTURE BY EDGED INCISION, 392
XIV. APOLLO AND THE PYTHON. HERACLES AND THE NEMEAN LION, 400
XV. HERA OF ARGOS. ZEUS OF SYRACUSE, 401
XVI. DEMETER OF MESSENE. HERA OF CROSSUS, 402
XVII. ATHENA OF THURIUM. SEREIE LIGEIA OF TERINA, 402
XVIII. ARTEMIS OF SYRACUSE. HERA OF LACINIAN CAPE, 404
XIX. ZEUS OF MESSENE. AJAX OF OPUS, 405
XX. GREEK AND BARBARIAN SCULPTURE, 407
XXI. THE BEGINNINGS OF CHIVALRY, 409
FIGURE PAGE
1. SPECIMEN OF PLATE, 293
2. WOODCUT, 323
3. FIGURE ON GREEK TYPE OF VASES, 326
4. EARLY DRAWING OF THE MYTH 330
5. CUT, "GIVE IT TO ME," 332
6. ENGRAVING ON COIN, 335
7. DRAWING OF FISH. BY TURNER, 362
8. IRON BAR, 379
9. DIAGRAM OF LEAF, 391
THE
CROWN OF WILD OLIVE
THREE LECTURES ON
WORK, TRAFFIC AND WAR
PREFACE.
Twenty years ago, there was no lovelier piece of lowland scenery in
South England, nor any more pathetic in the world, by its expression of
sweet human character and life, than that immediately bordering on the
sources of the Wandle, and including the lower moors of Addington, and
the villages of Beddington and Carshalton, with all their pools and
streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever sang with constant lips of
the hand which 'giveth rain from heaven;' no pastures ever lightened in
spring time with more passionate blossoming; no sweeter homes ever
hallowed the heart of the passer-by with their pride of peaceful
gladness--fain-hidden--yet full-confessed. The place remains, or, until
a few months ago, remained, nearly unchanged in its larger features;
but, with deliberate mind I say, that I have never seen anything so
ghastly in its inner tragic meaning,--not in Pisan Maremma--not by
Campagna tomb,--not by the sand-isles of the Torcellan shore,--as the
slow stealing of aspects of reckless, indolent, animal neglect, over the
delicate sweetness of that English scene: nor is any blasphemy or
impiety--any frantic saying or godless thought--more appalling to me,
using the best power of judgment I have to discern its sense and scope,
than the insolent defilings of those springs by the human herds that
drink of them. Just where the welling of stainless water, trembling and
pure, like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting
itself a radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp of feathery
weeds, all waving, which it traverses with its deep threads of
clearness, like the chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here and there
with white grenouillette; just in the very rush and murmur of the first
spreading currents, the human wretches of the place cast their street
and house foulness; heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old
metal, and rags of putrid clothes; they having neither energy to cart it
away, nor decency enough to dig it into the ground, thus shed into the
stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and melt, far away, in
all places where God meant those waters to bring joy and health. And, in
a little pool, behind some houses farther in the village, where another
spring rises, the shattered stones of the well, and of the little
fretted channel which was long ago built and traced for it by gentler
hands, lie scattered, each from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and
scoria; and brick-layers' refuse, on one side, which the clean water
nevertheless chastises to purity; but it cannot conquer the dead earth
beyond; and there, circled and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant
edge of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the
accumulation of indolent years. Half-a-dozen men, with one day's work,
could cleanse those pools, and trim the flowers about their banks, and
make every breath of summer air above them rich with cool balm; and
every glittering wave medicinal, as if it ran, troubled of angels, from
the porch of Bethesda. But that day's work is never given, nor will be;
nor will any joy be possible to heart of man, for evermore, about those
wells of English waters.
When I last left them, I walked up slowly through the back streets of
Croydon, from the old church to the hospital; and, just on the left,
before coming up to the crossing of the High Street, there was a new
public-house built. And the front of it was built in so wise manner,
that a recess of two feet was left below its front windows, between them
and the street-pavement--a recess too narrow for any possible use (for
even if it had been occupied by a seat, as in old time it might have
been, everybody walking along the street would have fallen over the legs
of the reposing wayfarers). But, by way of making this two feet depth of
freehold land more expressive of the dignity of an establishment for the
sale of spirituous liquors, it was fenced from the pavement by an
imposing iron railing, having four or five spearheads to the yard of it,
and six feet high; containing as much iron and iron-work, indeed as
could well be put into the space; and by this stately arrangement, the
little piece of dead ground within, between wall and street, became a
protective receptacle of refuse; cigar ends, and oyster shells, and the
like, such as an open-handed English street-populace habitually scatters
from its presence, and was thus left, unsweepable by any ordinary
methods. Now the iron bars which, uselessly (or in great degree worse
than uselessly), enclosed this bit of ground, and made it pestilent,
represented a quantity of work which would have cleansed the Carshalton
pools three times over;--of work, partly cramped and deadly, in the
mine; partly fierce[1] and exhaustive, at the furnace; partly foolish
and sedentary, of ill-taught students making bad designs: work from the
beginning to the last fruits of it, and in all the branches of it,
venomous, deathful, and miserable. Now, how did it come to pass that
this work was done instead of the other; that the strength and life of
the English operative were spent in defiling ground, instead of
redeeming it; and in producing an entirely (in that place) valueless
piece of metal, which can neither be eaten nor breathed, instead of
medicinal fresh air, and pure water?
There is but one reason for it, and at present a conclusive one,--that
the capitalist can charge per-centage on the work in the one case, and
cannot in the other. If, having certain funds for supporting labour at
my disposal, I pay men merely to keep my ground in order, my money is,
in that function, spent once for all; but if I pay them to dig iron out
of my ground, and work it, and sell it, I can charge rent for the
ground, and per-centage both on the manufacture and the sale, and make
my capital profitable in these three bye-ways. The greater part of the
profitable investment of capital, in the present day, is in operations
of this kind, in which the public is persuaded to buy something of no
use to it, on production, or sale, of which, the capitalist may charge
per-centage; the said public remaining all the while under the
persuasion that the per-centages thus obtained are real national gains,
whereas, they are merely filchings out of partially light pockets, to
swell heavy ones.
Thus, the Croydon publican buys the iron railing, to make himself more
conspicuous to drunkards. The public-housekeeper on the other side of
the way presently buys another railing, to out-rail him with. Both are,
as to their _relative_ attractiveness to customers of taste, just where
they were before; but they have lost the price of the railings; which
they must either themselves finally lose, or make their aforesaid
customers of taste pay, by raising the price of their beer, or
adulterating it. Either the publicans, or their customers, are thus
poorer by precisely what the capitalist has gained; and the value of the
work itself, meantime, has been lost to the nation; the iron bars in
that form and place being wholly useless. It is this mode of taxation of
the poor by the rich which is referred to in the text (page 31), in
comparing the modern acquisitive power of capital with that of the lance
and sword; the only difference being that the levy of black mail in old
times was by force, and is now by cozening. The old rider and reiver
frankly quartered himself on the publican for the night; the modern one
merely makes his lance into an iron spike, and persuades his host to buy
it. One comes as an open robber, the other as a cheating pedlar; but the
result, to the injured person's pocket, is absolutely the same. Of
course many useful industries mingle with, and disguise the useless
ones; and in the habits of energy aroused by the struggle, there is a
certain direct good. It is far better to spend four thousand pounds in
making a good gun, and then to blow it to pieces, than to pass life in
idleness. Only do not let it be called 'political economy.' There is
also a confused notion in the minds of many persons, that the gathering
of the property of the poor into the hands of the rich does no ultimate
harm; since, in whosesoever hands it may be, it must be spent at last,
and thus, they think, return to the poor again. This fallacy has been
again and again exposed; but grant the plea true, and the same apology
may, of course, be made for black mail, or any other form of robbery. It
might be (though practically it never is) as advantageous for the nation
that the robber should have the spending of the money he extorts, as
that the person robbed should have spent it. But this is no excuse for
the theft. If I were to put a turnpike on the road where it passes my
own gate, and endeavour to exact a shilling from every passenger, the
public would soon do away with my gate, without listening to any plea on
my part that 'it was as advantageous to them, in the end, that I should
spend their shillings, as that they themselves should.' But if, instead
of out-facing them with a turnpike, I can only persuade them to come in
and buy stones, or old iron, or any other useless thing, out of my
ground, I may rob them to the same extent, and be, moreover, thanked as
a public benefactor, and promoter of commercial prosperity. And this
main question for the poor of England--for the poor of all countries--is
wholly omitted in every common treatise on the subject of wealth. Even
by the labourers themselves, the operation of capital is regarded only
in its effect on their immediate interests; never in the far more
terrific power of its appointment of the kind and the object of labour.
It matters little, ultimately, how much a labourer is paid for making
anything; but it matters fearfully what the thing is, which he is
compelled to make. If his labour is so ordered as to produce food, and
fresh air, and fresh water, no matter that his wages are low;--the food
and fresh air and water will be at last there; and he will at last get
them. But if he is paid to destroy food and fresh air or to produce
iron bars instead of them,--the food and air will finally _not_ be
there, and he will _not_ get them, to his great and final inconvenience.
So that, conclusively, in political as in household economy, the great
question is, not so much what money you have in your pocket, as what you
will buy with it, and do with it.
I have been long accustomed, as all men engaged in work of investigation
must be, to hear my statements laughed at for years, before they are
examined or believed; and I am generally content to wait the public's
time. But it has not been without displeased surprise that I have found
myself totally unable, as yet, by any repetition, or illustration, to
force this plain thought into my readers' heads,--that the wealth of
nations, as of men, consists in substance, not in ciphers; and that the
real good of all work, and of all commerce, depends on the final worth
of the thing you make, or get by it. This is a practical enough
statement, one would think: but the English public has been so possessed
by its modern school of economists with the notion that Business is
always good, whether it be busy in mischief or in benefit; and that
buying and selling are always salutary, whatever the intrinsic worth of
what you buy or sell,--that it seems impossible to gain so much as a
patient hearing for any inquiry respecting the substantial result of our
eager modern labours. I have never felt more checked by the sense of
this impossibility than in arranging the heads of the following three
lectures, which, though delivered at considerable intervals of time, and
in different places, were not prepared without reference to each other.
Their connection would, however, have been made far more distinct, if I
had not been prevented, by what I feel to be another great difficulty in
addressing English audiences, from enforcing, with any decision, the
common, and to me the most important, part of their subjects. I chiefly
desired (as I have just said) to question my hearers--operatives,
merchants, and soldiers, as to the ultimate meaning of the _business_
they had in hand; and to know from them what they expected or intended
their manufacture to come to, their selling to come to, and their
killing to come to. That appeared the first point needing determination
before I could speak to them with any real utility or effect. 'You
craftsmen--salesmen--swordsmen,--do but tell me clearly what you want,
then, if I can say anything to help you, I will; and if not, I will
account to you as I best may for my inability.' But in order to put this
question into any terms, one had first of all to face the difficulty
just spoken of--to me for the present insuperable,--the difficulty of
knowing whether to address one's audience as believing, or not
believing, in any other world than this. For if you address any average
modern English company as believing in an Eternal life, and endeavour to
draw any conclusions, from this assumed belief, as to their present
business, they will forthwith tell you that what you say is very
beautiful, but it is not practical. If, on the contrary, you frankly
address them as unbelievers in Eternal life, and try to draw any
consequences from that unbelief,--they immediately hold you for an
accursed person, and shake off the dust from their feet at you. And the
more I thought over what I had got to say, the less I found I could say
it, without some reference to this intangible or intractable part of the
subject. It made all the difference, in asserting any principle of war,
whether one assumed that a discharge of artillery would merely knead
down a certain quantity of red clay into a level line, as in a brick
field; or whether, out of every separately Christian-named portion of
the ruinous heap, there went out, into the smoke and dead-fallen air of
battle, some astonished condition of soul, unwillingly released. It made
all the difference, in speaking of the possible range of commerce,
whether one assumed that all bargains related only to visible
property--or whether property, for the present invisible, but
nevertheless real, was elsewhere purchasable on other terms. It made all
the difference, in addressing a body of men subject to considerable
hardship, and having to find some way out of it--whether one could
confidentially say to them, 'My friends,--you have only to die, and all
will be right;' or whether one had any secret misgiving that such advice
was more blessed to him that gave, than to him that took it. And
therefore the deliberate reader will find, throughout these lectures, a
hesitation in driving points home, and a pausing short of conclusions
which he will feel I would fain have come to; hesitation which arises
wholly from this uncertainty of my hearers' temper. For I do not now
speak, nor have I ever spoken, since the time of my first forward youth,
in any proselyting temper, as desiring to persuade any one of what, in
such matters, I thought myself; but, whomsoever I venture to address, I
take for the time his creed as I find it; and endeavour to push it into
such vital fruit as it seems capable of. Thus, it is a creed with a
great part of the existing English people, that they are in possession
of a book which tells them, straight from the lips of God all they ought
to do, and need to know. I have read that book, with as much care as
most of them, for some forty years; and am thankful that, on those who
trust it, I can press its pleadings. My endeavour has been uniformly to
make them trust it more deeply than they do; trust it, not in their own
favourite verses only, but in the sum of all; trust it not as a fetish
or talisman, which they are to be saved by daily repetitions of; but as
a Captain's order, to be heard and obeyed at their peril. I was always
encouraged by supposing my hearers to hold such belief. To these, if to
any, I once had hope of addressing, with acceptance, words which
insisted on the guilt of pride, and the futility of avarice; from these,
if from any, I once expected ratification of a political economy, which
asserted that the life was more than the meat, and the body than
raiment; and these, it once seemed to me, I might ask without accusation
or fanaticism, not merely in doctrine of the lips, but in the bestowal
of their heart's treasure, to separate themselves from the crowd of whom
it is written, 'After all these things do the Gentiles seek.'
It cannot, however, be assumed, with any semblance of reason, that a
general audience is now wholly, or even in majority, composed of these
religious persons. A large portion must always consist of men who admit
no such creed; or who, at least, are inaccessible to appeals founded on
it. And as, with the so-called Christian, I desired to plead for honest
declaration and fulfilment of his belief in life,--with the so-called
Infidel, I desired to plead for an honest declaration and fulfilment of
his belief in death. The dilemma is inevitable. Men must either
hereafter live, or hereafter die; fate may be bravely met, and conduct
wisely ordered, on either expectation; but never in hesitation between
ungrasped hope, and unconfronted fear. We usually believe in
immortality, so far as to avoid preparation for death; and in mortality,
so far as to avoid preparation for anything after death. Whereas, a wise
man will at least hold himself prepared for one or other of two events,
of which one or other is inevitable; and will have all things in order,
for his sleep, or in readiness, for his awakening.
Nor have we any right to call it an ignoble judgment, if he determine to
put them in order, as for sleep. A brave belief in life is indeed an
enviable state of mind, but, as far as I can discern, an unusual one. I
know few Christians so convinced of the splendour of the rooms in their
Father's house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those
mansions, than they would have been if the Queen had sent for them to
live at Court: nor has the Church's most ardent 'desire to depart, and
be with Christ,' ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on
mourning for every person summoned to such departure. On the contrary, a
brave belief in death has been assuredly held by many not ignoble
persons, and it is a sign of the last depravity in the Church itself,
when it assumes that such a belief is inconsistent with either purity of
character, or energy of hand. The shortness of life is not, to any
rational person, a conclusive reason for wasting the space of it which
may be granted him; nor does the anticipation of death to-morrow
suggest, to any one but a drunkard, the expediency of drunkenness
to-day. To teach that there is no device in the grave, may indeed make
the deviceless person more contented in his dulness; but it will make
the deviser only more earnest in devising, nor is human conduct likely,
in every case, to be purer under the conviction that all its evil may in
a moment be pardoned, and all its wrong-doing in a moment redeemed; and
that the sigh of repentance, which purges the guilt of the past, will
waft the soul into a felicity which forgets its pain,--than it may be
under the sterner, and to many not unwise minds, more probable,
apprehension, that 'what a man soweth that shall he also reap'--or
others reap,--when he, the living seed of pestilence, walketh no more in
darkness, but lies down therein.
But to men whose feebleness of sight, or bitterness of soul, or the
offence given by the conduct of those who claim higher hope, may have
rendered this painful creed the only possible one, there is an appeal to
be made, more secure in its ground than any which can be addressed to
happier persons. I would fain, if I might offencelessly, have spoken to
them as if none others heard; and have said thus: Hear me, you dying
men, who will soon be deaf for ever. For these others, at your right
hand and your left, who look forward to a state of infinite existence,
in which all their errors will be overruled, and all their faults
forgiven; for these, who, stained and blackened in the battle smoke of
mortality, have but to dip themselves for an instant in the font of
death, and to rise renewed of plumage, as a dove that is covered with
silver, and her feathers like gold; for these, indeed, it may be
permissible to waste their numbered moments, through faith in a future
of innumerable hours; to these, in their weakness, it may be conceded
that they should tamper with sin which can only bring forth fruit of
righteousness, and profit by the iniquity which, one day, will be
remembered no more. In them, it may be no sign of hardness of heart to
neglect the poor, over whom they know their Master is watching; and to
leave those to perish temporarily, who cannot perish eternally. But, for
you, there is no such hope, and therefore no such excuse. This fate,
which you ordain for the wretched, you believe to be all their
inheritance; you may crush them, before the moth, and they will never
rise to rebuke you;--their breath, which fails for lack of food, once
expiring, will never be recalled to whisper against you a word of
accusing;--they and you, as you think, shall lie down together in the
dust, and the worms cover you;--and for them there shall be no
consolation, and on you no vengeance,--only the question murmured above
your grave: 'Who shall repay him what he hath done?' Is it therefore
easier for you in your heart to inflict the sorrow for which there is no
remedy? Will you take, wantonly, this little all of his life from your
poor brother, and make his brief hours long to him with pain? Will you
be readier to the injustice which can never be redressed; and niggardly
of mercy which you _can_ bestow but once, and which, refusing, you
refuse for ever? I think better of you, even of the most selfish, than
that you would do this, well understood. And for yourselves, it seems to
me, the question becomes not less grave, in these curt limits. If your
life were but a fever fit,--the madness of a night, whose follies were
all to be forgotten in the dawn, it might matter little how you fretted
away the sickly hours,--what toys you snatched at, or let fall,--what
visions you followed wistfully with the deceived eyes of sleepless
phrenzy. Is the earth only an hospital? Play, if you care to play, on
the floor of the hospital dens. Knit its straw into what crowns please
you; gather the dust of it for treasure, and die rich in that, clutching
at the black motes in the air with your dying hands;--and yet, it may be
well with you. But if this life be no dream, and the world no hospital;
if all the peace and power and joy you can ever win, must be won now;
and all fruit of victory gathered here, or never;--will you still,
throughout the puny totality of your life, weary yourselves in the fire
for vanity? If there is no rest which remaineth for you, is there none
you might presently take? was this grass of the earth made green for
your shroud only, not for your bed? and can you never lie down _upon_
it, but only _under_ it? The heathen, to whose creed you have returned,
thought not so. They knew that life brought its contest, but they
expected from it also the crown of all contest: No proud one! no
jewelled circlet flaming through Heaven above the height of the
unmerited throne; only some few leaves of wild olive, cool to the tired
brow, through a few years of peace. It should have been of gold, they
thought; but Jupiter was poor; this was the best the god could give
them. Seeking a greater than this, they had known it a mockery. Not in
war, not in wealth, not in tyranny, was there any happiness to be found
for them--only in kindly peace, fruitful and free. The wreath was to be
of _wild_ olive, mark you:--the tree that grows carelessly, tufting the
rocks with no vivid bloom, no verdure of branch; only with soft snow of
blossom, and scarcely fulfilled fruit, mixed with grey leaf and thornset
stem; no fastening of diadem for you but with such sharp embroidery! But
this, such as it is, you may win while yet you live; type of grey honour
and sweet rest.[2] Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed
trust, and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and the
ministry to their pain;--these, and the blue sky above you, and the
sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath; and mysteries and
presences, innumerable, of living things,--these may yet be here your
riches; untormenting and divine: serviceable for the life that now is
nor, it may be, without promise of that which is to come.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'A fearful occurrence took place a few days since, near
Wolverhampton. Thomas Snape, aged nineteen, was on duty as the "keeper"
of a blast furnace at Deepfield, assisted by John Gardner, aged
eighteen, and Joseph Swift, aged thirty-seven. The furnace contained
four tons of molten iron, and an equal amount of cinders, and ought to
have been run out at 7.30 P.M. But Snape and his mates, engaged in
talking and drinking, neglected their duty, and in the meantime, the
iron rose in the furnace until it reached a pipe wherein water was
contained. Just as the men had stripped, and were proceeding to tap the
furnace, the water in the pipe, converted into steam, burst down its
front and let loose on them the molten metal, which instantaneously
consumed Gardner; Snape, terribly burnt, and mad with pain, leaped into
the canal and then ran home and fell dead on the threshold, Swift
survived to reach the hospital, where he died too.
In further illustration of this matter, I beg the reader to look at the
article on the 'Decay of the English Race,' in the '_Pall-Mall Gazette_'
of April 17, of this year; and at the articles on the 'Report of the
Thames Commission,' in any journals of the same date.
[2] [Greek: melitoessa, aethlôn g' eneken].
THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.
LECTURE I.
_WORK._
(_Delivered before the Working Men's Institute, at Camberwell._)
My Friends,--I have not come among you to-night to endeavour to give you
an entertaining lecture; but to tell you a few plain facts, and ask you
some plain, but necessary questions. I have seen and known too much of
the struggle for life among our labouring population, to feel at ease,
even under any circumstances, in inviting them to dwell on the
trivialities of my own studies; but, much more, as I meet to-night, for
the first time, the members of a working Institute established in the
district in which I have passed the greater part of my life, I am
desirous that we should at once understand each other, on graver
matters. I would fain tell you, with what feelings, and with what hope,
I regard this Institution, as one of many such, now happily established
throughout England, as well as in other countries;--Institutions which
are preparing the way for a great change in all the circumstances of
industrial life; but of which the success must wholly depend upon our
clearly understanding the circumstances and necessary _limits_ of this
change. No teacher can truly promote the cause of education, until he
knows the conditions of the life for which that education is to prepare
his pupil. And the fact that he is called upon to address you nominally,
as a 'Working Class,' must compel him, if he is in any wise earnest or
thoughtful, to inquire in the outset, on what you yourselves suppose
this class distinction has been founded in the past, and must be founded
in the future. The manner of the amusement, and the matter of the
teaching, which any of us can offer you, must depend wholly on our first
understanding from you, whether you think the distinction heretofore
drawn between working men and others, is truly or falsely founded. Do
you accept it as it stands? do you wish it to be modified? or do you
think the object of education is to efface it, and make us forget it for
ever?
Let me make myself more distinctly understood. We call this--you and
I--a 'Working Men's' Institute, and our college in London, a 'Working
Men's' College. Now, how do you consider that these several institutes
differ, or ought to differ, from 'idle men's' institutes and 'idle
men's' colleges? Or by what other word than 'idle' shall I distinguish
those whom the happiest and wisest of working men do not object to call
the 'Upper Classes?' Are there really upper classes,--are there lower?
How much should they always be elevated, how much always depressed? And,
gentlemen and ladies--I pray those of you who are here to forgive me the
offence there may be in what I am going to say. It is not _I_ who wish
to say it. Bitter voices say it; voices of battle and of famine through
all the world, which must be heard some day, whoever keeps silence.
Neither is it to _you_ specially that I say it. I am sure that most now
present know their duties of kindness, and fulfil them, better perhaps
than I do mine. But I speak to you as representing your whole class,
which errs, I know, chiefly by thoughtlessness, but not therefore the
less terribly. Wilful error is limited by the will, but what limit is
there to that of which we are unconscious?
Bear with me, therefore, while I turn to these workmen, and ask them,
also as representing a great multitude, what they think the 'upper
classes' are, and ought to be, in relation to them. Answer, you workmen
who are here, as you would among yourselves, frankly; and tell me how
you would have me call those classes. Am I to call them--would _you_
think me right in calling them--the idle classes? I think you would feel
somewhat uneasy, and as if I were not treating my subject honestly, or
speaking from my heart, if I went on under the supposition that all rich
people were idle. You would be both unjust and unwise if you allowed me
to say that;--not less unjust than the rich people who say that all the
poor are idle, and will never work if they can help it, or more than
they can help.
For indeed the fact is, that there are idle poor and idle rich; and
there are busy poor and busy rich. Many a beggar is as lazy as if he had
ten thousand a year; and many a man of large fortune is busier than his
errand-boy, and never would think of stopping in the street to play
marbles. So that, in a large view, the distinction between workers and
idlers, as between knaves and honest men, runs through the very heart
and innermost economies of men of all ranks and in all positions. There
is a working class--strong and happy--among both rich and poor; there is
an idle class--weak, wicked, and miserable--among both rich and poor.
And the worst of the misunderstandings arising between the two orders
come of the unlucky fact that the wise of one class habitually
contemplate the foolish of the other. If the busy rich people watched
and rebuked the idle rich people, all would be right; and if the busy
poor people watched and rebuked the idle poor people, all would be
right. But each class has a tendency to look for the faults of the
other. A hard-working man of property is particularly offended by an
idle beggar; and an orderly, but poor, workman is naturally intolerant
of the licentious luxury of the rich. And what is severe judgment in the
minds of the just men of either class, becomes fierce enmity in the
unjust--but among the unjust _only_. None but the dissolute among the
poor look upon the rich as their natural enemies, or desire to pillage
their houses and divide their property. None but the dissolute among the
rich speak in opprobrious terms of the vices and follies of the poor.
There is, then, no class distinction between idle and industrious
people; and I am going to-night to speak only of the industrious. The
idle people we will put out of our thoughts at once--they are mere
nuisances--what ought to be done with _them_, we'll talk of at another
time. But there are class distinctions, among the industrious
themselves; tremendous distinctions, which rise and fall to every
degree in the infinite thermometer of human pain and of human
power--distinctions of high and low, of lost and won, to the whole reach
of man's soul and body.
These separations we will study, and the laws of them, among energetic
men only, who, whether they work or whether they play, put their
strength into the work, and their strength into the game; being in the
full sense of the word 'industrious,' one way or another--with a
purpose, or without. And these distinctions are mainly four:
I. Between those who work, and those who play.
II. Between those who produce the means of life, and those who consume
them.
III. Between those who work with the head, and those who work with the
hand.
IV. Between those who work wisely, and who work foolishly.
For easier memory, let us say we are going to oppose, in our
examination.--
I. Work to play;
II. Production to consumption;
III. Head to Hand; and,
IV. Sense to nonsense.
I. First, then, of the distinction between the classes who work and the
classes who play. Of course we must agree upon a definition of these
terms,--work and play,--before going farther. Now, roughly, not with
vain subtlety of definition, but for plain use of the words, 'play' is
an exertion of body or mind, made to please ourselves, and with no
determined end; and work is a thing done because it ought to be done,
and with a determined end. You play, as you call it, at cricket, for
instance. That is as hard work as anything else; but it amuses you, and
it has no result but the amusement. If it were done as an ordered form
of exercise, for health's sake, it would become work directly. So, in
like manner, whatever we do to please ourselves, and only for the sake
of the pleasure, not for an ultimate object, is 'play,' the 'pleasing
thing,' not the useful thing. Play may be useful in a secondary sense
(nothing is indeed more useful or necessary); but the use of it depends
on its being spontaneous.
Let us, then, enquire together what sort of games the playing class in
England spend their lives in playing at.
The first of all English games is making money. That is an all-absorbing
game; and we knock each other down oftener in playing at that than at
foot-ball, or any other roughest sport; and it is absolutely without
purpose; no one who engages heartily in that game ever knows why. Ask a
great money-maker what he wants to do with his money--he never knows. He
doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he _may_
get it. 'What will you make of what you have got?' you ask. 'Well, I'll
get more,' he says. Just as, at cricket, you get more runs. There's no
use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game.
And there's no use in the money, but to have more of it than other
people is the game. So all that great foul city of London
there,--rattling, growling, smoking, stinking,--a ghastly heap of
fermenting brick-work, pouring out poison at every pore,--you fancy it
is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very
nasty play, and very hard play, but still play. It is only Lord's
cricket ground without the turf,--a huge billiard table without the
cloth, and with pockets as deep as the bottomless pit; but mainly a
billiard table, after all.
Well, the first great English game is this playing at counters. It
differs from the rest in that it appears always to be producing money,
while every other game is expensive. But it does not always produce
money. There's a great difference between 'winning' money and 'making'
it; a great difference between getting it out of another man's pocket
into ours, or filling both. Collecting money is by no means the same
thing as making it; the tax-gatherer's house is not the Mint; and much
of the apparent gain (so called), in commerce, is only a form of
taxation on carriage or exchange.
Our next great English game, however, hunting and shooting, is costly
altogether; and how much we are fined for it annually in land, horses,
gamekeepers, and game laws, and all else that accompanies that
beautiful and special English game, I will not endeavour to count now:
but note only that, except for exercise, this is not merely a useless
game, but a deadly one, to all connected with it. For through
horse-racing, you get every form of what the higher classes everywhere
call 'Play,' in distinction from all other plays; that is--gambling; by
no means a beneficial or recreative game: and, through game-preserving,
you get also some curious laying out of ground; that beautiful
arrangement of dwelling-house for man and beast, by which we have grouse
and black-cock--so many brace to the acre, and men and women--so many
brace to the garret. I often wonder what the angelic builders and
surveyors--the angelic builders who build the 'many mansions' up above
there; and the angelic surveyors, who measured that four-square city
with their measuring reeds--I wonder what they think, or are supposed to
think, of the laying out of ground by this nation, which has set itself,
as it seems, literally to accomplish, word for word, or rather fact for
word, in the persons of those poor whom its Master left to represent
him, what that Master said of himself--that foxes and birds had homes,
but He none.
Then, next to the gentlemen's game of hunting, we must put the ladies'
game of dressing. It is not the cheapest of games. I saw a brooch at a
jeweller's in Bond Street a fortnight ago, not an inch wide, and without
any singular jewel in it, yet worth 3,000_l._ And I wish I could tell
you what this 'play' costs, altogether, in England, France, and Russia
annually. But it is a pretty game, and on certain terms, I like it; nay,
I don't see it played quite as much as I would fain have it. You ladies
like to lead the fashion:--by all means lead it--lead it thoroughly,
lead it far enough. Dress yourselves nicely, and dress everybody else
nicely. Lead the _fashions for the poor_ first; make _them_ look well,
and you yourselves will look, in ways of which you have now no
conception, all the better. The fashions you have set for some time
among your peasantry are not pretty ones; their doublets are too
irregularly slashed, and the wind blows too frankly through them.
Then there are other games, wild enough, as I could show you if I had
time.
There's playing at literature, and playing at art--very different, both,
from working at literature, or working at art, but I've no time to speak
of these. I pass to the greatest of all--the play of plays, the great
gentlemen's game, which ladies like them best to play at,--the game of
War. It is entrancingly pleasant to the imagination; the facts of it,
not always so pleasant. We dress for it, however, more finely than for
any other sport; and go out to it, not merely in scarlet, as to hunt,
but in scarlet and gold, and all manner of fine colours: of course we
could fight better in grey, and without feathers; but all nations have
agreed that it is good to be well dressed at this play. Then the bats
and balls are very costly; our English and French bats, with the balls
and wickets, even those which we don't make any use of, costing, I
suppose, now about fifteen millions of money annually to each nation;
all of which, you know is paid for by hard labourer's work in the furrow
and furnace. A costly game!--not to speak of its consequences; I will
say at present nothing of these. The mere immediate cost of all these
plays is what I want you to consider; they all cost deadly work
somewhere, as many of us know too well. The jewel-cutter, whose sight
fails over the diamonds; the weaver, whose arm fails over the web; the
iron-forger, whose breath fails before the furnace--_they_ know what
work is--they, who have all the work, and none of the play, except a
kind they have named for themselves down in the black north country,
where 'play' means being laid up by sickness. It is a pretty example for
philologists, of varying dialect, this change in the sense of the word
'play,' as used in the black country of Birmingham, and the red and
black country of Baden Baden. Yes, gentlemen, and gentlewomen, of
England, who think 'one moment unamused a misery, not made for feeble
man,' this is what you have brought the word 'play' to mean, in the
heart of merry England! You may have your fluting and piping; but there
are sad children sitting in the market-place, who indeed cannot say to
you, 'We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced:' but eternally
shall say to you, 'We have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.'
This, then, is the first distinction between the 'upper and lower'
classes. And this is one which is by no means necessary; which indeed
must, in process of good time, be by all honest men's consent abolished.
Men will be taught that an existence of play, sustained by the blood of
other creatures, is a good existence for gnats and sucking fish; but not
for men: that neither days, nor lives, can be made holy by doing nothing
in them: that the best prayer at the beginning of a day is that we may
not lose its moments; and the best grace before meat, the consciousness
that we have justly earned our dinner. And when we have this much of
plain Christianity preached to us again, and enough respect for what we
regard as inspiration, as not to think that 'Son, go work to-day in my
vineyard,' means 'Fool, go play to-day in my vineyard,' we shall all be
workers, in one way or another; and this much at least of the
distinction between 'upper' and 'lower' forgotten.
II. I pass then to our second distinction; between the rich and poor,
between Dives and Lazarus,--distinction which exists more sternly, I
suppose, in this day, than ever in the world, Pagan or Christian, till
now. I will put it sharply before you, to begin with, merely by reading
two paragraphs which I cut from two papers that lay on my breakfast
table on the same morning, the 25th of November, 1864. The piece about
the rich Russian at Paris is commonplace enough, and stupid besides (for
fifteen francs,--12_s._ 6_d._,--is nothing for a rich man to give for a
couple of peaches, out of season). Still, the two paragraphs printed on
the same day are worth putting side by side.
'Such a man is now here. He is a Russian, and, with your permission, we
will call him Count Teufelskine. In dress he is sublime; art is
considered in that toilet, the harmony of colour respected, the _chiar'
oscuro_ evident in well-selected contrast. In manners he is
dignified--nay, perhaps apathetic; nothing disturbs the placid serenity
of that calm exterior. One day our friend breakfasted _chez_ Bignon.
When the bill came he read, "Two peaches, 15f." He paid. "Peaches
scarce, I presume?" was his sole remark. "No, sir," replied the waiter,
"but Teufelskines are."' _Telegraph_, November 25, 1864.
'Yesterday morning, at eight o'clock, a woman, passing a dung heap in
the stone yard near the recently-erected alms-houses in Shadwell Gap,
High Street, Shadwell, called the attention of a Thames police-constable
to a man in a sitting position on the dung heap, and said she was afraid
he was dead. Her fears proved to be true. The wretched creature appeared
to have been dead several hours. He had perished of cold and wet, and
the rain had been beating down on him all night. The deceased was a
bone-picker. He was in the lowest stage of poverty, poorly clad, and
half-starved. The police had frequently driven him away from the stone
yard, between sunset and sunrise, and told him to go home. He selected a
most desolate spot for his wretched death. A penny and some bones were
found in his pockets. The deceased was between fifty and sixty years of
age. Inspector Roberts, of the K division, has given directions for
inquiries to be made at the lodging-houses respecting the deceased, to
ascertain his identity if possible.'--_Morning Post_, November 25, 1864.
You have the separation thus in brief compass; and I want you to take
notice of the 'a penny and some bones were found in his pockets,' and to
compare it with this third statement, from the _Telegraph_ of January
16th of this year:--
'Again, the dietary scale for adult and juvenile paupers was drawn up by
the most conspicuous political economists in England. It is low in
quantity, but it is sufficient to support nature; yet within ten years
of the passing of the Poor Law Act, we heard of the paupers in the
Andover Union gnawing the scraps of putrid flesh and sucking the marrow
from the bones of horses which they were employed to crush.'
You see my reason for thinking that our Lazarus of Christianity has some
advantage over the Jewish one. Jewish Lazarus expected, or at least
prayed, to be fed with crumbs from the rich man's table; but _our_
Lazarus is fed with crumbs from the dog's table.
Now this distinction between rich and poor rests on two bases. Within
its proper limits, on a basis which is lawful and everlastingly
necessary; beyond them, on a basis unlawful, and everlastingly
corrupting the framework of society. The lawful basis of wealth is, that
a man who works should be paid the fair value of his work; and that if
he does not choose to spend it to-day, he should have free leave to keep
it, and spend it to-morrow. Thus, an industrious man working daily, and
laying by daily, attains at last the possession of an accumulated sum of
wealth, to which he has absolute right. The idle person who will not
work, and the wasteful person who lays nothing by, at the end of the
same time will be doubly poor--poor in possession, and dissolute in
moral habit; and he will then naturally covet the money which the other
has saved. And if he is then allowed to attack the other, and rob him of
his well-earned wealth, there is no more any motive for saving, or any
reward for good conduct; and all society is thereupon dissolved, or
exists only in systems of rapine. Therefore the first necessity of
social life is the clearness of national conscience in enforcing the
law--that he should keep who has JUSTLY EARNED.
That law, I say, is the proper basis of distinction between rich and
poor. But there is also a false basis of distinction; namely, the power
held over those who earn wealth by those who levy or exact it. There
will be always a number of men who would fain set themselves to the
accumulation of wealth as the sole object of their lives. Necessarily,
that class of men is an uneducated class, inferior in intellect, and
more or less cowardly. It is physically impossible for a well-educated,
intellectual, or brave man to make money the chief object of his
thoughts; as physically impossible as it is for him to make his dinner
the principal object of them. All healthy people like their dinners, but
their dinner is not the main object of their lives. So all healthily
minded people like making money--ought to like it, and to enjoy the
sensation of winning it; but the main object of their life is not money;
it is something better than money. A good soldier, for instance, mainly
wishes to do his fighting well. He is glad of his pay--very properly
so, and justly grumbles when you keep him ten years without it--still,
his main notion of life is to win battles, not to be paid for winning
them. So of clergymen. They like pew-rents, and baptismal fees, of
course; but yet, if they are brave and well educated, the pew-rent is
not the sole object of their lives, and the baptismal fee is not the
sole purpose of the baptism; the clergyman's object is essentially to
baptize and preach, not to be paid for preaching. So of doctors. They
like fees no doubt,--ought to like them; yet if they are brave and well
educated, the entire object of their lives is not fees. They, on the
whole, desire to cure the sick; and,--if they are good doctors, and the
choice were fairly put to them,--would rather cure their patient, and
lose their fee, than kill him, and get it. And so with all other brave
and rightly trained men; their work is first, their fee second--very
important always, but still _second_. But in every nation, as I said,
there are a vast class who are ill-educated, cowardly, and more or less
stupid. And with these people, just as certainly the fee is first, and
the work second, as with brave people the work is first and the fee
second. And this is no small distinction. It is the whole distinction in
a man; distinction between life and death _in_ him, between heaven and
hell _for_ him. You cannot serve two masters;--you _must_ serve one or
other. If your work is first with you, and your fee second, work is your
master, and the lord of work, who is God. But if your fee is first with
you, and your work second, fee is your master, and the lord of fee, who
is the Devil; and not only the Devil, but the lowest of devils--the
'least erected fiend that fell.' So there you have it in brief terms;
Work first--you are God's servants; Fee first--you are the Fiend's. And
it makes a difference, now and ever, believe me, whether you serve Him
who has on His vesture and thigh written, 'King of Kings,' and whose
service is perfect freedom; or him on whose vesture and thigh the name
is written, 'Slave of Slaves,' and whose service is perfect slavery.
However, in every nation there are, and must always be, a certain number
of these Fiend's servants, who have it principally for the object of
their lives to make money. They are always, as I said, more or less
stupid, and cannot conceive of anything else so nice as money. Stupidity
is always the basis of the Judas bargain. We do great injustice to
Iscariot, in thinking him wicked above all common wickedness. He was
only a common money-lover, and, like all money-lovers, didn't understand
Christ;--couldn't make out the worth of Him, or meaning of Him. He
didn't want Him to be killed. He was horror-struck when he found that
Christ would be killed; threw his money away instantly, and hanged
himself. How many of our present money-seekers, think you, would have
the grace to hang themselves, whoever was killed? But Judas was a
common, selfish, muddle-headed, pilfering fellow; his hand always in the
bag of the poor, not caring for them. He didn't understand Christ;--yet
believed in Him, much more than most of us do; had seen Him do miracles,
thought He was quite strong enough to shift for Himself, and he, Judas,
might as well make his own little bye-perquisites out of the affair.
Christ would come out of it well enough, and he have his thirty pieces.
Now, that is the money-seeker's idea, all over the world. He doesn't
hate Christ, but can't understand Him--doesn't care for him--sees no
good in that benevolent business; makes his own little job out of it at
all events, come what will. And thus, out of every mass of men, you have
a certain number of bag-men--your 'fee-first' men, whose main object is
to make money. And they do make it--make it in all sorts of unfair ways,
chiefly by the weight and force of money itself, or what is called the
power of capital; that is to say, the power which money, once obtained,
has over the labour of the poor, so that the capitalist can take all its
produce to himself, except the labourer's food. That is the modern
Judas's way of 'carrying the bag,' and 'bearing what is put therein.'
Nay, but (it is asked) how is that an unfair advantage? Has not the man
who has worked for the money a right to use it as he best can? No; in
this respect, money is now exactly what mountain promontories over
public roads were in old times. The barons fought for them fairly:--the
strongest and cunningest got them; then fortified them, and made
everyone who passed below pay toll. Well, capital now is exactly what
crags were then. Men fight fairly (we will, at least, grant so much,
though it is more than we ought) for their money; but, once having got
it, the fortified millionaire can make everybody who passes below pay
toll to his million, and build another tower of his money castle. And I
can tell you, the poor vagrants by the roadside suffer now quite as much
from the bag-baron, as ever they did from the crag-baron. Bags and crags
have just the same result on rags. I have not time, however, to-night to
show you in how many ways the power of capital is unjust; but this one
great principle I have to assert--you will find it quite indisputably
true--that whenever money is the principal object of life with either
man or nation, it is both got ill, and spent ill; and does harm both in
the getting and spending; but when it is not the principal object, it
and all other things will be well got, and well spent. And here is the
test, with every man, of whether money is the principal object with him,
or not. If in mid-life he could pause and say, "Now I have enough to
live upon, I'll live upon it; and having well earned it, I will also
well spend it, and go out of the world poor, as I came into it," then
money is not principal with him; but if, having enough to live upon in
the manner befitting his character and rank, he still wants to make
more, and to _die_ rich, then money is the principal object with him,
and it becomes a curse to himself, and generally to those who spend it
after him. For you know it _must_ be spent some day; the only question
is whether the man who makes it shall spend it, or some one else. And
generally it is better for the maker to spend it, for he will know best
its value and use. This is the true law of life. And if a man does not
choose thus to spend his money, he must either hoard it or lend it, and
the worst thing he can generally do is to lend it; for borrowers are
nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is
mainly done, and all unjust war protracted.
For observe what the real fact is, respecting loans to foreign military
governments, and how strange it is. If your little boy came to you to
ask for money to spend in squibs and crackers, you would think twice
before you gave it him; and you would have some idea that it was wasted,
when you saw it fly off in fireworks, even though he did no mischief
with it. But the Russian children, and Austrian children, come to you,
borrowing money, not to spend in innocent squibs, but in cartridges and
bayonets to attack you in India with, and to keep down all noble life in
Italy with, and to murder Polish women and children with; and _that_ you
will give at once, because they pay you interest for it. Now, in order
to pay you that interest, they must tax every working peasant in their
dominions; and on that work you live. You therefore at once rob the
Austrian peasant, assassinate or banish the Polish peasant, and you live
on the produce of the theft, and the bribe for the assassination! That
is the broad fact--that is the practical meaning of your foreign loans,
and of most large interest of money; and then you quarrel with Bishop
Colenso, forsooth, as if _he_ denied the Bible, and you believed it!
though, wretches as you are, every deliberate act of your lives is a new
defiance of its primary orders; and as if, for most of the rich men of
England at this moment, it were not indeed to be desired, as the best
thing at least for _them_, that the Bible should _not_ be true, since
against them these words are written in it: 'The rust of your gold and
silver shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh, as it
were fire.'
III. I pass now to our third condition of separation, between the men
who work with the hand, and those who work with the head.
And here we have at last an inevitable distinction. There _must_ be work
done by the arms, or none of us could live. There _must_ be work done by
the brains, or the life we get would not be worth having. And the same
men cannot do both. There is rough work to be done, and rough men must
do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it; and it
is physically impossible that one class should do, or divide, the work
of the other. And it is of no use to try to conceal this sorrowful fact
by fine words, and to talk to the workman about the honourableness of
manual labour and the dignity of humanity. That is a grand old proverb
of Sancho Panza's, 'Fine words butter no parsnips;' and I can tell you
that, all over England just now, you workmen are buying a great deal too
much butter at that dairy. Rough work, honourable or not, takes the life
out of us; and the man who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day,
or driving an express train against the north wind all night, or holding
a collier's helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or whirling white hot iron at
a furnace mouth, that man is not the same at the end of his day, or
night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything
comfortable about him, reading books, or classing butterflies, or
painting pictures. If it is any comfort to you to be told that the rough
work is the more honourable of the two, I should be sorry to take that
much of consolation from you; and in some sense I need not. The rough
work is at all events real, honest, and, generally, though not always,
useful; while the fine work is, a great deal of it, foolish and false as
well as fine, and therefore dishonourable; but when both kinds are
equally well and worthily done, the head's is the noble work, and the
hand's the ignoble; and of all hand work whatsoever, necessary for the
maintenance of life, those old words, 'In the sweat of thy face thou
shalt eat bread,' indicate that the inherent nature of it is one of
calamity; and that the ground, cursed for our sake, casts also some
shadow of degradation into our contest with its thorn and its thistle;
so that all nations have held their days honourable, or 'holy,' and
constituted them 'holydays' or 'holidays,' by making them days of rest;
and the promise, which, among all our distant hopes, seems to cast the
chief brightness over death, is that blessing of the dead who die in the
Lord, that 'they rest from their labours, and their works do follow
them.'
And thus the perpetual question and contest must arise, who is to do
this rough work? and how is the worker of it to be comforted, redeemed,
and rewarded? and what kind of play should he have, and what rest, in
this world, sometimes, as well as in the next? Well, my good working
friends, these questions will take a little time to answer yet. They
must be answered: all good men are occupied with them, and all honest
thinkers. There's grand head work doing about them; but much must be
discovered, and much attempted in vain, before anything decisive can be
told you. Only note these few particulars, which are already sure.
As to the distribution of the hard work. None of us, or very few of us,
do either hard or soft work because we think we ought; but because we
have chanced to fall into the way of it, and cannot help ourselves. Now,
nobody does anything well that they cannot help doing: work is only done
well when it is done with a will; and no man has a thoroughly sound will
unless he knows he is doing what he should, and is in his place. And,
depend upon it, all work must be done at last, not in a disorderly,
scrambling, doggish way, but in an ordered, soldierly, human way--a
lawful way. Men are enlisted for the labour that kills--the labour of
war: they are counted, trained, fed, dressed, and praised for that. Let
them be enlisted also for the labour that feeds: let them be counted,
trained, fed, dressed, praised for that. Teach the plough exercise as
carefully as you do the sword exercise, and let the officers of troops
of life be held as much gentlemen as the officers of troops of death;
and all is done: but neither this, nor any other right thing, can be
accomplished--you can't even see your way to it--unless, first of all,
both servant and master are resolved that, come what will of it, they
will do each other justice. People are perpetually squabbling about what
will be best to do, or easiest to do, or adviseablest to do, or
profitablest to do; but they never, so far as I hear them talk, ever ask
what it is _just_ to do. And it is the law of heaven that you shall not
be able to judge what is wise or easy, unless you are first resolved to
judge what is just, and to do it. That is the one thing constantly
reiterated by our Master--the order of all others that is given
oftenest--'Do justice and judgment.' That's your Bible order; that's the
'Service of God,' not praying nor psalm-singing. You are told, indeed,
to sing psalms when you are merry, and to pray when you need anything;
and, by the perversion of the Evil Spirit, we get to think that praying
and psalm-singing are 'service.' If a child finds itself in want of
anything, it runs in and asks its father for it--does it call that,
doing its father a service? If it begs for a toy or a piece of
cake--does it call that serving its father? That, with God, is prayer,
and He likes to hear it: He likes you to ask Him for cake when you want
it; but He doesn't call that 'serving Him.' Begging is not serving: God
likes mere beggars as little as you do--He likes honest servants, not
beggars. So when a child loves its father very much, and is very happy,
it may sing little songs about him; but it doesn't call that serving its
father; neither is singing songs about God, serving God. It is enjoying
ourselves, if it's anything; most probably it is nothing; but if it's
anything, it is serving ourselves, not God. And yet we are impudent
enough to call our beggings and chauntings 'Divine Service:' we say
'Divine service will be "performed"' (that's our word--the form of it
gone through) 'at eleven o'clock.' Alas!--unless we perform Divine
service in every willing act of our life, we never perform it at all.
The one Divine work--the one ordered sacrifice--is to do justice; and it
is the last we are ever inclined to do. Anything rather than that! As
much charity as you choose, but no justice. 'Nay,' you will say,
'charity is greater than justice.' Yes, it is greater; it is the summit
of justice--it is the temple of which justice is the foundation. But you
can't have the top without the bottom; you cannot build upon charity.
You must build upon justice, for this main reason, that you have not, at
first, charity to build with. It is the last reward of good work. Do
justice to your brother (you can do that, whether you love him or not),
and you will come to love him. But do injustice to him, because you
don't love him; and you will come to hate him. It is all very fine to
think you can build upon charity to begin with; but you will find all
you have got to begin with, begins at home, and is essentially love of
yourself. You well-to-do people, for instance, who are here to-night,
will go to 'Divine service' next Sunday, all nice and tidy, and your
little children will have their tight little Sunday boots on, and lovely
little Sunday feathers in their hats; and you'll think, complacently and
piously, how lovely they look! So they do: and you love them heartily
and you like sticking feathers in their hats. That's all right: that
_is_ charity; but it is charity beginning at home. Then you will come to
the poor little crossing-sweeper, got up also,--it, in its Sunday
dress,--the dirtiest rags it has,--that it may beg the better: we shall
give it a penny, and think how good we are. That's charity going abroad.
But what does Justice say, walking and watching near us? Christian
Justice has been strangely mute, and seemingly blind; and, if not blind,
decrepit, this many a day: she keeps her accounts still, however--quite
steadily--doing them at nights, carefully, with her bandage off, and
through acutest spectacles (the only modern scientific invention she
cares about). You must put your ear down ever so close to her lips to
hear her speak; and then you will start at what she first whispers, for
it will certainly be, 'Why shouldn't that little crossing-sweeper have a
feather on its head, as well as your own child?' Then you may ask
Justice, in an amazed manner, 'How she can possibly be so foolish as to
think children could sweep crossings with feathers on their heads?' Then
you stoop again, and Justice says--still in her dull, stupid way--'Then,
why don't you, every other Sunday, leave your child to sweep the
crossing, and take the little sweeper to church in a hat and feather?'
Mercy on us (you think), what will she say next? And you answer, of
course, that 'you don't, because every body ought to remain content in
the position in which Providence has placed them.' Ah, my friends,
that's the gist of the whole question. _Did_ Providence put them in that
position, or did _you_? You knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell
him to remain content in the 'position in which Providence has placed
him.' That's modern Christianity. You say--'_We_ did not knock him into
the ditch.' How do you know what you have done, or are doing? That's
just what we have all got to know, and what we shall never know, until
the question with us every morning, is, not how to do the gainful thing,
but how to do the just thing; nor until we are at least so far on the
way to being Christian, as to have understood that maxim of the poor
half-way Mahometan, 'One hour in the execution of justice is worth
seventy years of prayer.'
Supposing, then, we have it determined with appropriate justice, _who_
is to do the hand work, the next questions must be how the hand-workers
are to be paid, and how they are to be refreshed, and what play they are
to have. Now, the possible quantity of play depends on the possible
quantity of pay; and the quantity of pay is not a matter for
consideration to hand-workers only, but to all workers. Generally, good,
useful work, whether of the hand or head, is either ill-paid, or not
paid at all. I don't say it should be so, but it always is so. People,
as a rule, only pay for being amused or being cheated, not for being
served. Five thousand a year to your talker, and a shilling a day to
your fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head
work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for. How much do you
think Homer got for his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise? only bitter
bread and salt, and going up and down other people's stairs. In science,
the man who discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid
with a dungeon; the man who invented the microscope, and first saw
earth, died of starvation, driven from his home: it is indeed very clear
that God means all thoroughly good work and talk to be done for nothing.
Baruch, the scribe, did not get a penny a line for writing Jeremiah's
second roll for him, I fancy; and St. Stephen did not get bishop's pay
for that long sermon of his to the Pharisees; nothing but stones. For
indeed that is the world-father's proper payment. So surely as any of
the world's children work for the world's good, honestly, with head and
heart; and come to it, saying, 'Give us a little bread, just to keep the
life in us,' the world-father answers them, 'No, my children, not bread;
a stone, if you like, or as many as you need, to keep you quiet.' But
the hand-workers are not so ill off as all this comes to. The worst that
can happen to _you_ is to break stones; not be broken by them. And for
you there will come a time for better payment; some day, assuredly, more
pence will be paid to Peter the Fisherman, and fewer to Peter the Pope;
we shall pay people not quite so much for talking in Parliament and
doing nothing, as for holding their tongues out of it and doing
something; we shall pay our ploughman a little more and our lawyer a
little less, and so on: but, at least, we may even now take care that
whatever work is done shall be fully paid for; and the man who does it
paid for it, not somebody else; and that it shall be done in an orderly,
soldierly, well-guided, wholesome way, under good captains and
lieutenants of labour; and that it shall have its appointed times of
rest, and enough of them; and that in those times the play shall be
wholesome play, not in theatrical gardens, with tin flowers and gas
sunshine, and girls dancing because of their misery; but in true
gardens, with real flowers, and real sunshine, and children dancing
because of their gladness; so that truly the streets shall be full (the
'streets,' mind you, not the gutters) of children, playing in the midst
thereof. We may take care that working-men shall have at least as good
books to read as anybody else, when they've time to read them; and as
comfortable fire-sides to sit at as anybody else, when they've time to
sit at them. This, I think, can be managed for you, my working friends,
in the good time.
IV. I must go on, however, to our last head, concerning ourselves all,
as workers. What is wise work, and what is foolish work? What the
difference between sense and nonsense, in daily occupation?
Well, wise work is, briefly, work _with_ God. Foolish work is work
_against_ God. And work done with God, which He will help, may be
briefly described as 'Putting in Order'--that is, enforcing God's law of
order, spiritual and material, over men and things. The first thing you
have to do, essentially; the real 'good work' is, with respect to men,
to enforce justice, and with respect to things, to enforce tidiness, and
fruitfulness. And against these two great human deeds, justice and
order, there are perpetually two great demons contending,--the devil of
iniquity, or inequity, and the devil of disorder, or of death; for death
is only consummation of disorder. You have to fight these two fiends
daily. So far as you don't fight against the fiend of iniquity, you work
for him. You 'work iniquity,' and the judgment upon you, for all your
'Lord, Lord's,' will be 'Depart from me, ye that work iniquity.' And so
far as you do not resist the fiend of disorder, you work disorder, and
you yourself do the work of Death, which is sin, and has for its wages,
Death himself.
Observe then, all wise work is mainly threefold in character. It is
honest, useful, and cheerful.
I. It is HONEST. I hardly know anything more strange than that you
recognise honesty in play, and you do not in work. In your lightest
games, you have always some one to see what you call 'fair-play.' In
boxing, you must hit fair; in racing, start fair. Your English watchword
is fair-play, your English hatred, foul-play. Did it ever strike you
that you wanted another watchword also, fair-work, and another hatred
also, foul-work? Your prize-fighter has some honour in him yet; and so
have the men in the ring round him: they will judge him to lose the
match, by foul hitting. But your prize-merchant gains his match by foul
selling, and no one cries out against that. You drive a gambler out of
the gambling-room who loads dice, but you leave a tradesman in
flourishing business, who loads scales! For observe, all dishonest
dealing _is_ loading scales. What does it matter whether I get short
weight, adulterate substance, or dishonest fabric? The fault in the
fabric is incomparably the worst of the two. Give me short measure of
food, and I only lose by you; but give me adulterate food, and I die by
you. Here, then, is your chief duty, you workmen and tradesmen--to be
true to yourselves, and to us who would help you. We can do nothing for
you, nor you for yourselves, without honesty. Get that, you get all;
without that, your suffrages, your reforms, your free-trade measures,
your institutions of science, are all in vain. It is useless to put your
heads together, if you can't put your hearts together. Shoulder to
shoulder, right hand to right hand, among yourselves, and no wrong hand
to anybody else, and you'll win the world yet.
II. Then, secondly, wise work is USEFUL. No man minds, or ought to mind,
its being hard, if only it comes to something; but when it is hard, and
comes to nothing; when all our bees' business turns to spiders'; and
for honeycomb we have only resultant cobweb, blown away by the next
breeze--that is the cruel thing for the worker. Yet do we ever ask
ourselves, personally, or even nationally, whether our work is coming to
anything or not? We don't care to keep what has been nobly done; still
less do we care to do nobly what others would keep; and, least of all,
to make the work itself useful instead of deadly to the doer, so as to
use his life indeed, but not to waste it. Of all wastes, the greatest
waste that you can commit is the waste of labour. If you went down in
the morning into your dairy, and you found that your youngest child had
got down before you; and that he and the cat were at play together, and
that he had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up,
you would scold the child, and be sorry the milk was wasted. But if,
instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with
human life in them, and instead of the cat to play with--the devil to
play with; and you yourself the player; and instead of leaving that
golden bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the
dust yourself, and pour the human blood out on the ground for the fiend
to lick up--that is no waste! What! you perhaps think, 'to waste the
labour of men is not to kill them.' Is it not? I should like to know how
you could kill them more utterly--kill them with second deaths, seventh
deaths, hundredfold deaths? It is the slightest way of killing to stop a
man's breath. Nay, the hunger, and the cold, and the little whistling
bullets--our love-messengers between nation and nation--have brought
pleasant messages from us to many a man before now; orders of sweet
release, and leave at last to go where he will be most welcome and most
happy. At the worst you do but shorten his life, you do not corrupt his
life. But if you put him to base labour, if you bind his thoughts, if
you blind his eyes, if you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if
you stunt his body, and blast his soul, and at last leave him not so
much as to reap the poor fruit of his degradation, but gather that for
yourself, and dismiss him to the grave, when you have done with him,
having, so far as in you lay, made the walls of that grave everlasting
(though, indeed, I fancy the goodly bricks of some of our family vaults
will hold closer in the resurrection day than the sod over the
labourer's head), this you think is no waste, and no sin!
III. Then, lastly, wise work is CHEERFUL, as a child's work is. And now
I want you to take one thought home with you, and let it stay with you.
Everybody in this room has been taught to pray daily, 'Thy kingdom
come.' Now, if we hear a man swear in the streets, we think it very
wrong, and say he 'takes God's name in vain.' But there's a twenty times
worse way of taking His name in vain, than that. It is to _ask God for
what we don't want_. He doesn't like that sort of prayer. If you don't
want a thing, don't ask for it: such asking is the worst mockery of your
King you can mock Him with; the soldiers striking Him on the head with
the reed was nothing to that. If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't
pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it; you must
work for it. And, to work for it, you must know what it is: we have all
prayed for it many a day without thinking. Observe, it is a kingdom that
is to come to us; we are not to go to it. Also, it is not to be a
kingdom of the dead, but of the living. Also, it is not to come all at
once, but quietly; nobody knows how. 'The kingdom of God cometh not with
observation.' Also, it is not to come outside of us, but in the hearts
of us: 'the kingdom of God is within you.' And, being within us, it is
not a thing to be seen, but to be felt; and though it brings all
substance of good with it, it does not consist in that: 'the kingdom of
God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy
Ghost:' joy, that is to say, in the holy, healthful, and helpful Spirit.
Now, if we want to work for this kingdom, and to bring it, and enter
into it, there's just one condition to be first accepted. You must enter
it as children, or not at all; 'Whosoever will not receive it as a
little child shall not enter therein.' And again, 'Suffer little
children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the
kingdom of heaven.'
_Of such_, observe. Not of children themselves, but of such as
children. I believe most mothers who read that text think that all
heaven is to be full of babies. But that's not so. There will be
children there, but the hoary head is the crown. 'Length of days, and
long life and peace,' that is the blessing, not to die in babyhood.
Children die but for their parents sins; God means them to live, but He
can't let them always; then they have their earlier place in heaven: and
the little child of David, vainly prayed for;--the little child of
Jeroboam, killed by its mother's step on its own threshold,--they will
be there. But weary old David, and weary old Barzillai, having learned
children's lessons at last, will be there too: and the one question for
us all, young or old, is, have we learned our child's lesson? it is the
_character_ of children we want, and must gain at our peril; let us see,
briefly, in what it consists.
The first character of right childhood is that it is Modest. A well-bred
child does not think it can teach its parents, or that it knows
everything. It may think its father and mother know everything,--perhaps
that all grown-up people know everything; very certainly it is sure that
_it_ does not. And it is always asking questions, and wanting to know
more. Well, that is the first character of a good and wise man at his
work. To know that he knows very little;--to perceive that there are
many above him wiser than he; and to be always asking questions, wanting
to learn, not to teach. No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or
governs well who wants to govern; it is an old saying (Plato's, but I
know not if his, first), and as wise as old.
Then, the second character of right childhood is to be Faithful.
Perceiving that its father knows best what is good for it, and having
found always, when it has tried its own way against his, that he was
right and it was wrong, a noble child trusts him at last wholly, gives
him its hand, and will walk blindfold with him, if he bids it. And that
is the true character of all good men also, as obedient workers, or
soldiers under captains. They must trust their captains;--they are bound
for their lives to choose none but those whom they _can_ trust. Then,
they are not always to be thinking that what seems strange to them, or
wrong in what they are desired to do, _is_ strange or wrong. They know
their captain: where he leads they must follow, what he bids, they must
do; and without this trust and faith, without this captainship and
soldiership, no great deed, no great salvation, is possible to man.
Among all the nations it is only when this faith is attained by them
that they become great: the Jew, the Greek, and the Mahometan, agree at
least in testifying to this. It was a deed of this absolute trust which
made Abraham the father of the faithful; it was the declaration of the
power of God as captain over all men, and the acceptance of a leader
appointed by Him as commander of the faithful, which laid the foundation
of whatever national power yet exists in the East; and the deed of the
Greeks, which has become the type of unselfish and noble soldiership to
all lands, and to all times, was commemorated, on the tomb of those who
gave their lives to do it, in the most pathetic, so far as I know, or
can feel, of all human utterances: 'Oh, stranger, go and tell our people
that we are lying here, having _obeyed_ their words.'
Then the third character of right childhood is to be Loving and
Generous. Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
It loves everything near it, when it is a right kind of child--would
hurt nothing, would give the best it has away, always, if you need
it--does not lay plans for getting everything in the house for itself,
and delights in helping people; you cannot please it so much as by
giving it a chance of being useful, in ever so little a way.
And because of all these characters, lastly, it is Cheerful. Putting its
trust in its father, it is careful for nothing--being full of love to
every creature, it is happy always, whether in its play or in its duty.
Well, that's the great worker's character also. Taking no thought for
the morrow; taking thought only for the duty of the day; trusting
somebody else to take care of to-morrow; knowing indeed what labour is,
but not what sorrow is; and always ready for play--beautiful play,--for
lovely human play is like the play of the Sun. There's a worker for you.
He, steady to his time, is set as a strong man to run his course, but
also, he _rejoiceth_ as a strong man to run his course. See how he
plays in the morning, with the mists below, and the clouds above, with a
ray here and a flash there, and a shower of jewels everywhere; that's
the Sun's play; and great human play is like his--all various--all full
of light and life, and tender, as the dew of the morning.
So then, you have the child's character in these four things--Humility,
Faith, Charity, and Cheerfulness. That's what you have got to be
converted to. 'Except ye be converted and become as little
children'--You hear much of conversion now-a-days; but people always
seem to think they have got to be made wretched by conversion,--to be
converted to long faces. No, friends, you have got to be converted to
short ones; you have to repent into childhood, to repent into delight,
and delightsomeness. You can't go into a conventicle but you'll hear
plenty of talk of backsliding. Backsliding, indeed! I can tell you, on
the ways most of us go, the faster we slide back the better. Slide back
into the cradle, if going on is into the grave--back, I tell you;
back--out of your long faces, and into your long clothes. It is among
children only, and as children only, that you will find medicine for
your healing and true wisdom for your teaching. There is poison in the
counsels of the _men_ of this world; the words they speak are all
bitterness, 'the poison of asps is under their lips,' but, 'the sucking
child shall play by the hole of the asp.' There is death in the looks of
men. 'Their eyes are privily set against the poor;' they are as the
uncharmable serpent, the cockatrice, which slew by seeing. But 'the
weaned child shall lay his hand on the cockatrice den.' There is death
in the steps of men: 'their feet are swift to shed blood; they have
compassed us in our steps like the lion that is greedy of his prey, and
the young lion lurking in secret places,' but, in that kingdom, the wolf
shall lie down with the lamb, and the fatling with the lion, and 'a
little child shall lead them.' There is death in the thoughts of men:
the world is one wide riddle to them, darker and darker as it draws to a
close; but the secret of it is known to the child, and the Lord of
heaven and earth is most to be thanked in that 'He has hidden these
things from the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto babes.'
Yes, and there is death--infinitude of death in the principalities and
powers of men. As far as the east is from the west, so far our sins
are--_not_ set from us, but multiplied around us: the Sun himself, think
you he _now_ 'rejoices' to run his course, when he plunges westward to
the horizon, so widely red, not with clouds, but blood? And it will be
red more widely yet. Whatever drought of the early and latter rain may
be, there will be none of that red rain. You fortify yourselves, you arm
yourselves against it in vain; the enemy and avenger will be upon you
also, unless you learn that it is not out of the mouths of the knitted
gun, or the smoothed rifle, but 'out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings' that the strength is ordained which shall 'still the enemy
and avenger.'
LECTURE II.
_TRAFFIC._
(_Delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford._)
My good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down here among your hills that
I might talk to you about this Exchange you are going to build: but
earnestly and seriously asking you to pardon me, I am going to do
nothing of the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can say very little,
about this same Exchange. I must talk of quite other things, though not
willingly;--I could not deserve your pardon, if when you invited me to
speak on one subject, I wilfully spoke on another. But I cannot speak,
to purpose, of anything about which I do not care; and most simply and
sorrowfully I have to tell you, in the outset, that I do _not_ care
about this Exchange of yours.
If, however, when you sent me your invitation, I had answered, 'I won't
come, I don't care about the Exchange of Bradford,' you would have been
justly offended with me, not knowing the reasons of so blunt a
carelessness. So I have come down, hoping that you will patiently let me
tell you why, on this, and many other such occasions, I now remain
silent, when formerly I should have caught at the opportunity of
speaking to a gracious audience.
In a word, then, I do not care about this Exchange,--because _you_
don't; and because you know perfectly well I cannot make you. Look at
the essential circumstances of the case, which you, as business men,
know perfectly well, though perhaps you think I forget them. You are
going to spend 30,000_l._, which to you, collectively, is nothing; the
buying a new coat is, as to the cost of it, a much more important matter
of consideration to me than building a new Exchange is to you. But you
think you may as well have the right thing for your money. You know
there are a great many odd styles of architecture about; you don't want
to do anything ridiculous; you hear of me, among others, as a
respectable architectural man-milliner: and you send for me, that I may
tell you the leading fashion; and what is, in our shops, for the moment,
the newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles.
Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have good
architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good
architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is
produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.
And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word
'taste;' for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener
controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. 'No,'
say many of my antagonists, 'taste is one thing, morality is another.
Tell us what is pretty; we shall be glad to know that; but preach no
sermons to us.'
Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste
is not only a part and an index of morality--it is the ONLY morality.
The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature
is, 'What do you like?' Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what
you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you
meet, what their 'taste' is, and if they answer candidly, you know them,
body and soul. 'You, my friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what
do _you_ like?' 'A pipe and a quartern of gin.' I know you. 'You, good
woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, what do you like?' 'A swept
hearth and a clean tea-table, and my husband opposite me, and a baby at
my breast.' Good, I know you also. 'You, little girl with the golden
hair and the soft eyes, what do you like?' 'My canary, and a run among
the wood hyacinths.' 'You, little boy with the dirty hands and the low
forehead, what do you like?' 'A shy at the sparrows, and a game at
pitch-farthing.' Good; we know them all now. What more need we ask?
'Nay,' perhaps you answer: 'we need rather to ask what these people and
children do, than what they like. If they _do_ right, it is no matter
that they like what is wrong; and if they _do_ wrong, it is no matter
that they like what is right. Doing is the great thing; and it does not
matter that the man likes drinking, so that he does not drink; nor that
the little girl likes to be kind to her canary, if she will not learn
her lessons; nor that the little boy likes throwing stones at the
sparrows, if he goes to the Sunday school.' Indeed, for a short time,
and in a provisional sense, this is true. For if, resolutely, people do
what is right, in time they come to like doing it. But they only are in
a right moral state when they _have_ come to like doing it; and as long
as they don't like it, they are still in a vicious state. The man is not
in health of body who is always thirsting for the bottle in the
cupboard, though he bravely bears his thirst; but the man who heartily
enjoys water in the morning and wine in the evening, each in its proper
quantity and time. And the entire object of true education is to make
people not merely _do_ the right things, but _enjoy_ the right
things--not merely industrious, but to love industry--not merely
learned, but to love knowledge--not merely pure, but to love purity--not
merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.
But you may answer or think, 'Is the liking for outside ornaments,--for
pictures, or statues, or furniture, or architecture,--a moral quality?'
Yes, most surely, if a rightly set liking. Taste for _any_ pictures or
statues is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. Only here
again we have to define the word 'good.' I don't mean by 'good,'
clever--or learned--or difficult in the doing. Take a picture by
Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice: it is an entirely clever
picture; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to
it; but it is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an
expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing,
and delight in that is an 'unmannered,' or 'immoral' quality. It is 'bad
taste' in the profoundest sense--it is the taste of the devils. On the
other hand, a picture of Titian's, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin,
or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the perpetual contemplation
of a good and perfect thing. That is an entirely moral quality--it is
the taste of the angels. And all delight in art, and all love of it,
resolve themselves into simple love of that which deserves love. That
deserving is the quality which we call 'loveliness'--(we ought to have
an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of the things which deserve to
be hated); and it is not an indifferent nor optional thing whether we
love this or that; but it is just the vital function of all our being.
What we _like_ determines what we _are_, and is the sign of what we are;
and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. As I was thinking
over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the
title of a book standing open in a bookseller's window. It was--'On the
necessity of the diffusion of taste among all classes.' 'Ah,' I thought
to myself, 'my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste,
where will your classes be? The man who likes what you like, belongs to
the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You may put him to
other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him
into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You
get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate
Calendar for literature, and "Pop goes the Weasel" for music. You think
you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your
lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him:--he won't like
to go back to his costermongering.'
And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time
to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any vice,
or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and for ever, either in bad
art, or by want of art; and that there is no national virtue, small or
great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the art which
circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to produce. Take,
for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and patient courage.
You have at present in England only one art of any consequence--that is,
iron-working. You know thoroughly well how to cast and hammer iron. Now,
do you think in those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to
melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the Infernos you have
created; do you think, on those iron plates, your courage and endurance
are not written for ever--not merely with an iron pen, but on iron
parchment? And take also your great English vice--European vice--vice of
all the world--vice of all other worlds that roll or shine in heaven,
bearing with them yet the atmosphere of hell--the vice of jealousy,
which brings competition into your commerce, treachery into your
councils, and dishonour into your wars--that vice which has rendered for
you, and for your next neighbouring nation, the daily occupations of
existence no longer possible, but with the mail upon your breasts and
the sword loose in its sheath; so that, at last, you have realised for
all the multitudes of the two great peoples who lead the so-called
civilisation of the earth,--you have realised for them all, I say, in
person and in policy, what was once true only of the rough Border riders
of your Cheviot hills--
'They carved at the meal
With gloves of steel,
And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd;--
do you think that this national shame and dastardliness of heart are not
written as legibly on every rivet of your iron armour as the strength of
the right hands that forged it? Friends, I know not whether this thing
be the more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is quite unspeakably
both. Suppose, instead of being now sent for by you, I had been sent for
by some private gentleman, living in a suburban house, with his garden
separated only by a fruit-wall from his next door neighbour's; and he
had called me to consult with him on the furnishing of his drawing room.
I begin looking about me, and find the walls rather bare; I think such
and such a paper might be desirable--perhaps a little fresco here and
there on the ceiling--a damask curtain or so at the windows. 'Ah,' says
my employer, 'damask curtains, indeed! That's all very fine, but you
know I can't afford that kind of thing just now!' 'Yet the world credits
you with a splendid income!' 'Ah, yes,' says my friend, 'but do you
know, at present, I am obliged to spend it nearly all in steel-traps?'
'Steel-traps! for whom?' 'Why, for that fellow on the other side the
wall, you know: we're very good friends, capital friends; but we are
obliged to keep our traps set on both sides of the wall; we could not
possibly keep on friendly terms without them, and our spring guns. The
worst of it is, we are both clever fellows enough; and there's never a
day passes that we don't find out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or
something; we spend about fifteen millions a year each in our traps,
take it all together; and I don't see how we're to do with less.' A
highly comic state of life for two private gentlemen! but for two
nations, it seems to me, not wholly comic? Bedlam would be comic,
perhaps, if there were only one madman in it; and your Christmas
pantomime is comic, when there is only one clown in it; but when the
whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart's
blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic, I think.
Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly allow for that.
You don't know what to do with yourselves for a sensation: fox-hunting
and cricketing will not carry you through the whole of this unendurably
long mortal life: you liked pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and
rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better made: but then the
worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, was not play to the
sparrows; and what is play to you now, is not play to the small birds of
State neither; and for the black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking
shots at them, if I mistake not.
I must get back to the matter in hand, however. Believe me, without
farther instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation's
vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the soldiership of early
Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of Tuscany;
the splendid human energy and beauty of Venice. I have no time to do
this to-night (I have done it elsewhere before now); but I proceed to
apply the principle to ourselves in a more searching manner.
I notice that among all the new buildings that cover your once wild
hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large
proportion, with your mills and mansions and I notice also that the
churches and schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions and
mills are never Gothic. Will you allow me to ask precisely the meaning
of this? For, remember, it is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. When
Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as churches; and when
the Italian style superseded the Gothic, churches were Italian as well
as houses. If there is a Gothic spire to the cathedral of Antwerp, there
is a Gothic belfry to the Hôtel de Ville at Brussels; if Inigo Jones
builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an Italian St.
Paul's. But now you live under one school of architecture, and worship
under another. What do you mean by doing this? Am I to understand that
you are thinking of changing your architecture back to Gothic; and that
you treat your churches experimentally, because it does not matter what
mistakes you make in a church? Or am I to understand that you consider
Gothic a pre-eminently sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you
think, like the fine frankincense, should be mixed for the tabernacle
only, and reserved for your religious services? For if this be the
feeling, though it may seem at first as if it were graceful and
reverent, you will find that, at the root of the matter, it signifies
neither more nor less than that you have separated your religion from
your life.
For consider what a wide significance this fact has; and remember that
it is not you only, but all the people of England, who are behaving thus
just now.
You have all got into the habit of calling the church 'the house of
God.' I have seen, over the doors of many churches, the legend actually
carved, '_This_ is the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.'
Now, note where that legend comes from, and of what place it was first
spoken. A boy leaves his father's house to go on a long journey on foot,
to visit his uncle; he has to cross a wild hill-desert; just as if one
of your own boys had to cross the wolds of Westmoreland, to visit an
uncle at Carlisle. The second or third day your boy finds himself
somewhere between Hawes and Brough, in the midst of the moors, at
sunset. It is stony ground, and boggy; he cannot go one foot farther
that night. Down he lies, to sleep, on Wharnside, where best he may,
gathering a few of the stones together to put under his head;--so wild
the place is, he cannot get anything but stones. And there, lying under
the broad night, he has a dream; and he sees a ladder set up on the
earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven, and the angels of God are
ascending and descending upon it. And when he wakes out of his sleep, he
says, 'How dreadful is this place; surely, this is none other than the
house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' This PLACE, observe; not
this church; not this city; not this stone, even, which he puts up for a
memorial--the piece of flint on which his head has lain. But this
_place_; this windy slope of Wharnside; this moorland hollow,
torrent-bitten, snow-blighted; this _any_ place where God lets down the
ladder. And how are you to know where that will be? or how are you to
determine where it may be, but by being ready for it always? Do you know
where the lightning is to fall next? You _do_ know that, partly; you can
guide the lightning; but you cannot guide the going forth of the Spirit,
which is that lightning when it shines from the east to the west.
But the perpetual and insolent warping of that strong verse to serve a
merely ecclesiastical purpose, is only one of the thousand instances in
which we sink back into gross Judaism. We call our churches 'temples.'
Now, you know, or ought to know, they are _not_ temples. They have never
had, never can have, anything whatever to do with temples. They are
'synagogues'--'gathering places'--where you gather yourselves together
as an assembly; and by not calling them so, you again miss the force of
another mighty text--'Thou, when thou prayest, shalt not be as the
hypocrites are; for they love to pray standing in the _churches_' [we
should translate it], 'that they may be seen of men. But thou, when thou
prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray
to thy Father,'--which is, not in chancel nor in aisle, but 'in
secret.'
Now, you feel, as I say this to you--I know you feel--as if I were
trying to take away the honour of your churches. Not so; I am trying to
prove to you the honour of your houses and your hills; I am trying to
show you--not that the Church is not sacred--but that the whole Earth
is. I would have you feel, what careless, what constant, what infectious
sin there is in all modes of thought, whereby, in calling your churches
only 'holy,' you call your hearths and homes profane; and have separated
yourselves from the heathen by casting all your household gods to the
ground, instead of recognising, in the place of their many and feeble
Lares, the presence of your One and Mighty Lord and Lar.
'But what has all this to do with our Exchange?' you ask me,
impatiently. My dear friends, it has just everything to do with it; on
these inner and great questions depend all the outer and little ones;
and if you have asked me down here to speak to you, because you had
before been interested in anything I have written, you must know that
all I have yet said about architecture was to show this. The book I
called 'The Seven Lamps' was to show that certain right states of temper
and moral feeling were the magic powers by which all good architecture,
without exception, had been produced. 'The Stones of Venice,' had, from
beginning to end, no other aim than to show that the Gothic architecture
of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a state
of pure national faith, and of domestic virtue; and that its Renaissance
architecture had arisen out of, and in all its features indicated, a
state of concealed national infidelity, and of domestic corruption. And
now, you ask me what style is best to build in; and how can I answer,
knowing the meaning of the two styles, but by another question--do you
mean to build as Christians or as Infidels? And still more--do you mean
to build as honest Christians or as honest Infidels? as thoroughly and
confessedly either one or the other? You don't like to be asked such
rude questions. I cannot help it; they are of much more importance than
this Exchange business; and if they can be at once answered, the
Exchange business settles itself in a moment. But, before I press them
farther, I must ask leave to explain one point clearly. In all my past
work, my endeavour has been to show that good architecture is
essentially religious--the production of a faithful and virtuous, not of
an infidel and corrupted people. But in the course of doing this, I have
had also to show that good architecture is not _ecclesiastical_. People
are so apt to look upon religion as the business of the clergy, not
their own, that the moment they hear of anything depending on
'religion,' they think it must also have depended on the priesthood; and
I have had to take what place was to be occupied between these two
errors, and fight both, often with seeming contradiction. Good
architecture is the work of good and believing men; therefore, you say,
at least some people say, 'Good architecture must essentially have been
the work of the clergy, not of the laity.' No--a thousand times no; good
architecture has always been the work of the commonalty, _not_ of the
clergy. What, you say, those glorious cathedrals--the pride of
Europe--did their builders not form Gothic architecture? No; they
corrupted Gothic architecture. Gothic was formed in the baron's castle,
and the burgher's street. It was formed by the thoughts, and hands, and
powers of free citizens and soldier kings. By the monk it was used as an
instrument for the aid of his superstition; when that superstition
became a beautiful madness, and the best hearts of Europe vainly dreamed
and pined in the cloister, and vainly raged and perished in the
crusade--through that fury of perverted faith and wasted war, the Gothic
rose also to its loveliest, most fantastic, and, finally, most foolish
dreams; and, in those dreams, was lost.
I hope, now, that there is no risk of your misunderstanding me when I
come to the gist of what I want to say to-night--when I repeat, that
every great national architecture has been the result and exponent of a
great national religion. You can't have bits of it here, bits there--you
must have it everywhere, or nowhere. It is not the monopoly of a
clerical company--it is not the exponent of a theological dogma--it is
not the hieroglyphic writing of an initiated priesthood; it is the manly
language of a people inspired by resolute and common purpose, and
rendering resolute and common fidelity to the legible laws of an
undoubted God.
Now, there have as yet been three distinct schools of European
architecture. I say, European, because Asiatic and African architectures
belong so entirely to other races and climates, that there is no
question of them here; only, in passing, I will simply assure you that
whatever is good or great in Egypt, and Syria, and India, is just good
or great for the same reasons as the buildings on our side of the
Bosphorus. We Europeans, then, have had three great religions: the
Greek, which was the worship of the God of Wisdom and Power; the
Mediæval, which was the Worship of the God of Judgment and Consolation;
the Renaissance, which was the worship of the God of Pride and Beauty;
these three we have had--they are past,--and now, at last, we English
have got a fourth religion, and a God of our own, about which I want to
ask you. But I must explain these three old ones first.
I repeat, first, the Greeks essentially worshipped the God of Wisdom; so
that whatever contended against their religion,--to the Jews a stumbling
block,--was, to the Greeks--_Foolishness_.
The first Greek idea of Deity was that expressed in the word, of which
we keep the remnant in our words '_Di_-urnal' and '_Di_-vine'--the god
of _Day_, Jupiter the revealer. Athena is his daughter, but especially
daughter of the Intellect, springing armed from the head. We are only
with the help of recent investigation beginning to penetrate the depth
of meaning couched under the Athenaic symbols: but I may note rapidly,
that her ægis, the mantle with the serpent fringes, in which she often,
in the best statues, is represented as folding up her left hand for
better guard, and the Gorgon on her shield, are both representative
mainly of the chilling horror and sadness (turning men to stone, as it
were,) of the outmost and superficial spheres of knowledge--that
knowledge which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, the
heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the child. For out of
imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension, danger, and disdain; but
from perfect knowledge, given by the full-revealed Athena, strength and
peace, in sign of which she is crowned with the olive spray, and bears
the resistless spear.
This, then, was the Greek conception of purest Deity, and every habit of
life, and every form of his art developed themselves from the seeking
this bright, serene, resistless wisdom; and setting himself, as a man,
to do things evermore rightly and strongly;[3] not with any ardent
affection or ultimate hope; but with a resolute and continent energy of
will, as knowing that for failure there was no consolation, and for sin
there was no remission. And the Greek architecture rose unerring,
bright, clearly defined, and self-contained.
Next followed in Europe the great Christian faith, which was essentially
the religion of Comfort. Its great doctrine is the remission of sins;
for which cause it happens, too often, in certain phases of
Christianity, that sin and sickness themselves are partly glorified, as
if, the more you had to be healed of, the more divine was the healing.
The practical result of this doctrine, in art, is a continual
contemplation of sin and disease, and of imaginary states of
purification from them; thus we have an architecture conceived in a
mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspiration, partly severe, partly
luxuriant, which will bend itself to every one of our needs, and every
one of our fancies, and be strong or weak with us, as we are strong or
weak ourselves. It is, of all architecture, the basest, when base people
build it--of all, the noblest, when built by the noble.
And now note that both these religions--Greek and Mediæval--perished by
falsehood in their own main purpose. The Greek religion of Wisdom
perished in a false philosophy--'Oppositions of science, falsely so
called.' The Mediæval religion of Consolation perished in false comfort;
in remission of sins given lyingly. It was the selling of absolution
that ended the Mediæval faith; and I can tell you more, it is the
selling of absolution which, to the end of time, will mark false
Christianity. Pure Christianity gives her remission of sins only by
_ending_ them; but false Christianity gets her remission of sins by
_compounding for_ them. And there are many ways of compounding for them.
We English have beautiful little quiet ways of buying absolution,
whether in low Church or high, far more cunning than any of Tetzel's
trading.
Then, thirdly, there followed the religion of Pleasure, in which all
Europe gave itself to luxury, ending in death. First, _bals masqués_ in
every saloon, and then guillotines in every square. And all these three
worships issue in vast temple building. Your Greek worshipped Wisdom,
and built you the Parthenon--the Virgin's temple. The Mediæval
worshipped Consolation, and built you Virgin temples also--but to our
Lady of Salvation. Then the Revivalist worshipped beauty, of a sort, and
built you Versailles, and the Vatican. Now, lastly, will you tell me
what _we_ worship, and what _we_ build?
You know we are speaking always of the real, active, continual, national
worship; that by which men act while they live; not that which they talk
of when they die. Now, we have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we
pay tithes of property, and sevenths of time; but we have also a
practical and earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our
property and six-sevenths of our time. And we dispute a great deal about
the nominal religion; but we are all unanimous about this practical one,
of which I think you will admit that the ruling goddess may be best
generally described as the 'Goddess of Getting-on,' or 'Britannia of the
Market.' The Athenians had an 'Athena Agoraia,' or Minerva of the
Market: but she was a subordinate type of their goddess, while our
Britannia Agoraia is the principal type of ours. And all your great
architectural works, are, of course, built to her. It is long since you
built a great cathedral; and how you would laugh at me, if I proposed
building a cathedral on the top of one of these hills of yours, taking
it for an Acropolis! But your railroad mounds, prolonged masses of
Acropolis; your railroad stations, vaster than the Parthenon, and
innumerable; your chimneys, how much more mighty and costly than
cathedral spires! your harbour-piers; your warehouses; your
exchanges!--all these are built to your great Goddess of 'Getting-on;'
and she has formed, and will continue to form, your architecture, as
long as you worship her; and it is quite vain to ask me to tell you how
to build to _her_; you know far better than I.
There might indeed, on some theories, be a conceivably good architecture
for Exchanges--that is to say if there were any heroism in the fact or
deed of exchange, which might be typically carved on the outside of your
building. For, you know, all beautiful architecture must be adorned with
sculpture or painting; and for sculpture or painting, you must have a
subject. And hitherto it has been a received opinion among the nations
of the world that the only right subjects for either, were _heroisms_ of
some sort. Even on his pots and his flagons, the Greek put a Hercules
slaying lions, or an Apollo slaying serpents, or Bacchus slaying
melancholy giants, and earth-born despondencies. On his temples, the
Greek put contests of great warriors in founding states, or of gods with
evil spirits. On his houses and temples alike, the Christian put
carvings of angels conquering devils; or of hero-martyrs exchanging this
world for another; subject inappropriate, I think, to our manner of
exchange here. And the Master of Christians not only left his followers
without any orders as to the sculpture of affairs of exchange on the
outside of buildings, but gave some strong evidence of his dislike of
affairs of exchange within them. And yet there might surely be a heroism
in such affairs; and all commerce become a kind of selling of doves, not
impious. The wonder has always been great to me, that heroism has never
been supposed to be in anywise consistent with the practice of
supplying people with food, or clothes; but rather with that of
quartering oneself upon them for food, and stripping them of their
clothes. Spoiling of armour is an heroic deed in all ages; but the
selling of clothes, old, or new, has never taken any colour of
magnanimity. Yet one does not see why feeding the hungry and clothing
the naked should ever become base businesses, even when engaged in on a
large scale. If one could contrive to attach the notion of conquest to
them anyhow? so that, supposing there were anywhere an obstinate race,
who refused to be comforted, one might take some pride in giving them
compulsory comfort; and as it were, 'occupying a country' with one's
gifts, instead of one's armies? If one could only consider it as much a
victory to get a barren field sown, as to get an eared field stripped;
and contend who should build villages, instead of who should 'carry'
them. Are not all forms of heroism, conceivable in doing these
serviceable deeds? You doubt who is strongest? It might be ascertained
by push of spade, as well as push of sword. Who is wisest? There are
witty things to be thought of in planning other business than campaigns.
Who is bravest? There are always the elements to fight with, stronger
than men; and nearly as merciless. The only absolutely and
unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be--that he
is paid little for it--and regularly: while you traffickers, and
exchangers, and others occupied in presumably benevolent business, like
to be paid much for it--and by chance. I never can make out how it is
that a knight-errant does not expect to be paid for his trouble, but a
pedlar-errant always does;--that people are willing to take hard knocks
for nothing, but never to sell ribands cheap;--that they are ready to go
on fervent crusades to recover the tomb of a buried God, never on any
travels to fulfil the orders of a living God;--that they will go
anywhere barefoot to preach their faith, but must be well bribed to
practise it, and are perfectly ready to give the Gospel gratis, but
never the loaves and fishes. If you chose to take the matter up on any
such soldierly principle, to do your commerce, and your feeding of
nations, for fixed salaries; and to be as particular about giving people
the best food, and the best cloth, as soldiers are about giving them the
best gunpowder, I could carve something for you on your exchange worth
looking at. But I can only at present suggest decorating its frieze with
pendant purses; and making its pillars broad at the base for the
sticking of bills. And in the innermost chambers of it there might be a
statue of Britannia of the Market, who may have, perhaps advisably, a
partridge for her crest, typical at once of her courage in fighting for
noble ideas; and of her interest in game; and round its neck the
inscription in golden letters, 'Perdix fovit quæ non peperit.'[4] Then,
for her spear, she might have a weaver's beam; and on her shield,
instead of her Cross, the Milanese boar, semi-fleeced, with the town of
Gennesaret proper, in the field and the legend 'In the best market,' and
her corslet, of leather, folded over her heart in the shape of a purse,
with thirty slits in it for a piece of money to go in at, on each day of
the month. And I doubt not but that people would come to see your
exchange, and its goddess, with applause.
Nevertheless, I want to point out to you certain strange characters in
this goddess of yours. She differs from the great Greek and Mediæval
deities essentially in two things--first, as to the continuance of her
presumed power; secondly, as to the extent of it.
1st, as to the Continuance.
The Greek Goddess of Wisdom gave continual increase of wisdom, as the
Christian Spirit of Comfort (or Comforter) continual increase of
comfort. There was no question, with these, of any limit or cessation of
function. But with your Agora Goddess, that is just the most important
question. Getting on--but where to? Gathering together--but how much? Do
you mean to gather always--never to spend? If so, I wish you joy of your
goddess, for I am just as well off as you, without the trouble of
worshipping her at all. But if you do not spend, somebody else
will--somebody else must. And it is because of this (among many other
such errors) that I have fearlessly declared your so-called science of
Political Economy to be no science; because, namely, it has omitted the
study of exactly the most important branch of the business--the study of
_spending_. For spend you must, and as much as you make, ultimately. You
gather corn:--will you bury England under a heap of grain; or will you,
when you have gathered, finally eat? You gather gold:--will you make
your house-roofs of it, or pave your streets with it? That is still one
way of spending it. But if you keep it, that you may get more, I'll give
you more; I'll give you all the gold you want--all you can imagine--if
you can tell me what you'll do with it. You shall have thousands of gold
pieces;--thousands of thousands--millions--mountains, of gold: where
will you keep them? Will you put an Olympus of silver upon a golden
Pelion--make Ossa like a wart? Do you think the rain and dew would then
come down to you, in the streams from such mountains, more blessedly
than they will down the mountains which God has made for you, of moss
and whinstone? But it is not gold that you want to gather! What is it?
greenbacks? No; not those neither. What is it then--is it ciphers after
a capital I? Cannot you practise writing ciphers, and write as many as
you want? Write ciphers for an hour every morning, in a big book, and
say every evening, I am worth all those noughts more than I was
yesterday. Won't that do? Well, what in the name of Plutus is it you
want? Not gold, not greenbacks, not ciphers after a capital I? You will
have to answer, after all, 'No; we want, somehow or other, money's
_worth_.' Well, what is that? Let your Goddess of Getting-on discover
it, and let her learn to stay therein.
II. But there is yet another question to be asked respecting this
Goddess of Getting-on. The first was of the continuance of her power;
the second is of its extent.
Pallas and the Madonna were supposed to be all the world's Pallas, and
all the world's Madonna. They could teach all men, and they could
comfort all men. But, look strictly into the nature of the power of your
Goddess of Getting-on; and you will find she is the Goddess--not of
everybody's getting on--but only of somebody's getting on. This is a
vital, or rather deathful, distinction. Examine it in your own ideal of
the state of national life which this Goddess is to evoke and maintain.
I asked you what it was, when I was last here;[5]--you have never told
me. Now, shall I try to tell you?
Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a
pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere underneath it.
On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with
two wings; and stables, and coach-houses; a moderately sized park; a
large garden and hot houses; and pleasant carriage drives through the
shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the
Goddess; the English gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his
beautiful family; always able to have the boudoir and the jewels for the
wife, and the beautiful ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for
the sons, and a shooting in the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of
the bank, is to be the mill; not less than a quarter of a mile long,
with a steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney
three hundred feet high. In this mill are to be in constant employment
from eight hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, never strike,
always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in
respectful language.
Is not that, broadly, and in the main features, the kind of thing you
propose to yourselves? It is very pretty indeed seen from above; not at
all so pretty, seen from below. For, observe, while to one family this
deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting on, to a thousand families she is
the Goddess of _not_ Getting on. 'Nay,' you say, 'they have all their
chance.' Yes, so has every one in a lottery, but there must always be
the same number of blanks. 'Ah! but in a lottery it is not skill and
intelligence which take the lead, but blind chance.' What then! do you
think the old practice, that 'they should take who have the power, and
they should keep who can,' is less iniquitous, when the power has become
power of brains instead of fist? and that, though we may not take
advantage of a child's or a woman's weakness, we may of a man's
foolishness? 'Nay, but finally, work must be done, and some one must be
at the top, some one at the bottom.' Granted, my friends. Work must
always be, and captains of work must always be; and if you in the least
remember the tone of any of my writings, you must know that they are
thought unfit for this age, because they are always insisting on need of
government, and speaking with scorn of liberty. But I beg you to observe
that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of
work, and taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you are
general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it
wins (if it fight for treasure or land); neither, because you are king
of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's
work. Real kings, on the contrary, are known invariably by their doing
quite the reverse of this,--by their taking the least possible quantity
of the nation's work for themselves. There is no test of real kinghood
so infallible as that. Does the crowned creature live simply, bravely,
unostentatiously? probably he _is_ a King. Does he cover his body with
jewels, and his table with delicates? in all probability he is _not_ a
King. It is possible he may be, as Solomon was; but that is when the
nation shares his splendour with him. Solomon made gold, not only to be
in his own palace as stones, but to be in Jerusalem as stones. But even
so, for the most part, these splendid kinghoods expire in ruin, and only
the true kinghoods live, which are of royal labourers governing loyal
labourers; who, both leading rough lives, establish the true dynasties.
Conclusively you will find that because you are king of a nation, it
does not follow that you are to gather for yourself all the wealth of
that nation; neither, because you are king of a small part of the
nation, and lord over the means of its maintenance--over field, or mill,
or mine, are you to take all the produce of that piece of the foundation
of national existence for yourself.
You will tell me I need not preach against these things, for I cannot
mend them. No, good friends, I cannot; but you can, and you will; or
something else can and will. Do you think these phenomena are to stay
always in their present power or aspect? All history shows, on the
contrary, that to be the exact thing they never can do. Change _must_
come; but it is ours to determine whether change of growth, or change of
death. Shall the Parthenon be in ruins on its rock, and Bolton priory in
its meadow, but these mills of yours be the consummation of the
buildings of the earth, and their wheels be as the wheels of eternity?
Think you that 'men may come, and men may go,' but--mills--go on
forever? Not so; out of these, better or worse shall come; and it is for
you to choose which.
I know that none of this wrong is done with deliberate purpose. I know,
on the contrary, that you wish your workmen well; that you do much for
them, and that you desire to do more for them, if you saw your way to it
safely. I know that many of you have done, and are every day doing,
whatever you feel to be in your power; and that even all this wrong and
misery are brought about by a warped sense of duty, each of you striving
to do his best, without noticing that this best is essentially and
centrally the best for himself, not for others. And all this has come of
the spreading of that thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of the
modern economist, that 'To do the best for yourself, is finally to do
the best for others.' Friends, our great Master said not so; and most
absolutely we shall find this world is not made so. Indeed, to do the
best for others, is finally to do the best for ourselves; but it will
not do to have our eyes fixed on that issue. The Pagans had got beyond
that. Hear what a Pagan says of this matter; hear what were, perhaps,
the last written words of Plato,--if not the last actually written (for
this we cannot know), yet assuredly in fact and power his parting
words--in which, endeavouring to give full crowning and harmonious close
to all his thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the imagined
sentence of the Great Spirit, his strength and his heart fail him, and
the words cease, broken off for ever. It is the close of the dialogue
called 'Critias,' in which he describes, partly from real tradition,
partly in ideal dream, the early state of Athens; and the genesis, and
order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis he
conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man, which
in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the Sons of
God intermarried with the daughters of men, for he supposes the earliest
race to have been indeed the children of God; and to have corrupted
themselves, until 'their spot was not the spot of his children.' And
this, he says, was the end; that indeed 'through many generations, so
long as the God's nature in them yet was full, they were submissive to
the sacred laws, and carried themselves lovingly to all that had kindred
with them in divineness; for their uttermost spirit was faithful and
true, and in every wise great; so that, in all meekness of wisdom, they
dealt with each other, and took all the chances of life; and despising
all things except virtue, they cared little what happened day by day,
and _bore lightly the burden_ of gold and of possessions; for they saw
that, if only their common love and virtue increased, all these things
would be increased together with them; but to set their esteem and
ardent pursuit upon material possession would be to lose that first, and
their virtue and affection together with it. And by such reasoning, and
what of the divine nature remained in them, they gained all this
greatness of which we have already told, but when the God's part of them
faded and became extinct, being mixed again and again, and effaced by
the prevalent mortality; and the human nature at last exceeded, they
then became unable to endure the courses of fortune; and fell into
shapelessness of life, and baseness in the sight of him who could see,
having lost everything that was fairest of their honour; while to the
blind hearts which could not discern the true life, tending to
happiness, it seemed that they were then chiefly noble and happy, being
filled with all iniquity of inordinate possession and power. Whereupon,
the God of God's, whose Kinghood is in laws, beholding a once just
nation thus cast into misery, and desiring to lay such punishment upon
them as might make them repent into restraining, gathered together all
the gods into his dwelling-place, which from heaven's centre overlooks
whatever has part in creation; and having assembled them, he said'----
The rest is silence. So ended are the last words of the chief wisdom of
the heathen, spoken of this idol of riches; this idol of yours; this
golden image high by measureless cubits, set up where your green fields
of England are furnace-burnt into the likeness of the plain of Dura:
this idol, forbidden to us, first of all idols, by our own Master and
faith; forbidden to us also by every human lip that has ever, in any age
or people, been accounted of as able to speak according to the purposes
of God. Continue to make that forbidden deity your principal one, and
soon no more art, no more science, no more pleasure will be possible.
Catastrophe will come; or worse than catastrophe, slow mouldering and
withering into Hades. But if you can fix some conception of a true human
state of life to be striven for--life for all men as for yourselves--if
you can determine some honest and simple order of existence; following
those trodden ways of wisdom, which are pleasantness, and seeking her
quiet and withdrawn paths, which are peace;--then, and so sanctifying
wealth into 'commonwealth,' all your art, your literature, your daily
labours, your domestic affection, and citizen's duty, will join and
increase into one magnificent harmony. You will know then how to build,
well enough; you will build with stone well, but with flesh better;
temples not made with hands, but riveted of hearts; and that kind of
marble, crimson-veined, is indeed eternal.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] It is an error to suppose that the Greek worship, or seeking, was
chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of Rightness and Strength, founded
on Forethought: the principal character of Greek art is not Beauty, but
Design: and the Dorian Apollo-worship and Athenian Virgin-worship are
both expressions of adoration of divine Wisdom and Purity. Next to these
great deities rank, in power over the national mind, Dionysus and Ceres,
the givers of human strength and life: then, for heroic example,
Hercules. There is no Venus-worship among the Greek in the great times:
and the Muses are essentially teachers of Truth, and of its harmonies.
[4] Jerem. xvii. 11 (best in Septuagint and Vulgate). 'As the partridge,
fostering what she brought not forth, so he that getteth riches, not by
right shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be
a fool.'
[5] Two Paths, p. 98.
LECTURE III.
_WAR._
(_Delivered at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich._)
Young soldiers, I do not doubt but that many of you came unwillingly
to-night, and many in merely contemptuous curiosity, to hear what a
writer on painting could possibly say, or would venture to say,
respecting your great art of war. You may well think within yourselves,
that a painter might, perhaps without immodesty, lecture younger
painters upon painting, but not young lawyers upon law, nor young
physicians upon medicine--least of all, it may seem to you, young
warriors upon war. And, indeed, when I was asked to address you, I
declined at first, and declined long; for I felt that you would not be
interested in my special business, and would certainly think there was
small need for me to come to teach you yours. Nay, I knew that there
ought to be _no_ such need, for the great veteran soldiers of England
are now men every way so thoughtful, so noble, and so good, that no
other teaching than their knightly example, and their few words of grave
and tried counsel should be either necessary for you, or even, without
assurance of due modesty in the offerer, endured by you.
But being asked, not once nor twice, I have not ventured persistently to
refuse; and I will try, in very few words, to lay before you some reason
why you should accept my excuse, and hear me patiently. You may imagine
that your work is wholly foreign to, and separate from mine. So far from
that, all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great
art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no
art among a shepherd people, if it remains at peace. There is no art
among an agricultural people, if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely
consistent with fine art; but cannot produce it. Manufacture not only is
unable to produce it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it
exist. There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is
based on battle.
Now, though I hope you love fighting for its own sake, you must, I
imagine, be surprised at my assertion that there is any such good fruit
of fighting. You supposed, probably, that your office was to defend the
works of peace, but certainly not to found them: nay, the common course
of war, you may have thought, was only to destroy them. And truly, I who
tell you this of the use of war, should have been the last of men to
tell you so, had I trusted my own experience only. Hear why: I have
given a considerable part of my life to the investigation of Venetian
painting and the result of that enquiry was my fixing upon one man as
the greatest of all Venetians, and therefore, as I believed, of all
painters whatsoever. I formed this faith, (whether right or wrong
matters at present nothing,) in the supremacy of the painter Tintoret,
under a roof covered with his pictures; and of those pictures, three of
the noblest were then in the form of shreds of ragged canvas, mixed up
with the laths of the roof, rent through by three Austrian shells. Now
it is not every lecturer who _could_ tell you that he had seen three of
his favourite pictures torn to rags by bombshells. And after such a
sight, it is not every lecturer who _would_ tell you that, nevertheless,
war was the foundation of all great art.
Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any careful comparison of the
states of great historic races at different periods. Merely to show you
what I mean, I will sketch for you, very briefly, the broad steps of the
advance of the best art of the world. The first dawn of it is in Egypt;
and the power of it is founded on the perpetual contemplation of death,
and of future judgment, by the mind of a nation of which the ruling
caste were priests, and the second, soldiers. The greatest works
produced by them are sculptures of their kings going out to battle, or
receiving the homage of conquered armies. And you must remember also,
as one of the great keys to the splendour of the Egyptian nation, that
the priests were not occupied in theology only. Their theology was the
basis of practical government and law, so that they were not so much
priests as religious judges, the office of Samuel, among the Jews, being
as nearly as possible correspondent to theirs.
All the rudiments of art then, and much more than the rudiments of all
science, are laid first by this great warrior-nation, which held in
contempt all mechanical trades, and in absolute hatred the peaceful life
of shepherds. From Egypt art passes directly into Greece, where all
poetry, and all painting, are nothing else than the description, praise,
or dramatic representation of war, or of the exercises which prepare for
it, in their connection with offices of religion. All Greek institutions
had first respect to war; and their conception of it, as one necessary
office of all human and divine life, is expressed simply by the images
of their guiding gods. Apollo is the god of all wisdom of the intellect;
he bears the arrow and the bow, before he bears the lyre. Again, Athena
is the goddess of all wisdom in conduct. It is by the helmet and the
shield, oftener than by the shuttle, that she is distinguished from
other deities.
There were, however, two great differences in principle between the
Greek and the Egyptian theories of policy. In Greece there was no
soldier caste; every citizen was necessarily a soldier. And, again,
while the Greeks rightly despised mechanical arts as much as the
Egyptians, they did not make the fatal mistake of despising agricultural
and pastoral life; but perfectly honoured both. These two conditions of
truer thought raise them quite into the highest rank of wise manhood
that has yet been reached; for all our great arts, and nearly all our
great thoughts, have been borrowed or derived from them. Take away from
us what they have given; and I hardly can imagine how low the modern
European would stand.
Now, you are to remember, in passing to the next phase of history, that
though you _must_ have war to produce art--you must also have much more
than war; namely, an art-instinct or genius in the people; and that,
though all the talent for painting in the world won't make painters of
you, unless you have a gift for fighting as well, you may have the gift
for fighting, and none for painting. Now, in the next great dynasty of
soldiers, the art-instinct is wholly wanting. I have not yet
investigated the Roman character enough to tell you the causes of this;
but I believe, paradoxical as it may seem to you, that, however truly
the Roman might say of himself that he was born of Mars, and suckled by
the wolf, he was nevertheless, at heart, more of a farmer than a
soldier. The exercises of war were with him practical, not poetical; his
poetry was in domestic life only, and the object of battle, 'pacis
imponere morem.' And the arts are extinguished in his hands, and do not
rise again, until, with Gothic chivalry, there comes back into the mind
of Europe a passionate delight in war itself, for the sake of war. And
then, with the romantic knighthood which can imagine no other noble
employment,--under the fighting kings of France, England, and Spain; and
under the fighting dukeships and citizenships of Italy, art is born
again, and rises to her height in the great valleys of Lombardy and
Tuscany, through which there flows not a single stream, from all their
Alps or Apennines, that did not once run dark red from battle: and it
reaches its culminating glory in the city which gave to history the most
intense type of soldiership yet seen among men;--the city whose armies
were led in their assault by their king, led through it to victory by
their king, and so led, though that king of theirs was blind, and in the
extremity of his age.
And from this time forward, as peace is established or extended in
Europe, the arts decline. They reach an unparalleled pitch of
costliness, but lose their life, enlist themselves at last on the side
of luxury and various corruption, and, among wholly tranquil nations,
wither utterly away; remaining only in partial practice among races who,
like the French and us, have still the minds, though we cannot all live
the lives, of soldiers.
'It may be so,' I can suppose that a philanthropist might exclaim.
'Perish then the arts, if they can flourish only at such a cost. What
worth is there in toys of canvas and stone if compared to the joy and
peace of artless domestic life?' And the answer is--truly, in
themselves, none. But as expressions of the highest state of the human
spirit, their worth is infinite. As results they may be worthless, but,
as signs, they are above price. For it is an assured truth that,
whenever the faculties of men are at their fulness, they _must_ express
themselves by art; and to say that a state is without such expression,
is to say that it is sunk from its proper level of manly nature. So
that, when I tell you that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean
also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of
men.
It was very strange to me to discover this; and very dreadful--but I saw
it to be quite an undeniable fact. The common notion that peace and the
virtues of civil life flourished together, I found, to be wholly
untenable. Peace and the _vices_ of civil life only flourish together.
We talk of peace and learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and
civilisation; but I found that those were not the words which the Muse
of History coupled together: that on her lips, the words were--peace and
sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and corruption, peace and
death. I found, in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of
word, and strength of thought, in war; that they were nourished in war,
and wasted by peace; taught by war, and deceived by peace; trained by
war, and betrayed by peace;--in a word, that they were born in war, and
expired in peace.
Yet now note carefully, in the second place, it is not _all_ war of
which this can be said--nor all dragon's teeth, which, sown, will start
up into men. It is not the ravage of a barbarian wolf-flock, as under
Genseric or Suwarrow; nor the habitual restlessness and rapine of
mountaineers, as on the old borders of Scotland; nor the occasional
struggle of a strong peaceful nation for its life, as in the wars of the
Swiss with Austria; nor the contest of merely ambitious nations for
extent of power, as in the wars of France under Napoleon, or the just
terminated war in America. None of these forms of war build anything but
tombs. But the creative or foundational war is that in which the
natural restlessness and love of contest among men are disciplined, by
consent, into modes of beautiful--though it may be fatal--play: in which
the natural ambition and love of power of men are disciplined into the
aggressive conquest of surrounding evil: and in which the natural
instincts of self-defence are sanctified by the nobleness of the
institutions, and purity of the households, which they are appointed to
defend. To such war as this all men are born; in such war as this any
man may happily die; and forth from such war as this have arisen
throughout the extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and
virtues of humanity.
I shall therefore divide the war of which I would speak to you into
three heads. War for exercise or play; war for dominion; and, war for
defence.
I. And first, of war for exercise or play. I speak of it primarily in
this light, because, through all past history, manly war has been more
an exercise than anything else, among the classes who cause, and
proclaim it. It is not a game to the conscript, or the pressed sailor;
but neither of these are the causers of it. To the governor who
determines that war shall be, and to the youths who voluntarily adopt it
as their profession, it has always been a grand pastime; and chiefly
pursued because they had nothing else to do. And this is true without
any exception. No king whose mind was fully occupied with the
development of the inner resources of his kingdom, or with any other
sufficing subject of thought, ever entered into war but on compulsion.
No youth who was earnestly busy with any peaceful subject of study, or
set on any serviceable course of action, ever voluntarily became a
soldier. Occupy him early, and wisely, in agriculture or business, in
science or in literature, and he will never think of war otherwise than
as a calamity. But leave him idle; and, the more brave and active and
capable he is by nature, the more he will thirst for some appointed
field for action; and find, in the passion and peril of battle, the only
satisfying fulfilment of his unoccupied being. And from the earliest
incipient civilisation until now, the population of the earth divides
itself, when you look at it widely, into two races; one of workers, and
the other of players--one tilling the ground, manufacturing, building,
and otherwise providing for the necessities of life;--the other part
proudly idle, and continually therefore needing recreation, in which
they use the productive and laborious orders partly as their cattle, and
partly as their puppets or pieces in the game of death.
Now, remember, whatever virtue or goodliness there may be in this game
of war, rightly played, there is none when you thus play it with a
multitude of small human pawns.
If you, the gentlemen of this or any other kingdom, choose to make your
pastime of contest, do so, and welcome; but set not up these unhappy
peasant-pieces upon the green fielded board. If the wager is to be of
death, lay it on your own heads, not theirs. A goodly struggle in the
Olympic dust, though it be the dust of the grave, the gods will look
upon, and be with you in; but they will not be with you, if you sit on
the sides of the amphitheatre, whose steps are the mountains of earth,
whose arena its valleys, to urge your peasant millions into gladiatorial
war. You also, you tender and delicate women, for whom, and by whose
command, all true battle has been, and must ever be; you would perhaps
shrink now, though you need not, from the thought of sitting as queens
above set lists where the jousting game might be mortal. How much more,
then, ought you to shrink from the thought of sitting above a theatre
pit in which even a few condemned slaves were slaying each other only
for your delight! And do you _not_ shrink from the _fact_ of sitting
above a theatre pit, where,--not condemned slaves,--but the best and
bravest of the poor sons of your people, slay each other,--not man to
man,--as the coupled gladiators; but race to race, in duel of
generations? You would tell me, perhaps, that you do not sit to see
this; and it is indeed true, that the women of Europe--those who have no
heart-interests of their own at peril in the contest--draw the curtains
of their boxes, and muffle the openings; so that from the pit of the
circus of slaughter there may reach them only at intervals a half-heard
cry and a murmur as of the wind's sighing, when myriads of souls expire.
They shut out the death-cries; and are happy, and talk wittily among
themselves. That is the utter literal fact of what our ladies do in
their pleasant lives.
Nay, you might answer, speaking for them--'We do not let these wars come
to pass for our play, nor by our carelessness; we cannot help them. How
can any final quarrel of nations be settled otherwise than by war?' I
cannot now delay, to tell you how political quarrels might be otherwise
settled. But grant that they cannot. Grant that no law of reason can be
understood by nations; no law of justice submitted to by them: and that,
while questions of a few acres, and of petty cash, can be determined by
truth and equity, the questions which are to issue in the perishing or
saving of kingdoms can be determined only by the truth of the sword, and
the equity of the rifle. Grant this, and even then, judge if it will
always be necessary for you to put your quarrel into the hearts of your
poor, and sign your treaties with peasants' blood. You would be ashamed
to do this in your own private position and power. Why should you not be
ashamed also to do it in public place and power? If you quarrel with
your neighbour, and the quarrel be indeterminable by law, and mortal,
you and he do not send your footmen to Battersea fields to fight it out;
nor do you set fire to his tenants' cottages, nor spoil their goods. You
fight out your quarrel yourselves, and at your own danger, if at all.
And you do not think it materially affects the arbitrement that one of
you has a larger household than the other; so that, if the servants or
tenants were brought into the field with their masters, the issue of the
contest could not be doubtful? You either refuse the private duel, or
you practise it under laws of honour, not of physical force; that so it
may be, in a manner, justly concluded. Now the just or unjust conclusion
of the private feud is of little moment, while the just or unjust
conclusion of the public feud is of eternal moment: and yet, in this
public quarrel, you take your servants' sons from their arms to fight
for it, and your servants' food from their lips to support it; and the
black seals on the parchment of your treaties of peace are the deserted
hearth and the fruitless field. There is a ghastly ludicrousness in
this, as there is mostly in these wide and universal crimes. Hear the
statement of the very fact of it in the most literal words of the
greatest of our English thinkers:--
'What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the
net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for
example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of
Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by
certain "natural enemies" of the French, there are
successively selected, during the French war, say thirty
able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled
and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow,
fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so
that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the
weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois.
Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are
selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the
public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the
south of Spain; and fed there till wanted.
'And now to that same spot in the south of Spain are thirty
similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like
manner wending; till at length, after infinite effort, the
two parties come into actual juxtaposition; and Thirty
stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand.
'Straightway the word "Fire!" is given, and they blow the
souls out of one another, and in place of sixty brisk useful
craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcases, which it must
bury, and anon shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel?
Busy as the devil is, not the smallest! They lived far
enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a
universe, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some
mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their
governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one
another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads
shoot.' (Sartor Resartus.)
Positively, then, gentlemen, the game of battle must not, and shall not,
ultimately be played this way. But should it be played any way? Should
it, if not by your servants, be practised by yourselves? I think, yes.
Both history and human instinct seem alike to say, yes. All healthy men
like fighting, and like the sense of danger; all brave women like to
hear of their fighting, and of their facing danger. This is a fixed
instinct in the fine race of them; and I cannot help fancying that fair
fight is the best play for them, and that a tournament was a better game
than a steeple-chase. The time may perhaps come in France as well as
here, for universal hurdle-races and cricketing: but I do not think
universal 'crickets' will bring out the best qualities of the nobles of
either country. I use, in such question, the test which I have adopted,
of the connection of war with other arts; and I reflect how, as a
sculptor, I should feel, if I were asked to design a monument for a dead
knight, in Westminster abbey, with a carving of a bat at one end, and a
ball at the other. It may be the remains in me only of savage Gothic
prejudice; but I had rather carve it with a shield at one end, and a
sword at the other. And this, observe, with no reference whatever to any
story of duty done, or cause defended. Assume the knight merely to have
ridden out occasionally to fight his neighbour for exercise; assume him
even a soldier of fortune, and to have gained his bread, and filled his
purse, at the sword's point. Still, I feel as if it were, somehow,
grander and worthier in him to have made his bread by sword play than
any other play; had rather he had made it by thrusting than by
batting;--much more, than by betting. Much rather that he should ride
war horses, than back race horses; and--I say it sternly and
deliberately--much rather would I have him slay his neighbour, than
cheat him.
But remember, so far as this may be true, the game of war is only that
in which the _full personal power of the human creature_ is brought out
in management of its weapons. And this for three reasons:--
First, the great justification of this game is that it truly, when well
played, determines _who is the best man_;--who is the highest bred, the
most self-denying, the most fearless, the coolest of nerve, the swiftest
of eye and hand. You cannot test these qualities wholly, unless there is
a clear possibility of the struggle's ending in death. It is only in the
fronting of that condition that the full trial of the man, soul and
body, comes out. You may go to your game of wickets, or of hurdles, or
of cards, and any knavery that is in you may stay unchallenged all the
while. But if the play may be ended at any moment by a lance-thrust, a
man will probably make up his accounts a little before he enters it.
Whatever is rotten and evil in him will weaken his hand more in holding
a sword hilt, than in balancing a billiard cue; and on the whole, the
habit of living lightly hearted, in daily presence of death, always has
had, and must have, a tendency both to the making and testing of honest
men. But for the final testing, observe, you must make the issue of
battle strictly dependent on fineness of frame, and firmness of hand.
You must not make it the question, which of the combatants has the
longest gun, or which has got behind the biggest tree, or which has the
wind in his face, or which has gunpowder made by the best chemist, or
iron smelted with the best coal, or the angriest mob at his back. Decide
your battle, whether of nations, or individuals, on _those_ terms;--and
you have only multiplied confusion, and added slaughter to iniquity. But
decide your battle by pure trial which has the strongest arm, and
steadiest heart,--and you have gone far to decide a great many matters
besides, and to decide them rightly.
And the other reasons for this mode of decision of cause, are the
diminution both of the material destructiveness, or cost, and of the
physical distress of war. For you must not think that in speaking to you
in this (as you may imagine), fantastic praise of battle, I have
overlooked the conditions weighing against me. I pray all of you, who
have not read, to read with the most earnest attention, Mr. Helps's two
essays on War and Government, in the first volume of the last series of
'Friends in Council.' Everything that can be urged against war is there
simply, exhaustively, and most graphically stated. And all, there urged,
is true. But the two great counts of evil alleged against war by that
most thoughtful writer, hold only against modern war. If you have to
take away masses of men from all industrial employment,--to feed them by
the labour of others,--to move them and provide them with destructive
machines, varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you
have to ravage the country which you attack,--to destroy for a score of
future years, its roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbours;--and
if, finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of
thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged
shot, and leave the fragments of living creatures countlessly beyond all
help of surgery, to starve and parch, through days of torture, down into
clots of clay--what book of accounts shall record the cost of your
work;--What book of judgment sentence the guilt of it?
That, I say, is _modern_ war,--scientific war,--chemical and mechanic
war, worse even than the savage's poisoned arrow. And yet you will tell
me, perhaps, that any other war than this is impossible now. It may be
so; the progress of science cannot, perhaps, be otherwise registered
than by new facilities of destruction; and the brotherly love of our
enlarging Christianity be only proved by multiplication of murder. Yet
hear, for a moment, what war was, in Pagan and ignorant days;--what war
might yet be, if we could extinguish our science in darkness, and join
the heathen's practice to the Christian's theory. I read you this from a
book which probably most of you know well, and all ought to
know--Muller's 'Dorians;'--but I have put the points I wish you to
remember in closer connection than in his text.
'The chief characteristic of the warriors of Sparta was great composure
and subdued strength; the violence [Greek: lyssa] of Aristodemus and
Isadas being considered as deserving rather of blame than praise; and
these qualities in general distinguished the Greeks from the northern
Barbarians, whose boldness always consisted in noise and tumult. For the
same reason the Spartans _sacrificed to the Muses_ before an action;
these goddesses being expected to produce regularity and order in
battle; as they _sacrificed on the same occasion in Crete to the god of
love_, as the confirmer of mutual esteem and shame. Every man put on a
crown, when the band of flute-players gave the signal for attack; all
the shields of the line glittered with their high polish, and mingled
their splendour with the dark red of the purple mantles, which were
meant both to adorn the combatant, and to conceal the blood of the
wounded; to fall well and decorously being an incentive the more to the
most heroic valour. The conduct of the Spartans in battle denotes a high
and noble disposition, which rejected all the extremes of brutal rage.
The pursuit of the enemy ceased when the victory was completed; and
after the signal for retreat had been given, all hostilities ceased. The
spoiling of arms, at least during the battle, was also interdicted; and
the consecration of the spoils of slain enemies to the gods, as, in
general, all rejoicings for victory, were considered as ill-omened.
Such was the war of the greatest soldiers who prayed to heathen gods.
What Christian war is, preached by Christian ministers, let any one tell
you, who saw the sacred crowning, and heard the sacred flute-playing,
and was inspired and sanctified by the divinely-measured and musical
language, of any North American regiment preparing for its charge. And
what is the relative cost of life in pagan and Christian wars, let this
one fact tell you:--the Spartans won the decisive battle of Corinth with
the loss of eight men; the victors at indecisive Gettysburg confess to
the loss of 30,000.
II. I pass now to our second order of war, the commonest among men, that
undertaken in desire of dominion. And let me ask you to think for a few
moments what the real meaning of this desire of dominion is--first in
the minds of kings--then in that of nations.
Now, mind you this first,--that I speak either about kings, or masses of
men, with a fixed conviction that human nature is a noble and beautiful
thing; not a foul nor a base thing. All the sin of men I esteem as their
disease, not their nature; as a folly which may be prevented, not a
necessity which must be accepted. And my wonder, even when things are at
their worst, is always at the height which this human nature can attain.
Thinking it high, I find it always a higher thing than I thought it;
while those who think it low, find it, and will find it, always lower
than they thought it: the fact being, that it is infinite, and capable
of infinite height and infinite fall; but the nature of it--and here is
the faith which I would have you hold with me--the _nature_ of it is in
the nobleness, not in the catastrophe.
Take the faith in its utmost terms. When the captain of the 'London'
shook hands with his mate, saying 'God speed you! I will go down with my
passengers,' _that_ I believe to be 'human nature.' He does not do it
from any religious motive--from any hope of reward, or any fear of
punishment; he does it because he is a man. But when a mother, living
among the fair fields of merry England, gives her two-year-old child to
be suffocated under a mattress in her inner room, while the said mother
waits and talks outside; _that_ I believe to be _not_ human nature. You
have the two extremes there, shortly. And you, men, and mothers, who are
here face to face with me to-night, I call upon you to say which of
these is human, and which inhuman--which 'natural' and which
'unnatural?' Choose your creed at once, I beseech you:--choose it with
unshaken choice--choose it forever. Will you take, for foundation of act
and hope, the faith that this man was such as God made him, or that this
woman was such as God made her? Which of them has failed from their
nature--from their present, possible, actual nature;--not their nature
of long ago, but their nature of now? Which has betrayed it--falsified
it? Did the guardian who died in his trust, die inhumanly, and as a
fool; and did the murderess of her child fulfil the law of her being?
Choose, I say; infinitude of choices hang upon this. You have had false
prophets among you--for centuries you have had them--solemnly warned
against them though you were; false prophets, who have told you that all
men are nothing but fiends or wolves, half beast, half devil. Believe
that and indeed you may sink to that. But refuse that, and have faith
that God 'made you upright,' though _you_ have sought out many
inventions; so, you will strive daily to become more what your Maker
meant and means you to be, and daily gives you also the power to be--and
you will cling more and more to the nobleness and virtue that is in you,
saying, 'My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go.'
I have put this to you as a choice, as if you might hold either of these
creeds you liked best. But there is in reality no choice for you; the
facts being quite easily ascertainable. You have no business to _think_
about this matter, or to choose in it. The broad fact is, that a human
creature of the highest race, and most perfect as a human thing, is
invariably both kind and true; and that as you lower the race, you get
cruelty and falseness, as you get deformity: and this so steadily and
assuredly, that the two great words which, in their first use, meant
only perfection of race, have come, by consequence of the invariable
connection of virtue with the fine human nature, both to signify
benevolence of disposition. The word generous, and the word gentle,
both, in their origin, meant only 'of pure race,' but because charity
and tenderness are inseparable from this purity of blood, the words
which once stood only for pride, now stand as synonyms for virtue.
Now, this being the true power of our inherent humanity, and seeing that
all the aim of education should be to develop this;--and seeing also
what magnificent self sacrifice the higher classes of men are capable
of, for any cause that they understand or feel,--it is wholly
inconceivable to me how well-educated princes, who ought to be of all
gentlemen the gentlest, and of all nobles the most generous, and whose
title of royalty means only their function of doing every man
'_right_'--how these, I say, throughout history, should so rarely
pronounce themselves on the side of the poor and of justice, but
continually maintain themselves and their own interests by oppression of
the poor, and by wresting of justice; and how this should be accepted as
so natural, that the word loyalty, which means faithfulness to law, is
used as if it were only the duty of a people to be loyal to their king,
and not the duty of a king to be infinitely more loyal to his people.
How comes it to pass that a captain will die with his passengers, and
lean over the gunwale to give the parting boat its course; but that a
king will not usually die with, much less _for_, his passengers,--thinks
it rather incumbent on his passengers, in any number, to die for _him_?
Think, I beseech you, of the wonder of this. The sea captain, not
captain by divine right, but only by company's appointment;--not a man
of royal descent, but only a plebeian who can steer;--not with the eyes
of the world upon him, but with feeble chance, depending on one poor
boat, of his name being ever heard above the wash of the fatal
waves;--not with the cause of a nation resting on his act, but helpless
to save so much as a child from among the lost crowd with whom he
resolves to be lost,--yet goes down quietly to his grave, rather than
break his faith to these few emigrants. But your captain by divine
right,--your captain with the hues of a hundred shields of kings upon
his breast,--your captain whose every deed, brave or base, will be
illuminated or branded for ever before unescapable eyes of men,--your
captain whose every thought and act are beneficent, or fatal, from
sunrising to setting, blessing as the sunshine, or shadowing as the
night,--this captain, as you find him in history, for the most part
thinks only how he may tax his passengers, and sit at most ease in his
state cabin!
For observe, if there had been indeed in the hearts of the rulers of
great multitudes of men any such conception of work for the good of
those under their command, as there is in the good and thoughtful
masters of any small company of men, not only wars for the sake of mere
increase of power could never take place, but our idea of power itself
would be entirely altered. Do you suppose that to think and act even for
a million of men, to hear their complaints, watch their weaknesses,
restrain their vices, make laws for them, lead them, day by day, to
purer life, is not enough for one man's work? If any of us were absolute
lord only of a district of a hundred miles square, and were resolved on
doing our utmost for it; making it feed as large a number of people as
possible; making every clod productive, and every rock defensive, and
every human being happy; should we not have enough on our hands think
you? But if the ruler has any other aim than this; if, careless of the
result of his interference, he desire only the authority to interfere;
and, regardless of what is ill-done or well-done, cares only that it
shall be done at his bidding,--if he would rather do two hundred miles'
space of mischief, than one hundred miles' space of good, of course he
will try to add to his territory; and to add inimitably. But does he add
to his power? Do you call it power in a child, if he is allowed to play
with the wheels and bands of some vast engine, pleased with their murmur
and whirl, till his unwise touch, wandering where it ought not, scatters
beam and wheel into ruin? Yet what machine is so vast, so incognisable,
as the working of the mind of a nation what child's touch so wanton, as
the word of a selfish king? And yet, how long have we allowed the
historian to speak of the extent of the calamity a man causes, as a just
ground for his pride; and to extol him as the greatest prince, who is
only the centre of the widest error. Follow out this thought by
yourselves; and you will find that all power, properly so called, is
wise and benevolent. There may be capacity in a drifting fire-ship to
destroy a fleet; there may be venom enough in a dead body to infect a
nation:--but which of you, the most ambitious, would desire a drifting
kinghood, robed in consuming fire, or a poison-dipped sceptre whose
touch was mortal? There is no true potency, remember, but that of help;
nor true ambition, but ambition to save.
And then, observe farther, this true power, the power of saving, depends
neither on multitude of men, nor on extent of territory. We are
continually assuming that nations become strong according to their
numbers. They indeed become so, if those numbers can be made of one
mind; but how are you sure you can stay them in one mind, and keep them
from having north and south minds? Grant them unanimous, how know you
they will be unanimous in right? If they are unanimous in wrong, the
more they are, essentially the weaker they are. Or, suppose that they
can neither be of one mind, nor of two minds, but can only be of _no_
mind? Suppose they are a more helpless mob; tottering into precipitant
catastrophe, like a waggon load of stones when the wheel comes off.
Dangerous enough for their neighbours, certainly, but not 'powerful.'
Neither does strength depend on extent of territory, any more than upon
number of population. Take up your maps when you go home this
evening,--put the cluster of British Isles beside the mass of South
America; and then consider whether any race of men need care how much
ground they stand upon. The strength is in the men, and in their unity
and virtue, not in their standing room: a little group of wise hearts is
better than a wilderness full of fools; and only that nation gains true
territory, which gains itself.
And now for the brief practical outcome of all this. Remember, no
government is ultimately strong, but in proportion to its kindness and
justice; and that a nation does not strengthen, by merely multiplying
and diffusing itself. We have not strengthened as yet, by multiplying
into America. Nay, even when it has not to encounter the separating
conditions of emigration, a nation need not boast itself of multiplying
on its own ground, if it multiplies only as flies or locusts do, with
the god of flies for its god. It multiplies its strength only by
increasing as one great family, in perfect fellowship and brotherhood.
And lastly, it does not strengthen itself by seizing dominion over races
whom it cannot benefit. Austria is not strengthened, but weakened, by
her grasp of Lombardy; and whatever apparent increase of majesty and of
wealth may have accrued to us from the possession of India, whether
these prove to us ultimately power or weakness, depends wholly on the
degree in which our influence on the native race shall be benevolent and
exalting. But, as it is at their own peril that any race extends their
dominion in mere desire of power, so it is at their own still greater
peril, that they refuse to undertake aggressive war, according to their
force, whenever they are assured that their authority would be helpful
and protective. Nor need you listen to any sophistical objection of the
impossibility of knowing when a people's help is needed, or when not.
Make your national conscience clean, and your national eyes will soon be
clear. No man who is truly ready to take part in a noble quarrel will
ever stand long in doubt by whom, or in what cause, his aid is needed. I
hold it my duty to make no political statement of any special bearing in
this presence; but I tell you broadly and boldly, that, within these
last ten years, we English have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs:
we have fought where we should not have fought, for gain; and we have
been passive where we should not have been passive, for fear. I tell you
that the principle of non-intervention, as now preached among us, is as
selfish and cruel as the worst frenzy of conquest, and differs from it
only by being not only malignant, but dastardly.
I know, however, that my opinions on this subject differ too widely from
those ordinarily held, to be any farther intruded upon you; and
therefore I pass lastly to examine the conditions of the third kind of
noble war;--war waged simply for defence of the country in which we were
born, and for the maintenance and execution of her laws, by whomsoever
threatened or defied. It is to this duty that I suppose most men
entering the army consider themselves in reality to be bound, and I want
you now to reflect what the laws of mere defence are; and what the
soldier's duty, as now understood, or supposed to be understood. You
have solemnly devoted yourselves to be English soldiers, for the
guardianship of England. I want you to feel what this vow of yours
indeed means, or is gradually coming to mean. You take it upon you,
first, while you are sentimental schoolboys; you go into your military
convent, or barracks, just as a girl goes into her convent while she is
a sentimental schoolgirl; neither of you then know what you are about,
though both the good soldiers and good nuns make the best of it
afterwards. You don't understand perhaps why I call you 'sentimental'
schoolboys, when you go into the army? Because, on the whole, it is love
of adventure, of excitement, of fine dress and of the pride of fame, all
which are sentimental motives, which chiefly make a boy like going into
the Guards better than into a counting-house. You fancy, perhaps, that
there is a severe sense of duty mixed with these peacocky motives? And
in the best of you, there is; but do not think that it is principal. If
you cared to do your duty to your country in a prosaic and unsentimental
way, depend upon it, there is now truer duty to be done in raising
harvests than in burning them; more in building houses, than in shelling
them--more in winning money by your own work, wherewith to help men,
than in taxing other people's work, for money wherewith to slay men;
more duty finally, in honest and unselfish living than in honest and
unselfish dying, though that seems to your boys' eyes the bravest. So
far then, as for your own honour, and the honour of your families, you
choose brave death in a red coat before brave life in a black one, you
are sentimental; and now see what this passionate vow of yours comes
to. For a little while you ride, and you hunt tigers or savages, you
shoot, and are shot; you are happy, and proud, always, and honoured and
wept if you die; and you are satisfied with your life, and with the end
of it; believing, on the whole, that good rather than harm of it comes
to others, and much pleasure to you. But as the sense of duty enters
into your forming minds, the vow takes another aspect. You find that you
have put yourselves into the hand of your country as a weapon. You have
vowed to strike, when she bids you, and to stay scabbarded when she bids
you; all that you need answer for is, that you fail not in her grasp.
And there is goodness in this, and greatness, if you can trust the hand
and heart of the Britomart who has braced you to her side, and are
assured that when she leaves you sheathed in darkness, there is no need
for your flash to the sun. But remember, good and noble as this state
may be, it is a state of slavery. There are different kinds of slaves
and different masters. Some slaves are scourged to their work by whips,
others are scourged to it by restlessness or ambition. It does not
matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have
cut thongs for it out of your own souls: the fact, so far, of slavery,
is in being driven to your work without thought, at another's bidding.
Again, some slaves are bought with money, and others with praise. It
matters not what the purchase-money is. The distinguishing sign of
slavery is to have a price, and be bought for it. Again, it matters not
what kind of work you are set on; some slaves are set to forced
diggings, others to forced marches; some dig furrows, others
field-works, and others graves. Some press the juice of reeds, and some
the juice of vines, and some the blood of men. The fact of the captivity
is the same whatever work we are set upon, though the fruits of the toil
may be different. But, remember, in thus vowing ourselves to be the
slaves of any master, it ought to be some subject of forethought with
us, what work he is likely to put us upon. You may think that the whole
duty of a soldier is to be passive, that it is the country you have left
behind who is to command, and you have only to obey. But are you sure
that you have left _all_ your country behind, or that the part of it you
have so left is indeed the best part of it? Suppose--and, remember, it
is quite conceivable--that you yourselves are indeed the best part of
England; that you who have become the slaves, ought to have been the
masters; and that those who are the masters, ought to have been the
slaves! If it is a noble and whole-hearted England, whose bidding you
are bound to do, it is well; but if you are yourselves the best of her
heart, and the England you have left be but a half-hearted England, how
say you of your obedience? You were too proud to become shopkeepers: are
you satisfied then to become the servants of shopkeepers? You were too
proud to become merchants or farmers yourselves: will you have merchants
or farmers then for your field marshals? You had no gifts of special
grace for Exeter Hall: will you have some gifted person thereat for your
commander-in-chief, to judge of your work, and reward it? You imagine
yourselves to be the army of England: how if you should find yourselves,
at last, only the police of her manufacturing towns, and the beadles of
her little Bethels?
It is not so yet, nor will be so, I trust, for ever; but what I want you
to see, and to be assured of, is, that the ideal of soldiership is not
mere passive obedience and bravery; that, so far from this, no country
is in a healthy state which has separated, even in a small degree, her
civil from her military power. All states of the world, however great,
fall at once when they use mercenary armies; and although it is a less
instant form of error (because involving no national taint of
cowardice), it is yet an error no less ultimately fatal--it is the error
especially of modern times, of which we cannot yet know all the
calamitous consequences--to take away the best blood and strength of the
nation, all the soul-substance of it that is brave, and careless of
reward, and scornful of pain, and faithful in trust; and to cast that
into steel, and make a mere sword of it; taking away its voice and will;
but to keep the worst part of the nation--whatever is cowardly,
avaricious, sensual, and faithless--and to give to this the voice, to
this the authority, to this the chief privilege, where there is least
capacity, of thought. The fulfilment of your vow for the defence of
England will by no means consist in carrying out such a system. You are
not true soldiers, if you only mean to stand at a shop door, to protect
shop-boys who are cheating inside. A soldier's vow to his country is
that he will die for the guardianship of her domestic virtue, of her
righteous laws, and of her anyway challenged or endangered honour. A
state without virtue, without laws, and without honour, he is bound
_not_ to defend; nay, bound to redress by his own right hand that which
he sees to be base in her. So sternly is this the law of Nature and
life, that a nation once utterly corrupt can only be redeemed by a
military despotism--never by talking, nor by its free effort. And the
health of any state consists simply in this: that in it, those who are
wisest shall also be strongest; its rulers should be also its soldiers;
or, rather, by force of intellect more than of sword, its soldiers its
rulers. Whatever the hold which the aristocracy of England has on the
heart of England, in that they are still always in front of her battles,
this hold will not be enough, unless they are also in front of her
thoughts. And truly her thoughts need good captain's leading now, if
ever! Do you know what, by this beautiful division of labour (her brave
men fighting, and her cowards thinking), she has come at last to think?
Here is a bit of paper in my hand,[6] a good one too, and an honest one;
quite representative of the best common public thought of England at
this moment; and it is holding forth in one of its leaders upon our
'social welfare,'--upon our 'vivid life'--upon the 'political supremacy
of Great Britain.' And what do you think all these are owing to? To what
our English sires have done for us, and taught us, age after age? No:
not to that. To our honesty of heart, or coolness of head, or steadiness
of will? No: not to these. To our thinkers, or our statesmen, or our
poets, or our captains, or our martyrs, or the patient labour of our
poor? No: not to these; or at least not to these in any chief measure.
Nay, says the journal, 'more than any agency, it is the cheapness and
abundance of our coal which have made us what we are.' If it be so, then
'ashes to ashes' be our epitaph! and the sooner the better. I tell you,
gentlemen of England, if ever you would have your country breathe the
pure breath of heaven again, and receive again a soul into her body,
instead of rotting into a carcase, blown up in the belly with carbonic
acid (and great _that_ way), you must think, and feel, for your England,
as well as fight for her: you must teach her that all the true greatness
she ever had, or ever can have, she won while her fields were green and
her faces ruddy;--that greatness is still possible for Englishmen, even
though the ground be not hollow under their feet, nor the sky black over
their heads;--and that, when the day comes for their country to lay her
honours in the dust, her crest will not rise from it more loftily
because it is dust of coal. Gentlemen, I tell you, solemnly, that the
day is coming when the soldiers of England must be her tutors and the
captains of her army, captains also of her mind.
And now, remember, you soldier youths, who are thus in all ways the hope
of your country; or must be, if she have any hope: remember that your
fitness for all future trust depends upon what you are now. No good
soldier in his old age was ever careless or indolent in his youth. Many
a giddy and thoughtless boy has become a good bishop, or a good lawyer,
or a good merchant; but no such an one ever became a good general. I
challenge you, in all history, to find a record of a good soldier who
was not grave and earnest in his youth. And, in general, I have no
patience with people who talk about 'the thoughtlessness of youth'
indulgently, I had infinitely rather hear of thoughtless old age, and
the indulgence due to _that_. When a man has done his work, and nothing
can any way be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil,
and jest with his fate, if he will; but what excuse can you find for
wilfulness of thought, at the very time when every crisis of future
fortune hangs on your decisions? A youth thoughtless! when all the
happiness of his home for ever depends on the chances, or the passions,
of an hour! A youth thoughtless! when the career of all his days depends
on the opportunity of a moment! A youth thoughtless! when his every act
is a foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a
fountain of life or death! Be thoughtless in _any_ after years, rather
than now--though, indeed, there is only one place where a man may be
nobly thoughtless,--his deathbed. No thinking should ever be left to be
done there.
Having, then, resolved that you will not waste recklessly, but earnestly
use, these early days of yours, remember that all the duties of her
children to England may be summed in two words--industry, and honour. I
say first, industry, for it is in this that soldier youth are especially
tempted to fail. Yet surely, there is no reason because your life may
possibly or probably be shorter than other men's, that you should
therefore waste more recklessly the portion of it that is granted you;
neither do the duties of your profession, which require you to keep your
bodies strong, in any wise involve the keeping of your minds weak. So
far from that, the experience, the hardship, and the activity of a
soldier's life render his powers of thought more accurate than those of
other men; and while, for others, all knowledge is often little more
than a means of amusement, there is no form of science which a soldier
may not at some time or other find bearing on business of life and
death. A young mathematician may be excused for langour in studying
curves to be described only with a pencil; but not in tracing those
which are to be described with a rocket. Your knowledge of a wholesome
herb may involve the feeding of an army; and acquaintance with an
obscure point of geography, the success of a campaign. Never waste an
instant's time, therefore; the sin of idleness is a thousandfold greater
in you than in other youths; for the fates of those who will one day be
under your command hang upon your knowledge; lost moments now will be
lost lives then, and every instant which you carelessly take for play,
you buy with blood. But there is one way of wasting time, of all the
vilest, because it wastes, not time only, but the interest and energy of
your minds. Of all the ungentlemanly habits into which you can fall, the
vilest is betting, or interesting yourselves in the issues of betting.
It unites nearly every condition of folly and vice; you concentrate your
interest upon a matter of chance, instead of upon a subject of true
knowledge; and you back opinions which you have no grounds for forming,
merely because they are your own. All the insolence of egotism is in
this; and so far as the love of excitement is complicated with the hope
of winning money, you turn yourselves into the basest sort of
tradesmen--those who live by speculation. Were there no other ground for
industry, this would be a sufficient one; that it protected you from the
temptation to so scandalous a vice. Work faithfully, and you will put
yourselves in possession of a glorious and enlarging happiness: not such
as can be won by the speed of a horse, or marred by the obliquity of a
ball.
First, then, by industry you must fulfil your vow to your country; but
all industry and earnestness will be useless unless they are consecrated
by your resolution to be in all things men of honour; not honour in the
common sense only, but in the highest. Rest on the force of the two main
words in the great verse, _integer_ vitæ, scelerisque _purus_. You have
vowed your life to England; give it her wholly--a bright, stainless,
perfect life--a knightly life. Because you have to fight with machines
instead of lances, there may be a necessity for more ghastly danger, but
there is none for less worthiness of character, than in olden time. You
may be true knights yet, though perhaps not _equites_; you may have to
call yourselves 'cannonry' instead of 'chivalry,' but that is no reason
why you should not call yourselves true men. So the first thing you have
to see to in becoming soldiers is that you make yourselves wholly true.
Courage is a mere matter of course among any ordinarily well-born
youths; but neither truth nor gentleness is matter of course. You must
bind them like shields about your necks; you must write them on the
tables of your hearts. Though it be not exacted of you, yet exact it of
yourselves, this vow of stainless truth. Your hearts are, if you leave
them unstirred, as tombs in which a god lies buried. Vow yourselves
crusaders to redeem that sacred sepulchre. And remember, before all
things--for no other memory will be so protective of you--that the
highest law of this knightly truth is that under which it is vowed to
women. Whomsoever else you deceive, whomsoever you injure, whomsoever
you leave unaided, you must not deceive, nor injure, nor leave unaided
according to your power, any woman of whatever rank. Believe me, every
virtue of the higher phases of manly character begins in this;--in truth
and modesty before the face of all maidens; in truth and pity, or truth
and reverence, to all womanhood.
And now let me turn for a moment to you,--wives and maidens, who are the
souls of soldiers; to you,--mothers, who have devoted your children to
the great hierarchy of war. Let me ask you to consider what part you
have to take for the aid of those who love you; for if you fail in your
part they cannot fulfil theirs; such absolute helpmates you are that mo
man can stand without that help, nor labour in his own strength.
I know your hearts, and that the truth of them never fails when an hour
of trial comes which you recognise for such. But you know not when the
hour of trial first finds you, nor when it verily finds you. You imagine
that you are only called upon to wait and to suffer; to surrender and to
mourn. You know that you must not weaken the hearts of your husbands and
lovers, even by the one fear of which those hearts are capable,--the
fear of parting from you, or of causing you grief. Through weary years
of separation, through fearful expectancies of unknown fate; through the
tenfold bitterness of the sorrow which might so easily have been joy,
and the tenfold yearning for glorious life struck down in its
prime--through all these agonies you fail not, and never will fail. But
your trial is not in these. To be heroic in danger is little;--you are
Englishwomen. To be heroic in change and sway of fortune is little;--for
do you not love? To be patient through the great chasm and pause of loss
is little;--for do you not still love in heaven? But to be heroic in
happiness; to bear yourselves gravely and righteously in the dazzling of
the sunshine of morning; not to forget the God in whom you trust, when
He gives you most; not to fail those who trust you, when they seem to
need you least; this is the difficult fortitude. It is not in the pining
of absence, not in the peril of battle, not in the wasting of sickness,
that your prayer should be most passionate, or your guardianship most
tender. Pray, mothers and maidens, for your young soldiers in the bloom
of their pride; pray for them, while the only dangers round them are in
their own wayward wills; watch you, and pray, when they have to face,
not death, but temptation. But it is this fortitude also for which there
is the crowning reward. Believe me, the whole course and character of
your lovers' lives is in your hands; what you would have them be, they
shall be, if you not only desire to have them so, but deserve to have
them so; for they are but mirrors in which you will see yourselves
imaged. If you are frivolous, they will be so also; if you have no
understanding of the scope of their duty, they also will forget it; they
will listen,--they _can_ listen,--to no other interpretation of it than
that uttered from your lips. Bid them be brave;--they will be brave for
you; bid them be cowards; and how noble soever they be;--they will quail
for you. Bid them be wise, and they will be wise for you; mock at their
counsel, they will be fools for you: such and so absolute is your rule
over them. You fancy, perhaps, as you have been told so often, that a
wife's rule should only be over her husband's house, not over his mind.
Ah, no! the true rule is just the reverse of that; a true wife, in her
husband's house, is his servant; it is in his heart that she is queen.
Whatever of the best he can conceive, it is her part to be; whatever of
highest he can hope, it is hers to promise; all that is dark in him she
must purge into purity; all that is failing in him she must strengthen
into truth: from her, through all the world's clamour, he must win his
praise; in her, through all the world's warfare, he must find his peace.
And, now, but one word more. You may wonder, perhaps, that I have spoken
all this night in praise of war. Yet, truly, if it might be, I, for one,
would fain join in the cadence of hammer-strokes that should beat swords
into ploughshares: and that this cannot be, is not the fault of us men.
It is _your_ fault. Wholly yours. Only by your command, or by your
permission, can any contest take place among us. And the real, final,
reason for all the poverty, misery, and rage of battle, throughout
Europe, is simply that you women, however good, however religious,
however self-sacrificing for those whom you love, are too selfish and
too thoughtless to take pains for any creature out of your own immediate
circles. You fancy that you are sorry for the pain of others. Now I just
tell you this, that if the usual course of war, instead of unroofing
peasants' houses, and ravaging peasants' fields, merely broke the china
upon your own drawing-room tables, no war in civilised countries would
last a week. I tell you more, that at whatever moment you chose to put a
period to war, you could do it with less trouble than you take any day
to go out to dinner. You know, or at least you might know if you would
think, that every battle you hear of has made many widows and orphans.
We have, none of us, heart enough truly to mourn with these. But at
least we might put on the outer symbols of mourning with them. Let but
every Christian lady who has conscience toward God, vow that she will
mourn, at least outwardly, for His killed creatures. Your praying is
useless, and your churchgoing mere mockery of God, if you have not plain
obedience in you enough for this. Let every lady in the upper classes of
civilised Europe simply vow that, while any cruel war proceeds, she will
wear _black_;--a mute's black,--with no jewel, no ornament, no excuse
for, or evasion into, prettiness.--I tell you again, no war would last a
week.
And lastly. You women of England are all now shrieking with one
voice,--you and your clergymen together,--because you hear of your
Bibles being attacked. If you choose to obey your Bibles, you will never
care who attacks them. It is just because you never fulfil a single
downright precept of the Book, that you are so careful for its credit:
and just because you don't care to obey its whole words, that you are so
particular about the letters of them. The Bible tells you to dress
plainly,--and you are mad for finery; the Bible tells you to have pity
on the poor,--and you crush them under your carriage-wheels; the Bible
tells you to do judgment and justice,--and you do not know, nor care to
know, so much as what the Bible word 'justice means.' Do but learn so
much of God's truth as that comes to; know what He means when He tells
you to be just: and teach your sons, that their bravery is but a fool's
boast, and their deeds but a firebrand's tossing, unless they are indeed
Just men, and Perfect in the Fear of God;--and you will soon have no
more war, unless it be indeed such as is willed by Him, of whom, though
Prince of Peace, it is also written, 'In Righteousness He doth judge,
and make war.'
FOOTNOTES:
[6] I do not care to refer to the journal quoted, because the article
was unworthy of its general tone, though in order to enable the audience
to verify the quoted sentence, I left the number containing it on the
table, when I delivered this lecture. But a saying of Baron Liebig's,
quoted at the head of a leader on the same subject in the 'Daily
Telegraph' of January 11, 1866, summarily digests and presents the
maximum folly of modern thought in this respect. 'Civilization,' says
the Baron, 'is the economy of power, and English power is coal.' Not
altogether so, my chemical friend. Civilization is the making of civil
persons, which is a kind of distillation of which alembics are
incapable, and does not at all imply the turning of a small company of
gentlemen into a large company of ironmongers. And English power (what
little of it may be left), is by no means coal, but, indeed, of that
which, 'when the whole world turns to coal, then chiefly lives.'
MUNERA PULVERIS
SIX ESSAYS
ON THE ELEMENTS OF
POLITICAL ECONOMY
PREFACE.
The following pages contain, I believe, the first accurate analysis of
the laws of Political Economy which has been published in England. Many
treatises, within their scope, correct, have appeared in contradiction
of the views popularly received; but no exhaustive examination of the
subject was possible to any person unacquainted with the value of the
products of the highest industries, commonly called the "Fine Arts;" and
no one acquainted with the nature of those industries has, so far as I
know, attempted, or even approached, the task.
So that, to the date (1863) when these Essays were published, not only
the chief conditions of the production of wealth had remained unstated,
but the nature of wealth itself had never been defined. "Every one has a
notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by
wealth," wrote Mr. Mill, in the outset of his treatise; and contentedly
proceeded, as if a chemist should proceed to investigate the laws of
chemistry without endeavouring to ascertain the nature of fire or water,
because every one had a notion of them, "sufficiently correct for common
purposes."
But even that apparently indisputable statement was untrue. There is not
one person in ten thousand who has a notion sufficiently correct, even
for the commonest purposes, of "what is meant" by wealth; still less of
what wealth everlastingly _is_, whether we mean it or not; which it is
the business of every student of economy to ascertain. We, indeed, know
(either by experience or in imagination) what it is to be able to
provide ourselves with luxurious food, and handsome clothes; and if Mr.
Mill had thought that wealth consisted only in these, or in the means
of obtaining these, it would have been easy for him to have so defined
it with perfect scientific accuracy. But he knew better: he knew that
some kinds of wealth consisted in the possession, or power of obtaining,
other things than these; but, having, in the studies of his life, no
clue to the principles of essential value, he was compelled to take
public opinion as the ground of his science; and the public, of course,
willingly accepted the notion of a science founded on their opinions.
I had, on the contrary, a singular advantage, not only in the greater
extent of the field of investigation opened to me by my daily pursuits,
but in the severity of some lessons I accidentally received in the
course of them.
When, in the winter of 1851, I was collecting materials for my work on
Venetian architecture, three of the pictures of Tintoret on the roof of
the School of St. Roch were hanging down in ragged fragments, mixed with
lath and plaster, round the apertures made by the fall of three Austrian
heavy shot. The city of Venice was not, it appeared, rich enough to
repair the damage that winter; and buckets were set on the floor of the
upper room of the school to catch the rain, which not only fell directly
through the shot holes, but found its way, owing to the generally
pervious state of the roof, through many of the canvases of Tintoret's
in other parts of the ceiling.
It was a lesson to me, as I have just said, no less direct than severe;
for I knew already at that time (though I have not ventured to assert,
until recently at Oxford,) that the pictures of Tintoret in Venice were
accurately the most precious articles of wealth in Europe, being the
best existing productions of human industry. Now at the time that three
of them were thus fluttering in moist rags from the roof they had
adorned, the shops of the Rue Rivoli at Paris were, in obedience
to a steadily-increasing public Demand, beginning to show a
steadily-increasing Supply of elaborately-finished and coloured
lithographs, representing the modern dances of delight, among which the
cancan has since taken a distinguished place.
The labour employed on the stone of one of these lithographs is very
much more than Tintoret was in the habit of giving to a picture of
average size. Considering labour as the origin of value, therefore, the
stone so highly wrought would be of greater value than the picture; and
since also it is capable of producing a large number of immediately
saleable or exchangeable impressions, for which the "demand" is
constant, the city of Paris naturally supposed itself, and on all
hitherto believed or stated principles of political economy, was,
infinitely richer in the possession of a large number of these
lithographic stones, (not to speak of countless oil pictures and marble
carvings of similar character), than Venice in the possession of those
rags of mildewed canvas, flaunting in the south wind and its salt rain.
And, accordingly, Paris provided (without thought of the expense) lofty
arcades of shops, and rich recesses of innumerable private apartments,
for the protection of these better treasures of hers from the weather.
Yet, all the while, Paris was not the richer for these possessions.
Intrinsically, the delightful lithographs were not wealth, but polar
contraries of wealth. She was, by the exact quantity of labour she had
given to produce these, sunk below, instead of above, absolute Poverty.
They not only were false Riches--they were true _Debt_, which had to be
paid at last--and the present aspect of the Rue Rivoli shows in what
manner.
And the faded stains of the Venetian ceiling, all the while, were
absolute and inestimable wealth. Useless to their possessors as
forgotten treasure in a buried city, they had in them, nevertheless, the
intrinsic and eternal nature of wealth; and Venice, still possessing the
ruins of them, was a rich city; only, the Venetians had _not_ a notion
sufficiently correct even for the very common purpose of inducing them
to put slates on a roof, of what was "meant by wealth."
The vulgar economist would reply that his science had nothing to do with
the qualities of pictures, but with their exchange-value only; and that
his business was, exclusively, to consider whether the remains of
Tintoret were worth as many ten-and-sixpences as the impressions which
might be taken from the lithographic stones.
But he would not venture, without reserve, to make such an answer, if
the example be taken in horses, instead of pictures. The most dull
economist would perceive, and admit, that a gentleman who had a fine
stud of horses was absolutely richer than one who had only ill-bred and
broken-winded ones. He would instinctively feel, though his
pseudo-science had never taught him, that the price paid for the
animals, in either case, did not alter the fact of their worth: that the
good horse, though it might have been bought by chance for a few
guineas, was not therefore less valuable, nor the owner of the galled
jade any the richer, because he had given a hundred for it.
So that the economist, in saying that his science takes no account of
the qualities of pictures, merely signifies that he cannot conceive of
any quality of essential badness or goodness existing in pictures; and
that he is incapable of investigating the laws of wealth in such
articles. Which is the fact. But, being incapable of defining intrinsic
value in pictures, it follows that he must be equally helpless to define
the nature of intrinsic value in painted glass, or in painted pottery,
or in patterned stuffs, or in any other national produce requiring true
human ingenuity. Nay, though capable of conceiving the idea of intrinsic
value with respect to beasts of burden, no economist has endeavoured to
state the general principles of National Economy, even with regard to
the horse or the ass. And, in fine, _the modern political economists
have been, without exception, incapable of apprehending the nature of
intrinsic value at all_.
And the first specialty of the following treatise consists in its giving
at the outset, and maintaining as the foundation of all subsequent
reasoning, a definition of Intrinsic Value, and Intrinsic
Contrary-of-Value; the negative power having been left by former writers
entirely out of account, and the positive power left entirely undefined.
But, secondly: the modern economist, ignoring intrinsic value, and
accepting the popular estimate of things as the only ground of his
science, has imagined himself to have ascertained the constant laws
regulating the relation of this popular demand to its supply; or, at
least, to have proved that demand and supply were connected by heavenly
balance, over which human foresight had no power. I chanced, by singular
coincidence, lately to see this theory of the law of demand and supply
brought to as sharp practical issue in another great siege, as I had
seen the theories of intrinsic value brought, in the siege of Venice.
I had the honour of being on the committee under the presidentship of
the Lord Mayor of London, for the victualling of Paris after her
surrender. It became, at one period of our sittings, a question of vital
importance at what moment the law of demand and supply would come into
operation, and what the operation of it would exactly be: the demand, on
this occasion, being very urgent indeed; that of several millions of
people within a few hours of utter starvation, for any kind of food
whatsoever. Nevertheless, it was admitted, in the course of debate, to
be probable that the divine principle of demand and supply might find
itself at the eleventh hour, and some minutes over, in want of carts and
horses; and we ventured so far to interfere with the divine principle as
to provide carts and horses, with haste which proved, happily, in time
for the need; but not a moment in advance of it. It was farther
recognized by the committee that the divine principle of demand and
supply would commence its operations by charging the poor of Paris
twelve-pence for a penny's worth of whatever they wanted; and would end
its operations by offering them twelve-pence worth for a penny, of
whatever they didn't want. Whereupon it was concluded by the committee
that the tiny knot, on this special occasion, was scarcely "_dignus
vindice_," by the divine principle of demand and supply: and that we
would venture, for once, in a profane manner, to provide for the poor of
Paris what they wanted, when they wanted it. Which, to the value of the
sums entrusted to us, it will be remembered we succeeded in doing.
But the fact is that the so-called "law," which was felt to be false in
this case of extreme exigence, is alike false in cases of less
exigence. It is false always, and everywhere. Nay to such an extent is
its existence imaginary, that the vulgar economists are not even agreed
in their account of it; for some of them mean by it, only that prices
are regulated by the relation between demand and supply, which is partly
true; and others mean that the relation itself is one with the process
of which it is unwise to interfere; a statement which is not only, as in
the above instance, untrue; but accurately the reverse of the truth: for
all wise economy, political or domestic, consists in the resolved
maintenance of a given relation between supply and demand, other than
the instinctive, or (directly) natural, one.
Similarly, vulgar political economy asserts for a "law" that wages are
determined by competition.
Now I pay my servants exactly what wages I think necessary to make them
comfortable. The sum is not determined at all by competition; but
sometimes by my notions of their comfort and deserving, and sometimes by
theirs. If I were to become penniless to-morrow, several of them would
certainly still serve me for nothing.
In both the real and supposed cases the so-called "law" of vulgar
political economy is absolutely set at defiance. But I cannot set the
law of gravitation at defiance, nor determine that in my house I will
not allow ice to melt, when the temperature is above thirty-two degrees.
A true law outside of my house, will remain a true one inside of it. It
is not, therefore, a law of Nature that wages are determined by
competition. Still less is it a law of State, or we should not now be
disputing about it publicly, to the loss of many millions of pounds to
the country. The fact which vulgar economists have been weak enough to
imagine a law, is only that, for the last twenty years a number of very
senseless persons have attempted to determine wages in that manner; and
have, in a measure, succeeded in occasionally doing so.
Both in definition of the elements of wealth, and in statement of the
laws which govern its distribution, modern political economy has been
thus absolutely incompetent, or absolutely false. And the following
treatise is not, as it has been asserted with dull pertinacity, an
endeavour to put sentiment in the place of science; but it contains the
exposure of what insolently pretended to be a science; and the
definition, hitherto unassailed--and I do not fear to assert,
unassailable--of the material elements with which political economy has
to deal, and the moral principles in which it consists; being not itself
a science, but "a system of conduct founded on the sciences, and
impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture." Which is
only to say, that industry, frugality, and discretion, the three
foundations of economy, are moral qualities, and cannot be attained
without moral discipline: a flat truism, the reader may think, thus
stated, yet a truism which is denied both vociferously, and in all
endeavour, by the entire populace of Europe; who are at present hopeful
of obtaining wealth by tricks of trade, without industry; who,
possessing wealth, have lost in the use of it even the conception,--how
much more the habit?--of frugality; and who, in the choice of the
elements of wealth, cannot so much as lose--since they have never
hitherto at any time possessed,--the faculty of discretion.
Now if the teachers of the pseudo-science of economy had ventured to
state distinctly even the poor conclusions they had reached on the
subjects respecting which it is most dangerous for a populace to be
indiscreet, they would have soon found, by the use made of them, which
were true, and which false.
But on main and vital questions, no political economist has hitherto
ventured to state one guiding principle. I will instance three subjects
of universal importance. National Dress. National Rent. National Debt.
Now if we are to look in any quarter for a systematic and exhaustive
statement of the principles of a given science, it must certainly be
from its Professor at Cambridge.
Take the last edition of Professor Fawcett's _Manual of Political
Economy_, and forming, first clearly in your mind these three following
questions, see if you can find an answer to them.
I. Does expenditure of capital on the production of luxurious dress and
furniture tend to make a nation rich or poor?
II. Does the payment, by the nation, of a tax on its land, or on the
produce of it, to a certain number of private persons, to be expended by
them as they please, tend to make the nation rich or poor?
III. Does the payment, by the nation, for an indefinite period, of
interest on money borrowed from private persons, tend to make the nation
rich or poor?
These three questions are, all of them, perfectly simple, and primarily
vital. Determine these, and you have at once a basis for national
conduct in all important particulars. Leave them undetermined, and there
is no limit to the distress which may be brought upon the people by the
cunning of its knaves, and the folly of its multitudes.
I will take the three in their order.
I. Dress. The general impression on the public mind at this day is, that
the luxury of the rich in dress and furniture is a benefit to the poor.
Probably not even the blindest of our political economists would venture
to assert this in so many words. But where do they assert the contrary?
During the entire period of the reign of the late Emperor it was assumed
in France, as the first principle of fiscal government, that a large
portion of the funds received as rent from the provincial labourer
should be expended in the manufacture of ladies' dresses in Paris. Where
is the political economist in France, or England, who ventured to assert
the conclusions of his science as adverse to this system? As early as
the year 1857 I had done my best to show the nature of the error, and to
give warning of its danger;[7] but not one of the men who had the
foolish ears of the people intent on their words, dared to follow me in
speaking what would have been an offence to the powers of trade; and the
powers of trade in Paris had their full way for fourteen years
more,--with this result, to-day,--as told us in precise and curt terms
by the Minister of Public Instruction,--[8]
"We have replaced glory by gold, work by speculation, faith
and honour by scepticism. To absolve or glorify immorality;
to make much of loose women; to gratify our eyes with
luxury, our ears with the tales of orgies; to aid in the
manoeuvres of public robbers, or to applaud them; to laugh
at morality, and only believe in success; to love nothing
but pleasure, adore nothing but force; to replace work with
a fecundity of fancies; to speak without thinking; to prefer
noise to glory; to erect sneering into a system, and lying
into an institution--is this the spectacle that we have
seen?--is this the society that we have been?"
Of course, other causes, besides the desire of luxury in furniture and
dress, have been at work to produce such consequences; but the most
active cause of all has been the passion for these; passion unrebuked by
the clergy, and, for the most part, provoked by economists, as
advantageous to commerce; nor need we think that such results have been
arrived at in France only; we are ourselves following rapidly on the
same road. France, in her old wars with us, never was so fatally our
enemy as she has been in the fellowship of fashion, and the freedom of
trade: nor, to my mind, is any fact recorded of Assyrian or Roman luxury
more ominous, or ghastly, than one which came to my knowledge a few
weeks ago, in England; a respectable and well-to-do father and mother,
in a quiet north country town, being turned into the streets in their
old age, at the suit of their only daughter's milliner.
II. Rent. The following account of the real nature of rent is given,
quite accurately, by Professor Fawcett, at page 112 of the last edition
of his _Political Economy_:--
"Every country has probably been subjugated, and grants of
vanquished territory were the ordinary rewards which the
conquering chief bestowed upon his more distinguished
followers. Lands obtained by force had to be defended by
force; and before law had asserted her supremacy, and
property was made secure, no baron was able to retain his
possessions, unless those who lived on his estates were
prepared to defend them....[9] As property became secure,
and landlords felt that the power of the State would protect
them in all the rights of property, every vestige of these
feudal tenures was abolished, and the relation between
landlord and tenant has thus become purely commercial. A
landlord offers his land to any one who is willing to take
it; he is anxious to receive the highest rent he can obtain.
What are the principles which regulate the rent which may
thus be paid?"
These principles the Professor goes on contentedly to investigate, never
appearing to contemplate for an instant the possibility of the first
principle in the whole business--the maintenance, by force, of the
possession of land obtained by force, being ever called in question by
any human mind. It is, nevertheless, the nearest task of our day to
discover how far original theft may be justly encountered by reactionary
theft, or whether reactionary theft be indeed theft at all; and farther,
what, excluding either original or corrective theft, are the just
conditions of the possession of land.
III. Debt. Long since, when, a mere boy, I used to sit silently
listening to the conversation of the London merchants who, all of them
good and sound men of business, were wont occasionally to meet round my
father's dining-table; nothing used to surprise me more than the
conviction openly expressed by some of the soundest and most cautious of
them, that "if there were no National debt they would not know what to
do with their money, or where to place it safely." At the 399th page of
his Manual, you will find Professor Fawcett giving exactly the same
statement.
"In our own country, this certainty against risk of loss is
provided by the public funds;"
and again, as on the question of rent, the Professor proceeds, without
appearing for an instant to be troubled by any misgiving that there may
be an essential difference between the effects on national prosperity of
a Government paying interest on money which it spent in fire works
fifty years ago, and of a Government paying interest on money to be
employed to-day on productive labour.
That difference, which the reader will find stated and examined at
length, in §§ 127-129 of this volume, it is the business of economists,
before approaching any other question relating to government, fully to
explain. And the paragraphs to which I refer, contain, I believe, the
only definite statement of it hitherto made.
The practical result of the absence of any such statement is, that
capitalists, when they do not know what to do with their money, persuade
the peasants, in various countries, that the said peasants want guns to
shoot each other with. The peasants accordingly borrow guns, out of the
manufacture of which the capitalists get a per-centage, and men of
science much amusement and credit. Then the peasants shoot a certain
number of each other, until they get tired; and burn each other's homes
down in various places. Then they put the guns back into towers,
arsenals, &c., in ornamental patterns; (and the victorious party put
also some ragged flags in churches). And then the capitalists tax both,
annually, ever afterwards, to pay interest on the loan of the guns and
gunpowder. And that is what capitalists call "knowing what to do with
their money;" and what commercial men in general call "practical" as
opposed to "sentimental" Political Economy.
Eleven years ago, in the summer of 1860, perceiving then fully, (as
Carlyle had done long before), what distress was about to come on the
said populace of Europe through these errors of their teachers, I began
to do the best I might, to combat them, in the series of papers for the
_Cornhill Magazine_, since published under the title of _Unto this
Last_. The editor of the Magazine was my friend, and ventured the
insertion of the three first essays; but the outcry against them became
then too strong for any editor to endure, and he wrote to me, with great
discomfort to himself, and many apologies to me, that the Magazine must
only admit one Economical Essay more.
I made, with his permission, the last one longer than the rest, and gave
it blunt conclusion as well as I could--and so the book now stands; but,
as I had taken not a little pains with the Essays, and knew that they
contained better work than most of my former writings, and more
important truths than all of them put together, this violent reprobation
of them by the _Cornhill_ public set me still more gravely thinking;
and, after turning the matter hither and thither in my mind for two
years more, I resolved to make it the central work of my life to write
an exhaustive treatise on Political Economy. It would not have been
begun, at that time, however, had not the editor of _Fraser's Magazine_
written to me, saying that he believed there was something in my
theories, and would risk the admission of what I chose to write on this
dangerous subject; whereupon, cautiously, and at intervals, during the
winter of 1862-63, I sent him, and he ventured to print, the preface of
the intended work, divided into four chapters. Then, though the Editor
had not wholly lost courage, the Publisher indignantly interfered; and
the readers of _Fraser_, as those of the _Cornhill_, were protected, for
that time, from farther disturbance on my part. Subsequently, loss of
health, family distress, and various untoward chances, prevented my
proceeding with the body of the book;--seven years have passed
ineffectually; and I am now fain to reprint the Preface by itself, under
the title which I intended for the whole.
Not discontentedly; being, at this time of life, resigned to the sense
of failure; and also, because the preface is complete in itself as a
body of definitions, which I now require for reference in the course of
my _Letters to Workmen_; by which also, in time, I trust less formally
to accomplish the chief purpose of _Munera Pulveris_, practically summed
in the two paragraphs 27 and 28: namely, to examine the moral results
and possible rectifications of the laws of distribution of wealth, which
have prevailed hitherto without debate among men. Laws which ordinary
economists assume to be inviolable, and which ordinary socialists
imagine to be on the eve of total abrogation. But they are both alike
deceived. The laws which at present regulate the possession of wealth
are unjust, because the motives which provoke to its attainment are
impure; but no socialism can effect their abrogation, unless it can
abrogate also covetousness and pride, which it is by no means yet in the
way of doing. Nor can the change be, in any case, to the extent that has
been imagined. Extremes of luxury may be forbidden, and agony of penury
relieved; but nature intends, and the utmost efforts of socialism will
not hinder the fulfilment of her intention, that a provident person
shall always be richer than a spendthrift; and an ingenious one more
comfortable than a fool. But, indeed, the adjustment of the possession
of the products of industry depends more on their nature than their
quantity, and on wise determination therefore of the aims of industry.
A nation which desires true wealth, desires it moderately, and can
therefore distribute it with kindness, and possess it with pleasure; but
one which desires false wealth, desires it immoderately, and can neither
dispense it with justice, nor enjoy it in peace.
Therefore, needing, constantly in my present work, to refer to the
definitions of true and false wealth given in the following Essays, I
republish them with careful revisal. They were written abroad; partly at
Milan, partly during a winter residence on the south-eastern slope of
the Mont Saléve, near Geneva; and sent to London in as legible MS. as I
could write; but I never revised the press sheets, and have been
obliged, accordingly, now to amend the text here and there, or correct
it in unimportant particulars. Wherever any modification has involved
change in the sense, it is enclosed in square brackets; and what few
explanatory comments I have felt it necessary to add, have been
indicated in the same manner. No explanatory comments, I regret to
perceive, will suffice to remedy the mischief of my affected
concentration of language, into the habit of which I fell by thinking
too long over particular passages, in many and many a solitary walk
towards the mountains of Bonneville or Annecy. But I never intended the
book for anything else than a dictionary of reference, and that for
earnest readers; who will, I have good hope, if they find what they
want in it, forgive the affectedly curt expressions.
The Essays, as originally published, were, as I have just stated, four
in number. I have now, more conveniently, divided the whole into six
chapters; and (as I purpose throughout this edition of my works)
numbered the paragraphs.
I inscribed the first volume of this series to the friend who aided me
in chief sorrow. Let me inscribe the second to the friend and guide who
has urged me to all chief labour, THOMAS CARLYLE.
* * * * *
I would that some better means were in my power of showing reverence to
the man who alone, of all our masters of literature, has written,
without thought of himself, what he knew it to be needful for the people
of his time to hear, if the will to hear were in them: whom, therefore,
as the time draws near when his task must be ended, Republican and
Free-thoughted England assaults with impatient reproach; and out of the
abyss of her cowardice in policy and dishonour in trade, sets the hacks
of her literature to speak evil, grateful to her ears, of the Solitary
Teacher who has asked her to be brave for the help of Man, and just, for
the love of God.
_Denmark Hill,_
_25th November, 1871._
FOOTNOTES:
[7] _Political Economy of Art._ (Smith and Elder, 1857, pp. 65-76.)
[8] See report of speech of M. Jules Simon, in _Pall Mall Gazette_ of
October 27, 1871.
[9] The omitted sentences merely amplify the statement; they in no wise
modify it.
MUNERA PULVERIS.
"Te maris et terræ numeroque carentis arenæ
Mensorem cohibent, Archyta,
Pulveris exigui prope litus parva Matinum
Munera."
CHAPTER I.
DEFINITIONS.
1. As domestic economy regulates the acts and habits of a household,
Political economy regulates those of a society or State, with reference
to the means of its maintenance.
Political economy is neither an art nor a science; but a system of
conduct and legislature, founded on the sciences, directing the arts,
and impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture.
2. The study which lately in England has been called Political Economy
is in reality nothing more than the investigation of some accidental
phenomena of modern commercial operations, nor has it been true in its
investigation even of these. It has no connection whatever with
political economy, as understood and treated of by the great thinkers of
past ages; and as long as its unscholarly and undefined statements are
allowed to pass under the same name, every word written on the subject
by those thinkers--and chiefly the words of Plato, Xenophon, Cicero and
Bacon--must be nearly useless to mankind. The reader must not,
therefore, be surprised at the care and insistance with which I have
retained the literal and earliest sense of all important terms used in
these papers; for a word is usually well made at the time it is first
wanted; its youngest meaning has in it the full strength of its youth:
subsequent senses are commonly warped or weakened; and as all careful
thinkers are sure to have used their words accurately, the first
condition, in order to be able to avail our selves of their sayings at
all, is firm definition of terms.
3. By the "maintenance" of a State is to be understood the support of
its population in healthy and happy life; and the increase of their
numbers, so far as that increase is consistent with their happiness. It
is not the object of political economy to increase the numbers of a
nation at the cost of common health or comfort; nor to increase
indefinitely the comfort of individuals, by sacrifice of surrounding
lives, or possibilities of life.
4. The assumption which lies at the root of nearly all erroneous
reasoning on political economy,--namely, that its object is to
accumulate money or exchangeable property,--may be shown in a few words
to be without foundation. For no economist would admit national economy
to be legitimate which proposed to itself only the building of a pyramid
of gold. He would declare the gold to be wasted, were it to remain in
the monumental form, and would say it ought to be employed. But to what
end? Either it must be used only to gain more gold, and build a larger
pyramid, or for some purpose other than the gaining of gold. And this
other purpose, however at first apprehended, will be found to resolve
itself finally into the service of man;--that is to say, the extension,
defence, or comfort of his life. The golden pyramid may perhaps be
providently built, perhaps improvidently; but the wisdom or folly of the
accumulation can only be determined by our having first clearly stated
the aim of all economy, namely, the extension of life.
If the accumulation of money, or of exchangeable property, were a
certain means of extending existence, it would be useless, in discussing
economical questions, to fix our attention upon the more distant
object--life--instead of the immediate one--money. But it is not so.
Money may sometimes be accumulated at the cost of life, or by
limitations of it; that is to say, either by hastening the deaths of
men, or preventing their births. It is therefore necessary to keep
clearly in view the ultimate object of economy; and to determine the
expediency of minor operations with reference to that ulterior end.
5. It has been just stated that the object of political economy is the
continuance not only of life, but of healthy and happy life. But all
true happiness is both a consequence and cause of life: it is a sign of
its vigor, and source of its continuance. All true suffering is in like
manner a consequence and cause of death. I shall therefore, in future,
use the word "Life" singly: but let it be understood to include in its
signification the happiness and power of the entire human nature, body
and soul.
6. That human nature, as its Creator made it, and maintains it wherever
His laws are observed, is entirely harmonious. No physical error can be
more profound, no moral error more dangerous, than that involved in the
monkish doctrine of the opposition of body to soul. No soul can be
perfect in an imperfect body: no body perfect without perfect soul.
Every right action and true thought sets the seal of its beauty on
person and face; every wrong action and foul thought its seal of
distortion; and the various aspects of humanity might be read as plainly
as a printed history, were it not that the impressions are so complex
that it must always in some cases (and, in the present state of our
knowledge, in all cases) be impossible to decipher them completely.
Nevertheless, the face of a consistently just, and of a consistently
unjust person, may always be rightly distinguished at a glance; and if
the qualities are continued by descent through a generation or two,
there arises a complete distinction of race. Both moral and physical
qualities are communicated by descent, far more than they can be
developed by education; (though both may be destroyed by want of
education), and there is as yet no ascertained limit to the nobleness of
person and mind which the human creature may attain, by persevering
observance of the laws of God respecting its birth and training.
7. We must therefore yet farther define the aim of political economy to
be "The multiplication of human life at the highest standard." It might
at first seem questionable whether we should endeavour to maintain a
small number of persons of the highest type of beauty and intelligence,
or a larger number of an inferior class. But I shall be able to show in
the sequel, that the way to maintain the largest number is first to aim
at the highest standard. Determine the noblest type of man, and aim
simply at maintaining the largest possible number of persons of that
class, and it will be found that the largest possible number of every
healthy subordinate class must necessarily be produced also.
8. The perfect type of manhood, as just stated, involves the perfections
(whatever we may hereafter determine these to be) of his body,
affections, and intelligence. The material things, therefore, which it
is the object of political economy to produce and use, (or accumulate
for use,) are things which serve either to sustain and comfort the body,
or exercise rightly the affections and form the intelligence.[10]
Whatever truly serves either of these purposes is "useful" to man,
wholesome, healthful, helpful, or holy. By seeking such things, man
prolongs and increases his life upon the earth.
On the other hand, whatever does not serve either of these
purposes,--much more whatever counteracts them,--is in like manner
useless to man, unwholesome, unhelpful, or unholy; and by seeking such
things man shortens and diminishes his life upon the earth.
9. And neither with respect to things useful or useless can man's
estimate of them alter their nature. Certain substances being good for
his food, and others noxious to him, what he thinks or wishes respecting
them can neither change, nor prevent, their power. If he eats corn, he
will live; if nightshade, he will die. If he produce or make good and
beautiful things, they will _Re-Create_ him; (note the solemnity and
weight of the word); if bad and ugly things, they will "corrupt" or
"break in pieces"--that is, in the exact degree of their power, Kill
him. For every hour of labour, however enthusiastic or well intended,
which he spends for that which is not bread, so much possibility of life
is lost to him. His fancies, likings, beliefs, however brilliant,
eager, or obstinate, are of no avail if they are set on a false object.
Of all that he has laboured for, the eternal law of heaven and earth
measures out to him for reward, to the utmost atom, that part which he
ought to have laboured for, and withdraws from him (or enforces on him,
it may be) inexorably, that part which he ought not to have laboured for
until, on his summer threshing-floor, stands his heap of corn; little or
much, not according to his labour, but to his discretion. No "commercial
arrangements," no painting of surfaces, nor alloying of substances, will
avail him a pennyweight. Nature asks of him calmly and inevitably, What
have you found, or formed--the right thing or the wrong? By the right
thing you shall live; by the wrong you shall die.
10. To thoughtless persons it seems otherwise. The world looks to them
as if they could cozen it out of some ways and means of life. But they
cannot cozen IT: they can only cozen their neighbours. The world is not
to be cheated of a grain; not so much as a breath of its air can be
drawn surreptitiously. For every piece of wise work done, so much life
is granted; for every piece of foolish work, nothing; for every piece of
wicked work, so much death is allotted. This is as sure as the courses
of day and night. But when the means of life are once produced, men, by
their various struggles and industries of accumulation or exchange, may
variously gather, waste, restrain, or distribute them; necessitating, in
proportion to the waste or restraint, accurately, so much more death.
The rate and range of additional death are measured by the rate and
range of waste; and are inevitable;--the only question (determined
mostly by fraud in peace, and force in war) is, Who is to die, and how?
11. Such being the everlasting law of human existence, the essential
work of the political economist is to determine what are in reality
useful or life-giving things, and by what degrees and kinds of labour
they are attainable and distributable. This investigation divides itself
under three great heads;--the studies, namely, of the phenomena, first,
of WEALTH; secondly, of MONEY; and thirdly, of RICHES.
These terms are often used as synonymous, but they signify entirely
different things. "Wealth" consists of things in themselves valuable;
"Money," of documentary claims to the possession of such things; and
"Riches" is a relative term, expressing the magnitude of the possessions
of one person or society as compared with those of other persons or
societies.
The study of Wealth is a province of natural science:--it deals with the
essential properties of things.
The study of Money is a province of commercial science:--it deals with
conditions of engagement and exchange.
The study of Riches is a province of moral science:--it deals with the
due relations of men to each other in regard of material possessions;
and with the just laws of their association for purposes of labour.
I shall in this first chapter shortly sketch out the range of subjects
which will come before us as we follow these three branches of inquiry.
12. And first of WEALTH, which, it has been said, consists of things
essentially valuable. We now, therefore, need a definition of "value."
"Value" signifies the strength, or "availing" of anything towards the
sustaining of life, and is always twofold; that is to say, primarily,
INTRINSIC, and secondarily, EFFECTUAL.
The reader must, by anticipation, be warned against confusing value with
cost, or with price. _Value is the life-giving power of anything; cost,
the quantity of labour required to produce it; price, the quantity of
labour which its possessor will take in exchange for it._[11] Cost and
price are commercial conditions, to be studied under the head of money.
13. Intrinsic value is the absolute power of anything to support life. A
sheaf of wheat of given quality and weight has in it a measurable power
of sustaining the substance of the body; a cubic foot of pure air, a
fixed power of sustaining its warmth; and a cluster of flowers of given
beauty a fixed power of enlivening or animating the senses and heart.
It does not in the least affect the intrinsic value of the wheat, the
air, or the flowers, that men refuse or despise them. Used or not, their
own power is in them, and that particular power is in nothing else.
14. But in order that this value of theirs may become effectual, a
certain state is necessary in the recipient of it. The digesting,
breathing, and perceiving functions must be perfect in the human
creature before the food, air, or flowers can become of their full value
to it. _The production of effectual value, therefore, always involves
two needs: first, the production of a thing essentially useful; then the
production of the capacity to use it._ Where the intrinsic value and
acceptant capacity come together there is Effectual value, or wealth;
where there is either no intrinsic value, or no acceptant capacity,
there is no effectual value; that is to say, no wealth. A horse is no
wealth to us if we cannot ride, nor a picture if we cannot see, _nor can
any noble thing be wealth, except to a noble person_. As the aptness of
the user increases, the effectual value of the thing used increases; and
in its entirety can co-exist only with perfect skill of use, and fitness
of nature.
15. Valuable material things may be conveniently referred to five heads:
(i.) Land, with its associated air, water, and organisms.
(ii.) Houses, furniture, and instruments.
(iii.) Stored or prepared food, medicine, and articles of bodily luxury,
including clothing.
(iv.) Books.
(v.) Works of art.
The conditions of value in these things are briefly as follows:--
16. (i.) Land. Its value is twofold; first, as producing food and
mechanical power; secondly, as an object of sight and thought, producing
intellectual power.
Its value, as a means of producing food and mechanical power, varies
with its form (as mountain or plain), with its substance (in soil or
mineral contents), and with its climate. All these conditions of
intrinsic value must be known and complied with by the men who have to
deal with it, in order to give effectual value; but at any given time
and place, the intrinsic value is fixed: such and such a piece of land,
with its associated lakes and seas, rightly treated in surface and
substance, can produce precisely so much food and power, and no more.
The second element of value in land being its beauty, united with such
conditions of space and form as are necessary for exercise, and for
fullness of animal life, land of the highest value in these respects
will be that lying in temperate climates, and boldly varied in form;
removed from unhealthy or dangerous influences (as of miasm or volcano);
and capable of sustaining a rich fauna and flora. Such land, carefully
tended by the hand of man, so far as to remove from it unsightlinesses
and evidences of decay, guarded from violence, and inhabited, under
man's affectionate protection, by every kind of living creature that can
occupy it in peace, is the most precious "property" that human beings
can possess.
17. (ii.) Buildings, furniture, and instruments.
The value of buildings consists, first, in permanent strength, with
convenience of form, of size, and of position; so as to render
employment peaceful, social intercourse easy, temperature and air
healthy. The advisable or possible magnitude of cities and mode of their
distribution in squares, streets, courts, &c.; the relative value of
sites of land, and the modes of structure which are healthiest and most
permanent, have to be studied under this head.
The value of buildings consists secondly in historical association, and
architectural beauty, of which we have to examine the influence on
manners and life.
The value of instruments consists, first, in their power of shortening
labour, or otherwise accomplishing what human strength unaided could
not. The kinds of work which are severally best accomplished by hand or
by machine;--the effect of machinery in gathering and multiplying
population, and its influence on the minds and bodies of such
population; together with the conceivable uses of machinery on a
colossal scale in accomplishing mighty and useful works, hitherto
unthought of, such as the deepening of large river channels;--changing
the surface of mountainous districts;--irrigating tracts of desert in
the torrid zone;--breaking up, and thus rendering capable of quicker
fusion, edges of ice in the northern and southern Arctic seas, &c., so
rendering parts of the earth habitable which hitherto have been
lifeless, are to be studied under this head.
The value of instruments is, secondarily, in their aid to abstract
sciences. The degree in which the multiplication of such instruments
should be encouraged, so as to make them, if large, easy of access to
numbers (as costly telescopes), or so cheap as that they might, in a
serviceable form, become a common part of the furniture of households,
is to be considered under this head.[12]
18. (iii.) Food, medicine, and articles of luxury. Under this head we
shall have to examine the possible methods of obtaining pure food in
such security and equality of supply as to avoid both waste and famine:
then the economy of medicine and just range of sanitary law: finally the
economy of luxury, partly an æsthetic and partly an ethical question.
19. (iv.) Books. The value of these consists,
First, in their power of preserving and communicating the knowledge of
facts.
Secondly, in their power of exciting vital or noble emotion and
intellectual action. They have also their corresponding negative powers
of disguising and effacing the memory of facts, and killing the noble
emotions, or exciting base ones. Under these two heads we have to
consider the economical and educational value, positive and negative, of
literature;--the means of producing and educating good authors, and the
means and advisability of rendering good books generally accessible, and
directing the reader's choice to them.
20. (v.) Works of art. The value of these is of the same nature as that
of books; but the laws of their production and possible modes of
distribution are very different, and require separate examination.
21. II.--MONEY. Under this head, we shall have to examine the laws of
currency and exchange; of which I will note here the first principles.
Money has been inaccurately spoken of as merely a means of exchange. But
it is far more than this. It is a documentary expression of legal claim.
It is not wealth, but a documentary claim to wealth, being the sign of
the relative quantities of it, or of the labour producing it, to which,
at a given time, persons, or societies, are entitled.
If all the money in the world, notes and gold, were destroyed in an
instant, it would leave the world neither richer nor poorer than it was.
But it would leave the individual inhabitants of it in different
relations.
Money is, therefore, correspondent in its nature to the title-deed of an
estate. Though the deed be burned, the estate still exists, but the
right to it has become disputable.
22. The real worth of money remains unchanged, as long as the proportion
of the quantity of existing money to the quantity of existing wealth or
available labour remains unchanged.
If the wealth increases, but not the money, the worth of the money
increases; if the money increases, but not the wealth, the worth of the
money diminishes.
23. Money, therefore, cannot be arbitrarily multiplied, any more than
title-deeds can. So long as the existing wealth or available labour is
not fully represented by the currency, the currency may be increased
without diminution of the assigned worth of its pieces. But when the
existing wealth, or available labour is once fully represented, every
piece of money thrown into circulation diminishes the worth of every
other existing piece, in the proportion it bears to the number of them,
provided the new piece be received with equal credit; if not, the
depreciation of worth takes place, according to the degree of its
credit.
24. When, however, new money, composed of some substance of supposed
intrinsic value (as of gold), is brought into the market, or when new
notes are issued which are supposed to be deserving of credit, the
desire to obtain the money will, under certain circumstances, stimulate
industry: an additional quantity of wealth is immediately produced, and
if this be in proportion to the new claims advanced, the value of the
existing currency is undepreciated. If the stimulus given be so great as
to produce more goods than are proportioned to the additional coinage,
the worth of the existing currency will be raised.
Arbitrary control and issues of currency affect the production of
wealth, by acting on the hopes and fears of men, and are, under certain
circumstances, wise. But the issue of additional currency to meet the
exigencies of immediate expense, is merely one of the disguised forms of
borrowing or taxing. It is, however, in the present low state of
economical knowledge, often possible for governments to venture on an
issue of currency, when they could not venture on an additional loan or
tax, because the real operation of such issue is not understood by the
people, and the pressure of it is irregularly distributed, and with an
unperceived gradation.
25. The use of substances of intrinsic value as the materials of a
currency, is a barbarism;--a remnant of the conditions of barter, which
alone render commerce possible among savage nations. It is, however,
still necessary, partly as a mechanical check on arbitrary issues;
partly as a means of exchanges with foreign nations. In proportion to
the extension of civilization, and increase of trustworthiness in
Governments, it will cease. So long as it exists, the phenomena of the
cost and price of the articles used for currency are mingled with those
proper to currency itself, in an almost inextricable manner: and the
market worth of bullion is affected by multitudinous accidental
circumstances, which have been traced, with more or less success, by
writers on commercial operations: but with these variations the true
political economist has no more to do than an engineer, fortifying a
harbour of refuge against Atlantic tide, has to concern himself with the
cries or quarrels of children who dig pools with their fingers for its
streams among the sand.
26. III.--RICHES. According to the various industry, capacity, good
fortune, and desires of men, they obtain greater or smaller share of,
and claim upon, the wealth of the world.
The inequalities between these shares, always in some degree just and
necessary, may be either restrained by law or circumstance within
certain limits; or may increase indefinitely.
Where no moral or legal restraint is put upon the exercise of the will
and intellect of the stronger, shrewder, or more covetous men, these
differences become ultimately enormous. But as soon as they become so
distinct in their extremes as that, on one side, there shall be manifest
redundance of possession, and on the other manifest pressure of
need,--the terms "riches" and "poverty" are used to express the opposite
states; being contrary only as the terms "warmth" and "cold" are
contraries, of which neither implies an actual degree, but only a
relation to other degrees, of temperature.
27. Respecting riches, the economist has to inquire, first, into the
advisable modes of their collection; secondly, into the advisable modes
of their administration.
Respecting the collection of national riches, he has to inquire, first,
whether he is justified in calling the nation rich, if the quantity of
wealth it possesses relatively to the wealth of other nations, be large;
irrespectively of the manner of its distribution. Or does the mode of
distribution in any wise affect the nature of the riches? Thus, if the
king alone be rich--suppose Croesus or Mausolus--are the Lydians or
Carians therefore a rich nation? Or if a few slave-masters are rich, and
the nation is otherwise composed of slaves, is it to be called a rich
nation? For if not, and the ideas of a certain mode of distribution or
operation in the riches, and of a certain degree of freedom in the
people, enter into our idea of riches as attributed to a people, we
shall have to define the degree of fluency, or circulative character
which is essential to the nature of common wealth; and the degree of
independence of action required in its possessors. Questions which look
as if they would take time in answering.[13]
28. And farther. Since the inequality, which is the condition of riches,
may be established in two opposite modes--namely, by increase of
possession on the one side, and by decrease of it on the other--we have
to inquire, with respect to any given state of riches, precisely in what
manner the correlative poverty was produced: that is to say, whether by
being surpassed only, or being depressed also; and if by being
depressed, what are the advantages, or the contrary, conceivable in the
depression. For instance, it being one of the commonest advantages of
being rich to entertain a number of servants, we have to inquire, on the
one side, what economical process produced the riches of the master; and
on the other, what economical process produced the poverty of the
persons who serve him; and what advantages each, on his own side,
derives from the result.
29. These being the main questions touching the collection of riches,
the next, or last, part of the inquiry is into their administration.
Their possession involves three great economical powers which require
separate examination: namely, the powers of selection, direction, and
provision.
The power of SELECTION relates to things of which the supply is limited
(as the supply of best things is always). When it becomes matter of
question to whom such things are to belong, the richest person has
necessarily the first choice, unless some arbitrary mode of distribution
be otherwise determined upon. The business of the economist is to show
how this choice may be a wise one.
The power of DIRECTION arises out of the necessary relation of rich men
to poor, which ultimately, in one way or another, involves the
direction of, or authority over, the labour of the poor; and this nearly
as much over their mental as their bodily labour. The business of the
economist is to show how this direction may be a Just one.
The power of PROVISION is dependent upon the redundance of wealth, which
may of course by active persons be made available in preparation for
future work or future profit; in which function riches have generally
received the name of capital; that is to say, of head-, or
source-material. The business of the economist is to show how this
provision may be a Distant one.
30. The examination of these three functions of riches will embrace
every final problem of political economy;--and, above, or before all,
this curious and vital problem,--whether, since the wholesome action of
riches in these three functions will depend (it appears), on the Wisdom,
Justice, and Farsightedness of the holders; and it is by no means to be
assumed that persons primarily rich, must therefore be just and
wise,--it may not be ultimately possible so, or somewhat so, to arrange
matters, as that persons primarily just and wise, should therefore be
rich?
Such being the general plan of the inquiry before us, I shall not limit
myself to any consecutive following of it, having hardly any good hope
of being able to complete so laborious a work as it must prove to me;
but from time to time, as I have leisure, shall endeavour to carry
forward this part or that, as may be immediately possible; indicating
always with accuracy the place which the particular essay will or should
take in the completed system.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] _See_ Appendix I.
[11] Observe these definitions,--they are of much importance,--and
connect with them the sentences in italics on this and the next page.
[12] [I cannot now recast these sentences, pedantic in their
generalization, and intended more for index than statement, but I must
guard the reader from thinking that I ever wish for cheapness by bad
quality. A poor boy need not always learn mathematics; but, if you set
him to do so, have the farther kindness to give him good compasses, not
cheap ones, whose points bend like lead.]
[13] [I regret the ironical manner in which this passage, one of great
importance in the matter of it, was written. The gist of it is, that the
first of all inquiries respecting the wealth of any nation is not, how
much it has; but whether it is in a form that can be used, and in the
possession of persons who can use it.]
CHAPTER II.
STORE-KEEPING.
31. The first chapter having consisted of little more than definition of
terms, I purpose, in this, to expand and illustrate the given
definitions.
The view which has here been taken of the nature of wealth, namely, that
it consists in an intrinsic value developed by a vital power, is
directly opposed to two nearly universal conceptions of wealth. In the
assertion that value is primarily intrinsic, it opposes the idea that
anything which is an object of desire to numbers, and is limited in
quantity, so as to have rated worth in exchange, may be called, or
virtually become, wealth. And in the assertion that value is,
secondarily, dependent upon power in the possessor, it opposes the idea
that the worth of things depends on the demand for them, instead of on
the use of them. Before going farther, we will make these two positions
clearer.
32. I. First. All wealth is intrinsic, and is not constituted by the
judgment of men. This is easily seen in the case of things affecting the
body; we know, that no force of fantasy will make stones nourishing, or
poison innocent; but it is less apparent in things affecting the mind.
We are easily--perhaps willingly--misled by the appearance of beneficial
results obtained by industries addressed wholly to the gratification of
fanciful desire; and apt to suppose that whatever is widely coveted,
dearly bought, and pleasurable in possession, must be included in our
definition of wealth. It is the more difficult to quit ourselves of this
error because many things which are true wealth in moderate use, become
false wealth in immoderate; and many things are mixed of good and
evil,--as mostly, books, and works of art,--out of which one person Will
get the good, and another the evil; so that it seems as if there were
no fixed good or evil in the things themselves, but only in the view
taken, and use made of them.
But that is not so. The evil and good are fixed; in essence, and in
proportion. And in things in which evil depends upon excess, the point
of excess, though indefinable, is fixed; and the power of the thing is
on the hither side for good, and on the farther side for evil. And in
all cases this power is inherent, not dependent on opinion or choice.
Our thoughts of things neither make, nor mar their eternal force;
nor--which is the most serious point for future consideration--can they
prevent the effect of it (within certain limits) upon ourselves.
33. Therefore, the object of any special analysis of wealth will be not
so much to enumerate what is serviceable, as to distinguish what is
destructive; and to show that it is inevitably destructive; that to
receive pleasure from an evil thing is not to escape from, or alter the
evil of it, but to be _altered by_ it; that is, to suffer from it to the
utmost, having our own nature, in that degree, made evil also. And it
may be shown farther, that, through whatever length of time or
subtleties of connexion the harm is accomplished, (being also less or
more according to the fineness and worth of the humanity on which it is
wrought), still, nothing _but_ harm ever comes of a bad thing.
34. So that, in sum, the term wealth is never to be attached to the
_accidental object of a morbid_ desire, but only to the _constant object
of a legitimate one_.[14] By the fury of ignorance, and fitfulness of
caprice, large interests may be continually attached to things
unserviceable or hurtful; if their nature could be altered by our
passions, the science of Political Economy would remain, what it has
been hitherto among us, the weighing of clouds, and the portioning out
of shadows. But of ignorance there is no science; and of caprice no law.
Their disturbing forces interfere with the operations of faithful
Economy, but have nothing in common with them: she, the calm arbiter of
national destiny, regards only essential power for good in all that she
accumulates, and alike disdains the wanderings[15] of imagination, and
the thirsts of disease.
35. II. Secondly. The assertion that wealth is not _only_ intrinsic, but
dependent, in order to become effectual, on a given degree of vital
power in its possessor, is opposed to another popular view of
wealth;--namely, that though it may always be constituted by caprice, it
is, when so constituted, a substantial thing, of which given quantities
may be counted as existing here, or there, and exchangeable at rated
prices.
In this view there are three errors. The first and chief is the
overlooking the fact that all exchangeableness of commodity, or
effective demand for it, depends on the sum of capacity for its use
existing, here or elsewhere. The book we cannot read, or picture we take
no delight in, may indeed be called part of our wealth, in so far as we
have power of exchanging either for something we like better. But our
power of effecting such exchange, and yet more, of effecting it to
advantage, depends absolutely on the number of accessible persons who
can understand the book, or enjoy the painting, and who will dispute the
possession of them. Thus the actual worth of either, even to us, depends
no more on their essential goodness than on the capacity existing
somewhere for the perception of it; and it is vain in any completed
system of production to think of obtaining one without the other. So
that, though the true political economist knows that co-existence of
capacity for use with temporary possession cannot be always secured, the
final fact, on which he bases all action and administration, is that, in
the whole nation, or group of nations, he has to deal with, for every
atom of intrinsic value produced he must with exactest chemistry produce
its twin atom of acceptant digestion, or understanding capacity; or, in
the degree of his failure, he has no wealth. Nature's challenge to us
is, in earnest, as the Assyrians mock; "I will give thee two thousand
horses, if thou be able on thy part to set riders upon them." Bavieca's
paces are brave, if the Cid backs him; but woe to us, if we take the
dust of capacity, wearing the armour of it, for capacity itself, for so
all procession, however goodly in the show of it, is to the tomb.
36. The second error in this popular view of wealth is, that in giving
the name of wealth to things which we cannot use, we in reality confuse
wealth with money. The land we have no skill to cultivate, the book
which is sealed to us, or dress which is superfluous, may indeed be
exchangeable, but as such are nothing more than a cumbrous form of
bank-note, of doubtful or slow convertibility. As long as we retain
possession of them, we merely keep our bank-notes in the shape of gravel
or clay, of book-leaves, or of embroidered tissue. Circumstances may,
perhaps, render such forms the safest, or a certain complacency may
attach to the exhibition of them; into both these advantages we shall
inquire afterwards; I wish the reader only to observe here, that
exchangeable property which we cannot use is, to us personally, merely
one of the forms of money, not of wealth.
37. The third error in the popular view is the confusion of Guardianship
with Possession; the real state of men of property being, too commonly,
that of curators, not possessors, of wealth.
A man's power over his property is at the widest range of it, fivefold;
it is power of Use, for himself, Administration, to others, Ostentation,
Destruction, or Bequest: and possession is in use only, which for each
man is sternly limited; so that such things, and so much of them as he
can use, are, indeed, well for him, or Wealth; and more of them, or any
other things, are ill for him, or Illth.[16] Plunged to the lips in
Orinoco, he shall drink to his thirst measure; more, at his peril: with
a thousand oxen on his lands, he shall eat to his hunger measure; more,
at his peril. He cannot live in two houses at once; a few bales of silk
or wool will suffice for the fabric of all the clothes he can ever wear,
and a few books will probably hold all the furniture good for his brain.
Beyond these, in the best of us but narrow, capacities, we have but the
power of administering, or _mal_-administering, wealth: (that is to say,
distributing, lending, or increasing it);--of exhibiting it (as in
magnificence of retinue or furniture),--of destroying, or, finally, of
bequeathing it. And with multitudes of rich men, administration
degenerates into curatorship; they merely hold their property in charge,
as Trustees, for the benefit of some person or persons to whom it is to
be delivered upon their death; and the position, explained in clear
terms, would hardly seem a covetable one. What would be the probable
feelings of a youth, on his entrance into life, to whom the career hoped
for him was proposed in terms such as these: "You must work
unremittingly, and with your utmost intelligence, during all your
available years, you will thus accumulate wealth to a large amount; but
you must touch none of it, beyond what is needful for your support.
Whatever sums you gain, beyond those required for your decent and
moderate maintenance, and whatever beautiful things you may obtain
possession of, shall be properly taken care of by servants, for whose
maintenance you will be charged, and whom you will have the trouble of
superintending, and on your deathbed you shall have the power of
determining to whom the accumulated property shall belong, or to what
purposes be applied."
38. The labour of life, under such conditions, would probably be neither
zealous nor cheerful; yet the only difference between this position and
that of the ordinary capitalist is the power which the latter supposes
himself to possess, and which is attributed to him by others, of
spending his money at any moment. This pleasure, taken _in the
imagination of power to part with that with which we have no intention
of parting_, is one of the most curious, though commonest forms of the
Eidolon, or Phantasm of Wealth. But the political economist has nothing
to do with this idealism, and looks only to the practical issue of
it--namely, that the holder of wealth, in such temper, may be regarded
simply as a mechanical means of collection; or as a money-chest with a
slit in it, not only receptant but suctional, set in the public
thoroughfare;--chest of which only Death has the key, and evil Chance
the distribution of the contents. In his function of Lender (which,
however, is one of administration, not use, as far as he is himself
concerned), the capitalist takes, indeed, a more interesting aspect; but
even in that function, his relations with the state are apt to
degenerate into a mechanism for the convenient contraction of debt;--a
function the more mischievous, because a nation invariably appeases its
conscience with respect to an unjustifiable expense, by meeting it with
borrowed funds, expresses its repentance of a foolish piece of business,
by letting its tradesmen wait for their money, and always leaves its
descendants to pay for the work which will be of the least advantage to
them.[17]
39. Quit of these three sources of misconception, the reader will have
little farther difficulty in apprehending the real nature of Effectual
value. He may, however, at first not without surprise, perceive the
consequences involved in his acceptance of the definition. For if the
actual existence of wealth be dependent on the power of its possessor,
it follows that the sum of wealth held by the nation, instead of being
constant, or calculable, varies hourly, nay, momentarily, with the
number and character of its holders! and that in changing hands, it
changes in quantity. And farther, since the worth of the currency is
proportioned to the sum of material wealth which it represents, if the
sum of the wealth changes, the worth of the currency changes. And thus
both the sum of the property, and power of the currency, of the state,
vary momentarily as the character and number of the holders. And not
only so, but different rates and kinds of variation are caused by the
character of the holders of different kinds of wealth. The transitions
of value caused by the character of the holders of land differ in mode
from those caused by character in holders of works of art; and these
again from those caused by character in holders of machinery or other
working capital. But we cannot examine these special phenomena of any
kind of wealth until we have a clear idea of the way in which true
currency expresses them; and of the resulting modes in which the cost
and price of any article are related to its value. To obtain this we
must approach the subject in its first elements.
40. Let us suppose a national store of wealth, composed of material
things either useful, or believed to be so, taken charge of by the
Government,[18] and that every workman, having produced any article
involving labour in its production, and for which he has no immediate
use, brings it to add to this store, receiving from the Government, in
exchange, an order either for the return of the thing itself, or of its
equivalent in other things, such as he may choose out of the store, at
any time when he needs them. The question of equivalence itself (how
much wine a man is to receive in return for so much corn, or how much
coal in return for so much iron) is a quite separate one, which we will
examine presently. For the time, let it be assumed that this equivalence
has been determined, and that the Government order, in exchange for a
fixed weight of any article (called, suppose _a_), is either for the
return of that weight of the article itself, or of another fixed weight
of the article _b_, or another of the article _c_, and so on.
Now, supposing that the labourer speedily and continually presents these
general orders, or, in common language, "spends the money," he has
neither changed the circumstances of the nation, nor his own, except in
so far as he may have produced useful and consumed useless articles, or
_vice versâ_. But if he does not use, or uses in part only, the orders
he receives, and lays aside some portion of them; and thus every day
bringing his contribution to the national store, lays by some
per-centage of the orders received in exchange for it, he increases the
national wealth daily by as much as he does not use of the received
order, and to the same amount accumulates a monetary claim on the
Government. It is, of course, always in his power, as it is his legal
right, to bring forward this accumulation of claim, and at once to
consume, destroy, or distribute, the sum of his wealth. Supposing he
never does so, but dies, leaving his claim to others, he has enriched
the State during his life by the quantity of wealth over which that
claim extends, or has, in other words, rendered so much additional life
possible in the State, of which additional life he bequeaths the
immediate possibility to those whom he invests with his claim. Supposing
him to cancel the claim, he would distribute this possibility of life
among the nation at large.
41. We hitherto consider the Government itself as simply a conservative
power, taking charge of the wealth entrusted to it.
But a Government may be more or less than a conservative power. It may
be either an improving, or destructive one.
If it be an improving power, using all the wealth entrusted to it to the
best advantage, the nation is enriched in root and branch at once, and
the Government is enabled, for every order presented, to return a
quantity of wealth greater than the order was written for, according to
the fructification obtained in the interim. This ability may be either
concealed, in which case the currency does not completely represent the
wealth of the country, or it may be manifested by the continual payment
of the excess of value on each order, in which case there is
(irrespectively, observe, of collateral results afterwards to be
examined) a perpetual rise in the worth of the currency, that is to say,
a fall in the price of all articles represented by it.
42. But if the Government be destructive, or a consuming power, it
becomes unable to return the value received on the presentation of the
order.
This inability may either be concealed by meeting demands to the full,
until it issue in bankruptcy, or in some form of national debt;--or it
may be concealed during oscillatory movements between destructiveness
and productiveness, which result on the whole in stability;--or it may
be manifested by the consistent return of less than value received on
each presented order, in which case there is a consistent fall in the
worth of the currency, or rise in the price of the things represented by
it.
43. Now, if for this conception of a central Government, we substitute
that of a body of persons occupied in industrial pursuits, of whom each
adds in his private capacity to the common store, we at once obtain an
approximation to the actual condition of a civilized mercantile
community, from which approximation we might easily proceed into still
completer analysis. I purpose, however, to arrive at every result by the
gradual expansion of the simpler conception; but I wish the reader to
observe, in the meantime, that both the social conditions thus supposed
(and I will by anticipation say also, all possible social conditions),
agree in two great points; namely, in the primal importance of the
supposed national store or stock, and in its destructibility or
improveability by the holders of it.
44. I. Observe that in both conditions, that of central
Government-holding, and diffused private-holding, the quantity of stock
is of the same national moment. In the one case, indeed, its amount may
be known by examination of the persons to whom it is confided; in the
other it cannot be known but by exposing the private affairs of every
individual. But, known or unknown, its significance is the same under
each condition. The riches of the nation consist in the abundance, and
their wealth depends on the nature, of this store.
45. II. In the second place, both conditions, (and all other possible
ones) agree in the destructibility or improveability of the store by its
holders. Whether in private hands, or under Government charge, the
national store may be daily consumed, or daily enlarged, by its
possessors; and while the currency remains apparently unaltered, the
property it represents may diminish or increase.
46. The first question, then, which we have to put under our simple
conception of central Government, namely, "What store has it?" is one of
equal importance, whatever may be the constitution of the State; while
the second question--namely, "Who are the holders of the store?"
involves the discussion of the constitution of the State itself.
The first inquiry resolves itself into three heads:
1. What is the nature of the store?
2. What is its quantity in relation to the population?
3. What is its quantity in relation to the currency?
The second inquiry into two:
1. Who are the Holders of the store, and in what proportions?
2. Who are the Claimants of the store, (that is to say, the holders of
the currency,) and in what proportions?
We will examine the range of the first three questions in the present
paper; of the two following, in the sequel.
47. I. QUESTION FIRST. What is the nature of the store? Has the nation
hitherto worked for and gathered the right thing or the wrong? On that
issue rest the possibilities of its life.
For example, let us imagine a society, of no great extent, occupied in
procuring and laying up store of corn, wine, wool, silk, and other such
preservable materials of food and clothing; and that it has a currency
representing them. Imagine farther, that on days of festivity, the
society, discovering itself to derive satisfaction from pyrotechnics,
gradually turns its attention more and more to the manufacture of
gunpowder; so that an increasing number of labourers, giving what time
they can spare to this branch of industry, bring increasing quantities
of combustibles into the store, and use the general orders received in
exchange to obtain such wine, wool, or corn, as they may have need of.
The currency remains the same, and represents precisely the same amount
of material in the store, and of labour spent in producing it. But the
corn and wine gradually vanish, and in their place, as gradually, appear
sulphur and saltpetre, till at last the labourers who have consumed corn
and supplied nitre, presenting on a festal morning some of their
currency to obtain materials for the feast, discover that no amount of
currency will command anything Festive, except Fire. The supply of
rockets is unlimited, but that of food, limited, in a quite final
manner; and the whole currency in the hands of the society represents an
infinite power of detonation, but none of existence.
48. This statement, caricatured as it may seem, is only exaggerated in
assuming the persistence of the folly to extremity, unchecked, as in
reality it would be, by the gradual rise in price of food. But it falls
short of the actual facts of human life in expression of the depth and
intensity of the folly itself. For a great part (the reader would not
believe how great until he saw the statistics in detail) of the most
earnest and ingenious industry of the world is spent in producing
munitions of war; gathering, that is to say the materials, not of
festive, but of consuming fire; filling its stores with all power of the
instruments of pain, and all affluence of the ministries of death. It
was no true _Trionfo della Morte_[19] which men have seen and feared
(sometimes scarcely feared) so long; wherein he brought them rest from
their labours. We see, and share, another and higher form of his triumph
now. Task-master, instead of Releaser, he rules the dust of the arena no
less than of the tomb; and, content once in the grave whither man went,
to make his works to cease and his devices to vanish,--now, in the busy
city and on the serviceable sea, makes his work to increase, and his
devices to multiply.
49. To this doubled loss, or negative power of labour, spent in
producing means of destruction, we have to add, in our estimate of the
consequences of human folly, whatever more insidious waste of toil there
is in production of unnecessary luxury. Such and such an occupation (it
is said) supports so many labourers, because so many obtain wages in
following it; but it is never considered that unless there be a
supporting power in the product of the occupation, the wages given to
one man are merely withdrawn from another. We cannot say of any trade
that it maintains such and such a number of persons, unless we know how
and where the money, now spent in the purchase of its produce, would
have been spent, if that produce had not been manufactured. The
purchasing funds truly support a number of people in making This; but
(probably) leave unsupported an equal number who are making, or could
have made That. The manufacturers of small watches thrive at Geneva;--it
is well;--but where would the money spent on small watches have gone,
had there been no small watches to buy?
50. If the so frequently uttered aphorism of mercantile economy--"labour
is limited by capital," were true, this question would be a definite
one. But it is untrue; and that widely. Out of a given quantity of funds
for wages, more or less labour is to be had, according to the quantity
of will with which we can inspire the workman; and the true limit of
labour is only in the limit of this moral stimulus of the will, and of
the bodily power. In an ultimate, but entirely unpractical sense, labour
is limited by capital, as it is by matter--that is to say, where there
is no material, there can be no work,--but in the practical sense,
labour is limited only by the great original capital of head, heart, and
hand. Even in the most artificial relations of commerce, labour is to
capital as fire to fuel: out of so much fuel, you _can_ have only so
much fire; but out of so much fuel, you _shall_ have so much fire,--not
in proportion to the mass of combustible, but to the force of wind that
fans and water that quenches; and the appliance of both. And labour is
furthered, as conflagration is, not so much by added fuel, as by
admitted air.[20]
51. For which reasons, I had to insert, in § 49, the qualifying
"probably;" for it can never be said positively that the purchase-money,
or wages fund of any trade is withdrawn from some other trade. The
object itself may be the stimulus of the production of the money which
buys it; that is to say, the work by which the purchaser obtained the
means of buying it, would not have been done by him unless he had wanted
that particular thing. And the production of any article not
intrinsically (nor in the process of manufacture) injurious, is useful,
if the desire of it causes productive labour in other directions.
52. In the national store, therefore, the presence of things
intrinsically valueless does not imply an entirely correlative absence
of things valuable. We cannot be certain that all the labour spent on
vanity has been diverted from reality, and that for every bad thing
produced, a precious thing has been lost. In great measure, the vain
things represent the results of roused indolence; they have been carved,
as toys, in extra time; and, if they had not been made, nothing else
would have been made. Even to munitions of war this principle applies;
they partly represent the work of men who, if they had not made spears,
would never have made pruning hooks, and who are incapable of any
activities but those of contest.
53. Thus then, finally, the nature of the store has to be considered
under two main lights; the one, that of its immediate and actual
utility; the other, that of the past national character which it
signifies by its production, and future character which it must develop
by its use. And the issue of this investigation will be to show us that.
Economy does not depend merely on principles of "demand and supply," but
primarily on what is demanded, and what is supplied; which I will beg of
you to observe, and take to heart.
* * * * *
54. II. QUESTION SECOND.--What is the quantity of the store, in relation
to the population?
It follows from what has been already stated that the accurate form in
which this question has to be put is--"What quantity of each article
composing the store exists in proportion to the real need for it by the
population?" But we shall for the time assume, in order to keep all our
terms at the simplest, that the store is wholly composed of useful
articles, and accurately proportioned to the several needs for them.
Now it cannot be assumed, because the store is large in proportion to
the number of the people, that the people must be in comfort; nor
because it is small, that they must be in distress. An active and
economical race always produces more than it requires, and lives (if it
is permitted to do so) in competence on the produce of its daily labour.
The quantity of its store, great or small, is therefore in many respects
indifferent to it, and cannot be inferred from its aspect. Similarly an
inactive and wasteful population, which cannot live by its daily labour,
but is dependent, partly or wholly, on consumption of its store, may be
(by various difficulties, hereafter to be examined, in realizing or
getting at such store) retained in a state of abject distress, though
its possessions may be immense. But the results always involved in the
magnitude of store are, the commercial power of the nation, its
security, and its mental character. Its commercial power, in that
according to the quantity of its store, may be the extent of its
dealings; its security, in that according to the quantity of its store
are its means of sudden exertion or sustained endurance; and its
character, in that certain conditions of civilization cannot be attained
without permanent and continually accumulating store, of great intrinsic
value, and of peculiar nature.[21]
55. Now, seeing that these three advantages arise from largeness of
store in proportion to population, the question arises immediately,
"Given the store--is the nation enriched by diminution of its numbers?
Are a successful national speculation, and a pestilence, economically
the same thing?"
This is in part a sophistical question; such as it would be to ask
whether a man was richer when struck by disease which must limit his
life within a predicable period, than he was when in health. He is
enabled to enlarge his current expenses, and has for all purposes a
larger sum at his immediate disposal (for, given the fortune, the
shorter the life, the larger the annuity); yet no man considers himself
richer because he is condemned by his physician.
56. The logical reply is that, since Wealth is by definition only the
means of life, a nation cannot be enriched by its own mortality. Or in
shorter words, the life is more than the meat; and existence itself,
more wealth than the means of existence. Whence, of two nations who have
equal store, the more numerous is to be considered the richer, provided
the type of the inhabitant be as high (for, though the relative bulk of
their store be less, its relative efficiency, or the amount of effectual
wealth, must be greater). But if the type of the population be
deteriorated by increase of its numbers, we have evidence of poverty in
its worst influence; and then, to determine whether the nation in its
total may still be justifiably esteemed rich, we must set or weigh, the
number of the poor against that of the rich.
To effect which piece of scale-work, it is of course necessary to
determine, first, who are poor and who are rich; nor this only, but also
how poor and how rich they are. Which will prove a curious
thermometrical investigation; for we shall have to do for gold and for
silver, what we have done for quicksilver;--determine, namely, their
freezing-point, their zero, their temperate and fever-heat points;
finally, their vaporescent point, at which riches, sometimes
explosively, as lately in America, "make to themselves wings:"--and
correspondently, the number of degrees _below_ zero at which poverty,
ceasing to brace with any wholesome cold, burns to the bone.[22]
57. For the performance of these operations, in the strictest sense
scientific, we will first look to the existing so-called "science" of
Political Economy; we will ask it to define for us the comparatively and
superlatively rich, and the comparatively and superlatively poor; and on
its own terms--if any terms it can pronounce--examine, in our prosperous
England, how many rich and how many poor people there are; and whether
the quantity and intensity of the poverty is indeed so overbalanced by
the quantity and intensity of wealth, that we may permit ourselves a
luxurious blindness to it, and call ourselves, complacently, a rich
country. And if we find no clear definition in the existing science, we
will endeavour for ourselves to fix the true degrees of the scale, and
to apply them.[23]
* * * * *
58. QUESTION THIRD. What is the quantity of the store in relation to the
Currency?
We have seen that the real worth of the currency, so far as dependent on
its relation to the magnitude of the store, may vary, within certain
limits, without affecting its worth in exchange. The diminution or
increase of the represented wealth may be unperceived, and the currency
may be taken either for more or less than it is truly worth. Usually it
is taken for much more; and its power in exchange, or credit-power, is
thus increased up to a given strain upon its relation to existing
wealth. This credit-power is of chief importance in the thoughts,
because most sharply present to the experience, of a mercantile
community: but the conditions of its stability[24] and all other
relations of the currency to the material store are entirely simple in
principle, if not in action. Far other than simple are the relations of
the currency to the available labour which it also represents. For this
relation is involved not only with that of the magnitude of the store to
the number, but with that of the magnitude of the store to the mind, of
the population. Its proportion to their number, and the resulting worth
of currency, are calculable; but its proportion to their will for labour
is not. The worth of the piece of money which claims a given quantity of
the store is, in exchange, less or greater according to the facility of
obtaining the same quantity of the same thing without having recourse to
the store. In other words it depends on the immediate Cost and Price of
the thing. We must now, therefore, complete the definition of these
terms.
59. All cost and price are counted in Labour. We must know first,
therefore, what is to be counted _as_ Labour.
I have already defined labour to be the Contest of the life of man with
an opposite. Literally, it is the quantity of "Lapse," loss, or failure
of human life, caused by any effort. It is usually confused with effort
itself, or the application of power (opera); but there is much effort
which is merely a mode of recreation, or of pleasure. The most beautiful
actions of the human body, and the highest results of the human
intelligence, are conditions, or achievements, of quite
unlaborious,--nay, of recreative,--effort. But labour is the _suffering_
in effort. It is the negative quantity, or quantity of de-feat, which
has to be counted against every Feat, and of de-fect which has to be
counted against every Fact, or Deed of men. In brief, it is "that
quantity of our toil which we die in."
We might, therefore, _à priori_, conjecture (as we shall ultimately
find), that it cannot be bought, nor sold. Everything else is bought and
sold for Labour, but labour itself cannot be bought nor sold for
anything, being priceless.[25] The idea that it is a commodity to be
bought or sold, is the alpha and omega of Politico-Economic fallacy.
60. This being the nature of labour, the "Cost" of anything is the
quantity of labour necessary to obtain it;--the quantity for which, or
at which, it "stands" (constant). It is literally the "Constancy" of the
thing;--you shall win it--move it--come at it, for no less than this.
Cost is measured and measurable (using the accurate Latin terms) only in
"labour," not in "opera."[26] It does not matter how much _work_ a thing
needs to produce it; it matters only how much _distress_. Generally the
more the power it requires, the less the distress; so that the noblest
works of man cost less than the meanest.
True labour, or spending of life, is either of the body, in fatigue or
pain; of the temper or heart (as in perseverance of search for
things,--patience in waiting for them,--fortitude or degradation in
suffering for them, and the like), or of the intellect. All these kinds
of labour are supposed to be included in the general term, and the
quantity of labour is then expressed by the time it lasts. So that a
unit of labour is "an hour's work" or a day's work, as we may
determine.[27]
61. Cost, like value, is both intrinsic and effectual. Intrinsic cost is
that of getting the thing in the right way; effectual cost is that of
getting the thing in the way we set about it. But intrinsic cost cannot
be made a subject of analytical investigation, being only partially
discoverable, and that by long experience. Effectual cost is all that
the political Economist can deal with; that is to say, the cost of the
thing under existing circumstances, and by known processes.
Cost, being dependent much on application of method, varies with the
quantity of the thing wanted, and with the number of persons who work
for it. It is easy to get a little of some things, but difficult to get
much; it is impossible to get some things with few hands, but easy to
get them with many.
62. The cost and value of things, however difficult to determine
accurately, are thus both dependent on ascertainable physical
circumstances.[28]
But their _price_ is dependent on the human will.
Such and such a thing is demonstrably good for so much. And it may
demonstrably be had for so much.
But it remains questionable, and in all manner of ways questionable,
whether I choose to give so much.[29]
This choice is always a relative one. It is a choice to give a price for
this, rather than for that;--a resolution to have the thing, if getting
it does not involve the loss of a better thing. Price depends,
therefore, not only on the cost of the commodity itself, but on its
relation to the cost of every other attainable thing.
Farther. The _power_ of choice is also a relative one. It depends not
merely on our own estimate of the thing, but on everybody else's
estimate; therefore on the number and force of the will of the
concurrent buyers, and on the existing quantity of the thing in
proportion to that number and force.
Hence the price of anything depends on four variables.
(1.) Its cost.
(2.) Its attainable quantity at that cost.
(3.) The number and power of the persons who want it.
(4.) The estimate they have formed of its desirableness.
Its value only affects its price so far as it is contemplated in this
estimate; perhaps, therefore, not at all.
63. Now, in order to show the manner in which price is expressed in
terms of a currency, we must assume these four quantities to be known,
and the "estimate of desirableness," commonly called the Demand, to be
certain. We will take the number of persons at the lowest. Let A and B
be two labourers who "demand," that is to say, have resolved to labour
for, two articles, _a_ and _b_. Their demand for these articles (if the
reader likes better, he may say their need) is to be conceived as
absolute, their existence depending on the getting these two things.
Suppose, for instance, that they are bread and fuel, in a cold country,
and let a represent the least quantity of bread, and _b_ the least
quantity of fuel, which will support a man's life for a day. Let _a_ be
producible by an hour's labour, but _b_ only by two hours' labour.
Then the _cost of a_ is one hour, and of _b_ two (cost, by our
definition, being expressible in terms of time). If, therefore, each man
worked both for his corn and fuel, each would have to work three hours a
day. But they divide the labour for its greater ease.[30] Then if A
works three hours, he produces 3 _a_, which is one a more than both the
men want. And if B works three hours, he produces only 1-1/2 _b_, or
half of _b_ less than both want. But if A work three hours and B six, A
has 3 _a_, and B has 3 _b_, a maintenance in the right proportion for
both for a day and half; so that each might take half a day's rest. But
as B has worked double time, the whole of this day's rest belongs in
equity to him. Therefore the just exchange should be, A giving two _a_
for one _b_, has one _a_ and one _b_;--maintenance for a day. B giving
one _b_ for two _a_, has two _a_ and two _b_; maintenance for two days.
But B cannot rest on the second day, or A would be left without the
article which B produces. Nor is there any means of making the exchange
just, unless a third labourer is called in. Then one workman, A,
produces _a_, and two, B and C, produce _b_:--A, working three hours,
has three _a_;--B, three hours, 1-1/2 _b_;--C, three hours, 1-1/2 _b_. B
and C each give half of _b_ for _a_, and all have their equal daily
maintenance for equal daily work.
To carry the example a single step farther, let three articles, _a_,
_b_, and _c_ be needed.
Let _a_ need one hour's work, _b_ two, and _c_ four; then the day's work
must be seven hours, and one man in a day's work can make 7 _a_, or
3-1/2 _b_, or 1-3/4 _c_.
Therefore one A works for _a_, producing 7 _a_; two B's work for _b_,
producing 7 _b_; four C's work for _c_, producing 7 _c_.
A has six _a_ to spare, and gives two _a_ for one _b_, and four _a_ for
one _c_. Each B has 2-1/2 _b_ to spare, and gives 1/2 _b_ for one _a_,
and two _b_ for one _c_.
Each C has 3/4 of _c_ to spare, and gives 1/2 _c_ for one _b_, and 1/4
of _c_ for one _a_.
And all have their day's maintenance.
Generally, therefore, it follows that if the demand is constant,[31] the
relative prices of things are as their costs, or as the quantities of
labour involved in production.
64. Then, in order to express their prices in terms of a currency, we
have only to put the currency into the form of orders for a certain
quantity of any given article (with us it is in the form of orders for
gold), and all quantities of other articles are priced by the relation
they bear to the article which the currency claims.
But the worth of the currency itself is not in the slightest degree
founded more on the worth of the article which it either claims or
consists in (as gold) than on the worth of every other article for which
the gold is exchangeable. It is just as accurate to say, "so many pounds
are worth an acre of land," as "an acre of land is worth so many
pounds." The worth of gold, of land, of houses, and of food, and of all
other things, depends at any moment on the existing quantities and
relative demands for all and each; and a change in the worth of, or
demand for, any one, involves an instantaneously correspondent change in
the worth of, and demand for, all the rest;--a change as inevitable and
as accurately balanced (though often in its process as untraceable) as
the change in volume of the outflowing river from some vast lake, caused
by change in the volume of the inflowing streams, though no eye can
trace, nor instrument detect, motion, either on its surface, or in the
depth.
65. Thus, then, the real working power or worth of the currency is
founded on the entire sum of the relative estimates formed by the
population of its possessions; a change in this estimate in any
direction (and therefore every change in the national character),
instantly alters the value of money, in its second great function of
commanding labour. But we must always carefully and sternly distinguish
between this worth of currency, dependent on the conceived or
appreciated value of what it represents, and the worth of it, dependent
on the _existence_ of what it represents. A currency is _true, or
false_, in proportion to the security with which it gives claim to the
possession of land, house, horse, or picture; but a currency is _strong
or weak_,[32] worth much, or worth little, in proportion to the degree
of estimate in which the nation holds the house, horse, or picture which
is claimed. Thus the power of the English currency has been, till of
late, largely based on the national estimate of horses and of wine: so
that a man might always give any price to furnish choicely his stable,
or his cellar; and receive public approval therefor: but if he gave the
same sum to furnish his library, he was called mad or a biblio-maniac.
And although he might lose his fortune by his horses, and his health or
life by his cellar, and rarely lost either by his books, he was yet
never called a Hippo-maniac nor an Oino-maniac; but only Biblio-maniac,
because the current worth of money was understood to be legitimately
founded on cattle and wine, but not on literature. The prices lately
given at sales for pictures and MSS. indicate some tendency to change in
the national character in this respect, so that the worth of the
currency may even come in time to rest, in an acknowledged manner,
somewhat on the state and keeping of the Bedford missal, as well as on
the health of Caractacus or Blink Bonny; and old pictures be considered
property, no less than old port. They might have been so before now, but
that it is more difficult to choose the one than the other.
66. Now, observe, all these sources of variation in the power of the
currency exist, wholly irrespective of the influences of vice,
indolence, and improvidence. We have hitherto supposed, throughout the
analysis, every professing labourer to labour honestly, heartily, and in
harmony with his fellows. We have now to bring farther into the
calculation the effects of relative industry, honour, and forethought;
and thus to follow out the bearings of our second inquiry: Who are the
holders of the Store and Currency, and in what proportions?
This, however, we must reserve for our next paper--noticing here only
that, however distinct the several branches of the subject are,
radically, they are so interwoven in their issues that we cannot rightly
treat any one, till we have taken cognizance of all. Thus the need of
the currency in proportion to number of population is materially
influenced by the probable number of the holders in proportion to the
non-holders; and this again, by the number of holders of goods, or
wealth, in proportion to the non-holders of goods. For as, by
definition, the currency is a claim to goods which are not possessed,
its quantity indicates the number of claimants in proportion to the
number of holders; and the force and complexity of claim. For if the
claims be not complex, currency as a means of exchange may be very small
in quantity. A sells some corn to B, receiving a promise from B to pay
in cattle, which A then hands over to C, to get some wine. C in due time
claims the cattle from B; and B takes back his promise. These exchanges
have, or might have been, all effected with a single coin or promise;
and the proportion of the currency to the store would in such
circumstances indicate only the circulating vitality of it--that is to
say, the quantity and convenient divisibility of that part of the store
which the _habits_ of the nation keep in circulation. If a cattle
breeder is content to live with his household chiefly on meat and milk,
and does not want rich furniture, or jewels, or books--if a wine and
corn grower maintains himself and his men chiefly on grapes and
bread;--if the wives and daughters of families weave and spin the
clothing of the household, and the nation, as a whole, remains content
with the produce of its own soil and the work of its own hands, it has
little occasion for circulating media. It pledges and promises little
and seldom; exchanges only so far as exchange is necessary for life. The
store belongs to the people in whose hands it is found, and money is
little needed either as an expression of right, or practical means of
division and exchange.
67. But in proportion as the habits of the nation become complex and
fantastic (and they may be both, without therefore being civilized), its
circulating medium must increase in proportion to its store. If every
one wants a little of everything,--if food must be of many kinds, and
dress of many fashions,--if multitudes live by work which, ministering
to fancy, has its pay measured by fancy, so that large prices will be
given by one person for what is valueless to another,--if there are
great inequalities of knowledge, causing great inequalities of
estimate,--and, finally, and worst of all, if the currency itself, from
its largeness, and the power which the possession of it implies, becomes
the sole object of desire with large numbers of the nation, so that the
holding of it is disputed among them as the main object of life:--in
each and all of these cases, the currency necessarily enlarges in
proportion to the store; and as a means of exchange and division, as a
bond of right, and as an object of passion, has a more and more
important and malignant power over the nation's dealings, character, and
life.
Against which power, when, as a bond of Right, it becomes too
conspicuous and too burdensome, the popular voice is apt to be raised in
a violent and irrational manner, leading to revolution instead of
remedy. Whereas all possibility of Economy depends on the clear
assertion and maintenance of this bond of right, however burdensome. The
first necessity of all economical government is to secure the
unquestioned and unquestionable working of the great law of
Property--that a man who works for a thing shall be allowed to get it,
keep it, and consume it, in peace; and that he who does not eat his cake
to-day, shall be seen, without grudging, to have his cake to-morrow.
This, I say, is the first point to be secured by social law; without
this, no political advance, nay, no political existence, is in any sort
possible. Whatever evil, luxury, iniquity, may seem to result from it,
this is nevertheless the first of all Equities; and to the enforcement
of this, by law and by police-truncheon, the nation must always
primarily set its mind--that the cupboard door may have a firm lock to
it, and no man's dinner be carried off by the mob, on its way home from
the baker's. Which, thus fearlessly asserting, we shall endeavour in
next paper to consider how far it may be practicable for the mob itself,
also, in due breadth of dish, to have dinners to carry home.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Remember carefully this statement, that Wealth consists only in the
things which the nature of humanity has rendered in all ages, and must
render in all ages to come, (that is what I meant by "constant") the
objects of legitimate desire. And see Appendix II.
[15] The _Wanderings_, observe, not the Right goings, of Imagination.
She is very far from despising these.
[16] _See_ Appendix III.
[17] I would beg the reader's very close attention to these 37th and
38th paragraphs. It would be well if a dogged conviction could be
enforced on nations, as on individuals, that, with few exceptions, what
they cannot at present pay for, they should not at present have.
[18] _See_ Appendix IV.
[19] I little thought, what _Trionfo della Morte_ would be, for this
very cause, and in literal fulfilment of the closing words of the 47th
paragraph, over the fields and houses of Europe, and over its fairest
city--within seven years from the day I wrote it.
[20] The meaning of which is, that you may spend a great deal of money,
and get very little work for it, and that little bad; but having good
"air" or "spirit," to put life into it, with very little money, you may
get a great deal of work, and all good; which, observe, is an
arithmetical, not at all a poetical or visionary circumstance.
[21] More especially, works of great art.
[22] The meaning of that, in plain English, is, that we must find out
how far poverty and riches are good or bad for people, and what is the
difference between being miserably poor--so as, perhaps, to be driven to
crime, or to pass life in suffering--and being blessedly poor, in the
sense meant in the Sermon on the Mount. For I suppose the people who
believe that sermon, do not think (if they ever honestly ask themselves
what they do think), either that Luke vi. 24. is a merely poetical
exclamation, or that the Beatitude of Poverty has yet been attained in
St. Martin's Lane and other back streets of London.
[23] Large plans!--Eight years are gone, and nothing done yet. But I
keep my purpose of making one day this balance, or want of balance,
visible, in those so seldom used scales of Justice.
[24] These are nearly all briefly represented by the image used for the
force of money by Dante, of mast and sail:--
Quali dal vento le gonfiate vele
Caggiono avvolte, poi che l'alber fiacca
Tal cadde a terra la fiera crudele.
The image may be followed out, like all of Dante's, into as close detail
as the reader chooses. Thus the stress of the sail must be proportioned
to the strength of the mast, and it is only in unforeseen danger that a
skilful seaman ever carries all the canvas his spars will bear, states
of mercantile languor are like the flap of the sail in a calm; of
mercantile precaution, like taking in reefs; and mercantile ruin is
instant on the breaking of the mast.
[I mean by credit-power, the general impression on the national mind
that a sovereign, or any other coin, is worth so much bread and
cheese--so much wine--so much horse and carriage--or so much fine art:
it may be really worth, when tried, less or more than is thought: the
thought of it is the credit-power.]
[25] The object of Political Economy is not to buy, nor to sell labour,
but to spare it. Every attempt to buy or sell it is, in the outcome,
ineffectual; so far as successful, it is not sale, but Betrayal; and the
purchase-money is a part of that thirty pieces which bought, first the
greatest of labours, and afterwards the burial-field of the Stranger;
for this purchase-money, being in its very smallness or vileness the
exactly measured opposite of the "vilis annona amicorum," makes all men
strangers to each other.
[26] Cicero's distinction, "sordidi quæstus, quorum operæ, non quorum
artes emuntur," admirable in principle, is inaccurate in expression,
because Cicero did not practically know how much operative dexterity is
necessary in all the higher arts; but the cost of this dexterity is
incalculable. Be it great or small, the "cost" of the mere perfectness
of touch in a hammer-stroke of Donatello's, or a pencil-touch of
Correggio's, is inestimable by any ordinary arithmetic.
[Old notes, these, more embarrassing I now perceive, than elucidatory;
but right, and worth retaining.]
[27] Only observe, as some labour is more destructive of life than other
labour, the hour or day of the more destructive toil is supposed to
include proportionate rest. Though men do not, or cannot, usually take
such rest, except in death.
[28] There is, therefore, observe, no such thing as cheapness (in the
common use of that term), without some error or injustice. A thing is
said to be cheap, not because it is common, but because it is supposed
to be sold under its worth. Everything has its proper and true worth at
any given time, in relation to everything else; and at that worth should
be bought and sold. If sold under it, it is cheap to the buyer by
exactly so much as the seller loses, and no more. Putrid meat, at
twopence a pound, is not "cheaper" than wholesome meat at sevenpence a
pound; it is probably much dearer; but if, by watching your opportunity,
you can get the wholesome meat for sixpence a pound, it is cheaper to
you by a penny, which you have gained, and the seller has lost. The
present rage for cheapness is either, therefore, simply and literally a
rage for badness of all commodities, or it is an attempt to find persons
whose necessities will force them to let you have more than you should
for your money. It is quite easy to produce such persons, and in large
numbers; for the more distress there is in a nation, the more cheapness
of this sort you can obtain, and your boasted cheapness is thus merely a
measure of the extent of your national distress.
There is, indeed, a condition of apparent cheapness, which we have some
right to be triumphant in; namely, the real reduction in cost of
articles by right application of labour. But in this case the article is
only cheap with reference to its _former_ price; the so-called cheapness
is only our expression for the sensation of contrast between its former
and existing prices. So soon as the new methods of producing the article
are established, it ceases to be esteemed either cheap or dear, at the
new price, as at the old one, and is felt to be cheap only when accident
enables it to be purchased beneath this new value. And it is no
advantage to produce the article more easily, except as it enables you
to multiply your population. Cheapness of this kind is merely the
discovery that more men can be maintained on the same ground; and the
question how many you will maintain in proportion to your additional
means, remains exactly in the same terms that it did before.
A form of immediate cheapness results, however, in many cases, without
distress, from the labour of a population where food is redundant, or
where the labour by which the food is produced leaves much idle time on
their hands, which may be applied to the production of "cheap" articles.
All such phenomena indicate to the political economist places where the
labour is unbalanced. In the first case, the just balance is to be
effected by taking labourers from the spot where pressure exists, and
sending them to that where food is redundant. In the second, the
cheapness is a local accident, advantageous to the local purchaser,
disadvantageous to the local producer. It is one of the first duties of
commerce to extend the market, and thus give the local producer his full
advantage.
Cheapness caused by natural accidents of harvest, weather, &c., is
always counterbalanced, in due time, by natural scarcity, similarly
caused. It is the part of wise government, and healthy commerce, so to
provide in times and places of plenty for times and places of dearth, as
that there shall never be waste, nor famine.
Cheapness caused by gluts of the market is merely a disease of clumsy
and wanton commerce.
[29] Price has been already defined (p. 9) to be the quantity of labour
which the possessor of a thing is willing to take for it. It is best to
consider the price to be that fixed by the possessor, because the
possessor has absolute power of refusing sale, while the purchaser has
no absolute power of compelling it; but the effectual or market price is
that at which their estimates coincide.
[30] This "greater ease" ought to be allowed for by a diminution in the
times of the divided work; but as the proportion of times would remain
the same, I do not introduce this unnecessary complexity into the
calculation.
[31] Compare _Unto this Last_, p. 115, _et seq._
[32] [That is to say, the love of money is founded first on the
intenseness of desire for given things; a youth will rob the till,
now-a-days, for pantomime tickets and cigars; the "strength" of the
currency being irresistible to him, in consequence of his desire for
those luxuries.]
CHAPTER III.
COIN-KEEPING.
68. It will be seen by reference to the last chapter that our present
task is to examine the relation of holders of store to holders of
currency; and of both to those who hold neither. In order to do this, we
must determine on which side we are to place substances such as gold,
commonly known as bases of currency. By aid of previous definitions the
reader will now be able to understand closer statements than have yet
been possible.
69. _The currency of any country consists of every document
acknowledging debt, which is transferable in the country._[33]
This transferableness depends upon its intelligibility and credit. Its
intelligibility depends chiefly on the difficulty of forging anything
like it;--its credit much on national character, but ultimately _always
on the existence of substantial means of meeting its demand_.[34]
As the degrees of transferableness are variable, (some documents passing
only in certain places, and others passing, if at all, for less than
their inscribed value), both the mass, and, so to speak, fluidity, of
the currency, are variable. True or perfect currency flows freely, like
a pure stream; it becomes sluggish or stagnant in proportion to the
quantity of less transferable matter which mixes with it, adding to its
bulk, but diminishing its purity. [Articles of commercial value, on
which bills are drawn, increase the currency indefinitely; and
substances of intrinsic value if stamped or signed without restriction
so as to become acknowledgments of debt, increase it indefinitely also.]
Every bit of gold found in Australia, so long as it remains uncoined, is
an article offered for sale like any other; but as soon as it is coined
into pounds, it diminishes the value of every pound we have now in our
pockets.
70. Legally authorized or national currency, in its perfect condition,
is a form of public acknowledgment of debt, so regulated and divided
that any person presenting a commodity of tried worth in the public
market, shall, if he please, receive in exchange for it a document
giving him claim to the return of its equivalent, (1) in any place, (2)
at any time, and (3) in any kind.
When currency is quite healthy and vital, the persons entrusted with its
management are always able to give on demand either,
A. The assigning document for the assigned quantity of goods. Or,
B. The assigned quantity of goods for the assigning document.
If they cannot give document for goods, the national exchange is at
fault.
If they cannot give goods for document, the national credit is at fault.
The nature and power of the document are therefore to be examined under
the three relations it bears to Place, Time, and Kind.
71. (1.) It gives claim to the return of equivalent wealth in any
_Place_. Its use in this function is to save carriage, so that parting
with a bushel of corn in London, we may receive an order for a bushel of
corn at the Antipodes, or elsewhere. To be perfect in this use, the
substance of currency must be to the maximum portable, credible, and
intelligible. Its non-acceptance or discredit results always from some
form of ignorance or dishonour: so far as such interruptions rise out
of differences in denomination, there is no ground for their continuance
among civilized nations. It may be convenient in one country to use
chiefly copper for coinage, in another silver, and in another
gold,--reckoning accordingly in centimes, francs, or zecchins: but that
a franc should be different in weight and value from a shilling, and a
zwanziger vary from both, is wanton loss of commercial power.
72. (2.) It gives claim to the return of equivalent wealth at any
_Time_. In this second use, currency is the exponent of accumulation: it
renders the laying-up of store at the command of individuals unlimitedly
possible;--whereas, but for its intervention, all gathering would be
confined within certain limits by the bulk of property, or by its decay,
or the difficulty of its guardianship. "I will pull down my barns and
build greater," cannot be a daily saying; and all material investment is
enlargement of care. The national currency transfers the guardianship of
the store to many; and preserves to the original producer the right of
re-entering on its possession at any future period.
73. (3.) It gives claim (practical, though not legal) to the return of
equivalent wealth in any _Kind_. It is a transferable right, not merely
to this or that, but to anything; and its power in this function is
proportioned to the range of choice. If you give a child an apple or a
toy, you give him a determinate pleasure, but if you give him a penny,
an indeterminate one, proportioned to the range of selection offered by
the shops in the village. The power of the world's currency is similarly
in proportion to the openness of the world's fair, and, commonly,
enhanced by the brilliancy of external aspect, rather than solidity of
its wares.
74. We have said that the currency consists of orders for equivalent
goods. If equivalent, their quality must be guaranteed. The kinds of
goods chosen for specific claim must, therefore, be capable of test,
while, also, that a store may be kept in hand to meet the call of the
currency, smallness of bulk, with great relative value, is desirable;
and indestructibility, over at least a certain period, essential.
Such indestructibility, and facility of being tested, are united in
gold; its intrinsic value is great, and its imaginary value greater; so
that, partly through indolence, partly through necessity and want of
organization, most nations have agreed to take gold for the only basis
of their currencies;--with this grave disadvantage, that its portability
enabling the metal to become an active part of the medium of exchange,
the stream of the currency itself becomes opaque with gold--half
currency and half commodity, in unison of functions which partly
neutralize, partly enhance each other's force.
75. They partly neutralize, since in so far as the gold is commodity, it
is bad currency, because liable to sale; and in so far as it is
currency, it is bad commodity, because its exchange value interferes
with its practical use. Especially its employment in the higher branches
of the arts becomes unsafe on account of its liability to be melted down
for exchange.
Again. They partly enhance, since in so far as the gold has acknowledged
intrinsic value, it is good currency, because everywhere acceptable; and
in so far as it has legal exchangeable value, its worth as a commodity
is increased. We want no gold in the form of dust or crystal; but we
seek for it coined, because in that form it will pay baker and butcher.
And this worth in exchange not only absorbs a large quantity in that
use,[35] but greatly increases the effect on the imagination of the
quantity used in the arts. Thus, in brief, the force of the functions is
increased, but their precision blunted, by their unison.
76. These inconveniences, however, attach to gold as a basis of currency
on account of its portability and preciousness. But a far greater
inconvenience attaches to it as the only legal basis of currency.
Imagine gold to be only attainable in masses weighing several pounds
each, and its value, like that of malachite or marble, proportioned to
its largeness of bulk;--it could not then get itself confused with the
currency in daily use, but it might still remain as its basis; and this
second inconvenience would still affect it, namely, that its
significance as an expression of debt varies, as that of every other
article would, with the popular estimate of its desirableness, and with
the quantity offered in the market. My power of obtaining other goods
for gold depends always on the strength of public passion for gold, and
on the limitation of its quantity, so that when either of two things
happen--that the world esteems gold less, or finds it more easily--_my
right of claim is in that degree effaced_; and it has been even gravely
maintained that a discovery of a mountain of gold would cancel the
National Debt; in other words, that men may be paid for what costs much
in what costs nothing. Now, it is true that there is little chance of
sudden convulsion in this respect; the world will not so rapidly
increase in wisdom as to despise gold on a sudden; and perhaps may [for
a little time] desire it more eagerly the more easily it is obtained;
nevertheless, the right of debt ought not to rest on a basis of
imagination; nor should the frame of a national currency vibrate with
every miser's panic, and every merchant's imprudence.
77. There are two methods of avoiding this insecurity, which would have
been fallen upon long ago, if, instead of calculating the conditions of
the supply of gold, men had only considered how the world might live and
manage its affairs without gold at all.[36] One is, to base the currency
on substances of truer intrinsic value; the other, to base it on
several substances instead of one. If I can only claim gold, the
discovery of a golden mountain starves me; but if I can claim bread, the
discovery of a continent of corn-fields need not trouble me. If,
however, I wish to exchange my bread for other things, a good harvest
will for the time limit my power in this respect; but if I can claim
either bread, iron, or silk at pleasure, the standard of value has three
feet instead of one, and will be proportionately firm. Thus, ultimately,
the steadiness of currency depends upon the breadth of its base; but the
difficulty of organization increasing with this breadth, the discovery
of the condition at once safest and most convenient[37] can only be by
long analysis, which must for the present be deferred. Gold or
silver[38] may always be retained in limited use, as a luxury of coinage
and questionless standard, of one weight and alloy among all nations,
varying only in the die. The purity of coinage, when metallic, is
closely indicative of the honesty of the system of revenue, and even of
the general dignity of the State.[39]
78. Whatever the article or articles may be which the national currency
promises to pay, a premium on that article indicates bankruptcy of the
government in that proportion, the division of its assets being
restrained only by the remaining confidence of the holders of notes in
the return of prosperity to the firm. Currencies of forced acceptance,
or of unlimited issue, are merely various modes of disguising taxation,
and delaying its pressure, until it is too late to interfere with the
cause of pressure. To do away with the possibility of such disguise
would have been among the first results of a true economical science,
had any such existed; but there have been too many motives for the
concealment, so long as it could by any artifices be maintained, to
permit hitherto even the founding of such a science.
79. And indeed, it is only through evil conduct, wilfully persisted in,
that there is any embarrassment, either in the theory or working of
currency. No exchequer is ever embarrassed, nor is any financial
question difficult of solution, when people keep their practice honest,
and their heads cool. But when governments lose all office of pilotage,
protection, or scrutiny; and live only in magnificence of authorized
larceny, and polished mendacity; or when the people, choosing
Speculation (the s usually redundant in the spelling) instead of Toil,
visit no dishonesty with chastisement, that each may with impunity take
his dishonest turn;--there are no tricks of financial terminology that
will save them; all signature and mintage do but magnify the ruin they
retard; and even the riches that remain, stagnant or current, change
only from the slime of Avernus to the sand of Phlegethon--_quick_sand at
the embouchure;--land fluently recommended by recent auctioneers as
"eligible for building leases."
80. Finally, then, the power of true currency is fourfold.
(1.) Credit power. Its worth in exchange, dependent on public opinion of
the stability and honesty of the issuer.
(2.) Real worth. Supposing the gold, or whatever else the currency
expressly promises, to be required from the issuer, for all his notes;
and that the call cannot be met in full. Then the actual worth of the
document would be, and its actual worth at any moment is, therefore to
be defined as, what the division of the assets of the issuer would
produce for it.
(3.) The exchange power, of its base. Granting that we can get five
pounds in gold for our note, it remains a question how much of other
things we can get for five pounds in gold. The more of other things
exist, and the less gold, the greater this power.
(4.) The power over labour, exercised by the given quantity of the base,
or of the things to be got for it. The question in this case is, how
much work, and (question of questions!) _whose_ work, is to be had for
the food which five pounds will buy. This depends on the number of the
population, on their gifts, and on their dispositions, with which, down
to their slightest humours, and up to their strongest impulses, the
power of the currency varies.
81. Such being the main conditions of national currency, we proceed to
examine those of the total currency, under the broad definition,
"transferable acknowledgment of debt;"[40] among the many forms of
which there are in effect only two, distinctly opposed; namely, the
acknowledgments of debts which will be paid, and of debts which will
not. Documents, whether in whole or part, of bad debt, being to those of
good debt as bad money to bullion, we put for the present these forms of
imposture aside (as in analysing a metal we should wash it clear of
dross), and then range, in their exact quantities, the true currency of
the country on one side, and the store or property of the country on the
other. We place gold, and all such substances, on the side of documents,
as far as they operate by signature;--on the side of store as far as
they operate by value. Then the currency represents the quantity of debt
in the country, and the store the quantity of its possession. The
ownership of all the property is divided between the holders of currency
and holders of store, and whatever the claiming value of the currency is
at any moment, that value is to be deducted from the riches of the
store-holders.
82. Farther, as true currency represents by definition debts which will
be paid, it represents either the debtor's wealth, or his ability and
willingness; that is to say, either wealth existing in his hands
transferred to him by the creditor, or wealth which, as he is at some
time surely to return it, he is either increasing, or, if diminishing,
has the will and strength to reproduce. A sound currency therefore, as
by its increase it represents enlarging debt, represents also enlarging
means; but in this curious way, that a certain quantity of it marks the
deficiency of the wealth of the country from what it would have been if
that currency had not existed.[41] In this respect it is like the
detritus of a mountain; assume that it lies at a fixed angle, and the
more the detritus, the larger must be the mountain; but it would have
been larger still, had there been none.
83. Farther, though, as above stated, every man possessing money has
usually also some property beyond what is necessary for his immediate
wants, and men possessing property usually also hold currency beyond
what is necessary for their immediate exchanges, it mainly determines
the class to which they belong, whether in their eyes the money is an
adjunct of the property, or the property of the money. In the first case
the holder's pleasure is in his possessions, and in his money
subordinately, as the means of bettering or adding to them. In the
second, his pleasure is in his money, and in his possessions only as
representing it. (In the first case the money is as an atmosphere
surrounding the wealth, rising from it and raining back upon it; but in
the second, it is as a deluge, with the wealth floating, and for the
most part perishing in it.[42]) The shortest distinction between the men
is that the one wishes always to buy, and the other to sell.
84. Such being the great relations of the classes, their several
characters are of the highest importance to the nation; for on the
character of the store-holders chiefly depend the preservation, display,
and serviceableness of its wealth; on that of the currency-holders, its
distribution; on that of both, its reproduction.
We shall, therefore, ultimately find it to be of incomparably greater
importance to the nation in whose hands the thing is put, than how much
of it is got; and that the character of the holders may be conjectured
by the quality of the store; for such and such a man always asks for
such and such a thing; nor only asks for it, but if it can be bettered,
betters it: so that possession and possessor reciprocally act on each
other, through the entire sum of national possession. The base nation,
asking for base things, sinks daily to deeper vileness of nature and
weakness in use; while the noble nation, asking for noble things, rises
daily into diviner eminence in both; the tendency to degradation being
surely marked by "[Greek: ataxia];" that is to say, (expanding the Greek
thought), by carelessness as to the hands in which things are put,
consequent dispute for the acquisition of them, disorderliness in the
accumulation of them, inaccuracy in the estimate of them, and bluntness
in conception as to the entire nature of possession.
85. The currency-holders always increase in number and influence in
proportion to the bluntness of nature and clumsiness of the
store-holders; for the less use people can make of things, the more they
want of them, and the sooner weary of them, and want to change them for
something else; and all frequency of change increases the quantity and
power of currency. The large currency-holder himself is essentially a
person who never has been able to make up his mind as to what he will
have, and proceeds, therefore, in vague collection and aggregation, with
more and more infuriate passion, urged by complacency in progress,
vacancy in idea, and pride of conquest.
While, however, there is this obscurity in the nature of possession of
currency, there is a charm in the seclusion of it, which is to some
people very enticing. In the enjoyment of real property, others must
partly share. The groom has some enjoyment of the stud, and the gardener
of the garden; but the money is, or seems, shut up; it is wholly
enviable. No one else can have part in any complacencies arising from
it.
The power of arithmetical comparison is also a great thing to
unimaginative people. They know always they are so much better than they
were, in money; so much better than others, in money; but wit cannot be
so compared, nor character. My neighbour cannot be convinced that I am
wiser than he is, but he can, that I am worth so much more; and the
universality of the conviction is no less flattering than its clearness.
Only a few can understand,--none measure--and few will willingly adore,
superiorities in other things; but everybody can understand money,
everybody can count it, and most will worship it.
86. Now, these various temptations to accumulation would be politically
harmless if what was vainly accumulated had any fair chance of being
wisely spent. For as accumulation cannot go on for ever, but must some
day end in its reverse--if this reverse were indeed a beneficial
distribution and use, as irrigation from reservoir, the fever of
gathering, though perilous to the gatherer, might be serviceable to the
community. But it constantly happens (so constantly, that it may be
stated as a political law having few exceptions), that what is
unreasonably gathered is also unreasonably spent by the persons into
whose hands it finally falls. Very frequently it is spent in war, or
else in a stupefying luxury, twice hurtful, both in being indulged by
the rich and witnessed by the poor. So that the _mal tener_ and _mal
dare_ are as correlative as complementary colours; and the circulation
of wealth, which ought to be soft, steady, strong, far-sweeping, and
full of warmth, like the Gulf stream, being narrowed into an eddy, and
concentrated at a point, changes into the alternate suction and
surrender of Charybdis. Which is indeed, I doubt not, the true meaning
of that marvellous fable, "infinite," as Bacon said of it, "in matter of
meditation."[43]
87. It is a strange habit of wise humanity to speak in enigmas only, so
that the highest truths and usefullest laws must be hunted for through
whole picture-galleries of dreams, which to the vulgar seem dreams only.
Thus Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and
Goethe, have hidden all that is chiefly serviceable in their work, and
in all the various literature they absorbed and re-embodied, under types
which have rendered it quite useless to the multitude. What is worse,
the two primal declarers of moral discovery, Homer and Plato, are partly
at issue; for Plato's logical power quenched his imagination, and he
became incapable of understanding the purely imaginative element either
in poetry or painting: he therefore somewhat overrates the pure
discipline of passionate art in song and music, and misses that of
meditative art. There is, however, a deeper reason for his distrust of
Homer. His love of justice, and reverently religious nature, made him
dread, as death, every form of fallacy; but chiefly, fallacy respecting
the world to come (his own myths being only symbolic exponents of a
rational hope). We shall perhaps now every day discover more clearly how
right Plato was in this, and feel ourselves more and more wonderstruck
that men such as Homer and Dante (and, in an inferior sphere, Milton),
not to speak of the great sculptors and painters of every age, have
permitted themselves, though full of all nobleness and wisdom, to coin
idle imaginations of the mysteries of eternity, and guide the faiths of
the families of the earth by the courses of their own vague and
visionary arts: while the indisputable truths of human life and duty,
respecting which they all have but one voice, lie hidden behind these
veils of phantasy, unsought, and often unsuspected. I will gather
carefully, out of Dante and Homer, what, in this kind, bears on our
subject, in its due place; the first broad intention of their symbols
may be sketched at once.
88. The rewards of a worthy use of riches, subordinate to other ends,
are shown by Dante in the fifth and sixth orbs of Paradise; for the
punishment of their unworthy use, three places are assigned; one for the
avaricious and prodigal whose souls are lost, (_Hell_, canto 7); one for
the avaricious and prodigal whose souls are capable of purification,
(_Purgatory_, canto 19); and one for the usurers, of whom _none_ can be
redeemed (_Hell_, canto 17). The first group, the largest in all hell
("gente piu che altrove troppa," compare Virgil's "quæ maxima turba"),
meet in contrary currents, _as the_ _waves of Charybdis_, casting
weights at each other from opposite sides. This weariness of contention
is the chief element of their torture; so marked by the beautiful lines
beginning "Or puoi, figliuol," &c.: (but the usurers, who made their
money inactively, _sit_ on the sand, equally without rest, however. "Di
qua, di la, soccorrien," &c.) For it is not avarice, but _contention_
for riches, leading to this double misuse of them, which, in Dante's
light, is the unredeemable sin. The place of its punishment is guarded
by Plutus, "the great enemy," and "la fièra crudele," a spirit quite
different from the Greek Plutus, who, though old and blind, is not
cruel, and is curable, so as to become far-sighted. ([Greek: ou typhlos
all' oxy blepôn].--Plato's epithets in first book of the _Laws_.) Still
more does this Dantesque type differ from the resplendent Plutus of
Goethe in the second part of _Faust_, who is the personified power of
wealth for good or evil--not the passion for wealth; and again from the
Plutus of Spenser, who is the passion of mere aggregation. Dante's
Plutus is specially and definitely the Spirit of Contention and
Competition, or Evil Commerce; because, as I showed before, this kind of
commerce "makes all men strangers;" his speech is therefore
unintelligible, and no single soul of all those ruined by him _has
recognizable features_.
On the other hand, the redeemable sins of avarice and prodigality are,
in Dante's sight, those which are without deliberate or calculated
operation. The lust, or lavishness, of riches can be purged, so long as
there has been no servile consistency of dispute and competition for
them. The sin is spoken of as that of degradation by the love of earth;
it is purified by deeper humiliation--the souls crawl on their bellies;
their chant is, "my soul cleaveth unto the dust." But the spirits thus
condemned are all recognizable, and even the worst examples of the
thirst for gold, which they are compelled to tell the histories of
during the night, are of men swept by the passion of avarice into
violent crime, but not sold to its steady work.
89. The precept given to each of these spirits for its deliverance
is--Turn thine eyes to the lucre (lure) which the Eternal King rolls
with the mighty wheels. Otherwise, the wheels of the "Greater Fortune,"
of which the constellation is ascending when Dante's dream begins.
Compare George Herbert--
"Lift up thy head;
Take stars for money; stars, not to be told
By any art, yet to be purchased."
And Plato's notable sentence in the third book of the _Polity_.--"Tell
them they have divine gold and silver in their souls for ever; that they
need no money stamped of men--neither may they otherwise than impiously
mingle the gathering of the divine with the mortal treasure, _for
through that which the law of the multitude has coined, endless crimes
have been done and suffered; but in their's is neither pollution nor
sorrow_."
90. At the entrance of this place of punishment an evil spirit is seen
by Dante, quite other than the "Gran Nemico." The great enemy is obeyed
knowingly and willingly; but this spirit--feminine--and called a
Siren--is the "_Deceitfulness_ of riches," [Greek: apatê ploutou] of the
Gospels, winning obedience by guile. This is the Idol of riches, made
doubly phantasmal by Dante's seeing her in a dream. She is lovely to
look upon, and enchants by her sweet singing, but her womb is loathsome.
Now, Dante does not call her one of the Sirens carelessly, any more than
he speaks of Charybdis carelessly; and though he had got at the meaning
of the Homeric fable only through Virgil's obscure tradition of it, the
clue he has given us is quite enough. Bacon's interpretation, "the
Sirens, _or pleasures_," which has become universal since his time, is
opposed alike to Plato's meaning and Homer's. The Sirens are not
pleasures, but _Desires_: in the Odyssey they are the phantoms of vain
desire; but in Plato's Vision of Destiny, phantoms of divine desire;
singing each a different note on the circles of the distaff of
Necessity, but forming one harmony, to which the three great Fates put
words. Dante, however, adopted the Homeric conception of them, which was
that they were demons of the Imagination, not carnal; (desire of the
eyes; not lust of the flesh); therefore said to be daughters of the
Muses. Yet not of the Muses, heavenly or historical but of the Muse of
pleasure; and they are at first winged, because even vain hope excites
and helps when first formed; but afterwards, contending for the
possession of the imagination with the Muses themselves, they are
deprived of their wings.
91. And thus we are to distinguish the Siren power from the power of
Circe, who is no daughter of the Muses, but of the strong elements, Sun
and Sea; her power is that of frank, and full vital pleasure, which, if
governed and watched, nourishes men; but, unwatched, and having no
"moly," bitterness or delay, mixed with it, turns men into beasts, but
does not slay them,--leaves them, on the contrary, power of revival. She
is herself indeed an Enchantress;--pure Animal life; transforming--or
degrading--but always wonderful (she puts the stores on board the ship
invisibly, and is gone again, like a ghost); even the wild beasts
rejoice and are softened around her cave; the transforming poisons she
gives to men are mixed with no rich feast, but with pure and right
nourishment,--Pramnian wine, cheese, and flour; that is, wine, milk, and
corn, the three great sustainers of life--it is their own fault if these
make swine of them; (see Appendix V.) and swine are chosen merely as the
type of consumption; as Plato's [Greek: hyôn polis], in the second book
of the _Polity_, and perhaps chosen by Homer with a deeper knowledge of
the likeness in variety of nourishment, and internal form of body.
"Et quel est, s'il vous plait, cet audacieux animal qui se permet d'être
bâti au dedans comme une jolie petite fille?"
"Hélas! chère enfant, j'ai honte de le nommer, et il ne faudra pas m'en
vouloir. C'est ... c'est le cochon. Ce n'est pas précisément flatteur
pour vous; mais nous en sommes tous là, et si cela vous contrarie par
trop, il faut aller vous plaindre au bon Dieu qui a voulu que les choses
fussent arrangées ainsi: seulement le cochon, qui ne pense qu'à manger,
a l'estomac bien plus vaste que nous et c'est toujours une
consolation."--_(Histoire d'une Bouchée de Pain_, Lettre ix.)
92. But the deadly Sirens are in all things opposed to the Circean
power. They promise pleasure, but never give it. They nourish in no
wise; but slay by slow death. And whereas they corrupt the heart and
the head, instead of merely betraying the senses, there is no recovery
from their power; they do not tear nor scratch, like Scylla, but the men
who have listened to them are poisoned, and waste away. Note that the
Sirens' field is covered, not merely with the bones, but with the
_skins_, of those who have been consumed there. They address themselves,
in the part of the song which Homer gives, not to the passions of
Ulysses, but to his vanity, and the only man who ever came within
hearing of them, and escaped untempted, was Orpheus, who silenced the
vain imaginations by singing the praises of the gods.
93. It is, then, one of these Sirens whom Dante takes as the phantasm or
deceitfulness of riches; but note further, that she says it was her song
that deceived Ulysses. Look back to Dante's account of Ulysses' death,
and we find it was not the love of money, but pride of knowledge, that
betrayed him; whence we get the clue to Dante's complete meaning: that
the souls whose love of wealth is pardonable have been first deceived
into pursuit of it by a dream of its higher uses, or by ambition. His
Siren is therefore the Philotimé of Spenser, daughter of Mammon--
"Whom all that folk with such contention
Do flock about, my deare, my daughter is--
Honour and dignitie from her alone
Derived are."
By comparing Spenser's entire account of this Philotimé with Dante's of
the Wealth-Siren, we shall get at the full meaning of both poets; but
that of Homer lies hidden much more deeply. For his Sirens are
indefinite; and they are desires of any evil thing; power of wealth is
not specially indicated by him, until, escaping the 'harmonious danger
of imagination, Ulysses has to choose between two practical ways of
life, indicated by the two _rocks_ of Scylla and Charybdis. The monsters
that haunt them are quite distinct from the rocks themselves, which,
having many other subordinate significations, are in the main Labour and
Idleness, or getting and spending; each with its attendant monster, or
betraying demon. The rock of gaining has its summit in the clouds,
invisible, and not to be climbed; that of spending is low, but marked by
the cursed fig-tree, which has leaves, but no fruit. We know the type
elsewhere; and there is a curious lateral allusion to it by Dante when
Jacopo di Sant' Andrea, who had ruined himself by profusion and
committed suicide, scatters the leaves of the bush of Lotto degli Agli,
endeavouring to hide himself among them. We shall hereafter examine the
type completely; here I will only give an approximate rendering of
Homer's words, which have been obscured more by translation than even by
tradition.
94. "They are overhanging rocks. The great waves of blue water break
round them; and the blessed Gods call them the Wanderers.
"By one of them no winged thing can pass--not even the wild doves that
bring ambrosia to their father Jove--but the smooth rock seizes its
sacrifice of them." (Not even ambrosia to be had without Labour. The
word is peculiar--as a part of anything is offered for Sacrifice;
especially used of heave-offering.) "It reaches the wide heaven with its
top, and a dark blue cloud rests on it, and never passes; neither does
the clear sky hold it, in summer nor in harvest. Nor can any man climb
it--not if he had twenty feet and hands, for it is smooth as though it
were hewn.
"And in the midst of it is a cave which is turned the way of hell. And
therein dwells Scylla, whining for prey: her cry, indeed, is no louder
than that of a newly-born whelp: but she herself is an awful thing--nor
can any creature see her face and be glad; no, though it were a god that
rose against her. For she has twelve feet, all fore-feet, and six necks,
and terrible heads on them; and each has three rows of teeth, full of
black death.
"But the opposite rock is lower than this, though but a bow-shot
distant; and upon it there is a great fig-tree, full of leaves; and
under it the terrible Charybdis sucks down the black water. Thrice in
the day she sucks it down, and thrice; casts it up again: be not thou
there when she sucks down, for Neptune himself could not save thee."
[Thus far went my rambling note, in _Fraser's Magazine_. The Editor sent
me a compliment on it--of which I was very proud; what the Publisher
thought of it, I am not informed; only I know that eventually he stopped
the papers. I think a great deal of it myself, now, and have put it all
in large print accordingly, and should like to write more; but will, on
the contrary, self-denyingly, and in gratitude to any reader who has got
through so much, end my chapter.]
FOOTNOTES:
[33] Remember this definition: it is of great importance as opposed to
the imperfect ones usually given. When first these essays were
published, I remember one of their reviewers asking contemptuously, "Is
half-a-crown a document?" it never having before occurred to him that a
document might be stamped as well as written, and stamped on silver as
well as on parchment.
[34] I do not mean the demand of the holder of a five-pound note for
five pounds, but the demand of the holder of a pound for a pound's worth
of something good.
[35] [Read and think over, the following note very carefully.] The waste
of labour in obtaining the gold, though it cannot be estimated by help
of any existing data, may be understood in its bearing on entire economy
by supposing it limited to transactions between two persons. If two
farmers in Australia have been exchanging corn and cattle with each
other for years, keeping their accounts of reciprocal debt in any simple
way, the sum of the possessions of either would not be diminished,
though the part of it which was lent or borrowed were only reckoned by
marks on a stone, or notches on a tree; and the one counted himself
accordingly, so many scratches, or so many notches, better than the
other. But it would soon be seriously diminished if, discovering gold in
their fields, each resolved only to accept golden counters for a
reckoning; and accordingly, whenever he wanted a sack of corn or a cow,
was obliged to go and wash sand for a week before he could get the means
of giving a receipt for them.
[36] It is difficult to estimate the curious futility of discussions
such as that which lately occupied a section of the British Association,
on the absorption of gold, while no one can produce even the simplest of
the data necessary for the inquiry. To take the first occurring
one,--What means have we of ascertaining the weight of gold employed
this year in the toilettes of the women of Europe (not to speak of
Asia); and, supposing it known, what means of conjecturing the weight by
which, next year, their fancies, and the changes of style among their
jewellers, will diminish or increase it?
[37] See, in Pope's epistle to Lord Bathurst, his sketch of the
difficulties and uses of a currency literally "pecuniary"--(consisting
of herds of cattle).
"His Grace will game--to White's a bull be led," &c.
[38] Perhaps both; perhaps silver only. It may be found expedient
ultimately to leave gold free for use in the arts. As a means of
reckoning, the standard might be, and in some cases has already been,
entirely ideal.--_See_ Mill's _Political Economy_, book iii. chap. VII.
at beginning.
[39] The purity of the drachma and zecchin were not without significance
of the state of intellect, art, and policy, both in Athens and
Venice;--a fact first impressed upon me ten years ago, when, in taking
daguerreotypes at Venice, I found no purchaseable gold pure enough to
gild them with, except that of the old Venetian zecchin.
[40] Under which term, observe, we include all documents of debt, which,
being honest, might be transferable, though they practically are not
transferred; while we exclude all documents which are in reality
worthless, though in fact transferred temporarily, as bad money is. The
document of honest debt, not transferred, is merely to paper currency as
gold withdrawn from circulation is to that of bullion. Much confusion
has crept into the reasoning on this subject from the idea that the
withdrawal from circulation is a definable state, whereas it is a
graduated state, and indefinable. The sovereign in my pocket is
withdrawn from circulation as long as I choose to keep it there. It is
no otherwise withdrawn if I bury it, nor even if I choose to make it,
and others, into a golden cup, and drink out of them; since a rise in
the price of the wine, or of other things, may at any time cause me to
melt the cup and throw it back into currency; and the bullion operates
on the prices of the things in the market as directly, though not as
forcibly, while it is in the form of a cup as it does in the form of a
sovereign. No calculation can be founded on my humour in either case. If
I like to handle rouleaus, and therefore keep a quantity of gold, to
play with, in the form of jointed basaltic columns, it is all one in its
effect on the market as if I kept it in the form of twisted filigree,
or, steadily "amicus lamnæ," beat the narrow gold pieces into broad
ones, and dined off them. The probability is greater that I break the
rouleau than that I melt the plate; but the increased probability is not
calculable. Thus, documents are only withdrawn from the currency when
cancelled, and bullion when it is so effectually lost as that the
probability of finding it is no greater than of finding new gold in the
mine.
[41] For example, suppose an active peasant, having got his ground into
good order and built himself a comfortable house, finding time still on
his hands, sees one of his neighbours little able to work, and
ill-lodged, and offers to build him also a house, and to put his land in
order, on condition of receiving for a given period rent for the
building and tithe of the fruits. The offer is accepted, and a document
given promissory of rent and tithe. This note is money. It can only be
good money if the man who has incurred the debt so far recovers his
strength as to be able to take advantage of the help he has received,
and meet the demand of the note; if he lets his house fall to ruin, and
his field to waste, his promissory note will soon be valueless: but the
existence of the note at all is a consequence of his not having worked
so stoutly as the other. Let him gain as much as to be able to pay back
the entire debt; the note is cancelled, and we have two rich
store-holders and no currency.
[42] [You need not trouble yourself to make out the sentence in
parenthesis, unless you like, but do not think it is mere metaphor. It
states a fact which I could not have stated so shortly, _but_ by
metaphor.]
[43] [What follows, to the end of the chapter, was a note only, in the
first printing; but for after service, it is of more value than any
other part of the book, so I have put it into the main text.]
CHAPTER IV.
COMMERCE.
95. As the currency conveys right of choice out of many things in
exchange for one, so Commerce is the agency by which the power of choice
is obtained; so that countries producing only timber can obtain for
their timber silk and gold; or, naturally producing only jewels and
frankincense, can obtain for them cattle and corn. In this function,
commerce is of more importance to a country in proportion to the
limitations of its products, and the restlessness of its
fancy;--generally of greater importance towards Northern latitudes.
96. Commerce is necessary, however, not only to exchange local products,
but local skill. Labour requiring the agency of fire can only be given
abundantly in cold countries; labour requiring suppleness of body and
sensitiveness of touch, only in warm ones; labour involving accurate
vivacity of thought only in temperate ones; while peculiar imaginative
actions are produced by extremes of heat and cold, and of light and
darkness. The production of great art is limited to climates warm enough
to admit of repose in the open air, and cool enough to render such
repose delightful. Minor variations in modes of skill distinguish every
locality. The labour which at any place is easiest, is in that place
cheapest; and it becomes often desirable that products raised in one
country should be wrought in another. Hence have arisen discussions on
"International values" which will be one day remembered as highly
curious exercises of the human mind. For it will be discovered, in due
course of tide and time, that international value is regulated just as
inter-provincial or inter-parishional value is. Coals and hops are
exchanged between Northumberland and Kent on absolutely the same
principles as iron and wine between Lancashire and Spain. The greater
breadth of an arm of the sea increases the cost, but does not modify the
principle of exchange; and a bargain written in two languages will have
no other economical results than a bargain written in one. The distances
of nations are measured, not by seas, but by ignorances; and their
divisions determined, not by dialects, but by enmities.[44]
97. Of course, a system of international values may always be
constructed if we assume a relation of moral law to physical geography;
as, for instance, that it is right to cheat or rob across a river,
though not across a road; or across a sea, though not across a river,
&c.;--again, a system of such values may be constructed by assuming
similar relations of taxation to physical geography; as, for instance,
that an article should be taxed in crossing a river, but not in crossing
a road; or in being carried fifty miles, but not in being carried five,
&c.; such positions are indeed not easily maintained when once put in
logical form; but _one_ law of international value is maintainable in
any form: namely, that the farther your neighbour lives from you, and
the less he understands you, _the more you are bound to be true in your
dealings with him_; because your power over him is greater in proportion
to his ignorance, and his remedy more difficult in proportion to his
distance.[45]
98. I have just said the breadth of sea increases the cost of exchange.
Now note that exchange, or commerce, _in itself_, is always costly; the
sum of the value of the goods being diminished by the cost of their
conveyance, and by the maintenance of the persons employed in it; so
that it is only when there is advantage to both producers (in getting
the one thing for the other) greater than the loss in conveyance, that
the exchange is expedient. And it can only be justly conducted when the
porters kept by the producers (commonly called merchants) expect _mere_
pay, and not profit.[46] For in just commerce there are but three
parties--the two persons or societies exchanging, and the agent or
agents of exchange; the value of the things to be exchanged is known by
both the exchangers, and each receives equal value, neither gaining nor
losing (for whatever one gains the other loses). The intermediate agent
is paid a known per-centage by both, partly for labour in conveyance,
partly for care, knowledge, and risk; every attempt at concealment of
the amount of the pay indicates either effort on the part of the agent
to obtain unjust profit, or effort on the part of the exchangers to
refuse him just pay. But for the most part it is the first, namely, the
effort on the part of the merchant to obtain larger profit (so-called)
by buying cheap and selling dear. Some part, indeed, of this larger gain
is deserved, and might be openly demanded, because it is the reward of
the merchant's knowledge, and foresight of probable necessity; but the
greater part of such gain is unjust; and unjust in this most fatal way,
that it depends, first, on keeping the exchangers ignorant of the
exchange value of the articles; and, secondly, on taking advantage of
the buyer's need and the seller's poverty. It is, therefore, one of the
essential, and quite the most fatal, forms of usury; for usury means
merely taking an exorbitant[47] sum for the use of anything; and it is
no matter whether the exorbitance is on loan or exchange, on rent or on
price--the essence of the usury being that it is obtained by advantage
of opportunity or necessity, and not as due reward for labour. All the
great thinkers, therefore, have held it to be unnatural and impious, in
so far as it feeds on the distress of others, or their folly.[48]
Nevertheless, attempts to repress it by law must for ever be
ineffective; though Plato, Bacon, and the First Napoleon--all three of
them men who knew somewhat more of humanity than the "British merchant"
usually does--tried their hands at it, and have left some (probably)
good moderative forms of law, which we will examine in their place. But
the only final check upon it must be radical purifying of the national
character, for being, as Bacon calls it, "concessum propter duritiem
cordis," it is to be done away with by touching the heart only; not,
however, without medicinal law--as in the case of the other permission,
"propter duritiem." But in this more than in anything (though much in
all, and though in this he would not himself allow of their application,
for his own laws against usury are sharp enough), Plato's words in the
fourth book of the Polity are true, that neither drugs, nor charms, nor
burnings, will touch a deep-lying political sore, any more than a deep
bodily one; but only right and utter change of constitution: and that
"they do but lose their labour who think that by any tricks of law they
can get the better of these mischiefs of commerce, and see not that they
hew at a Hydra."
99. And indeed this Hydra seems so unslayable, and sin sticks so fast
between the joinings of the stones of buying and selling, that "to
trade" in things, or literally "cross-give" them, has warped itself, by
the instinct of nations, into their worst word for fraud; for, because
in trade there cannot but be trust, and it seems also that there cannot
but also be injury in answer to it, what is merely fraud between enemies
becomes treachery among friends: and "trader," "traditor," and "traitor"
are but the same word. For which simplicity of language there is more
reason than at first appears: for as in true commerce there is no
"profit," so in true commerce there is no "sale." The idea of sale is
that of an interchange between enemies respectively endeavouring to get
the better one of another; but commerce is an exchange between friends;
and there is no desire but that it should be just, any more than there
would be between members of the same family.[49] The moment there is a
bargain over the pottage, the family relation is dissolved:--typically,
"the days of mourning for my father are at hand." Whereupon follows the
resolve, "then will I slay my brother."
100. This inhumanity of mercenary commerce is the more notable because
it is a fulfilment of the law that the corruption of the best is the
worst. For as, taking the body natural for symbol of the body politic,
the governing and forming powers may be likened to the brain, and the
labouring to the limbs, the mercantile, presiding over circulation and
communication of things in changed utilities, is symbolized by the
heart; and, if that hardens, all is lost. And this is the ultimate
lesson which the leader of English intellect meant for us, (a lesson,
indeed, not all his own, but part of the old wisdom of humanity), in the
tale of the _Merchant of Venice_; in which the true and incorrupt
merchant,--_kind and free beyond every other Shakspearian conception of
men_,--is opposed to the corrupted merchant, or usurer; the lesson being
deepened by the expression of the strange hatred which the corrupted
merchant bears to the pure one, mixed with intense scorn,--
"This is the fool that lent out money gratis; look to him, jailer," (as
to lunatic no less than criminal) the enmity, observe, having its
symbolism literally carried out by being aimed straight at the heart,
and finally foiled by a literal appeal to the great moral law that flesh
and blood cannot be weighed, enforced by "Portia"[50] ("Portion"), the
type of divine Fortune, found, not in gold, nor in silver, but in lead,
that is to say, in endurance and patience, not in splendour; and finally
taught by her lips also, declaring, instead of the law and quality of
"merces," the greater law and quality of mercy, which is not strained,
but drops as the rain, blessing him that gives and him that takes. And
observe that this "mercy" is not the mean "Misericordia," but the mighty
"Gratia," answered by Gratitude, (observe Shylock's leaning on the, to
him detestable, word, _gratis_, and compare the relations of Grace to
Equity given in the second chapter of the second book of the
_Memorabilia_;) that is to say, it is the gracious or loving, instead of
the strained, or competing manner, of doing things, answered, not only
with "merces" or pay, but with "merci" or thanks. And this is indeed the
meaning of the great benediction "Grace, mercy, and peace," for there
can be no peace without grace, (not even by help of rifled cannon), nor
even without triplicity of graciousness, for the Greeks, who began but
with one Grace, had to open their scheme into three before they had
done.
101. With the usual tendency of long repeated thought, to take the
surface for the deep, we have conceived these goddesses as if they only
gave loveliness to gesture; whereas their true function is to give
graciousness to deed, the other loveliness arising naturally out of
that. In which function Charis becomes Charitas;[51] and has a name and
praise even greater than that of Faith or Truth, for these may be
maintained sullenly and proudly; but Charis is in her countenance always
gladdening (Aglaia), and in her service instant and humble; and the true
wife of Vulcan, or Labour. And it is not until her sincerity of function
is lost, and her mere beauty contemplated instead of her patience, that
she is born again of the foam flake, and becomes Aphrodite; and it is
then only that she becomes capable of joining herself to war and to the
enmities of men, instead of to labour and their services. Therefore the
fable of Mars and Venus is chosen by Homer, picturing himself as
Demodocus, to sing at the games in the court of Alcinous. Phæacia is the
Homeric island of Atlantis; an image of noble and wise government,
concealed, (how slightly!) merely by the change of a short vowel for a
long one in the name of its queen; yet misunderstood by all later
writers, (even by Horace, in his "pinguis, Phæaxque"). That fable
expresses the perpetual error of men in thinking that grace and dignity
can only be reached by the soldier, and never by the artisan; so that
commerce and the useful arts have had the honour and beauty taken away,
and only the Fraud and Pain left to them, with the lucre. Which is,
indeed, one great reason of the continual blundering about the offices
of government with respect to commerce. The higher classes are ashamed
to employ themselves in it; and though ready enough to fight for (or
occasionally against) the people,--to preach to them,--or judge them,
will not break bread for them; the refined upper servant who has
willingly looked after the burnishing of the armoury and ordering of the
library, not liking to set foot in the larder.
102. Farther still. As Charis becomes Charitas on the one side, she
becomes--better still--Chara, Joy, on the other; or rather this is her
very mother's milk and the beauty of her childhood; for God brings no
enduring Love, nor any other good, out of pain; nor out of contention;
but out of joy and harmony. And in this sense, human and divine, music
and gladness, and the measures of both, come into her name; and Cher
becomes full-vowelled Cheer, and Cheerful; and Chara opens into Choir
and Choral.[52]
103. And lastly. As Grace passes into Freedom of action, Charis becomes
Eleutheria, or Liberality; a form of liberty quite curiously and
intensely different from the thing usually understood by "Liberty" in
modern language: indeed, much more like what some people would call
slavery: for a Greek always understood, primarily, by liberty,
deliverance from the law of his own passions (or from what the Christian
writers call bondage of corruption), and this a complete liberty: not
being merely safe from the Siren, but also unbound from the mast, and
not having to resist the passion, but making it fawn upon, and follow
him--(this may be again partly the meaning of the fawning beasts about
the Circean cave; so, again, George Herbert--
Correct thy passion's spite,
Then may the beasts draw thee to happy light)--
And it is only in such generosity that any man becomes capable of so
governing others as to take true part in any system of national economy.
Nor is there any other eternal distinction between the upper and lower
classes than this form of liberty, Eleutheria, or benignity, in the one,
and its opposite of slavery, Douleia, or malignity, in the other; the
separation of these two orders of men, and the firm government of the
lower by the higher, being the first conditions of possible wealth and
economy in any state,--the Gods giving it no greater gift than the power
to discern its true freemen, and "malignum spernere vulgus."
104. While I have traced the finer and higher laws of this matter for
those whom they concern, I have also to note the material law--vulgarly
expressed in the proverb, "Honesty is the best policy." That proverb is
indeed wholly inapplicable to matters of private interest. It is not
true that honesty, as far as material gain is concerned, profits
individuals. A clever and cruel knave will in a mixed society always be
richer than an honest person can be. But Honesty is the best "policy,"
if policy mean practice of State. For fraud gains nothing in a State. It
only enables the knaves in it to live at the expense of honest people;
while there is for every act of fraud, however small, a loss of wealth
to the community. Whatever the fraudulent person gains, some other
person loses, as fraud produces nothing; and there is, _besides_, the
loss of the time and thought spent in accomplishing the fraud, and of
the strength otherwise obtainable by mutual help (not to speak of the
fevers of anxiety and jealousy in the blood, which are a heavy physical
loss, as I will show in due time). Practically, when the nation is
deeply corrupt cheat answers to cheat; every one is in turn imposed
upon, and there is to the body politic the dead loss of the ingenuity,
together with the incalculable mischief of the injury to each defrauded
person, producing collateral effect unexpectedly. My neighbour sells me
bad meat: I sell him in return flawed iron. We neither of us get one
atom of pecuniary advantage on the whole transaction, but we both suffer
unexpected inconvenience; my men get scurvy, and his cattle-truck runs
off the rails.
105. The examination of this form of Charis must, therefore, lead us
into the discussion of the principles of government in general, and
especially of that of the poor by the rich, discovering how the
Graciousness joined with the Greatness, or Love with Majestas, is the
true Dei Gratia, or Divine Right, of every form and manner of King; _i.
e._, specifically, of the thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, and
powers of the earth:--of the thrones, stable, or "ruling," literally
right-doing powers ("rex eris, recte si facies"):--of the
dominations--lordly, edifying, dominant and harmonious powers; chiefly
domestic, over the "built thing," domus, or house; and inherently
twofold, Dominus and Domina; Lord and Lady:--of the Princedoms,
pre-eminent, incipient, creative, and demonstrative powers; thus poetic
and mercantile, in the "princeps carmen deduxisse" and the
merchant-prince:--of the Virtues or Courages; militant, guiding, or
Ducal powers:--and finally of the Strengths, or Forces pure; magistral
powers, of the More over the less, and the forceful and free over the
weak and servile elements of life.
Subject enough for the next paper, involving "economical" principles of
some importance, of which, for theme, here is a sentence, which I do not
care to translate, for it would sound harsh in English,[53] though,
truly, it is one of the tenderest ever uttered by man; which may be
meditated over, or rather _through_, in the meanwhile, by any one who
will take the pains:--
[Greek: Ar oun, hôsper Hippos tô anepistêmoni men encheirounti de
chrêsthai zêmia estin, houtô kai adelphos, otan tis autô mê epistamenos
encheir chrêsthai, zêmia esti];
FOOTNOTES:
[44] I have repeated the substance of this and the next paragraph so
often since, that I am ashamed and weary. The thing is too true, and too
simple, it seems, for anybody ever to believe. Meantime, the theories of
"international values," as explained by Modern Political Economy, have
brought about last year's pillage of France by Germany, and the
affectionate relations now existing in consequence between the
inhabitants of the right and left banks of the Rhine.
[45] I wish some one would examine and publish accurately the late
dealings of the Governors of the Cape with the Caffirs.
[46] By "pay," I mean wages for labour or skill; by "profit," gain
dependent on the state of the market.
[47] Since I wrote this, I have worked out the question of interest of
money, which always, until lately, had embarrassed and defeated me; and
I find that the payment of interest of any amount whatever is real
"usury," and entirely unjustifiable. I was shown this chiefly by the
pamphlets issued by Mr. W. C. Sillar, though I greatly regret the
impatience which causes Mr. Sillar to regard usury as the radical crime
in political economy. There are others worse, that act with it.
[48] Hence Dante's companionship of Cahors, _Inf._, canto xi., supported
by the view taken of the matter throughout the middle ages, in common
with the Greeks.
[49] I do not wonder when I re-read this, that people talk about my
"sentiment." But there is no sentiment whatever in the matter. It is a
hard and bare commercial fact, that if two people deal together who
don't try to cheat each other, they will in a given time, make more
money out of each other than if they do. See § 104.
[50] Shakspeare would certainly never have chosen this name had he been
forced to retain the Roman spelling. Like Perdita, "lost lady," or
Cordelia, "heart-lady," Portia is "fortune" lady. The two great relative
groups of words, Fortuna, fero, and fors--Portio, porto, and pars (with
the lateral branch, op-portune, im-portune, opportunity, &c.), are of
deep and intricate significance; their various senses of bringing,
abstracting, and sustaining being all centralized by the wheel (which
bears and moves at once), or still better, the ball (spera) of
Fortune,--"Volve sua spera, e beata si gode:" the motive power of this
wheel distinguishing its goddess from the fixed majesty of Necessitas
with her iron nails; or [Greek: anankê], with her pillar of fire and
iridescent orbits, _fixed_ at the centre. Portus and porta, and gate in
its connexion with gain, form another interesting branch group; and
Mors, the concentration of delaying, is always to be remembered with
Fors, the concentration of bringing and bearing, passing on into Fortis
and Fortitude.
[This note is literally a mere memorandum for the future work which I am
now completing in _Fors Clavigera_; it was printed partly in vanity, but
also with real desire to get people to share the interest I found in the
careful study of the leading words in noble languages. Compare the next
note.]
[51] As Charis becomes Charitas, the word "Cher," or "Dear," passes from
Shylock's sense of it (to buy cheap and sell dear) into Antonio's sense
of it: emphasized with the final _i_ in tender "Cheri," and hushed to
English calmness in our noble "Cherish." The reader must not think that
any care can be misspent in tracing the connexion and power of the words
which we have to use in the sequel. (See Appendix VI.) Much education
sums itself in making men economize their words, and understand them.
Nor is it possible to estimate the harm which has been done, in matters
of higher speculation and conduct, by loose verbiage, though we may
guess at it by observing the dislike which people show to having
anything about their religion said to them in simple words, because then
they understand it. Thus congregations meet weekly to invoke the
influence of a Spirit of Life and Truth; yet if any part of that
character were intelligibly expressed to them by the formulas of the
service, they would be offended. Suppose, for instance, in the closing
benediction, the clergyman were to give vital significance to the vague
word "Holy," and were to say, "the fellowship of the Helpful and Honest
Ghost be with you, and remain with you always," what would be the horror
of many, first at the irreverence of so intelligible an expression; and
secondly, at the discomfortable occurrence of the suspicion that while
throughout the commercial dealings of the week they had denied the
propriety of Help, and possibility of Honesty, the Person whose company
they had been now asking to be blessed with could have no fellowship
with cruel people or knaves.
[52] "[Greek: ta men oun alla zôa ouk echein aisthêsin tôn en tais
kinêsesi taxeôn oude ataxiôn ois dê rythmos unoma kai haomonia êmin de
ous eipomen tous Theous] (Apollo, the Muses, and Bacchus--the grave
Bacchus, that is--ruling the choir of age; or Bacchus restraining; 'sæva
_tene_, cum Berecyntio cornu tympana,' &c.) [Greek: synchoreutas
dedosthai, toutous einai kai tous dedôkotas tên enrythmon te kai
enarmonion aisthêsin meth' êdonês ... chorous te ônomakenai para tês
charas emphyton onoma]." "Other animals have no perception of order nor
of disorder in motion; but for us, Apollo and Bacchus and the Muses are
appointed to mingle in our dances; and there are they who have given us
the sense of delight in rhythm and harmony. And the name of choir,
choral dance, (we may believe,) came from chara (delight)."--Laws, book
ii.
[53] [My way now, is to say things plainly, if I can, whether they sound
harsh or not;--this is the translation--"Is it possible, then, that as a
horse is only a mischief to any one who attempts to use him without
knowing how, so also our brother, if we attempt to use him without
knowing how, may be a mischief to us?"]
CHAPTER V.
GOVERNMENT.
106. It remains for us, as I stated in the close of the last chapter, to
examine first the principles of government in general, and then those of
the government of the Poor by the Rich.
The government of a state consists in its customs, laws, and councils,
and their enforcements.
I. CUSTOMS.
As one person primarily differs from another by fineness of nature, and,
secondarily, by fineness of training, so also, a polite nation differs
from a savage one, first, by the refinement of its nature, and secondly
by the delicacy of its customs.
In the completeness of custom, which is the nation's self-government,
there are three stages--first, fineness in method of doing or of
being;--called the manner or moral of acts; secondly, firmness in
holding such method after adoption, so that it shall become a habit in
the character: _i. e._, a constant "having" or "behaving;" and, lastly,
ethical power in performance and endurance, which is the skill following
on habit, and the ease reached by frequency of right doing.
The sensibility of the nation is indicated by the fineness of its
customs; its courage, continence, and self-respect by its persistence in
them.
By sensibility I mean its natural perception of beauty, fitness, and
rightness; or of what is lovely, decent, and just: faculties dependent
much on race, and the primal signs of fine breeding in man; but
cultivable also by education, and necessarily perishing without it. True
education has, indeed, no other function than the development of these
faculties, and of the relative will. It has been the great error of
modern intelligence to mistake science for education. You do not educate
a man by telling him what he knew not, but by making him what he was
not.
And making him what he will remain for ever: for no wash of weeds will
bring back the faded purple. And in that dyeing there are two
processes--first, the cleansing and wringing-out, which is the baptism
with water; and then the infusing of the blue and scarlet colours,
gentleness and justice, which is the baptism with fire.
107.[54] The customs and manners of a sensitive and highly-trained race
are always Vital: that is to say, they are orderly manifestations of
intense life, like the habitual action of the fingers of a musician. The
customs and manners of a vile and rude race, on the contrary, are
conditions of decay: they are not, properly speaking, habits, but
incrustations; not restraints, or forms, of life; but gangrenes,
noisome, and the beginnings of death.
And generally, so far as custom attaches itself to indolence instead of
action, and to prejudice instead of perception, it takes this deadly
character, so that thus
Custom hangs upon us with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.
But that weight, if it become impetus, (living instead of dead weight)
is just what gives value to custom, when it works _with_ life, instead
of against it.
108. The high ethical training of a nation implies perfect Grace,
Pitifulness, and Peace; it is irreconcilably inconsistent with filthy or
mechanical employments,--with the desire of money,--and with mental
states of anxiety, jealousy, or indifference to pain. The present
insensibility of the upper classes of Europe to the surrounding aspects
of suffering, uncleanness, and crime, binds them not only into one
responsibility with the sin, but into one dishonour with the foulness,
which rot at their thresholds. The crimes daily recorded in the
police-courts of London and Paris (and much more those which are
_un_recorded) are a disgrace to the whole body politic;[55] they are, as
in the body natural, stains of disease on a face of delicate skin,
making the delicacy itself frightful. Similarly, the filth and poverty
permitted or ignored in the midst of us are as dishonourable to the
whole social body, as in the body natural it is to wash the face, but
leave the hands and feet foul. Christ's way is the only true one: begin
at the feet; the face will take care of itself.
109. Yet, since necessarily, in the frame of a nation, nothing but the
head can be of gold, and the feet, for the work they have to do, must be
part of iron, part of clay;--foul or mechanical work is always reduced
by a noble race to the minimum in quantity; and, even then, performed
and endured, not without sense of degradation, as a fine temper is
wounded by the sight of the lower offices of the body. The highest
conditions of human society reached hitherto have cast such work to
slaves; but supposing slavery of a politically defined kind to be done
away with, mechanical and foul employment must, in all highly organized
states, take the aspect either of punishment or probation. All criminals
should at once be set to the most dangerous and painful forms of it,
especially to work in mines and at furnaces,[56] so as to relieve the
innocent population as far as possible: of merely rough (not mechanical)
manual labour, especially agricultural, _a large portion should be done
by the upper classes_;--_bodily health, and sufficient contrast and
repose for the mental functions, being unattainable without it_; what
necessarily inferior labour remains to be done, as especially in
manufactures, should, and always will, when the relations of society are
reverent and harmonious, fall to the lot of those who, for the time, are
fit for nothing better. For as, whatever the perfectness of the
educational system, there must remain infinite differences between the
natures and capacities of men; and these differing natures are generally
rangeable under the two qualities of lordly, (or tending towards rule,
construction, and harmony), and servile (or tending towards misrule,
destruction, and discord); and since the lordly part is only in a state
of profitableness while ruling, and the servile only in a state of
redeemableness while serving, the whole health of the state depends on
the manifest separation of these two elements of its mind; for, if the
servile part be not separated and rendered visible in service, it mixes
with, and corrupts, the entire body of the state; and if the lordly part
be not distinguished, and set to rule, it is crushed and lost, being
turned to no account, so that the rarest qualities of the nation are all
given to it in vain.[57]
II. LAWS.
110. These are the definitions and bonds of custom, or of what the
nation desires should become custom.
Law is either archic,[58] (of direction), meristic, (of division), or
critic, (of judgment).
Archic law is that of appointment and precept: it defines what is and is
not to be _done_.
Meristic law is that of balance and distribution: it defines what is and
is not to be _possessed_.
Critic law is that of discernment and award: it defines what is and is
not to be _suffered_.
111. A. ARCHIC LAW. If we choose to unite the laws of precept and
distribution under the head of "statutes," all law is simply either of
statute or judgment; that is, first the establishment of ordinance, and,
secondly, the assignment of the reward, or penalty, due to its
observance or violation.
To some extent these two forms of law must be associated, and, with
every ordinance, the penalty of disobedience to it be also determined.
But since the degrees and guilt of disobedience vary, the determination
of due reward and punishment must be modified by discernment of special
fact, which is peculiarly the office of the judge, as distinguished from
that of the lawgiver and law-sustainer, or king; not but that the two
offices are always theoretically, and in early stages, or limited
numbers, of society, are often practically, united in the same person or
persons.
112. Also, it is necessary to keep clearly in view the distinction
between these two kinds of law, because the possible range of law is
wider in proportion to their separation. There are many points of
conduct respecting which the nation may wisely express its will by a
written precept or resolve, yet not enforce it by penalty:[59] and the
expedient degree of penalty is always quite a separate consideration
from the expedience of the statute; for the statute may often be better
enforced by mercy than severity, and is also easier in the bearing, and
less likely to be abrogated. Farther, laws of precept have reference
especially to youth, and concern themselves with training; but laws of
judgment to manhood, and concern themselves with remedy and reward.
There is a highly curious feeling in the English mind against
educational law: we think no man's liberty should be interfered with
till he has done irrevocable wrong; whereas it is then just too late for
the only gracious and kingly interference, which is to hinder him from
doing it. Make your educational laws strict, and your criminal ones may
be gentle; but, leave youth its liberty and you will have to dig
dungeons for age. And it is good for a man that he "wear the yoke in his
youth:" for the reins may then be of silken thread; and with sweet chime
of silver bells at the bridle; but, for the captivity of age, you must
forge the iron fetter, and cast the passing bell.
113. Since no law can be, in a final or true sense, established, but by
right, (all unjust laws involving the ultimate necessity of their own
abrogation), the law-giving can only become a law-sustaining power in so
far as it is Royal, or "right doing;"--in so far, that is, as it rules,
not misrules, and orders, not dis-orders, the things submitted to it.
Throned on this rock of justice, the kingly power becomes established
and establishing; "[Greek: theios]," or divine, and, therefore, it is
literally true that no ruler can err, so long as he is a ruler, or
[Greek: archôn oudeis amartanei tote hotan archôn ê]; perverted by
careless thought, which has cost the world somewhat, into--"the king can
do no wrong."
114. B. MERISTIC LAW,[60] or that of the tenure of property, first
determines what every individual possesses by right, and secures it to
him; and what he possesses by wrong, and deprives him of it. But it has
a far higher provisory function: it determines what every man _should_
possess, and puts it within his reach on due conditions; and what he
should _not_ possess, and puts this out of his reach, conclusively.
115. Every article of human wealth has certain conditions attached to
its merited possession; when these are unobserved, possession becomes
rapine. And the object of meristic law is not only to secure to every
man his rightful share (the share, that is, which he has worked for,
produced, or received by gift from a rightful owner), but to enforce the
due conditions of possession, as far as law may conveniently reach; for
instance, that land shall not be wantonly allowed to run to waste, that
streams shall not be poisoned by the persons through whose properties
they pass, nor air be rendered unwholesome beyond given limits. Laws of
this kind exist already in rudimentary degree, but need large
development; the just laws respecting the possession of works of art
have not hitherto been so much as conceived, and the daily loss of
national wealth, and of its use, in this respect, is quite incalculable.
And these laws need revision quite as much respecting property in
national as in private hands. For instance: the public are under a vague
impression that, because they have paid for the contents of the British
Museum, every one has an equal right to see and to handle them. But the
public have similarly paid for the contents of Woolwich arsenal; yet do
not expect free access to it, or handling of its contents. The British
Museum is neither a free circulating library, nor a free school: it is a
place for the safe preservation, and exhibition on due occasion, of
unique books, unique objects of natural history, and unique works of
art; its books can no more be used by everybody than its coins can be
handled, or its statues cast. There ought to be free libraries in every
quarter of London, with large and complete reading-rooms attached; so
also free educational museums should be open in every quarter of London,
all day long, until late at night, well lighted, well catalogued, and
rich in contents both of art and natural history. But neither the
British Museum nor National Gallery is a school; they are _treasuries_;
and both should be severely restricted in access and in use. Unless some
order of this kind is made, and that soon, for the MSS. department of
the Museum, (its superintendents have sorrowfully told me this, and
repeatedly), the best MSS. in the collection will be destroyed,
irretrievably, by the careless and continual handling to which they are
now subjected.
Finally, in certain conditions of a nation's progress, laws limiting
accumulation of any kind of property may be found expedient.
116. C. CRITIC LAW determines questions of injury, and assigns due
rewards and punishments to conduct.
Two curious economical questions arise laterally with respect to this
branch of law, namely, the cost of crime, and the cost of judgment. The
cost of crime is endured by nations ignorantly, that expense being
nowhere stated in their budgets; the cost of judgment, patiently,
(provided only it can be had pure for the money), because the science,
or perhaps we ought rather to say the art, of law, is felt to found a
noble profession and discipline; so that civilized nations are usually
glad that a number of persons should be supported by exercise in oratory
and analysis. But it has not yet been calculated what the practical
value might have been, in other directions, of the intelligence now
occupied in deciding, through courses of years, what might have been
decided as justly, had the date of judgment been fixed, in as many
hours. Imagine one half of the funds which any great nation devotes to
dispute by law, applied to the determination of physical questions in
medicine, agriculture, and theoretic science; and calculate the probable
results within the next ten years!
I say nothing yet of the more deadly, more lamentable loss, involved in
the use of purchased, instead of personal, justice--[Greek: "epaktô par
allôn--aporia oikeiôn."]
117. In order to true analysis of critic law, we must understand the
real meaning of the word "injury."
We commonly understand by it, any kind of harm done by one man to
another; but we do not define the idea of harm: sometimes we limit it to
the harm which the sufferer is conscious of; whereas much the worst
injuries are those he is unconscious of; and, at other times, we limit
the idea to violence, or restraint; whereas much the worse forms of
injury are to be accomplished by indolence, and the withdrawal of
restraint.
118. "Injury" is then simply the refusal, or violation of, any man's
right or claim upon his fellows: which claim, much talked of in modern
times, under the term "right," is mainly resolvable into two branches: a
man's claim not to be hindered from doing what he should; and his claim
to be hindered from doing what he should not; these two forms of
hindrance being intensified by reward, help, and fortune, or Fors, on
one side, and by punishment, impediment, and even final arrest, or Mors,
on the other.
119. Now, in order to a man's obtaining these two rights, it is clearly
needful that the _worth_ of him should be approximately known; as well
as the _want_ of worth, which has, unhappily, been usually the principal
subject of study for critic law, careful hitherto only to mark degrees
of de-merit, instead of merit;--assigning, indeed, to the _De_ficiencies
(not always, alas! even to these) just estimate, fine, or penalty; but
to the _Ef_ficiencies, on the other side, which are by much the more
interesting, as well as the only profitable part of its subject,
assigning neither estimate nor aid.
120. Now, it is in this higher and perfect function of critic law,
_en_abling instead of _dis_abling, that it becomes truly Kingly, instead
of Draconic: (what Providence gave the great, wrathful legislator his
name?): that is, it becomes the law of man and of life, instead of the
law of the worm and of death--both of these laws being set in changeless
poise one against another, and the enforcement of both being the eternal
function of the lawgiver, and true claim of every living soul: such
claim being indeed strong to be mercifully hindered, and even, if need
be, abolished, when longer existence means only deeper destruction, but
stronger still to be mercifully helped, and recreated, when longer
existence and new creation mean nobler life. So that reward and
punishment will be found to resolve themselves mainly[61] into help and
hindrance; and these again will issue naturally from time recognition of
deserving, and the just reverence and just wrath which follow
instinctively on such recognition.
121. I say, "follow," but, in reality, they are part of the recognition.
Reverence is as instinctive as anger;--both of them instant on true
vision: it is sight and understanding that we have to teach, and these
_are_ reverence. Make a man perceive worth, and in its reflection he
sees his own relative unworth, and worships thereupon inevitably, not
with stiff courtesy, but rejoicingly, passionately, and, best of all,
_restfully_: for the inner capacity of awe and love is infinite in man,
and only in finding these, can we find peace. And the common insolences
and petulances of the people, and their talk of equality, are not
irreverence in them in the least, but mere blindness, stupefaction, and
fog in the brains,[62] the first sign of any cleansing away of which is,
that they gain some power of discerning, and some patience in submitting
to, their true counsellors and governors. In the mode of such
discernment consists the real "constitution" of the state, more than in
the titles or offices of the discerned person; for it is no matter, save
in degree of mischief, to what office a man is appointed, if he cannot
fulfil it.
122. III. GOVERNMENT BY COUNCIL.
This is the determination, by living authority, of the national conduct
to be observed under existing circumstances; and the modification or
enlargement, abrogation or enforcement, of the code of national law
according to present needs or purposes. This government is necessarily
always by council, for though the authority of it may be vested in one
person, that person cannot form any opinion on a matter of public
interest but by (voluntarily or involuntarily) submitting himself to the
influence of others.
This government is always twofold--visible and invisible.
The visible government is that which nominally carries on the national
business; determines its foreign relations, raises taxes, levies
soldiers, orders war or peace, and otherwise becomes the arbiter of the
national fortune. The invisible government is that exercised by all
energetic and intelligent men, each in his sphere, regulating the inner
will and secret ways of the people, essentially forming its character,
and preparing its fate.
Visible governments are the toys of some nations, the diseases of
others, the harness of some, the burdens of more the necessity of all.
Sometimes their career is quite distinct from that of the people, and to
write it, as the national history, is as if one should number the
accidents which befall a man's weapons and wardrobe, and call the list
his biography. Nevertheless, a truly noble and wise nation necessarily
has a noble and wise visible government, for its wisdom issues in that
conclusively.
123. Visible governments are, in their agencies, capable of three pure
forms, and of no more than three.
They are either monarchies, where the authority is vested in one person;
oligarchies, when it is vested in a minority; or democracies, when
vested in a majority.
But these three forms are not only, in practice, variously limited and
combined, but capable of infinite difference in character and use,
receiving specific names according to their variations; which names,
being nowise agreed upon, nor consistently used, either in thought or
writing, no man can at present tell, in speaking of any kind of
government, whether he is understood; nor, in hearing, whether he
understands. Thus we usually call a just government by one person a
monarchy, and an unjust or cruel one, a tyranny: this might be
reasonable if it had reference to the divinity of true government; but
to limit the term "oligarchy" to government by a few rich people, and to
call government by a few wise or noble people "aristocracy," is
evidently absurd, unless it were proved that rich people never could be
wise, or noble people rich; and farther absurd, because there are other
distinctions in character, as well as riches or wisdom (greater purity
of race, or strength of purpose, for instance), which may give the power
of government to the few. So that if we had to give names to every group
or kind of minority, we should have verbiage enough. But there is only
one right name--"oligarchy."
124. So also the terms "republic" and "democracy"[63] are confused,
especially in modern use; and both of them are liable to every sort of
misconception. A republic means, properly, a polity in which the state,
with its all, is at every man's service, and every man, with his all, at
the state's service--(people are apt to lose sight of the last
condition), but its government may nevertheless be oligarchic (consular,
or decemviral, for instance), or monarchic (dictatorial). But a
democracy means a state in which the government rests directly with the
majority of the citizens. And both these conditions have been judged
only by such accidents and aspects of them as each of us has had
experience of; and sometimes both have been confused with anarchy, as it
is the fashion at present to talk of the "failure of republican
institutions in America," when there has never yet been in America any
such thing as an institution, but only defiance of institution; neither
any such thing as a _res-publica_, but only a multitudinous
_res-privata_; every man for himself. It is not republicanism which
fails now in America; it is your model science of political economy,
brought to its perfect practice. There you may see competition, and the
"law of demand and supply" (especially in paper), in beautiful and
unhindered operation.[64] Lust of wealth, and trust in it; vulgar faith
in magnitude and multitude, instead of nobleness; besides that
faith natural to backwoodsmen--"lucum ligna,"[65]--perpetual
self-contemplation, issuing in passionate vanity; total ignorance of the
finer and higher arts, and of all that they teach and bestow; and the
discontent of energetic minds unoccupied, frantic with hope of
uncomprehended change, and progress they know not whither;[66]--these
are the things that have "failed" in America; and yet not altogether
failed--it is not collapse, but collision; the greatest railroad
accident on record, with fire caught from the furnace, and Catiline's
quenching "non aquâ, sed ruinâ."[67] But I see not, in any of our talk
of them, justice enough done to their erratic strength of purpose, nor
any estimate taken of the strength of endurance of domestic sorrow, in
what their women and children suppose a righteous cause. And out of that
endurance and suffering, its own fruit will be born with time; [_not_
abolition of slavery, however. See § 130.] and Carlyle's prophecy of
them (June, 1850), as it has now come true in the first clause, will, in
the last:--
"America, too, will find that caucuses, divisionalists, stump-oratory,
and speeches to Buncombe will not carry men to the immortal gods; that
the Washington Congress, and constitutional battle of Kilkenny cats is
there, as here, naught for such objects; quite incompetent for such;
and, in fine, that said sublime constitutional arrangement will require
to be (with terrible throes, and travail such as few expect yet)
remodelled, abridged, extended, suppressed, torn asunder, put together
again--not without heroic labour and effort, quite other than that of
the stump-orator and the revival preacher, one day."
125.[68] Understand, then, once for all, that no form of government,
provided it be a government at all, is, as such, to be either condemned
or praised, or contested for in anywise, but by fools. But all forms of
government are good just so far as they attain this one vital necessity
of policy--_that the wise and kind, few or many, shall govern the unwise
and unkind_; and they are evil so far as they miss of this, or reverse
it. Not does the form, in any case, signify one whit, but its
_firmness_, and adaptation to the need; for if there be many foolish
persons in a state, and few wise, then it is good that the few govern;
and if there be many wise, and few foolish, then it is good that the
many govern; and if many be wise, yet one wiser, then it is good that
one should govern; and so on. Thus, we may have "the ant's republic, and
the realm of bees," both good in their kind; one for groping, and the
other for building; and nobler still, for flying;--the Ducal
monarchy[69] of those
Intelligent of seasons, that set forth
The aery caravan, high over seas.
126. Nor need we want examples, among the inferior creatures, of
dissoluteness, as well as resoluteness, in government. I once saw
democracy finely illustrated by the beetles of North Switzerland, who by
universal suffrage, and elytric acclamation, one May twilight, carried
it, that they would fly over the Lake of Zug; and flew _short_, to the
great disfigurement of the Lake of Zug,--[Greek: Kantharon limên]--over
some leagues square, and to the close of the cockchafer democracy for
that year. Then, for tyranny, the old fable of the frogs and the stork
finely touches one form of it; but truth will image it more closely than
fable, for tyranny is not complete when it is only over the idle, but
when it is over the laborious and the blind. This description of
pelicans and climbing perch, which I find quoted in one of our popular
natural histories, out of Sir Emerson Tennant's _Ceylon_, comes as near
as may be to the true image of the thing:--
"Heavy rains came on, and as we stood on the high ground, we observed a
pelican on the margin of the shallow pool gorging himself; our people
went towards him, and raised a cry of 'Fish, fish!' We hurried down, and
found numbers of fish struggling upward through the grass, in the rills
formed by the trickling of the rain. There was scarcely water to cover
them, but nevertheless they made rapid progress up the bank, on which
our followers collected about two baskets of them. They were forcing
their way up the knoll, and had they not been interrupted, first by the
pelican, and afterwards by ourselves, they would in a few minutes have
gained the highest point, and descended on the other side into a pool
which formed another portion of the tank. In going this distance,
however, they must have used muscular exertion enough to have taken them
half a mile on level ground; for at these places all the cattle and wild
animals of the neighbourhood had latterly come to drink, so that the
surface was everywhere indented with footmarks, in addition to the
cracks in the surrounding baked mud, into which the fish tumbled in
their progress. In those holes, which were deep, and the sides
perpendicular, they remained to die, and were carried off by kites and
crows."[70]
127. But whether governments be bad or good, one general disadvantage
seems to attach to them in modern times--that they are all _costly_.[71]
This, however, is not essentially the fault of the governments. If
nations choose to play at war, they will always find their governments
willing to lead the game, and soon coming under that term of
Aristophanes, "[Greek: kapêloi aspidôn]," "shield-sellers." And when
([Greek: pêm epi pêmati])[72] the shields take the form of iron ships,
with apparatus "for defence against liquid fire,"--as I see by latest
accounts they are now arranging the decks in English dockyards--they
become costly biers enough for the grey convoy of chief mourner waves,
wreathed with funereal foam, to bear back the dead upon; the massy
shoulders of those corpse-bearers being intended for quite other work,
and to bear the living, and food for the living, if we would let them.
128. Nor have we the least right to complain of our governments being
expensive, so long as we set the government _to do precisely the work
which brings no return_. If our present doctrines of political economy
be just, let us trust them to the utmost; take that war business out of
the government's hands, and test therein the principles of supply and
demand. Let our future sieges of Sebastopol be done by contract--no
capture, no pay--(I admit that things might sometimes go better so); and
let us sell the commands of our prospective battles, with our vicarages,
to the lowest bidder; so may we have cheap victories, and divinity. On
the other hand, if we have so much suspicion of our science that we dare
not trust it on military or spiritual business, would it not be but
reasonable to try whether some authoritative handling may not prosper in
matters utilitarian? If we were to set our governments to do useful
things instead of mischievous, possibly even the apparatus itself might
in time come to be less costly. The machine, applied to the building of
the house, might perhaps pay, when it seems not to pay, applied to
pulling it down. If we made in our dockyards ships to carry timber and
coals, instead of cannon, and with provision for the brightening of
domestic solid culinary fire, instead of for the scattering of liquid
hostile fire, it might have some effect on the taxes. Or suppose that we
tried the experiment on land instead of water carriage; already the
government, not unapproved, carries letters and parcels for us; larger
packages may in time follow;--even general merchandise--why not, at
last, ourselves? Had the money spent in local mistakes and vain private
litigation, on the railroads of England, been laid out, instead, under
proper government restraint, on really useful railroad work, and had no
absurd expense been incurred in ornamenting stations, we might already
have had,--what ultimately it will be found we must have,--quadruple
rails, two for passengers, and two for traffic, on every great line; and
we might have been carried in swift safety, and watched and warded by
well-paid pointsmen, for half the present fares. [For, of course, a
railroad company is merely an association of turnpike-keepers, who make
the tolls as high as they can, not to mend the roads with, but to
pocket. The public will in time discover this, and do away with
turnpikes on railroads, as on all other public-ways.]
129. Suppose it should thus turn out, finally, that a true government
set to true work, instead of being a costly engine, was a paying one?
that your government, rightly organized, instead of itself subsisting by
an income-tax, would produce its subjects some subsistence in the shape
of an income dividend?--police, and judges duly paid besides, only with
less work than the state at present provides for them.
A true government set to true work!--Not easily to be imagined, still
less obtained; but not beyond human hope or ingenuity. Only you will
have to alter your election systems somewhat, first. Not by universal
suffrage, nor by votes purchasable with beer, is such government to be
had. That is to say, not by universal _equal_ suffrage. Every man
upwards of twenty, who has been convicted of no legal crime, should have
his say in this matter; but afterwards a louder voice, as he grows
older, and approves himself wiser. If he has one vote at twenty, he
should have two at thirty, four at forty, ten at fifty. For every single
vote which he has with an income of a hundred a year, he should have ten
with an income of a thousand, (provided you first see to it that wealth
is, as nature intended it to be, the reward of sagacity and
industry--not of good luck in a scramble or a lottery). For every single
vote which he had as subordinate in any business, he should have two
when he became a master; and every office and authority nationally
bestowed, implying trustworthiness and intellect, should have its known
proportional number of votes attached to it. But into the detail and
working of a true system in these matters we cannot now enter; we are
concerned as yet with definitions only, and statements of first
principles, which will be established now sufficiently for our purposes
when we have examined the nature of that form of government last on the
list in § 105,--the purely "Magistral," exciting at present its full
share of public notice, under its ambiguous title of "slavery."
130. I have not, however, been able to ascertain in definite terms, from
the declaimers against slavery, what they understand by it. If they mean
only the imprisonment or compulsion of one person by another, such
imprisonment or compulsion being in many cases highly expedient,
slavery, so defined, would be no evil in itself, but only in its abuse;
that is, when men are slaves, who should not be, or masters, who should
not be, or even the fittest characters for either state, placed in it
under conditions which should not be. It is not, for instance, a
necessary condition of slavery, nor a desirable one, that parents should
be separated from children, or husbands from wives; but the institution
of war, against which people declaim with less violence, effects such
separations,--not unfrequently in a very permanent manner. To press a
sailor, seize a white youth by conscription for a soldier, or carry off
a black one for a labourer, may all be right acts, or all wrong ones,
according to needs and circumstances. It is wrong to scourge a man
unnecessarily. So it is to shoot him. Both must be done on occasion; and
it is better and kinder to flog a man to his work, than to leave him
idle till he robs, and flog him afterwards. The essential thing for all
creatures is to be made to do right; how they are made to do it--by
pleasant promises, or hard necessities, pathetic oratory, or the
whip--is comparatively immaterial.[73] To be deceived is perhaps as
incompatible with human dignity as to be whipped; and I suspect the last
method to be not the worst, for the help of many individuals. The Jewish
nation throve under it, in the hand of a monarch reputed not unwise; it
is only the change of whip for scorpion which is inexpedient; and that
change is as likely to come to pass on the side of license as of law.
For the true scorpion whips are those of the nation's pleasant vices,
which are to it as St. John's locusts--crown on the head, ravin in the
mouth, and sting in the tail. If it will not bear the rule of Athena and
Apollo, who shepherd without smiting ([Greek: ou plêgê nemontes]),
Athena at last calls no more in the corners of the streets; and then
follows the rule of Tisiphone, who smites without shepherding.
131. If, however, by slavery, instead of absolute compulsion, is meant
_the purchase, by money, of the right of compulsion_, such purchase is
necessarily made whenever a portion of any territory is transferred, for
money, from one monarch to another: which has happened frequently enough
in history, without its being supposed that the inhabitants of the
districts so transferred became therefore slaves. In this, as in the
former case, the dispute seems about the fashion of the thing, rather
than the fact of it. There are two rocks in mid-sea, on each of which,
neglected equally by instructive and commercial powers, a handful of
inhabitants live as they may. Two merchants bid for the two properties,
but not in the same terms. One bids for the people, buys _them_, and
sets them to work, under pain of scourge; the other bids for the rock,
buys _it_, and throws the inhabitants into the sea. The former is the
American, the latter the English method, of slavery; much is to be said
for, and something against, both, which I hope to say in due time and
place.[74]
132. If, however, slavery mean not merely the purchase of the right of
compulsion, but _the purchase of the body and soul of the creature
itself for money_, it is not, I think, among the black races that
purchases of this kind are most extensively made, or that separate souls
of a fine make fetch the highest price. This branch of the inquiry we
shall have occasion also to follow out at some length, for in the worst
instances of the selling of souls, we are apt to get, when we ask if the
sale is valid, only Pyrrhon's answer[75]--"None can know."
133. The fact is that slavery is not a political institution at all,
_but an inherent, natural, and eternal inheritance_ of a large portion
of the human race--to whom, the more you give of their own free will,
the more slaves they will make themselves. In common parlance, we idly
confuse captivity with slavery, and are always thinking of the
difference between pine-trunks (Ariel in the pine), and cowslip-bells
("in the cowslip-bell I lie"), or between carrying wood and drinking
(Caliban's slavery and freedom), instead of noting the far more serious
differences between Ariel and Caliban themselves, and the means by
which, practically, that difference may be brought about or diminished.
134.[76] Plato's slave, in the _Polity_, who, well dressed and washed,
aspires to the hand of his master's daughter, corresponds curiously to
Caliban attacking Prospero's cell; and there is an undercurrent of
meaning throughout, in the _Tempest_ as well as in the _Merchant of
Venice_; referring in this case to government, as in that to commerce.
Miranda[77] ("the wonderful," so addressed first by Ferdinand, "Oh, you
wonder!") corresponds to Homer's Arete: Ariel and Caliban are
respectively the spirits of faithful and imaginative labour, opposed to
rebellious, hurtful and slavish labour. Prospero ("for hope"), a true
governor, is opposed to Sycorax, the mother of slavery, her name
"Swine-raven," indicating at once brutality and deathfulness; hence the
line--
"As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed, with _raven's feather_,"--&c.
For all these dreams of Shakespeare, as those of true and strong men
must be, are "[Greek: phantasmata theia, kai skiai tôn ontôn]"--divine
phantasms, and shadows of things that are. We hardly tell our children,
willingly, a fable with no purport in it; yet we think God sends his
best messengers only to sing fairy tales to us, fond and empty. The
_Tempest_ is just like a grotesque in a rich missal, "clasped where
paynims pray." Ariel is the spirit of generous and free-hearted service,
in early stages of human society oppressed by ignorance and wild
tyranny: venting groans as fast as mill-wheels strike; in shipwreck of
states, dreadful; so that "all but mariners plunge in the brine, and
quit the vessel, then all afire with _me_," yet having in itself the
will and sweetness of truest peace, whence that is especially called
"Ariel's" song, "Come unto these yellow sands, and there, _take hands_,"
"courtesied when you have, and kissed, the wild waves whist:" (mind, it
is "cortesia," not "curtsey,") and read "quiet" for "whist," if you want
the full sense. Then you may indeed foot it featly, and sweet spirits
bear the burden for you--with watch in the night, and call in early
morning. The _vis viva_ in elemental transformation follows--"Full
fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made." Then, giving
rest _after_ labour, it "fetches dew from the still vext Bermoöthes,
and, with a charm joined to their suffered labour, leaves men asleep."
Snatching away the feast of the cruel, it seems to them as a harpy;
followed by the utterly vile, who cannot see it in any shape, but to
whom it is the picture of nobody, it still gives shrill harmony to their
false and mocking catch, "Thought is free;" but leads them into briers
and foul places, and at last hollas the hounds upon them. Minister of
fate against the great criminal, it joins itself with the "incensed seas
and shores "--the sword that layeth at it cannot hold, and may "with
bemocked-at stabs as soon kill the still-closing waters, as diminish one
dowle that is in its plume." As the guide and aid of true love, it is
always called by Prospero "fine" (the French "fine," not the English),
or "delicate"--another long note would be needed to explain all the
meaning in this word. Lastly, its work done, and war, it resolves itself
into the elements. The intense significance of the last song, "Where the
bee sucks," I will examine in its due place.
The types of slavery in Caliban are more palpable, and need not be dwelt
on now: though I will notice them also, severally, in their proper
places;--the heart of his slavery is in his worship: "That's a brave
god, and bears celestial--liquor." But, in illustration of the sense in
which the Latin "benignus" and "malignus" are to be coupled with
Eleutheria and Douleia, note that Caliban's torment is always the
physical reflection of his own nature--"cramps" and "side stiches that
shall pen thy breath up; thou shalt be pinched, as thick as honeycombs:"
the whole nature of slavery being one cramp and cretinous contraction.
Fancy this of Ariel! You may fetter him, but you set no mark on him; you
may put him to hard work and far journey, but you cannot give him a
cramp.
135. I should dwell, even in these prefatory papers, at more length on
this subject of slavery, had not all I would say been said already, in
vain, (not, as I hope, ultimately in vain), by Carlyle, in the first of
the _Latter-day Pamphlets_, which I commend to the reader's gravest
reading; together with that as much neglected, and still more
immediately needed, on model prisons, and with the great chapter on
"Permanence" (fifth of the last section of "Past and Present"), which
sums what is known, and foreshadows, or rather forelights, all that is
to be learned of National Discipline. I have only here farther to
examine the nature of one world-wide and everlasting form of slavery,
wholesome in use, as deadly in abuse;--the service of the rich by the
poor.
FOOTNOTES:
[54] [Think over this paragraph carefully; it should have been much
expanded to be quite intelligible; but it contains all that I want it to
contain.]
[55] "The ordinary brute, who flourishes in the very centre of ornate
life, tells us of unknown depths on the verge of which we totter, being
bound to thank our stars every day we live that there is not a general
outbreak, and a revolt from the yoke of civilization."--_Times_ leader,
Dec. 25, 1862. Admitting that our stars are to be thanked for our
safety, whom are we to thank for the danger?
[56] Our politicians, even the best of them, regard only the distress
caused by the _failure_ of mechanical labour. The degradation caused by
its excess is a far more serious subject of thought, and of future fear.
I shall examine this part of our subject at length hereafter. There can
hardly be any doubt, at present, cast on the truth of the above
passages, as all the great thinkers are unanimous on the matter. Plato's
words are terrific in their scorn and pity whenever he touches on the
mechanical arts. He calls the men employed in them not even human, but
partially and diminutively human, "[Greek: anthrôpiskoi,]" and opposes
such work to noble occupations, not merely as prison is opposed to
freedom but as a convict's dishonoured prison is to the temple (escape
from them being like that of a criminal to the sanctuary); and the
destruction caused by them being of soul no less than body.--_Rep._ vi.
9. Compare _Laws_, v. 11. Xenophon dwells on the evil of occupations at
the furnace and especially their "[Greek: ascholia], want of
leisure."--_Econ._ i. 4. (Modern England, with all its pride of
education, has lost that first sense of the word "school;" and till it
recover that, it will find no other rightly.) His word for the harm to
the soul is to "break" it, as we say of the heart.--_Econ._ i. 6. And
herein, also, is the root of the scorn, otherwise apparently most
strange and cruel, with which Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare always speak
of the populace; for it is entirely true that, in great states, the
lower orders are low by nature as well as by task, being precisely that
part of the commonwealth which has been thrust down for its coarseness
or unworthiness (by coarseness I mean especially insensibility and
irreverence--the "profane" of Horace); and when this ceases to be so,
and the corruption and profanity are in the higher instead of the lower
orders, there arises, first, helpless confusion, then, if the lower
classes deserve power, ensues swift revolution, and they get it; but if
neither the populace nor their rulers deserve it, there follows mere
darkness and dissolution, till, out of the putrid elements, some new
capacity of order rises, like grass on a grave; if not, there is no more
hope, nor shadow of turning, for that nation. Atropos has her way with
it.
So that the law of national health is like that of a great lake or sea,
in perfect but slow circulation, letting the dregs fall continually to
the lowest place, and the clear water rise; yet so as that there shall
be no neglect of the lower orders, but perfect supervision and sympathy,
so that if one member suffer, all members shall suffer with it.
[57] "[Greek: oligês, kai allôs gignomenês]." (Little, and that little
born in vain.) The bitter sentence never was so true as at this day.
[58] [This following note is a mere cluster of memoranda, but I keep it
for reference.] Thetic, or Thesmic, would perhaps be a better term than
archic; but liable to be confused with some which we shall want relating
to Theoria. The administrators of the three great divisions of law are
severally Archons, Merists, and Dicasts. The Archons are the true
princes, or beginners of things; or leaders (as of an orchestra). The
Merists are properly the Domini, or Lords of houses and nations. The
Dicasts, properly, the judges, and that with Olympian justice, which
reaches to heaven and hell. The violation of archic law is [Greek:
hamartia] (error), [Greek: ponêria] (failure), or [Greek: plêmmeleia]
(discord). The violation of meristic law is [Greek: anomia] (iniquity).
The violation of critic law is [Greek: adikia] (injury). Iniquity is the
central generic term; for all law is _fatal_; it is the division to men
of their fate; as the fold of their pasture, it is [Greek: nomos]; as
the assigning of their portion, [Greek: moira].
[59] [This is the only sentence which, in revising these essays, I am
now inclined to question; but the point is one of extreme difficulty.
There might be a law, for instance, of curfew, that candles should be
put out, unless for necessary service, at such and such an hour, the
idea of "necessary service" being quite indefinable, and no penalty
possible; yet there would be a distinct consciousness of illegal conduct
in young ladies' minds who danced by candlelight till dawn.]
[60] [Read this and the next paragraph with attention; they contain
clear statements, which I cannot mend, of things most necessary.]
[61] [Mainly; not altogether. Conclusive reward of high virtue is loving
and crowning, not helping; and conclusive punishment of deep vice is
hating and crushing, not merely hindering.]
[62] Compare Chaucer's "villany" (clownishness).
Full foul and chorlishe seemed she,
And eke villanous for to be,
And little coulde of norture
To worship any creature.
[63] [I leave this paragraph, in every syllable, as it was written,
during the rage of the American war; it was meant to refer, however,
chiefly to the Northerns: what modifications its hot and partial terms
require I will give in another place: let it stand now as it stood.]
[64] Supply and demand! Alas! for what noble work was there ever any
audible "demand" in that poor sense (Past and Present)? Nay, the demand
is not loud, even for ignoble work. _See_ "Average Earnings of Betty
Taylor," in _Times_ of 4th February of this year [1863]: "Worked from
Monday morning at 8 A.M. to Friday night at 5.30 P.M. for 1_s._
5-1/2_d._"--_Laissez faire._ [This kind of slavery finds no
Abolitionists that I hear of.]
[65] ["That the sacred grove is nothing but logs."]
[66] Ames, by report of Waldo Emerson, says "that a monarchy is a
merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and
go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink,
but then your feet are always in the water." Yes, that is comfortable;
and though your raft cannot sink (being too worthless for that), it may
go to pieces, I suppose, when the four winds (your only pilots) steer
competitively from its four corners, and carry it, [Greek: ôs opôrinos
Boreês phoreêsin akanthas], and then more than your feet will be in the
water.
[67] ["Not with water, but with ruin." The worst ruin being that which
the Americans chiefly boast of. They sent all their best and honestest
youths, Harvard University men and the like, to that accursed war; got
them nearly all shot; wrote pretty biographies (to the ages of 17, 18,
19) and epitaphs for them; and so, having washed all the salt out of the
nation in blood, left themselves to putrefaction, and the morality of
New York.]
[68] [This paragraph contains the gist of all that precede.]
[69] [Whenever you are puzzled by any apparently mistaken use of words
in these essays, take your dictionary, remembering I had to fix terms,
as well as principles. A Duke is a "dux" or "leader;" the flying wedge
of cranes is under a "ducal monarch"--a very different personage from a
queen bee. The Venetians, with a beautiful instinct, gave the name to
their King of the Sea.]
[70] [This is a perfect picture of the French under the tyrannies of
their Pelican Kings, before the Revolution. But they must find other
than Pelican Kings--or rather, Pelican Kings of the Divine brood, that
feed their children, and with their best blood.]
[71] [Read carefully, from this point; because here begins the statement
of things requiring to be done, which I am now re-trying to make
definite in _Fors Clavigera_.]
[72] ["Evil on the top of Evil." Delphic oracle, meaning iron on the
anvil.]
[73] [Permit me to enforce and reinforce this statement, with all
earnestness. It is the sum of what needs most to be understood in the
matter of education.]
[74] [A pregnant paragraph, meant against English and Scotch landlords
who drive their people off the land.]
[75] [In Lucian's dialogue, "The sale of lives."]
[76] [I raise this analysis of the _Tempest_ into my text; but it is
nothing but a hurried note, which I may never have time to expand. I
have retouched it here and there a little, however.]
[77] Of Shakspeare's names I will afterwards speak at more length; they
are curiously--often barbarously--much by Providence,--but assuredly not
without Shakspeare's cunning purpose--mixed out of the various
traditions he confusedly adopted, and languages which he imperfectly
knew. Three of the clearest in meaning have been already noticed.
Desdemona, "[Greek: dysdaimonia]," "miserable fortune," is also plain
enough. Othello is, I believe, "the careful;" all the calamity of the
tragedy arising from the single flaw and error in his magnificently
collected strength. Ophelia, "serviceableness," the true lost wife of
Hamlet, is marked as having a Greek name by that of her brother,
Laertes; and its signification is once exquisitely alluded to in that
brother's last word of her, where her gentle preciousness is opposed to
the uselessness of the churlish clergy--"A _ministering_ angel shall my
sister be, when thou liest howling." Hamlet is, I believe, connected in
some way with "homely" the entire event of the tragedy turning on
betrayal of home duty. Hermione ([Greek: erma]), "pillar-like," ([Greek:
hê eidos eche chrysês 'Aphroditês]). Titania ([Greek: titênê]), "the
queen;" Benedict and Beatrice, "blessed and blessing;" Valentine and
Proteus, enduring (or strong), (valens), and changeful. Iago and Iachimo
have evidently the same root--probably the Spanish Iago, Jacob, "the
supplanter," Leonatus, and other such names, are interpreted, or played
with, in the plays themselves. For the interpretation of Sycorax, and
reference to her raven's feather, I am indebted to Mr. John R. Wise.
CHAPTER VI.
MASTERSHIP.
136. As in all previous discussions of our subject, we must study the
relation of the commanding rich to the obeying poor in its simplest
elements, in order to reach its first principles.
The simplest state of it, then, is this:[78] a wise and provident person
works much, consumes little, and lays by a store; an improvident person
works little, consumes all his produce, and lays by no store. Accident
interrupts the daily work, or renders it less productive; the idle
person must then starve, or be supported by the provident one, who,
having him thus at his mercy, may either refuse to maintain him
altogether, or, which will evidently be more to his own interest, say to
him, "I will maintain you, indeed, but you shall now work hard, instead
of indolently, and instead of being allowed to lay by what you save, as
you might have done, had you remained independent, _I_ will take all the
surplus. You would not lay it up for yourself; it is wholly your own
fault that has thrown you into my power, and I will force you to work,
or starve; yet you shall have no profit of your work, only your daily
bread for it; [and competition shall determine how much of that[79]]."
This mode of treatment has now become so universal that it is supposed
to be the only natural--nay, the only possible one; and the market wages
are calmly defined by economists as "the sum which will maintain the
labourer."
137. The power of the provident person to do this is only checked by the
correlative power of some neighbour of similarly frugal habits, who says
to the labourer--"I will give you a little more than this other
provident person: come and work for me."
The power of the provident over the improvident depends thus, primarily,
on their relative numbers; secondarily, on the modes of agreement of the
adverse parties with each other. The accidental level of wages is a
variable function of the number of provident and idle persons in the
world, of the enmity between them as classes, and of the agreement
between those of the same class. _It depends, from beginning to end, on
moral conditions._
138. Supposing the rich to be entirely selfish, _it is always for their
interest that the poor should be as numerous as they can employ, and
restrain_. For, granting that the entire population is no larger than
the ground can easily maintain--that the classes are stringently
divided--and that there is sense or strength of hand enough with the
rich to secure obedience; then, if nine-tenths of a nation are poor, the
remaining tenth have the service of nine persons each;[80] but, if
eight-tenths are poor, only of four each; if seven-tenths are poor, of
two and a third each; if six-tenths are poor, of one and a half each;
and if five-tenths are poor, of only one each. But, practically, if the
rich strive always to obtain more power over the poor, instead of to
raise them--and if, on the other hand, the poor become continually more
vicious and numerous, through neglect and oppression,--though the
_range_ of the power of the rich increases, its _tenure_ becomes less
secure; until, at last the measure of iniquity being full, revolution,
civil war, or the subjection of the state to a healthier or stronger
one, closes the moral corruption, and industrial disease.[81]
139. It is rarely, however, that things come to this extremity. Kind
persons among the rich, and wise among the poor, modify the connexion of
the classes: the efforts made to raise and relieve on the one side, and
the success of honest toil on the other, bind and blend the orders of
society into the confused tissue of half-felt obligation,
sullenly-rendered obedience, and variously-directed, or mis-directed
toil, which form the warp of daily life. But this great law rules all
the wild design: that success (while society is guided by laws of
competition) _signifies always so much victory over your neighbour_ as
to obtain the direction of his work, and to take the profits of it.
_This is the real source of all great riches._ No man can become largely
rich by his personal toil.[82] The work of his own hands, wisely
directed, will indeed always maintain himself and his family, and make
fitting provision for his age. _But it is only by the discovery of some
method of taxing the labour of others that he can become opulent._ Every
increase of his capital enables him to extend this taxation more widely;
that is, to invest larger funds in the maintenance of labourers,--to
direct, accordingly, vaster and yet vaster masses of labour, and to
appropriate its profits.
140. There is much confusion of idea on the subject of this
appropriation. It is, of course, the interest of the employer to
disguise it from the persons employed; and, for his own comfort and
complacency, he often desires no less to disguise it from himself. And
it is matter of much doubt with me, how far the foul and foolish
arguments used habitually on this subject are indeed the honest
expression of foul and foolish convictions;--or rather (as I am
sometimes forced to conclude from the irritation with which they are
advanced) are resolutely dishonest, wilful, and malicious sophisms,
arranged so as to mask, to the last moment, the real laws of economy,
and future duties of men. By taking a simple example, and working it
thoroughly out, the subject may be rescued from all but such determined
misrepresentation.
141. Let us imagine a society of peasants, living on a rivershore,
exposed to destructive inundation at somewhat extended intervals; and
that each peasant possesses of this good, but imperilled, ground, more
than he needs to cultivate for immediate subsistence. We will assume
farther (and with too great probability of justice), that the greater
part of them indolently keep in tillage just as much land as supplies
them with daily food;--that they leave their children idle, and take no
precautions against the rise of the stream. But one of them, (we will
say but one, for the sake of greater clearness) cultivates carefully
_all_ the ground of his estate; makes his children work hard and
healthily; uses his spare time and theirs in building a rampart against
the river; and, at the end of some years, has in his storehouses large
reserves of food and clothing,--in his stables a well-tended breed of
cattle, and around his fields a wedge of wall against flood.
The torrent rises at last--sweeps away the harvests, and half the
cottages of the careless peasants, and leaves them destitute. They
naturally come for help to the provident one, whose fields are unwasted,
and whose granaries are full. He has the right to refuse it to them: no
one disputes this right.[83] But he will probably _not_ refuse it; it is
not his interest to do so, even were he entirely selfish and cruel. The
only question with him will be on what terms his aid is to be granted.
142. Clearly, not on terms of mere charity. To maintain his neighbours
in idleness would be not only his ruin, but theirs. He will require work
from them, in exchange for their maintenance; and, whether in kindness
or cruelty, all the work they can give. Not now the three or four hours
they were wont to spend on their own land, but the eight or ten hours
they ought to have spent.[84] But how will he apply this labour? The men
are now his slaves;--nothing less, and nothing more. On pain of
starvation, he can force them to work in the manner, and to the end, he
chooses. And it is by his wisdom in this choice that the worthiness of
his mastership is proved, or its unworthiness. Evidently, he must first
set them to bank out the water in some temporary way, and to get their
ground cleansed and resown; else, in any case, their continued
maintenance will be impossible. That done, and while he has still to
feed them, suppose he makes them raise a secure rampart for their own
ground against all future flood, and rebuild their houses in safer
places, with the best material they can find; being allowed time out of
their working hours to fetch such material from a distance. And for the
food and clothing advanced, he takes security in land that as much shall
be returned at a convenient period.
143. We may conceive this security to be redeemed, and the debt paid at
the end of a few years. The prudent peasant has sustained no loss; _but
is no richer than he was, and has had all his trouble for nothing_. But
he has enriched his neighbours materially; bettered their houses,
secured their land, and rendered them, in worldly matters, equal to
himself. In all rational and final sense, he has been throughout their
true Lord and King.
144. We will next trace his probable line of conduct, presuming his
object to be exclusively the increase of his own fortune. After roughly
recovering and cleansing the ground, he allows the ruined peasantry only
to build huts upon it, such as he thinks protective enough from the
weather to keep them in working health. The rest of their time he
occupies, first in pulling down, and rebuilding on a magnificent scale,
his own house, and in adding large dependencies to it. This done, in
exchange for his continued supply of corn, he buys as much of his
neighbours' land as he thinks he can superintend the management of; and
makes the former owners securely embank and protect the ceded portion.
By this arrangement, he leaves to a certain number of the peasantry only
as much ground as will just maintain them in their existing numbers; as
the population increases, he takes the extra hands, who cannot be
maintained on the narrowed estates, for his own servants; employs some
to cultivate the ground he has bought, giving them of its produce merely
enough for subsistence; with the surplus, which, under his energetic and
careful superintendence, will be large, he maintains a train of servants
for state, and a body of workmen, whom he educates in ornamental arts.
He now can splendidly decorate his house, lay out its grounds
magnificently, and richly supply his table, and that of his household
and retinue. And thus, without any abuse of right, we should find
established all the phenomena of poverty and riches, which (it is
supposed necessarily) accompany modern civilization. In one part of the
district, we should have unhealthy land, miserable dwellings, and
half-starved poor; in another, a well-ordered estate, well-fed servants,
and refined conditions of highly educated and luxurious life.
145. I have put the two cases in simplicity, and to some extremity. But
though in more complex and qualified operation, all the relations of
society are but the expansion of these two typical sequences of conduct
and result. I do not say, observe, that the first procedure is entirely
recommendable; or even entirely right; still less, that the second is
wholly wrong. Servants, and artists, and splendour of habitation and
retinue, have all their use, propriety, and office. But I am determined
that the reader shall understand clearly what they cost; and see that
the condition of having them is the subjection to us of a certain number
of imprudent or unfortunate persons (or, it may be, more fortunate than
their masters), over whose destinies we exercise a boundless control.
"Riches" mean eternally and essentially this; and God send at last a
time when those words of our best-reputed economist shall be true, and
we _shall_ indeed "all know what it is to be rich;"[85] that it is to
be slave-master over farthest earth, and over all ways and thoughts of
men. Every operative you employ is your true servant: distant or near,
subject to your immediate orders, or ministering to your
widely-communicated caprice,--for the pay he stipulates, or the price he
tempts,--all are alike under this great dominion of the gold. The
milliner who makes the dress is as much a servant (more so, in that she
uses more intelligence in the service) as the maid who puts it on; the
carpenter who smooths the door, as the footman who opens it; the
tradesmen who supply the table, as the labourers and sailors who supply
the tradesmen. Why speak of these lower services? Painters and singers
(whether of note or rhyme,) jesters and storytellers, moralists,
historians, priests,--so far as these, in any degree, paint, or sing, or
tell their tale, or charm their charm, or "perform" their rite, _for
pay_,--in so far, they are all slaves; abject utterly, if the service be
for pay only; abject less and less in proportion to the degrees of love
and of wisdom which enter into their duty, or _can_ enter into it,
according as their function is to do the bidding and the work of a manly
people;--or to amuse, tempt, and deceive, a childish one.
146. There is always, in such amusement and temptation, to a certain
extent, a government of the rich by the poor, as of the poor by the
rich; but the latter is the prevailing and necessary one, and it
consists, when it is honourable, in the collection of the profits of
labour from those who would have misused them, and the administration of
those profits for the service either of the same persons in future, or
of others; and when it is dishonourable, as is more frequently the case
in modern times, it consists in the collection of the profits of labour
from those who would have rightly used them, and their appropriation to
the service of the collector himself.
147. The examination of these various modes of collection and use of
riches will form the third branch of our future inquiries; but the key
to the whole subject lies in the clear understanding of the difference
between selfish and unselfish expenditure. It is not easy, by any
course of reasoning, to enforce this on the generally unwilling hearer;
yet the definition of unselfish expenditure is brief and simple. It is
expenditure which, if you are a capitalist, does not pay _you_, but pays
somebody else; and if you are a consumer, does not please _you_, but
pleases somebody else. Take one special instance, in further
illustration of the general type given above. I did not invent that
type, but spoke of a real river, and of real peasantry, the languid and
sickly race which inhabits, or haunts--for they are often more like
spectres than living men--the thorny desolation of the banks of the Arve
in Savoy. Some years ago, a society, formed at Geneva, offered to embank
the river for the ground which would have been recovered by the
operation; but the offer was refused by the (then Sardinian) government.
The capitalists saw that this expenditure would have "paid" if the
ground saved from the river was to be theirs. But if, when the offer
that had this aspect of profit was refused, they had nevertheless
persisted in the plan, and merely taking security for the return of
their outlay, lent the funds for the work, and thus saved a whole race
of human souls from perishing in a pestiferous fen (as, I presume, some
among them would, at personal risk, have dragged any one drowning
creature out of the current of the stream, and not expected payment
therefor), such expenditure would have precisely corresponded to the use
of his power made, in the first instance, by our supposed richer
peasant--it would have been the king's, of grace, instead of the
usurer's, for gain.
148. "Impossible, absurd, Utopian!" exclaim nine-tenths of the few
readers whom these words may find.
No, good reader, _this_ is not Utopian: but I will tell you what would
have seemed, if we had not seen it, Utopian on the side of evil instead
of good; that ever men should have come to value their money so much
more than their lives, that if you call upon them to become soldiers,
and take chance of a bullet through their heart, and of wife and
children being left desolate, for their pride's sake, they will do it
gaily, without thinking twice; but if you ask them, for their country's
sake, to spend a hundred pounds without security of getting back a
hundred-and-five,[86] they will laugh in your face.
149. Not but that also this game of life-giving and taking is, in the
end, somewhat more costly than other forms of play might be. Rifle
practice is, indeed, a not unhealthy pastime, and a feather on the top
of the head is a pleasing appendage; but while learning the stops and
fingering of the sweet instrument, does no one ever calculate the cost
of an overture? What melody does Tityrus meditate on his tenderly spiral
pipe? The leaden seed of it, broadcast, true conical "Dents de Lion"
seed--needing less allowance for the wind than is usual with that kind
of herb--what crop are you likely to have of it? Suppose, instead of
this volunteer marching and countermarching, you were to do a little
volunteer ploughing and counter-ploughing? It is more difficult to do it
straight: the dust of the earth, so disturbed, is more grateful than for
merely rhythmic footsteps. Golden cups, also, given for good ploughing,
would be more suitable in colour: (ruby glass, for the wine which
"giveth his colour" on the ground, might be fitter for the rifle prize
in ladies' hands). Or, conceive a little volunteer exercise with the
spade, other than such as is needed for moat and breastwork, or even
for the burial of the fruit of the leaden avena-seed, subject to the
shrill Lemures' criticism--
Wer hat das Haus so schlecht gebauet?
If you were to embank Lincolnshire more stoutly against the sea? or
strip the peat of Solway, or plant Plinlimmon moors with larch--then, in
due season, some amateur reaping and threshing?
"Nay, we reap and thresh by steam, in these advanced days."
I know it, my wise and economical friends. The stout arms God gave you
to win your bread by, you would fain shoot your neighbours, and God's
sweet singers with;[87] then you invoke the fiends to your farm-service;
and--
When young and old come forth to play
On a sulphurous holiday,
Tell how the darkling goblin sweat
(His feast of cinders duly set),
And, belching night, where breathed the morn,
His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn
That ten day-labourers could not end.
150. Going back to the matter in hand, we will press the example closer.
On a green knoll above that plain of the Arve, between Cluse and
Bonneville, there was, in the year 1860, a cottage, inhabited by a
well-doing family--man and wife, three children, and the grandmother. I
call it a cottage, but in truth, it was a large chimney on the ground,
wide at the bottom, so that the family might live round the fire;
lighted by one small broken window, and entered by an unclosing door.
The family, I say, was "well-doing;" at least it was hopeful and
cheerful; the wife healthy, the children, for Savoyards, pretty and
active, but the husband threatened with decline, from exposure under the
cliffs of the Mont Vergi by day, and to draughts between every plank of
his chimney in the frosty nights.
"Why could he not plaster the chinks?" asks the practical reader. For
the same reason that your child cannot wash its face and hands till you
have washed them many a day for it, and will not wash them when it can,
till you force it.
151. I passed this cottage often in my walks, had its window and door
mended; sometimes mended also a little the meal of sour bread and broth,
and generally got kind greeting and smile from the face of young or old;
which greeting this year, narrowed itself into the half-recognizing
stare of the elder child, and the old woman's tears; for the father and
mother were both dead,--one of sickness, the other of sorrow. It
happened that I passed not alone, but with a companion, a practised
English joiner, who, while these people were dying of cold, had been
employed from six in the morning to six in the evening, for two months,
in fitting, without nails, the panels of a single door in a large house
in London. Three days of his work taken, at the right time from
fastening the oak panels with useless precision, and applied to fasten
the larch timbers with decent strength, would have saved these
Savoyards' lives. _He_ would have been maintained equally; (I suppose
him equally paid for his work by the owner of the greater house, only
the work not consumed selfishly on his own walls;) and the two peasants,
and eventually, probably their children, saved.
152. There are, therefore,--let me finally enforce, and leave with the
reader, this broad conclusion,--three things to be considered in
employing any poor person. It is not enough to give him employment. You
must employ him first to produce useful things; secondly, of the several
(suppose equally useful) things he can equally well produce, you must
set him to make that which will cause him to lead the healthiest life;
lastly, of the things produced, it remains a question of wisdom and
conscience how much you are to take yourself, and how much to leave to
others. A large quantity, remember, unless you destroy it, _must_ always
be so left at one time or another; the only questions you have to decide
are, not _what_ you will give, but _when_, and _how_, and _to whom_, you
will give. The natural law of human life is, of course, that in youth a
man shall labour and lay by store for his old age, and when age comes,
shall use what he has laid by, gradually slackening his toil, and
allowing himself more frank use of his store; taking care always to
leave himself as much as will surely suffice for him beyond any possible
length of life. What he has gained, or by tranquil and unanxious toil
continues to gain, more than is enough for his own need, he ought so to
administer, while he yet lives, as to see the good of it again
beginning, in other hands; for thus he has himself the greatest sum of
pleasure from it, and faithfully uses his sagacity in its control.
Whereas most men, it appears, dislike the sight of their fortunes going
out into service again, and say to themselves,--"I can indeed nowise
prevent this money from falling at last into the hands of others, nor
hinder the good of it from becoming theirs, not mine; but at least let a
merciful death save me from being a witness of their satisfaction; and
may God so far be gracious to me as to let no good come of any of this
money of mine before my eyes."
153. Supposing this feeling unconquerable, the safest way of rationally
indulging it would be for the capitalist at once to spend all his
fortune on himself, which might actually, in many cases, be quite the
rightest as well as the pleasantest thing to do, if he had just tastes
and worthy passions. But, whether for himself only, or through the
hands, and for the sake, of others also, the law of wise life is, that
the maker of the money shall also be the spender of it, and spend it,
approximately, all, before he dies; so that his true ambition as an
economist should be, to die, not as rich, but as poor, as possible,[88]
calculating the ebb tide of possession in true and calm proportion to
the ebb tide of life. Which law, checking the wing of accumulative
desire in the mid-volley,[89] and leading to peace of possession and
fulness of fruition in old age, is also wholesome, in that by the
freedom of gift, together with present help and counsel, it at once
endears and dignifies age in the sight of youth, which then no longer
strips the bodies of the dead, but receives the grace of the living. Its
chief use would (or will be, for men are indeed capable of attaining to
this much use of their reason), that some temperance and measure will be
put to the acquisitiveness of commerce.[90] For as things stand, a man
holds it his duty to be temperate in his food, and of his body, but for
no duty to be temperate in his riches, and of his mind. He sees that he
ought not to waste his youth and his flesh for luxury; but he will waste
his age, and his soul, for money, and think he does no wrong, nor know
the _delirium tremens_ of the intellect for disease. But the law of life
is, that a man should fix the sum he desires to make annually, as the
food he desires to eat daily; and stay when he has reached the limit,
refusing increase of business, and leaving it to others, so obtaining
due freedom of time for better thoughts.[91] How the gluttony of
business is punished, a bill of health for the principals of the richest
city houses, issued annually, would show in a sufficiently impressive
manner.
154. I know, of course, that these statements will be received by the
modern merchant as an active border rider of the sixteenth century would
have heard of its being proper for men of the Marches to get their
living by the spade, instead of the spur. But my business is only to
state veracities and necessities; I neither look for the acceptance of
the one, nor hope for the nearness of the other. Near or distant, the
day _will_ assuredly come when the merchants of a state shall be its
true ministers of exchange, its porters, in the double sense of carriers
and gate-keepers, bringing all lands into frank and faithful
communication, and knowing for their master of guild, Hermes the herald,
instead of Mercury the gain-guarder.
155. And now, finally, for immediate rule to all who will accept it.
The distress of any population means that they need food, house-room,
clothes, and fuel. You can never, therefore, be wrong in employing any
labourer to produce food, house-room, clothes, or fuel; but you are
_always_ wrong if you employ him to produce nothing, (for then some
other labourer must be worked double time to feed him); and you are
generally wrong, at present, if you employ him (unless he can do nothing
else) to produce works of art or luxuries; because modern art is mostly
on a false basis, and modern luxury is criminally great.[92]
156. The way to produce more food is mainly to bring in fresh ground,
and increase facilities of carriage;--to break rock, exchange earth,
drain the moist, and water the dry, to mend roads, and build harbours of
refuge. Taxation thus spent will annihilate taxation, but spent in war,
it annihilates revenue.
157. The way to produce house-room is to apply your force first to the
humblest dwellings. When your brick-layers are out of employ, do not
build splendid new streets, but better the old ones; send your paviours
and slaters to the poorest villages, and see that your poor are
healthily lodged, before you try your hand on stately architecture. You
will find its stateliness rise better under the trowel afterwards; and
we do do not yet build so well that we need hasten to display our skill
to future ages. Had the labour which has decorated the Houses of
Parliament filled, instead, rents in walls and roofs throughout the
county of Middlesex; and our deputies met to talk within massive walls
that would have needed no stucco for five hundred years,--the decoration
might have been afterwards, and the talk now. And touching even our
highly conscientious church building, it may be well to remember that in
the best days of church plans, their masons called themselves "logeurs
du bon Dieu;" and that since, according to the most trusted reports, God
spends a good deal of His time in cottages as well as in churches, He
might perhaps like to be a little better lodged there also.
158. The way to get more clothes is--not, necessarily, to get more
cotton. There were words written twenty years ago[93] which would have
saved many of us some shivering, had they been minded in time. Shall we
read them again?
"The Continental people, it would seem, are importing our machinery,
beginning to spin cotton, and manufacture for themselves; to cut us out
of this market, and then out of that! Sad news, indeed; but
irremediable. By no means the saddest news--the saddest news, is that we
should find our national existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend
on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any
other people. A most narrow stand for a great nation to base itself on!
A stand which, with all the Corn-law abrogations conceivable, I do not
think will be capable of enduring.
"My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came honestly
down from it and said--'This is our minimum of cotton prices; we care
not, for the present, to make cotton any cheaper. Do you, if it seem so
blessed to you, make cotton cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton fur,
your heart with copperas fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the
general gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!' I admire a nation which
fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other nations to the end
of the world. Brothers, we will cease to undersell them; we will be
content to equal-sell them; to be happy selling equally with them! I do
not see the use of underselling them: cotton-cloth is already twopence a
yard, or lower; and yet bare backs were never more numerous among us.
Let inventive men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving
how cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent a little how cotton at
its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier divided among us.
"Let inventive men consider--whether the secret of this universe does
after all consist in making money. With a hell which means--'failing to
make money,' I do not think there is any heaven possible that would suit
one well. In brief, all this Mammon gospel of supply-and-demand,
competition _laissez faire_, and devil take the hindmost (foremost, is
it not, rather, Mr. Carlyle?), 'begins to be one of the shabbiest
gospels ever preached.'"
159. The way to produce more fuel[94] is first to make your coal mines
safer, by sinking more shafts; then set all your convicts to work in
them, and if, as is to be hoped, you succeed in diminishing the supply
of that sort of labourer, consider what means there may be, first, of
growing forest where its growth will improve climate; secondly, of
splintering the forests which now make continents of fruitful land
pathless and poisonous, into fagots for fire;--so gaining at once
dominion icewards and sunwards. Your steam power has been given (you
will find eventually) for work such as that: and not for excursion
trains, to give the labourer a moment's breath, at the peril of his
breath for ever, from amidst the cities which it has crushed into masses
of corruption. When you know how to build cities, and how to rule them,
you will be able to breathe in their streets, and the "excursion" will
be the afternoon's walk or game in the fields round them.
160. "But nothing of this work will pay?"
No; no more than it pays to dust your rooms, or wash your doorsteps. It
will pay; not at first in currency, but in that which is the end and the
source of currency,--in life; (and in currency richly afterwards). It
will pay in that which is more than life,--in light, whose true price
has not yet been reckoned in any currency, and yet into the image of
which, all wealth, one way or other, must be cast. For your riches must
either be as the lightning, which,
Begot but in a cloud,
Though shining bright, and speaking loud,
Whilst it begins, concludes its violent race;
And, where it gilds, it wounds the place;--
or else, as the lightning of the sacred sign, which shines from one part
of the heaven to the other. There is no other choice; you must either
take dust for deity, spectre for possession, fettered dream for life,
and for epitaph, this reversed verse of the great Hebrew hymn of economy
(Psalm cxii.):--"He hath gathered together, he hath stripped the poor,
his iniquity remaineth for ever:"--or else, having the sun of justice to
shine on you, and the sincere substance of good in your possession, and
the pure law and liberty of life within you, leave men to write this
better legend over your grave:--
"He hath dispersed abroad. He hath given to the poor. His righteousness
remaineth for ever."
FOOTNOTES:
[78] In the present general examination, I concede so much to ordinary
economists as to ignore all _innocent_ poverty. I adapt my reasoning,
for once, to the modern English practical mind, by assuming poverty to
be always criminal; the conceivable exceptions we will examine
afterwards.
[79] [I have no terms of English, and can find none in Greek nor Latin,
nor in any other strong language known to me, contemptuous enough to
attach to the bestial idiotism of the modern theory that wages are to be
measured by competition.]
[80] I say nothing yet of the quality of the servants, which,
nevertheless, is the gist of the business. Will you have Paul Veronese
to paint your ceiling, or the plumber from over the way? Both will work
for the same money; Paul, if anything, a little the cheaper of the two,
if you keep him in good humour; only you have to discern him first,
which will need eyes.
[81] [I have not altered a syllable in these three paragraphs, 137, 138,
139, on revision; but have much italicised: the principles stated being
as vital, as they are little known.]
[82] By his art he may; but only when its produce, or the sight or
hearing of it, becomes a subject of dispute, so as to enable the artist
to tax the labour of multitudes highly, in exchange for his own.
[83] [Observe this; the legal right to keep what you have worked for,
and use it as you please, is the corner-stone of all economy: compare
the end of Chap. II.]
[84] [I should now put the time of necessary labour rather under than
over the third of the day.]
[85] [See Preface to _Unto this Last_.]
[86] I have not hitherto touched on the subject of interest of money; it
is too complex, and must be reserved for its proper place in the body of
the work. The definition of interest (apart from compensation for risk)
is, "the exponent of the comfort of accomplished labour, separated from
its power;" the power being what is lent: and the French economists who
have maintained the entire illegality of interest are wrong; yet by no
means so curiously or wildly wrong as the English and French ones
opposed to them, whose opinions have been collected by Dr. Whewell at
page 41 of his _Lectures_; it never seeming to occur to the mind of the
compiler, any more than to the writers whom he quotes, that it is quite
possible, and even (according to Jewish proverb) prudent, for men to
hoard as ants and mice do, for use, not usury; and lay by something for
winter nights, in the expectation of rather sharing than lending the
scrapings. My Savoyard squirrels would pass a pleasant time of it under
the snow-laden pine branches, if they always declined to economize
because no one would pay them interest on nuts.
[I leave this note as it stood: but, as I have above stated, should now
side wholly with the French economists spoken of, in asserting the
absolute illegality of interest.]
[87] Compare Chaucer's feeling respecting birds (from Canace's falcon,
to the nightingale, singing, "Domine, labia--" to the Lord of Love),
with the usual modern British sentiments on this subject. Or even
Cowley's:--
"What prince's choir of music can excel
That which within this shade does dwell,
To which we nothing pay, or give,
They, like all other poets, live
Without reward, or thanks for their obliging pains!
'Tis well if they become not prey."
Yes; it Is better than well; particularly since the seed sown by the
wayside has been protected by the peculiar appropriation of part of the
church-rates in our country parishes. See the remonstrance from a
"Country parson," in _The Times_ of June 4th (or 5th; the letter is
dated June 3rd,) 1862:--"I have heard at a vestry meeting a good deal of
higgling over a few shillings' outlay in cleaning the church; but I have
never heard any dissatisfaction expressed on account of that part of the
rate which is invested in 50 or 100 dozens of birds' heads."
[If we could trace the innermost of all causes of modern war, I believe
it would be found, not in the avarice nor ambition of nations, but in
the mere idleness of the upper classes. They have nothing to do but to
teach the peasantry to kill each other.]
[88] [See the _Life of Fenelon_. "The labouring peasantry were at all
times the objects of his tenderest care; his palace at Cambray, with all
his books and writings, being consumed by fire, he bore the misfortune
with unruffled calmness, and said it was better his palace should be
burnt than the cottage of a poor peasant." (These thoroughly good men
always go too far, and lose their power over the mass.) He died
exemplifying the mean he had always observed between prodigality and
avarice, leaving neither debts nor money.]
[89] [Greek: kai penian hêgoumenous einai mê to tên ousian elattô poiein
alla to têi aplêstian pleiô]. "And thinking (wisely) that poverty
consists not in making one's possessions less, but one's avarice
more."--_Laws_, v. 8. Read the context, and compare. "He who spends for
all that is noble, and gains by nothing but what is just, will hardly be
notably wealthy, or distressfully poor."--_Laws_, v. 42.
[90] The fury of modern trade arises chiefly out of the possibility of
making sudden fortunes by largeness of transaction, and accident of
discovery or contrivance. I have no doubt that the final interest of
every nation is to check the action of these commercial lotteries; and
that all great accidental gains or losses should be national,--not
individual. But speculation absolute, unconnected with commercial
effort, is an unmitigated evil in a state, and the root of countless
evils beside.
[91] [I desire in the strongest terms to reinforce all that is contained
in this paragraph.]
[92] It is especially necessary that the reader should keep his mind
fixed on the methods of consumption and destruction, as the true sources
of national poverty. Men are apt to call every exchange "expenditure,"
but it is only consumption which is expenditure. A large number of the
purchases made by the richer classes are mere forms of interchange of
unused property, wholly without effect on national prosperity. It
matters nothing to the state whether, if a china pipkin be rated as
worth a hundred pounds, A has the pipkin and B the pounds, or A the
pounds and B the pipkin. But if the pipkin is pretty, and A or B breaks
it, there is national loss, not otherwise. So again, when the loss has
really taken place, no shifting of the shoulders that bear it will do
away with the reality of it. There is an intensely ludicrous notion in
the public mind respecting the abolishment of debt by denying it. When a
debt is denied, the lender loses instead of the borrower, that is all;
the loss is precisely, accurately, everlastingly the same. The Americans
borrow money to spend in blowing up their own houses. They deny their
debt, by one-third already [1863], gold being at fifty premium; and they
will probably deny it wholly. That merely means that the holders of the
notes are to be the losers instead of the issuers. The quantity of loss
is precisely equal, and irrevocable; it is the quantity of human
industry spent in effecting the explosion, plus the quantity of goods
exploded. Honour only decides _who_ shall pay the sum lost not whether
it is to be paid or not. Paid it must be, and to the uttermost farthing.
[93] [(_Past and Present._ Chap. IX. of Third Section.) To think that
for these twenty--now twenty-six--years, this one voice of Carlyle's has
been the only faithful and useful utterance in all England, and has
sounded through all these years in vain! See _Fors Clavigera_, Letter
X.]
[94] [We don't want to produce more fuel just now, but much less; and to
use what we get for cooking and warming ourselves, instead of for
running from place to place.]
APPENDICES.
I have brought together in these last pages a few notes, which were not
properly to be incorporated with the text, and which, at the bottom of
pages, checked the reader's attention to the main argument. They
contain, however, several statements to which I wish to be able to
refer, or have already referred, in other of my books, so that I think
right to preserve them.
APPENDIX I.--(p. 22.)
The greatest of all economists are those most opposed to the doctrine of
"laissez faire," namely, the fortifying virtues, which the wisest men of
all time have arranged under the general heads of Prudence, or
Discretion (the spirit which discerns and adopts rightly); Justice (the
spirit which rules and divides rightly); Fortitude (the spirit which
persists and endures rightly); and Temperance (the spirit which stops
and refuses rightly). These cardinal and sentinel virtues are not only
the means of protecting and prolonging life itself, but they are the
chief guards, or sources, of the material means of life, and the
governing powers and princes of economy. Thus, precisely according to
the number of just men in a nation, is their power of avoiding either
intestine or foreign war. All disputes may be peaceably settled, if a
sufficient number of persons have been trained to submit to the
principles of justice, while the necessity for war is in direct ratio to
the number of unjust persons who are incapable of determining a quarrel
but by violence. Whether the injustice take the form of the desire of
dominion, or of refusal to submit to it, or of lust of territory, or
lust of money, or of mere irregular passion and wanton will, the result
is economically the same;--loss of the quantity of power and life
consumed in repressing the injustice, added to the material and moral
destruction caused by the fact of war. The early civil wars of England,
and the existing[95] war in America, are curious examples--these under
monarchical, this under republican, institutions--of the results on
large masses of nations of the want of education in principles of
justice. But the mere dread or distrust resulting from the want of the
inner virtues of Faith and Charity prove often no less costly than war
itself. The fear which France and England have of each other costs each
nation about fifteen millions sterling annually, besides various
paralyses of commerce; that sum being spent in the manufacture of means
of destruction instead of means of production. There is no more reason
in the nature of things that France and England should be hostile to
each other than that England and Scotland should be, or Lancashire and
Yorkshire; and the reciprocal terrors of the opposite sides of the
English Channel are neither more necessary, more economical, nor more
virtuous, than the old riding and reiving on the opposite flanks of the
Cheviots, or than England's own weaving for herself of crowns of thorn,
from the stems of her Red and White roses.
APPENDIX II.--(p. 34.)
Few passages of the book which at least some part of the nations at
present most advanced in civilization accept as an expression of final
truth, have been more distorted than those bearing on Idolatry. For the
idolatry there denounced is neither sculpture, nor veneration of
sculpture. It is simply the substitution of an "Eidolon," phantasm, or
imagination of Good, for that which is real and enduring; from the
Highest Living Good, which gives life, to the lowest material good
which ministers to it. The Creator, and the things created, which He is
said to have "seen good" in creating, are in this their eternal goodness
appointed always to be "worshipped,"--_i. e._, to have goodness and
worth ascribed to them from the heart; and the sweep and range of
idolatry extend to the rejection of any or all of these, "calling evil
good, and good evil,--putting bitter for sweet, and sweet for
bitter."[96] For in that rejection and substitution we betray the first
of all Loyalties, to the fixed Law of life, and with resolute opposite
loyalty serve our own imagination of good, which is the law, not of the
House, but of the Grave, (otherwise called the law of "mark missing,"
which we translate "law of Sin"); these "two masters," between whose
services we have to choose, being otherwise distinguished as God and
Mammon, which Mammon, though we narrowly take it as the power of
money only, is in truth the great evil Spirit of false and
fond desire, or "Covetousness, which is Idolatry." So that
Iconoclasm--_image_-breaking--is easy; but an Idol cannot be broken--it
must be forsaken; and this is not so easy, either to do, or persuade to
doing. For men may readily be convinced of the weakness of an image; but
not of the emptiness of an imagination.
APPENDIX III.--(p. 36.)
I have not attempted to support, by the authority of other writers, any
of the statements made in these papers; indeed, if such authorities were
rightly collected, there would be no occasion for my writing at all.
Even in the scattered passages referring to this subject in three books
of Carlyle's--Sartor Resartus, Past and Present, and the Latter Day
Pamphlets,--all has been said that needs to be said, and far better than
I shall ever say it again. But the habit of the public mind at present
is to require everything to be uttered diffusely, loudly, and a hundred
times over, before it will listen; and it has revolted against these
papers of mine as if they contained things daring and new, when there
is not one assertion in them of which the truth has not been for ages
known to the wisest, and proclaimed by the most eloquent of men. It
would be [I had written _will_ be; but have now reached a time of life
for which there is but one mood--the conditional,] a far greater
pleasure to me hereafter, to collect their words than to add to mine;
Horace's clear rendering of the substance of the passages in the text
may be found room for at once,
Si quis emat citharas, emptas comportet in unum
Nec studio citharae, nec Musae deditus ulli;
Si scalpra et formas non sutor, nautica vela
Aversus mercaturis, delirus et amens
Undique dicatur merito. Qui discrepat istis
Qui nummos aurumque recondit, nescius uti
Compositis; metuensque velut contingere sacrum?
[Which may be roughly thus translated:--
"Were anybody to buy fiddles, and collect a number, being in
no wise given to fiddling, nor fond of music: or if, being
no cobbler, he collected awls and lasts, or, having no mind
for sea-adventure, bought sails, every one would call him a
madman, and deservedly. But what difference is there between
such a man and one who lays by coins and gold, and does not
know how to use, when he has got them?"]
With which it is perhaps desirable also to give Xenophon's statement, it
being clearer than any English one can be, owing to the power of the
general Greek term for wealth, "useable things."
[I have cut out the Greek because I can't be troubled to correct the
accents, and am always nervous about them; here it is in English, as
well as I can do it:--
"This being so, it follows that things are only property to the man who
knows how to use them; as flutes, for instance, are property to the man
who can pipe upon them respectably; but to one who knows not how to
pipe, they are no property, unless he can get rid of them
advantageously.... For if they are not sold, the flutes are no property
(being serviceable for nothing); but, sold, they become property. To
which Socrates made answer,--'and only then if he knows how to sell
them, for if he sell them to another man who cannot play on them, still
they are no property.'"]
APPENDIX IV.--(p. 39.)
The reader is to include here in the idea of "Government," any branch of
the Executive, or even any body of private persons, entrusted with the
practical management of public interests unconnected directly with their
own personal ones. In theoretical discussions of legislative
interference with political economy, it is usually, and of course
unnecessarily, assumed that Government must be always of that form and
force in which we have been accustomed to see it;--that its abuses can
never be less, nor its wisdom greater, nor its powers more numerous.
But, practically, the custom in most civilized countries is, for every
man to deprecate the interference of Government as long as things tell
for his personal advantage, and to call for it when they cease to do so.
The request of the Manchester Economists to be supplied with cotton by
Government (the system of supply and demand having, for the time, fallen
sorrowfully short of the expectations of scientific persons from it), is
an interesting case in point. It were to be wished that less wide and
bitter suffering, suffering, too, of the innocent, had been needed to
force the nation, or some part of it, to ask itself why a body of men,
already confessedly capable of managing matters both military and
divine, should not be permitted, or even requested, at need, to provide
in some wise for sustenance as well as for defence; and secure, if it
might be,--(and it might, I think, even the _rather_ be),--purity of
bodily, as well as of spiritual, aliment? Why, having made many roads
for the passage of armies, may they not make a few for the conveyance of
food; and after organizing, with applause, various schemes of
theological instruction for the Public, organize, moreover, some
methods of bodily nourishment for them? Or is the soul so much less
trustworthy in its instincts than the stomach, that legislation is
necessary for the one, but inapplicable to the other.
APPENDIX V.--(p. 70.)
I debated with myself whether to make the note on Homer longer by
examining the typical meaning of the shipwreck of Ulysses, and his
escape from Charybdis by help of her fig-tree; but as I should have had
to go on to the lovely myth of Leucothea's veil, and did not care to
spoil this by a hurried account of it, I left it for future examination;
and, three days after the paper was published, observed that the
reviewers, with their customary helpfulness, were endeavouring to throw
the whole subject back into confusion by dwelling on this single (as
they imagined) oversight. I omitted also a note on the sense of the word
[Greek: lygron], with respect to the pharmacy of Circe, and herb-fields
of Helen, (compare its use in Odyssey, xvii., 473, &c.), which would
farther have illustrated the nature of the Circean power. But, not to be
led too far into the subtleties of these myths, observe respecting them
all, that even in very simple parables, it is not always easy to attach
indisputable meaning to every part of them. I recollect some years ago,
throwing an assembly of learned persons who had met to delight
themselves with interpretations of the parable of the prodigal son,
(interpretations which had up to that moment gone very smoothly,) into
mute indignation, by inadvertently asking who the _un_prodigal son was,
and what was to be learned by _his_ example. The leading divine of the
company, Mr. Molyneux, at last explained to me that the unprodigal son
was a lay figure, put in for dramatic effect, to make the story
prettier, and that no note was to be taken of him. Without, however,
admitting that Homer put in the last escape of Ulysses merely to make
his story prettier, this is nevertheless true of all Greek myths, that
they have many opposite lights and shades; they are as changeful as
opal, and like opal, usually have one colour by reflected, and another
by transmitted light. But they are true jewels for all that, and full of
noble enchantment for those who can use them; for those who cannot, I am
content to repeat the words I wrote four years ago, in the appendix to
the _Two Paths_--
"The entire purpose of a great thinker may be difficult to fathom, and
we may be over and over again more or less mistaken in guessing at his
meaning; but the real, profound, nay, quite bottomless and unredeemable
mistake, is the fool's thought, that he had _no_ meaning."
APPENDIX VI.--(p. 84)
The derivation of words is like that of rivers: there is one real
source, usually small, unlikely, and difficult to find, far up among the
hills; then, as the word flows on and comes into service, it takes in
the force of other words from other sources, and becomes quite another
word--often much more than one word, after the junction--a word as it
were of many waters, sometimes both sweet and bitter. Thus the whole
force of our English "charity" depends on the guttural in "charis"
getting confused with the c of the Latin "carus;" thenceforward
throughout the middle ages, the two ideas ran on together, and both got
confused with St. Paul's [Greek: agapê], which expresses a different
idea in all sorts of ways; our "charity" having not only brought in the
entirely foreign sense of alms-giving, but lost the essential sense of
contentment, and lost much more in getting too far away from the
"charis" of the final Gospel benedictions. For truly it is fine
Christianity we have come to, which, professing to expect the perpetual
grace or charity of its Founder, has not itself grace or charity enough
to hinder it from overreaching its friends in sixpenny bargains; and
which, supplicating evening and morning the forgiveness of its own
debts, goes forth at noon to take its fellow-servants by the throat,
saying,--not merely "Pay me that thou owest," but "Pay me that thou
owest me _not_."
It is true that we sometimes wear Ophelia's rue with a difference, and
call it "Herb o' grace o' Sundays," taking consolation out of the
offertory with--"Look, what he layeth out; it shall be paid him again."
Comfortable words indeed, and good to set against the old royalty of
Largesse--
Whose moste joie was, I wis,
When that she gave, and said, "Have this."
[I am glad to end, for this time, with these lovely words of Chaucer. We
have heard only too much lately of "Indiscriminate charity," with
implied reproval, not of the Indiscrimination merely, but of the Charity
also. We have partly succeeded in enforcing on the minds of the poor the
idea that it is disgraceful to receive; and are likely, without much
difficulty, to succeed in persuading not a few of the rich that it is
disgraceful to give. But the political economy of a great state makes
both giving and receiving graceful; and the political economy of true
religion interprets the saying that "it is more blessed to give than to
receive," not as the promise of reward in another life for mortified
selfishness in this, but as pledge of bestowal upon us of that sweet and
better nature, which does not mortify itself in giving.]
_Brantwood, Coniston,_
_5th October, 1871._
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[95] [Written in 1862. I little thought that when I next corrected my
type, the "existing" war best illustrative of the sentence would be
between Frenchmen in the Elysian Fields of Paris.]
[96] Compare the close of the Fourth Lecture in _Aratra Pentelici_.
PRE-RAPHAELITISM
To
FRANCIS HAWKSWORTH FAWKES, ESQ
OF FARNLEY
THESE PAGES
WHICH OWE THEIR PRESENT FORM TO ADVANTAGES GRANTED
BY HIS KINDNESS
ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
BY HIS OBLIGED FRIEND
JOHN RUSKIN
PREFACE.
Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of "Modern Painters,"
I ventured to give the following advice to the young artists of
England:--
"They should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her
laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to
penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and
scorning nothing." Advice which, whether bad or good, involved infinite
labor and humiliation in the following it; and was therefore, for the
most part, rejected.
It has, however, at last been carried out, to the very letter, by a
group of men who, for their reward, have been assailed with the most
scurrilous abuse which I ever recollect seeing issue from the public
press. I have, therefore, thought it due to them to contradict the
directly false statements which have been made respecting their works;
and to point out the kind of merit which, however deficient in some
respects, those works possess beyond the possibility of dispute.
Denmark Hill,
Aug. 1851.
PRE-RAPHAELITISM.
It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no man to live
in this world without working: but it seems to me no less evident that
He intends every man to be happy in his work. It is written, "in the
sweat of thy brow," but it was never written, "in the breaking of thine
heart," thou shalt eat bread; and I find that, as on the one hand,
infinite misery is caused by idle people, who both fail in doing what
was appointed for them to do, and set in motion various springs of
mischief in matters in which they should have had no concern, so on the
other hand, no small misery is caused by over-worked and unhappy people,
in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force
upon others, of work itself. Were it not so, I believe the fact of their
being unhappy is in itself a violation of divine law, and a sign of some
kind of folly or sin in their way of life. Now in order that people may
be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit
for it: They must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of
success in it--not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of
other people for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather
knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done,
whatever the world may say or think about it. So that in order that a
man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of
his work, but a good judge of his work.
The first thing then that he has to do, if unhappily his parents or
masters have not done it for him, is to find out what he is fit for. In
which inquiry a man may be very safely guided by his likings, if he be
not also guided by his pride. People usually reason in some such
fashion as this: "I don't seem quite fit for a head-manager in the firm
of ---- & Co., therefore, in all probability, I am fit to be Chancellor
of the Exchequer." Whereas, they ought rather to reason thus: "I don't
seem quite fit to be head-manager in the firm of ---- & Co., but I
daresay I might do something in a small green-grocery business; I used
to be a good judge of peas;" that is to say, always trying lower instead
of trying higher, until they find bottom: once well set on the ground, a
man may build up by degrees, safely, instead of disturbing every one in
his neighborhood by perpetual catastrophes. But this kind of humility is
rendered especially difficult in these days, by the contumely thrown on
men in humble employments. The very removal of the massy bars which once
separated one class of society from another, has rendered it tenfold
more shameful in foolish people's, i. e. in most people's eyes, to
remain in the lower grades of it, than ever it was before. When a man
born of an artisan was looked upon as an entirely different species of
animal from a man born of a noble, it made him no more uncomfortable or
ashamed to remain that different species of animal, than it makes a
horse ashamed to remain a horse, and not to become a giraffe. But now
that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself,
unreproached, with people once far above him, not only is the natural
discontentedness of humanity developed to an unheard-of extent, whatever
a man's position, but it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in
the state he was born in, and everybody thinks it his _duty_ to try to
be a "gentleman." Persons who have any influence in the management of
public institutions for charitable education know how common this
feeling has become. Hardly a day passes but they receive letters from
mothers who want all their six or eight sons to go to college, and make
the grand tour in the long vacation, and who think there is something
wrong in the foundations of society, because this is not possible. Out
of every ten letters of this kind, nine will allege, as the reason of
the writers' importunity, their desire to keep their families in such
and such a "station of life." There is no real desire for the safety,
the discipline, or the moral good of the children, only a panic horror
of the inexpressibly pitiable calamity of their living a ledge or two
lower on the molehill of the world--a calamity to be averted at any cost
whatever, of struggle, anxiety, and shortening of life itself. I do not
believe that any greater good could be achieved for the country, than
the change in public feeling on this head, which might be brought about
by a few benevolent men, undeniably in the class of "gentlemen," who
would, on principle, enter into some of our commonest trades, and make
them honorable; showing that it was possible for a man to retain his
dignity, and remain, in the best sense, a gentleman, though part of his
time was every day occupied in manual labor, or even in serving
customers over a counter. I do not in the least see why courtesy, and
gravity, and sympathy with the feelings of others, and courage, and
truth, and piety, and what else goes to make up a gentleman's character,
should not be found behind a counter as well as elsewhere, if they were
demanded, or even hoped for, there.
Let us suppose, then, that the man's way of life and manner of work have
been discreetly chosen; then the next thing to be required is, that he
do not over-work himself therein. I am not going to say anything here
about the various errors in our systems of society and commerce, which
appear (I am not sure if they ever do more than appear) to force us to
over-work ourselves merely that we may live; nor about the still more
fruitful cause of unhealthy toil--the incapability, in many men, of
being content with the little that is indeed necessary to their
happiness. I have only a word or two to say about one special cause of
over-work--the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things, and the
hope of accomplishing them by immense efforts: hope as vain as it is
pernicious; not only making men over-work themselves, but rendering all
the work they do unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and let
the reader be assured of this (it is a truth all-important to the best
interests of humanity). _No great intellectual thing was ever done by
great effort_; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and he
does it _without_ effort. Nothing is, at present, less understood by us
than this--nothing is more necessary to be understood. Let me try to say
it as clearly, and explain it as fully as I may.
I have said no great _intellectual_ thing: for I do not mean the
assertion to extend to things moral. On the contrary, it seems to me
that just because we are intended, as long as we live, to be in a state
of intense moral effort, we are _not_ intended to be in intense physical
or intellectual effort. Our full energies are to be given to the soul's
work--to the great fight with the Dragon--the taking the kingdom of
heaven by force. But the body's work and head's work are to be done
quietly, and comparatively without effort. Neither limbs nor brain are
ever to be strained to their utmost; that is not the way in which the
greatest quantity of work is to be got out of them: they are never to be
worked furiously, but with tranquillity and constancy. We are to follow
the plough from sunrise to sunset, but not to pull in race-boats at the
twilight: we shall get no fruit of that kind of work, only disease of
the heart.
How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this great truth and law
were but once sincerely, humbly understood,--that if a great thing can
be done at all, it can be done easily; that, when it is needed to be
done, there is perhaps only one man in the world who can do it; but _he_
can do it without any trouble--without more trouble, that is, than it
costs small people to do small things; nay, perhaps, with less. And yet
what truth lies more openly on the surface of all human phenomena? Is
not the evidence of Ease on the very front of all the greatest works in
existence? Do they not say plainly to us, not, "there has been a great
_effort_ here," but, "there has been a great _power_ here"? It is not
the weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have
to recognise in all mighty things; and that is just what we now _never_
recognise, but think that we are to do great things, by help of iron
bars and perspiration:--alas! we shall do nothing that way but lose some
pounds of our own weight.
Yet, let me not be misunderstood, nor this great truth be supposed
anywise resolvable into the favorite dogma of young men, that they need
not work if they have genius. The fact is, that a man of genius is
always far more ready to work than other people, and gets so much more
good from the work that he does, and is often so little conscious of the
inherent divinity in himself, that he is very apt to ascribe all his
capacity to his work, and to tell those who ask how he came to be what
he is: "If I _am_ anything, which I much doubt, I made myself so merely
by labor." This was Newton's way of talking, and I suppose it would be
the general tone of men whose genius had been devoted to the physical
sciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, but
in whatever field, it will always be distinguished by its perpetual,
steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating and
disciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incommunicable
facility in exercising them. Therefore, literally, it is no man's
business whether he has genius or not: work he must, whatever he is, but
quietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such work
will be always the things that God meant him to do, and will be his
best. No agonies nor heart-rendings will enable him to do any better. If
he be a great man, they will be great things; if a small man, small
things; but always, if thus peacefully done, good and right; always, if
restlessly and ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despicable.
Then the third thing needed was, I said, that a man should be a good
judge of his work; and this chiefly that he may not be dependent upon
popular opinion for the manner of doing it, but also that he may have
the just encouragement of the sense of progress, and an honest
consciousness of victory: how else can he become
"That awful independent on to-morrow,
Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile."
I am persuaded that the real nourishment and help of such a feeling as
this is nearly unknown to half the workmen of the present day. For
whatever appearance of self-complacency there may be in their outward
bearing, it is visible enough, by their feverish jealousy of each
other, how little confidence they have in the sterling value of their
several doings. Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up; and
there is too visible distress and hopelessness in men's aspects to admit
of the supposition that they have any stable support of faith in
themselves.
I have stated these principles generally, because there is no branch of
labor to which they do not apply: But there is one in which our
ignorance or forgetfulness of them has caused an incalculable amount of
suffering: and I would endeavor now to reconsider them with especial
reference to it,--the branch of the Arts.
In general, the men who are employed in the Arts have freely chosen
their profession, and suppose themselves to have special faculty for it;
yet, as a body, they are not happy men. For which this seems to me the
reason, that they are expected, and themselves expect, to make their
bread _by being clever_--not by steady or quiet work; and are,
therefore, for the most part, trying to be clever, and so living in an
utterly false state of mind and action.
This is the case, to the same extent, in no other profession or
employment. A lawyer may indeed suspect that, unless he has more wit
than those around him, he is not likely to advance in his profession;
but he will not be always thinking how he is to display his wit. He will
generally understand, early in his career, that wit must be left to take
care of itself, and that it is hard knowledge of law and vigorous
examination and collation of the facts of every case entrusted to him,
which his clients will mainly demand; this it is which he has to be paid
for; and this is healthy and measurable labor, payable by the hour. If
he happen to have keen natural perception and quick wit, these will come
into play in their due time and place, but he will not think of them as
his chief power; and if he have them not, he may still hope that
industry and conscientiousness may enable him to rise in his profession
without them. Again in the case of clergymen: that they are sorely
tempted to display their eloquence or wit, none who know their own
hearts will deny, but then they _know_ this to _be_ a temptation: they
never would suppose that cleverness was all that was to be expected from
them, or would sit down deliberately to write a clever sermon: even the
dullest or vainest of them would throw some veil over their vanity, and
pretend to some profitableness of purpose in what they did. They would
not openly ask of their hearers--Did you think my sermon ingenious, or
my language poetical? They would early understand that they were not
paid for being ingenious, nor called to be so, but to preach truth; that
if they happened to possess wit, eloquence, or originality, these would
appear and be of service in due time, but were not to be continually
sought after or exhibited: and if it should happen that they had them
not, they might still be serviceable pastors without them.
Not so with the unhappy artist. No one expects any honest or useful work
of him; but every one expects him to be ingenious. Originality,
dexterity, invention, imagination, every thing is asked of him except
what alone is to be had for asking--honesty and sound work, and the due
discharge of his function as a painter. What function? asks the reader
in some surprise. He may well ask; for I suppose few painters have any
idea what their function is, or even that they have any at all.
And yet surely it is not so difficult to discover. The faculties, which
when a man finds in himself, he resolves to be a painter, are, I
suppose, intenseness of observation and facility of imitation. The man
is created an observer and an imitator; and his function is to convey
knowledge to his fellow-men, of such things as cannot be taught
otherwise than ocularly. For a long time this function remained a
religious one: it was to impress upon the popular mind the reality of
the objects of faith, and the truth of the histories of Scripture, by
giving visible form to both. That function has now passed away, and none
has as yet taken its place. The painter has no profession, no purpose.
He is an idler on the earth, chasing the shadows of his own fancies.
But he was never meant to be this. The sudden and universal Naturalism,
or inclination to copy ordinary natural objects, which manifested
itself among the painters of Europe, at the moment when the invention of
printing superseded their legendary labors, was no false instinct. It
was misunderstood and misapplied, but it came at the right time, and has
maintained itself through all kinds of abuse; presenting in the recent
schools of landscape, perhaps only the first fruits of its power. That
instinct was urging every painter in Europe at the same moment to his
true duty--_the faithful representation of all objects of historical
interest, or of natural beauty existent at the period_; representations
such as might at once aid the advance of the sciences, and keep faithful
record of every monument of past ages which was likely to be swept away
in the approaching eras of revolutionary change.
The instinct came, as I said, exactly at the right moment; and let the
reader consider what amount and kind of general knowledge might by this
time have been possessed by the nations of Europe, had their painters
understood and obeyed it. Suppose that, after disciplining themselves so
as to be able to draw, with unerring precision, each the particular kind
of subject in which he most delighted, they had separated into two great
armies of historians and naturalists;--that the first had painted with
absolute faithfulness every edifice, every city, every battle-field,
every scene of the slightest historical interest, precisely and
completely rendering their aspect at the time; and that their
companions, according to their several powers, had painted with like
fidelity the plants and animals, the natural scenery, and the
atmospheric phenomena of every country on the earth--suppose that a
faithful and complete record were now in our museums of every building
destroyed by war, or time, or innovation, during these last 200
years--suppose that each recess of every mountain chain of Europe had
been penetrated, and its rocks drawn with such accuracy that the
geologist's diagram was no longer necessary--suppose that every tree of
the forest had been drawn in its noblest aspect, every beast of the
field in its savage life--that all these gatherings were already in our
national galleries, and that the painters of the present day were
laboring, happily and earnestly, to multiply them, and put such means of
knowledge more and more within reach of the common people--would not
that be a more honorable life for them, than gaining precarious bread by
"bright effects?" They think not, perhaps. They think it easy, and
therefore contemptible, to be truthful; they have been taught so all
their lives. But it is not so, whoever taught it them. It is most
difficult, and worthy of the greatest men's greatest effort, to render,
as it should be rendered, the simplest of the natural features of the
earth; but also be it remembered, no man is confined to the simplest;
each may look out work for himself where he chooses, and it will be
strange if he cannot find something hard enough for him. The excuse is,
however, one of the lips only; for every painter knows that when he
draws back from the attempt to render nature as she is, it is oftener in
cowardice than in disdain.
I must leave the reader to pursue this subject for himself; I have not
space to suggest to him the tenth part of the advantages which would
follow, both to the painter from such an understanding of his mission,
and to the whole people, in the results of his labor. Consider how the
man himself would be elevated: how content he would become, how earnest,
how full of all accurate and noble knowledge, how free from
envy--knowing creation to be infinite, feeling at once the value of what
he did, and yet the nothingness. Consider the advantage to the people;
the immeasurably larger interest given to art itself; the easy,
pleasurable, and perfect knowledge conveyed by it, in every subject; the
far greater number of men who might be healthily and profitably occupied
with it as a means of livelihood; the useful direction of myriads of
inferior talents, now left fading away in misery. Conceive all this, and
then look around at our exhibitions, and behold the "cattle pieces," and
"sea pieces," and "fruit pieces," and "family pieces;" the eternal brown
cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in
saucers, and foolish faces in simpers;--and try to feel what we are, and
what we might have been.
Take a single instance in one branch of archæology. Let those who are
interested in the history of religion consider what a treasure we should
now have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables, and
drunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line for line, the religious
and domestic sculpture on the German, Flemish, and French cathedrals and
castles; and if every building destroyed in the French or in any other
subsequent revolution, had thus been drawn in all its parts with the
same precision with which Gerard Douw or Mieris paint bas-reliefs of
Cupids. Consider, even now, what incalculable treasure is still left in
ancient bas-reliefs, full of every kind of legendary interest, of subtle
expression, of priceless evidence as to the character, feelings habits,
histories, of past generations, in neglected and shattered churches and
domestic buildings, rapidly disappearing over the whole of
Europe--treasure which, once lost, the labor of all men living cannot
bring back again; and then look at the myriads of men, with skill
enough, if they had but the commonest schooling, to record all this
faithfully, who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked women
from academy models, or idealities of chivalry fitted out with Wardour
Street armor, or eternal scenes from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and the
Vicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londoners
wearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Do
but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible
imbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in the
southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fibre of the
heart in you that will break too.
But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, for
imagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty?
Yes; the highest, the noblest place--that which these only can attain
when they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever
imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without
forcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of training
which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could
receive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present training
consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and invention
high enough, and suppose that they _can_ be taught. Throughout every
sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rank
attributed to these powers,--the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be
attained, increased, or in any wise modified by teaching, only in
various ways capable of being concealed or quenched. Understand this
thoroughly; know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same
species of creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our
methods of teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinks
of bringing men up to be poets?--of producing poets by any kind of
general recipe or method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see in
youth that which we hope may, in its development, become a power of this
kind, should we instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of
him, and nothing else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labor?
Should we force him to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of his
boyish brain, and set before him, as the only objects of his study, the
laws of versification which criticism has supposed itself to discover in
the works of previous writers? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much be
likely to come of them so treated? unless, indeed, they were so great as
to break through all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and build
their own foundation in spite of us; whereas if, as in cases numbering
millions against units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this,
could any thing come of such training but utter inanity and spuriousness
of the whole man? But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain and
bridle the first flame of invention in early youth, heaping material on
it as one would on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we
desired to feed into greatness? Should we not educate the whole
intellect into general strength, and all the affections into warmth and
honesty, and look to heaven for the rest? This, I say, we should have
sense enough to do, in order to produce a poet in words: but, it being
required to produce a poet on canvas, what is our way of setting to
work? We begin, in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or
sixteen, that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her;
but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the
better; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do
himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original, manner: that is to say, he
is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet
this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules,
is to have a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a
principle shadow occupying one-third of the same; that no two people's
heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the
personages represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order,
which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in
proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin;
but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen
is to bestow upon God's work in general. This I say is the kind of
teaching which through various channels, Royal Academy lecturings, press
criticisms, public enthusiasm, and not least by solid weight of gold, we
give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters!
But we do worse than this. Within the last few years some sense
of the real tendency of such teaching has appeared in some of
our younger painters. It only _could_ appear in the younger ones,
our older men having become familiarised with the false system,
or else having passed through it and forgotten it, not well knowing
the degree of harm they had sustained. This sense appeared, among our
youths,--increased,--matured into resolute action. Necessarily, to exist
at all, it needed the support both of strong instincts and of
considerable self-confidence, otherwise it must at once have been borne
down by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Strong
instincts are apt to make men strange, and rude; self-confidence,
however well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance
of impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening
every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of
it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little
ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in
a youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedly
to be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of
his work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that he
should be regarded with disfavor by many, even the most temperate, of
the judges trained in the system he was breaking through, and with utter
contempt and reprobation by the envious and the dull. Consider, farther,
that the particular system to be overthrown was, in the present case,
one of which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the
expense of manliness and truth; and it will seem likely, _à priori_,
that the men intended successfully to resist the influence of such a
system should be endowed with little natural sense of beauty, and thus
rendered dead to the temptation it presented. Summing up these
conditions, there is surely little cause for surprise that pictures
painted, in a temper of resistance, by exceedingly young men, of
stubborn instincts and positive self-trust, and with little natural
perception of beauty, should not be calculated, at the first glance, to
win us from works enriched by plagiarism, polished by convention,
invested with all the attractiveness of artificial grace, and
recommended to our respect by established authority.
We should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in
proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to
the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or
affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit
of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and
their success in attaining them.
All this has actually been the case, but in a degree which it would have
been impossible to anticipate. That two youths, of the respective ages
of eighteen and twenty, should have conceived for themselves a totally
independent and sincere method of study, and enthusiastically persevered
in it against every kind of dissuasion and opposition, is strange
enough; that in the third or fourth year of their efforts they should
have produced works in many parts not inferior to the best of Albert
Durer, this is perhaps not less strange. But the loudness and
universality of the howl which the common critics of the press have
raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help or
encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate
their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do
neither the one nor the other,--these are strangest of all--unimaginable
unless they had been experienced.
And as if these were not enough, private malice is at work against them,
in its own small, slimy way. The very day after I had written my second
letter to the Times in the defence of the Pre-Raphaelites, I received an
anonymous letter respecting one of them, from some person apparently
hardly capable of spelling, and about as vile a specimen of petty
malignity as ever blotted paper. I think it well that the public should
know this, and so get some insight into the sources of the spirit which
is at work against these men--how first roused it is difficult to say,
for one would hardly have thought that mere eccentricity in young
artists could have excited an hostility so determined and so
cruel;--hostility which hesitated at no assertion, however impudent.
That of the "absence of perspective" was one of the most curious pieces
of the hue and cry which began with the Times, and died away in feeble
maundering in the Art Union; I contradicted it in the Times--I here
contradict it directly for the second time. There was not a single error
in perspective in three out of the four pictures in question. But if
otherwise, would it have been anything remarkable in them? I doubt, if
with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one
architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I
never met but with two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to
draw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions
and curvatures might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our
architects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talking
to one of the most distinguished among them, the author of several most
valuable works, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle in
perspective. And in this state of general science our writers for the
press take it upon them to tell us, that the forest trees in Mr. Hunt's
_Sylvia_, and the bunches of lilies in Mr. Collins's _Convent Thoughts_,
are out of perspective.[97]
It might not, I think, in such circumstances, have been ungraceful or
unwise in the Academicians themselves to have defended their young
pupils, at least by the contradiction of statements directly false
respecting them,[98] and the direction of the mind and sight of the
public to such real merit as they possess. If Sir Charles Eastlake,
Mulready, Edwin and Charles Landseer, Cope, and Dyce would each of them
simply state their own private opinion respecting their paintings, sign
it and publish it, I believe the act would be of more service to English
art than any thing the Academy has done since it was founded. But as I
cannot hope for this, I can only ask the public to give their pictures
careful examination, and look at them at once with the indulgence and
the respect which I have endeavored to show they deserve.
Yet let me not be misunderstood. I have adduced them only as examples of
the kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for that of
our modern schools, and of singular success in certain characters,
finish of detail, and brilliancy of color. What faculties, higher than
imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say; but I do
say that if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in due
time all the more forcibly because they have received training so
severe.
For it is always to be remembered that no one mind is like another,
either in its powers or perceptions; and while the main principles of
training must be the same for all, the result in each will be as various
as the kinds of truth which each will apprehend; therefore, also, the
modes of effort, even in men whose inner principles and final aims are
exactly the same. Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest,
equally industrious, equally impressed with a humble desire to render
some part of what they saw in nature faithfully; and, otherwise trained
in convictions such as I have above endeavored to induce. But one of
them is quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, and
excessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has a
memory which nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is
comparatively near-sighted.
Set them both free in the same field in a mountain valley. One sees
everything, small and large, with almost the same clearness; mountains
and grasshoppers alike; the leaves on the branches, the veins in the
pebbles, the bubbles in the stream: but he can remember nothing, and
invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to his mighty task; abandoning
at once all thoughts of seizing transient effects, or giving general
impressions of that which his eyes present to him in microscopical
dissection, he chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and
calculates with courage the number of weeks which must elapse before he
can do justice to the intensity of his perceptions, or the fulness of
matter in his subject.
Meantime, the other has been watching the change of the clouds, and the
march of the light along the mountain sides; he beholds the entire scene
in broad, soft masses of true gradation, and the very feebleness of his
sight is in some sort an advantage to him, in making him more sensible
of the aërial mystery of distance, and hiding from him the multitudes of
circumstances which it would have been impossible for him to represent.
But there is not one change in the casting of the jagged shadows along
the hollows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind for ever; not a
flake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud about their bases, but
he has watched it as it melts away, and could recall it to its lost
place in heaven by the slightest effort of his thoughts. Not only so,
but thousands and thousands of such images, of older scenes, remain
congregated in his mind, each mingling in new associations with those
now visibly passing before him, and these again confused with other
images of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by in
sudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbols
and blots, and undecipherable shorthand:--as for his sitting down to
"draw from Nature," there was not one of the things which he wished to
represent that stayed for so much as five seconds together: but none of
them escaped, for all that: they are sealed up in that strange
storehouse of his; he may take one of them out, perhaps, this day twenty
years, and paint it in his dark room, far away. Now, observe, you may
tell both of these men, when they are young, that they are to be honest,
that they have an important function, and that they are not to care what
Raphael did. This you may wholesomely impress on them both. But fancy
the exquisite absurdity of expecting either of them to possess any of
the qualities of the other.
I have supposed the feebleness of sight in the last, and of invention in
the first painter, that the contrast between them might be more
striking; but, with very slight modification, both the characters are
real. Grant to the first considerable inventive power, with exquisite
sense of color; and give to the second, in addition to all his other
faculties, the eye of an eagle; and the first is John Everett Millais,
the second Joseph Mallard William Turner.
They are among the few men who have defied all false teaching, and have,
therefore, in great measure, done justice to the gifts with which they
were entrusted. They stand at opposite poles, marking culminating points
of art in both directions; between them, or in various relations to
them, we may class five or six more living artists who, in like manner,
have done justice to their powers. I trust that I may be pardoned for
naming them, in order that the reader may know how the strong innate
genius in each has been invariably accompanied with the same humility,
earnestness, and industry in study.
It is hardly necessary to point out the earnestness or humility in the
works of William Hunt; but it may be so to suggest the high value they
possess as records of English rural life, and _still_ life. Who is there
who for a moment could contend with him in the unaffected, yet humorous
truth with which he has painted our peasant children? Who is there who
does not sympathize with him in the simple love with which he dwells on
the brightness and bloom of our summer fruit and flowers? And yet there
is something to be regretted concerning him: why should he be allowed
continually to paint the same bunches of hot-house grapes, and supply
to the Water Color Society a succession of pineapples with the
regularity of a Covent Garden fruiterer? He has of late discovered that
primrose banks are lovely; but there are other things grow wild besides
primroses: what undreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, if
he would lose himself for a summer in Highland foregrounds; if he would
paint the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they
nestle in the clefts of the rocks, and the mosses and bright lichens of
the rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and bring back a
piece of Jura pasture in spring; with the gentians in their earliest
blue, and the soldanelle beside the fading snow! And return again, and
paint a gray wall of Alpine crag, with budding roses crowning it like a
wreath of rubies. That is what he was meant to do in this world; not to
paint bouquets in china vases.
I have in various other places expressed my sincere respect for the
works of Samuel Prout: his shortness of sight has necessarily prevented
their possessing delicacy of finish or fulness of minor detail; but I
think that those of no other living artist furnish an example so
striking of innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular work at
the exact and only period when it was possible. At the instant when
peace had been established all over Europe, but when neither national
character nor national architecture had as yet been seriously changed by
promiscuous intercourse or modern "improvement;" when, however, nearly
every ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state of
comparative neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruinousness, and of
separation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiar
interest--half sorrowful, half sublime;--at that moment Prout was
trained among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall, until his
eye was accustomed to follow with delight the rents and breaks, and
irregularities which, to another man, would have been offensive; and
then, gifted with infinite readiness in composition, but also with
infinite affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray, he was
sent to preserve, in an almost innumerable series of drawings, _every
one made on the spot_, the aspect borne, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, by cities which, in a few years more, rekindled
wars, or unexpected prosperities, were to ravage, or renovate, into
nothingness.
It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis; but there is this
fellowship between them, that both seem to have been intended to
appreciate the characters of foreign countries more than of their
own--nay, to have been born in England chiefly that the excitement of
strangeness might enhance to them the interest of the scenes they had to
represent. I believe John Lewis to have done more entire justice to all
his powers (and they are magnificent ones) than any other man amongst
us. His mission was evidently to portray the comparatively animal life
of the southern and eastern families of mankind. For this he was
prepared in a somewhat singular way--by being led to study, and endowed
with altogether peculiar apprehension of, the most sublime characters of
animals themselves. Rubens, Rembrandt, Snyders, Tintoret, and Titian,
have all, in various ways, drawn wild beasts magnificently; but they
have in some sort humanized or demonized them, making them either
ravenous fiends or educated beasts, that would draw cars, and had
respect for hermits. The sullen isolation of the brutal nature; the
dignity and quietness of the mighty limbs; the shaggy mountainous power,
mingled with grace, as of a flowing stream; the stealthy restraint of
strength and wrath in every soundless motion of the gigantic frame; all
this seems never to have been seen, much less drawn, until Lewis drew
and himself engraved a series of animal subjects, now many years ago.
Since then, he has devoted himself to the portraiture of those European
and Asiatic races, among whom the refinements of civilization exist
without its laws or its energies, and in whom the fierceness, indolence,
and subtlety of animal nature are associated with brilliant imagination
and strong affections. To this task he has brought not only intense
perception of the kind of character, but powers of artistical
composition like those of the great Venetians, displaying, at the same
time, a refinement of drawing almost miraculous, and appreciable only,
as the minutiæ of nature itself are appreciable, by the help of the
microscope. The value, therefore, of his works, as records of the aspect
of the scenery and inhabitants of the south of Spain and of the East, in
the earlier part of the nineteenth century, is quite above all estimate.
I hardly know how to speak of Mulready: in delicacy and completion of
drawing, and splendor of color, he takes place beside John Lewis and the
pre-Raphaelites; but he has, throughout his career, displayed no
definiteness in choice of subject. He must be named among the painters
who have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doing
so; but having obtained a consummate method of execution, he has thrown
it away on subjects either altogether uninteresting, or above his
powers, or unfit for pictorial representation. "The Cherry Woman,"
exhibited in 1850, may be named as an example of the first kind; the
"Burchell and Sophia" of the second (the character of Sir William
Thornhill being utterly missed); the "Seven Ages" of the third; for this
subject cannot be painted. In the written passage, the thoughts are
progressive and connected; in the picture they must be co-existent, and
yet separate; nor can all the characters of the ages be rendered in
painting at all. One may represent the soldier at the cannon's mouth,
but one cannot paint the "bubble reputation" which he seeks. Mulready,
therefore, while he has always produced exquisite pieces of painting,
has failed in doing anything which can be of true or extensive use. He
has, indeed, understood how to discipline his genius, but never how to
direct it.
Edwin Landseer is the last painter but one whom I shall name: I need not
point out to any one acquainted with his earlier works, the labor, or
watchfulness of nature which they involve, nor need I do more than
allude to the peculiar faculties of his mind. It will at once be granted
that the highest merits of his pictures are throughout found in those
parts of them which are least like what had before been accomplished;
and that it was not by the study of Raphael that he attained his eminent
success, but by a healthy love of Scotch terriers.
None of these painters, however, it will be answered, afford examples
of the rise of the highest imaginative power out of close study of
matters of fact. Be it remembered, however, that the imaginative power,
in its magnificence, is not to be found every day. Lewis has it in no
mean degree; but we cannot hope to find it at its highest more than once
in an age. We _have_ had it once, and must be content.
Towards the close of the last century, among the various drawings
executed, according to the quiet manner of the time, in greyish blue,
with brown foregrounds, some began to be noticed as exhibiting rather
more than ordinary diligence and delicacy, signed W. Turner.[99] There
was nothing, however, in them at all indicative of genius, or even of
more than ordinary talent, unless in some of the subjects a large
perception of space, and excessive clearness and decision in the
arrangement of masses. Gradually and cautiously the blues became mingled
with delicate green, and then with gold; the browns in the foreground
became first more positive, and then were slightly mingled with other
local colors; while the touch, which had at first been heavy and broken,
like that of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew more and
more refined and expressive, until it lost itself in a method of
execution often too delicate for the eye to follow, rendering, with a
precision before unexampled, both the texture and the form of every
object. The style may be considered as perfectly formed about the year
1800, and it remained unchanged for twenty years.
During that period the painter had attempted, and with more or less
success had rendered, every order of landscape subject, but always on
the same principle, subduing the colors of nature into a harmony of
which the key-notes are greyish green and brown; pure blues and delicate
golden yellows being admitted in small quantity, as the lowest and
highest limits of shade and light: and bright local colors in extremely
small quantity in figures or other minor accessories.
Pictures executed on such a system are not, properly speaking, works in
_color_ at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which both the
shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which best
expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the lights
and the foreground are executed in that which best expresses their
warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as not, in
studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand: but the use of
two, three, or four colors, always in the same relations and places,
does not in the least constitute the work a study of color, any more
than the brown engravings of the Liber Studiorum; nor would the idea of
color be in general more present to the artist's mind, when he was at
work on one of these drawings, than when he was using pure brown in the
mezzotint engraving. But the idea of space, warmth, and freshness being
not successfully expressible in a single tint, and perfectly expressible
by the admission of three or four, he allows himself this advantage when
it is possible, without in the least embarrassing himself with the
actual color of the objects to be represented. A stone in the fore
ground might in nature have been cold grey, but it will be drawn
nevertheless of a rich brown, because it is in the foreground; a hill in
the distance might in nature be purple with heath, or golden with furze;
but it will be drawn nevertheless of a cool grey, because it is in the
distance.
This at least was the general theory,--carried out with great severity
in many, both of the drawings and pictures executed by him during the
period: in others more or less modified by the cautious introduction of
color, as the painter felt his liberty increasing; for the system was
evidently never considered as final, or as anything more than a means of
progress: the conventional, easily manageable color, was visibly
adopted, only that his mind might be at perfect liberty to address
itself to the acquirement of the first and most necessary knowledge in
all art--that of form. But as form, in landscape, implies vast bulk and
space, the use of the tints which enabled him best to express them, was
actually auxiliary to the mere drawing; and, therefore, not only
permissible, but even necessary, while more brilliant or varied tints
were never indulged in, except when they might be introduced without
the slightest danger of diverting his mind for an instant from his
principal object. And, therefore, it will be generally found in the
works of this period, that exactly in proportion to the importance and
general toil of the composition, is the severity of the tint; and that
the play of color begins to show itself first in slight and small
drawings, where he felt that he could easily secure all that he wanted
in form.
Thus the "Crossing the Brook," and such other elaborate and large
compositions, are actually painted in nothing but grey, brown, and blue,
with a point or two of severe local color in the figures; but in the
minor drawings, tender passages of complicated color occur not
unfrequently in easy places; and even before the year 1800 he begins to
introduce it with evident joyfulness and longing in his rude and simple
studies, just as a child, if it could be supposed to govern itself by a
fully developed intellect, would cautiously, but with infinite pleasure,
add now and then a tiny dish of fruit or other dangerous luxury to the
simple order of its daily fare. Thus, in the foregrounds of his most
severe drawings, we not unfrequently find him indulging in the luxury of
a peacock; and it is impossible to express the joyfulness with which he
seems to design its graceful form, and deepen with soft pencilling the
bloom of its blue, after he has worked through the stern detail of his
almost colorless drawing. A rainbow is another of his most frequently
permitted indulgences; and we find him very early allowing the edges of
his evening clouds to be touched with soft rose-color or gold; while,
whenever the hues of nature in anywise fall into his system, and can be
caught without a dangerous departure from it, he instantly throws his
whole soul into the faithful rendering of them. Thus the usual brown
tones of his foreground become warmed into sudden vigor, and are varied
and enhanced with indescribable delight, when he finds himself by the
shore of a moorland stream, where they truly express the stain of its
golden rocks, and the darkness of its clear, Cairngorm-like pools, and
the usual serenity of his aërial blue is enriched into the softness and
depth of the sapphire, when it can deepen the distant slumber of some
Highland lake, or temper the gloomy shadows of the evening upon its
hills.
The system of his color being thus simplified, he could address all the
strength of his mind to the accumulation of facts of form; his choice of
subject, and his methods of treatment, are therefore as various as his
color is simple; and it is not a little difficult to give the reader who
is unacquainted with his works, an idea either of their infinitude of
aims, on the one hand, or of the kind of feeling which prevades them
all, on the other. No subject was too low or too high for him; we find
him one day hard at work on a cock and hen, with their family of
chickens in a farm-yard; and bringing all the refinement of his
execution into play to express the texture of the plumage; next day, he
is drawing the Dragon of Colchis. One hour he is much interested in a
gust of wind blowing away an old woman's cap; the next he is painting
the fifth plague of Egypt. Every landscape painter before him had
acquired distinction by confining his efforts to one class of subject.
Hobbima painted oaks; Ruysdael, waterfalls and copses; Cuyp, river or
meadow scenes in quiet afternoons; Salvator and Poussin, such kind of
mountain scenery as people could conceive, who lived in towns in the
seventeenth century. But I am well persuaded that if all the works of
Turner, up to the year 1820, were divided into classes (as he has
himself divided them in the Liber Studiorum), no preponderance could be
assigned to one class over another. There is architecture, including a
large number of formal "gentlemen's seats," I suppose drawings
commissioned by the owners; then lowland pastoral scenery of every kind,
including nearly all farming operations,--ploughing, harrowing, hedging
and ditching, felling trees, sheep-washing, and I know not what else;
then all kinds of town life--court-yards of inns, starting of mail
coaches, interiors of shops, house-buildings, fairs, elections, &c.;
then all kinds of inner domestic life--interiors of rooms, studies of
costumes, of still life, and heraldry, including multitudes of
symbolical vignettes; then marine scenery of every kind, full of local
incident; every kind of boat and method of fishing for particular fish,
being specifically drawn, round the whole coast of England;--pilchard
fishing at St. Ives, whiting fishing at Margate, herring at Loch Fyne;
and all kinds of shipping, including studies of every separate part of
the vessels, and many marine battle-pieces, two in particular of
Trafalgar, both of high importance,--one of the Victory after the
battle, now in Greenwich Hospital; another of the Death of Nelson, in
his own gallery; then all kinds of mountain scenery, some idealised into
compositions, others of definite localities; together with classical
compositions, Romes and Carthages and such others, by the myriad, with
mythological, historical, or allegorical figures,--nymphs, monsters, and
spectres; heroes and divinities.[100]
What general feeling, it may be asked incredulously, can possibly
pervade all this? This, the greatest of all feelings--an utter
forgetfulness of self. Throughout the whole period with which we are at
present concerned, Turner appears as a man of sympathy absolutely
infinite--a sympathy so all-embracing, that I know nothing but that of
Shakespeare comparable with it. A soldier's wife resting by the roadside
is not beneath it; Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, watching the dead
bodies of her sons, not above it. Nothing can possibly be so mean as
that it will not interest his whole mind, and carry away his whole
heart; nothing so great or solemn but that he can raise himself into
harmony with it; and it is impossible to prophesy of him at any moment,
whether, the next, he will be in laughter or in tears.
This is the root of the man's greatness; and it follows as a matter of
course that this sympathy must give him a subtle power of expression,
even of the characters of mere material things, such as no other painter
ever possessed. The man who can best feel the difference between
rudeness and tenderness in humanity, perceives also more difference
between the branches of an oak and a willow than any one else would; and
therefore, necessarily the most striking character of the drawings
themselves is the speciality of whatever they represent--the thorough
stiffness of what is stiff, and grace of what is graceful, and vastness
of what is vast; but through and beyond all this, the condition of the
mind of the painter himself is easily enough discoverable by comparison
of a large number of the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful:
in itself quite passionless, though entering with ease into the external
passion which it contemplates. By the effort of its will it sympathises
with tumult or distress, even in their extremes, but there is no tumult,
no sorrow in itself, only a chastened and exquisitely peaceful
cheerfulness, deeply meditative; touched without loss of its own perfect
balance, by sadness on the one side, and stooping to playfulness upon
the other. I shall never cease to regret the destruction, by fire, now
several years ago, of a drawing which always seemed to me to be the
perfect image of the painter's mind at this period,--the drawing of
Brignal Church near Rokeby, of which a feeble idea may still be gathered
from the engraving (in the Yorkshire series). The spectator stands on
the "Brignal banks," looking down into the glen at twilight; the sky is
still full of soft rays, though the sun is gone; and the Greta glances
brightly in the valley, singing its evening-song; two white clouds,
following each other, move without wind through the hollows of the
ravine, and others lie couched on the far away moorlands; every leaf of
the woods is still in the delicate air; a boy's kite, incapable of
rising, has become entangled in their branches, he is climbing to
recover it; and just behind it in the picture, almost indicated by it,
the lowly church is seen in its secluded field between the rocks and the
stream; and around it the low churchyard wall, and the few white stones
which mark the resting places of those who can climb the rocks no more,
nor hear the river sing as it passes.
There are many other existing drawings which indicate the same character
of mind, though I think none so touching or so beautiful; yet they are
not, as I said above, more numerous than those which express his
sympathy with sublimer or more active scenes; but they are almost always
marked by a tenderness of execution, and have a look of being beloved in
every part of them, which shows them to be the truest expression of his
own feelings.
One other characteristic of his mind at this period remains to be
noticed--its reverence for talent in others. Not the reverence which
acts upon the practices of men as if they were the laws of nature, but
that which is ready to appreciate the power, and receive the assistance,
of every mind which has been previously employed in the same direction,
so far as its teaching seems to be consistent with the great text-book
of nature itself. Turner thus studied almost every preceding landscape
painter, chiefly Claude, Poussin, Vandevelde, Loutherbourg, and Wilson.
It was probably by the Sir George Beaumonts and other feeble
conventionalists of the period, that he was persuaded to devote his
attention to the works of these men; and his having done so will be
thought, a few scores of years hence, evidence of perhaps the greatest
modesty ever shown by a man of original power. Modesty at once admirable
and unfortunate, for the study of the works of Vandevelde and Claude was
productive of unmixed mischief to him; he spoiled many of his marine
pictures, as for instance Lord Ellesmere's, by imitation of the former;
and from the latter learned a false ideal, which confirmed by the
notions of Greek art prevalent in London in the beginning of this
century, has manifested itself in many vulgarities in his composition
pictures, vulgarities which may perhaps be best expressed by the general
term "Twickenham Classicism," as consisting principally in conceptions
of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of most
of our suburban villas. From Nicolo Poussin and Loutherbourg he seems to
have derived advantage; perhaps also from Wilson; and much in his
subsequent travels from far higher men, especially Tintoret and Paul
Veronese. I have myself heard him speaking with singular delight of the
putting in of the beech leaves in the upper right-hand corner of
Titian's Peter Martyr. I cannot in any of his works trace the slightest
influence of Salvator; and I am not surprised at it, for though Salvator
was a man of far higher powers than either Vandevelde or Claude, he was
a wilful and gross caricaturist. Turner would condescend to be helped by
feeble men, but could not be corrupted by false men. Besides, he had
never himself seen classical life, and Claude was represented to him as
competent authority for it. But he _had_ seen mountains and torrents,
and knew therefore that Salvator could not paint them.
One of the most characteristic drawings of this period fortunately bears
a date, 1818, and brings us within two years of another dated drawing,
no less characteristic of what I shall henceforward call Turner's Second
period. It is in the possession of Mr. Hawkesworth Fawkes of Farnley,
one of Turner's earliest and truest friends; and bears the inscription,
unusually conspicuous, heaving itself up and down over the eminences of
the foreground--"PASSAGE OF MONT CENIS. J. M. W. TURNER, January 15th,
1820."
The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or what
seems to have been a hospice at that time,--I do not remember such at
present,--a small square-built house, built as if partly for a fortress,
with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a kind of
drawbridge to the door. This building, about 400 or 500 yards off, is
seen in a dim, ashy grey against the light, which by help of a violent
blast of mountain wind has broken through the depth of clouds which
hangs upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing but
this roof of drifting cloud; but neither is there any weight of
darkness--the high air is too thin for it,--all savage, howling, and
luminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting out
here and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is a
desolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it in
long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof and
through its window in a frantic whirl; the near ground is all wan with
half-thawed, half-trampled snow; a diligence in front, whose horses,
unable to face the wind, have turned right round with fright, its
passengers struggling to escape, jammed in the window; a little farther
on is another carriage off the road, some figures pushing at its wheels,
and its driver at the horses' heads, pulling and lashing with all his
strength, his lifted arm stretched out against the light of the
distance, though too far off for the whip to be seen.
Now I am perfectly certain that any one thoroughly accustomed to the
earlier works of the painter, and shown this picture for the first time,
would be struck by two altogether new characters in it.
The first, a seeming enjoyment of the excitement of the scene, totally
different from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerly
have been regarded. Every incident of motion and of energy is seized
upon with indescribable delight, and every line of the composition
animated with a force and fury which are now no longer the mere
expression of a contemplated external truth, but have origin in some
inherent feeling in the painter's mind.
The second, that although the subject is one in itself almost incapable
of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the
impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it
might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low
minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of color have been
elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading,
instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warm
hues of the granite promontories, the dull stone color of the walls of
the buildings, clearly opposed, even in shade, to the grey of the snow
wreaths heaped against them, and the faint greens and ghastly blues of
the glacier ice, being all expressed with delicacies of transition
utterly unexampled in any previous drawings.
These, accordingly, are the chief characteristics of the works of
Turner's second period, as distinguished from the first,--a new energy
inherent in the mind of the painter, diminishing the repose and exalting
the force and fire of his conceptions, and the presence of Color, as at
least an essential, and often a principal, element of design.
Not that it is impossible, or even unusual, to find drawings of serene
subject, and perfectly quiet feeling, among the compositions of this
period; but the repose is in them, just as the energy and tumult were in
the earlier period, an external quality, which the painter images by an
effort of the will: it is no longer a character inherent in himself. The
"Ulleswater," in the England series, is one of those which are in most
perfect peace: in the "Cowes," the silence is only broken by the dash
of the boat's oars, and in the "Alnwick" by a stag drinking; but in at
least nine drawings out of ten, either sky, water, or figures are in
rapid motion, and the grandest drawings are almost always those which
have even violent action in one or other, or in all: e. g. high force of
Tees, Coventry, Llanthony, Salisbury, Llanberis, and such others.
The color is, however, a more absolute distinction; and we must return
to Mr. Fawkes's collection in order to see how the change in it was
effected. That such a change would take place at one time or other was
of course to be securely anticipated, the conventional system of the
first period being, as above stated, merely a means of Study. But the
immediate cause was the journey of the year 1820. As might be guessed
from the legend on the drawing above described, "Passage of Mont Cenis,
January 15th, 1820," that drawing represents what happened on the day in
question to the painter himself. He passed the Alps then in the winter
of 1820; and either in the previous or subsequent summer, but on the
same journey, he made a series of sketches on the Rhine, in body color,
now in Mr. Fawkes's collection. Every one of those sketches is the
almost instantaneous record of an _effect_ of color or atmosphere, taken
strictly from nature, the drawing and the details of every subject being
comparatively subordinate, and the color nearly as principal as the
light and shade had been before,--certainly the leading feature, though
the light and shade are always exquisitely harmonized with it. And
naturally, as the color becomes the leading object, those times of day
are chosen in which it is most lovely; and whereas before, at least five
out of six of Turner's drawings represented ordinary daylight, we now
find his attention directed constantly to the evening: and, for the
first time, we have those rosy lights upon the hills, those gorgeous
falls of sun through flaming heavens, those solemn twilights, with the
blue moon rising as the western sky grows dim, which have ever since
been the themes of his mightiest thoughts.
I have no doubt, that the _immediate_ reason of this change was the
impression made upon him by the colors of the continental skies. When
he first travelled on the Continent (1800), he was comparatively a young
student; not yet able to draw form as he wanted, he was forced to give
all his thoughts and strength to this primary object. But now he was
free to receive other impressions; the time was come for perfecting his
art, and the first sunset which he saw on the Rhine taught him that all
previous landscape art was vain and valueless, that in comparison with
natural color, the things that had been called paintings were mere ink
and charcoal, and that all precedent and all authority must be cast away
at once, and trodden under foot. He cast them away: the memories of
Vandevelde and Claude were at once weeded out of the great mind they had
encumbered; they and all the rubbish of the schools together with them;
the waves of the Rhine swept them away for ever; and a new dawn rose
over the rocks of the Siebengebirge.
There was another motive at work, which rendered the change still more
complete. His fellow artists were already conscious enough of his
superior power in drawing, and their best hope was, that he might not be
able to color. They had begun to express this hope loudly enough for it
to reach his ears. The engraver of one of his most important marine
pictures told me, not long ago, that one day about the period in
question, Turner came into his room to examine the progress of the
plate, not having seen his own picture for several months. It was one of
his dark early pictures, but in the foreground was a little piece of
luxury, a pearly fish wrought into hues like those of an opal. He stood
before the picture for some moments; then laughed, and pointed joyously
to the fish;--"They say that Turner can't color!" and turned away.
Under the force of these various impulses the change was total. _Every
subject thenceforth was primarily conceived in color_; and no engraving
ever gave the slightest idea of any drawing of this period.
The artists who had any perception of the truth were in despair; the
Beaumontites, classicalists, and "owl species" in general, in as much
indignation as their dulness was capable of. They had deliberately
closed their eyes to all nature, and had gone on inquiring, "Where do
you put your brown tree?" A vast revelation was made to them at once,
enough to have dazzled any one; but to _them_, light unendurable as
incomprehensible. They "did to the moon complain," in one vociferous,
unanimous, continuous "Tu whoo." Shrieking rose from all dark places at
the same instant, just the same kind of shrieking that is now raised
against the Pre-Raphaelites. Those glorious old Arabian Nights, how true
they are! Mocking and whispering, and abuse loud and low by turns, from
all the black stones beside the road, when one living soul is toiling up
the hill to get the golden water. Mocking and whispering, that he may
look back, and become a black stone like themselves.
Turner looked not back, but he went on in such a temper as a strong man
must be in, when he is forced to walk with his fingers in his ears. He
retired into himself; he could look no longer for help, or counsel, or
sympathy from any one; and the spirit of defiance in which he was forced
to labor led him sometimes into violences, from which the slightest
expression of sympathy would have saved him. The new energy that was
upon him, and the utter isolation into which he was driven, were both
alike dangerous, and many drawings of the time show the evil effects of
both; some of them being hasty, wild, or experimental, and others little
more than magnificent expressions of defiance of public opinion.
But all have this noble virtue--they are in everything his own: there
are no more reminiscences of dead masters, no more trials of skill in
the manner of Claude or Poussin; every faculty of his soul is fixed upon
nature only, as he saw her, or as he remembered her.
I have spoken above of his gigantic memory: it is especially necessary
to notice this, in order that we may understand the kind of grasp which
a man of real imagination takes of all things that are once brought
within his reach--grasp thenceforth not to be relaxed for ever.
On looking over any catalogues of his works, or of particular series of
them, we shall notice the recurrence of the same subject two, three, or
even many times. In any other artist this would be nothing remarkable.
Probably most modern landscape painters multiply a favorite subject
twenty, thirty, or sixty fold, putting the shadows and the clouds in
different places, and "inventing," as they are pleased to call it, a new
"effect" every time. But if we examine the successions of Turner's
subjects, we shall find them either the records of a succession of
impressions actually perceived by him at some favorite locality, or else
repetitions of one impression received in early youth, and again and
again realised as his increasing powers enabled him to do better justice
to it. In either case we shall find them records of _seen facts_;
_never_ compositions in his room to fill up a favorite outline.
For instance, every traveller, at least every traveller of thirty years'
standing, must love Calais, the place where he first felt himself in a
strange world. Turner evidently loved it excessively. I have never
catalogued his studies of Calais, but I remember, at this moment, five:
there is first the "Pas de Calais," a very large oil painting, which is
what he saw in broad daylight as he crossed over, when he got near the
French side. It is a careful study of French fishing boats running for
the shore before the wind, with the picturesque old city in the
distance. Then there is the "Calais Harbor" in the Liber Studiorum: that
is what he saw just as he was going into the harbor,--a heavy brig
warping out, and very likely to get in his way, or run against the pier,
and bad weather coming on. Then there is the "Calais Pier," a large
painting, engraved some years ago by Mr. Lupton:[101] that is what he
saw when he had landed, and ran back directly to the pier to see what
had become of the brig. The weather had got still worse, the fishwomen
were being blown about in a distressful manner on the pier head, and
some more fishing boats were running in with all speed. Then there is
the "Fortrouge," Calais: that is what he saw after he had been home to
Dessein's, and dined, and went out again in the evening to walk on the
sands, the tide being down. He had never seen such a waste of sands
before, and it made an impression on him. The shrimp girls were all
scattered over them too, and moved about in white spots on the wild
shore; and the storm had lulled a little, and there was a sunset--such a
sunset,--and the bars of Fortrouge seen against it, skeleton-wise.
He did not paint that directly; thought over it,--painted it a long
while afterwards.
Then there is the vignette in the illustrations to Scott. That is what
he saw as he was going home, meditatively; and the revolving lighthouse
came blazing out upon him suddenly, and disturbed him. He did not like
that so much; made a vignette of it, however, when he was asked to do a
bit of Calais, twenty or thirty years afterwards, having already done
all the rest.
Turner never told me all this, but any one may see it if he will compare
the pictures. They might, possibly, not be impressions of a single day,
but of two days or three; though in all human probability they were seen
just as I have stated them;[102] but they _are_ records of successive
impressions, as plainly written as ever traveller's diary. All of them
pure veracities. Therefore immortal.
I could multiply these series almost indefinitely from the rest of his
works. What is curious, some of them have a kind of private mark running
through all the subjects. Thus I know three drawings of Scarborough, and
all of them have a starfish in the foreground: I do not remember any
others of his marine subjects which have a starfish.
The other kind of repetition--the recurrence to one early impression--is
however still more remarkable. In the collection of F. H. Bale, Esq.,
there is a small drawing of Llanthony Abbey. It is in his boyish manner,
its date probably about 1795; evidently a sketch from nature, finished
at home. It had been a showery day; the hills were partially concealed
by the rain, and gleams of sunshine breaking out at intervals. A man was
fishing in the mountain stream. The young Turner sought a place of some
shelter under the bushes; made his sketch, took great pains when he got
home to imitate the rain, as he best could; added his child's luxury of
a rainbow; put in the very bush under which he had taken shelter, and
the fisherman, a somewhat ill-jointed and long-legged fisherman, in the
courtly short breeches which were the fashion of the time.
Some thirty years afterwards, with all his powers in their strongest
training, and after the total change in his feelings and principles
which I have endeavored to describe, he undertook the series of "England
and Wales," and in that series introduced the subject of Llanthony
Abbey. And behold, he went back to his boy's sketch, and boy's thought.
He kept the very bushes in their places, but brought the fisherman to
the other side of the river, and put him, in somewhat less courtly
dress, under their shelter, instead of himself. And then he set all his
gained strength and new knowledge at work on the well-remembered shower
of rain, that had fallen thirty years before, to do it better. The
resultant drawing[103] is one of the very noblest of his second period.
Another of the drawings of the England series, Ulleswater, is the
repetition of one in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which, by the method of
its execution, I should conjecture to have been executed about the year
1808, or 1810: at all events, it is a very quiet drawing of the first
period. The lake is quite calm; the western hills in grey shadow, the
eastern massed in light. Helvellyn rising like a mist between them, all
being mirrored in the calm water. Some thin and slightly evanescent cows
are standing in the shallow water in front; a boat floats motionless
about a hundred yards from the shore: the foreground is of broken rocks,
with lovely pieces of copse on the right and left.
This was evidently Turner's record of a quiet evening by the shore of
Ulleswater, but it was a feeble one. He could not at that time render
the sunset colors: he went back to it therefore in the England series,
and painted it again with his new power. The same hills are there, the
same shadows, the same cows,--they had stood in his mind, on the same
spot, for twenty years,--the same boat, the same rocks, only the copse
is cut away--it interfered with the masses of his color: some figures
are introduced bathing, and what was grey, and feeble gold in the first
drawing, becomes purple, and burning rose-color in the last.
But perhaps one of the most curious examples is in the series of
subjects from Winchelsea. That in the Liber Studiorum, "Winchelsea,
Sussex," bears date 1812, and its figures consist of a soldier speaking
to a woman, who is resting on the bank beside the road. There is another
small subject, with Winchelsea in the distance, of which the engraving
bears date 1817. It has _two_ women with bundles, and _two_ soldiers
toiling along the embankment in the plain, and a baggage waggon in the
distance. Neither of these seems to have satisfied him, and at last he
did another for the England series, of which the engraving bears date
1830. There is now a regiment on the march; the baggage waggon is there,
having got no further on in the thirteen years, but one of the women is
tired, and has fainted on the bank; another is supporting her against
her bundle, and giving her drink; a third sympathetic woman is added,
and the two soldiers have stopped, and one is drinking from his canteen.
Nor is it merely of entire scenes, or of particular incidents, that
Turner's memory is thus tenacious. The slightest passages of color or
arrangement that have pleased him--the fork of a bough, the casting of a
shadow, the fracture of a stone--will be taken up again and again, and
strangely worked into new relations with other thoughts. There is a
single sketch from nature in one of the portfolios at Farnley, of a
common wood-walk on the estate, which has furnished passages to no fewer
than three of the most elaborate compositions in the Liber Studiorum.
I am thus tedious in dwelling on Turner's powers of memory, because I
wish it to be thoroughly seen how all his greatness, all his infinite
luxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everything
that he sees,--on his grasping all, and losing hold of nothing,--on his
forgetting himself, and forgetting nothing else. I wish it to be
understood how every great man paints what he sees or did see, his
greatness being indeed little else than his intense sense of fact. And
thus Pre-Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one and
the same, so far as education can influence them. They are different in
their choice, different in their faculties, but all the same in this,
that Raphael himself, so far as he was great, and all who preceded or
followed him who ever were great, became so by painting the truths
around them as they appeared to each man's own mind, not as he had been
taught to see them, except by the God who made both him and them.
There is, however, one more characteristic of Turner's second period, on
which I have still to dwell, especially with reference to what has been
above advanced respecting the fallacy of overtoil; namely, the
magnificent ease with which all is done when it is _successfully_ done.
For there are one or two drawings of this time which are _not_ done
easily. Turner had in these set himself to do a fine thing to exhibit
his powers; in the common phrase, to excel himself; so sure as he does
this, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever come from
his hands are some of this second period, on which he has spent much
time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident from one side
to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and warm lights set
against them in violent contrast; one of Bamborough Castle, a large
water-color, may be named as an example. But the truly noble works are
those in which, without effort, he has expressed his thoughts as they
came, and forgotten himself; and in these the outpouring of invention is
not less miraculous than the swiftness and obedience of the mighty hand
that expresses it. Any one who examines the drawings may see the
evidence of this facility, in the strange freshness and sharpness of
every touch of color; but when the multitude of delicate touches, with
which all the aërial tones are worked, is taken into consideration, it
would still appear impossible that the drawing could have been completed
with _ease_, unless we had direct evidence in the matter: fortunately,
it is not wanting. There is a drawing in Mr. Fawkes's collection of a
man-of-war taking in stores: it is of the usual size of those of the
England series, about sixteen inches by eleven: it does not appear one
of the most highly finished, but is still farther removed from
slightness. The hull of a first-rate occupies nearly one-half of the
picture on the right, her bows towards the spectator, seen in sharp
perspective from stem to stern, with all her portholes, guns, anchors,
and lower rigging elaborately detailed; there are two other ships of the
line in the middle distance, drawn with equal precision; a noble breezy
sea dancing against their broad bows, full of delicate drawing in its
waves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the larger vessel, and several
other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky. It might appear no small
exertion of mind to draw the detail of all this shipping down to the
smallest ropes, from memory, in the drawing-room of a mansion in the
middle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been given for the
effort. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter from the first stroke to
the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning after
breakfast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three hours, and
went out to shoot.
Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordinary painters,
and they will see the truth of what was above asserted,--that if a great
thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; and let them not
torment themselves with twisting of compositions this way and that, and
repeating, and experimenting, and scene-shifting. If a man can compose
at all, he can compose at once, or rather he must compose in spite of
himself. And this is the reason of that silence which I have kept in
most of my works, on the subject of Composition. Many critics,
especially the architects, have found fault with me for not "teaching
people how to arrange masses;" for not "attributing sufficient
importance to composition." Alas! I attribute far more importance to it
than they do;--so much importance, that I should just as soon think of
sitting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or King
Lear, as how to "compose," in the true sense, a single building or
picture. The marvellous stupidity of this age of lecturers is, that
they do not see that what they call "principles of composition," are
mere principles of common sense in everything, as well as in pictures
and buildings;--A picture is to have a principal light? Yes; and so a
dinner is to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point,
and an air of music a principal note, and every man a principal object.
A picture is to have harmony of relation among its parts? Yes; and so is
a speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company well
chosen, and a ragout well mixed. Composition! As if a man were not
composing every moment of his life, well or ill, and would not do it
instinctively in his picture as well as elsewhere, if he could.
Composition of this lower or common kind is of exactly the same
importance in a picture that it is in any thing else,--no more. It is
well that a man should say what he has to say in good order and
sequence, but the main thing is to say it truly. And yet we go on
preaching to our pupils as if to have a principal light was every thing,
and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein the courses
are indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty.
It is not, however, only in invention that men over-work themselves, but
in execution also; and here I have a word to say to the Pre-Raphaelites
specially. They are working too hard. There is evidence in failing
portions of their pictures, showing that they have wrought so long upon
them that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that the hand
refused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there are certain
qualities of drawing which they miss from over-carefulness. For, let
them be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common desire of
men to see things done in what they call a "masterly," or "bold," or
"broad," manner: a truth oppressed and abused, like almost every other
in this world, but an eternal one nevertheless; and whatever mischief
may have followed from men's looking for nothing else but this facility
of execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all right if
only it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the truth
remains the same:--that because it is not intended that men shall
torment or weary themselves with any earthly labor, it is appointed
that the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease and
decision of manipulation. I only wish people understood this much of
sculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finely
finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more
vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to
the workman's hammer: but at all events, in painting it is felt by all
men, and justly felt. The freedom of the lines of nature can only be
represented by a similar freedom in the hand that follows them; there
are curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, and
in the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught but
by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care what
example is taken, be it the most subtle and careful work of Leonardo
himself, there will be found a play and power and ease in the outlines,
which no _slow_ effort could ever imitate. And if the Pre-Raphaelites do
not understand how this kind of power, in its highest perfection, may be
united with the most severe rendering of all other orders of truth, and
especially of those with which they themselves have most sympathy, let
them look at the drawings of John Lewis.
These then are the principal lessons which we have to learn from Turner,
in his second or central period of labor. There is one more, however, to
be received; and that is a warning; for towards the close of it, what
with doing small conventional vignettes for publishers, making showy
drawings from sketches taken by other people of places he had never
seen, and touching up the bad engravings from his works submitted to him
almost every day,--engravings utterly destitute of animation, and which
had to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them over with
white, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many conventionalities,
and even falsities; and, having trusted for ten or twelve years almost
entirely to his memory and invention, living I believe mostly in London,
and receiving a new sensation only from the burning of the Houses of
Parliament, he painted many pictures between 1830 and 1840 altogether
unworthy of him. But he was not thus to close his career.
In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook another journey into
Switzerland. It was then at least forty years since he had first seen
the Alps; (the source of the Arveron, in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which
could not have been painted till he had seen the thing itself, bears
date 1800,) and the direction of his journey in 1840 marks his fond
memory of that earliest one; for, if we look over the Swiss studies and
drawings executed in his first period, we shall be struck with his
fondness for the pass of the St. Gothard; the most elaborate drawing in
the Farnley collection is one of the Lake of Lucerne from Fluelen; and,
counting the Liber Studiorum subjects, there are, to my knowledge, six
compositions taken at the same period from the pass of St. Gothard, and,
probably, several others are in existence. The valleys of Sallenche, and
Chamouni, and Lake of Geneva, are the only other Swiss scenes which seem
to have made very profound impressions on him.
He returned in 1841 to Lucerne; walked up Mont Pilate on foot, crossed
the St. Gothard, and returned by Lausanne and Geneva. He made a large
number of colored sketches on this journey, and realised several of them
on his return. The drawings thus produced are different from all that
had preceded them, and are the first which belong definitely to what I
shall henceforth call his Third period.
The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while the
faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all
conventionality being done away with by the force of the impression
which he had received from the Alps, after his long separation from
them. The drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of
thought: most of them by deep serenity, passing into melancholy; all by
a richness of color, such as he had never before conceived. They, and
the works done in following years, bear the same relation to those of
the rest of his life that the colors of sunset do to those of the day;
and will be recognised, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapes
ever yet conceived by human intellect.
Such has been the career of the greatest painter of this century. Many
a century may pass away before there rises such another; but what
greatness any among us may be capable of, will, at least, be best
attained by following in his path; by beginning in all quietness and
hopefulness to use whatever powers we may possess to represent the
things around us as we see and feel them; trusting to the close of life
to give the perfect crown to the course of its labors, and knowing
assuredly that the determination of the degree in which watchfulness is
to be exalted into invention, rests with a higher will than our own.
And, if not greatness, at least a certain good, is thus to be achieved;
for though I have above spoken of the mission of the more humble artist,
as if it were merely to be subservient to that of the antiquarian or the
man of science, there is an ulterior aspect in which it is not
subservient, but superior. Every archæologist, every natural
philosopher, knows that there is a peculiar rigidity of mind brought on
by long devotion to logical and analytical inquiries. Weak men, giving
themselves to such studies, are utterly hardened by them, and become
incapable of understanding anything nobler, or even of feeling the value
of the results to which they lead. But even the best men are in a sort
injured by them, and pay a definite price, as in most other matters, for
definite advantages. They gain a peculiar strength, but lose in
tenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, hammer
in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the
mountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery
with which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with which
they are adorned in the mind of the passing traveller. In his more
informed conception, they arrange themselves like a dissected model:
where another man would be awe-struck by the magnificence of the
precipice, he sees nothing but the emergence of a fossiliferous rock,
familiarised already to his imagination as extending in a shallow
stratum, over a perhaps uninteresting district; where the unlearned
spectator would be touched with strong emotion by the aspect of the
snowy summits which rise in the distance, he sees only the culminating
points of a metamorphic formation, with an uncomfortable web of
fan-like fissures radiating, in his imagination, through their
centres[104]. That in the grasp he has obtained of the inner relations
of all these things to the universe, and to man, that in the views which
have been opened to him of natural energies such as no human mind would
have ventured to conceive, and of past states of being, each in some new
way bearing witness to the unity of purpose and everlastingly consistent
providence of the Maker of all things, he has received reward well
worthy the sacrifice, I would not for an instant deny; but the sense of
the loss is not less painful to him if his mind be rightly constituted;
and it would be with infinite gratitude that he would regard the man,
who, retaining in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity to the
facts of science so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable and
credible to the most sternly critical intellect, should yet invest its
features again with the sweet veil of their daily aspect; should make
them dazzling with the splendor of wandering light, and involve them in
the unsearchableness of stormy obscurity; should restore to the divided
anatomy its visible vitality of operation, clothe naked crags with soft
forests, enrich the mountain ruins with bright pastures, and lead the
thoughts from the monotonous recurrence of the phenomena of the physical
world, to the sweet interests and sorrows of human life and death.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[97] It was not a little curious, that in the very number of the Art
Union which repeated this direct falsehood about the Pre-Raphaelite
rejection of "linear perspective" (by-the-bye, the next time J. B. takes
upon him to speak of any one connected with the Universities, he may as
well first ascertain the difference between a Graduate and an
Under-Graduate), the second plate given should have been of a picture of
Bonington's,--a professional landscape painter, observe,--for the want
of _aërial_ perspective in which the Art Union itself was obliged to
apologise, and in which the artist has committed nearly as many blunders
in _linear_ perspective as there are lines in the picture.
[98] These false statements may be reduced to three principal heads, and
directly contradicted in succession.
The first, the current fallacy of society as well as of the press, was,
that the Pre-Raphaelites imitated the _errors_ of early painters.
A falsehood of this kind could not have obtained credence anywhere but
in England, few English people, comparatively, having ever seen a
picture of early Italian Masters. If they had, they would have known
that the Pre-Raphaelite pictures are just as superior to the early
Italian in skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and knowledge of
effect, as inferior to them in grace of design; and that in a word,
there is not a shadow of resemblance between the two styles. The
Pre-Raphaelites imitate no pictures: they paint from nature only. But
they have opposed themselves as a body to that kind of teaching above
described, which only began after Raphael's time: and they have opposed
themselves as sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools;
a feeling compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow
pride. Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelites. If they
adhere to their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with
the help of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said, found a new
and noble school in England. If their sympathies with the early artists
lead them into mediævalism or Romanism, they will of course come to
nothing. But I believe there is no danger of this, at least for the
strongest among them. There may be some weak ones, whom the Tractarian
heresies may touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches
from a strong stem. I hope all things from the school.
The second falsehood was, that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draw well.
This was asserted, and could have been asserted only by persons who had
never looked at the pictures.
The third falsehood was, that they had no system of light and shade. To
which it may be simply replied that their system of light and shade is
exactly the same as the Sun's; which is, I believe, likely to outlast
that of the Renaissance, however brilliant.
[99] He did not use his full signature, J. M. W., until about the year
1800.
[100] I shall give a _catalogue raisonnée_ of all this in the third
volume of "Modern Painters."
[101] The plate was, however, never published.
[102] And the more probably because Turner was never fond of staying
long at any place, and was least of all likely to make a pause of two or
three days at the beginning of his journey.
[103] Vide Modern Painters, Part II. Sect. III. Chap. IV. § 14.
[104] This state of mind appears to have been the only one which
Wordsworth had been able to discern in men of science; and in disdain of
which, he wrote that short-sighted passage in the Excursion, Book III.
l. 165-190, which is, I think, the only one in the whole range of his
works which his true friends would have desired to see blotted out. What
else has been found fault with as feeble or superfluous, is not so in
the intense distinctive relief which it gives to his character. But
these lines are written in mere ignorance of the matter they treat; in
mere want of sympathy with the men they describe; for, observe, though
the passage is put into the mouth of the Solitary, it is fully
confirmed, and even rendered more scornful, by the speech which follows.
ARATRA PENTELICI
SIX LECTURES
ON THE ELEMENTS OF
SCULPTURE
GIVEN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN MICHAELMAS TERM, 1870
PREFACE.
I must pray the readers of the following Lectures to remember that the
duty at present laid on me at Oxford is of an exceptionally complex
character. Directly, it is to awaken the interest of my pupils in a
study which they have hitherto found unattractive, and imagined to be
useless; but more imperatively, it is to define the principles by which
the study itself should be guided; and to vindicate their security
against the doubts with which frequent discussion has lately encumbered
a subject which all think themselves competent to discuss. The
possibility of such vindication is, of course, implied in the original
consent of the universities to the establishment of Art Professorships.
Nothing can be made an element of education of which it is impossible to
determine whether it is ill done or well; and the clear assertion that
there is a canon law in formative Art is, at this time, a more important
function of each University than the instruction of its younger members
in any branch of practical skill. It matters comparatively little
whether few or many of our students learn to draw; but it matters much
that all who learn should be taught with accuracy. And the number who
may be justifiably advised to give any part of the time they spend at
college to the study of painting or sculpture ought to depend, and
finally _must_ depend, on their being certified that painting and
sculpture, no less than language or than reasoning, have grammar and
method,--that they permit a recognizable distinction between scholarship
and ignorance, and enforce a constant distinction between Right and
Wrong.
This opening course of Lectures on Sculpture is therefore restricted to
the statement, not only of first principles, but of those which were
illustrated by the practice of one school, and by that practice in its
simplest branch, the analysis of which could be certified by easily
accessible examples, and aided by the indisputable evidence of
photography.[105]
The exclusion of the terminal Lecture of the course from the series now
published, is in order to mark more definitely this limitation of my
subject; but in other respects the Lectures have been amplified in
arranging them for the press, and the portions of them trusted at the
time to extempore delivery, (not through indolence, but because
explanations of detail are always most intelligible when most familiar,)
have been in substance to the best of my power set down, and in what I
said too imperfectly, completed.
In one essential particular I have felt it necessary to write what I
would not have spoken. I had intended to make no reference, in my
University Lectures, to existing schools of Art, except in cases where
it might be necessary to point out some undervalued excellence. The
objects specified in the eleventh paragraph of my inaugural Lecture,
might, I hoped, have been accomplished without reference to any works
deserving of blame; but the Exhibition of the Royal Academy in the
present year showed me a necessity of departing from my original
intention. The task of impartial criticism[106] is now, unhappily, no
longer to rescue modest skill from neglect; but to withstand the errors
of insolent genius, and abate the influence of plausible mediocrity.
The Exhibition of 1871 was very notable in this important particular,
that it embraced some representation of the modern schools of nearly
every country in Europe; and I am well assured that looking back upon it
after the excitement of that singular interest has passed away, every
thoughtful judge of Art will confirm my assertion, that it contained not
a single picture of accomplished merit; while it contained many that
were disgraceful to Art, and some that were disgraceful to humanity.
It becomes, under such circumstances, my inevitable duty to speak of the
existing conditions of Art with plainness enough to guard the youths
whose judgments I am entrusted to form, from being misled, either by
their own naturally vivid interest in what represents, however
unworthily, the scenes and persons of their own day, or by the cunningly
devised, and, without doubt, powerful allurements of Art which has long
since confessed itself to have no other object than to allure. I have,
therefore, added to the second of these Lectures such illustration of
the motives and course of modern industry as naturally arose out of its
subject, and shall continue in future to make similar applications;
rarely, indeed, permitting myself, in the Lectures actually read before
the University, to introduce subjects of instant, and therefore too
exciting, interest; but completing the addresses which I prepare for
publication in these, and in any other particulars which may render them
more widely serviceable.
The present course of Lectures will be followed, if I am able to fulfil
the design of them, by one of a like elementary character on
Architecture; and that by a third series on Christian Sculpture: but, in
the meantime, my effort is to direct the attention of the resident
students to Natural History, and to the higher branches of ideal
Landscape: and it will be, I trust, accepted as sufficient reason for
the delay which has occurred in preparing the following sheets for the
press, that I have not only been interrupted by a dangerous illness, but
engaged, in what remained to me of the summer, in an endeavour to
deduce, from the overwhelming complexity of modern classification in the
Natural Sciences, some forms capable of easier reference by Art
students, to whom the anatomy of brutal and floral nature is often no
less important than that of the human body.
The preparation of examples for manual practice, and the arrangement of
standards for reference, both in Painting and Sculpture, had to be
carried on meanwhile, as I was able. For what has already been done, the
reader is referred to the _Catalogue of the Educational Series_,
published at the end of the Spring Term; of what remains to be done I
will make no anticipatory statement, being content to have ascribed to
me rather the fault of narrowness in design, than of extravagance in
expectation.
DENMARK HILL,
_25th November, 1871._
FOOTNOTES:
[105] Photography cannot exhibit the character of large and finished
sculpture; but its audacity of shadow is in perfect harmony with the
more roughly picturesque treatment necessary in coins. For the rendering
of all such frank relief, and for the better explanation of forms
disturbed by the lustre of metal or polished stone, the method employed
in the plates of this volume will be found, I believe, satisfactory.
Casts are first taken from the coins, in white plaster; these are
photographed, and the photograph printed by the heliotype process of
Messrs. Edwards and Kidd. Plate XII. is exceptional, being a pure
mezzotint engraving of the old school, excellently carried through by my
assistant, Mr. Allen, who was taught, as a personal favour to myself, by
my friend, and Turner's fellow-worker, Thomas Lupton. Plate IV. was
intended to be a photograph from the superb vase in the British Museum,
No. 564 in Mr. Newton's Catalogue; but its variety of colour defied
photography, and after the sheets had gone to press I was compelled to
reduce Le Normand's plate of it, which is unsatisfactory, but answers my
immediate purpose.
The enlarged photographs for use in the Lecture Room were made for me
with most successful skill by Sergeant Spackman, of South Kensington;
and the help throughout rendered to me by Mr. Burgess is acknowledged in
the course of the Lectures; though with thanks which must remain
inadequate lest they should become tedious; for Mr. Burgess drew the
subjects of Plates III., X., and XIII.; drew and engraved every woodcut
in the book; and printed all the plates with his own hand.
[106] A pamphlet by the Earl of Southesk, "_Britain's Art Paradise_,"
(Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh) contains an entirely admirable
criticism of the most faultful pictures of the 1871 Exhibition. It is to
be regretted that Lord Southesk speaks only to condemn; but indeed, in
my own three days' review of the rooms, I found nothing deserving of
notice otherwise, except Mr. Hook's always pleasant sketches from fisher
life, and Mr. Pettie's graceful and powerful, though too slightly
painted, study from _Henry VI_.
ARATRA PENTELICI.
LECTURE I.
OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS.
_November, 1870._
1. If, as is commonly believed, the subject of study which it is my
special function to bring before you had no relation to the great
interests of mankind, I should have less courage in asking for your
attention to-day, than when I first addressed you; though, even then, I
did not do so without painful diffidence. For at this moment, even
supposing that in other places it were possible for men to pursue their
ordinary avocations undisturbed by indignation or pity; here, at least,
in the midst of the deliberative and religious influences of England,
only one subject, I am well assured, can seriously occupy your
thoughts--the necessity, namely, of determining how it has come to pass,
that in these recent days, iniquity the most reckless and monstrous can
be committed unanimously, by men more generous than ever yet in the
world's history were deceived into deeds of cruelty; and that prolonged
agony of body and spirit, such as we should shrink from inflicting
wilfully on a single criminal, has become the appointed and accepted
portion of unnumbered multitudes of innocent persons, inhabiting the
districts of the world which, of all others, as it seemed, were best
instructed in the laws of civilization, and most richly invested with
the honour, and indulged in the felicity, of peace.
Believe me, however, the subject of Art--instead of being foreign to
these deep questions of social duty and peril,--is so vitally connected
with them, that it would be impossible for me now to pursue the line of
thought in which I began these lectures, because so ghastly an emphasis
would be given to every sentence by the force of passing events. It is
well, then, that in the plan I have laid down for your study, we shall
now be led into the examination of technical details, or abstract
conditions of sentiment; so that the hours you spend with me may be
times of repose from heavier thoughts. But it chances strangely that, in
this course of minutely detailed study, I have first to set before you
the most essential piece of human workmanship, the plough, at the very
moment when--(you may see the announcement in the journals either of
yesterday or the day before)--the swords of your soldiers have been sent
for _to be sharpened_, and not at all to be beaten into ploughshares. I
permit myself, therefore, to remind you of the watchword of all my
earnest writings--"Soldiers of the Ploughshare, instead of Soldiers of
the Sword"--and I know it my duty to assert to you that the work we
enter upon to-day is no trivial one, but full of solemn hope; the hope,
namely, that among you there may be found men wise enough to lead the
national passions towards the arts of peace, instead of the arts of war.
I say the work "we enter upon," because the first four lectures I gave
in the spring were wholly prefatory; and the following three only
defined for you methods of practice. To-day we begin the systematic
analysis and progressive study of our subject.
2. In general, the three great, or fine, Arts of Painting, Sculpture,
and Architecture, are thought of as distinct from the lower and more
mechanical formative arts, such as carpentry or pottery. But we cannot,
either verbally, or with any practical advantage, admit such
classification. How are we to distinguish painting on canvas from
painting on china?--or painting on china from painting on glass?--or
painting on glass from infusion of colour into any vitreous substance,
such as enamel?--or the infusion of colour into glass and enamel from
the infusion of colour into wool or silk, and weaving of pictures in
tapestry, or patterns in dress? You will find that although, in
ultimately accurate use of the word, painting must be held to mean only
the laying of a pigment on a surface with a soft instrument; yet, in
broad comparison of the functions of Art, we must conceive of one and
the same great artistic faculty, as governing _every mode of disposing
colours in a permanent relation on, or in, a solid substance_; whether
it be by tinting canvas, or dyeing stuffs; inlaying metals with fused
flint, or coating walls with coloured stone.
3. Similarly the word "Sculpture,"--though in ultimate accuracy it is to
be limited to the development of form in hard substances by cutting away
portions of their mass--in broad definition, must be held to signify
_the reduction of any shapeless mass of solid matter into an intended
shape_, whatever the consistence of the substance, or nature of the
instrument employed; whether we carve a granite mountain, or a piece of
box-wood, and whether we use, for our forming instrument axe, or hammer,
or chisel, or our own hands, or water to soften, or fire to
fuse;--whenever and however we bring a shapeless thing into shape, we do
so under the laws of the one great Art of Sculpture.
4. Having thus broadly defined painting and sculpture, we shall see that
there is, in the third place, a class of work separated from both, in a
specific manner, and including a great group of arts which neither, of
necessity, _tint_, nor for the sake of form merely, _shape_, the
substances they deal with; but construct or arrange them with a view to
the resistance of some external force. We construct, for instance, a
table with a flat top, and some support of prop, or leg, proportioned in
strength to such weights as the table is intended to carry. We construct
a ship out of planks, or plates of iron, with reference to certain
forces of impact to be sustained, and of inertia to be overcome; or we
construct a wall or roof with distinct reference to forces of pressure
and oscillation, to be sustained or guarded against; and therefore, in
every case, with especial consideration of the strength of our
materials, and the nature of that strength, elastic, tenacious, brittle,
and the like.
Now although this group of arts nearly always involves the putting of
two or more separate pieces together, we must not define it by that
accident. The blade of an oar is not less formed with reference to
external force than if it were made of many pieces; and the frame of a
boat, whether hollowed out of a tree-trunk, or constructed of planks
nailed together, is essentially the same piece of art; to be judged by
its buoyancy and capacity of progression. Still, from the most wonderful
piece of all architecture, the human skeleton, to this simple one,[107]
the ploughshare, on which it depends for its subsistence, _the putting
of two or more pieces together_ is curiously necessary to the
perfectness of every fine instrument; and the peculiar mechanical work
of Dædalus,--inlaying,--becomes all the more delightful to us in
external aspect, because, as in the jawbone of a Saurian, or the wood of
a bow, it is essential to the finest capacities of tension and
resistance.
5. And observe how unbroken the ascent from this, the simplest
architecture, to the loftiest. The placing of the timbers in a ship's
stem, and the laying of the stones in a bridge buttress, are similar in
art to the construction of the ploughshare, differing in no essential
point, either in that they deal with other materials, or because, of the
three things produced, one has to divide earth by advancing through it,
another to divide water by advancing through it, and the third to divide
water which advances against it. And again, the buttress of a bridge
differs only from that of a cathedral in having less weight to sustain,
and more to resist. We can find no term in the gradation, from the
ploughshare to the cathedral buttress, at which we can set a logical
distinction.
6. Thus then we have simply three divisions of Art--one, that of giving
colours to substance; another, that of giving form to it without
question of resistance to force; and the third, that of giving form or
position which will make it capable of such resistance. All the fine
arts are embraced under these three divisions. Do not think that it is
only a logical or scientific affectation to mass them together in this
manner; it is, on the contrary, of the first practical importance to
understand that the painter's faculty, or masterhood over colour, being
as subtle as a musician's over sound, must be looked to for the
government of every operation in which colour is employed; and that, in
the same manner, the appliance of any art whatsoever to minor objects
cannot be right, unless under the direction of a true master of that
art. Under the present system, you keep your Academician occupied only
in producing tinted pieces of canvas to be shown in frames, and smooth
pieces of marble to be placed in niches; while you expect your builder
or constructor to design coloured patterns in stone and brick, and your
china-ware merchant to keep a separate body of workwomen who can paint
china, but nothing else. By this division of labour, you ruin all the
arts at once. The work of the Academician becomes mean and effeminate,
because he is not used to treat colour on a grand scale and in rough
materials; and your manufactures become base because no well educated
person sets hand to them. And therefore it is necessary to understand,
not merely as a logical statement, but as a practical necessity, that
wherever beautiful colour is to be arranged, you need a Master of
Painting; and wherever noble form is to be given, a Master of Sculpture;
and wherever complex mechanical force is to be resisted, a Master of
Architecture.
7. But over this triple division there must rule another yet more
important. Any of these three arts may be either imitative of natural
objects or limited to useful appliance. You may either paint a picture
that represents a scene, or your street door, to keep it from rotting;
you may mould a statue, or a plate; build the resemblance of a cluster
of lotus stalks, or only a square pier. Generally speaking, Painting and
Sculpture will be imitative, and Architecture merely useful; but there
is a great deal of Sculpture--as this crystal ball[108] for instance,
which is not imitative, and a great deal of Architecture which, to some
extent is so, as the so called foils of Gothic apertures; and for many
other reasons you will find it necessary to keep distinction clear in
your minds between the arts--of whatever kind--which are imitative, and
produce a resemblance or image of something which is not present; and
those which are limited to the production of some useful reality, as the
blade of a knife, or the wall of a house. You will perceive also, as we
advance, that sculpture and painting are indeed in this respect only one
art; and that we shall have constantly to speak and think of them as
simply _graphic_, whether with chisel or colour, their principal
function being to make us, in the words of Aristotle, "[Greek:
theôrêtikoi tou peri ta sômata kallous]" (Polit. 8, 3.), "having
capacity and habit of contemplation of the beauty that is in material
things;" while Architecture, and its co-relative arts, are to be
practised under quite other conditions of sentiment.
8. Now it is obvious that so far as the fine arts consist either in
imitation or mechanical construction, the right judgment of them must
depend on our knowledge of the things they imitate, and forces they
resist: and my function of teaching here would (for instance) so far
resolve itself, either into demonstration that this painting of a
peach,[109] does resemble a peach, or explanation of the way in which
this ploughshare (for instance) is shaped so as to throw the earth aside
with least force of thrust. And in both of these methods of study,
though of course your own diligence must be your chief master, to a
certain extent your Professor of Art can always guide you securely, and
can show you, either that the image does truly resemble what it attempts
to resemble, or that the structure is rightly prepared for the service
it has to perform. But there is yet another virtue of fine art which is,
perhaps, exactly that about which you will expect your Professor to
teach you most, and which, on the contrary, is exactly that about which
you must teach yourselves all that it is essential to learn.
9. I have here in my hand one of the simplest possible examples of the
union of the graphic and constructive powers,--one of my breakfast
plates. Since all the finely architectural arts, we said, began in the
shaping of the cup and the platter, we will begin, ourselves, with the
platter.
Why has it been made round? For two structural reasons: first, that the
greatest holding surface may be gathered into the smallest space; and
secondly, that in being pushed past other things on the table, it may
come into least contact with them.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
Next, why has it a rim? For two other structural reasons; first, that it
is convenient to put salt or mustard upon; but secondly and chiefly,
that the plate may be easily laid hold of. The rim is the simplest form
of continuous handle.
Farther, to keep it from soiling the cloth, it will be wise to put this
ridge beneath, round the bottom; for as the rim is the simplest possible
form of continuous handle, so this is the simplest form of continuous
leg. And we get the section given beneath the figure for the essential
one of a rightly made platter.
10. Thus far our art has been strictly utilitarian having respect to
conditions of collision, of carriage, and of support. But now, on the
surface of our piece of pottery, here are various bands and spots of
colour which are presumably set there to make it pleasanter to the eye.
Six of the spots, seen closely, you discover are intended to represent
flowers. These then have as distinctly a graphic purpose as the other
properties of the plate have an architectural one, and the first
critical question we have to ask about them is, whether they are like
roses or not. I will anticipate what I have to say in subsequent
lectures so far as to assure you that, if they are to be like roses at
all, the liker they can be, the better. Do not suppose, as many people
will tell you, that because this is a common manufactured article, your
roses on it are the better for being ill-painted, or half-painted. If
they had been painted by the same hand that did this peach, the plate
would have been all the better for it; but, as it chanced, there was no
hand such as William Hunt's to paint them, and their graphic power is
not distinguished. In any case, however, that graphic power must have
been subordinate to their effect as pink spots, while the band of
green-blue round the plate's edge, and the spots of gold, pretend to no
graphic power at all, but are meaningless spaces of colour or metal.
Still less have they any mechanical office: they add nowise to the
serviceableness of the plate; and their agreeableness, if they possess
any, depends, therefore, neither on any imitative, nor any structural,
character; but on some inherent pleasantness in themselves, either of
mere colours to the eye (as of taste to the tongue), or in the placing
of those colours in relations which obey some mental principle of order,
or physical principle of harmony.
11. These abstract relations and inherent pleasantnesses, whether in
space, number, or time, and whether of colours or sounds, form what we
may properly term the musical or harmonic element in every art; and the
study of them is an entirely separate science. It is the branch of
art-philosophy to which the word "æsthetics" should be strictly limited,
being the inquiry into the nature of things that in themselves are
pleasant to the human senses or instincts, though they represent
nothing, and serve for nothing, their only service _being_ their
pleasantness. Thus it is the province of æsthetics to tell you, (if you
did not know it before,) that the taste and colour of a peach are
pleasant, and to ascertain, if it be ascertainable, (and you have any
curiosity to know,) why they are so.
12. The information would, I presume, to most of you, be gratuitous. If
it were not, and you chanced to be in a sick state of body in which you
disliked peaches, it would be, for the time, to you false information,
and, so far as it was true of other people, to you useless. Nearly the
whole study of æsthetics is in like manner either gratuitous or useless.
Either you like the right things without being recommended to do so, or
if you dislike them, your mind cannot be changed by lectures on the laws
of taste. You recollect the story of Thackeray, provoked, as he was
helping himself to strawberries, by a young coxcomb's telling him that
"he never took fruit or sweets." "That" replied, or is said to have
replied, Thackeray, "is because you are a sot, and a glutton." And the
whole science of æsthetics is, in the depth of it, expressed by one
passage of Goethe's in the end of the 2nd part of Faust;--the notable
one that follows the song of the Lemures, when the angels enter to
dispute with the fiends for the soul of Faust. They enter
singing--"Pardon to sinners and life to the dust." Mephistopheles hears
them first, and exclaims to his troop, "Discord I hear, and filthy
jingling"--"Mistöne höre ich; garstiges Geklimper." This, you see, is
the extreme of bad taste in music. Presently the angelic host begin
strewing roses, which discomfits the diabolic crowd altogether.
Mephistopheles in vain calls to them--"What do you duck and shrink
for--is that proper hellish behaviour? Stand fast, and let them
strew"--"Was duckt und zuckt ihr; ist das Hellen-brauch? So haltet
stand, und lasst sie streuen." There you have, also, the extreme of bad
taste in sight and smell. And in the whole passage is a brief embodiment
for you of the ultimate fact that all æsthetics depend on the health of
soul and body, and the proper exercise of both, not only through years,
but generations. Only by harmony of both collateral and successive
lives can the great doctrine of the Muses be received which enables men
"[Greek: chairein orthôs]," "to have pleasures rightly;" and there is no
other definition of the beautiful, nor of any subject of delight to the
æsthetic faculty, than that it is what one noble spirit has created,
seen and felt by another of similar or equal nobility. So much as there
is in you of ox, or of swine, perceives no beauty, and creates none:
what is human in you, in exact proportion to the perfectness of its
humanity, can create it, and receive.
13. Returning now to the very elementary form in which the appeal to our
æsthetic virtue is made in our breakfast-plate, you notice that there
are two distinct kinds of pleasantness attempted. One by hues of colour;
the other by proportions of space. I have called these the musical
elements of the arts relating to sight; and there are indeed two
complete sciences, one of the combinations of colour, and the other of
the combinations of line and form, which might each of them separately
engage us in as intricate study as that of the science of music. But of
the two, the science of colour is, in the Greek sense, the more musical,
being one of the divisions of the Apolline power; and it is so
practically educational, that if we are not using the faculty for colour
to discipline nations, they will infallibly use it themselves as a means
of corruption. Both music and colour are naturally influences of peace;
but in the war trumpet, and the war shield, in the battle song and
battle standard, they have concentrated by beautiful imagination the
cruel passions of men; and there is nothing in all the Divina Commedia
of history more grotesque, yet more frightful, than the fact that, from
the almost fabulous period when the insanity and impiety of war wrote
themselves in the symbols of the shields of the Seven against Thebes,
colours have been the sign and stimulus of the most furious and fatal
passions that have rent the nations: blue against green, in the decline
of the Roman Empire; black against white, in that of Florence; red
against white, in the wars of the Royal houses in England; and at this
moment, red against white, in the contest of anarchy and loyalty, in all
the world.
14. On the other hand, the directly ethical influence of colour in the
sky, the trees, flowers, and coloured creatures round us, and in our own
various arts massed under the one name of painting, is so essential and
constant that we cease to recognize it, because we are never long enough
altogether deprived of it to feel our need; and the mental diseases
induced by the influence of corrupt colour are as little suspected, or
traced to their true source, as the bodily weaknesses resulting from
atmospheric miasmata.
15. The second musical science which belongs peculiarly to sculpture
(and to painting, so far as it represents form), consists in the
disposition of beautiful masses. That is to say, beautiful surfaces
limited by beautiful lines. Beautiful _surfaces_, observe; and remember
what is noted in my fourth lecture of the difference between a space and
a mass. If you have at any time examined carefully, or practised from,
the drawings of shells placed in your copying series, you cannot but
have felt the difference in the grace between the aspects of the same
line, when enclosing a rounded or unrounded space. The exact science of
sculpture is that of the relations between outline and the solid form it
limits; and it does not matter whether that relation be indicated by
drawing or carving, so long as the expression of solid form is the
mental purpose; it is the science always of the beauty of relation in
three dimensions. To take the simplest possible line of continuous
limit--the circle: the flat disc enclosed by it may indeed be made an
element of decoration, though a very meagre one but its relative mass,
the ball, being gradated in three dimensions, is always delightful.
Here[110] is at once the simplest, and in mere patient mechanism, the
most skilful, piece of sculpture I can possibly show you,--a piece of
the purest rock-crystal, chiselled, (I believe, by mere toil of hand,)
into a perfect sphere. Imitating nothing, constructing nothing;
sculpture for sculpture's sake, of purest natural substance into
simplest primary form.
16. Again. Out of the nacre of any mussel or oyster-shell you might cut,
at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat circular discs of the
prettiest colour and lustre. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of
shell _is_ used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster
becoming itself an unwilling modeller, agglutinates its juice into three
dimensions, and the fact of the surface being now geometrically
gradated, together with the savage instinct of attributing value to what
is difficult to obtain, make the little boss so precious in men's sight
that wise eagerness of search for the kingdom of heaven can be likened
to their eagerness of search for _it_; and the gates of Paradise can be
no otherwise rendered so fair to their poor intelligence, as by telling
them that every several gate was of "one pearl."
17. But take note here. We have just seen that the sum of the perceptive
faculty is expressed in those words of Aristotle's "to take pleasure
rightly" or straightly--[Greek: chairein orthôs]. Now, it is not
possible to do the direct opposite of that,--to take pleasure
iniquitously or obliquely--[Greek: chairein adikôs] or [Greek:
skoliôs]--more than you do in enjoying a thing because your neighbour
cannot get it. You may enjoy a thing legitimately because it is rare,
and cannot be seen often, (as you do a fine aurora, or a sunset, or an
unusually lovely flower); that is Nature's way of stimulating your
attention. But if you enjoy it because your neighbour cannot have
it--and, remember, all value attached to pearls more than glass beads,
is merely and purely for that cause,--then you rejoice through the worst
of idolatries, covetousness; and neither arithmetic, nor writing, nor
any other so-called essential of education, is now so vitally necessary
to the population of Europe, as such acquaintance with the principles of
intrinsic value, as may result in the iconoclasm of jewellery; and in
the clear understanding that we are not in that instinct, civilized, but
yet remain wholly savage, so far as we care for display of this selfish
kind.
You think, perhaps, I am quitting my subject, and proceeding, as it is
too often with appearance of justice alleged against me, into irrelevant
matter. Pardon me; the end, not only of these lectures, but of my whole
professorship, would be accomplished,--and far more than that,--if only
the English nation could be made to understand that the beauty which is
indeed to be a joy for ever, must be a joy for all; and that though the
idolatry may not have been wholly divine which sculptured gods, the
idolatry is wholly diabolic, which, for vulgar display, sculptures
diamonds.
18. To go back to the point under discussion. A pearl, or a glass bead,
may owe its pleasantness in some degree to its lustre as well as to its
roundness. But a mere and simple ball of unpolished stone is enough for
sculpturesque value. You may have noticed that the quatrefoil used in
the Ducal Palace of Venice owes its complete loveliness in distant
effect to the finishing of its cusps. The extremity of the cusp is a
mere ball of Istrian marble; and consider how subtle the faculty of
sight must be, since it recognizes at any distance, and is gratified by,
the mystery of the termination of cusp obtained by the gradated light on
the ball.
In that Venetian tracery this simplest element of sculptured form is
used sparingly, as the most precious that can be employed to finish the
façade. But alike in our own, and the French, central Gothic, the
ball-flower is lavished on every line--and in your St. Mary's spire, and
the Salisbury spire, and the towers of Notre Dame of Paris, the rich
pleasantness of decoration,--indeed, their so-called "decorated
style,"--consists only in being daintily beset with stone balls. It is
true the balls are modified into dim likeness of flowers; but do you
trace the resemblance to the rose in their distant, which is their
intended effect?
19. But farther, let the ball have motion; then the form it generates
will be that of a cylinder. You have, perhaps, thought that pure Early
English Architecture depended for its charm on visibility of
construction. It depends for its charm altogether on the abstract
harmony of groups of cylinders,[111] arbitrarily bent into mouldings,
and arbitrarily associated as shafts, having no _real_ relation to
construction whatsoever, and a theoretical relation so subtle that none
of us had seen it, till Professor Willis worked it out for us.
20. And now, proceeding to analysis of higher sculpture, you may have
observed the importance I have attached to the porch of San Zenone, at
Verona, by making it, among your standards, the first of the group which
is to illustrate the system of sculpture and architecture founded on
faith in a future life. That porch, fortunately represented in the
photograph, from which Plate I. has been engraved, under a clear and
pleasant light, furnishes you with examples of sculpture of every kind
from the flattest incised bas-relief to solid statues, both in marble
and bronze. And the two points I have been pressing upon you are
conclusively exhibited here, namely,--(1). That sculpture is essentially
the production of a pleasant bossiness or roundness of surface; (2) that
the pleasantness of that bossy condition to the eye is irrespective of
imitation on one side, and of structure on the other.
21. (1.) Sculpture is essentially the production of a pleasant bossiness
or roundness of surface.
If you look from some distance at these two engravings of Greek coins,
(place the book open so that you can see the opposite plate three or
four yards off,) you will find the relief on each of them simplifies
itself into a pearl-like portion of a sphere, with exquisitely gradated
light on its surface. When you look at them nearer, you will see that
each smaller portion into which they are divided--cheek, or brow, or
leaf, or tress of hair--resolves itself also into a rounded or
undulated surface, pleasant by gradation of light. Every several surface
is delightful in itself, as a shell, or a tuft of rounded moss, or the
bossy masses of distant forest would be. That these intricately
modulated masses present some resemblance to a girl's face, such as the
Syracusans imagined that of the water-goddess Arethusa, is entirely a
secondary matter; the primary condition is that the masses shall be
beautifully rounded, and disposed with due discretion and order.
[Illustration: PLATE I.--PORCH OF SAN ZENONE. VERONA.]
22. (2.) It is difficult for you, at first, to feel this order and
beauty of surface, apart from the imitation. But you can see there is a
pretty disposition of, and relation between, the projections of a
fir-cone, though the studded spiral imitates nothing. Order exactly the
same in kind, only much more complex; and an abstract beauty of surface
rendered definite by increase and decline of light--(for every curve of
surface has its own luminous law, and the light and shade on a parabolic
solid differs, specifically, from that on an elliptical or spherical
one)--it is the essential business of the sculptor to obtain; as it is
the essential business of a painter to get good colour, whether he
imitates anything or not. At a distance from the picture, or carving,
where the things represented become absolutely unintelligible, we must
yet be able to say, at a glance, "That is good painting, or good
carving."
And you will be surprised to find, when you try the experiment, how much
the eye must instinctively judge in this manner. Take the front of San
Zenone for instance, Plate I. You will find it impossible without a
lens, to distinguish in the bronze gates, and in great part of the wall,
anything that their bosses represent. You cannot tell whether the
sculpture is of men, animals, or trees; only you feel it to be composed
of pleasant projecting masses; you acknowledge that both gates and wall
are, somehow, delightfully roughened; and only afterwards, by slow
degrees, can you make out what this roughness means; nay, though here
(Plate III.) I magnify[112] one of the bronze plates of the gate to a
scale, which gives you the same advantage as if you saw it quite close,
in the reality,--you may still be obliged to me for the information,
that _this_ boss represents the Madonna asleep in her little bed, and
this smaller boss, the Infant Christ in His; and this at the top, a
cloud with an angel coming out of it, and these jagged bosses, two of
the Three Kings, with their crowns on, looking up to the star, (which is
intelligible enough I admit); but what this straggling, three-legged
boss beneath signifies, I suppose neither you nor I can tell, unless it
be the shepherd's dog, who has come suddenly upon the Kings with their
crowns on, and is greatly startled at them.
23. Farther, and much more definitely, the pleasantness of the surface
decoration is independent of structure; that is to say, of any
architectural requirement of stability. The greater part of the
sculpture here is exclusively ornamentation of a flat wall, or of door
panelling; only a small portion of the church front is thus treated, and
the sculpture has no more to do with the form of the building than a
piece of a lace veil would have, suspended beside its gates on a festal
day; the proportions of shaft and arch might be altered in a hundred
different ways, without diminishing their stability; and the pillars
would stand more safely on the ground than on the backs of these carved
animals.
24. I wish you especially to notice these points, because the false
theory that ornamentation should be merely decorated structure is so
pretty and plausible, that it is likely to take away your attention from
the far more important abstract conditions of design. Structure should
never be contradicted, and in the best buildings it is pleasantly
exhibited and enforced; in this very porch the joints of every stone are
visible, and you will find me in the Fifth Lecture insisting on this
clearness of its anatomy as a merit; yet so independent is the
mechanical structure of the true design, that when I begin my Lectures
on Architecture, the first building I shall give you as a standard will
be one in which the structure is wholly concealed. It will be the
Baptistry of Florence, which is, in reality, as much a buttressed chapel
with a vaulted roof, as the Chapter House of York--but round it, in
order to conceal that buttressed structure, (not to decorate, observe,
but to _conceal_) a flat external wall is raised; simplifying the whole
to a mere hexagonal box, like a wooden piece of Tunbridge ware, on the
surface of which the eye and intellect are to be interested by the
relations of dimension and curve between pieces of encrusting marble of
different colours, which have no more to do with the real make of the
building than the diaper of a Harlequin's jacket has to do with his
bones.
[Illustration: PLATE II.--THE ARETHUSA OF SYRACUSE.]
[Illustration: PLATE III.--THE WARNING TO THE KINGS.
San Zenone. Verona.]
25. The sense of abstract proportion, on which the enjoyment of such a
piece of art entirely depends, is one of the æsthetic faculties which
nothing can develop but time and education. It belongs only to
highly-trained nations; and, among them, to their most strictly refined
classes, though the germs of it are found, as part of their innate
power, in every people capable of art. It has for the most part vanished
at present from the English mind, in consequence of our eager desire for
excitement, and for the kind of splendour that exhibits wealth, careless
of dignity; so that, I suppose, there are very few now even of our
best-trained Londoners who know the difference between the design of
Whitehall and that of any modern club-house in Pall-mall. The order and
harmony which, in his enthusiastic account of the Theatre of Epidaurus,
Pausanias insists on before beauty, can only be recognized by stern
order and harmony in our daily lives; and the perception of them is as
little to be compelled, or taught suddenly, as the laws of still finer
choice in the conception of dramatic incident which regulate poetic
sculpture.
26. And now, at last, I think, we can sketch out the subject before us
in a clear light. We have a structural art, divine, and human, of which
the investigation comes under the general term, Anatomy; whether the
junctions or joints be in mountains, or in branches of trees, or in
buildings, or in bones of animals. We have next a musical art, falling
into two distinct divisions--one using colours, the other masses, for
its elements of composition; lastly, we have an imitative art, concerned
with the representation of the outward appearances of things. And, for
many reasons, I think it best to begin with imitative Sculpture; that
being defined as _the art which, by the musical disposition of masses,
imitates anything of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us; and
does so in accordance with structural laws having due reference to the
materials employed_.
So that you see our task will involve the immediate inquiry what the
things are of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us: what, in few
words,--if we are to be occupied in the making of graven images--we
ought to like to make images _of_. Secondly, after having determined its
subject, what degree of imitation or likeness we ought to desire in our
graven image; and lastly, under what limitations demanded by structure
and material, such likeness may be obtained.
These inquiries I shall endeavour to pursue with you to some practical
conclusion, in my next four lectures, and in the sixth, I will briefly
sketch the actual facts that have taken place in the development of
sculpture by the two greatest schools of it that hitherto have existed
in the world.
27. The tenor of our next lecture then must be an inquiry into the real
nature of Idolatry; that is to say, the invention and service of Idols:
and, in the interval, may I commend to your own thoughts this question,
not wholly irrelevant, yet which I cannot pursue; namely, whether the
God to whom we have so habitually prayed for deliverance "from battle,
murder, and sudden death," _is_ indeed, seeing that the present state of
Christendom is the result of a thousand years' praying to that effect,
"as the gods of the heathen who were but idols;" or whether--(and
observe, one or other of these things _must_ be true)--whether our
prayers to Him have been, by this much, worse than Idolatry;--that
heathen prayer was true prayer to false gods; and our prayers have been
false prayers to the True One.
FOOTNOTES:
[107] I had a real ploughshare on my lecture table; but it would
interrupt the drift of the statements in the text too long if I
attempted here to illustrate by figures the relation of the coulter to
the share, and of the hard to the soft pieces of metal in the share
itself.
[108] A sphere of rock crystal, cut in Japan, enough imaginable by the
reader, without a figure.
[109] One of William Hunt's peaches; not, I am afraid, imaginable
altogether, but still less representable by figure.
[110] The crystal ball above mentioned.
[111] All grandest effects in mouldings may be, and for the most part
have been, obtained by rolls and cavettos of circular (segmental)
section. More refined sections, as that of the fluting of a Doric shaft,
are only of use near the eye and in beautiful stone; and the pursuit of
them was one of the many errors of later Gothic. The statement in the
text that the mouldings, even of best time, "have no real relation to
construction," is scarcely strong enough: they in fact contend with, and
deny the construction, their principal purpose seeming to be the
concealment of the joints of the voussoirs.
[112] Some of the most precious work done for me by my assistant Mr.
Burgess, during the course of these lectures, consisted in making
enlarged drawings from portions of photographs. Plate III. is engraved
from a drawing of his, enlarged from the original photograph of which
Plate I. is a reduction.
LECTURE II.
IDOLATRY.
_November, 1870._
28. Beginning with the simple conception of sculpture as the art of
fiction in solid substance, we are now to consider what its subjects
should be. What--having the gift of imagery--should we by preference
endeavour to image? A question which is, indeed, subordinate to the
deeper one--why we should wish to image anything at all.
29. Some years ago, having been always desirous that the education of
women should begin in learning how to cook, I got leave, one day, for a
little girl of eleven years old to exchange, much to her satisfaction,
her schoolroom for the kitchen. But as ill fortune would have it, there
was some pastry toward, and she was left unadvisedly in command of some
delicately rolled paste; whereof she made no pies, but an unlimited
quantity of cats and mice.
Now you may read the works of the gravest critics of art from end to
end; but you will find, at last, they can give you no other true account
of the spirit of sculpture than that it is an irresistible human
instinct for the making of cats and mice, and other imitable living
creatures, in such permanent form that one may play with the images at
leisure.
Play with them, or love them, or fear them, or worship them. The cat may
become the goddess Pasht, and the mouse, in the hand of the sculptured
king, enforce his enduring words "[Greek: es eme tis oreôn eusebês
estô];" but the great mimetic instinct underlies all such purpose; and
is zooplastic,--life-shaping,--alike in the reverent and the impious.
30. Is, I say, and has been, hitherto; none of us dare say that it will
be. I shall have to show you hereafter that the greater part of the
technic energy of men, as yet, has indicated a kind of childhood; and
that the race becomes, if not more wise, at least more manly,[113] with
every gained century. I can fancy that all this sculpturing and painting
of ours may be looked back upon, in some distant time, as a kind of
doll-making, and that the words of Sir Isaac Newton may be smiled at no
more: only it will not be for stars that we desert our stone dolls, but
for men. When the day comes, as come it must, in which we no more deface
and defile God's image in living clay, I am not sure that we shall any
of us care so much for the images made of Him, in burnt clay.
31. But, hitherto, the energy of growth in any people may be almost
directly measured by their passion for imitative art; namely, for
sculpture, or for the drama, which is living and speaking sculpture, or,
as in Greece, for both; and in national as in actual childhood, it is
not merely the _making_, but the _making-believe_; not merely the acting
for the sake of the scene, but acting for the sake of acting, that is
delightful. And, of the two mimetic arts, the drama, being more
passionate, and involving conditions of greater excitement and luxury,
is usually in its excellence the sign of culminating strength in the
people; while fine sculpture, requiring always submission to severe law,
is an unfailing proof of their being in early and active progress.
_There is no instance of fine sculpture being produced by a nation
either torpid, weak, or in decadence._ Their drama may gain in grace and
wit; but their sculpture, in days of decline, is _always_ base.
32. If my little lady in the kitchen had been put in command of colours,
as well as of dough, and if the paste would have taken the colours, we
may be sure her mice would have been painted brown, and her cats
tortoise-shell; and this, partly indeed for the added delight and
prettiness of colour itself, but more for the sake of absolute
realization to her eyes and mind. Now all the early sculpture of the
most accomplished nations has been thus coloured, rudely or finely; and,
therefore, you see at once how necessary it is that we should keep the
term "graphic" for imitative art generally; since no separation can at
first be made between carving and painting, with reference to the mental
powers exerted in, or addressed by, them. In the earliest known art of
the world, a reindeer hunt may be scratched in outline on the flat side
of a clean-picked bone, and a reindeer's head carved out of the end of
it; both these are flint-knife work, and, strictly speaking, sculpture:
but the scratched outline is the beginning of drawing, and the carved
head of sculpture proper. When the spaces enclosed by the scratched
outline are filled with colour, the colouring soon becomes a principal
means of effect; so that, in the engraving of an Egyptian-colour
bas-relief (S. 101), Rosellini has been content to miss the outlining
incisions altogether, and represent it as a painting only. Its proper
definition is, "painting accented by sculpture;" on the other hand, in
solid coloured statues,--Dresden china figures, for example,--we have
pretty sculpture accented by painting; the mental purpose in both kinds
of art being to obtain the utmost degree of realization possible, and
the ocular impression being the same, whether the delineation is
obtained by engraving or painting. For, as I pointed out to you in my
fifth lecture, everything is seen by the eye as patches of colour, and
of colour only; a fact which the Greeks knew well; so that when it
becomes a question in the dialogue of Minos, "[Greek: tini onti tê opsei
horatai ta hoômena]," the answer is "[Greek: aisthêsei tautê tê dia tôn
ophthalmôn dêloisê hêmin ta chrômata]."--"What kind of power is the
sight with which we see things? It is that sense which, through the
eyes, can reveal _colours_ to us."
33. And now observe that while the graphic arts begin in the mere
mimetic effort, they proceed, as they obtain more perfect realization,
to act under the influence of a stronger and higher instinct. They begin
by scratching the reindeer, the most interesting object of sight. But
presently, as the human creature rises in scale of intellect, it
proceeds to scratch, not the most interesting object of sight only, but
the most interesting object of imagination; not the reindeer, but the
Maker and Giver of the reindeer. And the second great condition for the
advance of the art of sculpture is that the race should possess, in
addition to the mimetic instinct, the realistic or idolizing instinct;
the desire to see as substantial the powers that are unseen, and bring
near those that are far off, and to possess and cherish those that are
strange. To make in some way tangible and visible the nature of the
gods--to illustrate and explain it by symbols; to bring the immortals
out of the recesses of the clouds, and make them Penates; to bring back
the dead from darkness, and make them Lares.
34. Our conception of this tremendous and universal human passion has
been altogether narrowed by the current idea that Pagan religious art
consisted only, or chiefly, in giving personality to the gods. The
personality was never doubted; it was visibility, interpretation, and
possession that the hearts of men sought. Possession, first of all--the
getting hold of some hewn log of wild olive-wood that would fall on its
knees if it was pulled from its pedestal--and, afterwards, slowly
clearing manifestation; the exactly right expression is used in Lucian's
dream,--[Greek: Pheidias edeixe ton Dia]; "Showed[114] Zeus;" manifested
him, nay, in a certain sense, brought forth, or created, as you have it,
in Anacreon's ode to the Rose, of the birth of Athena herself--
[Greek: polemoklonon t' Athênên
koruphês edeiknye Zeus.]
But I will translate the passage from Lucian to you at length--it is in
every way profitable.
35. "There came to me, in the healing[115] night, a divine dream, so
clear that it missed nothing of the truth itself; yes, and still after
all this time, the shapes of what I saw remain in my sight, and the
sound of what I heard dwells in my ears"--note the lovely sense of
[Greek: enaulos]--the sound being as of a stream passing always by in
the same channel,--"so distinct was everything to me. Two women laid
hold of my hands and pulled me, each towards herself, so violently, that
I had like to have been pulled asunder; and they cried out against one
another,--the one, that she was resolved to have me to herself, being
indeed her own, and the other that it was vain for her to claim what
belonged to others;--and the one who first claimed me for her own was
like a hard worker, and had strength as a man's; and her hair was dusty,
and her hand full of horny places, and her dress fastened tight about
her, and the folds of it loaded with white marble-dust, so that she
looked just as my uncle used to look when he was filing stones: but the
other was pleasant in features, and delicate in form, and orderly in her
dress; and so in the end, they left it to me to decide, after hearing
what they had to say, with which of them I would go; and first the hard
featured and masculine one spoke:--
[Illustration: IV
THE NATIVITY OF ATHENA.]
36. "'Dear child, I am the Art of Image-sculpture, which yesterday you
began to learn; and I am as one of your own people, and of your house,
for your grandfather,' (and she named my mother's father) 'was a
stone-cutter; and both your uncles had good name through me: and if you
will keep yourself well clear of the sillinesses and fluent follies that
come from this creature,' (and she pointed to the other woman) 'and will
follow me, and live with me, first of all, you shall be brought up as a
man should be, and have strong shoulders; and, besides that, you shall
be kept well quit of all restless desires, and you shall never be
obliged to go away into any foreign places, leaving your own country and
the people of your house; _neither shall all men praise you for your
talk_.[116] And you must not despise this rude serviceableness of my
body, neither this meanness of my dusty dress; for, pushing on in their
strength from such things as these, that great Phidias revealed Zeus,
and Polyclitus wrought out Hera, and Myron was praised, and Praxiteles
marvelled at: therefore are these men worshipped with the gods.'"
37. There is a beautiful ambiguity in the use of the preposition with
the genitive in this last sentence. "Pushing on from these things" means
indeed, justly, that the sculptors rose from a mean state to a noble
one; but not as _leaving_ the mean state;--not as, from a hard life,
attaining to a soft one,--but as being helped and strengthened by the
rough life to do what was greatest. Again, "worshipped with the gods"
does not mean that they are thought of as in any sense equal to, or like
to, the gods, but as being on the side of the gods against what is base
and ungodly; and that the kind of worth which is in them is therefore
indeed worshipful, as having its source with the gods. Finally, observe
that every one of the expressions, used of the four sculptors, is
definitely the best that Lucian could have chosen. Phidias carved like
one who had seen Zeus, and had only to _reveal_ him; Polyclitus, in
labour of intellect, completed his sculpture by just law, and _wrought_
out Hera; Myron was of all most _praised_, because he did best what
pleased the vulgar; and Praxiteles, the most _wondered at_ or admired,
because he bestowed utmost exquisiteness of beauty.
38. I am sorry not to go on with the dream; the more refined lady, as
you may remember, is liberal or gentlemanly Education, and prevails at
last; so that Lucian becomes an author instead of a sculptor, I think to
his own regret, though to our present benefit. One more passage of his I
must refer you to, as illustrative of the point before us; the
description of the temple of the Syrian Hieropolis, where he explains
the absence of the images of the sun and moon. "In the temple itself,"
he says, "on the left hand as one goes in, there is set first the throne
of the sun; but no form of him is thereon, for of these two powers
alone, the sun and the moon, they show no carved images. And I also
learned why this is their law, for they say that it is permissible,
indeed, to make of the other gods, graven images, since the forms of
them are not visible to all men. But Helios and Selenaia are everywhere
clear-bright, and all men behold them; what need is there therefore for
sculptured work of these, who appear in the air?"
39. This, then, is the second instinct necessary to sculpture; the
desire for the manifestation, description, and companionship of unknown
powers; and for possession of a bodily substance--the "bronze
Strasbourg," which you can embrace, and hang immortelles on the head
of--instead of an abstract idea. But if you get nothing more in the
depth of the national mind than these two feelings, the mimetic and
idolizing instincts, there may be still no progress possible for the
arts except in delicacy of manipulation and accumulative caprice of
design. You must have not only the idolizing instinct, but an [Greek:
êthos] which chooses the right thing to idolize! Else, you will get
states of art like those in China or India, non-progressive, and in
great part diseased and frightful, being wrought under the influence of
foolish terror, or foolish admiration. So that a third condition,
completing and confirming both the others, must exist in order to the
development of the creative power.
40. This third condition is that the heart of the nation shall be set on
the discovery of just or equal law, and shall be from day to day
developing that law more perfectly. The Greek school of sculpture is
formed during, and in consequence of, the national effort to discover
the nature of justice; the Tuscan, during, and in consequence of, the
national effort to discover the nature of justification. I assert to you
at present briefly, what will, I hope, be the subject of prolonged
illustration hereafter.
41. Now when a nation with mimetic instinct and imaginative longing is
also thus occupied earnestly in the discovery of Ethic law, that effort
gradually brings precision and truth into all its manual acts; and the
physical progress of sculpture as in the Greek, so in the Tuscan,
school, consists in gradually _limiting_ what was before indefinite, in
_verifying_ what was inaccurate, and in _humanizing_ what was monstrous.
I might perhaps content you by showing these external phenomena, and by
dwelling simply on the increasing desire of naturalness, which compels,
in every successive decade of years, literally, in the sculptured
images, the mimicked bones to come together, bone to his bone; and the
flesh to come up upon them, until from a flattened and pinched handful
of clay, respecting which you may gravely question whether it was
intended for a human form at all;--by slow degrees, and added touch to
touch, in increasing consciousness of the bodily truth,--at last the
Aphrodite of Melos stands before you, a perfect woman. But all that
search for physical accuracy is merely the external operation, in the
arts, of the seeking for truth in the inner soul; it is impossible
without that higher effort, and the demonstration of it would be worse
than useless to you, unless I made you aware at the same time of its
spiritual cause.
42. Observe farther; the increasing truth in representation is
co-relative with increasing beauty in the thing to be represented. The
pursuit of justice which regulates the imitative effort, regulates also
the development of the race into dignity of person, as of mind; and
their culminating art-skill attains the grasp of entire truth at the
moment when the truth becomes most lovely. And then, ideal sculpture may
go on safely into portraiture. But I shall not touch on the subject of
portrait sculpture to-day; it introduces many questions of detail, and
must be a matter for subsequent consideration.
43. These then are the three great passions which are concerned in true
sculpture. I cannot find better, or, at least, more easily remembered,
names for them than "the Instincts of Mimicry, Idolatry, and
Discipline;" meaning, by the last, the desire of equity and wholesome
restraint, in all acts and works of life. Now of these, there is no
question but that the love of Mimicry is natural and right, and the love
of Discipline is natural and right. But it looks a grave question
whether the yearning for Idolatry, (the desire of companionship with
images,) is right. Whether, indeed, if such an instinct be essential to
good sculpture, the art founded on it can possibly be "fine" art.
44. I must now beg for your close attention, because I have to point out
distinctions in modes of conception which will appear trivial to you,
unless accurately understood; but of an importance in the history of art
which cannot be overrated.
When the populace of Paris adorned the statue of Strasbourg with
immortelles, none, even the simplest of the pious decorators, would
suppose that the city of Strasbourg itself, or any spirit or ghost of
the city, was actually there, sitting in the Place de la Concorde. The
figure was delightful to them as a visible nucleus for their fond
thoughts about Strasbourg; but never for a moment supposed to _be_
Strasbourg.
Similarly, they might have taken delight in a statue purporting to
represent a river instead of a city,--the Rhine, or Garonne,
suppose,--and have been touched with strong emotion in looking at it, if
the real river were dear to them, and yet never think for an instant
that the statue _was_ the river.
And yet again, similarly, but much more distinctly, they might take
delight in the beautiful image of a god, because it gathered and
perpetuated their thoughts about that god; and yet never suppose, nor be
capable of being deceived by any arguments into supposing, that the
statue _was_ the god.
On the other hand, if a meteoric stone fell from the sky in the sight of
a savage, and he picked it up hot, he would most probably lay it aside
in some, to him, sacred place, and believe _the stone itself_ to be a
kind of god, and offer prayer and sacrifice to it.
In like manner, any other strange or terrifying object, such, for
instance, as a powerfully noxious animal or plant, he would be apt to
regard in the same way; and very possibly also construct for himself
frightful idols of some kind, calculated to produce upon him a vague
impression of their being alive; whose imaginary anger he might
deprecate or avert with sacrifice, although incapable of conceiving in
them any one attribute of exalted intellectual or moral nature.
45. If you will now refer to § 52-59 of my Introductory Lectures, you
will find this distinction between a resolute conception, recognized for
such, and an involuntary apprehension of spiritual existence, already
insisted on at some length. And you will see more and more clearly as we
proceed, that the deliberate and intellectually commanded conception is
not idolatrous in any evil sense whatever, but is one of the grandest
and wholesomest functions of the human soul; and that the essence of
evil idolatry begins only in the idea or belief of a real presence of
any kind, in a thing in which there is no such presence.
46. I need not say that the harm of the idolatry must depend on the
certainty of the negative. If there be a real presence in a pillar of
cloud, in an unconsuming flame, or in a still small voice, it is no sin
to bow down before these.
But, as matter of historical fact, the idea of such presence has
generally been both ignoble and false, and confined to nations of
inferior race, who are often condemned to remain for ages in conditions
of vile terror, destitute of thought. Nearly all Indian architecture and
Chinese design arise out of such a state: so also, though in a less
gross degree, Ninevite and Phoenician art, early Irish, and
Scandinavian; the latter, however, with vital elements of high intellect
mingled in it from the first.
But the greatest races are never grossly subject to such terror, even in
their childhood, and the course of their minds is broadly divisible into
three distinct stages.
47. (I.) In their infancy they begin to imitate the real animals about
them, as my little girl made the cats and mice, but with an undercurrent
of partial superstition--a sense that there must be more in the
creatures than they can see; also they catch up vividly any of the
fancies of the baser nations round them, and repeat these more or less
apishly, yet rapidly naturalizing and beautifying them. They then
connect all kinds of shapes together, compounding meanings out of the
old chimeras, and inventing new ones with the speed of a running
wild-fire; but always getting more of man into their images, and
admitting less of monster or brute; their own characters, meanwhile,
expanding and purging themselves, and shaking off the feverish fancy, as
springing flowers shake the earth off their stalks.
48. (II.) In the second stage, being now themselves perfect men and
women, they reach the conception of true and great gods as existent in
the universe; and absolutely cease to think of them as in any wise
present in statues or images; but they have now learned to make these
statues beautifully human, and to surround them with attributes that may
concentrate their thoughts of the gods. This is, in Greece, accurately
the Pindaric time, just a little preceding the Phidian; the Phidian is
already dimmed with a faint shadow of infidelity; still, the Olympic
Zeus may be taken as a sufficiently central type of a statue which was
no more supposed to _be_ Zeus, than the gold or elephants' tusks it was
made of; but in which the most splendid powers of human art were
exhausted in representing a believed and honoured God to the happy and
holy imagination of a sincerely religious people.
49. (III.) The third stage of national existence follows, in which, the
imagination having now done its utmost, and being partly restrained by
the sanctities of tradition, which permit no farther change in the
conceptions previously created, begins to be superseded by logical
deduction and scientific investigation. At the same moment, the elder
artists having done all that is possible in realizing the national
conceptions of the Gods, the younger ones, forbidden to change the
scheme of existing representations, and incapable of doing anything
better in that kind, betake themselves to refine and decorate the old
ideas with more attractive skill. Their aims are thus more and more
limited to manual dexterity, and their fancy paralyzed. Also, in the
course of centuries, the methods of every art continually improving, and
being made subjects of popular inquiry, praise is now to be got, for
eminence in these, from the whole mob of the nation; whereas
intellectual design can never be discerned but by the few. So that in
this third æra, we find every kind of imitative and vulgar dexterity
more and more cultivated; while design and imagination are every day
less cared for, and less possible.
50. Meanwhile, as I have just said, the leading minds in literature and
science become continually more logical and investigative; and, once
that they are established in the habit of testing facts accurately, a
very few years are enough to convince all the strongest thinkers that
the old imaginative religion is untenable, and cannot any longer be
honestly taught in its fixed traditional form, except by ignorant
persons. And at this point the fate of the people absolutely depends on
the degree of moral strength into which their hearts have been already
trained. If it be a strong, industrious, chaste, and honest race, the
taking its old gods, or at least the old forms of them, away from it,
will indeed make it deeply sorrowful and amazed; but will in no whit
shake its will, nor alter its practice. Exceptional persons, naturally
disposed to become drunkards, harlots, and cheats, but who had been
previously restrained from indulging these dispositions by their fear of
God, will, of course, break out into open vice, when that fear is
removed. But the heads of the families of the people, instructed in the
pure habits and perfect delights of an honest life, and to whom the
thought of a Father in heaven had been a comfort, not a restraint, will
assuredly not seek relief from the discomfort of their orphanage by
becoming uncharitable and vile. Also the high leaders of their thought
gather their whole strength together in the gloom; and at the first
entrance of this valley of the Shadow of Death, look their new enemy
full in the eyeless face of him, and subdue him, and his terror, under
their feet. "Metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum,... strepitumque
Acherontis avari." This is the condition of national soul expressed by
the art, and the words, of Holbein, Durer, Shakspeare, Pope, and Goethe.
51. But if the people, at the moment when the trial of darkness
approaches, be not confirmed in moral character, but are only
maintaining a superficial virtue by the aid of a spectral religion; the
moment the staff of their faith is broken, the character of the race
falls like a climbing plant cut from its hold: then all the earthliest
vices attack it as it lies in the dust; every form of sensual and insane
sin is developed, and half a century is sometimes enough to close, in
hopeless shame, the career of the nation in literature, art, and war.
52. Notably, within the last hundred years, all religion has perished
from the practically active national mind of France and England. No
statesman in the senate of either country would dare to use a sentence
out of their acceptedly divine Revelation, as having now a literal
authority over them for their guidance, or even a suggestive wisdom for
their contemplation. England, especially, has cast her Bible full in the
face of her former God; and proclaimed, with open challenge to Him, her
resolved worship of His declared enemy, Mammon. All the arts, therefore,
founded on religion, and sculpture chiefly, are here in England effete
and corrupt, to a degree which arts never were hitherto in the history
of mankind: and it is possible to show you the condition of sculpture
living, and sculpture dead, in accurate opposition, by simply comparing
the nascent Pisan school in Italy with the existing school in England.
53. You were perhaps surprised at my placing in your educational
series, as a type of original Italian sculpture, the pulpit by Niccola
Pisano in the Duomo of Siena. I would rather, had it been possible, have
given the pulpit by Giovanni Pisano in the Duomo of Pisa; but that
pulpit is dispersed in fragments through the upper galleries of the
Duomo, and the cloister of the Campo Santo; and the casts of its
fragments now put together at Kensington are too coarse to be of use to
you. You may partly judge, however, of the method of their execution by
the eagle's head, which I have sketched from the marble in the Campo
Santo (Edu., No. 113), and the lioness with her cubs, (Edu., No. 103,
more carefully studied at Siena); and I will get you other illustrations
in due time. Meanwhile, I want you to compare the main purpose of the
Cathedral of Pisa, and its associated Bell Tower, Baptistery, and Holy
Field, with the main purpose of the principal building lately raised for
the people of London. In these days, we indeed desire no cathedrals; but
we have constructed an enormous and costly edifice, which, in claiming
educational influence over the whole London populace, and middle class,
is verily the Metropolitan cathedral of this century,--the Crystal
Palace.
54. It was proclaimed, at its erection, an example of a newly discovered
style of architecture, greater than any hitherto known,--our best
popular writers, in their enthusiasm, describing it as an edifice of
Fairyland. You are nevertheless to observe that this novel production of
fairy enchantment is destitute of every kind of sculpture, except the
bosses produced by the heads of nails and rivets; while the Duomo of
Pisa, in the wreathen work of its doors, in the foliage of its capitals,
inlaid colour designs of its façade, embossed panels of its baptistery
font, and figure sculpture of its two pulpits, contained the germ of a
school of sculpture which was to maintain, through a subsequent period
of four hundred years, the greatest power yet reached by the arts of the
world in description of Form, and expression of Thought.
55. Now it is easy to show you the essential cause of the vast
discrepancy in the character of these two buildings.
In the vault of the apse of the Duomo of Pisa, was a colossal image of
Christ, in coloured mosaic, bearing to the temple, as nearly as
possible, the relation which the statue of Athena bore to the Parthenon;
and in the same manner, concentrating the imagination of the Pisan on
the attributes of the God in whom he believed.
In precisely the same position with respect to the nave of the building,
but of larger size, as proportioned to the three or four times greater
scale of the whole, a colossal piece of sculpture was placed by English
designers, at the extremity of the Crystal Palace, in preparation for
their solemnities in honour of the birthday of Christ, in December, 1867
or 1868.
That piece of sculpture was the face of the clown in a pantomime, some
twelve feet high from brow to chin, which face, being moved by the
mechanism which is our pride, every half minute opened its mouth from
ear to ear, showed its teeth, and revolved its eyes, the force of these
periodical seasons of expression being increased and explained by the
illuminated inscription underneath "Here we are again."
56. When it is assumed, and with too good reason, that the mind of the
English populace is to be addressed, in the principal Sacred Festival of
its year, by sculpture such as this, I need scarcely point out to you
that the hope is absolutely futile of advancing their intelligence by
collecting within this building, (itself devoid absolutely of every kind
of art, and so vilely constructed that those who traverse it are
continually in danger of falling over the cross-bars that bind it
together) examples of sculpture filched indiscriminately from the past
work, bad and good, of Turks, Greeks, Romans, Moors, and Christians,
miscoloured, misplaced, and misinterpreted;[117] here thrust into
unseemly corners, and there mortised together into mere confusion of
heterogeneous obstacle; pronouncing itself hourly more intolerable in
weariness, until any kind of relief is sought from it in steam
wheelbarrows or cheap toy-shops; and most of all in beer and meat, the
corks and the bones being dropped through the chinks in the damp deal
flooring of the English Fairy Palace.
57. But you will probably think me unjust in assuming that a building
prepared only for the amusement of the people can typically represent
the architecture or sculpture of modern England. You may urge, that I
ought rather to describe the qualities of the refined sculpture which is
executed in large quantities for private persons belonging to the upper
classes, and for sepulchral and memorial purposes. But I could not now
criticise that sculpture with any power of conviction to you, because I
have not yet stated to you the principles of good sculpture in general.
I will, however, in some points, tell you the facts by anticipation.
58. We have much excellent portrait sculpture; but portrait sculpture,
which is nothing more, is always third-rate work, even when produced by
men of genius;--nor does it in the least require men of genius to
produce it. To paint a portrait, indeed, implies the very highest gifts
of painting; but any man, of ordinary patience and artistic feeling, can
carve a satisfactory bust.
59. Of our powers in historical sculpture, I am, without question, just,
in taking for sufficient evidence the monuments we have erected to our
two greatest heroes by sea and land; namely, the Nelson Column, and the
statue of the Duke of Wellington opposite Apsley House. Nor will you, I
hope, think me severe,--certainly, whatever you may think me, I am using
only the most temperate language, in saying of both these monuments,
that they are absolutely devoid of high sculptural merit. But, consider
how much is involved in the fact thus dispassionately stated, respecting
the two monuments in the principal places of our capital, to our two
greatest heroes.
60. Remember that we have before our eyes, as subjects of perpetual
study and thought, the art of all the world for three thousand years
past: especially, we have the best sculpture of Greece, for example of
bodily perfection; the best of Rome, for example of character in
portraiture; the best of Florence, for example of romantic passion: we
have unlimited access to books and other sources of instruction; we have
the most perfect scientific illustrations of anatomy, both human and
comparative; and, we have bribes for the reward of success, large, in
the proportion of at least twenty to one, as compared with those offered
to the artists of any other period. And with all these advantages, and
the stimulus also of fame carried instantly by the press to the remotest
corners of Europe, the best efforts we can make, on the grandest of
occasions, result in work which it is impossible in any one particular
to praise.
Now consider for yourselves what an intensity of the negation of the
faculty of sculpture this implies in the national mind! What measures
can be assigned to the gulf of incapacity, which can deliberately
swallow up in the gorge of it the teaching and example of three thousand
years, and produce as the result of that instruction, what it is
courteous to call "nothing?"
61. That is the conclusion at which we arrive, on the evidence presented
by our historical sculpture. To complete the measure of ourselves, we
must endeavour to estimate the rank of the two opposite schools of
sculpture employed by us in the nominal service of religion, and in the
actual service of vice.
I am aware of no statue of Christ, nor of any apostle of Christ, nor of
any scene related in the New Testament, produced by us within the last
three hundred years, which has possessed even superficial merit enough
to attract public attention.
Whereas the steadily immoral effect of the formative art which we learn,
more or less apishly, from the French schools, and employ, but too
gladly, in manufacturing articles for the amusement of the luxurious
classes, must be ranked as one of the chief instruments used by joyful
fiends and angry fates, for the ruin of our civilization.
If, after I have set before you the nature and principles of true
sculpture, in Athens, Pisa, and Florence, you reconsider these
facts,--(which you will then at once recognize as such),--you will find
that they absolutely justify my assertion that the state of sculpture in
modern England, as compared with that of the great Ancients, is
literally one of corrupt and dishonourable death, as opposed to bright
and fameful life.
62. And now, will you bear with me, while I tell you finally why this is
so?
The cause with which you are personally concerned is your own frivolity;
though essentially this is not your fault, but that of the system of
your early training. But the fact remains the same, that here, in
Oxford, you, a chosen body of English youth, in no wise care for the
history of your country, for its present dangers, or its present duties.
You still, like children of seven or eight years old, are interested
only in bats, balls, and oars: nay, including with you the students of
Germany and France, it is certain that the general body of modern
European youth have their minds occupied more seriously by the sculpture
and painting of the bowls of their tobacco-pipes, than by all the
divinest workmanship and passionate imagination of Greece, Rome, and
Mediæval Christendom.
63. But the elementary causes, both of this frivolity in you, and of
worse than frivolity in older persons, are the two forms of deadly
Idolatry which are now all but universal in England.
The first of these is the worship of the Eidolon, or Phantasm of Wealth;
worship of which you will find the nature partly examined in the 37th
paragraph of my _Munera Pulveris_; but which is briefly to be defined as
the servile apprehension of an active power in Money, and the submission
to it as the God of our life.
64. The second elementary cause of the loss of our nobly imaginative
faculty, is the worship of the Letter, instead of the Spirit, in what we
chiefly accept as the ordinance and teaching of Deity; and the
apprehension of a healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book
whose primal commands we refuse to obey.
No feather idol of Polynesia was ever a sign of a more shameful
idolatry, than the modern notion in the minds of certainly the majority
of English religious persons, that the Word of God, by which the heavens
were of old, and the earth, standing out of the water and in the
water,--the Word of God which came to the prophets, and comes still for
ever to all who will hear it, (and to many who will forbear); and which,
called Faithful and True, is to lead forth, in the judgment, the armies
of heaven,--that this "Word of God" may yet be bound at our pleasure in
morocco, and carried about in a young lady's pocket, with tasselled
ribands to mark the passages she most approves of.
65. Gentlemen, there has hitherto been seen no instance, and England is
little likely to give the unexampled spectacle, of a country successful
in the noble arts, yet in which the youths were frivolous, the maidens
falsely religious, the men, slaves of money, and the matrons, of vanity.
Not from all the marble of the hills of Luni will such a people ever
shape one statue that may stand nobly against the sky; not from all the
treasures bequeathed to them by the great dead, will they gather, for
their own descendants, any inheritance but shame.
FOOTNOTES:
[113] Glance forward at once to § 75, read it, and return to this.
[114] There is a primary and vulgar sense of "exhibited" in Lucian's
mind; but the higher meaning is involved in it.
[115] In the Greek, "ambrosial." Recollect always that ambrosia, as food
of gods, is the continual restorer of strength; that all food is
ambrosial when it nourishes, and that the night is called "ambrosial"
because it restores strength to the soul through its peace, as, in the
23rd Psalm, the stillness of waters.
[116] I have italicised this final promise of blessedness, given by the
noble Spirit of Workmanship. Compare Carlyle's 5th Latter-day pamphlet,
throughout; but especially pp. 12-14, in the first edition.
[117] "Falsely represented," would be the better expression. In the cast
of the tomb of Queen Eleanor, for a single instance, the Gothic foliage
of which one essential virtue is its change over every shield, is
represented by a repetition of casts from one mould, of which the design
itself is entirely conjectural.
LECTURE III.
IMAGINATION.
_November, 1870._
66. The principal object of the preceding lecture (and I choose rather
to incur your blame for tediousness in repeating, than for obscurity in
defining it), was to enforce the distinction between the ignoble and
false phase of Idolatry, which consists in the attribution of a
spiritual power to a material thing; and the noble and truth-seeking
phase of it, to which I shall in these lectures[118] give the general
term of Imagination;--that is to say, the invention of material symbols
which may lead us to contemplate the character and nature of gods,
spirits, or abstract virtues and powers, without in the least implying
the actual presence of such Beings among us, or even their possession,
in reality, of the forms we attribute to them.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
67. For instance, in the ordinarily received Greek type of Athena, on
vases of the Phidian time (sufficiently represented in the opposite
woodcut), no Greek would have supposed the vase on which this was
painted to be itself Athena, nor to contain Athena inside of it, as the
Arabian fisherman's casket contained the genie; neither did he think
that this rude black painting, done at speed as the potter's fancy urged
his hand, represented anything like the form or aspect of the Goddess
herself. Nor would he have thought so, even had the image been ever so
beautifully wrought. The goddess might, indeed, visibly appear under the
form of an armed virgin, as she might under that of a hawk or a swallow,
when it pleased her to give such manifestation of her presence; but it
did not, therefore, follow that she was constantly invested with any of
these forms, or that the best which human skill could, even by her own
aid, picture of her, was, indeed, a likeness of her. The real use, at
all events, of this rude image, was only to signify to the eye and heart
the facts of the existence, in some manner, of a Spirit of wisdom,
perfect in gentleness, irresistible in anger; having also physical
dominion over the air which is the life and breadth of all creatures,
and clothed, to human eyes, with ægis of fiery cloud, and raiment of
falling dew.
68. In the yet more abstract conception of the Spirit of agriculture, in
which the wings of the chariot represent the winds of spring, and its
crested dragons are originally a mere type of the seed with its twisted
root piercing the ground, and sharp-edged leaves rising above it; we are
in still less danger of mistaking the symbol for the presumed form of an
actual Person. But I must, with persistence, beg of you to observe that
in all the noble actions of imagination in this kind, the distinction
from idolatry consists, not in the denial of the being, or presence of
the Spirit, but only in the due recognition of our human incapacity to
conceive the one, or compel the other.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.]
69. Farther--and for this statement I claim your attention still more
earnestly. As no nation has ever attained real greatness during periods
in which it was subject to any condition of Idolatry, so no nation has
ever attained or persevered in greatness, except in reaching and
maintaining a passionate Imagination of a spiritual estate higher than
that of men; and of spiritual creatures nobler than men, having a quite
real and personal existence, however imperfectly apprehended by us.
And all the arts of the present age deserving to be included under the
name of sculpture have been degraded by us, and all principles of just
policy have vanished from us,--and that totally,--for this double
reason; that we are on one side, given up to idolatries of the most
servile kind, as I showed you in the close of the last lecture,--while,
on the other hand, we have absolutely ceased from the exercise of
faithful imagination; and the only remnants of the desire of truth which
remain in us have been corrupted into a prurient itch to discover the
origin of life in the nature of the dust, and prove that the source of
the order of the universe is the accidental concurrence of its atoms.
70. Under these two calamities of our time, the art of sculpture has
perished more totally than any other, because the object of that art is
exclusively the representation of form as the exponent of life. It is
essentially concerned only with the human form, which is the exponent of
the highest life we know; and with all subordinate forms only as they
exhibit conditions of vital power which have some certain relation to
humanity. It deals with the "particula undique desecta" of the animal
nature, and itself contemplates, and brings forward for its disciples'
contemplation, all the energies of creation which transform the [Greek:
pêlos], or lower still, the [Greek: borboros] of the _trivia_, by
Athena's help, into forms of power;--([Greek: to men holon architektôn
autos ên. syneirgazeto de toi kai ê 'Athêna empneousa ton pêlon kai
empsycha poiousa einai ta plasmata];)[119]--but it has nothing whatever
to do with the representation of forms not living, however beautiful,
(as of clouds or waves); nor may it condescend to use its perfect skill,
except in expressing the noblest conditions of life.
These laws of sculpture, being wholly contrary to the practice of our
day, I cannot expect you to accept on my assertion, nor do I wish you to
do so. By placing definitely good and bad sculpture before you, I do not
doubt but that I shall gradually prove to you the nature of all
excelling and enduring qualities; but to-day I will only confirm my
assertions by laying before you the statement of the Greeks themselves
on the subject; given in their own noblest time, and assuredly
authoritative, in every point which it embraces, for all time to come.
71. If any of you have looked at the explanation I have given of the
myth of Athena in my _Queen of the Air_, you cannot but have been
surprised that I took scarcely any note of the story of her birth. I did
not, because that story is connected intimately with the Apolline myths;
and is told of Athena, not essentially as the goddess of the air, but as
the goddess of Art-Wisdom.
You have probably often smiled at the legend itself, or avoided thinking
of it, as revolting. It is indeed, one of the most painful and childish
of sacred myths; yet remember, ludicrous and ugly as it seems to us,
this story satisfied the fancy of the Athenian people in their highest
state; and if it did not satisfy--yet it was accepted by, all later
mythologists: you may also remember I told you to be prepared to find
that, given a certain degree of national intellect, the ruder the
symbol, the deeper would be its purpose. And this legend of the birth of
Athena is the central myth of all that the Greeks have left us
respecting the power of their arts; and in it they have expressed, as it
seemed good to them, the most important things they had to tell us on
these matters. We may read them wrongly; but we must read them here, if
anywhere.
72. There are so many threads to be gathered up in the legend, that I
cannot hope to put it before you in total clearness, but I will take
main points. Athena is born in the island of Rhodes; and that island is
raised out of the sea by Apollo, after he had been left without
inheritance among the gods. Zeus[120] would have cast the lot again, but
Apollo orders the golden-girdled Lachesis to stretch out her hands; and
not now by chance or lot, but by noble enchantment, the island rises out
of the sea.
Physically, this represents the action of heat and light on chaos,
especially on the deep sea. It is the "Fiat lux" of Genesis, the first
process in the conquest of Fate by Harmony. The island is dedicated to
the Nymph Rhodos, by whom Apollo has the seven sons who teach [Greek:
sophôtata noêmata]; because the rose is the most beautiful organism
existing in matter not vital, expressive of the direct action of light
on the earth, giving lovely form and colour at once; (compare the use of
it by Dante as the form of the sainted crowd in highest heaven) and
remember that, therefore, the rose is in the Greek mind, essentially a
Doric flower, expressing the worship of Light, as the Iris or Ion is an
Ionic one, expressing the worship of the Winds and Dew.
73. To understand the agency of Hephæstus at the birth of Athena, we
must again return to the founding of the arts on agriculture by the
hand. Before you can cultivate land you must clear it; and the
characteristic weapon of Hephæstus,--which is as much his attribute as
the trident is of Poseidon, and the rhabdos of Hermes, is not, as you
would have expected, the hammer, but the clearing-axe--the doubled-edged
[Greek: pélekys], the same that Calypso gives Ulysses with which to cut
down the trees for his home voyage; so that both the naval and
agricultural strength of the Athenians are expressed by this weapon,
with which they had to hew out their fortune. And you must keep in mind
this agriculturally laborious character of Hephæstus, even when he is
most distinctly the god of serviceable fire; thus Horace's perfect
epithet for him "avidus" expresses at once the devouring eagerness of
fire, and the zeal of progressive labour, for Horace gives it to him
when he is fighting against the giants. And this rude symbol of his
cleaving the forehead of Zeus with the axe, and giving birth to Athena
signifies, indeed, physically the thrilling power of heat in the
heavens, rending the clouds, and giving birth to the blue air; but far
more deeply it signifies the subduing of adverse Fate by true labour;
until, out of the chasm, cleft by resolute and industrious fortitude,
springs the Spirit of Wisdom.
74. Here (Fig. 4) is an early drawing of the myth, to which I shall have
to refer afterwards in illustration of the childishness of the Greek
mind at the time when its art-symbols were first fixed; but it is of
peculiar value, because the physical character of Vulcan, as fire, is
indicated by his wearing the [Greek: endromides] of Hermes, while the
antagonism of Zeus, as the adverse chaos, either of cloud or of fate, is
shown by his striking at Hephæstus with his thunderbolt. But Plate IV.
gives you (as far as the light on the rounded vase will allow it to be
deciphered) a characteristic representation of the scene, as conceived
in later art.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.]
75. I told you in a former lecture of this course that the entire Greek
intellect was in a childish phase as compared to that of modern times.
Observe, however, childishness does not necessarily imply universal
inferiority: there may be a vigorous, acute, pure, and solemn childhood,
and there may be a weak, foul, and ridiculous condition of advanced
life; but the one is still essentially the childish, and the other the
adult phase of existence.
76. You will find, then, that the Greeks were the first people that were
born into complete humanity. All nations before them had been, and all
around them still were, partly savage, bestial, clay-encumbered,
inhuman; still semi-goat, or semi-ant, or semi-stone, or semi-cloud. But
the power of a new spirit came upon the Greeks, and the stones were
filled with breath, and the clouds clothed with flesh; and then came the
great spiritual battle between the Centaurs and Lapithæ; and the living
creatures became "Children of Men." Taught, yet, by the Centaur--sown,
as they knew, in the fang--from the dappled skin of the brute, from the
leprous scale of the serpent, their flesh came again as the flesh of a
little child, and they were clean.
Fix your mind on this as the very central character of the Greek
race--the being born pure and human out of the brutal misery of the
past, and looking abroad, for the first time, with their children's
eyes, wonderingly open, on the strange and divine world.
77. Make some effort to remember, so far as may be possible to you,
either what you felt in yourselves when you were young, or what you have
observed in other children, of the action of thought and fancy. Children
are continually represented as living in an ideal world of their own. So
far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is
to live always in the tangible present, having little pleasure in
memory, and being utterly impatient and tormented by anticipation: weak
alike in reflection and forethought, but having an intense possession of
the actual present, down to the shortest moments and least objects of
it; possessing it, indeed, so intensely that the sweet childish days are
as long as twenty days will be; and setting all the faculties of heart
and imagination on little things, so as to be able to make anything out
of them he chooses. Confined to a little garden, he does not imagine
himself somewhere else, but makes a great garden out of that; possessed
of an acorn-cup, he will not despise it and throw it away, and covet a
golden one in its stead: it is the adult who does so. The child keeps
his acorn-cup as a treasure, and makes a golden one out of it in his
mind; so that the wondering grown-up person standing beside him is
always tempted to ask concerning his treasures, not, "What would you
have more than these?" but "What possibly can you see _in_ these?" for,
to the bystander, there is a ludicrous and incomprehensible
inconsistency between the child's words and the reality. The little
thing tells him gravely, holding up the acorn-cup, that "this is a
queen's crown, or a fairy's boat," and, with beautiful effrontery,
expects him to believe the same. But observe--the acorn-cup must be
_there_, and in his own hand. "Give it me;" then I will make more of it
for myself. That is the child's one word, always.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.]
78. It is also the one word of the Greek--"Give it me." Give me _any_
thing definite here in my sight, then I will make more of it.
[Illustration: PLATE V.--TOMB OF THE DOGES JACOPO AND LORENZO TIEPOLO.]
I cannot easily express to you how strange it seems to me that I am
obliged, here in Oxford, to take the position of an apologist for Greek
art; that I find, in spite of all the devotion of the admirable scholars
who have so long maintained in our public schools the authority of Greek
literature, our younger students take no interest in the manual work of
the people upon whose thoughts the tone of their early intellectual life
has exclusively depended. But I am not surprised that the interest, if
awakened, should not at first take the form of admiration. The
inconsistency between an Homeric description of a piece of furniture or
armour, and the actual rudeness of any piece of art approximating within
even three or four centuries, to the Homeric period, is so great, that
we at first cannot recognize the art as elucidatory of, or in any way
related to, the poetic language.
79. You will find, however, exactly the same kind of discrepancy between
early sculpture, and the languages of deed and thought, in the second
birth, and childhood, of the world, under Christianity. The same fair
thoughts and bright imaginations arise again; and similarly, the fancy
is content with the rudest symbols by which they can be formalized to
the eyes. You cannot understand that the rigid figure (2) with chequers
or spots on its breast, and sharp lines of drapery to its feet, could
represent, to the Greek, the healing majesty of heaven: but can you any
better understand how a symbol so haggard as this (Fig. 5) could
represent to the noblest hearts of the Christian ages the power and
ministration of angels? Yet it not only did so, but retained in the rude
undulatory and linear ornamentation of its dress, record of the thoughts
intended to be conveyed by the spotted ægis and falling chiton of
Athena, eighteen hundred years before. Greek and Venetian alike, in
their noble childhood, knew with the same terror the coiling wind and
congealed hail in heaven--saw with the same thankfulness the dew shed
softly on the earth, and on its flowers; and both recognized, ruling
these, and symbolized by them, the great helpful spirit of Wisdom, which
leads the children of men to all knowledge, all courage, and all art.
80. Read the inscription written on the sarcophagus (Plate V.), at the
extremity of which this angel is sculptured. It stands in an open recess
in the rude brick wall of the west front of the church of St. John and
Paul at Venice, being the tomb of the two doges, father and son, Jacopo
and Lorenzo Tiepolo. This is the inscription:--
"Quos natura pares studiis, virtutibus, arte
Edidit, illustres genitor natusque, sepulti
Hác sub rupe Duces. Venetum charissima proles
Theupula collatis dedit hos celebranda triumphis.
Omnia presentis donavit predia templi
Dux Jacobus: valido fixit moderamine leges
Urbis, et ingratam redimens certamine Jadram
Dalmatiosque dedit patrie, post, Marte subactas
Graiorum pelago maculavit sanguine classes.
Suscipit oblatos princeps Laurentius Istros,
Et domuit rigidos, ingenti strage cadentes,
Bononie populos. Hinc subdita Cervia cessit.
Fundavere vias pacis; fortique relictá
Re, superos sacris petierunt mentibus ambo.
"Dominus Jachobus hobiit[121] M.CCLI.
Dominus Laurentius hobiit M.CCLXXVIII."
You see, therefore, this tomb is an invaluable example of thirteenth
century sculpture in Venice. In Plate VI., you have an example of the
(coin) sculpture of the date accurately corresponding in Greece to the
thirteenth century in Venice, when the meaning of symbols was everything
and the workmanship comparatively nothing. The upper head is an Athena,
of Athenian work in the seventh or sixth century--(the coin itself may
have been struck later, but the archaic type was retained). The two
smaller impressions below are the front and obverse of a coin of the
same age from Corinth, the head of Athena on one side, and Pegasus, with
the archaic Koppa, on the other. The smaller head is bare, the hair
being looped up at the back and closely bound with an olive branch. You
are to note this general outline of the head, already given in a more
finished type in Plate II., as a most important elementary form in the
finest sculpture, not of Greece only, but of all Christendom. In the
upper head the hair is restrained still more closely by a round helmet,
for the most part smooth, but embossed with a single flower tendril,
having one bud, one flower, and above it, two olive leaves. You have
thus the most absolutely restricted symbol possible to human thought of
the power of Athena over the flowers and trees of the earth. An olive
leaf by itself could not have stood for the sign of a tree, but the two
can, when set in position of growth.
[Illustration: PLATE VI.--ARCHAIC ATHENA OF ATHENS AND CORINTH.]
I would not give you the reverse of the coin on the same plate, because
you would have looked at it only, laughed at it, and not examined the
rest; but here it is, wonderfully engraved for you (Fig. 6): of it we
shall have more to say afterwards.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.]
81. And now as you look at these rude vestiges of the religion of
Greece, and at the vestiges, still ruder, on the Ducal tomb, of the
religion of Christendom, take warning against two opposite errors.
There is a school of teachers who will tell you that nothing but Greek
art is deserving of study, and that all our work at this day should be
an imitation of it.
Whenever you feel tempted to believe them, think of these portraits of
Athena and her owl, and be assured that Greek art is not in all respects
perfect, nor exclusively deserving of imitation.
There is another school of teachers who will tell you that Greek art is
good for nothing; that the soul of the Greek was outcast, and that
Christianity entirely superseded its faith, and excelled its works.
Whenever you feel tempted to believe _them_, think of this angel on the
tomb of Jacopo Tiepolo; and remember, that Christianity, after it had
been twelve hundred years existent as an imaginative power on the earth,
could do no better work than this, though with all the former power of
Greece to help it; nor was able to engrave its triumph in having stained
its fleets in the seas of Greece with the blood of her people, but
between barbarous imitations of the pillars which that people had
invented.
82. Receiving these two warnings, receive also this lesson; In both
examples, childish though it be, this Heathen and Christian art is alike
sincere, and alike vividly imaginative: the actual work is that of
infancy; the thoughts, in their visionary simplicity, are also the
thoughts of infancy, but in their solemn virtue, they are the thoughts
of men.
We, on the contrary, are now, in all that we do, absolutely without
sincerity;--absolutely, therefore, without imagination, and without
virtue. Our hands are dexterous with the vile and deadly dexterity of
machines; our minds filled with incoherent fragments of faith, which we
cling to in cowardice, without believing, and make pictures of in
vanity, without loving. False and base alike, whether we admire or
imitate, we cannot learn from the Heathen's art, but only pilfer it; we
cannot revive the Christian's art, but only galvanize it; we are, in the
sum of us, not human artists at all, but mechanisms of conceited clay,
masked in the furs and feathers of living creatures, and convulsed with
voltaic spasms, in mockery of animation.
83. You think, perhaps, that I am using terms unjustifiable in violence.
They would, indeed, be unjustifiable, if, spoken from this chair, they
were violent at all. They are, unhappily, temperate and
accurate,--except in shortcoming of blame. For we are not only impotent
to restore, but strong to defile, the work of past ages. Of the
impotence, take but this one, utterly humiliatory, and, in the full
meaning of it, ghastly, example. We have lately been busy embanking, in
the capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the
imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of
nature most useful. Of all architectural features of the metropolis,
that embankment will be, in future, the most conspicuous; and in its
position and purpose it was the most capable of noble adornment.
For that adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern poetical
imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has,
indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to
gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes'
tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a
sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble,
which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every
capital of Europe for the last fifty years. We cast _that_ badly, and
give lustre to the ill-cast fish with lacquer in imitation of bronze. On
the base of their pedestals, towards the road, we put for
advertisement's sake, the initials of the casting firm; and, for farther
originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of Mercury; and to
adorn the front of the pedestals towards the river, being now wholly at
our wit's end, we can think of nothing better than to borrow the
door-knocker which--again for the last fifty years--has disturbed and
decorated two or three millions of London street-doors; and magnifying
the marvellous device of it, a lion's head with a ring in its mouth
(still borrowed from the Greek), we complete the embankment with a row
of heads and rings, on a scale which enables them to produce, at the
distance at which only they can be seen, the exact effect of a row of
sentry boxes.
84. Farther. In the very centre of the city, and at the point where the
Embankment commands a view of Westminster Abbey on one side and of St.
Paul's on the other--that is to say, at precisely the most important and
stately moment of its whole course--it has to pass under one of the
arches of Waterloo Bridge, which, in the sweep of its curve, is as
vast--it alone--as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in
proportions. But over the Rialto, though of late and debased Venetian
work, there still reigns some power of human imagination: on the two
flanks of it are carved the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation; on
the keystone the descending Dove. It is not, indeed, the fault of living
designers that the Waterloo arch is nothing more than a gloomy and
hollow heap of wedged blocks of blind granite. But just beyond the damp
shadow of it, the new Embankment is reached by a flight of stairs, which
are, in point of fact, the principal approach to it, a-foot, from
central London; the descent from the very midst of the metropolis of
England to the banks of the chief river of England; and for this
approach, living designers _are_ answerable.
85. The principal decoration of the descent is again a gas-lamp, but a
shattered one, with a brass crown on the top of it or, rather,
half-crown, and that turned the wrong way, the back of it to the river
and causeway, its flame supplied by a visible pipe far wandering along
the wall; the whole apparatus being supported by a rough cross-beam.
Fastened to the centre of the arch above is a large placard, stating
that the Royal Humane Society's drags are in constant readiness, and
that their office is at 4, Trafalgar Square. On each side of the arch
are temporary, but dismally old and battered boardings, across two
angles capable of unseemly use by the British public. Above one of these
is another placard, stating that this is the Victoria Embankment. The
steps themselves--some forty of them--descend under a tunnel, which the
shattered gas-lamp lights by night, and nothing by day. They are covered
with filthy dust, shaken off from infinitude of filthy feet; mixed up
with shreds of paper, orange-peel, foul straw, rags, and cigar ends, and
ashes; the whole agglutinated, more or less, by dry saliva into slippery
blotches and patches; or, when not so fastened, blown dismally by the
sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and
descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find
elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of
building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far
separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately
indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace,
Mercy, and Peace of Heaven.
86. I am obliged always to use the English word "Grace" in two senses,
but remember that the Greek [Greek: charis] includes them both (the
bestowing, that is to say of Beauty and Mercy); and especially it
includes these in the passage of Pindar's first ode, which gives us the
key to the right interpretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You
remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (§ 151), that
the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the
family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them
all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar
pauses--not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility
in the circumstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of
Demeter--and gives his own reading of the event, instead of the ancient
one. He justifies this to himself, and to his hearers, by the plea that
myths have, in some sort, or degree, ([Greek: pou ti]), led the mind of
mortals beyond the truth: and then he goes on:--
"Grace, which creates everything that is kindly and soothing for
mortals, adding honour, has often made things at first untrustworthy,
become trustworthy through Love."
87. I cannot, except in these lengthened terms, give you the complete
force of the passage; especially of the [Greek: apiston emêsato
pioton]--"made it trustworthy by passionate desire that it should be
so"--which exactly describes the temper of religious persons at the
present day, who are kindly and sincere, in clinging to the forms of
faith which either have long been precious to themselves, or which they
feel to have been without question instrumental in advancing the dignity
of mankind. And it is part of the constitution of humanity--a part
which, above others, you are in danger of unwisely contemning under the
existing conditions of our knowledge, that the things thus sought for
belief with eager passion, do, indeed, become trustworthy to us; that,
to each of us, they verily become what we would have them; the force of
the [Greek: mênis] and [Greek: mnêmê] with which we seek after them,
does, indeed, make them powerful to us for actual good or evil; and it
is thus granted to us to create not only with our hands things that
exalt or degrade our sight, but with our hearts also, things that exalt
or degrade our souls; giving true substance to all that we hoped for;
evidence to things that we have not seen, but have desired to see; and
calling, in the sense of creating, things that are not, as though they
were.
88. You remember that in distinguishing Imagination from Idolatry, I
referred you to the forms of passionate affection with which a noble
people commonly regards the rivers and springs of its native land. Some
conception of personality or of spiritual power in the stream, is almost
necessarily involved in such emotion; and prolonged [Greek: charis] in
the form of gratitude, the return of Love for benefits continually
bestowed, at last alike in all the highest and the simplest minds, when
they are honourable and pure, makes this untrue thing trustworthy;
[Greek: apiston emêsato piston], until it becomes to them the safe basis
of some of the happiest impulses of their moral nature. Next to the
marbles of Verona, given you as a primal type of the sculpture of
Christianity, moved to its best energy in adorning the entrance of its
temples, I have not unwillingly placed, as your introduction to the best
sculpture of the religion of Greece, the forms under which it
represented the personality of the fountain Arethusa. But, without
restriction to those days of absolute devotion, let me simply point out
to you how this untrue thing, made true by Love, has intimate and
heavenly authority even over the minds of men of the most practical
sense, the most shrewd wit, and the most severe precision of moral
temper. The fair vision of Sabrina in _Comus_, the endearing and tender
promise, "Fies nobilium tu quoque fontium," and the joyful and proud
affection of the great Lombard's address to the lakes of his enchanted
land,--
Te, Lari maxume, teque
Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Benace, marino,
may surely be remembered by you with regretful piety, when you stand by
the blank stones which at once restrain and disgrace your native river,
as the final worship rendered to it by modern philosophy. But a little
incident which I saw last summer on its bridge at Wallingford, may put
the contrast of ancient and modern feeling before you still more
forcibly.
89. Those of you who have read with attention (none of us can read with
too much attention), Molière's most perfect work, the _Misanthrope_,
must remember Celiméne's description of her lovers, and her excellent
reason for being unable to regard with any favour, "notre grand flandrin
de vicomte,--depuis que je l'ai vu, trois quarts d'heure durant, cracher
dans un puits pour faire des ronds." That sentence is worth noting, both
in contrast to the reverence paid by the ancients to wells and springs,
and as one of the most interesting traces of the extension of the
loathsome habit among the upper classes of Europe and America, which now
renders all external grace, dignity, and decency, impossible in the
thoroughfares of their principal cities. In connection with that
sentence of Molière's you may advisably also remember this fact, which I
chanced to notice on the bridge of Wallingford. I was walking from end
to end of it, and back again, one Sunday afternoon of last May, trying
to conjecture what had made this especial bend and ford of the Thames so
important in all the Anglo-Saxon wars. It was one of the few sunny
afternoons of the bitter spring, and I was very thankful for its light,
and happy in watching beneath it the flow and the glittering of the
classical river, when I noticed a well-dressed boy, apparently just out
of some orderly Sunday-school, leaning far over the parapet; watching,
as I conjectured, some bird or insect on the bridge-buttress. I went up
to him to see what he was looking at; but just as I got close to him, he
started over to the opposite parapet, and put himself there into the
same position, his object being, as I then perceived, to spit from both
sides upon the heads of a pleasure party who were passing in a boat
below.
90. The incident may seem to you too trivial to be noticed in this
place. To me, gentlemen, it was by no means trivial. It meant, in the
depth of it, such absence of all true [Greek: charis], reverence, and
intellect, as it is very dreadful to trace in the mind of any human
creature, much more in that of a child educated with apparently every
advantage of circumstance in a beautiful English country town, within
ten miles of our University. Most of all, is it terrific when we regard
it as the exponent (and this, in truth, it is), of the temper which, as
distinguished from former methods, either of discipline or recreation,
the present tenor of our general teaching fosters in the mind of
youth;--teaching which asserts liberty to be a right, and obedience a
degradation; and which, regardless alike of the fairness of nature and
the grace of behaviour, leaves the insolent spirit and degraded senses
to find their only occupation in malice, and their only satisfaction in
shame.
91. You will, I hope, proceed with me, not scornfully any more, to
trace, in the early art of a noble heathen nation, the feeling of what
was at least a better childishness than this of ours; and the efforts to
express, though with hands yet failing, and minds oppressed by ignorant
phantasy, the first truth by which they knew that they lived; the birth
of wisdom and of all her powers of help to man, as the reward of his
resolute labour.
92. "[Greek: Aphaistou technaisi]." Note that word of Pindar in the
Seventh Olympic. This axe-blow of Vulcan's was to the Greek mind truly
what Clytemnestra falsely asserts hers to have been "[Greek: tês de
dexias cheros ergon dikaias tektonos]"; physically, it meant the opening
of the blue through the rent clouds of heaven, by the action of local
terrestrial heat of Hephæstus as opposed to Apollo, who shines on the
surface of the upper clouds, but cannot pierce them; and, spiritually,
it meant the first birth of prudent thought out of rude labour, the
clearing-axe in the hand of the woodman being the practical elementary
sign of his difference from the wild animals of the wood. Then he goes
on, "From the high head of her Father, Athenaia rushing forth, cried
with her great and exceeding cry; and the Heaven trembled at her, and
the Earth Mother." The cry of Athena, I have before pointed out,
physically distinguishes her, as the spirit of the air, from silent
elemental powers; but in this grand passage of Pindar it is again the
mythic cry of which he thinks; that is to say, the giving articulate
words, by intelligence, to the silence of Fate. "Wisdom crieth aloud,
she uttereth her voice in the streets," and Heaven and Earth tremble at
her reproof.
93. Uttereth her voice in "the streets." For all men, that is to say;
but to what work did the Greeks think that her voice was to call them?
What was to be the impulse communicated by her prevailing presence; what
the sign of the people's obedience to her?
This was to be the sign--"But she, the goddess herself, gave to them to
prevail over the dwellers upon earth, _with best-labouring hands in
every art. And by their paths there were the likenesses of living and of
creeping things_; and the glory was deep. For to the cunning workman,
greater knowledge comes, undeceitful."
94. An infinitely pregnant passage, this, of which to-day you are to
note mainly these three things: First, that Athena is the goddess of
Doing, not at all of sentimental inaction. She is begotten, as it were,
of the woodman's axe; her purpose is never in a word only, but in a word
and a blow. She guides the hands that labour best, in every art.
95. Secondly. The victory given by Wisdom, the worker, to the hands that
labour best, is that the streets and ways, [Greek: keleuthoi], shall be
filled by likenesses of living and creeping things?
Things living, and creeping! Are the Reptile things not alive then? You
think Pindar wrote that carelessly? or that, if he had only known a
little modern anatomy, instead of "reptile" things, he would have said
"monochondylous" things? Be patient, and let us attend to the main
points first.
Sculpture, it thus appears, is the only work of wisdom that the Greeks
care to speak of; they think it involves and crowns every other.
Image-making art; _this_ is Athena's, as queenliest of the arts.
Literature, the order and the strength of word, of course belongs to
Apollo and the Muses; under Athena are the Substances and the Forms of
things.
96, Thirdly. By this forming of Images there is to be gained a
"deep"--that is to say--a weighty, and prevailing, glory; not a floating
nor fugitive one. For to the cunning workman, greater knowledge comes,
"undeceitful."
"[Greek: Daenti]" I am forced to use two English words to translate that
single Greek one. The "cunning" workman, thoughtful in experience,
touch, and vision of the thing to be done; no machine, witless, and of
necessary motion; yet not cunning only, but having perfect habitual
skill of hand also; the confirmed reward of truthful doing. Recollect,
in connection with this passage of Pindar, Homer's three verses about
getting the lines of ship-timber true, (_Il._ xv. 410)
[Greek:
"All' ôste stathmê dory nêion exithynei
tektonos en palamêsi daêmonos, hos ra te pasês
ed eidê sophiês, upothêmosynêsin Athênês,"]
and the beautiful epithet of Persephone, "[Greek: daeira]," as the Tryer
and Knower of good work; and remembering these, trust Pindar for the
truth of his saying, that to the cunning workman--(and let me solemnly
enforce the words by adding--that to him _only_,) knowledge comes
undeceitful.
97. You may have noticed, perhaps, and with a smile, as one of the
paradoxes you often hear me blamed for too fondly stating, what I told
you in the close of my Third Introductory Lecture, that "so far from
art's being immoral, little else except art is moral." I have now
farther to tell you, that little else, except art, is wise; that all
knowledge, unaccompanied by a habit of useful action, is too likely to
become deceitful, and that every habit of useful action must resolve
itself into some elementary practice of manual labour. And I would, in
all sober and direct earnestness advise you, whatever may be the aim,
predilection, or necessity of your lives, to resolve upon this one thing
at least, that you will enable yourselves daily to do actually with your
hands, something that is useful to mankind. To do anything well with
your hands, useful or not;--to be, even in trifling, [Greek: palamêsi
daêmôn] is already much;--when we come to examine the art of the middle
ages I shall be able to show you that the strongest of all influences of
right then brought to bear upon character was the necessity for
exquisite manual dexterity in the management of the spear and bridle;
and in your own experience most of you will be able to recognize the
wholesome effect, alike on body and mind, of striving, within proper
limits of time, to become either good batsmen, or good oarsmen. But the
bat and the racer's oar are children's toys. Resolve that you will be
men in usefulness, as well as in strength; and you will find that then
also, but not till then, you can become men in understanding; and that
every fine vision and subtle theorem will present itself to you
thenceforward undeceitfully, [Greek: hypothêmosynêsin Athênês].
98. But there is more to be gathered yet from the words of Pindar. He is
thinking, in his brief, intense way, at once of Athena's work on the
soul, and of her literal power on the dust of the Earth. His "[Greek:
keleuthoi]" is a wide word meaning all the paths of sea and land.
Consider, therefore, what Athena's own work _actually is_--in the
literal fact of it. The blue, clear air _is_ the sculpturing power upon
the earth and sea. Where the surface of the earth is reached by that,
and its matter and substance inspired with, and filled by that, organic
form becomes possible. You must indeed have the sun, also, and moisture;
the kingdom of Apollo risen out of the sea: but the sculpturing of
living things, shape by shape, is Athena's, so that under the brooding
spirit of the air, what was without form, and void brings forth the
moving creature that hath life.
99. That is her work then--the giving of Form; then the separately
Apolline work is the giving of Light; or, more strictly, Sight: giving
that faculty to the retina to which we owe not merely the idea of light,
but the existence of it; for light is to be defined only as the
sensation produced in the eye of an animal, under given conditions;
those same conditions being, to a stone, only warmth or chemical
influence, but not light. And that power of seeing, and the other
various personalities and authorities of the animal body, in pleasure
and pain, have never, hitherto, been, I do not say, explained, but in
any wise touched or approached by scientific discovery. Some of the
conditions of mere external animal form and of muscular vitality have
been shown; but for the most part that is true, even of external form,
which I wrote six years ago. "You may always stand by Form against
Force. To a painter, the essential character of anything is the form of
it, and the philosophers cannot touch that. They come and tell you, for
instance, that there is as much heat, or motion, or calorific energy (or
whatever else they like to call it), in a tea-kettle, as in a
gier-eagle. Very good: that is so; and it is very interesting. It
requires just as much heat as will boil the kettle, to take the
gier-eagle up to his nest, and as much more to bring him down again on a
hare or a partridge. But we painters, acknowledging the equality and
similarity of the kettle and the bird in all scientific respects,
attach, for our part, our principal interest to the difference in their
forms. For us, the primarily cognisable facts, in the two things, are,
that the kettle has a spout, and the eagle a beak; the one a lid on its
back, the other a pair of wings; not to speak of the distinction also of
volition, which the philosophers may properly call merely a form or mode
of force--but, then to an artist, the form or mode is the gist of the
business."
100. As you will find that it is, not to the artist only, but to all of
us. The laws under which matter is collected and constructed are the
same throughout the universe: the substance so collected, whether for
the making of the eagle, or the worm, may be analyzed into gaseous
identity; a diffusive vital force, apparently so closely related to
mechanically measurable heat as to admit the conception of its being
itself mechanically measurable, and unchanging in total quantity, ebbs
and flows alike through the limbs of men, and the fibres of insects.
But, above all this, and ruling every grotesque or degraded accident of
this, are two laws of beauty in form, and of nobility in character,
which stand in the chaos of creation between the Living and the Dead, to
separate the things that have in them a sacred and helpful, from those
that have in them an accursed and destroying, nature; and the power of
Athena, first physically put forth in the sculpturing of these [Greek:
zôa and erpeta], these living and reptile things, is put forth, finally,
in enabling the hearts of men to discern the one from the other; to know
the unquenchable fires of the Spirit from the unquenchable fires of
Death; and to choose, not unaided, between submission to the Love that
cannot end, or to the Worm that cannot die.
101. The unconsciousness of their antagonism is the most notable
characteristic of the modern scientific mind; and I believe no credulity
or fallacy admitted by the weakness (or it may sometimes rather have
been the strength) of early imagination, indicates so strange a
depression beneath the due scale of human intellect, as the failure of
the sense of beauty in form, and loss of faith in heroism of conduct,
which have become the curses of recent science,[122] art, and policy.
102. That depression of intellect has been alike exhibited in the mean
consternation confessedly felt on one side, and the mean triumph
apparently felt on the other, during the course of the dispute now
pending as to the origin of man. Dispute for the present, not to be
decided, and of which the decision is to persons in the modern temper of
mind, wholly without significance: and I earnestly desire that you, my
pupils, may have firmness enough to disengage your energies from
investigation so premature and so fruitless, and sense enough to
perceive that it does not matter how you have been made, so long as you
are satisfied with being what you are. If you are dissatisfied with
yourselves, it ought not to console, but humiliate you, to imagine that
you were once seraphs; and if you are pleased with yourselves, it is not
any ground of reasonable shame to you if, by no fault of your own, you
have passed through the elementary condition of apes.
103. Remember, therefore, that it is of the very highest importance that
you should know what you _are_, and determine to be the best that you
may be; but it is of no importance whatever, except as it may contribute
to that end, to know what you have been. Whether your Creator shaped you
with fingers, or tools, as a sculptor would a lump of clay, or gradually
raised you to manhood through a series of inferior forms, is only of
moment to you in this respect--that in the one case you cannot expect
your children to be nobler creatures than you are yourselves--in the
other, every act and thought of your present life may be hastening the
advent of a race which will look back to you, their fathers (and you
ought at least to have attained the dignity of desiring that it may be
so), with incredulous disdain.
104. But that you _are_ yourselves capable of that disdain and dismay;
that you are ashamed of having been apes, if you ever were so; that you
acknowledge instinctively, a relation of better and worse, and a law
respecting what is noble and base, which makes it no question to you
that the man is worthier than the baboon--_this_ is a fact of infinite
significance. This law of preference in your hearts is the true essence
of your being, and the consciousness of that law is a more positive
existence than any dependent on the coherence or forms of matter.
105. Now, but a few words more of mythology, and I have done. Remember
that Athena holds the weaver's shuttle, not merely as an instrument of
_texture_, but as an instrument of _picture_; the ideas of clothing, and
of the warmth of life, being thus inseparably connected with those of
graphic beauty and the brightness of life. I have told you that no art
could be recovered among us without perfectness in dress, nor without
the elementary graphic art of women, in divers colours of needlework.
There has been no nation of any art-energy, but has strenuously occupied
and interested itself in this household picturing, from the web of
Penelope to the tapestry of Queen Matilda, and the meshes of Arras and
Gobelins.
106. We should then naturally ask what kind of embroidery Athena put on
her own robe; "[Greek: peplon heanon, poikilon hou r autê poiêsato kai
kame chersin]."
The subject of that [Greek: poikilia] of hers, as you know, was the war
of the giants and gods. Now the real name of these giants, remember, is
that used by Hesiod, "[Greek: pêlochonoi]," "mud-begotten," and the
meaning of the contest between these and Zeus, [Greek: pêlogonôn
elatêr], is, again, the inspiration of life into the clay, by the
goddess of breath; and the actual confusion going on visibly before you,
daily, of the earth, heaping itself into cumbrous war with the powers
above it.
107. Thus briefly, the entire material of Art, under Athena's hand, is
the contest of life with clay; and all my task in explaining to you the
early thought of both the Athenian and Tuscan schools will only be the
tracing of this battle of the giants into its full heroic form, when,
not in tapestry only--but in sculpture--and on the portal of the Temple
of Delphi itself, you have the "[Greek: klonos en teichesi lainoisi
gigantôn]," and their defeat hailed by the passionate cry of delight
from the Athenian maids, beholding Pallas in her full power, "[Greek:
leussô Pallad' eman theon]," my own goddess. All our work, I repeat,
will be nothing but the inquiry into the development of this the
subject, and the pressing fully home the question of Plato about that
embroidery--"And think you that there is verily war with each other
among the Gods? and dreadful enmities and battle, such as the poets have
told, and such as our painters set forth in graven scripture, to adorn
all our sacred rites and holy places; yes, and in the great Panathenaea
themselves, the Peplus, full of such wild picturing, is carried up into
the Acropolis--shall we say that these things are true, oh Euthuphron,
right-minded friend?"
108. Yes, we say, and know, that these things are true; and true for
ever: battles of the gods, not among themselves, but against the
earth-giants. Battle prevailing age by age, in nobler life and lovelier
imagery; creation, which no theory of mechanism, no definition of force,
can explain, the adoption and completing of individual form by
individual animation, breathed out of the lips of the Father of Spirits.
And to recognize the presence in every knitted shape of dust, by which
it lives and moves and has its being--to recognize it, revere, and show
it forth, is to be our eternal Idolatry.
"Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them."
"Assuredly no," we answered once, in our pride; and through porch and
aisle, broke down the carved work thereof, with axes and hammers.
Who would have thought the day so near when we should bow down to
worship, not the creatures, but their atoms,--not the forces that form,
but those that dissolve them? Trust me, gentlemen, the command which is
stringent against adoration of brutality, is stringent no less against
adoration of chaos, nor is faith in an image fallen from heaven to be
reformed by a faith only in the phenomenon of decadence. We have ceased
from the making of monsters to be appeased by sacrifice;--it is
well,--if indeed we have also ceased from making them in our thoughts.
We have learned to distrust the adorning of fair phantasms, to which we
once sought for succour;--it is well, if we learn to distrust also the
adorning of those to which we seek, for temptation; but the verity of
gains like these can only be known by our confession of the divine seal
of strength and beauty upon the tempered frame, and honour in the
fervent heart, by which, increasing visibly, may yet be manifested to
us the holy presence, and the approving love, of the Loving God, who
visits the iniquities of the Fathers upon the Children, unto the third
and fourth generation of them that hate Him, and shows mercy unto
thousands in them that love Him, and keep His Commandments.
FOOTNOTES:
[118] I shall be obliged in future lectures, as hitherto in my other
writings, to use the terms, Idolatry and Imagination in a more
comprehensive sense; but here I use them for convenience sake,
limitedly, to avoid the continual occurrence of the terms, noble and
ignoble, or false and true, with reference to modes of conception.
[119] "And in sum, he himself (Prometheus) was the master-maker, and
Athena worked together with him, breathing into the clay, and caused the
moulded things to have soul (psyche) in them."--LUCIAN, PROMETHEUS.
[120] His relations with the two great Titans, Themis and Mnemosyne,
belong to another group of myths. The father of Athena is the lower and
nearer physical Zeus, from whom Metis, the mother of Athena, long
withdraws and disguises herself.
[121] The Latin verses are of later date; the contemporary plain prose
retains the Venetian gutturals and aspirates.
[122] The best modern illustrated scientific works show perfect faculty
of representing monkeys, lizards, and insects; absolute incapability of
representing either a man, a horse, or a lion.
LECTURE IV.
LIKENESS.
_November, 1870._
109. You were probably vexed, and tired, towards the close of my last
lecture, by the time it took us to arrive at the apparently simple
conclusion, that sculpture must only represent organic form, and the
strength of life in its contest with matter. But it is no small thing to
have that "[Greek: leussô Pallada]" fixed in your minds, as the one
necessary sign by which you are to recognize right sculpture, and
believe me you will find it the best of all things, if you can take for
yourselves the saying from the lips of the Athenian maids, in its
entirety, and say also--[Greek: leussô Pallad' eman theon]. I proceed
to-day into the practical appliance of this apparently speculative, but
in reality imperative, law.
110. You observe, I have hitherto spoken of the power of Athena, as over
painting no less than sculpture. But her rule over both arts is only so
far as they are zoographic;--representative, that is to say, of animal
life, or of such order and discipline among other elements, as may
invigorate and purify it. Now there is a speciality of the art of
painting beyond this, namely, the representation of phenomena of colour
and shadow, as such, without question of the nature of the things that
receive them. I am now accordingly obliged to speak of sculpture and
painting as distinct arts, but the laws which bind sculpture, bind no
less the painting of the higher schools which has, for its main purpose,
the showing beauty in human or animal form; and which is therefore
placed by the Greeks equally under the rule of Athena, as the Spirit,
first, of Life, and then of Wisdom in conduct.
111. First, I say, you are to "see Pallas" in all such work, as the
Queen of Life; and the practical law which follows from this, is one of
enormous range and importance, namely, that nothing must be represented
by sculpture, external to any living form, which does not help to
enforce or illustrate the conception of life. Both dress and armour may
be made to do this, by great sculptors, and are continually so used by
the greatest. One of the essential distinctions between the Athenian and
Florentine schools is dependent on their treatment of drapery in this
respect; an Athenian always sets it to exhibit the action of the body,
by flowing with it, or over it, or from it, so as to illustrate both its
form and gesture; a Florentine, on the contrary, always uses his drapery
to conceal or disguise the forms of the body, and exhibit mental
emotion: but both use it to enhance the life, either of the body or
soul; Donatello and Michael Angelo, no less than the sculptors of Gothic
chivalry, ennoble armour in the same way; but base sculptors carve
drapery and armour for the sake of their folds and picturesqueness only,
and forget the body beneath. The rule is so stern that all delight in
mere incidental beauty, which painting often triumphs in, is wholly
forbidden to sculpture;--for instance, in _painting_ the branch of a
tree, you may rightly represent and enjoy the lichens and moss on it,
but a sculptor must not touch one of them: they are inessential to the
tree's life,--he must give the flow and bending of the branch only, else
he does not enough "see Pallas" in it.
Or to take a higher instance, here is an exquisite little painted poem,
by Edward Frere; a cottage interior, one of the thousands which within
the last two months[123] have been laid desolate in unhappy France.
Every accessory in the painting is of value--the fireside, the tiled
floor, the vegetables lying upon it, and the basket hanging from the
roof. But not one of these accessories would have been admissible in
sculpture. You must carve nothing but what has life. "Why"? you probably
feel instantly inclined to ask me.--You see the principle we have got,
instead of being blunt or useless, is such an edged tool that you are
startled the moment I apply it. "Must we refuse every pleasant accessory
and picturesque detail, and petrify nothing but living creatures"?--Even
so: I would not assert it on my own authority. It is the Greeks who say
it, but whatever they say of sculpture, be assured, is true.
112. That then is the first law--you must see Pallas as the Lady of
Life--the second is, you must see her as the Lady of Wisdom; or [Greek:
sophia]--and this is the chief matter of all. I cannot but think, that
after the considerations into which we have now entered, you will find
more interest than hitherto in comparing the statements of Aristotle, in
the Ethics, with those of Plato in the Polity, which are authoritative
as Greek definitions of goodness in art, and which you may safely hold
authoritative as constant definitions of it. You remember, doubtless,
that the [Greek: sophia] or [Greek: aretê technês], for the sake of
which Phidias is called [Greek: sophos] as a sculptor, and Polyclitus as
an image-maker, Eth. 6. 7. (the opposition is both between ideal and
portrait sculpture, and between working in stone and bronze) consists in
the "[Greek: nous tôn timiôtatôn tê physei]" "the mental apprehension of
the things that are most honourable in their nature." Therefore what is,
indeed, most lovely, the true image-maker will most love; and what is
most hateful, he will most hate, and in all things discern the best and
strongest part of them, and represent that essentially, or, if the
opposite of that, then with manifest detestation and horror. That is his
art wisdom; the knowledge of good and evil, and the love of good, so
that you may discern, even in his representation of the vilest thing,
his acknowledgment of what redemption is possible for it, or latent
power exists in it; and, contrariwise, his sense of its present misery.
But for the most part, he will idolize, and force us also to idolize,
whatever is living, and virtuous, and victoriously right; opposing to it
in some definite mode the image of the conquered [Greek: herpeton].
113. This is generally true of both the great arts; but in severity and
precision, true of sculpture. To return to our illustration: this poor
little girl was more interesting to Edward Frere, he being a painter,
because she was poorly dressed, and wore these clumsy shoes, and old red
cap, and patched gown. May we sculpture her so? No. We may sculpture her
naked, if we like; but not in rags.
But if we may not put her into marble in rags, may we give her a pretty
frock with ribands and flounces to it, and put her into marble in that?
No. We may put her simplest peasant's dress, so it be perfect and
orderly, into marble; anything finer than that would be more
dishonourable in the eyes of Athena than rags. If she were a French
princess, you might carve her embroidered robe and diadem; if she were
Joan of Arc you might carve her armour--for then these also would be
"[Greek: tôn timiôtatôn]," not otherwise.
114. Is not this an edge-tool we have got hold of, unawares? and a
subtle one too; so delicate and scimitar-like in decision. For note,
that even Joan of Arc's armour must be only sculptured, _if she has it
on_; it is not the honourableness or beauty of it that are enough, but
the direct bearing of it by her body. You might be deeply, even
pathetically, interested by looking at a good knight's dinted coat of
mail, left in his desolate hall. May you sculpture it where it hangs?
No; the helmet for his pillow, if you will--no more.
You see we did not do our dull work for nothing in last lecture. I
define what we have gained once more, and then we will enter on our new
ground.
115. The proper subject of sculpture, we have determined, is the
spiritual power seen in the form of any living thing, and so represented
as to give evidence that the sculptor has loved the good of it and hated
the evil.
"_So_ represented," we say; but how is that to be done? Why should it
not be represented, if possible, just as it is seen? What mode or limit
of representation may we adopt? We are to carve things that have
life;--shall we try so to imitate them that they may indeed seem
living,--or only half living, and like stone instead of flesh?
It will simplify this question if I show you three examples of what the
Greeks actually did: three typical pieces of their sculpture, in order
of perfection.
116. And now, observe that in all our historical work, I will endeavour
to do, myself, what I have asked you to do in your drawing exercises;
namely, to outline firmly in the beginning, and then fill in the detail
more minutely. I will give you first, therefore, in a symmetrical form,
absolutely simple and easily remembered, the large chronology of the
Greek school; within that unforgettable scheme we will place, as we
discover them, the minor relations of arts and times.
I number the nine centuries before Christ thus, upwards, and divide them
into three groups of three each.
{ 9
A. ARCHAIC. { 8
{ 7
----
{ 6
B. BEST. { 5
{ 4
----
{ 3
C. CORRUPT. { 2
{ 1
Then the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries are the period of Archaic
Greek Art, steadily progressive wherever it existed.
The sixth, fifth, and fourth are the period of central Greek Art; the
fifth, or central century producing the finest. That is easily
recollected by the battle of Marathon. And the third, second, and first
centuries are the period of steady decline.
[Illustration: PLATE VII.--ARCHAIC, CENTRAL AND DECLINING ART OF
GREECE.]
Learn this A B C thoroughly, and mark, for yourselves, what you, at
present, think the vital events in each century. As you know more, you
will think other events the vital ones; but the best historical
knowledge only approximates to true thought in that matter; only be sure
that what is truly vital in the character which governs events, is
always expressed by the art of the century; so that if you could
interpret that art rightly, the better part of your task in reading
history would be done to your hand.
117. It is generally impossible to date with precision art of the
archaic period--often difficult to date even that of the central three
hundred years. I will not weary you with futile minor divisions of time;
here are three coins (Plate VII.) roughly, but decisively,
characteristic of the three ages. The first is an early coin of
Tarentum. The city was founded as you know, by the Spartan Phalanthus,
late in the eighth century. I believe the head is meant for that of
Apollo Archegetes, it may however be Taras, the son of Poseidon; it is
no matter to us at present whom it is meant for, but the fact that we
cannot know, is itself of the greatest import. We cannot say, with any
certainty, unless by discovery of some collateral evidence, whether this
head is intended for that of a god, or demi-god, or a mortal warrior.
Ought not that to disturb some of your thoughts respecting Greek
idealism? Farther, if by investigation we discover that the head is
meant for that of Phalanthus, we shall know nothing of the character of
Phalanthus from the face; for there is no portraiture at this early
time.
118. The second coin is of Ænus in Macedonia; probably of the fifth or
early fourth century, and entirely characteristic of the central period.
This we know to represent the face of a god--Hermes. The third coin is a
king's, not a city's. I will not tell you, at this moment, what king's;
but only that it is a late coin of the third period, and that it is as
distinct in purpose as the coin of Tarentum is obscure. We know of this
coin, that it represents no god nor demi-god, but a mere mortal; and we
know precisely, from the portrait, what that mortal's face was like.
119. A glance at the three coins, as they are set side by side, will now
show you the main differences in the three great Greek styles. The
archaic coin is sharp and hard; every line decisive and numbered, set
unhesitatingly in its place; nothing is wrong, though everything
incomplete, and, to us who have seen finer art, ugly. The central coin
is as decisive and clear in arrangement of masses, but its contours are
completely rounded and finished. There is no character in its execution
so prominent that you can give an epithet to the style. It is not hard,
it is not soft, it is not delicate, it is not coarse, it is not
grotesque, it is not beautiful; and I am convinced, unless you had been
told that this is fine central Greek art, you would have seen nothing at
all in it to interest you. Do not let yourselves be anywise forced into
admiring it; there is, indeed, nothing more here, than an approximately
true rendering of a healthy youthful face, without the slightest attempt
to give an expression of activity, cunning, nobility, or any other
attribute of the Mercurial mind. Extreme simplicity, unpretending vigour
of work, which claims no admiration either for minuteness or dexterity,
and suggests no idea of effort at all; refusal of extraneous ornament,
and perfectly arranged disposition of counted masses in a sequent order,
whether in the beads, or the ringlets of hair; this is all you have to
be pleased with; neither will you ever find, in the best Greek Art,
more. You might at first suppose that the chain of beads round the cap
was an extraneous ornament; but I have little doubt that it is as
definitely the proper fillet for the head of Hermes, as the olive for
Zeus, or corn for Triptolemus. The cap or petasus cannot have expanded
edges, there is no room for them on the coin; these must be understood,
therefore; but the nature of the cloud-petasus is explained by edging it
with beads, representing either dew or hail. The shield of Athena often
bears white pellets for hail, in like manner.
120. The third coin will, I think, at once strike you by what we moderns
should call its "vigour of character." You may observe also that the
features are finished with great care and subtlety, but at the cost of
simplicity and breadth. But the _essential_ difference between it and
the central art, is its disorder in design--you see the locks of hair
cannot be counted any longer--they are entirely dishevelled and
irregular. Now the individual character may, or may not be, a sign of
decline; but the licentiousness, the casting loose of the masses in the
design, is an infallible one. The effort at portraiture is good for art
if the men to be portrayed are good men, not otherwise. In the instance
before you, the head is that of Mithridates VI. of Pontus, who had,
indeed, the good qualities of being a linguist and a patron of the arts;
but as you will remember, murdered, according to report, his mother,
certainly his brother, certainly his wives and sisters, I have not
counted how many of his children, and from a hundred to a hundred and
fifty thousand persons besides; these last in a single day's massacre.
The effort to represent this kind of person is not by any means a method
of study from life ultimately beneficial to art.
121. This however is not the point I have to urge to-day. What I want
you to observe is that, though the master of the great time does not
attempt portraiture, he _does_ attempt animation. And as far as his
means will admit, he succeeds in making the face--you might almost
think--vulgarly animated; as like a real face, literally, "as it can
stare." Yes: and its sculptor meant it to be so; and that was what
Phidias meant his Jupiter to be, if he could manage it. Not, indeed, to
be taken for Zeus himself; and yet, to be as like a living Zeus as art
could make it. Perhaps you think he tried to make it look living only
for the sake of the mob, and would not have tried to do so for
connoisseurs. Pardon me; for real connoisseurs, he would, and did; and
herein consists a truth which belongs to all the arts, and which I will
at once drive home in your minds, as firmly as I can.
122. All second-rate artists--(and remember, the second-rate ones are a
loquacious multitude, while the great come only one or two in a century;
and then, silently)--all second-rate artists will tell you that the
object of fine art is not resemblance, but some kind of abstraction more
refined than reality. Put that out of your heads at once. The object of
the great Resemblant Arts is, and always has been, to resemble; and to
resemble as closely as possible. It is the function of a good portrait
to set the man before you in habit as he lived, and I would we had a few
more that did so. It is the function of a good landscape to set the
scene before you in its reality, to make you, if it may be, think the
clouds are flying, and the streams foaming. It is the function of the
best sculptor--the true Dædalus--to make stillness look like breathing,
and marble look like flesh.
123. And in all great times of art, this purpose is as naïvely expressed
as it is steadily held. All the talk about abstraction belongs to
periods of decadence. In living times, people see something living that
pleases them; and they try to make it live for ever, or to make it
something as like it as possible, that will last for ever. They paint
their statues, and inlay the eyes with jewels, and set real crowns on
their heads; they finish, in their pictures, every thread of embroidery,
and would fain, if they could, draw every leaf upon the trees. And their
only verbal expression of conscious success is, that they have made
their work "look real."
124. You think all that very wrong. So did I, once; but it was I that
was wrong. A long time ago, before ever I had seen Oxford, I painted a
picture of the Lake of Como, for my father. It was not at all like the
Lake of Como; but I thought it rather the better for that. My father
differed with me; and objected particularly to a boat with a red and
yellow awning, which I had put into the most conspicuous corner of my
drawing. I declared this boat to be "necessary to the composition." My
father not the less objected, that he had never seen such a boat, either
at Como or elsewhere; and suggested that if I would make the lake look a
little more like water, I should be under no necessity of explaining its
nature by the presence of floating objects. I thought him at the time a
very simple person for his pains; but have since learned, and it is the
very gist of all practical matters, which, as professor of fine art, I
have now to tell you, that the great point in painting a lake is--to get
it to look like water.
125. So far, so good. We lay it down for a first principle, that our
graphic art, whether painting or sculpture, is to produce something
which shall look as like Nature as possible. But now we must go one step
farther, and say that it is to produce what shall look like Nature to
people who know what Nature is like! You see this is at once a great
restriction, as well as a great exaltation of our aim. Our business is
not to deceive the simple; but to deceive the wise! Here, for instance,
is a modern Italian print, representing, to the best of its power, St.
Cecilia, in a brilliantly realistic manner. And the fault of the work is
not in its earnest endeavour to show St. Cecilia in habit as she lived,
but in that the effort could only be successful with persons unaware of
the habit St. Cecilia lived in. And this condition of appeal only to the
wise increases the difficulty of imitative resemblance so greatly, that,
with only average skill or materials, we must surrender all hope of it,
and be content with an imperfect representation, true as far as it
reaches, and such as to excite the imagination of a wise beholder to
complete it; though falling very far short of what either he or we
should otherwise have desired. For instance, here is a suggestion, by
Sir Joshua Reynolds, of the general appearance of a British
Judge--requiring the imagination of a very wise beholder indeed, to fill
it up, or even at first to discover what it is meant for. Nevertheless,
it is better art than the Italian St. Cecilia, because the artist,
however little he may have done to represent his knowledge, does,
indeed, know altogether what a Judge is like, and appeals only to the
criticism of those who know also.
126. There must be, therefore, two degrees of truth to be looked for in
the good graphic arts; one, the commonest, which, by any partial or
imperfect sign conveys to you an idea which you must complete for
yourself; and the other, the finest, a representation so perfect as to
leave you nothing to be farther accomplished by this independent
exertion; but to give you the same feeling of possession and presence
which you would experience from the natural object itself. For instance
of the first, in this representation of a rainbow,[124] the artist has
no hope that, by the black lines of engraving, he can deceive you into
any belief of the rainbow's being there, but he gives indication enough
of what he intends, to enable you to supply the rest of the idea
yourself, providing always you know beforehand what a rainbow is like.
But in this drawing of the falls of Terni,[125] the painter has
strained his skill to the utmost to give an actually deceptive
resemblance of the iris, dawning and fading among the foam. So far as he
has not actually deceived you, it is not because he would not have done
so if he could; but only because his colours and science have fallen
short of his desire. They have fallen so little short that, in a good
light, you may all but believe the foam and the sunshine are drifting
and changing among the rocks.
127. And after looking a little while, you will begin to regret that
they are not so: you will feel that, lovely as the drawing is, you would
like far better to see the real place, and the goats skipping among the
rocks, and the spray floating above the fall. And this is the true sign
of the greatest art--to part voluntarily with its greatness;--to make
_itself_ poor and unnoticed; but so to exalt and set forth its theme
that you may be fain to see the theme instead of it. So that you have
never enough admired a great workman's doing till you have begun to
despise it. The best homage that could be paid to the Athena of Phidias
would be to desire rather to see the living goddess; and the loveliest
Madonnas of Christian art fall short of their due power, if they do not
make their beholders sick at heart to see the living Virgin.
128. We have then, for our requirement of the finest art (sculpture, or
anything else), that it shall be so like the thing it represents as to
please those who best know or can conceive the original; and, if
possible, please them deceptively--its final triumph being to deceive
even the wise; and (the Greeks thought) to please even the Immortals,
who were so wise as to be undeceivable. So that you get the Greek, thus
far entirely true, idea of perfectness in sculpture, expressed to you by
what Phalaris says, at first sight of the bull of Perilaus, "It only
wanted motion and bellowing to seem alive; and as soon as I saw it, I
cried out, it ought to be sent to the god." To Apollo, for only he, the
undeceivable, could thoroughly understand such sculpture, and perfectly
delight in it.
129. And with this expression of the Greek ideal of sculpture, I wish
you to join the early Italian, summed in a single line by Dante--"non
vide me' di me, chi vide 'l vero." Read the 12th canto of the
"Purgatory," and learn that whole passage by heart; and if ever you
chance to go to Pistoja, look at La Robbia's coloured porcelain
bas-reliefs of the seven works of Mercy on the front of the hospital
there; and note especially the faces of the two sick men--one at the
point of death, and the other in the first peace and long-drawn
breathing of health after fever--and you will know what Dante meant by
the preceding line, "Morti li morti, e i vivi parèn vivi."
130. But now, may we not ask farther,--is it impossible for art such as
this, prepared for the wise, to please the simple also? Without entering
on the awkward questions of degree, how many the wise can be, or how
much men should know, in order to be rightly called wise, may we not
conceive an art to be possible, which would deceive _every_body, or
everybody worth deceiving? I showed you at my first lecture, a little
ringlet of Japan ivory, as a type of elementary bas-relief touched with
colour; and in your rudimentary series you have a drawing by Mr.
Burgess, of one of the little fishes enlarged, with every touch of the
chisel facsimiled on the more visible scale; and showing the little
black bead inlaid for the eye, which in the original is hardly to be
seen without a lens. You may, perhaps be surprised, when I tell you,
that (putting the question of _subject_ aside for the moment, and
speaking only of the mode of execution and aim at resemblance), you have
there a perfect example of the Greek ideal of method in sculpture. And
you will admit that, to the simplest person whom we could introduce as a
critic, that fish would be a satisfactory, nay, almost a deceptive fish;
while to any one caring for subtleties of art, I need not point out that
every touch of the chisel is applied with consummate knowledge, and that
it would be impossible to convey more truth and life with the given
quantity of workmanship.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.]
131. Here is, indeed, a drawing by Turner, (Edu. 131), in which with
some fifty times the quantity of labour, and far more highly educated
faculty of sight, the artist has expressed some qualities of lustre and
colour which only very wise persons indeed could perceive in a John
Dory; and this piece of paper contains, therefore, much more, and more
subtle, art, than the Japan ivory; but are we sure that it is therefore
_greater_ art? or that the painter was better employed in producing this
drawing, which only one person can possess, and only one in a hundred
enjoy, than he would have been in producing two or three pieces on a
larger scale, which should have been at once accessible to, and
enjoyable by, a number of simpler persons? Suppose for instance, that
Turner, instead of faintly touching this outline, on white paper, with
his camel's hair pencil, had struck the main forms of his fish into
marble, thus (Fig. 7): and instead of colouring the white paper so
delicately that, perhaps, only a few of the most keenly observant
artists in England can see it at all, had, with his strong hand, tinted
the marble with a few colours, deceptive to the people, and harmonious
to the initiated; suppose that he had even conceded so much to the
spirit of popular applause as to allow of a bright glass bead being
inlaid for the eye, in the Japanese manner; and that the enlarged,
deceptive, and popularly pleasing work had been carved on the outside of
a great building,--say Fishmongers' Hall,--where everybody commercially
connected with Billingsgate could have seen it, and ratified it with the
wisdom of the market;--might not the art have been greater, worthier,
and kinder in such use?
132. Perhaps the idea does not once approve itself to you of having your
public buildings covered with ornaments like this; but pray, remember
that the choice of _subject_ is an ethical question, not now before us.
All I ask you to decide is whether the method is right, and would be
pleasant in giving the distinctiveness to pretty things, which it has
here given to what, I suppose it may be assumed, you feel to be an ugly
thing. Of course, I must note parenthetically, such realistic work is
impossible in a country where the buildings are to be discoloured by
coal-smoke; but so is all fine sculpture, whatsoever; and the whiter,
the worse its chance. For that which is prepared for private persons, to
be kept under cover, will, of necessity, degenerate into the copyism of
past work, or merely sensational and sensual forms of present life,
unless there be a governing school addressing the populace, for their
instruction, on the outside of buildings. So that, as I partly warned
you in my third lecture, you can simply have _no_ sculpture in a coal
country. Whether you like coals or carvings best, is no business of
mine. I merely have to assure you of the fact that they are
incompatible.
But, assuming that we are again, some day, to become a civilized and
governing race, deputing ironmongery, coal-digging, and lucre-digging,
to our slaves in other countries, it is quite conceivable that, with an
increasing knowledge of natural history, and desire for such knowledge,
what is now done by careful, but inefficient, woodcuts, and in
ill-coloured engravings, might be put in quite permanent sculptures,
with inlay of variegated precious stones, on the outside of buildings,
where such pictures would be little costly to the people; and in a more
popular manner still, by Robbia ware and Palissy ware, and inlaid
majolica, which would differ from the housewives' present favourite
decoration of plates above her kitchen dresser, by being every piece of
it various, instructive, and universally visible.
133. You hardly know, I suppose, whether I am speaking in jest or
earnest. In the most solemn earnest, I assure you; though such is the
strange course of our popular life that all the irrational arts of
destruction are at once felt to be earnest; while any plan for those of
instruction on a grand scale, sounds like a dream or jest. Still, I do
not absolutely propose to decorate our public buildings with sculpture
wholly of this character; though beast, and fowl, and creeping things,
and fishes, might all find room on such a building as the Solomon's
House of a New Atlantis; and some of them might even become symbolic of
much to us again. Passing through the Strand, only the other day, for
instance, I saw four highly finished and delicately coloured pictures of
cock-fighting, which, for imitative quality, were nearly all that could
be desired, going far beyond the Greek cock of Himera; and they would
have delighted a Greek's soul, if they had meant as much as a Greek
cock-fight; but they were only types of the "[Greek: endomachas
alektôr]," and of the spirit of home contest, which has been so fatal
lately to the Bird of France; and not of the defence of one's own
barnyard, in thought of which the Olympians set the cock on the pillars
of their chariot course; and gave it goodly alliance in its battle, as
you may see here, in what is left of the angle of mouldering marble in
the chair of the priest of Dionusos. The cast of it, from the centre of
the theatre under the Acropolis, is in the British Museum; and I wanted
its spiral for you, and this kneeling Angel of Victory;--it is late
Greek art, but nobly systematic flat bas-relief. So I set Mr. Burgess to
draw it; but neither he nor I for a little while, could make out what
the Angel of Victory was kneeling for. His attitude is an ancient and
grandly conventional one among the Egyptians; and I was tracing it back
to a kneeling goddess of the greatest dynasty of the Pharaohs--a goddess
of Evening, or Death, laying down the sun out of her right hand;--when,
one bright day, the shadows came out clear on the Athenian throne, and I
saw that my Angel of Victory was only backing a cock at a cock-fight.
134. Still, as I have said, there is no reason why sculpture, even for
simplest persons, should confine itself to imagery of fish, or fowl, or
four-footed things.
We go back to our first principle: we ought to carve nothing but what is
honourable. And you are offended, at this moment, with my fish, (as I
believe, when the first sculptures appeared on the windows of this
museum, offence was taken at the unnecessary introduction of cats),
these dissatisfactions being properly felt by your "[Greek: nous tôn
timiôtatôn]." For indeed, in all cases, our right judgment must depend
on our wish to give honour only to things and creatures that deserve it.
135. And now I must state to you another principle of veracity, both in
sculpture, and all following arts, of wider scope than any hitherto
examined. We have seen that sculpture is to be a true representation of
true external form. Much more is it to be a representation of true
internal emotion. You must carve only what you yourself see as you see
it; but, much more, you must carve only what you yourself feel, as you
feel it. You may no more endeavour to feel through other men's souls,
than to see with other men's eyes. Whereas generally now in Europe and
America, every man's energy is bent upon acquiring some false emotion,
not his own, but belonging to the past, or to other persons, because he
has been taught that such and such a result of it will be fine. Every
attempted sentiment in relation to art is hypocritical; our notions of
sublimity, of grace, or pious serenity, are all second hand; and we are
practically incapable of designing so much as a bell-handle or a
door-knocker without borrowing the first notion of it from those who are
gone--where we shall not wake them with our knocking. I would we could.
136. In the midst of this desolation we have nothing to count on for
real growth, but what we can find of honest liking and longing, in
ourselves and in others. We must discover, if we would healthily
advance, what things are verily [Greek: timiôtata] among us; and if we
delight to honour the dishonourable, consider how, in future, we may
better bestow our likings. Now it appears to me from all our popular
declarations, that we, at present, honour nothing so much as liberty and
independence; and no person so much as the Free man and Self-made man,
who will be ruled by no one, and has been taught, or helped, by no one.
And the reason I chose a fish for you as the first subject of sculpture,
was that in men who are free and self-made, you have the nearest
approach, humanly possible, to the state of the fish, and finely
organized [Greek: herpeton]. You get the exact phrase in Habakkuk, if
you take the Septuagint text.--"[Greek: poiêseis tous anthrôpous hôs
tous ichthyas tês thalassês, kai hôs ta herpeta ta ouk echonta
hêgoumenon."] "Thou wilt make men as the fishes of the sea, and as the
reptile things, _that have no ruler over them_." And it chanced that as
I was preparing this lecture, one of our most able and popular prints
gave me a woodcut of the "self-made man," specified as such, so
vigorously drawn, and with so few touches, that Phidias or Turner
himself could scarcely have done it better; so that I had only to ask my
assistant to enlarge it with accuracy, and it became comparable with my
fish at once. Of course it is not given by the caricaturist as an
admirable face; only, I am enabled by his skill to set before you,
without any suspicion of unfairness on _my_ part, the expression to
which the life we profess to think most honourable, naturally leads. If
we were to take the hat off, you see how nearly the profile corresponds
with that of the typical fish.
[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--THE APOLLO OF SYRACUSE AND THE SELF-MADE
MAN.]
137. Such, then, being the definition by your best popular art, of the
ideal of feature at which we are gradually arriving by self-manufacture;
when I place opposite to it (in Plate VIII.) the profile of a man not in
any wise self-made, neither by the law of his own will, nor by the love
of his own interest--nor capable, for a moment, of any kind of
"Independence," or of the idea of independence; but wholly dependent
upon, and subjected to, external influence of just law, wise teaching,
and trusted love and truth, in his fellow-spirits;--setting before you,
I say, this profile of a God-made instead of a self-made, man, I know
that you will feel, on the instant, that you are brought into contact
with the vital elements of human art; and that this, the sculpture of
the good, is indeed the only permissible sculpture.
138. A God-made _man_, I say. The face, indeed, stands as a symbol of
more than man in its sculptor's mind. For as I gave you, to lead your
first effort in the form of leaves, the sceptre of Apollo, so this,
which I give you as the first type of rightness in the form of flesh, is
the countenance of the holder of that sceptre, the Sun-God of Syracuse.
But there is nothing in the face (nor did the Greek suppose there was)
more perfect than might be seen in the daily beauty of the creatures the
Sun-God shone upon, and whom his strength and honour animated. This is
not an ideal, but a quite literally true, face of a Greek youth; nay, I
will undertake to show you that it is not supremely beautiful, and even
to surpass it altogether with the literal portrait of an Italian one. It
is in verity no more than the form habitually taken by the features of a
well educated young Athenian or Sicilian citizen; and the one
requirement for the sculptors of to-day is not, as it has been thought,
to invent the same ideal, but merely to see the same reality.
Now, you know I told you in my fourth lecture, that the beginning of art
was in getting our country clean and our people beautiful, and you
supposed that to be a statement irrelevant to my subject; just as, at
this moment, you perhaps think, I am quitting the great subject of this
present lecture--the method of likeness-making--and letting myself
branch into the discussion of what things we are to make likeness of.
But you shall see hereafter that the method of imitating a beautiful
thing must be different from the method of imitating an ugly one; and
that, with the change in subject from what is dishonourable to what is
honourable, there will be involved a parallel change in the management
of tools, of lines, and of colours. So that before I can determine for
you _how_ you are to imitate, you must tell me what kind of face you
wish to imitate. The best draughtsmen in the world could not draw this
Apollo in ten scratches, though he can draw the self-made man. Still
less this nobler Apollo of Ionian Greece, (Plate IX.) in which the
incisions are softened into a harmony like that of Correggio's painting.
So that you see the method itself,--the choice between black incision or
fine sculpture, and perhaps, presently, the choice between colour or no
colour, will depend on what you have to represent. Colour may be
expedient for a glistening dolphin or a spotted fawn;--perhaps
inexpedient for white Poseidon, and gleaming Dian. So that, before
defining the laws of sculpture, I am compelled to ask you, _what you
mean to carve_; and that, little as you think it, is asking you how you
mean to live, and what the laws of your State are to be, for _they_
determine those of your statue. You can only have this kind of face to
study from, in the sort of state that produced it. And you will find
that sort of state described in the beginning of the fourth book of the
laws of Plato; as founded, for one thing, on the conviction that of all
the evils that can happen to a state, quantity of money is the greatest!
[Greek: meizon kakon, ôs epos eipein, polei ouden an gignoito, eis
gennaiôn kai dikaiôn êthôn ktêsin], "for, to speak shortly, no greater
evil, matching each against each, can possibly happen to a city, as
adverse to its forming just or generous character," than its being full
of silver and gold.
139. Of course, the Greek notion may be wrong, and ours right,
only--[Greek: ôs epos eipein]--you can have Greek sculpture only on that
Greek theory: shortly expressed by the words put into the mouth of
Poverty herself, in the Plutus of Aristophanes "[Greek: Tou ploutou
parechô beltionas andras, kai tên gnômên, kai tên idean]," "I deliver to
you better men than the God of Money can, both in imagination and
feature." So on the other hand, this ichthyoid, reptilian, or
mono-chondyloid ideal of the self-made man can only be reached,
universally, by a nation which holds that poverty, either of purse or
spirit,--but especially the spiritual character of being [Greek: ptôchoi
tô pneumati], is the lowest of degradations; and which believes that the
desire of wealth is the first of manly and moral sentiments. As I have
been able to get the popular ideal represented by its own living art, so
I can give you this popular faith in its own living words; but in words
meant seriously and not at all as caricature, from one of our leading
journals, professedly æsthetic also in its very name, the _Spectator_,
of August 6th, 1870.
[Illustration: PLATE IX.--APOLLO CHRYSOCOMES OF CLAZOMENÆ.]
"Mr. Ruskin's plan," it says, "would make England poor, in order that
she might be cultivated, and refined and artistic. A wilder proposal was
never broached by a man of ability; and it might be regarded as a proof
that the assiduous study of art emasculates the intellect, _and even the
moral sense_. Such a theory almost warrants the contempt with which art
is often regarded by essentially intellectual natures, like Proudhon"
(sic). "Art is noble as the flower of life, and the creations of a
Titian are a great heritage of the race; but if England could secure
high art and Venetian glory of colour only by the sacrifice of her
manufacturing supremacy, and _by the acceptance of national poverty_,
then the pursuit of such artistic achievements would imply that we had
ceased to possess natures of manly strength, _or to know the meaning of
moral aims_. If we must choose between a Titian and a Lancashire cotton
mill, then, in the name of manhood and of morality, give us the cotton
mill. Only the dilettantism of the studio; that dilettantism which
loosens the moral no less than the intellectual fibre, and which is as
fatal to rectitude of action as to correctness of reasoning power, would
make a different choice."
You see also, by this interesting and most memorable passage, how
completely the question is admitted to be one of ethics--the only real
point at issue being, whether this face or that is developed on the
truer moral principle.
140. I assume, however, for the present, that this Apolline type is the
kind of form you wish to reach and to represent. And now observe,
instantly, the whole question of manner of imitation is altered for us.
The fins of the fish, the plumes of the swan, and the flowing of the
Sun-God's hair are all represented by incisions--but the incisions do
sufficiently represent the fin and feather,--they _in_sufficiently
represent the hair. If I chose, with a little more care and labor, I
could absolutely get the surface of the scales and spines of the fish,
and the expression of its mouth; but no quantity of labor would obtain
the real surface of a tress of Apollo's hair, and the full expression of
his mouth. So that we are compelled at once to call the imagination to
help us, and say to it, _You_ know what the Apollo Chrysocomes must be
like; finish all this for yourself. Now, the law under which imagination
works, is just that of other good workers. "You must give me clear
orders; show me what I have to do, and where I am to begin, and let me
alone." And the orders can be given, quite clearly, up to a certain
point, in form; but they cannot be given clearly in color, now that the
subject is subtle. All beauty of this high kind depends on harmony; let
but the slightest discord come into it, and the finer the thing is, the
more fatal will be the flaw. Now, on a flat surface, I can command my
color to be precisely what and where I mean it to be; on a round one I
cannot. For all harmony depends, first, on the fixed proportion of the
color of the light to that of the relative shadow; and therefore if I
fasten my color, I must fasten my shade. But on a round surface the
shadow changes at every hour of the day; and therefore all coloring
which is expressive of form, is impossible; and if the form is fine,
(and here there is nothing but what is fine,) you may bid farewell to
color.
141. Farewell to color; that is to say, if the thing is to be seen
distinctly, and you have only wise people to show it to; but if it is to
be seen indistinctly, at a distance, color may become explanatory; and
if you have simple people to show it to, color may be necessary to
excite _their_ imaginations, though not to excite yours. And the art is
great always by meeting its conditions in the straightest way; and if it
is to please a multitude of innocent and bluntly-minded persons, must
express itself in the terms that will touch them; else it is not good.
And I have to trace for you through the history of the past, and
possibilities of the future, the expedients used by great sculptors to
obtain clearness, impressiveness, or splendor; and the manner of their
appeal to the people, under various light and shadow, and with reference
to different degrees of public intelligence: such investigation
resolving itself again and again, as we proceed, into questions
absolutely ethical; as, for instance, whether color is to be bright or
dull,--that is to say, for a populace cheerful or heartless;--whether it
is to be delicate or strong,--that is to say, for a populace attentive
or careless; whether it is to be a background like the sky, for a
procession of young men and maidens, because your populace revere
life--or the shadow of the vault behind a corpse stained with drops of
blackened blood, for a populace taught to worship Death. Every critical
determination of rightness depends on the obedience to some ethic law,
by the most rational and, therefore, simplest means. And you see how it
depends most, of all things, on whether you are working for chosen
persons, or for the mob; for the joy of the boudoir, or of the Borgo.
And if for the mob, whether the mob of Olympia, or of St. Antoine.
Phidias, showing his Jupiter for the first time, hides behind the temple
door to listen, resolved afterwards "[Greek: rhythmizein to agalma pros
to tois pleistois dokoun, ou gar hêgeito mikran einai symboulên dêmou
tosoutou]," and truly, as your people is, in judgment, and in multitude,
so must your sculpture be, in glory. An elementary principle which has
been too long out of mind.
142. I leave you to consider it, since, for some time, we shall not
again be able to take up the inquiries to which it leads. But,
ultimately, I do not doubt that you will rest satisfied in these
following conclusions:
1. Not only sculpture, but all the other fine arts, must be for the
people.
2. They must be didactic to the people, and that as their chief end. The
structural arts, didactic in their manner; the graphic arts, in their
matter also.
3. And chiefly the great representative and imaginative arts--that is to
say, the drama and sculpture--are to teach what is noble in past
history, and lovely in existing human and organic life.
4. And the test of right manner of execution in these arts, is that
they strike, in the most emphatic manner, the rank of popular minds
to which they are addressed.
5. And the test of utmost fineness in execution in these arts, is that
they make themselves be forgotten in what they represent; and so fulfil
the words of their greatest Master,
"THE BEST, IN THIS KIND, ARE BUT SHADOWS."
FOOTNOTES:
[123] See date of delivery of Lecture. The picture was of a peasant girl
of eleven or twelve years old, peeling carrots by a cottage fire.
[124] In Durer's "Melencholia."
[125] Turner's, in the Hakewill series.
LECTURE V.
STRUCTURE.
_December, 1870._
143. On previous occasions of addressing you, I have endeavoured to show
you, first, how sculpture is distinguished from other arts; then its
proper subjects, then its proper method in the realization of these
subjects. To-day, we must, in the fourth place, consider the means at
its command for the accomplishment of these ends; the nature of its
materials; and the mechanical or other difficulties of their treatment.
And however doubtful we may have remained, as to the justice of Greek
ideals, or propriety of Greek methods of representing them, we may be
certain that the example of the Greeks will be instructive in all
practical matters relating to this great art, peculiarly their own. I
think even the evidence I have already laid before you is enough to
convince you, that it was by rightness and reality, not by idealism or
delightfulness only, that their minds were finally guided; and I am sure
that, before closing the present course, I shall be able so far to
complete that evidence, as to prove to you that the commonly received
notions of classic art are, not only unfounded, but even in many
respects, directly contrary to the truth. You are constantly told that
Greece idealized whatever she contemplated. She did the exact contrary:
she realized and verified it. You are constantly told she sought only
the beautiful. She sought, indeed, with all her heart; but she found,
because she never doubted that the search was to be consistent with
propriety and common sense. And the first thing you will always discern
in Greek work is the first which you _ought_ to discern in all work;
namely, that the object of it has been rational, and has been obtained
by simple and unostentatious means.
144. "That the object of the work has been rational!" Consider how much
that implies. That it should be by all means seen to have been
determined upon, and carried through, with sense and discretion; these
being gifts of intellect far more precious than any knowledge of
mathematics, or of the mechanical resources of art. Therefore, also,
that it should be a modest and temperate work, a structure fitted to the
actual state of men; proportioned to their actual size, as animals,--to
their average strength,--to their true necessities,--and to the degree
of easy command they have over the forces and substances of nature.
145. You see how much this law excludes! All that is fondly magnificent,
insolently ambitious, or vainly difficult. There is, indeed, such a
thing as Magnanimity in design, but never unless it be joined also with
modesty and _Equ_animity. Nothing extravagant, monstrous, strained, or
singular, can be structurally beautiful. No towers of Babel envious of
the skies; no pyramids in mimicry of the mountains of the earth; no
streets that are a weariness to traverse, nor temples that make pigmies
of the worshippers.
It is one of the primal merits and decencies of Greek work that it was,
on the whole, singularly small in scale, and wholly within reach of
sight, to its finest details. And, indeed, the best buildings that I
know are thus modest; and some of the best are minute jewel cases for
sweet sculpture. The Parthenon would hardly attract notice, if it were
set by the Charing Cross Railway Station: the Church of the Miracoli, at
Venice, the Chapel of the Rose, at Lucca, and the Chapel of the Thorn,
at Pisa, would not, I suppose, all three together, fill the tenth part,
cube, of a transept of the Crystal Palace. And they are better so.
146. In the chapter on Power in the "Seven Lamps of Architecture," I
have stated what seems, at first, the reverse of what I am saying now;
namely, that it is better to have one grand building than any number of
mean ones. And that is true, but you cannot command grandeur by size
till you can command grace in minuteness; and least of all, remember,
will you so command it to-day, when magnitude has become the chief
exponent of folly and misery, co-ordinate in the fraternal enormities of
the Factory and Poorhouse,--the Barracks and Hospital. And the final law
in this matter is, that if you require edifices only for the grace and
health of mankind, and build them without pretence and without
chicanery, they will be sublime on a modest scale, and lovely with
little decoration.
147. From these principles of simplicity and temperance, two very
severely fixed laws of construction follow; namely, first, that our
structure, to be beautiful, must be produced with tools of men; and
secondly, that it must be composed of natural substances. First, I say,
produced with tools of men. All fine art requires the application of the
whole strength and subtlety of the body, so that such art is not
possible to any sickly person, but involves the action and force of a
strong man's arm from the shoulder, as well as the delicatest touch of
his finger: and it is the evidence that this full and fine strength has
been spent on it which makes the art executively noble; so that no
instrument must be used, habitually, which is either too heavy to be
delicately restrained, or too small and weak to transmit a vigorous
impulse; much less any mechanical aid, such as would render the
sensibility of the fingers ineffectual.[126]
148. Of course, any kind of work in glass, or in metal, on a large
scale, involves some painful endurance of heat; and working in clay,
some habitual endurance of cold; but the point beyond which the effort
must not be carried is marked by loss of power of manipulation. As long
as the eyes and fingers have complete command of the material (as a
glass blower has, for instance, in doing fine ornamental work)--the law
is not violated; but all our great engine and furnace work, in
gun-making and the like, is degrading to the intellect; and no nation
can long persist in it without losing many of its human faculties. Nay,
even the use of machinery, other than the common rope and pully, for the
lifting of weights, is degrading to architecture; the invention of
expedients for the raising of enormous stones has always been a
characteristic of partly savage or corrupted races. A block of marble
not larger than a cart with a couple of oxen could carry, and a
cross-beam, with a couple of pulleys, raise, is as large as should
generally be used in any building. The employment of large masses is
sure to lead to vulgar exhibitions of geometrical arrangement,[127] and
to draw away the attention from the sculpture. In general, rocks
naturally break into such pieces as the human beings that have to build
with them can easily lift, and no larger should be sought for.
149. In this respect, and in many other subtle ways, the law that the
work is to be with tools of men is connected with the farther condition
of its modesty, that it is to be wrought in substance provided by
Nature, and to have a faithful respect to all the essential qualities of
such substance.
And here I must ask your attention to the idea, and, more than
idea,--the fact, involved in that infinitely misused term,
"Providentia," when applied to the Divine Power. In its truest sense and
scholarly use, it is a human virtue, [Greek: Promêtheia]; the personal
type of it is in Prometheus, and all the first power of [Greek: technê],
is from him, as compared to the weakness of days when men without
foresight "[Greek: ephyron eikê panta]." But, so far as we use the word
"Providence" as an attribute of the Maker and Giver of all things, it
does not mean that in a shipwreck He takes care of the passengers who
are to be saved and takes none of those who are to be drowned; but it
_does_ mean that every race of creatures is born into the world under
circumstances of approximate adaptation to its necessities; and, beyond
all others, the ingenious and observant race of man is surrounded with
elements naturally good for his food, pleasant to his sight, and
suitable for the subjects of his ingenuity;--the stone, metal, and clay
of the earth he walks upon lending themselves at once to his hand, for
all manner of workmanship.
150. Thus, his truest respect for the law of the entire creation is
shown by his making the most of what he can get most easily; and there
is no virtue of art, nor application of common sense, more sacredly
necessary than this respect to the beauty of natural substance, and the
ease of local use; neither are there any other precepts of construction
so vital as these--that you show all the strength of your material,
tempt none of its weaknesses, and do with it only what can be simply and
permanently done.
151. Thus, all good building will be with rocks, or pebbles, or burnt
clay, but with no artificial compound; all good painting, with common
oils and pigments on common canvas, paper, plaster, or wood,--admitting,
sometimes for precious work, precious things, but all applied in a
simple and visible way. The highest imitative art should not, indeed, at
first sight, call attention to the means of it; but even that, at
length, should do so distinctly, and provoke the observer to take
pleasure in seeing how completely the workman is master of the
particular material he has used, and how beautiful and desirable a
substance it was, for work of that kind. In oil painting its unctious
quality is to be delighted in; in fresco, its chalky quality; in glass,
its transparency; in wood, its grain; in marble, its softness; in
porphyry, its hardness; in iron, its toughness. In a flint country, one
should feel the delightfulness of having flints to pick up, and fasten
together into rugged walls. In a marble country one should be always
more and more astonished at the exquisite colour and structure of
marble; in a slate country one should feel as if every rock cleft itself
only for the sake of being built with conveniently.
[Illustration: PLATE X.--MARBLE MASONRY IN THE DUOMO OF VERONA.]
152. Now, for sculpture, there are, briefly, two materials--Clay, and
Stone; for glass is only a clay that gets clear and brittle as it cools,
and metal a clay that gets opaque and tough as it cools. Indeed, the
true use of gold in this world is only as a very pretty and very ductile
clay, which you can spread as flat as you like, spin as fine as you
like, and which will neither crack, nor tarnish.
All the arts of sculpture in clay may be summed up under the word
"Plastic," and all of those in stone, under the word "Glyptic."
153. Sculpture in clay will accordingly include all cast brick-work,
pottery, and tile-work[128]--a somewhat important branch of human skill.
Next to the potter's work, you have all the arts in porcelain, glass,
enamel, and metal; everything, that is to say, playful and familiar in
design, much of what is most felicitously inventive, and, in bronze or
gold, most precious and permanent.
154. Sculpture in stone, whether granite, gem, or marble, while we
accurately use the general term "glyptic" for it, may be thought of
with, perhaps, the most clear force under the English word "engraving."
For, from the mere angular incision which the Greek consecrated in the
triglyphs of his greatest order of architecture, grow forth all the arts
of bas-relief, and methods of localized groups of sculpture connected
with each other and with architecture: as, in another direction, the
arts of engraving and wood-cutting themselves.
155. Over all this vast field of human skill the laws which I have
enunciated to you rule with inevitable authority, embracing the
greatest, and consenting to the humblest, exertion; strong to repress
the ambition of nations, if fantastic and vain, but gentle to approve
the efforts of children, made in accordance with the visible intention
of the Maker of all flesh, and the Giver of all Intelligence. These
laws, therefore, I now repeat, and beg of you to observe them as
irrefragable.
1. That the work is to be with tools of men.
2. That it is to be in natural materials.
3. That it is to exhibit the virtues of those materials, and aim at no
quality inconsistent with them.
4. That its temper is to be quiet and gentle, in harmony with common
needs, and in consent to common intelligence.
We will now observe the bearing of these laws on the elementary
conditions of the art at present under discussion.
156. There is, first, work in baked clay, which contracts as it dries,
and is very easily frangible. Then you must put no work into it
requiring niceness in dimension, nor any so elaborate that it would be a
great loss if it were broken, but as the clay yields at once to the
hand, and the sculptor can do anything with it he likes, it is a
material for him to sketch with and play with,--to record his fancies
in, before they escape him--and to express roughly, for people who can
enjoy such sketches, what he has not time to complete in marble. The
clay, being ductile, lends itself to all softness of line; being easily
frangible, it would be ridiculous to give it sharp edges, so that a
blunt and massive rendering of graceful gesture will be its natural
function; but as it can be pinched, or pulled, or thrust in a moment
into projection which it would take hours of chiselling to get in stone,
it will also properly be used for all fantastic and grotesque form, not
involving sharp edges. Therefore, what is true of chalk and charcoal,
for painters, is equally true of clay, for sculptors; they are all most
precious materials for true masters, but tempt the false ones into fatal
license; and to judge rightly of terra-cotta work is a far higher reach
of skill in sculpture-criticism than to distinguish the merits of a
finished statue.
157. We have, secondly, work in bronze, iron, gold, and other metals; in
which the laws of structure are still more definite.
All kinds of twisted and wreathen work on every scale become delightful
when wrought in ductile or tenacious metal, but metal which is to be
_hammered_ into form separates itself into two great divisions--solid,
and flat.
[Illustration: PLATE XI.--THE FIRST ELEMENTS OF SCULPTURE.
Incised Outline and Opened Space.]
(A.) In solid metal work, _i. e._, metal cast thick enough to resist
bending, whether it be hollow or not, violent and various projection may
be admitted, which would be offensive in marble; but no sharp edges,
because it is difficult to produce them with the hammer. But since the
permanence of the material justifies exquisiteness of workmanship,
whatever delicate ornamentation can be wrought with rounded surfaces may
be advisedly introduced; and since the colour of bronze or any other
metal is not so pleasantly representative of flesh as that of marble, a
wise sculptor will depend less on flesh contour, and more on picturesque
accessories, which, though they would be vulgar if attempted in stone,
are rightly entertaining in bronze or silver. Verrochio's statue of
Colleone at Venice, Cellini's Perseus at Florence, and Ghiberti's gates
at Florence, are models of bronze treatment.
(B.) When metal is beaten thin, it becomes what is technically called
"plate," (the _flattened_ thing) and may be treated advisably in two
ways; one, by beating it out into bosses, the other by cutting it into
strips and ramifications. The vast schools of goldsmith's work and of
iron decoration, founded on these two principles, have had the most
powerful influences over general taste in all ages and countries. One of
the simplest and most interesting elementary examples of the treatment
of flat metal by cutting is the common branched iron bar, Fig. 8, used
to close small apertures in countries possessing any good primitive
style of iron-work, formed by alternate cuts on its sides, and the
bending down of the several portions. The ordinary domestic window
balcony of Verona is formed by mere ribands of iron, bent into curves as
studiously refined as those of a Greek vase, and decorated merely by
their own terminations in spiral volutes.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
All cast work in metal, unfinished by hand, is inadmissible in any
school of living art, since it cannot possess the perfection of form due
to a permanent substance; and the continual sight of it is destructive
of the faculty of taste: but metal stamped with precision, as in coins,
is to sculpture what engraving is to painting.
158. Thirdly. Stone-sculpture divides itself into three schools: one in
very hard material; one in very soft, and one in that of centrally
useful consistence.
A. The virtue of work in hard material is the expression of form in
shallow relief, or in broad contours; deep cutting in hard material is
inadmissible, and the art, at once pompous and trivial, of gem
engraving, has been in the last degree destructive of the honour and
service of sculpture.
B. The virtue of work in soft material is deep cutting, with studiously
graceful disposition of the masses of light and shade. The greater
number of flamboyant churches of France are cut out of an adhesive
chalk; and the fantasy of their latest decoration was, in great part,
induced by the facility of obtaining contrast of black space, undercut,
with white tracery easily left in sweeping and interwoven rods--the
lavish use of wood in domestic architecture materially increasing the
habit of delight in branched complexity of line. These points, however,
I must reserve for illustration in my lectures on architecture. To-day,
I shall limit myself to the illustration of elementary sculptural
structure in the best material;--that is to say, in crystalline marble,
neither soft enough to encourage the caprice of the workman, nor hard
enough to resist his will.
159. C. By the true "Providence" of Nature, the rock which is thus
submissive has been in some places stained with the fairest colours, and
in others blanched into the fairest absence of colour, that can be found
to give harmony to inlaying, or dignity to form. The possession by the
Greeks of their [Greek: leukos lithos] was indeed the first circumstance
regulating the development of their art; it enabled them at once to
express their passion for light by executing the faces, hands, and feet
of their dark wooden statues in white marble, so that what we look upon
only with pleasure for fineness of texture was to them an imitation of
the luminous body of the deity shining from behind its dark robes; and
ivory afterwards is employed in their best statues for its yet more soft
and flesh-like brightness, receptive also of the most delicate
colour--(therefore to this day the favourite ground of miniature
painters). In like manner, the existence of quarries of peach-coloured
marble within twelve miles of Verona, and of white marble and green
serpentine between Pisa and Genoa, defined the manner both of sculpture
and architecture for all the Gothic buildings of Italy. No subtlety of
education could have formed a high school of art without these
materials.
160. Next to the colour, the fineness of substance which will take a
perfectly sharp edge, is essential; and this not merely to admit fine
delineation in the sculpture itself, but to secure a delightful
precision in placing the blocks of which it is composed. For the
possession of too fine marble, as far as regards the work itself, is a
temptation instead of an advantage to an inferior sculptor; and the
abuse of the facility of undercutting, especially of undercutting so as
to leave profiles defined by an edge against shadow, is one of the chief
causes of decline of style in such encrusted bas-reliefs as those of the
Certosa of Pavia and its contemporary monuments. But no undue temptation
ever exists as to the fineness of block fitting; nothing contributes to
give so pure and healthy a tone to sculpture as the attention of the
builder to the jointing of his stones; and his having both the power to
make them fit so perfectly as not to admit of the slightest portion of
cement showing externally, and the skill to insure, if needful, and to
suggest always, their stability in cementless construction. Plate X.
represents a piece of entirely fine Lombardic building, the central
portion of the arch in the Duomo of Verona, which corresponds to that of
the porch of San Zenone, represented in Plate I. In both these pieces of
building, the only line that traces the architrave round the arch, is
that of the masonry joint; yet this line is drawn with extremest
subtlety, with intention of delighting the eye by its relation of varied
curvature to the arch itself; and it is just as much considered as the
finest pen-line of a Raphael drawing. Every joint of the stone is used,
in like manner, as a thin black line, which the slightest sign of cement
would spoil like a blot. And so proud is the builder of his fine
jointing, and so fearless of any distortion or strain spoiling the
adjustment afterwards, that in one place he runs his joint quite
gratuitously through a bas-relief, and gives the keystone its only sign
of pre-eminence by the minute inlaying of the head of the Lamb, into the
stone of the course above.
161. Proceeding from this fine jointing to fine draughtsmanship, you
have, in the very outset and earliest stage of sculpture, your flat
stone surface given you as a sheet of white paper, on which you are
required to produce the utmost effect you can with the simplest means,
cutting away as little of the stone as may be, to save both time and
trouble; and, above all, leaving the block itself, when shaped, as solid
as you can, that its surface may better resist weather, and the carved
parts be as much protected as possible by the masses left around them.
162. The first thing to be done is clearly to trace the outline of
subject with an incision approximating in section to that of the furrow
of a plough, only more equal-sided. A fine sculptor strikes it, as his
chisel leans, freely, on marble; an Egyptian, in hard rock, cuts it
sharp, as in cuneiform inscriptions. In any case, you have a result
somewhat like the upper figure, Plate XI., in which I show you the most
elementary indication of form possible, by cutting the outline of the
typical archaic Greek head with an incision like that of a Greek
triglyph, only not so precise in edge or slope, as it is to be modified
afterwards.
163. Now, the simplest thing we can do next, is to round off the flat
surface _within_ the incision, and put what form we can get into the
feebler projection of it thus obtained. The Egyptians do this, often
with exquisite skill, and then, as I showed you in a former lecture,
colour the whole--using the incision as an outline. Such a method of
treatment is capable of good service in representing, at little cost of
pains, subjects in distant effect, and common, or merely picturesque,
subjects even near. To show you what it is capable of, and what
coloured sculpture would be in its rudest type, I have prepared the
coloured relief of the John Dory[129] as a natural history drawing for
distant effect. You know, also, that I meant him to be ugly--as ugly as
any creature can well be. In time, I hope to show you prettier
things--peacocks and kingfishers,--butterflies and flowers, on grounds
of gold, and the like, as they were in Byzantine work. I shall expect
you, in right use of your æsthetic faculties, to like those better than
what I show you to-day. But it is now a question of method only; and if
you will look, after the lecture, first at the mere white relief, and
then see how much may be gained by a few dashes of colour, such as a
practised workman could lay in a quarter of an hour,--the whole forming,
if well done, almost a deceptive image--you will, at least, have the
range of power in Egyptian sculpture clearly expressed to you.
164. But for fine sculpture, we must advance by far other methods. If we
carve the subject with real delicacy, the cast shadow of the incision
will interfere with its outline, so that, for representation of
beautiful things, you must clear away the ground about it, at all events
for a little distance. As the law of work is to use the least pains
possible, you clear it only just as far back as you need, and then for
the sake of order and finish, you give the space a geometrical outline.
By taking, in this case, the simplest I can,--a circle,--I can clear the
head with little labor in the removal of surface round it; (see the
lower figure in Plate XI.)
165. Now, these are the first terms of all well-constructed bas-relief.
The mass you have to treat consists of a piece of stone, which, however
you afterwards carve it, can but, at its most projecting point, reach
the level of the external plane surface out of which it was mapped, and
defined by a depression round it; that depression being at first a mere
trench, then a moat of certain width, of which the outer sloping bank is
in contact, as a limiting geometrical line, with the laterally salient
portions of sculpture. This, I repeat, is the primal construction of
good bas-relief, implying, first, perfect protection to its surface from
any transverse blow, and a geometrically limited space to be occupied by
the design, into which it shall pleasantly (and as you shall ultimately
see, ingeniously,) contract itself: implying, secondly, a determined
depth of projection, which it shall rarely reach, and never exceed: and
implying, finally, the production of the whole piece with the least
possible labor of chisel and loss of stone.
166. And these, which are the first, are very nearly the last
constructive laws of sculpture. You will be surprised to find how much
they include, and how much of minor propriety in treatment their
observance involves.
In a very interesting essay on the architecture of the Parthenon, by the
professor of architecture of the Ecole Polytechnique, M. Emile Boutmy,
you will find it noticed that the Greeks do not usually weaken, by
carving, the constructive masses of their building; but put their chief
sculpture in the empty spaces between the triglyphs, or beneath the
roof. This is true; but in so doing, they merely build their panel
instead of carving it; they accept no less than the Goths, the laws of
recess and limitation, as being vital to the safety and dignity of their
design; and their noblest recumbent statues are, constructively, the
fillings of the acute extremity of a panel in the form of an obtusely
summitted triangle.
167. In gradual descent from that severest type, you will find that an
immense quantity of sculpture of all times and styles may be generally
embraced under the notion of a mass hewn out of, or, at least, placed
in, a panel or recess, deepening, it may be, into a niche; the sculpture
being always designed with reference to its position in such recess;
and, therefore, to the effect of the building out of which the recess is
hewn.
But, for the sake of simplifying our inquiry, I will at first suppose no
surrounding protective ledge to exist, and that the area of stone we
have to deal with is simply a flat slab, extant from a flat surface
depressed all round it.
168. A _flat_ slab, observe. The flatness of surface is essential to the
problem of bas-relief. The lateral limit of the panel may, or may not,
be required; but the vertical limit of surface _must_ be expressed; and
the art of bas-relief is to give the effect of true form on that
condition. For observe, if nothing more were needed than to make first a
cast of a solid form, then cut it in half, and apply the half of it to
the flat surface;--if, for instance, to carve a bas-relief of an apple,
all I had to do was to cut my sculpture of the whole apple in half, and
pin it to the wall, any ordinary trained sculptor, or even a mechanical
workman, could produce bas-relief; but the business is to carve a
_round_ thing out of _flat_ thing; to carve an apple out of a
biscuit!--to conquer, as a subtle Florentine has here conquered,[130]
his marble, so as not only to get motion into what is most rigidly
fixed, but to get boundlessness into what is most narrowly bounded; and
carve Madonna and Child, rolling clouds, flying angels, and space of
heavenly air behind all, out of a film of stone not the third of an inch
thick where it is thickest.
169. Carried, however, to such a degree of subtlety as this, and with so
ambitious and extravagant aim, bas-relief becomes a tour-de-force; and,
you know, I have just told you all tours-de-force are wrong. The true
law of bas-relief is to begin with a depth of incision proportioned
justly to the distance of the observer and the character of the subject,
and out of that rationally determined depth, neither increased for
ostentation of effect, nor diminished for ostentation of skill, to do
the utmost that will be easily visible to an observer, supposing him to
give an average human amount of attention, but not to peer into, or
critically scrutinize the work.
170. I cannot arrest you to-day by the statement of any of the laws of
sight and distance which determine the proper depth of bas-relief.
Suppose that depth fixed; then observe what a pretty problem, or,
rather, continually varying cluster of problems, will be offered to us.
You might, at first, imagine that, given what we may call our scale of
solidity, or scale of depth, the diminution from nature would be in
regular proportion, as for instance, if the real depth of your subject
be, suppose a foot, and the depth of your bas-relief an inch, then the
parts of the real subject which were six inches round the side of it
would be carved, you might imagine, at the depth of half-an-inch, and so
the whole thing mechanically reduced to scale. But not a bit of it. Here
is a Greek bas-relief of a chariot with two horses (upper figure, Plate
XXI). Your whole subject has therefore the depth of two horses side by
side, say six or eight feet. Your bas-relief has, on the scale,[131] say
the depth of the third of an inch. Now, if you gave only the sixth of an
inch for the depth of the off horse, and, dividing him again, only the
twelfth of an inch for that of each foreleg, you would make him look a
mile away from the other, and his own forelegs a mile apart. Actually,
the Greek has made the _near leg of the off horse project much beyond
the off leg of the near horse_; and has put nearly the whole depth and
power of his relief into the breast of the off horse, while for the
whole distance from the head of the nearest to the neck of the other, he
has allowed himself only a shallow line; knowing that, if he deepened
that, he would give the nearest horse the look of having a thick nose;
whereas, by keeping that line down, he has not only made the head itself
more delicate, but detached it from the other by giving no cast shadow,
and left the shadow below to serve for thickness of breast, cutting it
as sharp down as he possibly can, to make it bolder.
171. Here is a fine piece of business we have got into!--even supposing
that all this selection and adaptation were to be contrived under
constant laws, and related only to the expression of given forms. But
the Greek sculptor, all this while, is not only debating and deciding
how to show what he wants, but, much more, debating and deciding what,
as he can't show everything, he will choose to show at all. Thus, being
himself interested, and supposing that you will be, in the manner of
the driving, he takes great pains to carve the reins, to show you where
they are knotted, and how they are fastened round the driver's waist
(you recollect how Hippolytus was lost by doing that), but he does not
care the least bit about the chariot, and having rather more geometry
than he likes in the cross and circle of one wheel of it, entirely omits
the other!
172. I think you must see by this time that the sculptor's is not quite
a trade which you can teach like brickmaking; nor its produce an article
of which you can supply any quantity "demanded" for the next railroad
waiting-room. It may perhaps, indeed, seem to you that, in the
difficulties thus presented by it, bas-relief involves more direct
exertion of intellect than finished solid sculpture. It is not so,
however. The questions involved by bas-relief are of a more curious and
amusing kind, requiring great variety of expedients; though none except
such as a true workmanly instinct delights in inventing and invents
easily; but design in solid sculpture involves considerations of weight
in mass, of balance, of perspective and opposition, in projecting forms,
and of restraint for those which must not project, such as none but the
greatest masters have ever completely solved; and they, not always; the
difficulty of arranging the composition so as to be agreeable from
points of view on all sides of it, being, itself, arduous enough.
173. Thus far, I have been speaking only of the laws of structure
relating to the projection of the mass which becomes itself the
sculpture. Another most interesting group of constructive laws governs
its relation to the line that contains or defines it.
In your Standard Series I have placed a photograph of the south transept
of Rouen Cathedral. Strictly speaking, all standards of Gothic are of
the thirteenth century; but, in the fourteenth, certain qualities of
richness are obtained by the diminution of restraint; out of which we
must choose what is best in their kinds. The pedestals of the statues
which once occupied the lateral recesses are, as you see, covered with
groups of figures, enclosed each in a quatrefoil panel; the spaces
between this panel and the enclosing square being filled with sculptures
of animals.
You cannot anywhere find a more lovely piece of fancy, or more
illustrative of the quantity of result that may be obtained with low and
simple chiselling. The figures are all perfectly simple in drapery, the
story told by lines of action only in the main group, no accessories
being admitted. There is no undercutting anywhere, nor exhibition of
technical skill, but the fondest and tenderest appliance of it; and one
of the principal charms of the whole is the adaptation of every subject
to its quaint limit. The tale must be told within the four petals of the
quatrefoil, and the wildest and playfullest beasts must never come out
of their narrow corners. The attention with which spaces of this kind
are filled by the Gothic designers is not merely a beautiful compliance
with architectural requirements, but a definite assertion of their
delight in the restraint of law; for, in illuminating books, although,
if they chose it, they might have designed floral ornaments, as we now
usually do, rambling loosely over the leaves, and although, in later
works, such license is often taken by them, in all books of the fine
time the wandering tendrils are enclosed by limits approximately
rectilinear, and in gracefullest branching often detach themselves from
the right line only by curvature of extreme severity.
174 Since the darkness and extent of shadow by which the sculpture is
relieved necessarily vary with the depth of the recess, there arise a
series of problems, in deciding which the wholesome desire for emphasis
by means of shadow is too often exaggerated by the ambition of the
sculptor to show his skill in undercutting. The extreme of vulgarity is
usually reached when the entire bas-relief is cut hollow underneath, as
in much Indian and Chinese work, so as to relieve its forms against an
absolute darkness; but no formal law can ever be given; for exactly the
same thing may be beautifully done for a wise purpose, by one person,
which is basely done, and to no purpose, or to a bad one, by another.
Thus, the desire for emphasis itself may be the craving of a deadened
imagination, or the passion of a vigorous one; and relief against
shadow may be sought by one man only for sensation, and by another for
intelligibility. John of Pisa undercuts fiercely, in order to bring out
the vigour of life which no level contour could render; the Lombardi of
Venice undercut delicately, in order to obtain beautiful lines, and
edges of faultless precision; but the base Indian craftsmen undercut
only that people may wonder how the chiselling was done through the
holes, or that they may see every monster white against black.
175. Yet, here again we are met by another necessity for discrimination.
There may be a true delight in the inlaying of white on dark, as there
is a true delight in vigorous rounding. Nevertheless, the general law is
always, that, the lighter the incisions, and the broader the surface,
the grander, cæteris paribus, will be the work. Of the structural terms
of that work you now know enough to understand that the schools of good
sculpture, considered in relation to projection, divide themselves into
four entirely distinct groups:--
1st. Flat Relief, in which the surface is, in many places,
absolutely flat; and the expression depends greatly on the
lines of its outer contour, and on fine incisions within
them.
2nd. Round Relief, in which, as in the best coins, the
sculptured mass projects so as to be capable of complete
modulation into form, but is not anywhere undercut. The
formation of a coin by the blow of a die necessitates, of
course, the severest obedience to this law.
3rd. Edged Relief. Undercutting admitted, so as to throw out
the forms against a background of shadow.
4th. Full Relief. The statue completely solid in form, and
unreduced in retreating depth of it, yet connected locally
with some definite part of the building, so as to be still
dependent on the shadow of its background and direction of
protective line.
176. Let me recommend you at once to take what pains may be needful to
enable you to distinguish these four kinds of sculpture, for the
distinctions between them are not founded on mere differences in
gradation of depth. They are truly four species, or orders, of
sculpture, separated from each other by determined characters. I have
used, you may have noted, hitherto in my Lectures, the word "bas-relief"
almost indiscriminately for all, because the degree of lowness or
highness of relief is not the question, but the _method_ of relief.
Observe again, therefore--
A. If a portion of the surface is absolutely flat, you have the first
order--Flat Relief.
B. If every portion of the surface is rounded, but none undercut, you
have Round Relief--essentially that of seals and coins.
C. If any part of the edges be undercut, but the general projection of
solid form reduced, you have what I think you may conveniently call
Foliate Relief,--the parts of the design overlapping each other in
places, like edges of leaves.
D. If the undercutting is bold and deep, and the projection of solid
form unreduced, you have full relief.
Learn these four names at once by heart:--
Flat Relief.
Round Relief.
Foliate Relief.
Full Relief.
And whenever you look at any piece of sculpture, determine first to
which of these classes it belongs; and then consider how the sculptor
has treated it with reference to the necessary structure--that
reference, remember, being partly to the mechanical conditions of the
material, partly to the means of light and shade at his command.
[Illustration: PLATE XII.--BRANCH OF PHILLYREA. DARK PURPLE]
177. To take a single instance. You know, for these many years, I have
been telling our architects with all the force of voice I had in me,
that they could design nothing until they could carve natural forms
rightly. Many imagine that work was easy; but judge for yourselves
whether it be or not. In Plate XII., I have drawn, with approximate
accuracy, a cluster of Phillyrea leaves as they grow. Now, if we wanted
to cut them in bas-relief, the first thing we should have to consider
would be the position of their outline on the marble;--here it is, as
far down as the spring of the leaves. But do you suppose that is what an
ordinary sculptor could either lay for his first sketch, or contemplate
as a limit to be worked down to? Then consider how the interlacing and
springing of the leaves can be expressed within this outline. It must be
done by leaving such projection in the marble as will take the light in
the same proportion as the drawing does;--and a Florentine workman could
do it, for close sight, without driving one incision deeper, or raising
a single surface higher, than the eighth of an inch. Indeed, no sculptor
of the finest time would design such a complex cluster of leaves as
this, except for bronze or iron work; they would take simpler contours
for marble; but the laws of treatment would, under these conditions,
remain just as strict: and you may, perhaps, believe me now when I tell
you that, in any piece of fine structural sculpture by the great
masters, there is more subtlety and noble obedience to lovely laws than
could be explained to you if I took twenty lectures to do it in, instead
of one.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.]
178. There remains yet a point of mechanical treatment, on which I have
not yet touched at all; nor that the least important,--namely, the
actual method and style of handling. A great sculptor uses his tools
exactly as a painter his pencil, and you may recognize the decision of
his thought, and glow of his temper, no less in the workmanship than the
design. The modern system of modelling the work in clay, getting it into
form by machinery, and by the hands of subordinates, and touching it at
last, if indeed the (so called) sculptor touch it at all, only to
correct their inefficiencies, renders the production of good work in
marble a physical impossibility. The first result of it is that the
sculptor thinks in clay instead of marble, and loses his instinctive
sense of the proper treatment of a brittle substance. The second is that
neither he nor the public recognize the touch of the chisel as
expressive of personal feeling or power, and that nothing is looked for
except mechanical polish.
179. The perfectly simple piece of Greek relief represented in Plate
XIII., will enable you to understand at once,--examination of the
original, at your leisure, will prevent you, I trust, from ever
forgetting--what is meant by the virtue of handling in sculpture.
[Illustration: PLATE XIII.--GREEK FLAT RELIEF AND SCULPTURE BY EDGED
INCISION.]
The projection of the heads of the four horses, one behind the other, is
certainly not more, altogether, than three-quarters of an inch from the
flat ground, and the one in front does not in reality project more than
the one behind it, yet, by mere drawing,[132] you see the sculptor has
got them to appear to recede in due order, and by the soft rounding of
the flesh surfaces, and modulation of the veins, he has taken away all
look of flatness from the necks. He has drawn the eyes and nostrils with
dark incision, careful as the finest touches of a painter's pencil: and
then, at last, when he comes to the manes, he has let fly hand and
chisel with their full force, and where a base workman, (above all, if
he had modelled the thing in clay first,) would have lost himself in
laborious imitation of hair, the Greek has struck the tresses out with
angular incisions, deep driven, every one in appointed place and
deliberate curve, yet flowing so free under his noble hand that you
cannot alter, without harm, the bending of any single ridge, nor
contract, nor extend, a point of them. And if you will look back to
Plate IX. you will see the difference between this sharp incision, used
to express horse-hair, and the soft incision with intervening rounded
ridge, used to express the hair of Apollo Chrysocomes; and, beneath, the
obliquely ridged incision used to express the plumes of his swan; in
both these cases the handling being much more slow, because the
engraving is in metal; but the structural importance of incision, as the
means of effect, never lost sight of. Finally, here are two actual
examples of the work in marble of the two great schools of the world;
one, a little Fortune, standing tiptoe on the globe of the Earth, its
surface traced with lines in hexagons; not chaotic under Fortune's feet;
Greek, this, and by a trained workman;--dug up in the temple of Neptune
at Corfu;--and here, a Florentine portrait-marble, found in the recent
alterations, face downwards, under the pavement of St'a Maria
Novella;[133] both of them first-rate of their kind; and both of them,
while exquisitely finished at the telling points, showing, on all their
unregarded surfaces, the rough furrow of the fast-driven chisel, as
distinctly as the edge of a common paving-stone.
180. Let me suggest to you, in conclusion, one most interesting point of
mental expression in these necessary aspects of finely executed
sculpture. I have already again and again pressed on your attention the
beginning of the arts of men in the make and use of the ploughshare.
Read more carefully--you might indeed do well to learn at once by
heart,--the twenty-seven lines of the Fourth Pythian, which describe the
ploughing of Jason. There is nothing grander extant in human fancy, nor
set down in human words: but this great mythical expression of the
conquest of the earth-clay, and brute-force, by vital human energy, will
become yet more interesting to you when you reflect what enchantment has
been cut, on whiter clay, by the tracing of finer furrows;--what the
delicate and consummate arts of man have done by the ploughing of
marble, and granite, and iron. You will learn daily more and more, as
you advance in actual practice, how the primary manual art of engraving,
in the steadiness, clearness, and irrevocableness of it, is the best
art-discipline that can be given either to mind or hand;[134] you will
recognize one law of right, pronouncing itself in the well-resolved work
of every age; you will see the firmly traced and irrevocable incision
determining not only the forms, but, in great part, the moral temper, of
all vitally progressive art; you will trace the same principle and power
in the furrows which the oblique sun shows on the granite of his own
Egyptian city,--in the white scratch of the stylus through the colour on
a Greek vase--in the first delineation, on the wet wall, of the groups
of an Italian fresco; in the unerring and unalterable touch of the great
engraver of Nüremberg,--and in the deep driven and deep bitten ravines
of metal by which Turner closed, in embossed limits, the shadows of the
Liber Studiorum.
Learn, therefore, in its full extent, the force of the great Greek word,
[Greek: charassô];--and, give me pardon--if you think pardon needed,
that I ask you also to learn the full meaning of the English word
derived from it. Here, at the Ford of the Oxen of Jason, are other
furrows to be driven than these in the marble of Pentelicus. The
fruitfullest, or the fatallest of all ploughing is that by the thoughts
of your youth, on the white field of its imagination. For by these,
either down to the disturbed spirit, "[Greek: kekoptai kai charassetai
pedon];" or around the quiet spirit, and on all the laws of conduct that
hold it, as a fair vase its frankincense, are ordained the pure colours,
and engraved the just Characters, of Æonian life.
FOOTNOTES:
[126] Nothing is more wonderful, or more disgraceful among the forms of
ignorance engendered by modern vulgar occupations in pursuit of gain,
than the unconsciousness, now total, that fine art is essentially
Athletic. I received a letter from Birmingham, some little time since,
inviting me to see how much, in glass manufacture, "machinery excelled
rude hand work." The writer had not the remotest conception that he
might as well have asked me to come and see a mechanical boat-race rowed
by automata, and "how much machinery excelled rude arm-work."
[127] Such as the sculptureless arch of Waterloo Bridge, for instance,
referred to in the Third Lecture, § 84.
[128] It is strange, at this day, to think of the relation of the
Athenian Ceramicus to the French Tile-fields, Tileries, or Tuileries;
and how these last may yet become--have already partly become--"the
Potter's field," blood-bought (December, 1870.)
[129] This relief is now among the other casts which I have placed in
the lower school in the University galleries.
[130] The reference is to a cast from a small and low relief of
Florentine work in the Kensington Museum.
[131] The actual bas-relief is on a coin, and the projection not above
the twentieth of an inch, but I magnified it in photograph, for this
Lecture, so as to represent a relief with about the third of an inch for
maximum projection.
[132] This plate has been executed from a drawing by Mr. Burgess, in
which he has followed the curves of incision with exquisite care, and
preserved the effect of the surface of the stone, where a photograph
would have lost it by exaggerating accidental stains.
[133] These two marbles will always, henceforward, be sufficiently
accessible for reference in my room at Corpus Christi College.
[134] That it was also, in, some cases, the earliest that the Greeks
gave, is proved by Lucian's account of his first lesson at his uncle's;
the [Greek: enkopeus], literally "in-cutter"--being the first tool put
into his hand, and an earthenware tablet to cut upon, which the boy
pressing too hard, presently breaks;--gets beaten--goes home crying, and
becomes, after his dream above quoted, a philosopher instead of a
sculptor.
LECTURE VI.
THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS.
_December, 1870._
181. It can scarcely be needful for me to tell even the younger members
of my present audience, that the conditions necessary for the production
of a perfect school of sculpture have only twice been met in the history
of the world, and then for a short time; nor for short time only, but
also in narrow districts, namely, in the valleys and islands of Ionian
Greece, and in the strip of land deposited by the Arno, between the
Apennine crests and the sea.
All other schools, except these two, led severally by Athens in the
fifth century before Christ, and by Florence in the fifteenth of our own
era, are imperfect; and the best of them are derivative: these two are
consummate in themselves, and the origin of what is best in others.
182. And observe, these Athenian and Florentine schools are both of
equal rank, as essentially original and independent. The Florentine,
being subsequent to the Greek, borrowed much from it; but it would have
existed just as strongly--and, perhaps, in some respects, more
nobly--had it been the first, instead of the latter of the two. The task
set to each of these mightiest of the nations was, indeed, practically
the same, and as hard to the one as to the other. The Greeks found
Phoenician and Etruscan art monstrous, and had to make them human. The
Italians found Byzantine and Norman art monstrous, and had to make them
human. The original power in the one case is easily traced; in the other
it has partly to be unmasked, because the change at Florence was, in
many points, suggested and stimulated by the former school. But we
mistake in supposing that Athens taught Florence the laws of design; she
taught her, in reality, only the duty of truth.
183. You remember that I told you the highest art could do no more than
rightly represent the human form. This is the simple test, then, of a
perfect school,--that it has represented the human form, so that it is
impossible to conceive of its being better done. And that, I repeat, has
been accomplished twice only: once in Athens, once in Florence. And so
narrow is the excellence even of these two exclusive schools, that it
cannot be said of either of them that they represented the entire human
form. The Greeks perfectly drew, and perfectly moulded the body and
limbs; but there is, so far as I am aware, no instance of their
representing the face as well as any great Italian. On the other hand,
the Italian painted and carved the face insuperably; but I believe there
is no instance of his having perfectly represented the body, which, by
command of his religion, it became his pride to despise, and his safety
to mortify.
184. The general course of your study here renders it desirable that you
should be accurately acquainted with the leading principles of Greek
sculpture; but I cannot lay these before you without giving undue
prominence to some of the special merits of that school, unless I
previously indicate the relation it holds to the more advanced, though
less disciplined, excellence of Christian art.
In this and the last lecture of the present course,[135] I shall
endeavour, therefore, to mass for you, in such rude and diagram-like
outline as may be possible or intelligible, the main characteristics of
the two schools, completing and correcting the details of comparison
afterwards; and not answering, observe, at present, for any
generalization I give you, except as a ground for subsequent closer and
more qualified statements.
And in carrying out this parallel, I shall speak indifferently of works
of sculpture, and of the modes of painting which propose to themselves
the same objects as sculpture. And this indeed Florentine, as opposed to
Venetian, painting, and that of Athens in the fifth century, nearly
always did.
185. I begin, therefore, by comparing two designs of the simplest
kind--engravings, or, at least, linear drawings, both; one on clay, one
on copper, made in the central periods of each style, and representing
the same goddess--Aphrodite. They are now set beside each other in your
Rudimentary Series. The first is from a patera lately found at Camirus,
authoritatively assigned by Mr. Newton, in his recent catalogue, to the
best period of Greek art. The second is from one of the series of
engravings executed, probably, by Baccio Baldini, in 1485, out of which
I chose your first practical exercise--the Sceptre of Apollo. I cannot,
however, make the comparison accurate in all respects, for I am obliged
to set the restricted type of the Aphrodite Urania of the Greeks beside
the universal Deity conceived by the Italian as governing the air,
earth, and sea; nevertheless the restriction in the mind of the Greek,
and expatiation in that of the Florentine, are both characteristic. The
Greek Venus Urania is flying in heaven, her power over the waters
symbolized by her being borne by a swan, and her power over the earth by
a single flower in her right hand; but the Italian Aphrodite is rising
out of the actual sea, and only half risen: her limbs are still in the
sea, her merely animal strength filling the waters with their life; but
her body to the loins is in the sunshine, her face raised to the sky;
her hand is about to lay a garland of flowers on the earth.
186. The Venus Urania of the Greeks, in her relation to men, has power
only over lawful and domestic love; therefore, she is fully dressed, and
not only quite dressed, but most daintily and trimly: her feet
delicately sandalled, her gown spotted with little stars, her hair
brushed exquisitely smooth at the top of her head, trickling in minute
waves down her forehead; and though, because there's such a quantity of
it, she can't possibly help having a chignon, look how tightly she has
fastened it in with her broad fillet. Of course she is married, so she
must wear a cap with pretty minute pendant jewels at the border; and a
very small necklace, all that her husband can properly afford, just
enough to go closely round the neck, and no more. On the contrary, the
Aphrodite of the Italian, being universal love, is pure-naked; and her
long hair is thrown wild to the wind and sea.
These primal differences in the symbolism, observe, are only because the
artists are thinking of separate powers: they do not necessarily involve
any national distinction in feeling. But the differences I have next to
indicate are essential, and characterize the two opposed national modes
of mind.
187. First, and chiefly. The Greek Aphrodite is a very pretty person,
and the Italian a decidedly plain one. That is because a Greek thought
no one could possibly love any but pretty people; but an Italian thought
that love could give dignity to the meanest form that it inhabited, and
light to the poorest that it looked upon. So his Aphrodite will not
condescend to be pretty.
188. Secondly. In the Greek Venus the breasts are broad and full, though
perfectly severe in their almost conical profile;--(you are allowed on
purpose to see the outline of the right breast, under the chiton:)--also
the right arm is left bare, and you can just see the contour of the
front of the right limb and knee; both arm and limb pure and firm, but
lovely. The plant she holds in her hand is a branching and flowering
one, the seed vessel prominent. These signs all mean that her essential
function is child-bearing.
On the contrary, in the Italian Venus the breasts are so small as to be
scarcely traceable; the body strong, and almost masculine in its angles;
the arms meagre and unattractive, and she lays a decorative garland of
flowers on the earth. These signs mean that the Italian thought of love
as the strength of an eternal spirit, for ever helpful; and for ever
crowned with flowers, that neither know seed-time nor harvest, and bloom
where there is neither death, nor birth.
189. Thirdly. The Greek Aphrodite is entirely calm, and looks straight
forward. Not one feature of her face is disturbed, or seems ever to have
been subject to emotion. The Italian Aphrodite looks up, her face all
quivering and burning with passion and wasting anxiety. The Greek one
is quiet, self-possessed, and self-satisfied; the Italian incapable of
rest, she has had no thought nor care for herself; her hair has been
bound by a fillet like the Greeks; but it is now all fallen loose, and
clotted with the sea, or clinging to her body; only the front tress of
it is caught by the breeze from her raised forehead, and lifted, in the
place where the tongues of fire rest on the brows, in the early
Christian pictures of Pentecost, and the waving fires abide upon the
heads of Angelico's seraphim.
190. There are almost endless points of interest, great and small, to be
noted in these differences of treatment. This binding of the hair by the
single fillet marks the straight course of one great system of art
method, from that Greek head which I showed you on the archaic coin of
the seventh century before Christ, to this of the fifteenth of our own
era--nay, when you look close, you will see the entire action of the
head depends on one lock of hair falling back from the ear, which it
does in compliance with the old Greek observance of its being bent there
by the pressure of the helmet. That rippling of it down her shoulders
comes from the Athena of Corinth; the raising of it on her forehead,
from the knot of the hair of Diana, changed into the vestal fire of the
angels. But chiefly, the calmness of the features in the one face, and
their anxiety in the other, indicate first, indeed, the characteristic
difference in every conception of the schools, the Greek never
representing expression, the Italian primarily seeking it; but far more,
mark for us here the utter change in the conception of love; from the
tranquil guide and queen of a happy terrestrial domestic life, accepting
its immediate pleasures and natural duties, to the agonizing hope of an
infinite good, and the ever mingled joy and terror of a love divine in
jealousy, crying, "Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon
thine arm; for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave."
The vast issues dependent on this change in the conception of the ruling
passion of the human soul, I will endeavour to show you, on a future
occasion: in my present lecture, I shall limit myself to the definition
of the temper of Greek sculpture, and of its distinctions from
Florentine in the treatment of any subject whatever, be it love or
hatred, hope or despair.
These great differences are mainly the following.
191. 1. A Greek never expresses momentary passion; a Florentine looks to
momentary passion as the ultimate object of his skill.
When you are next in London, look carefully in the British Museum at the
casts from the statues in the pediment of the Temple of Minerva at
Ægina. You have there Greek work of definite date;--about 600 B.C.,
certainly before 580--of the purest kind; and you have the
representation of a noble ideal subject, the combats of the Æacidæ at
Troy, with Athena herself looking on. But there is no attempt whatever
to represent expression in the features, none to give complexity of
action or gesture; there is no struggling, no anxiety, no visible
temporary exertion of muscles. There are fallen figures, one pulling a
lance out of his wound, and others in attitudes of attack and defence;
several kneeling to draw their bows. But all inflict and suffer, conquer
or expire, with the same smile.
192. Plate XIV. gives you examples, from more advanced art, of true
Greek representation; the subjects being the two contests of leading
import to the Greek heart--that of Apollo with the Python, and of
Hercules with the Nemean Lion. You see that in neither case is there the
slightest effort to represent the [Greek: lyssa] or agony of contest. No
good Greek artist would have you behold the suffering, either of gods,
heroes, or men; nor allow you to be apprehensive of the issue of their
contest with evil beasts, or evil spirits. All such lower sources of
excitement are to be closed to you; your interest is to be in the
thoughts involved by the fact of the war; and in the beauty or rightness
of form, whether active or inactive. I have to work out this subject
with you afterwards, and to compare with the pure Greek method of
thought, that of modern dramatic passion, engrafted on it, as typically
in Turner's contest of Apollo and the Python: in the meantime, be
content with the statement of this first great principle--that a Greek,
as such, never expresses momentary passion.
[Illustration: PLATE XIV.--APOLLO AND THE PYTHON.
HERACLES AND THE NEMEAN LION.]
[Illustration: PLATE XV.--HERA OF ARGOS. ZEUS OF SYRACUSE.]
193. Secondly. The Greek, as such, never expresses personal character,
while a Florentine holds it to be the ultimate condition of beauty. You
are startled, I suppose, at my saying this, having had it often pointed
out to you, as a transcendent piece of subtlety in Greek art, that you
could distinguish Hercules from Apollo by his being stout, and Diana
from Juno by her being slender. That is very true; but those are general
distinctions of class, not special distinctions of personal character.
Even as general, they are bodily, not mental. They are the distinctions,
in fleshly aspect, between an athlete and a musician,--between a matron
and a huntress; but in no wise distinguish the simple-hearted hero from
the subtle Master of the Muses, nor the wilful and fitful girl-goddess
from the cruel and resolute matron-goddess. But judge for
yourselves;--In the successive plates, XV.--XVIII., I show you,[136]
typically represented as the protectresses of nations, the Argive,
Cretan, and Lacinian Hera, the Messenian Demeter, the Athena of Corinth,
the Artemis of Syracuse, the fountain Arethusa of Syracuse, and the
Sirem Ligeia of Terina. Now, of these heads, it is true that some are
more delicate in feature than the rest, and some softer in expression:
in other respects, can you trace any distinction between the Goddesses
of Earth and Heaven, or between the Goddess of Wisdom and the Water
Nymph of Syracuse? So little can you do so, that it would have remained
a disputed question--had not the name luckily been inscribed on some
Syracusan coins--whether the head upon them was meant for Arethusa at
all; and, continually, it becomes a question respecting finished
statues, if without attributes, "Is this Bacchus or Apollo--Zeus or
Poseidon?" There is a fact for you; noteworthy, I think! There is no
personal character in true Greek art:--abstract ideas of youth and age,
strength and swiftness, virtue and vice,--yes: but there is no
individuality; and the negative holds down to the revived
conventionalism of the Greek school by Leonardo, when he tells you how
you are to paint young women, and how old ones; though a Greek would
hardly have been so discourteous to age as the Italian is in his canon
of it,--"old women should be represented as passionate and hasty, after
the manner of Infernal Furies."
194. "But at least, if the Greeks do not give character, they give ideal
beauty?" So it is said, without contradiction. But will you look again
at the series of coins of the best time of Greek art, which I have just
set before you? Are any of these goddesses or nymphs very beautiful?
Certainly the Junos are not. Certainly the Demeters are not. The Siren,
and Arethusa, have well-formed and regular features; but I am quite sure
that if you look at them without prejudice, you will think neither
reach even the average standard of pretty English girls. The Venus
Urania suggests at first, the idea of a very charming person, but you
will find there is no real depth nor sweetness in the contours, looked
at closely. And remember, these are chosen examples; the best I can find
of art current in Greece at the great time; and if even I were to take
the celebrated statues, of which only two or three are extant, not one
of them excels the Venus of Melos; and she, as I have already asserted,
in _The Queen of the Air_, has nothing notable in feature except dignity
and simplicity. Of Athena I do not know one authentic type of great
beauty; but the intense ugliness which the Greeks could tolerate in
their symbolism of her will be convincingly proved to you by the coin
represented in Plate VI. You need only look at two or three vases of the
best time, to assure yourselves that beauty of feature was, in popular
art, not only unattained, but unattempted; and finally,--and this you
may accept as a conclusive proof of the Greek insensitiveness to the
most subtle beauty--there is little evidence even in their literature,
and none in their art, of their having ever perceived any beauty in
infancy, or early childhood.
[Illustration: PLATE XVI.--DEMETER OF MESSENE. HERA OF CROSSUS.]
[Illustration: PLATE XVII.--ATHENA OF THURIUM.
SEREIE LIGEIA OF TERINA]
195. The Greeks, then, do not give passion, do not give character, do
not give refined or naïve beauty. But you may think that the absence of
these is intended to give dignity to the gods and nymphs; and that their
calm faces would be found, if you long observed them, instinct with some
expression of divine mystery or power.
I will convince you of the narrow range of Greek thought in these
respects, by showing you, from the two sides of one and the same coin,
images of the most mysterious of their Deities, and the most
powerful,--Demeter and Zeus.
Remember, that just as the west coasts of Ireland and England catch
first on their hills the rain of the Atlantic, so the western
Peloponnese arrests, in the clouds of the first mountain ranges of
Arcadia, the moisture of the Mediterranean; and over all the plains of
Elis, Pylos, and Messene, the strength and sustenance of men was
naturally felt to be granted by Zeus; as, on the east coast of Greece,
the greater clearness of the air by the power of Athena. If
you will recollect the prayer of Rhea, in the single line of
Callimachus--"[Greek: Gaia philê, teke kai su teai d' ôdines elaphrai],"
(compare Pausanias iv. 33, at the beginning,)--it will mark for you the
connection, in the Greek mind, of the birth of the mountain springs of
Arcadia with the birth of Zeus. And the centres of Greek thought on this
western coast are necessarily Elis, and, (after the time of
Epaminondas,) Messene.
196. I show you the coin of Messene, because the splendid height and
form of Mount Ithome were more expressive of the physical power of Zeus
than the lower hills of Olympia; and also because it was struck just at
the time of the most finished and delicate Greek art--a little after the
main strength of Phidias, but before decadence had generally pronounced
itself. The coin is a silver didrachm, bearing on one side a head of
Demeter (Plate XVI., at the top); on the other a full figure of Zeus
Aietophoros (Plate XIX., at the top); the two together signifying the
sustaining strength of the earth and heaven. Look first at the head of
Demeter. It is merely meant to personify fulness of harvest; there is no
mystery in it, no sadness, no vestige of the expression which we should
have looked for in any effort to realize the Greek thoughts of the Earth
Mother, as we find them spoken by the poets. But take it merely as
personified abundance;--the goddess of black furrow and tawny grass--how
commonplace it is, and how poor! The hair is grand, and there is one
stalk of wheat set in it, which is enough to indicate the goddess who is
meant; but, in that very office, ignoble, for it shows that the artist
could only inform you that this was Demeter by such a symbol. How easy
it would have been for a great designer to have made the hair lovely
with fruitful flowers, and the features noble in mystery of gloom, or of
tenderness. But here you have nothing to interest you, except the common
Greek perfections of a straight nose and a full chin.
197. We pass, on the reverse of the die, to the figure of Zeus
Aietophoros. Think of the invocation to Zeus in the Suppliants, (525),
"King of Kings, and Happiest of the Happy, Perfectest of the Perfect in
strength, abounding in all things, Jove--hear us and be with us;" and
then, consider what strange phase of mind it was, which, under the very
mountain-home of the god, was content with this symbol of him as a
well-fed athlete, holding a diminutive and crouching eagle on his fist.
The features and the right hand have been injured in this coin, but the
action of the arms shows that it held a thunderbolt, of which, I
believe, the twisted rays were triple. In the, presumably earlier, coin
engraved by Millingen, however,[137] it is singly pointed only; and the
added inscription "[Greek: ITHÔM]," in the field, renders the conjecture
of Millingen probable, that this is a rude representation of the statue
of Zeus Ithomates, made by Ageladas, the master of Phidias; and I think
it has, indeed, the aspect of the endeavour, by a workman of more
advanced knowledge, and more vulgar temper, to put the softer anatomy of
later schools into the simple action of an archaic figure. Be that as it
may, here is one of the most refined cities of Greece content with the
figure of an athlete as the representative of their own mountain god;
marked as a divine power merely by the attributes of the eagle and
thunderbolt.
[Illustration: PLATE XVIII.--ARTEMIS OF SYRACUSE.
HERA OF LACINIAN CAPE.]
[Illustration: PLATE XIX.--ZEUS OF MESSENE. AJAX OF OPUS.]
198. Lastly. The Greeks have not, it appears, in any supreme way, given
to their statues character, beauty, or divine strength. Can they give
divine sadness? Shall we find in their artwork any of that pensiveness
and yearning for the dead, which fills the chants of their tragedy? I
suppose if anything like nearness or firmness of faith in afterlife is
to be found in Greek legend, you might look for it in the stories about
the Island of Leuce, at the mouth of the Danube, inhabited by the ghosts
of Achilles, Patroclus, Ajax the son of Oïleus, and Helen; and in which
the pavement of the Temple of Achilles was washed daily by the sea-birds
with their wings, dipping them in the sea.
Now it happens that we have actually on a coin of the Locrians the
representation of the ghost of the Lesser Ajax. There is nothing in the
history of human imagination more lovely, than their leaving always a
place for his spirit, vacant in their ranks of battle. But here is their
sculptural representation of the phantom; (lower figure, Plate XIX.),
and I think you will at once agree with me in feeling that it would be
impossible to conceive anything more completely unspiritual. You might
more than doubt that it could have been meant for the departed soul,
unless you were aware of the meaning of this little circlet between the
feet. On other coins you find his name inscribed there, but in this you
have his habitation, the haunted Island of Leuce itself, with the waves
flowing round it.
199. Again and again, however, I have to remind you, with respect to
these apparently frank and simple failures, that the Greek always
intends you to think for yourself, and understand, more than he can
speak. Take this instance at our hands, the trim little circlet for the
Island of Leuce. The workman knows very well it is not like the island,
and that he could not make it so; that at its best, his sculpture can be
little more than a letter; and yet, in putting this circlet, and its
encompassing fretwork of minute waves, he does more than if he had
merely given you a letter L, or written "Leuce." If you know anything of
beaches and sea, this symbol will set your imagination at work in
recalling them; then you will think of the temple service of the
novitiate sea-birds, and of the ghosts of Achilles and Patroclus
appearing, like the Dioscuri, above the storm-clouds of the Euxine. And
the artist, throughout his work, never for an instant loses faith in
your sympathy and passion being ready to answer his;--if you have none
to give, he does not care to take you into his counsel; on the whole,
would rather that you should not look at his work.
200. But if you have this sympathy to give, you may be sure that
whatever he does for you will be right, as far as he can render it so.
It may not be sublime, nor beautiful, nor amusing; but it will be full
of meaning, and faithful in guidance. He will give you clue to myriads
of things that he cannot literally teach; and, so far as he does teach,
you may trust him. Is not this saying much?
And as he strove only to teach what was true, so, in his sculptured
symbol, he strove only to carve what was--Right. He rules over the arts
to this day, and will for ever, because he sought not first for beauty,
nor first for passion, or for invention, but for Rightness; striving to
display, neither himself nor his art, but the thing that he dealt with,
in its simplicity. That is his specific character as a Greek. Of course,
every nation's character is connected with that of others surrounding or
preceding it; and in the best Greek work you will find some things that
are still false, or fanciful; but whatever in it is false or fanciful,
is not the Greek part of it--it is the Phoenician, or Egyptian, or
Pelasgian part. The essential Hellenic stamp is veracity:--Eastern
nations drew their heroes with eight legs, but the Greeks drew them with
two;--Egyptians drew their deities with cats' heads, but the Greeks drew
them with men's; and out of all fallacy, disproportion, and
indefiniteness, they were, day by day, resolvedly withdrawing and
exalting themselves into restricted and demonstrable truth.
201. And now, having cut away the misconceptions which encumbered our
thoughts, I shall be able to put the Greek school into some clearness of
its position for you, with respect to the art of the world. That
relation is strangely duplicate; for on one side, Greek art is the root
of all simplicity; and on the other, of all complexity.
[Illustration: PLATE XX.--GREEK AND BARBARIAN SCULPTURE.]
On one side I say, it is the root of all simplicity. If you were for
some prolonged period to study Greek sculpture exclusively in the Elgin
Room of the British Museum, and were then suddenly transported to the
Hôtel de Cluny, or any other museum of Gothic and barbarian workmanship,
you would imagine the Greeks were the masters of all that was grand,
simple, wise, and tenderly human, opposed to the pettiness of the toys
of the rest of mankind.
202. On one side of their work they are so. From all vain and mean
decoration--all weak and monstrous error, the Greeks rescue the forms of
man and beast, and sculpture them in the nakedness of their true flesh,
and with the fire of their living soul. Distinctively from other races,
as I have now, perhaps to your weariness, told you, this is the work of
the Greek, to give health to what was diseased, and chastisement to what
was untrue. So far as this is found in any other school, hereafter, it
belongs to them by inheritance from the Greeks, or invests them with the
brotherhood of the Greek. And this is the deep meaning of the myth of
Dædalus as the giver of motion to statues. The literal change from the
binding together of the feet to their separation, and the other
modifications of action which took place, either in progressive skill,
or often, as the mere consequence of the transition from wood to stone,
(a figure carved out of one wooden log must have necessarily its feet
near each other, and hands at its sides), these literal changes are as
nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the bestowing of apparent life.
The figures of monstrous gods on Indian temples have their legs separate
enough; but they are infinitely more dead than the rude figures at
Branchidæ sitting with their hands on their knees. And, briefly, the
work of Dædalus is the giving of deceptive life, as that of Prometheus
the giving of real life; and I can put the relation of Greek to all
other art, in this function, before you in easily compared and
remembered examples.
203. Here, on the right, in Plate XX., is an Indian bull, colossal, and
elaborately carved, which you may take as a sufficient type of the bad
art of all the earth. False in form, dead in heart, and loaded with
wealth, externally. We will not ask the date of this; it may rest in the
eternal obscurity of evil art, everywhere and for ever. Now, besides
this colossal bull, here is a bit of Dædalus work, enlarged from a coin
not bigger than a shilling: look at the two together, and you ought to
know, henceforward, what Greek art means, to the end of your days.
204. In this aspect of it then, I say, it is the simplest and nakedest
of lovely veracities. But it has another aspect, or rather another pole,
for the opposition is diametric. As the simplest, so also it is the most
complex of human art. I told you in my fifth Lecture, showing you the
spotty picture of Velasquez, that an essential Greek character is a
liking for things that are dappled. And you cannot but have noticed how
often and how prevalently the idea which gave its name to the Porch of
Polygnotus, "[Greek: stoa poikilê]," occurs to the Greeks as connected
with the finest art. Thus, when the luxurious city is opposed to the
simple and healthful one, in the second book of Plato's Polity, you find
that, next to perfumes, pretty ladies, and dice, you must have in it
"[Greek: poikilia]," which observe, both in that place and again in the
third book, is the separate art of joiners' work, or inlaying; but the
idea of exquisitely divided variegation or division, both in sight and
sound--the "ravishing division to the lute," as in Pindar's "[Greek:
poikiloi hymnoi]"--runs through the compass of all Greek
art-description; and if, instead of studying that art among marbles you
were to look at it only on vases of a fine time, (look back, for
instance, to Plate IV. here), your impression of it would be, instead of
breadth and simplicity, one of universal spottiness and chequeredness,
"[Greek: en angeôn Herkesin pampoikilois];" and of the artist's
delighting in nothing so much as in crossed or starred or spotted
things; which, in right places, he and his public both do unlimitedly.
Indeed they hold it complimentary even to a trout, to call him a
"spotty." Do you recollect the trout in the tributaries of the Ladon,
which Pausanias says were spotted, so that they were like thrushes and
which, the Arcadians told him, could speak? In this last [Greek:
poikilia], however, they disappointed him. "I, indeed, saw some of them
caught," he says, "but I did not hear any of them speak, though I waited
beside the river till sunset."
[Illustration: PLATE XXI.--THE BEGINNINGS OF CHIVALRY.]
205. I must sum roughly now, for I have detained you too long.
The Greeks have been thus the origin not only of all broad, mighty, and
calm conception, but of all that is divided, delicate, and tremulous;
"variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made." To them, as
first leaders of ornamental design, belongs, of right, the praise of
glistenings in gold, piercings in ivory, stainings in purple,
burnishings in dark blue steel; of the fantasy of the Arabian
roof--quartering of the Christian shield,--rubric and arabesque of
Christian scripture; in fine, all enlargement, and all diminution of
adorning thought, from the temple to the toy, and from the mountainous
pillars of Agrigentum to the last fineness of fretwork in the Pisan
Chapel of the Thorn.
And in their doing all this, they stand as masters of human order and
justice, subduing the animal nature guided by the spiritual one, as you
see the Sicilian Charioteer stands, holding his horse-reins, with the
wild lion racing beneath him, and the flying angel above, on the
beautiful coin of early Syracuse; (lowest in Plate XXI).
And the beginnings of Christian chivalary were in that Greek bridling of
the dark and the white horses.
206. Not that a Greek never made mistakes. He made as many as we do
ourselves, nearly;--he died of his mistakes at last--as we shall die of
them; but so far he was separated from the herd of more mistaken and
more wretched nations--so far as he was Greek--it was by his rightness.
He lived, and worked, and was satisfied with the fatness of his land,
and the fame of his deeds, by his justice, and reason, and modesty. He
became _Græculus esuriens_, little, and hungry, and every man's
errand-boy, by his iniquity, and his competition, and his love of talk.
But his Græcism was in having done, at least at one period of his
dominion, more than anybody else, what was modest, useful, and eternally
true; and as a workman, he verily did, or first suggested the doing of,
everything possible to man.
Take Dædalus, his great type of the practically executive craftsman, and
the inventor of expedients in craftsmanship, (as distinguished from
Prometheus, the institutor of moral order in art). Dædalus invents,--he,
or his nephew,--
The potter's wheel, and all work in clay;
The saw, and all work in wood;
The masts and sails of ships, and all modes of motion; (wings only
proving too dangerous!)
The entire art of minute ornament;
And the deceptive life of statues.
By his personal toil, he involves the fatal labyrinth for Minos; builds
an impregnable fortress for the Agrigentines; adorns healing baths among
the wild parsley fields of Selinus; buttresses the precipices of Eryx,
under the temple of Aphrodite; and for her temple itself--finishes in
exquisiteness the golden honeycomb.
207. Take note of that last piece of his art: it is connected with many
things which I must bring before you when we enter on the study of
architecture. That study we shall begin at the foot of the Baptistery of
Florence, which, of all buildings known to me, unites the most perfect
symmetry with the quaintest [Greek: poikilia]. Then, from the tomb of
your own Edward the Confessor, to the farthest shrine of the opposite
Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and
iridescent dominion of Dædalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division,
interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this
last summer I found the dark red masses of the rough sandstone of
Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had
in carving them, into wedged hexagons--reminiscences of the honeycomb of
Venus Erycina. His ingenuity plays around the framework of all the
noblest things; and yet the brightness of it has a lurid shadow. The
spot of the fawn, of the bird, and the moth, may be harmless. But
Dædalus reigns no less over the spot of the leopard and snake. That
cruel and venomous power of his art is marked, in the legends of him,
by his invention of the saw from the serpent's tooth; and his seeking
refuge, under blood-guiltiness, with Minos, who can judge evil, and
measure, or remit, the penalty of it, but not reward good: Rhadamanthus
only can measure _that_; but Minos is essentially the recognizer of evil
deeds "conoscitor delle peccata," whom, therefore, you find in Dante
under the form of the [Greek: erpeton]. "Cignesi con la coda tante
volte, quantunque gradi vuol che giu sia messa."
And this peril of the influence of Dædalus is twofold; first in leading
us to delight in glitterings and semblances of things, more than in
their form, or truth;--admire the harlequin's jacket more than the
hero's strength; and love the gilding of the missal more than its
words;--but farther, and worse, the ingenuity of Dædalus may even become
bestial, an instinct for mechanical labour only, strangely involved with
a feverish and ghastly cruelty:--(you will find this distinct in the
intensely Dædal work of the Japanese); rebellious, finally, against the
laws of nature and honour, and building labyrinths for monsters,--not
combs for bees.
208. Gentlemen, we of the rough northern race may never, perhaps, be
able to learn from the Greek his reverence for beauty: but we may at
least learn his disdain of mechanism:--of all work which he felt to be
monstrous and inhuman in its imprudent dexterities.
We hold ourselves, we English, to be good workmen. I do not think I
speak with light reference to recent calamity, (for I myself lost a
young relation, full of hope and good purpose, in the foundered ship
_London_,) when I say that either an Æginetan or Ionian shipwright built
ships that could be fought from, though they were under water; and
neither of them would have been proud of having built one that would
fill and sink helplessly if the sea washed over her deck, or turn upside
down if a squall struck her topsail.
Believe me, gentlemen, good workmanship consists in continence and
common sense, more than in frantic expatiation of mechanical ingenuity;
and if you would be continent and rational, you had better learn more of
Art than you do now, and less of Engineering. What is taking place at
this very hour,[138] among the streets, once so bright, and avenues
once so pleasant, of the fairest city in Europe, may surely lead us all
to feel that the skill of Dædalus, set to build impregnable fortresses,
is not so wisely applied as in framing the [Greek: trêton ponou]--the
golden honeycomb.
FOOTNOTES:
[135] The closing Lecture, on the religious temper of the Florentine,
though necessary for the complete explanation of the subject to my
class, at the time, introduced new points of inquiry which I do not
choose to lay before the general reader until they can be examined in
fuller sequence. The present volume, therefore, closes with the Sixth
Lecture, and that on Christian art will be given as the first of the
published course on Florentine Sculpture.
[136] These plates of coins are given for future reference and
examination, not merely for the use made of them in this place. The
Lacinian Hera, if a coin could be found unworn in surface, would be very
noble; her hair is thrown free because she is the goddess of the cape of
storms though in her temple, there, the wind never moved the ashes on
its altar. (Livy, xxiv. 3.)
[137] Ancient Cities and Kings, Plate IV. No. 20.
[138] The siege of Paris, at the time of the delivery of this Lecture,
was in one of its most destructive phases.
_THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND._
(_Delivered at the R. A. Institution, Woolwich, December 14, 1869._)
I would fain have left to the frank expression of the moment, but fear I
could not have found clear words--I cannot easily find them, even
deliberately,--to tell you how glad I am, and yet how ashamed, to accept
your permission to speak to you. Ashamed of appearing to think that I
can tell you any truth which you have not more deeply felt than I; but
glad in the thought that my less experience, and way of life sheltered
from the trials, and free from the responsibilities of yours, may have
left me with something of a child's power of help to you; a sureness of
hope, which may perhaps be the one thing that can be helpful to men who
have done too much not to have often failed in doing all that they
desired. And indeed, even the most hopeful of us, cannot but now be in
many things apprehensive. For this at least we all know too well, that
we are on the eve of a great political crisis, if not of political
change. That a struggle is approaching between the newly-risen power of
democracy and the apparently departing power of feudalism; and another
struggle, no less imminent, and far more dangerous, between wealth and
pauperism. These two quarrels are constantly thought of as the same.
They are being fought together, and an apparently common interest unites
for the most part the millionaire with the noble, in resistance to a
multitude, crying, part of it for bread and part of it for liberty.
And yet no two quarrels can be more distinct. Riches--so far from being
necessary to noblesse--are adverse to it. So utterly adverse, that the
first character of all the Nobilities which have founded great dynasties
in the world is to be poor;--often poor by oath--always poor by
generosity. And of every true knight in the chivalric ages, the first
thing history tells you is, that he never kept treasure for himself.
Thus the causes of wealth and noblesse are not the same; but opposite.
On the other hand, the causes of anarchy and of the poor are not the
same, but opposite. Side by side, in the same rank, are now indeed set
the pride that revolts against authority, and the misery that appeals
against avarice. But, so far from being a common cause, all anarchy is
the forerunner of poverty, and all prosperity begins in obedience. So
that thus, it has become impossible to give due support to the cause of
order, without seeming to countenance injury; and impossible to plead
justly the claims of sorrow, without seeming to plead also for those of
license.
Let me try, then, to put in very brief terms, the real plan of this
various quarrel, and the truth of the cause on each side. Let us face
that full truth, whatever it may be, and decide what part, according to
our power, we should take in the quarrel.
First. For eleven hundred years, all but five, since Charlemagne set on
his head the Lombard crown, the body of European people have submitted
patiently to be governed; generally by kings--always by single leaders
of some kind. But for the last fifty years they have begun to suspect,
and of late they have many of them concluded, that they have been on the
whole ill-governed, or misgoverned, by their kings. Whereupon they say,
more and more widely, "Let us henceforth have no kings; and no
government at all."
Now we said, we must face the full truth of the matter, in order to see
what we are to do. And the truth is that the people _have_ been
misgoverned;--that very little is to be said, hitherto, for most of
their masters--and that certainly in many places they will try their new
system of "no masters:"--and as that arrangement will be delightful to
all foolish persons, and, at first, profitable to all wicked ones,--and
as these classes are not wanting or unimportant in any human
society,--the experiment is likely to be tried extensively. And the
world may be quite content to endure much suffering with this fresh
hope, and retain its faith in anarchy, whatever comes of it, till it can
endure no more.
Then, secondly. The people have begun to suspect that one particular
form of this past misgovernment has been, that their masters have set
them to do all the work, and have themselves taken all the wages. In a
word, that what was called governing them, meant only wearing fine
clothes, and living on good fare at their expense. And I am sorry to
say, the people are quite right in this opinion also. If you inquire
into the vital fact of the matter, this you will find to be the constant
structure of European society for the thousand years of the feudal
system; it was divided into peasants who lived by working; priests who
lived by begging; and knights who lived by pillaging; and as the
luminous public mind becomes gradually cognizant of these facts, it will
assuredly not suffer things to be altogether arranged that way any more;
and the devising of other ways will be an agitating business; especially
because the first impression of the intelligent populace is, that
whereas, in the dark ages, half the nation lived idle, in the bright
ages to come, the whole of it may.
Now, thirdly--and here is much the worst phase of the crisis. This past
system of misgovernment, especially during the last three hundred years,
has prepared, by its neglect, a class among the lower orders which it is
now peculiarly difficult to govern. It deservedly lost their
respect--but that was the least part of the mischief. The deadly part of
it was, that the lower orders lost their habit, and at last their
faculty, of respect;--lost the very capability of reverence, which is
the most precious part of the human soul. Exactly in the degree in which
you can find creatures greater than yourself, to look up to, in that
degree, you are ennobled yourself, and, in that degree, happy. If you
could live always in the presence of archangels, you would be happier
than in that of men; but even if only in the company of admirable
knights and beautiful ladies, the more noble and bright they were, and
the more you could reverence their virtue the happier you would be. On
the contrary, if you were condemned to live among a multitude of idiots,
dumb, distorted and malicious, you would not be happy in the constant
sense of your own superiority. Thus all real joy and power of progress
in humanity depend on finding something to reverence; and all the
baseness and misery of humanity begin in a habit of disdain. Now, by
general misgovernment, I repeat, we have created in Europe a vast
populace, and out of Europe a still vaster one, which has lost even the
power and conception of reverence;[139]--which exists only in the
worship of itself--which can neither see anything beautiful around it,
nor conceive anything virtuous above it; which has, towards all goodness
and greatness, no other feelings than those of the lowest
creatures--fear, hatred, or hunger a populace which has sunk below your
appeal in their nature, as it has risen beyond your power in their
multitude;--whom you can now no more charm than you can the adder, nor
discipline, than you can the summer fly.
It is a crisis, gentlemen; and time to think of it. I have roughly and
broadly put it before you in its darkness. Let us look what we may find
of light.
Only the other day, in a journal which is a fairly representative
exponent of the Conservatism of our day, and for the most part not at
all in favor of strikes or other popular proceedings; only about three
weeks since, there was a leader, with this, or a similar, title--"What
is to become of the House of Lords?" It startled me, for it seemed as if
we were going even faster than I had thought, when such a question was
put as a subject of quite open debate, in a journal meant chiefly for
the reading of the middle and upper classes. Open or not--the debate is
near. What _is_ to become of them? And the answer to such question
depends first on their being able to answer another question--"What is
the _use_ of them!" For some time back, I think the theory of the nation
has been, that they are useful as impediments to business, so as to give
time for second thoughts. But the nation is getting impatient of
impediments to business; and certainly, sooner or later, will think it
needless to maintain these expensive obstacles to its humors. And I
have not heard, either in public, or from any of themselves, a clear
expression of their own conception of their use. So that it seems thus
to become needful for all men to tell them, as our one quite
clear-sighted teacher, Carlyle, has been telling us for many a year,
that the use of the Lords of a country is to _govern_ the country. If
they answer that use, the country will rejoice in keeping them; if not,
that will become of them which must of all things found to have lost
their serviceableness.
Here, therefore, is the one question, at this crisis, for them, and for
us. Will they be lords indeed, and give us laws--dukes indeed, and give
us guiding--princes indeed, and give us beginning, of truer dynasty,
which shall not be soiled by covetousness, nor disordered by iniquity?
Have they themselves sunk so far as not to hope this? Are there yet any
among them who can stand forward with open English brows, and say,--So
far as in me lies, I will govern with my might, not for Dieu et _mon_
Droit, but for the first grand reading of the war cry, from which that
was corrupted, "Dieu et Droit?" Among them I know there are some--among
you, soldiers of England, I know there are many, who can do this; and in
you is our trust. I, one of the lower people of your country, ask of you
in their name--you whom I will not any more call soldiers, but by the
truer name of Knights;--Equites of England. How many yet of you are
there, knights errant now beyond all former fields of danger--knights
patient now beyond all former endurance; who still retain the ancient
and eternal purpose of knighthood, to subdue the wicked, and aid the
weak? To them, be they few or many, we English people call for help to
the wretchedness, and for rule over the baseness, of multitudes desolate
and deceived, shrieking to one another this new gospel of their new
religion. "Let the weak do as they can, and the wicked as they will."
I can hear you saying in your hearts, even the bravest of you, "The time
is past for all that." Gentlemen, it is not so. The time has come for
_more_ than all that. Hitherto, soldiers have given their lives for
false fame, and for cruel power. The day is now when they must give
their lives for true fame, and for beneficent power: and the work is
near every one of you--close beside you--the means of it even thrust
into your hands. The people are crying to you for command, and you stand
there at pause, and silent. You think they don't want to be commanded;
try them; determine what is needful for them--honorable for them; show
it them, promise to bring them to it, and they will follow you through
fire. "Govern us," they cry with one heart, though many minds. They
_can_ be governed still, these English; they are men still; not gnats,
nor serpents. They love their old ways yet, and their old masters, and
their old land. They would fain live in it, as many as may stay there,
if you will show them how, there, to live;--or show them even, how,
there, like Englishmen, to die.
"To live in it, as many as may!" How many do you think may? How many
_can_? How many do you want to live there? As masters, your first object
must be to increase your power; and in what does the power of a country
consist? Will you have dominion over its stones, or over its clouds, or
over its souls? What do you mean by a great nation, but a great
multitude of men who are true to each other, and strong, and of worth?
Now you can increase the multitude only definitely--your island has only
so much standing room--but you can increase the _worth in_definitely. It
is but a little island;--suppose, little as it is, you were to fill it
with friends? You may, and that easily. You must, and that speedily; or
there will be an end to this England of ours, and to all its loves and
enmities.
To fill this little island with true friends--men brave, wise, and
happy! Is it so impossible, think you, after the world's eighteen
hundred years of Christianity, and our own thousand years of toil, to
fill only this little white gleaming crag with happy creatures, helpful
to each other? Africa, and India, and the Brazilian wide-watered plain,
are these not wide enough for the ignorance of our race? have they not
space enough for its pain? Must we remain _here_ also savage,--_here_
at enmity with each other,--_here_ foodless, houseless, in rags, in
dust, and without hope, as thousands and tens of thousands of us are
lying? Do not think it, gentlemen. The thought that it is inevitable is
the last infidelity; infidelity not to God only, but to every creature
and every law that He has made. Are we to think that the earth was only
shaped to be a globe of torture; and that there cannot be one spot of it
where peace can rest, or justice reign? Where are men ever to be happy,
if not in England? by whom shall they ever be taught to do right, if not
by you? Are we not of a race first among the strong ones of the earth;
the blood in us incapable of weariness, unconquerable by grief? Have we
not a history of which we can hardly think without becoming insolent in
our just pride of it? Can we dare, without passing every limit of
courtesy to other nations, to say how much more we have to be proud of
in our ancestors than they? Among our ancient monarchs, great crimes
stand out as monstrous and strange. But their valor, and, according to
their understanding, their benevolence, are constant. The Wars of the
Roses, which are as a fearful crimson shadow on our land, represent the
normal condition of other nations; while from the days of the Heptarchy
downwards we have had examples given us, in all ranks, of the most
varied and exalted virtue; a heap of treasure that no moth can corrupt,
and which even our traitorship, if we are to become traitors to it,
cannot sully.
And this is the race, then, that we know not any more how to govern! and
this the history which we are to behold broken off by sedition! and this
is the country, of all others, where life is to become difficult to the
honest, and ridiculous to the wise! And the catastrophe, forsooth, is to
come just when we have been making swiftest progress beyond the wisdom
and wealth of the past. Our cities are a wilderness of spinning wheels
instead of palaces; yet the people have not clothes. We have blackened
every leaf of English greenwood with ashes, and the people die of cold;
our harbors are a forest of merchant ships, and the people die of
hunger.
Whose fault is it? Yours, gentlemen; yours only. You alone can feed
them, and clothe, and bring into their right minds, for you only can
govern--that is to say, you only can educate them.
Educate, or govern, they are one and the same word. Education does not
mean teaching people to know what they do not know. It means teaching
them to behave as they do not behave. And the true "compulsory
education" which the people now ask of you is not catechism, but drill.
It is not teaching the youth of England the shapes of letters and the
tricks of numbers; and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to
roguery, and their literature to lust. It is, on the contrary, training
them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and
souls. It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by
kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise,--but above
all--by example.
Compulsory! Yes, by all means! "Go ye out into the highways and hedges,
and _compel_ them to come in." Compulsory! Yes, and gratis also. _Dei
Gratia_, they must be taught, as, _Dei Gratia_, you are set to teach
them. I hear strange talk continually, "how difficult it is to make
people pay for being educated!" Why, I should think so! Do you make your
children pay for their education, or do you give it them compulsorily,
and gratis? You do not expect _them_ to pay you for their teaching,
except by becoming good children. Why should you expect a peasant to pay
for his, except by becoming a good man?--payment enough, I think, if we
knew it. Payment enough to himself, as to us. For that is another of our
grand popular mistakes--people are always thinking of education as a
means of livelihood. Education is not a profitable business, but a
costly one; nay, even the best attainments of it are always
unprofitable, in any terms of coin. No nation ever made its bread either
by its great arts, or its great wisdoms. By its minor arts or
manufactures, by its practical knowledges, yes: but its noble
scholarship, its noble philosophy, and its noble art, are always to be
bought as a treasure, not sold for a livelihood. You do not learn that
you may live--you live that you may learn. You are to spend on National
Education, and to be spent for it, and to make by it, not more money,
but better men;--to get into this British Island the greatest possible
number of good and brave Englishmen. _They_ are to be your "money's
worth."
But where is the money to come from? Yes, that is to be asked. Let us,
as quite the first business in this our national crisis, look not only
into our affairs, but into our accounts, and obtain some general notion
how we annually spend our money, and what we are getting for it.
Observe, I do not mean to inquire into the public revenue only; of that
some account is rendered already. But let us do the best we can to set
down the items of the national _private_ expenditure; and know what we
spend altogether, and how.
To begin with this matter of education. You probably have nearly all
seen the admirable lecture lately given by Captain Maxse, at
Southampton. It contains a clear statement of the facts at present
ascertained as to our expenditure in that respect. It appears that of
our public moneys, for every pound that we spend on education we spend
twelve either in charity or punishment;--ten millions a year in
pauperism and crime, and eight hundred thousand in instruction. Now
Captain Maxse adds to this estimate of ten millions public money spent
on crime and want, a more or less conjectural sum of eight millions for
private charities. My impression is that this is much beneath the truth,
but at all events it leaves out of consideration much the heaviest and
saddest form of charity--the maintenance, by the working members of
families, of the unfortunate or ill-conducted persons whom the general
course of misrule now leaves helpless to be the burden of the rest.
Now I want to get first at some, I do not say approximate, but at all
events some suggestive, estimate of the quantity of real distress and
misguided life in this country. Then next, I want some fairly
representative estimate of our private expenditure in luxuries. We won't
spend more, publicly, it appears, than eight hundred thousand a year, on
educating men gratis. I want to know, as nearly as possible, what we
spend privately a year, in educating horses gratis. Let us, at least,
quit ourselves in this from the taunt of Rabshakeh, and see that for
every horse we train also a horseman; and that the rider be at least as
high-bred as the horse, not jockey, but chevalier. Again, we spend eight
hundred thousand, which is certainly a great deal of money, in making
rough _minds_ bright. I want to know how much we spend annually in
making rough _stones_ bright; that is to say, what may be the united
annual sum, or near it, of our jewellers' bills. So much we pay for
educating children gratis;--how much for educating diamonds gratis? and
which pays best for brightening, the spirit or the charcoal? Let us get
those two items set down with some sincerity, and a few more of the same
kind. _Publicly_ set down. We must not be ashamed of the way we spend
our money. If our right hand is not to know what our left does, it must
not be because it would be ashamed if it did.
That is, therefore, quite the first practical thing to be done. Let
every man who wishes well to his country, render it yearly an account of
his income, and of the main heads of his expenditure; or, if he is
ashamed to do so, let him no more impute to the poor their poverty as a
crime, nor set them to break stones in order to frighten them from
committing it. To lose money ill is indeed often a crime; but to get it
ill is a worse one, and to spend it ill, worst of all. You object, Lords
of England, to increase, to the poor, the wages you give them, because
they spend them, you say, unadvisedly. Render them, therefore, an
account of the wages which _they_ give _you_; and show them, by your
example, how to spend theirs, to the last farthing advisedly.
It is indeed time to make this an acknowledged subject of instruction,
to the workingman,--how to spend his wages. For, gentlemen, we _must_
give that instruction, whether we will or no, one way or the other. We
have given it in years gone by; and now we find fault with our peasantry
for having been too docile, and profited too shrewdly by our tuition.
Only a few days since I had a letter from the wife of a village rector,
a man of common sense and kindness, who was greatly troubled in his
mind because it was precisely the men who got highest wages in summer
that came destitute to his door in the winter. Destitute, and of riotous
temper--for their method of spending wages in their period of prosperity
was by sitting two days a week in the tavern parlor, ladling port wine,
not out of bowls, but out of buckets. Well, gentlemen, who taught them
that method of festivity? Thirty years ago, I, a most inexperienced
freshman, went to my first college supper; at the head of the table sat
a nobleman of high promise and of admirable powers, since dead of palsy;
there also we had in the midst of us, not buckets, indeed, but bowls as
large as buckets; there also, we helped ourselves with ladles. There
(for this beginning of college education was compulsory), I choosing
ladlefuls of punch instead of claret, because I was then able,
unperceived to pour them into my waistcoat instead of down my throat,
stood it out to the end, and helped to carry four of my fellow-students,
one of them the son of the head of a college, head foremost, down stairs
and home.
Such things are no more; but the fruit of them remains, and will for
many a day to come. The laborers whom you cannot now shut out of the
ale-house are only the too faithful disciples of the gentlemen who were
wont to shut themselves into the dining-room. The gentlemen have not
thought it necessary, in order to correct their own habits, to diminish
their incomes; and, believe me, the way to deal with your drunken
workman is not to lower his wages,--but to mend his wits.[140]
And if indeed we do not yet see quite clearly how to deal with the sins
of our poor brother, it is possible that our dimness of sight may still
have other causes that can be cast out. There are two opposite cries of
the great liberal and conservative parties, which are both most right,
and worthy to be rallying cries. On their side "let every man have his
chance;" on yours "let every man stand in his place." Yes, indeed, let
that be so, every man in his place, and every man fit for it. See that
he holds that place from Heaven's Providence; and not from his family's
Providence. Let the Lords Spiritual quit themselves of simony, we laymen
will look after the heretics for them. Let the Lords Temporal quit
themselves of nepotism, and we will take care of their authority for
them. Publish for us, you soldiers, an army gazette, in which the one
subject of daily intelligence shall be the grounds of promotion; a
gazette which shall simply tell us, what there certainly can be no
detriment to the service in our knowing, when any officer is appointed
to a new command,--what his former services and successes have
been,--whom he has superseded,--and on what ground. It will be always a
satisfaction to us; it may sometimes be an advantage to you: and then,
when there is really necessary debate respecting reduction of wages, let
us always begin not with the wages of the industrious classes, but with
those of the idle ones. Let there be honorary titles, if people like
them; but let there be no honorary incomes.
So much for the master's motto, "Every man in his place." Next for the
laborer's motto, "Every man his chance." Let us mend that for them a
little, and say, "Every man his certainty"--certainty, that if he does
well, he will be honored, and aided, and advanced in such degree as may
be fitting for his faculty and consistent with his peace; and equal
certainty that if he does ill, he will by sure justice be judged, and by
sure punishment be chastised; if it may be, corrected; and if that may
not be, condemned. That is the right reading of the Republican motto,
"Every man his chance." And then, with such a system of government,
pure, watchful and just, you may approach your great problem of national
education, or in other words, of national employment. For all education
begins in work. What we think, or what we know; or what we believe, is
in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what
we _do;_ and for man, woman, or child, the first point of education is
to make them do their best. It is the law of good economy to make the
best of everything. How much more to make the best of every creature!
Therefore, when your pauper comes to you and asks for bread, ask of him
instantly--What faculty have you? What can you do best? Can you drive a
nail into wood? Go and mend the parish fences. Can you lay a brick? Mend
the walls of the cottages where the wind comes in. Can you lift a
spadeful of earth? Turn this field up three feet deep all over. Can you
only drag a weight with your shoulders? Stand at the bottom of this hill
and help up the overladen horses. Can you weld iron and chisel stone?
Fortify this wreck-strewn coast into a harbor; and change these shifting
sands into fruitful ground. Wherever death was, bring life; that is to
be your work; that your parish refuge; that your education. So and no
otherwise can we meet existent distress. But for the continual education
of the whole people, and for their future happiness, they must have such
consistent employment as shall develop all the powers of the fingers,
and the limbs, and the brain: and that development is only to be
obtained by hand-labor, of which you have these four great
divisions--hand-labor on the earth, hand-labor on the sea, hand-labor in
art, hand-labor in war. Of the last two of these I cannot speak
to-night, and of the first two only with extreme brevity.
I. Hand-labor on the earth, the work of the husbandman and of the
shepherd;--to dress the earth and to keep the flocks of it--the first
task of man, and the final one--the education always of noblest
lawgivers, kings and teachers; the education of Hesiod, of Moses, of
David, of all the true strength of Rome; and all its tenderness: the
pride of Cincinnatus, and the inspiration of Virgil. Hand-labor on the
earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with singing:--not
steam-piston labor on the earth, and the harvest of it brought forth
with steam-whistling. You will have no prophet's voice accompanied by
that shepherd's pipe, and pastoral symphony. Do you know that lately, in
Cumberland, in the chief pastoral district of England--in Wordsworth's
own home--a procession of villagers on their festa day provided for
themselves, by way of music, a steam-plough whistling at the head of
them.
Give me patience while I put the principle of machine labor before you,
as clearly and in as short compass as possible; it is one that should be
known at this juncture. Suppose a farming proprietor needs to employ a
hundred men on his estate, and that the labor of these hundred men is
enough, but not more than enough, to till all his land, and to raise
from it food for his own family, and for the hundred laborers. He is
obliged, under such circumstances, to maintain all the men in moderate
comfort, and can only by economy accumulate much for himself. But,
suppose he contrive a machine that will easily do the work of fifty men,
with only one man to watch it. This sounds like a great advance in
civilization. The farmer of course gets his machine made, turns off the
fifty men, who may starve or emigrate at their choice, and now he can
keep half of the produce of his estate, which formerly went to feed
them, all to himself. That is the essential and constant operation of
machinery among us at this moment.
Nay, it is at first answered; no man can in reality keep half the
produce of an estate to himself, nor can he in the end keep more than
his own human share of anything; his riches must diffuse themselves at
some time; he must maintain somebody else with them, however he spends
them. That is mainly true (not altogether so), for food and fuel are in
ordinary circumstances personally wasted by rich people, in quantities
which would save many lives. One of my own great luxuries, for instance,
is candlelight--and I probably burn, for myself alone, as many candles
during the winter, as would comfort the old eyes, or spare the young
ones, of a whole rushlighted country village. Still, it is mainly true,
that it is not by their personal waste that rich people prevent the
lives of the poor. This is the way they do it. Let me go back to my
farmer. He has got his machine made, which goes creaking, screaming, and
occasionally exploding, about modern Arcadia. He has turned off his
fifty men to starve. Now, at some distance from his own farm, there is
another on which the laborers were working for their bread in the same
way, by tilling the land. The machinist sends over to these, saying--"I
have got food enough for you without your digging or ploughing any more.
I can maintain you in other occupations instead of ploughing that land;
if you rake in its gravel you will find some hard stones--you shall
grind those on mills till they glitter; then, my wife shall wear a
necklace of them. Also, if you turn up the meadows below you will find
some fine white clay, of which you shall make a porcelain service for
me: and the rest of the farm I want for pasture for horses for my
carriage--and you shall groom them, and some of you ride behind the
carriage with staves in your hands, and I will keep you much fatter for
doing that than you can keep yourselves by digging."
Well--but it is answered, are we to have no diamonds, nor china, nor
pictures, nor footmen, then--but all to be farmers? I am not saying what
we ought to do, I want only to show you with perfect clearness first
what we _are doing_; and that, I repeat, is the upshot of
machine-contriving in this country. And observe its effect on the
national strength. Without machines, you have a hundred and fifty yeomen
ready to join for defence of the land. You get your machine, starve
fifty of them, make diamond-cutters or footmen of as many more, and for
your national defence against an enemy, you have now, and _can_ have,
only fifty men, instead of a hundred and fifty; these also now with
minds much alienated from you as their chief,[141] and the rest,
lapidaries or footmen; and a steam plough.
That is one effect of machinery; but at all events, if we have thus lost
in men, we have gained in riches; instead of happy human souls, we have
at least got pictures, china, horses, and are ourselves better off than
we were before. But very often, and in much of our machine-contriving,
even _that_ result does not follow. We are not one whit the richer for
the machine, we only employ it for our amusement. For observe, our
gaining in riches depends on the men who are out of employment
consenting to be starved, or sent out of the country. But suppose they
do not consent passively to be starved, but some of them become
criminals, and have to be taken charge of and fed at a much greater cost
than if they were at work, and, others, paupers, rioters, and the like,
then you attain the real outcome of modern wisdom and ingenuity. You
have your hundred men honestly at country work; but you don't like the
sight of human beings in your fields; you like better to see a smoking
kettle. You pay, as an amateur, for that pleasure, and you employ your
fifty men in picking oakum, or begging, rioting, and thieving.
By hand-labor, therefore, and that alone, we are to till the ground. By
hand-labor also to plough the sea; both for food, and in commerce, and
in war: not with floating kettles there neither, but with hempen bridle,
and the winds of heaven in harness. That is the way the power of Greece
rose on her Egean, the power of Venice on her Adria, of Amalfi in her
blue bay, of the Norman sea-riders from the North Cape to Sicily:--so,
your own dominion also of the past. Of the past mind you. On the Baltic
and the Nile, your power is already departed. By machinery you would
advance to discovery; by machinery you would carry your commerce;--you
would be engineers instead of sailors; and instantly in the North seas
you are beaten among the ice, and before the very Gods of Nile, beaten
among the sand. Agriculture, then, by the hand or by the plough drawn
only by animals; and shepherd and pastoral husbandry, are to be the
chief schools of Englishmen. And this most royal academy of all
academies you have to open over all the land, purifying your heaths and
hills, and waters, and keeping them full of every kind of lovely natural
organism, in tree, herb, and living creature. All land that is waste and
ugly, you must redeem into ordered fruitfulness; all ruin, desolateness,
imperfectness of hut or habitation, you must do away with; and
throughout every village and city of your English dominion there must
not be a hand that cannot find a helper, nor a heart that cannot find a
comforter.
"How impossible!" I know, you are thinking. Ah! So far from impossible,
it is easy, it is natural, it is necessary, and I declare to you that,
sooner or later, it _must be done_, at our peril. If now our English
lords of land will fix this idea steadily before them; take the people
to their hearts, trust to their loyalty, lead their labor;--then indeed
there will be princes again in the midst of us, worthy of the island
throne,
"This royal throne of kings--this sceptred isle--
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection, and the hand of war;
This precious stone set in the silver sea;
This happy breed of men--this little world:
This other Eden--Demi-Paradise."
But if they refuse to do this, and hesitate and equivocate, clutching
through the confused catastrophe of all things only at what they can
still keep stealthily for themselves--their doom is nearer than even
their adversaries hope, and it will be deeper than even their despisers
dream.
That, believe me, is the work you have to do in England; and out of
England you have room for everything else you care to do. Are her
dominions in the world so narrow that she can find no place to spin
cotton in but Yorkshire? We may organize emigration into an infinite
power. We may assemble troops of the more adventurous and ambitious of
our youth; we may send them on truest foreign service, founding new
seats of authority, and centres of thought, in uncultivated and
unconquered lands; retaining the full affection to the native country no
less in our colonists than in our armies, teaching them to maintain
allegiance to their fatherland in labor no less than in battle; aiding
them with free hand in the prosecution of discovery, and the victory
over adverse natural powers; establishing seats of every manufacture in
the climates and places best fitted for it, and bringing ourselves into
due alliance and harmony of skill with the dexterities of every race,
and the wisdoms of every tradition and every tongue.
And then you may make England itself the centre of the learning, of the
arts, of the courtesies and felicities of the world. Yon may cover her
mountains with pasture; her plains with corn, her valleys with the lily,
and her gardens with the rose. You may bring together there in peace
the wise and the pure, and the gentle of the earth, and by their word,
command through its farthest darkness the birth of "God's first
creature, which was Light." You know whose words those are; the words of
the wisest of Englishmen. He, and with him the wisest of all other great
nations, have spoken always to men of this hope, and they would not
hear. Plato, in the dialogue of Critias, his last, broken off at his
death--Pindar, in passionate singing of the fortunate islands--Virgil,
in the prophetic tenth eclogue--Bacon, in his fable of the New
Atlantis--More, in the book which, too impatiently wise, became the
bye-word of fools--these, all, have told us with one voice what we
should strive to attain; _they_ not hopeless of it, but for our follies
forced, as it seems, by heaven, to tell us only partly and in parables,
lest we should hear them and obey.
Shall we never listen to the words of these wisest of men? Then listen
at least to the words of your children--let us in the lips of babes and
sucklings find our strength; and see that we do not make them mock
instead of pray, when we teach them, night and morning, to ask for what
we believe never can be granted;--that the will of the Father,--which
is, that His creatures may be righteous and happy--should be done, _on
earth_, as it is in Heaven.
FOOTNOTES:
[139] Compare _Time and Tide_, § 169, _and Fors Clavigera_, Letter XIV,
page 9.
[140] See Appendix, "Modern Education," and compare § 70 of _Time and
Tide_.
[141] [They were deserting, I am informed, in the early part of this
year, 1873, at the rate of a regiment a week.]
_NOTES ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA._
I am often accused of inconsistency; but believe myself defensible
against the charge with respect to what I have said on nearly every
subject except that of war. It is impossible for me to write
consistently of war, for the groups of facts I have gathered about it
lead me to two precisely opposite conclusions.
When I find this the case, in other matters, I am silent, till I can
choose my conclusion: but, with respect to war, I am forced to speak, by
the necessities of the time; and forced to act, one way or another. The
conviction on which I act is, that it causes an incalculable amount of
avoidable human suffering, and that it ought to cease among Christian
nations; and if therefore any of my boy-friends desire to be soldiers, I
try my utmost to bring them into what I conceive to be a better mind.
But, on the other hand, I know certainly that the most beautiful
characters yet developed among men have been formed in war;--that all
great nations have been warrior nations, and that the only kinds of
peace which we are likely to get in the present age are ruinous alike to
the intellect, and the heart.
The lecture on "War," in this volume, addressed to young soldiers, had
for its object to strengthen their trust in the virtue of their
profession. It is inconsistent with itself, in its closing appeal to
women, praying them to use their influence to bring wars to an end. And
I have been hindered from completing my long intended notes on the
economy of the Kings of Prussia by continually increasing doubt how far
the machinery and discipline of war, under which they learned the art
of government, was essential for such lesson; and what the honesty and
sagacity of the Friedrich who so nobly repaired his ruined Prussia,
might have done for the happiness of his Prussia, unruined.
In war, however, or in peace, the character which Carlyle chiefly loves
him for, and in which Carlyle has shown him to differ from all kings up
to this time succeeding him, is his constant purpose to use every power
entrusted to him for the good of his people; and be, not in name only,
but in heart and hand, their king.
Not in ambition, but in natural instinct of duty. Friedrich, born to
govern, determines to govern to the best of his faculty. That "best" may
sometimes be unwise; and self-will, or love of glory, may have their
oblique hold on his mind, and warp it this way or that; but they are
never principal with him. He believes that war is necessary, and
maintains it; sees that peace is necessary, and calmly persists in the
work of it to the day of his death, not claiming therein more praise
than the head of any ordinary household, who rules it simply because it
is his place, and he must not yield the mastery of it to another.
How far, in the future, it may be possible for men to gain the strength
necessary for kingship without either fronting death, or inflicting it,
seems to me not at present determinable. The historical facts are that,
broadly speaking, none but soldiers, or persons with a soldierly
faculty, have ever yet shown themselves fit to be kings; and that no
other men are so gentle, so just, or so clear-sighted. Wordsworth's
character of the happy warrior cannot be reached in the height of it
_but by_ a warrior; nay, so much is it beyond common strength that I had
supposed the entire meaning of it to be metaphorical, until one of the
best soldiers of England himself read me the poem,[142] and taught me,
what I might have known, had I enough watched his own life, that it was
entirely literal. There is nothing of so high reach distinctly
demonstrable in Friedrich: but I see more and more, as I grow older,
that the things which are the most worth, encumbered among the errors
and faults of every man's nature, are never clearly demonstrable; and
are often most forcible when they are scarcely distinct to his own
conscience,--how much less, clamorous for recognition by others!
Nothing can be more beautiful than Carlyle's showing of this, to any
careful reader of Friedrich. But careful readers are but one in the
thousand; and by the careless, the masses of detail with which the
historian must deal are insurmountable.
My own notes, made for the special purpose of hunting down the one point
of economy, though they cruelly spoil Carlyle's own current and method
of thought, may yet be useful in enabling readers, unaccustomed to books
involving so vast a range of conception, to discern what, on this one
subject only, may be gathered from that history. On any other subject of
importance, similar gatherings might be made of other passages. The
historian has to deal with all at once.
I therefore have determined to print here, as a sequel to the Essay on
War, my notes from the first volume of Friedrich, on the economies of
Brandenburg, up to the date of the establishment of the Prussian
monarchy. The economies of the first three Kings of Prussia I shall then
take up in _Fors Clavigera_, finding them fitter for examination in
connection with the subject of that book than of this.
I assume, that the reader will take down his first volume of Carlyle,
and read attentively the passages to which I refer him. I give the
reference first to the largest edition, in six volumes (1858-1865);
then, in parenthesis, to the smallest or "people's edition" (1872-1873).
The pieces which I have quoted in my own text are for the use of readers
who may not have ready access to the book; and are enough for the
explanation of the points to which I wish them to direct their thoughts
in reading such histories of soldiers or soldier-kingdoms.
I.
_Year_ 928 to 936.--_Dawn of Order in Christian Germany._
Book II. Chap. i. p. 67 (47).
Henry the Fowler, "the beginning of German kings," is a mighty soldier
_in the cause of peace_; his essential work the building and
organization of fortified towns for the protection of men.
Read page 72 with utmost care (51), "He fortified towns," to end of
small print. I have added some notes on the matter in my lecture on
Giovanni Pisano; but whether you can glance at them or not, fix in your
mind this institution of truly civil or civic building in Germany, as
distinct from the building of baronial castles for the security of
_robbers_: and of a standing army consisting of every ninth man, called
a "burgher" ("townsman")--a soldier, appointed to learn that profession
that he may guard the walls--the exact reverse of _our_ notion of a
burgher.
Frederick's final idea of his army is, indeed, only this.
Brannibor, a chief fortress of the Wends, is thus taken, and further
strengthened by Henry the Fowler; wardens appointed for it; and thus the
history of Brandenburg begins. On all frontiers, also, this "beginning
of German kings" has his "Markgraf." "Ancient of the marked place." Read
page 73, measuredly, learning it by heart, if it may be. (51-2.)
II.
936-1000.--_History of Nascent Brandenburg._
The passage I last desired you to read ends with this sentence: "The
sea-wall you build, and what main floodgates you establish in it, will
depend on the state of the outer sea."
From this time forward you have to keep clearly separate in your minds,
(A) the history of that outer sea, Pagan Scandinavia, Russia, and
Bor-Russia, or Prussia proper; (B) the history of Henry the Fowler's
Eastern and Western Marches; asserting themselves gradually as Austria
and the Netherlands; and (C) the history of this inconsiderable fortress
of Brandenburg, gradually becoming considerable, and the capital city of
increasing district between them. That last history, however, Carlyle is
obliged to leave vague and gray for two hundred years after Henry's
death. Absolutely dim for the first century, in which nothing is evident
but that its wardens or Markgraves had no peaceable possession of the
place. Read the second paragraph in page 74 (52-3), "in old books" to
"reader," and the first in page 83 (59) "meanwhile" to "substantial,"
consecutively. They bring the story of Brandenburg itself down, at any
rate, from 936 to 1000.
III.
936-1000.--_State of the Outer Sea._
Read now Chapter II. beginning at page 76 (54), wherein you will get
account of the beginning of vigorous missionary work on the outer sea,
in Prussia proper; of the death of St. Adalbert, and of the purchase of
his dead body by the Duke of Poland.
You will not easily understand Carlyle's laugh in this chapter, unless
you have learned yourself to laugh in sadness, and to laugh in love.
"No Czech blows his pipe in the woodlands without certain precautions
and preliminary fuglings of a devotional nature." (Imagine St. Adalbert,
in spirit, at the railway station in Birmingham!)
My own main point for notice in the chapter is the purchase of his body
for its "weight in gold." Swindling angels held it up in the scales; it
did not weigh so much as a web of gossamer. "Had such excellent odor,
too, and came for a mere nothing of gold," says Carlyle. It is one of
the first commercial transactions of Germany, but I regret the conduct
of the angels on the occasion. Evangelicalism has been proud of ceasing
to invest in relics, its swindling angels helping it to better things,
as it supposes. For my own part, I believe Christian Germany could not
have bought at this time any treasure more precious; nevertheless, the
missionary work itself you find is wholly vain. The difference of
opinion between St. Adalbert and the Wends, on Divine matters, does not
signify to the Fates. They will not have it disputed about; and end the
dispute adversely, to St. Adalbert--adversely, even, to Brandenburg and
its civilizing power, as you will immediately see.
IV.
1000-1030.--_History of Brandenburg in Trouble._
Book II. Chap. iii. p. 83 (59).
The adventures of Brandenburg in contest with Pagan Prussia, irritated,
rather than amended, by St. Adalbert. In 1023, roughly, a hundred years
after Henry the Fowler's death, Brandenburg is taken by the Wends, and
its first line of Markgraves ended; its population mostly butchered,
especially the priests; and the Wends' God, Triglaph, "something like
three whales' cubs combined by boiling," set up on the top of St. Mary's
Hill.
Here is an adverse "Doctrine of the Trinity" which has its supporters!
It is wonderful,--this Tripod and Triglyph--three-footed, three-cut
faith of the North and South, the leaf of the oxalis, and strawberry,
and clover, fostering the same in their simple manner. I suppose it to
be the most savage and natural of notions about Deity; a prismatic
idol-shape of Him, rude as a triangular log, as a trefoil grass. I do
not find how long Triglaph held his state on St. Mary's Hill. "For a
time," says Carlyle, "the priests all slain or fled--shadowy Markgraves
the like--church and state lay in ashes, and Triglaph, like a triple
porpoise under the influence of laudanum, stood, I know not whether on
his head or his tail, aloft on the Harlungsberg, as the Supreme of this
Universe for the time being."
V.
1030-1130.--_Brandenburg under the Ditmarsch Markgraves, or
Ditmarsch-Stade Markgraves._
Book II. Chap. iii. p. 85 (60).
Of Anglish, or Saxon breed. They attack Brandenburg, under its
Triglyphic protector, take it--dethrone him, and hold the town for a
hundred years, their history "stamped beneficially on the face of
things, Markgraf after Markgraf getting killed in the business.
'Erschlagen,' 'slain,' fighting with the Heathen--say the old books, and
pass on to another." If we allow seven years to Triglaph--we get a clear
century for these--as above indicated. They die out in 1130.
VI.
1130-1170.--_Brandenburg under Albert the Bear._
Book II. Chap iv. p. 91 (64).
He is the first of the Ascanien Markgraves, whose castle of Ascanica is
on the northern slope of the Hartz Mountains, "ruins still dimly
traceable."
There had been no soldier or king of note among the Ditmarsch
Markgraves, so that you will do well to fix in your mind successively
the three men, Henry the Fowler, St. Adalbert, and Albert the Bear. A
soldier again, and a strong one. Named the Bear only from the device on
his shield, first wholly definite Markgraf of Brandenburg that there is,
"and that the luckiest of events for Brandenburg." Read page 93 (66)
carefully, and note this of his economies.
* * * * *
Nothing better is known to me of Albert the Bear than his introducing
large numbers of Dutch Netherlanders into those countries; men thrown
out of work, who already knew how to deal with bog and sand, by mixing
and delving, and who first taught Brandenburg what greenness and
cow-pasture was. The Wends, in presence of such things, could not but
consent more and more to efface themselves--either to become German, and
grow milk and cheese in the Dutch manner, or to disappear from the
world.
* * * * *
After two-hundred and fifty years of barking and worrying, the Wends are
now finally reduced to silence; their anarchy well buried and wholesome
Dutch cabbage planted over it; Albert did several great things in the
world; but this, for posterity, remains his memorable feat. Not done
quite easily, but done: big destinies of nations or of persons are not
founded gratis in this world, He had a sore, toilsome time of it,
coercing, warring, managing among his fellow-creatures, while his day's
work lasted--fifty years or so, for it began early. He died in his
castle of Ballenstädt, peaceably among the Hartz Mountains at last, in
the year 1170, age about sixty-five.
* * * * *
Now, note in all this the steady gain of soldiership enforcing order and
agriculture, with St. Adalbert giving higher strain to the imagination.
Henry the Fowler establishes walled towns, fighting for mere peace.
Albert the Bear plants the country with cabbages, fighting for his
cabbage-fields. And the disciples of St. Adalbert, generally, have
succeeded in substituting some idea of Christ for the idea of Triglaph.
Some idea only; other ideas than of Christ haunt even to this day those
Hartz Mountains among which Albert the Bear dies so peacefully.
Mephistopheles, and all his ministers, inhabit there, commanding
mephitic clouds and earth-born dreams.
VII.
1170-1320.--_Brandenburg 150 years under the Ascanien Markgraves._
Vol. I. Book II Chap. viii. p. 135 (96).
"Wholesome Dutch cabbages continued to be more and more planted by them
in the waste sand: intrusive chaos, and Triglaph held at bay by them,"
till at last in 1240, seventy years after the great Bear's death, they
fortify a new Burg, a "_little_ rampart," Wehrlin, diminutive of Wehr
(or vallum), gradually smoothing itself, with a little echo of the Bear
in it too, into Ber-lin, the oily river Spree flowing by, "in which you
catch various fish;" while trade over the flats and by the dull streams,
is widely possible. Of the Ascanien race, the notablest is Otto with the
Arrow, whose story see, pp. 138-141 (98-100), noting that Otto is one of
the first Minnesingers; that, being a prisoner to the Archbishop of
Magdeburg, his wife rescues him, selling her jewels to bribe the canons;
and that the Knight, set free on parole and promise of farther ransom,
rides back with his own price in his hand; holding himself thereat
cheaply bought, though no angelic legerdemain happens to the scales now.
His own estimate of his price--"Rain gold ducats on my war-horse and me,
till you cannot see the point of my spear atop."
Emptiness of utter pride, you think?
Not so. Consider with yourself, reader, how much you dare to say, aloud,
_you_ are worth. If you have _no_ courage to name any price whatsoever
for yourself, believe me, the cause is not your modesty, but that in
very truth you feel in your heart there would be no bid for you at
Lucian's sale of lives, were that again possible, at Christie and
Manson's.
Finally (1319 exactly; say 1320, for memory), the Ascanien line expired
in Brandenburg, and the little town and its electorate lapsed to the
Kaiser: meantime other economical arrangements had been in progress; but
observe first how far we have got.
The Fowler, St. Adalbert and the Bear have established order, and some
sort of Christianity; but the established persons begin to think
somewhat too well of themselves. On quite honest terms, a dead saint or
a living knight ought to be worth their true "weight in gold." But a
pyramid, with only the point of the spear seen at top, would be many
times over one's weight in gold. And although men were yet far enough
from the notion of modern days, that the gold is better than the flesh,
and from buying it with the clay of one's body, and even the fire of
one's soul, instead of soul and body with _it_, they were beginning to
fight for their own supremacy, or for their own religious fancies, and
not at all to any useful end, until an entirely unexpected movement is
made in the old useful direction forsooth, only by some kind
ship-captains of Lübeck!
VIII.
1210-1320.--_Civil work, aiding military, during the Ascanien period._
Vol. I. Book II. Chap. vi. p. 109 (77).
In the year 1190, Acre not yet taken, and the crusading army wasting by
murrain on the shore, the German soldiers especially having none to look
after them, certain compassionate ship-captains of Lübeck, one Walpot
von Bassenheim taking the lead, formed themselves into an union for
succor of the sick and the dying, set up canvas tents from the Lübeck
ship stores, and did what utmost was in them silently in the name of
mercy and heaven. Finding its work prosper, the little medicinal and
weather-fending company took vows on itself, strict chivalry forms, and
decided to become permanent "Knights Hospitallers of our dear Lady of
Mount Zion," separate from the former Knights Hospitallers, as being
entirely German: yet soon, as the German Order of St. Mary, eclipsing in
importance Templars, Hospitallers, and every other chivalric order then
extant; no purpose of battle in them, but much strength for it; their
purpose only the helping of German pilgrims. To this only they are
bound by their vow, "gelübde," and become one of the usefullest of clubs
in all the Pall Mall of Europe.
Finding pilgrimage in Palestine falling slack, and more need for them on
the homeward side of the sea, their Hochmeister, Hermann of the Salza,
goes over to Venice in 1210. There the titular bishop of still
unconverted Preussen advises him of that field of work for his idle
knights. Hermann thinks well of it: sets his St. Mary's riders at
Triglaph, with the sword in one hand and a missal in the other.
Not your modern way of affecting conversion! Too illiberal, you think;
and what would Mr. J. S. Mill say?
But if Triglaph _had_ been verily "three whales' cubs combined by
boiling," you would yourself have promoted attack upon him for the sake
of his oil, would not you? The Teutsch Ritters, fighting him for
charity, are they so much inferior to you?
* * * * *
They built, and burnt, innumerable stockades for and against; built
wooden forts which are now stone towns. They fought much and
prevalently; galloped desperately to and fro, ever on the alert. In
peaceabler ulterior times, they fenced in the Nogat and the Weichsel
with dams, whereby unlimited quagmire might become grassy meadow--as it
continues to this day. Marienburg (Mary's Burg), with its grand stone
Schloss still visible and even habitable: this was at length their
headquarter. But how many Burgs of wood and stone they built, in
different parts; what revolts, surprisals, furious fights in woody,
boggy places they had, no man has counted.
But always some preaching by zealous monks, accompanied the chivalrous
fighting. And colonists came in from Germany; trickling in, or at times
streaming. Victorious Ritterdom offers terms to the beaten heathen:
terms not of tolerant nature, but which _will be punctually kept by
Ritterdom_. When the flame of revolt or general conspiracy burnt up
again too extensively, high personages came on crusade to them. Ottocar,
King of Bohemia, with his extensive far-shining chivalry, "conquered
Samland in a month;" tore up the Romova where Adalbert had been
massacred, and burned it from the face of the earth. A certain fortress
was founded at that time, in Ottocar's presence; and in honor of him
they named it King's Fortress, "Königsberg." Among King Ottocar's
esquires, or subaltern junior officials, on this occasion, is one
Rudolf, heir of a poor Swiss lordship and gray hill castle, called
Hapsburg, rather in reduced circumstances, whom Ottocar likes for his
prudent, hardy ways; a stout, modest, wise young man, who may chance to
redeem Hapsburg a little, if he lives.
Conversion, and complete conquest once come, there was a happy time for
Prussia; ploughshare instead of sword: busy sea-havens, German towns,
getting built; churches everywhere rising; grass growing, and peaceable
cows, where formerly had been quagmire and snakes, and for the Order a
happy time. On the whole, this Teutsch Ritterdom, for the first century
and more, was a grand phenomenon, and flamed like a bright blessed
beacon through the night of things, in those Northern countries. For
above a century, we perceive, it was the rallying place of all brave men
who had a career to seek on terms other than vulgar. The noble soul,
aiming beyond money, and sensible to more than hunger in this world, had
a beacon burning (as we say), if the night chanced to overtake it, and
the earth to grow too intricate, as is not uncommon. Better than the
career of stump-oratory, I should fancy, and its Hesperides apples,
golden, and of gilt horse-dung. Better than puddling away one's poor
spiritual gift of God (loan, not gift), such as it may be, in building
the lofty rhyme, the lofty review article, for a discerning public that
has sixpence to spare! Times alter greatly.[143]
* * * * *
We must pause here again for a moment to think where we are, and who is
_with us_. The Teutsch Ritters have been fighting, independently of all
states, for their own hand, or St. Adalbert's; partly for mere love of
fight, partly for love of order, partly for love of God. Meantime, other
Riders have been fighting wholly for what they could get by it; and
other persons, not Riders, have not been fighting at all, but in their
own towns peacefully manufacturing and selling.
Of Henry the Fowler's Marches, Austria has become a military power,
Flanders a mercantile one, pious only in the degree consistent with
their several occupations. Prussia is now a practical and farming
country, more Christian than its longer-converted neighbors.
* * * * *
Towns are built, Königsberg (King Ottocar's town), Thoren (Thorn, City
of the Gates), with many others; so that the wild population and the
tame now lived tolerably together, under Gospel and Lübeck law; and all
was ploughing and trading.
* * * * *
But Brandenburg itself, what of it?
The Ascanien Markgraves rule it on the whole prosperously down to 1320,
when their line expires, and it falls into the power of Imperial
Austria.
IX.
1320-1415.--_Brandenburg under the Austrians._
A century--the fourteenth--of miserable anarchy and decline for
Brandenburg, its Kurfürsts, in deadly succession, making what they can
out of it for their own pockets. The city itself and its territory
utterly helpless. Read pp. 180, 181 (129, 130). "The towns suffered
much, any trade they might have had going to wreck. Robber castles
flourished, all else decayed, no highway safe. What are Hamburg pedlars
made for but to be robbed?"
X.
1415-1440.--_Brandenburg under Friedrich of Nüremberg._
This is the fourth of the men whom you are to remember as creators of
the Prussian monarchy, Henry the Fowler, St. Adalbert, Albert the Bear,
of Ascanien, and Friedrich of Nüremberg; (of Hohenzollern, by name, and
by country, of the Black Forest, north of the Lake of Constance).
Brandenburg is sold to him at Constance, during the great Council, for
about 200,000_l._ of our money, worth perhaps a million in that day;
still, with its capabilities, "dog cheap." Admitting, what no one at the
time denied, the general marketableness of states as private property,
this is the one practical result, thinks Carlyle (not likely to think
wrong), of that oecumenical deliberation, four years long, of the
"elixir of the intellect and dignity of Europe. And that one thing was
not its doing; but a pawnbroking job, intercalated," putting, however,
at last, Brandenburg again under the will of one strong man. On St.
John's day, 1412, he first set foot in his town, "and Brandenburg, under
its wise Kurfürst, begins to be cosmic again." The story of Heavy Peg,
pages 195-198 (138, 140), is one of the most brilliant and important
passages of the first volume; page 199, specially to our purpose, must
be given entire:--
The offer to be Kaiser was made him in his old days; but he
wisely declined that too. It was in Brandenburg, by what he
silently founded there, that he did his chief benefit to
Germany and mankind. He understood the noble art of
governing men; had in him the justness, clearness, valor,
and patience needed for that. A man of sterling probity, for
one thing. _Which indeed is the first requisite in said
art_:--if you will have your laws obeyed without mutiny, see
well that they be pieces of God Almighty's law; otherwise
all the artillery in the world will not keep down mutiny.
Friedrich "travelled much over Brandenburg;" looking into
everything with his own eyes; making, I can well fancy,
innumerable crooked things straight; reducing more and more
that famishing dog-kennel of a Brandenburg into a fruitful
arable field. His portraits represent a square-headed,
mild-looking, solid gentleman, with a certain twinkle of
mirth in the serious eyes of him. Except in those Hussite
wars for Kaiser Sigismund and the Reich, in which no man
could prosper, he may be defined as constantly prosperous.
To Brandenburg he was, very literally, the blessing of
blessings; redemption out of death into life. In the ruins
of that old Friesack Castle, battered down by Heavy Peg,
antiquarian science (if it had any eyes) might look for the
taproot of the Prussian nation, and the beginning of all
that Brandenburg has since grown to under the sun.
Which growth is now traced by Carlyle in its various budding and
withering, under the succession of the twelve Electors, of whom
Friedrich, with his heavy Peg, is first, and Friedrich, first King of
Prussia, grandfather of Friedrich the Great, the twelfth.
XI.
1416-1701.--_Brandenburg under the Hohenzollern Kurfürsts._
Book III.
Who the Hohenzollerns were, and how they came to power in Nüremberg, is
told in Chap. v. of Book II.
Their succession in Brandenburg is given in brief at page 377 (269). I
copy it, in absolute barrenness of enumeration, for our momentary
convenience, here:
Friedrich 1st of Brandenburg (6th of Nüremberg), 1412-1440
Friedrich II., called "Iron Teeth," 1440-1472
Albert, 1472-1486
Johann, 1486-1499
Joachim I., 1499-1535
Joachim II., 1535-1571
Johann George, 1571-1598
Joachim Friedrich, 1598-1608
Johann Sigismund, 1608-1619
George Wilhelm, 1619-1640
Friedrich Wilhelm (the Great Elector), 1640-1688
Friedrich, first King; crowned 18th January, 1701
Of this line of princes we have to say they followed generally in their
ancestor's steps, and had success of the like kind more or less;
Hohenzollerns all of them, by character and behaviour as well as by
descent. No lack of quiet energy, of thrift, sound sense. There was
likewise solid fair-play in general, no founding of yourself on ground
that will not carry, _and there was instant, gentle, but inexorable
crushing of mutiny_, if it showed itself, which after the Second
Elector, or at most the Third, it had altogether ceased to do.
This is the general account of them; of special matters note the
following:--
II. Friedrich, called "Iron-teeth," from his firmness, proves a notable
manager and governor. Builds the palace at Berlin in its first form, and
makes it his chief residence. Buys Neumark from the fallen Teutsch
Ritters, and generally establishes things on securer footing.
III. Albert, "a fiery, tough old Gentlemen," called the Achilles of
Germany in his day; has half-a-century of fighting with his own
Nürembergers, with Bavaria, France, Burgundy, and its fiery Charles,
besides being head constable to the Kaiser among any disorderly persons
in the East. His skull, long shown on his tomb, "marvellous for strength
and with no visible sutures."
IV. John, the orator of his race; (but the orations unrecorded). His
second son, Archbishop of Maintz, for whose piece of memorable work see
page 223 (143) and read in connection with that the history of Margraf
George, pp. 237-241 (152-154), and the 8th chapter of the third book.
V. Joachim I., of little note; thinks there has been enough Reformation,
and checks proceedings in a dull stubbornness, causing him at least
grave domestic difficulties.--Page 271 (173).
VI. Joachim II. Again active in the Reformation, and staunch,
though generally in a cautious, weighty, never in a rash,
swift way, to the great cause of Protestantism and to all
good causes. He was himself a solemnly devout man; deep,
awe-stricken reverence dwelling in his view of this
universe. Most serious, though with a jocose dialect,
commonly having a cheerful wit in speaking to men. Luther's
books he called his Seelenschatz, (soul's treasure); Luther
and the Bible were his chief reading. Fond of profane
learning, too, and of the useful or ornamental arts; given
to music, and "would himself sing aloud" when he had a
melodious leisure hour.
VII. Johann George, a prudent thrifty Herr; no mistresses, no luxuries
allowed; at the sight of a new-fashioned coat he would fly out on an
unhappy youth and pack him from his presence. Very strict in point of
justice; a peasant once appealing to him in one of his inspection
journeys through the country--
"Grant me justice, Durchlaucht, against so and so; I am your
Highness's born subject." "Thou shouldst have it, man, wert
thou a born Turk!" answered Johann George.
Thus, generally, we find this line of Electors representing in Europe
the Puritan mind of England in a somewhat duller, but less dangerous,
form; receiving what Protestantism could teach of honesty and common
sense, but not its anti-Catholic fury, or its selfish spiritual anxiety.
Pardon of sins is not to be had from Tetzel; neither, the Hohenzollern
mind advises with itself, from even Tetzel's master, for either the
buying, or the asking. On the whole, we had better commit as few as
possible, and live just lives and plain ones.
A conspicuous thrift, veracity, modest solidity, looks
through the conduct of this Herr; a determined Protestant he
too, as indeed all the following were and are.
VIII. Joachim Friedrich. Gets hold of Prussia, which hitherto, you
observe, has always been spoken of as a separate country from
Brandenburg. March 11, 1605--"squeezed his way into the actual
guardianship of Preussen and its imbecile Duke, which was his by right."
For my own part, I do not trouble myself much about these rights, never
being able to make out any single one, to begin with, except the right
to keep everything and every place about you in as good order as you
can--Prussia, Poland, or what else. I should much like, for instance,
just now, to hear of any honest Cornish gentleman of the old Drake breed
taking a fancy to land in Spain, and trying what he could make of his
rights as far round Gibraltar as he could enforce them. At all events,
Master Joachim has somehow got hold of Prussia; and means to keep it.
IX. Johann Sigismund. Only notable for our economical purposes, as
getting the "guardianship" of Prussia confirmed to him. The story at
page 317 (226), "a strong flame of choler," indicates a new order of
things among the knights of Europe--"princely etiquettes melting all
into smoke." Too literally so, that being one of the calamitous
functions of the plain lives we are living, and of the busy life our
country is living. In the Duchy of Cleve, especially, concerning which
legal dispute begins in Sigismund's time. And it is well worth the
lawyers' trouble, it seems.
It amounted, perhaps, to two Yorkshires in extent. A
naturally opulent country of fertile meadows, shipping
capabilities, metalliferous hills, and at this time, in
consequence of the Dutch-Spanish war, and the multitude of
Protestant refugees, it was getting filled with ingenious
industries, and rising to be what it still is, the busiest
quarter of Germany. A country lowing with kine; the hum of
the flax-spindle heard in its cottages in those old
days--"much of the linen called Hollands is made in Jülich,
and only bleached, stamped, and sold by the Dutch," says
Büsching. A country in our days which is shrouded at short
intervals with the due canopy of coal-smoke, and loud with
sounds of the anvil and the loom.
The lawyers took two hundred and six years to settle the question
concerning this Duchy, and the thing Johann Sigismund had claimed
legally in 1609 was actually handed over to Johann Sigismund's
descendant in the seventh generation. "These litigated duchies are now
the Prussian provinces, Jülich, Berg, Cleve, and the nucleus of
Prussia's possessions in the Rhine country."
X. George Wilhelm. Read pp. 325 to 327 (231, 233) on this Elector and
German Protestantism, now fallen cold, and somewhat too little
dangerous. But George Wilhelm is the only weak prince of all the twelve.
For another example how the heart and life of a country depend upon its
prince, not on its council, read this, of Gustavus Adolphus, demanding
the cession of Spandau and Küstrin:
Which cession Kurfürst George Wilhelm, though giving all his
prayers to the good cause, could by no means grant. Gustav
had to insist, with more and more emphasis, advancing at
last with military menace upon Berlin itself. He was met by
George Wilhelm and his Council, "in the woods of Cöpenick,"
short way to the east of that city; there George Wilhelm and
his Council wandered about, sending messages, hopelessly
consulting, saying among each other, "Que faire? ils ont des
canons." For many hours so, round the inflexible Gustav, who
was there like a fixed mile-stone, and to all questions and
comers had only one answer.
On our special question of war and its consequences, read this of the
Thirty Years' one:
But on the whole, the grand weapon in it, and towards the
latter times, the exclusive one, was hunger. The opposing
armies tried to starve one another; at lowest, tried each
not to starve. Each trying to eat the country or, at any
rate, to leave nothing eatable in it; what that will mean
for the country we may consider. As the armies too
frequently, and the Kaiser's armies habitually, lived
without commissariat, often enough without pay, all horrors
of war and of being a seat of war, that have been since
heard of, are poor to those then practised, the detail of
which is still horrible to read. Germany, in all eatable
quarters of it, had to undergo the process; tortured, torn
to pieces, wrecked, and brayed as in a mortar, under the
iron mace of war. Brandenburg saw its towns seized and
sacked, its country populations driven to despair by the one
party and the other. Three times--first in the
Wallenstein-Mecklenburg times, while fire and sword were the
weapons, and again, twice over, in the ultimate stages of
the struggle, when starvation had become the
method--Brandenburg fell to be the principal theatre of
conflict, where all forms of the dismal were at their
height. In 1638, three years after that precious "Peace of
Prag,"... the ravages of the starving Gallas and his
Imperialists excelled all precedent,... men ate human flesh,
nay, human creatures ate their own children. "Que faire? ils
ont des canons!"
"We have now arrived at the lowest nadir point" (says Carlyle) "of the
history of Brandenburg under the Hohenzollerns." Is this then all that
Heavy Peg and our nine Kurfürsts have done for us?
Carlyle does not mean that; but even he, greatest of historians since
Tacitus, is not enough careful to mark for us the growth of national
character, as distinct from the prosperity of dynasties.
A republican historian would think of this development only, and suppose
it to be possible without any dynasties.
Which is indeed in a measure so, and the work now chiefly needed in
moral philosophy, as well as history, is an analysis of the constant and
prevalent, yet unthought of, influences, which, without any external
help from kings, and in a silent and entirely necessary manner, form, in
Sweden, in Bavaria, in the Tyrol, in the Scottish border, and on the
French sea-coast, races of noble peasants; pacific, poetic, heroic,
Christian-hearted in the deepest sense, who may indeed perish by sword
or famine in any cruel thirty years' war, or ignoble thirty years'
peace, and yet leave such strength to their children that the country,
apparently ravaged into hopeless ruin, revives, under any prudent king,
as the cultivated fields do under the spring rain. How the rock to which
no seed can cling, and which no rain can soften, is subdued into the
good ground which can bring forth its hundredfold, we forget to watch,
while we follow the footsteps of the sower, or mourn the catastrophes of
storm. All this while, the Prussian earth--the Prussian soul--has been
thus dealt upon by successive fate; and now, though laid, as it seems,
utterly desolate, it can be revived by a few years of wisdom and of
peace.
Vol. I. Book III. Chap, xviii.--The Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm.
Eleventh of the dynasty:--
There hardly ever came to sovereign power a young man of
twenty under more distressing, hopeless-looking
circumstances. Political significance Brandenburg had none;
a mere Protestant appendage, dragged about by a Papist
Kaiser. His father's Prime Minister, as we have seen, was in
the interest of his enemies; not Brandenburg's servant, but
Austria's. The very commandants of his fortresses,
Commandant of Spandau more especially, refused to obey
Friedrich Wilhelm on his accession; "were bound to obey the
Kaiser in the first place."
For twenty years past Brandenburg had been scoured by
hostile armies, which, especially the Kaiser's part of
which, committed outrages new in human history. In a year or
two hence, Brandenburg became again the theatre of business,
Austrian Gallas advancing thither again (1644) with intent
"to shut up Torstenson and his Swedes in Jutland." Gallas
could by no means do what he intended; on the contrary, he
had to run from Torstenson--what feet could do; was hunted,
he and his Merode Brüder (beautiful inventors of the
"marauding" art), till they pretty much all died (crepirten)
says Köhler. No great loss to society, the death of these
artists, but we can fancy what their life, and especially
what the process of their dying, may have cost poor
Brandenburg again!
Friedrich Wilhelm's aim, in this as in other emergencies,
was sun-clear to himself, but for most part dim to everybody
else. He had to walk very warily, Sweden on one hand of him,
suspicious Kaiser on the other: he had to wear semblances,
to be ready with evasive words, and advance noiselessly by
many circuits. More delicate operation could not be
imagined. But advance he did; advance and arrive. With
extraordinary talent, diligence, and felicity the young man
wound himself out of this first fatal position, got those
foreign armies pushed out of his country, and kept them out.
His first concern had been to find some vestige of revenue,
to put that upon a clear footing, and by loans or otherwise
to scrape a little ready-money together. On the strength _of
which a small body of soldiers could be collected about him,
and drilled into real ability to fight and obey_. This as a
basis: on this followed all manner of things, freedom from
Swedish-Austrian invasions, as the first thing. He was
himself, as appeared by-and-by, a fighter of the first
quality, when it came to that; but never was willing to
fight if he could help it. Preferred rather to shift,
manoeuvre, and negotiate, which he did in most vigilant,
adroit, and masterly manner. But by degrees he had grown to
have, and could maintain it, an army of twenty-four thousand
men, among the best troops then in being.
To wear semblances, to be ready with evasive words, how is this, Mr.
Carlyle? thinks perhaps the rightly thoughtful reader.
Yes, such things have to be; There are lies and lies, and there are
truths and truths. Ulysses cannot ride on the ram's back, like Phryxus;
but must ride under his belly. Read also this, presently following:
Shortly after which, Friedrich Wilhelm, who had shone much
in the battle of Warsaw, into which he was dragged against
his will, changed sides. An inconsistent, treacherous man?
Perhaps not, O reader! perhaps a man advancing "in
circuits," the only way he has; spirally, face now to east,
now to west, with his own reasonable private aim sun-clear
to him all the while?
The battle of Warsaw, three days long, fought with Gustavus, the
grandfather of Charles XII., against the Poles, virtually ends the
Polish power:
Old Johann Casimir, not long after that peace of Oliva,
getting tired of his unruly Polish chivalry and their ways,
abdicated--retired to Paris, and "and lived much with Ninon
de l'Enclos and her circle," for the rest of his life. He
used to complain of his Polish chivalry, that there was no
solidity in them; nothing but outside glitter, with tumult
and anarchic noise; fatal want of one essential talent, _the
talent of obeying_; and has been heard to prophesy that a
glorious Republic, persisting in such courses, would arrive
at results which would surprise it.
Onward from this time, Friedrich Wilhelm figures in the
world; public men watching his procedure; kings anxious to
secure him--Dutch print-sellers sticking up his portraits
for a hero-worshipping public. Fighting hero, had the public
known it, was not his essential character, though he had to
fight a great deal. He was essentially an industrial man;
great in organizing, regulating, in constraining chaotic
heaps to become cosmic for him. He drains bogs, settles
colonies in the waste places of his dominions, cuts canals;
unweariedly encourages trade and work. The Friedrich
Wilhelm's Canal, which still carries tonnage from the Oder
to the Spree, is a monument of his zeal in this way;
creditable with the means he had. To the poor French
Protestants in the Edict-of-Nantes affair, he was like an
express benefit of Heaven; one helper appointed to whom the
help itself was profitable. He munificently welcomed them
to Brandenburg; showed really a noble piety and human pity,
as well as judgment; nor did Brandenburg and he want their
reward. Some twenty thousand nimble French souls, evidently
of the best French quality, found a home there; made "waste
sands about Berlin into potherb gardens;" and in spiritual
Brandenburg, too, did something of horticulture which is
still noticeable.
Now read carefully the description of the man, p. 352 (224-5); the story
of the battle of Fehrbellin, "the Marathon of Brandenburg," p. 354
(225); and of the winter campaign of 1679, p. 356 (227), beginning with
its week's marches at sixty miles a day; his wife, as always, being with
him;
Louisa, honest and loving Dutch girl, aunt to our William of
Orange, who trimmed up her own "Orange-burg"
(country-house), twenty miles north of Berlin, into a little
jewel of the Dutch type, potherb gardens, training-schools
for young girls, and the like, a favorite abode of hers when
she was at liberty for recreation. But her life was busy and
earnest; she was helpmate, not in name only, to an ever busy
man. They were married young; a marriage of love withal.
Young Friedrich Wilhelm's courtship; wedding in Holland; the
honest, trustful walk and conversation of the two sovereign
spouses, their journeyings together, their mutual hopes,
fears, and manifold vicissitudes, till death, with stern
beauty, shut it in; all is human, true, and wholesome in it,
interesting to look upon, and rare among sovereign persons.
Louisa died in 1667, twenty-one years before her husband, who married
again--(little to his contentment)--died in 1688; and Louisa's second
son, Friedrich, ten years old at his mother's death, and now therefore
thirty-one, succeeds, becoming afterwards Friedrich I. of Prussia.
And here we pause on two great questions. Prussia is assuredly at this
point a happier and better country than it was, when inhabited by Wends.
But is Friedrich I. a happier and better man than Henry the Fowler? Have
all these kings thus improved their country, but never themselves? Is
this somewhat expensive and ambitious Herr, Friedrich I. buttoned in
diamonds, indeed the best that Protestantism can produce, as against
Fowlers, Bears, and Red Beards? Much more, Friedrich Wilhelm, orthodox
on predestination; most of all, his less orthodox son;--have we, in
these, the highest results which Dr. Martin Luther can produce for the
present, in the first circles of society? And if not, how is it that the
country, having gained so much in intelligence and strength, lies more
passively in their power than the baser country did under that of nobler
men?
These, and collateral questions, I mean to work out as I can, with
Carlyle's good help;--but must pause for this time; in doubt, as
heretofore. Only of this one thing I doubt not, that the name of all
great kings, set over Christian nations, must at last be, in fufilment,
the hereditary one of these German princes, "Rich in Peace;" and that
their coronation will be with Wild olive, not with gold.
FOOTNOTES:
[142] The late Sir Herbert Edwardes.
[143] I would much rather print these passages of Carlyle in large
golden letters than small black ones; but they are only here at all for
unlucky people who can't read them with the context.
THE
ETHICS OF THE DUST
TEN LECTURES
TO
LITTLE HOUSEWIVES
ON
THE ELEMENTS OF CRYSTALLISATION
CONTENTS.
ETHICS OF THE DUST.
LECTURE I. PAGE
THE VALLEY OF DIAMONDS 1
LECTURE II.
THE PYRAMID BUILDERS 21
LECTURE III.
THE CRYSTAL LIFE 31
LECTURE IV.
THE CRYSTAL ORDERS 43
LECTURE V.
CRYSTAL VIRTUES 56
LECTURE VI.
CRYSTAL QUARRELS 70
LECTURE VII.
HOME VIRTUES 82
LECTURE VIII.
CRYSTAL CAPRICE 98
LECTURE IX.
CRYSTAL SORROWS 111
LECTURE X.
THE CRYSTAL REST 125
NOTES 143
FICTION--FAIR AND FOUL 153
ELEMENTS OF DRAWING.
LETTER I.
ON FIRST PRACTICE 233
LETTER II.
SKETCHING FROM NATURE 293
LETTER III.
ON COLOUR AND COMPOSITION 331
APPENDIX: THINGS TO BE STUDIED 403
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
ELEMENTS OF DRAWING.
FIGURE PAGE
1. SQUARES 237
2. GRADATED SPACES 241
3. OUTLINE OF LETTER 245
4. OUTLINE OF BOUGH OF TREE 248
5. CHARRED LOG 257
6. SHOOT OF LILAC 272
7. LEAF 274
8. BOUGH OF PHILLYREA 275
9. SPRAY OF PHILLYREA 276
10. TRUNK OF TREE, BY TITIAN 284
11. SKETCH FROM RAPHAEL 285
12. OUTLINES OF A BALL 287
13. WOODCUT OF DURER'S 289
14, 15, 16. MASSES OF LEAVES 290, 291
17, 18, 19. CURVATURES IN LEAVES 295, 296
20. FROM AN ETCHING, BY TURNER 297
21. ALPINE BRIDGE 307
22. ALPINE BRIDGE AS IT APPEARS AT VARIOUS DISTANCES 308
23. OUTLINES EXPRESSIVE OF FOLIAGE 314
24. SHOOT OF SPANISH CHESTNUT 315
25. YOUNG SHOOT OF OAK 316
26, 27, 28. WOODCUTS AFTER TITIAN 321, 322
29. DIAGRAM OF WINDOW 339
30. SWISS COTTAGE 355
31. GROUPS OF LEAVE 350
32. PAINTING, by Turner 361
33. SKETCH ON CALAIS SANDS, by Turner 365
34. DRAWING OF AN IDEAL BRIDGE, by Turner 369
35. PROFILE OF THE TOWERS OF EHRENBREITSTEIN 370
36. CURVES 371
37, 38, 39. CURVES FOUND IN LEAVES 372
40. OUTLINES OF A TREE TRUNK 373
41-44. TREE RADIATION 374, 375
45, 46. WOODCUTS OF LEAF 376
47. LEAF OF COLUMBINE 378
48. TOP OF AN OLD TOWER 385
PERSONÆ.
OLD LECTURER (of incalculable age)
FLORRIE, on astronomical evidence presumed to be aged 9.
ISABEL " 11.
MAY " 11.
LILY " 12.
KATHLEEN " 14.
LUCILLA " 15.
VIOLET " 16.
DORA (who has the keys and is housekeeper) " 17.
EGYPT (so called from her dark eyes) " 17.
JESSIE (who somehow always makes the room look
brighter when she is in it) " 18.
MARY (of whom everybody, including the Old Lecturer,
is in great awe) " 20.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
I have seldom been more disappointed by the result of my best pains
given to any of my books, than by the earnest request of my publisher,
after the opinion of the public had been taken on the 'Ethics of the
Dust,' that I would "write no more in dialogue!" However, I bowed to
public judgment in this matter at once, (knowing also my inventive
powers to be of the feeblest,); but in reprinting the book, (at the
prevailing request of my kind friend, Mr. Henry Willett,) I would pray
the readers whom it may at first offend by its disconnected method, to
examine, nevertheless, with care, the passages in which the principal
speaker sums the conclusions of any dialogue: for these summaries were
written as introductions, for young people, to all that I have said on
the same matters in my larger books; and, on re-reading them, they
satisfy me better, and seem to me calculated to be more generally
useful, than anything else I have done of the kind.
The summary of the contents of the whole book, beginning, "You may at
least earnestly believe," at p. 130, is thus the clearest exposition I
have ever yet given of the general conditions under which the Personal
Creative Power manifests itself in the forms of matter; and the analysis
of heathen conceptions of Deity, beginning at p. 131, and closing at p.
138, not only prefaces, but very nearly supersedes, all that in more
lengthy terms I have since asserted, or pleaded for, in 'Aratra
Pentelici,' and the 'Queen of the Air.'
And thus, however the book may fail in its intention of suggesting new
occupations or interests to its younger readers, I think it worth
reprinting, in the way I have also reprinted 'Unto this Last,'--page for
page; that the students of my more advanced works may be able to refer
to these as the original documents of them; of which the most essential
in this book are these following.
I. The explanation of the baseness of the avaricious functions of the
Lower Pthah, p. 39, with his beetle-gospel, p. 41, "that a nation can
stand on its vices better than on its virtues," explains the main motive
of all my books on Political Economy.
II. The examination of the connexion between stupidity and crime, pp.
57-62, anticipated all that I have had to urge in Fors Clavigera against
the commonly alleged excuse for public wickedness,--"They don't mean
it--they don't know any better."
III. The examination of the roots of Moral Power, pp. 90-92, is a
summary of what is afterwards developed with utmost care in my inaugural
lecture at Oxford on the relation of Art to Morals; compare in that
lecture, §§ 83-85, with the sentence in p. 91 of this book, "Nothing is
ever done so as really to please our Father, unless we would also have
done it, though we had had no Father to know of it."
This sentence, however, it must be observed, regards only the general
conditions of action in the children of God, in consequence of which it
is foretold of them by Christ that they will say at the Judgment, "When
saw we thee?" It does not refer to the distinct cases in which virtue
consists in faith given to command, appearing to foolish human judgment
inconsistent with the Moral Law, as in the sacrifice of Isaac; nor to
those in which any directly-given command requires nothing more of
virtue than obedience.
IV. The subsequent pages, 92-97, were written especially to check the
dangerous impulses natural to the minds of many amiable young women, in
the direction of narrow and selfish religious sentiment: and they
contain, therefore, nearly everything which I believe it necessary that
young people should be made to observe, respecting the errors of
monastic life. But they in nowise enter on the reverse, or favourable
side: of which indeed I did not, and as yet do not, feel myself able to
speak with any decisiveness; the evidence on that side, as stated in the
text, having "never yet been dispassionately examined."
V. The dialogue with Lucilla, beginning at p. 63, is, to my own fancy,
the best bit of conversation in the book, and the issue of it, at p. 67,
the most practically and immediately useful. For on the idea of the
inevitable weakness and corruption of human nature, has logically
followed, in our daily life, the horrible creed of modern "Social
science," that all social action must be scientifically founded on
vicious impulses. But on the habit of measuring and reverencing our
powers and talents that we may kindly use them, will be founded a true
Social science, developing, by the employment of them, all the real
powers and honourable feelings of the race.
VI. Finally, the account given in the second and third lectures, of the
real nature and marvellousness of the laws of crystallization, is
necessary to the understanding of what farther teaching of the beauty of
inorganic form I may be able to give, either in 'Deucalion,' or in my
'Elements of Drawing.' I wish however that the second lecture had been
made the beginning of the book; and would fain now cancel the first
altogether, which I perceive to be both obscure and dull. It was meant
for a metaphorical description of the pleasures and dangers in the
kingdom of Mammon, or of worldly wealth; its waters mixed with blood,
its fruits entangled in thickets of trouble, and poisonous when
gathered; and the final captivity of its inhabitants within frozen walls
of cruelty and disdain. But the imagery is stupid and ineffective
throughout; and I retain this chapter only because I am resolved to
leave no room for any one to say that I have withdrawn, as erroneous in
principle, so much as a single sentence of any of my books written since
1860.
One license taken in this book, however, though often permitted to
essay-writers for the relief of their dulness, I never mean to take
more,--the relation of composed metaphor as of actual dream, pp. 23 and
104. I assumed, it is true, that in these places the supposed dream
would be easily seen to be an invention; but must not any more, even
under so transparent disguise, pretend to any share in the real powers
of Vision possessed by great poets and true painters.
BRANTWOOD:
_10th October, 1877._
PREFACE.
The following lectures were really given, in substance, at a girls'
school (far in the country); which in the course of various experiments
on the possibility of introducing some better practice of drawing into
the modern scheme of female education, I visited frequently enough to
enable the children to regard me as a friend. The lectures always fell
more or less into the form of fragmentary answers to questions; and they
are allowed to retain that form, as, on the whole, likely to be more
interesting than the symmetries of a continuous treatise. Many children
(for the school was large) took part, at different times, in the
conversations; but I have endeavoured, without confusedly multiplying
the number of imaginary[144] speakers, to represent, as far as I could,
the general tone of comment and enquiry among young people.
It will be at once seen that these Lectures were not intended for an
introduction to mineralogy. Their purpose was merely to awaken in the
minds of young girls, who were ready to work earnestly and
systematically, a vital interest in the subject of their study. No
science can be learned in play; but it is often possible, in play, to
bring good fruit out of past labour, or show sufficient reasons for the
labour of the future.
The narrowness of this aim does not, indeed, justify the absence of all
reference to many important principles of structure, and many of the
most interesting orders of minerals; but I felt it impossible to go far
into detail without illustrations; and if readers find this book useful,
I may, perhaps, endeavour to supplement it by illustrated notes of the
more interesting phenomena in separate groups of familiar
minerals;--flints of the chalk;--agates of the basalts;--and the
fantastic and exquisitely beautiful varieties of the vein-ores of the
two commonest metals, lead and iron. But I have always found that the
less we speak of our intentions, the more chance there is of our
realizing them; and this poor little book will sufficiently have done
its work, for the present, if it engages any of its young readers in
study which may enable them to despise it for its shortcomings.
DENMARK HILL:
_Christmas, 1865._
FOOTNOTES:
[144] I do not mean, in saying 'imaginary,' that I have not permitted to
myself, in several instances, the affectionate discourtesy of some
reminiscence of personal character; for which I must hope to be forgiven
by my old pupils and their friends, as I could not otherwise have
written the book at all. But only two sentences in all the dialogues,
and the anecdote of 'Dotty,' are literally 'historical.'
THE ETHICS OF THE DUST.
LECTURE I.
_THE VALLEY OF DIAMONDS._
_A very idle talk, by the dining-room fire, after
raisin-and-almond time._
OLD LECTURER; FLORRIE, ISABEL, MAY, LILY, _and_ SIBYL.
OLD LECTURER (L.). Come here, Isabel, and tell me what the make-believe
was, this afternoon.
ISABEL (_arranging herself very primly on the foot-stool_). Such a
dreadful one! Florrie and I were lost in the Valley of Diamonds.
L. What! Sindbad's, which nobody could get out of?
ISABEL. Yes; but Florrie and I got out of it.
L. So I see. At least, I see you did; but are you sure Florrie did?
ISABEL. Quite sure.
FLORRIE (_putting her head round from behind_ L.'s _sofa-cushion_).
Quite sure. (_Disappears again._)
L. I think I could be made to feel surer about it.
(FLORRIE _reappears, gives_ L. _a kiss, and again exit._)
L. I suppose it's all right; but how did you manage it?
ISABEL. Well, you know, the eagle that took up Sindbad was very
large--very, very large--the largest of all the eagles.
L. How large were the others?
ISABEL. I don't quite know--they were so far off. But this one was, oh,
so big! and it had great wings, as wide as--twice over the ceiling. So,
when it was picking up Sindbad, Florrie and I thought it wouldn't know
if we got on its back too: so I got up first, and then I pulled up
Florrie, and we put our arms round its neck, and away it flew.
L. But why did you want to get out of the valley? and why haven't you
brought me some diamonds?
ISABEL. It was because of the serpents. I couldn't pick up even the
least little bit of a diamond, I was so frightened.
L. You should not have minded the serpents.
ISABEL. Oh, but suppose that they had minded me?
L. We all of us mind you a little too much, Isabel, I'm afraid.
ISABEL. No--no--no, indeed.
L. I tell you what, Isabel--I don't believe either Sindbad, or Florrie,
or you, ever were in the Valley of Diamonds.
ISABEL. You naughty! when I tell you we were!
L. Because you say you were frightened at the serpents.
ISABEL. And wouldn't you have been?
L. Not at those serpents. Nobody who really goes into the valley is ever
frightened at them--they are so beautiful.
ISABEL (_suddenly serious_). But there's no real Valley of Diamonds, is
there?
L. Yes, Isabel; very real indeed.
FLORRIE (_reappearing_). Oh, where? Tell me about it.
L. I cannot tell you a great deal about it; only I know it is very
different from Sindbad's. In his valley, there was only a diamond lying
here and there; but, in the real valley, there are diamonds covering the
grass in showers every morning, instead of dew: and there are clusters
of trees, which look like lilac trees; but, in spring, all their
blossoms are of amethyst.
FLORRIE. But there can't be any serpents there, then?
L. Why not?
FLORRIE. Because they don't come into such beautiful places.
L. I never said it was a beautiful place.
FLORRIE. What! not with diamonds strewed about it like dew?
L. That's according te your fancy, Florrie. For myself, I like dew
better.
ISABEL. Oh, but the dew won't stay; it all dries!
L. Yes; and it would be much nicer if the diamonds dried too, for the
people in the valley have to sweep them off the grass, in heaps,
whenever they want to walk on it; and then the heaps glitter so, they
hurt one's eyes.
FLORRIE. Now you're just playing, you know.
L. So are you, you know.
FLORRIE. Yes, but you mustn't play.
L. That's very hard, Florrie; why mustn't I, if you may?
FLORRIE. Oh, I may, because I'm little, but you mustn't, because
you're--(_hesitates for a delicate expression of magnitude_).
L. (_rudely taking the first that comes_). Because I'm big? No; that's
not the way of it at all, Florrie. Because you're little, you should
have very little play; and because I'm big I should have a great deal.
ISABEL _and_ FLORRIE (_both_). No--no--no--no. That isn't it at all.
(ISABEL _sola, quoting Miss Ingelow._) 'The lambs play always--they know
no better.' (_Putting her head very much on one side._) Ah,
now--please--please--tell us true; we want to know.
L. But why do you want me to tell you true, any more than the man who
wrote the 'Arabian Nights?'
ISABEL. Because--because we like to know about real things; and you can
tell us, and we can't ask the man who wrote the stories.
L. What do you call real things?
ISABEL. Now, you know! Things that really are.
L. Whether you can see them or not?
ISABEL. Yes, if somebody else saw them.
L. But if nobody has ever seen them?
ISABEL (_evading the point_.) Well, but, you know, if there were a real
Valley of Diamonds, somebody _must_ have seen it.
L. You cannot be so sure of that, Isabel. Many people go to real places,
and never see them; and many people pass through this valley, and never
see it.
FLORRIE. What stupid people they must be!
L. No, Florrie. They are much wiser than the people who do see it.
MAY. I think I know where it is.
ISABEL. Tell us more about it, and then we'll guess.
L. Well. There's a great broad road, by a river-side, leading up into
it.
MAY (_gravely cunning, with emphasis on the last word_). Does the road
really go _up_?
L. You think it should go down into a valley? No, it goes up; this is a
valley among the hills, and it is as high as the clouds, and is often
full of them; so that even the people who most want to see it, cannot,
always.
ISABEL. And what is the river beside the road like?
L. It ought to be very beautiful, because it flows over diamond
sand--only the water is thick and red.
ISABEL. Red water?
L. It isn't all water.
MAY. Oh, please never mind that, Isabel, just now; I want to hear about
the valley.
L. So the entrance to it is very wide, under a steep rock; only such
numbers of people are always trying to get in, that they keep jostling
each other, and manage it but slowly. Some weak ones are pushed back,
and never get in at all; and make great moaning as they go away: but
perhaps they are none the worse in the end.
MAY. And when one gets in, what is it like?
L. It is up and down, broken kind of ground: the road stops directly;
and there are great dark rocks, covered all over with wild gourds and
wild vines; the gourds, if you cut them, are red, with black seeds, like
water-melons, and look ever so nice; and the people of the place make a
red pottage of them: but you must take care not to eat any if you ever
want to leave the valley (though I believe putting plenty of meal in it
makes it wholesome). Then the wild vines have clusters of the colour of
amber; and the people of the country say they are the grape of Eshcol;
and sweeter than honey; but, indeed, if anybody else tastes them, they
are like gall. Then there are thickets of bramble, so thorny that they
would be cut away directly, anywhere else; but here they are covered
with little cinque-foiled blossoms of pure silver; and, for berries,
they have clusters of rubies. Dark rubies, which you only see are red
after gathering them. But you may fancy what blackberry parties the
children have! Only they get their frocks and hands sadly torn.
LILY. But rubies can't spot one's frocks as blackberries do?
L. No; but I'll tell you what spots them--the mulberries. There are
great forests of them, all up the hills, covered with silkworms, some
munching the leaves so loud that it is like mills at work; and some
spinning. But the berries are the blackest you ever saw; and, wherever
they fall, they stain a deep red; and nothing ever washes it out again.
And it is their juice, soaking through the grass, which makes the river
so red, because all its springs are in this wood. And the boughs of the
trees are twisted, as if in pain, like old olive branches; and their
leaves are dark. And it is in these forests that the serpents are; but
nobody is afraid of them. They have fine crimson crests, and they are
wreathed about the wild branches, one in every tree, nearly; and they
are singing serpents, for the serpents are, in this forest, what birds
are in ours.
FLORRIE. Oh, I don't want to go there at all, now.
L. You would like it very much indeed, Florrie, if you were there. The
serpents would not bite you; the only fear would be of your turning into
one!
FLORRIE. Oh, dear, but that's worse.
L. You wouldn't think so if you really were turned into one, Florrie;
you would be very proud of your crest. And as long as you were yourself
(not that you could get there if you remained quite the little Florrie
you are now), you would like to hear the serpents sing. They hiss a
little through it, like the cicadas in Italy; but they keep good time,
and sing delightful melodies; and most of them have seven heads, with
throats which each take a note of the octave; so that they can sing
chords--it is very fine indeed. And the fire-flies fly round the edge of
the forests all the night long; you wade in fire-flies, they make the
fields look like a lake trembling with reflection of stars; but you must
take care not to touch them, for they are not like Italian fireflies,
but burn, like real sparks.
FLORRIE. I don't like it at all; I'll never go there.
L. I hope not, Florrie; or at least that you will get out again if you
do. And it is very difficult to get out, for beyond these serpent
forests there are great cliffs of dead gold, which form a labyrinth,
winding always higher and higher, till the gold is all split asunder by
wedges of ice; and glaciers, welded, half of ice seven times frozen, and
half of gold seven times frozen, hang down from them, and fall in
thunder, cleaving into deadly splinters, like the Cretan arrowheads; and
into a mixed dust of snow and gold, ponderous, yet which the mountain
whirlwinds are able to lift and drive in wreaths and pillars, hiding the
paths with a burial cloud, fatal at once with wintry chill, and weight
of golden ashes. So the wanderers in the labyrinth fall, one by one, and
are buried there:--yet, over the drifted graves, those who are spared
climb to the last, through coil on coil of the path;--for at the end of
it they see the king of the valley, sitting on his throne: and beside
him (but it is only a false vision), spectra of creatures like
themselves, set on thrones, from which they seem to look down on all the
kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. And on the canopy of his
throne there is an inscription in fiery letters, which they strive to
read, but cannot; for it is written in words which are like the words of
all languages, and yet are of none. Men say it is more like their own
tongue to the English than it is to any other nation; but the only
record of it is by an Italian, who heard the King himself cry it as a
war cry, 'Pape Satan, Pape Satan Aleppe.'[145]
SIBYL. But do they all perish there? You said there was a way through
the valley, and out of it.
L. Yes; but few find it. If any of them keep to the grass paths, where
the diamonds are swept aside; and hold their hands over their eyes so as
not to be dazzled, the grass paths lead forward gradually to a place
where one sees a little opening in the golden rocks. You were at
Chamouni last year, Sibyl; did your guide chance to show you the pierced
rock of the Aiguille du Midi?
SIBYL. No, indeed, we only got up from Geneva on Monday night; and it
rained all Tuesday; and we had to be back at Geneva again, early on
Wednesday morning.
L. Of course. That is the way to see a country in a Sibylline manner, by
inner consciousness: but you might have seen the pierced rock in your
drive up, or down, if the clouds broke: not that there is much to see in
it; one of the crags of the aiguille-edge, on the southern slope of it,
is struck sharply through, as by an awl, into a little eyelet hole;
which you may see, seven thousand feet above the valley (as the clouds
flit past behind it, or leave the sky), first white, and then dark blue.
Well, there's just such an eyelet hole in one of the upper crags of the
Diamond Valley; and, from a distance, you think that it is no bigger
than the eye of a needle. But if you get up to it, they say you may
drive a loaded camel through it, and that there are fine things on the
other side, but I have never spoken with anybody who had been through.
SIBYL. I think we understand it now. We will try to write it down, and
think of it.
L. Meantime, Florrie, though all that I have been telling you is very
true, yet you must not think the sort of diamonds that people wear in
rings and necklaces are found lying about on the grass. Would you like
to see how they really are found?
FLORRIE. Oh, yes--yes.
L. Isabel--or Lily--run up to my room and fetch me the little box with a
glass lid, out of the top drawer of the chest of drawers. (_Race
between_ LILY _and_ ISABEL.)
(_Re-enter_ ISABEL _with the box, very much out of breath._
LILY _behind._)
L. Why, you never can beat Lily in a race on the stairs, can you,
Isabel?
ISABEL (_panting_). Lily--beat me--ever so far--but she gave me--the
box--to carry in.
L. Take off the lid, then; gently.
FLORRIE (_after peeping in, disappointed_). There's only a great ugly
brown stone!
L. Not much more than that, certainly, Florrie, if people were wise. But
look, it is not a single stone; but a knot of pebbles fastened together
by gravel; and in the gravel, or compressed sand, if you look close, you
will see grains of gold glittering everywhere, all through; and then, do
you see these two white beads, which shine, as if they had been covered
with grease?
FLORRIE. May I touch them?
L. Yes; you will find they are not greasy, only very smooth. Well, those
are the fatal jewels; native here in their dust with gold, so that you
may see, cradled here together, the two great enemies of mankind,--the
strongest of all malignant physical powers that have tormented our race.
SIBYL. Is that really so? I know they do great harm; but do they not
also do great good?
L. My dear child, what good? Was any woman, do you suppose, ever the
better for possessing diamonds? but how many have been made base,
frivolous, and miserable by desiring them? Was ever man the better for
having coffers full of gold? But who shall measure the guilt that is
incurred to fill them? Look into the history of any civilised nations;
analyse, with reference to this one cause of crime and misery, the lives
and thoughts of their nobles, priests, merchants, and men of luxurious
life. Every other temptation is at last concentrated into this; pride,
and lust, and envy, and anger all give up their strength to avarice. The
sin of the whole world is essentially the sin of Judas. Men do not
disbelieve their Christ; but they sell Him.
SIBYL. But surely that is the fault of human nature? it is not caused by
the accident, as it were, of there being a pretty metal, like gold, to
be found by digging. If people could not find that, would they not find
something else, and quarrel for it instead?
L. No. Wherever legislators have succeeded in excluding, for a time,
jewels and precious metals from among national possessions, the national
spirit has remained healthy. Covetousness is not natural to
man--generosity is; but covetousness must be excited by a special cause,
as a given disease by a given miasma; and the essential nature of a
material for the excitement of covetousness is, that it shall be a
beautiful thing which can be retained _without a use_. The moment we
can use our possessions to any good purpose ourselves, the instinct of
communicating that use to others rises side by side with our power. If
you can read a book rightly, you will want others to hear it; if you can
enjoy a picture rightly, you will want others to see it: learn how to
manage a horse, a plough, or a ship, and you will desire to make your
subordinates good horsemen, ploughmen, or sailors; you will never be
able to see the fine instrument you are master of, abused; but, once fix
your desire on anything useless, and all the purest pride and folly in
your heart will mix with the desire, and make you at last wholly
inhuman, a mere ugly lump of stomach and suckers, like a cuttle-fish.
SIBYL. But surely, these two beautiful things, gold and diamonds, must
have been appointed to some good purpose?
L. Quite conceivably so, my dear: as also earthquakes and pestilences;
but of such ultimate purposes we can have no sight. The practical,
immediate office of the earthquake and pestilence is to slay us, like
moths; and, as moths, we shall be wise to live out of their way. So, the
practical, immediate office of gold and diamonds is the multiplied
destruction of souls (in whatever sense you have been taught to
understand that phrase); and the paralysis of wholesome human effort and
thought on the face of God's earth: and a wise nation will live out of
the way of them. The money which the English habitually spend in cutting
diamonds would, in ten years, if it were applied to cutting rocks
instead, leave no dangerous reef nor difficult harbour round the whole
island coast. Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting, indeed, a
true piece of regalia. (_Leaves this to their thoughts for a little
while._) Then, also, we poor mineralogists might sometimes have the
chance of seeing a fine crystal of diamond unhacked by the jeweller.
SIBYL. Would it be more beautiful uncut?
L. No; but of infinite interest. We might even come to know something
about the making of diamonds.
SIBYL. I thought the chemists could make them already?
L. In very small black crystals, yes; but no one knows how they are
formed where they are found; or if indeed they are formed there at all.
These, in my hand, look as if they had been swept down with the gravel
and gold; only we can trace the gravel and gold to their native rocks,
but not the diamonds. Read the account given of the diamond in any good
work on mineralogy;--you will find nothing but lists of localities of
gravel, or conglomerate rock (which is only an old indurated gravel).
Some say it was once a vegetable gum; but it may have been charred wood;
but what one would like to know is, mainly, why charcoal should make
itself into diamonds in India, and only into black lead in Borrowdale.
SIBYL. Are they wholly the same, then?
L. There is a little iron mixed with our black lead but nothing to
hinder its crystallisation. Your pencils in fact are all pointed with
formless diamond, though they would be HHH pencils to purpose, if it
crystallised.
SUBYL. But what _is_ crystallisation?
L. A pleasant question, when one's half asleep, and it has been tea time
these two hours. What thoughtless things girls are!
SIBYL. Yes, we are; but we want to know, for all that.
L. My dear, it would take a week to tell you.
SIBYL. Well, take it, and tell us.
L. But nobody knows anything about it.
SIBYL. Then tell us something that nobody knows.
L. Get along with you, and tell Dora to make tea.
(_The house rises; but of course the_ LECTURER _wanted to be
forced to lecture again, and was._)
FOOTNOTES:
[145] Dante, Inf. 7. 1.
LECTURE II.
_THE PYRAMID BUILDERS._
_In the large Schoolroom, to which everybody has been
summoned by ringing of the great bell._
L. So you have all actually come to hear about crystallisation! I cannot
conceive why, unless the little ones think that the discussion may
involve some reference to sugar-candy.
(_Symptoms of high displeasure among the younger members of
council._ ISABEL _frowns severely at L., and shakes her head
violently._)
My dear children, if you knew it, you are yourselves, at this moment, as
you sit in your ranks, nothing, in the eye of a mineralogist, but a
lovely group of rosy sugar-candy, arranged by atomic forces. And even
admitting you to be something more, you have certainly been
crystallising without knowing it. Did I not hear a great hurrying and
whispering, ten minutes ago, when you were late in from the playground;
and thought you would not all be quietly seated by the time I was
ready:--besides some discussion about places--something about 'it's not
being fair that the little ones should always be nearest?' Well, you
were then all being crystallised. When you ran in from the garden, and
against one another in the passages, you were in what mineralogists
would call a state of solution, and gradual confluence; when you got
seated in those orderly rows, each in her proper place, you became
crystalline. That is just what the atoms of a mineral do, if they can,
whenever they get disordered: they get into order again as soon as may
be.
I hope you feel inclined to interrupt me, and say, 'But we know our
places; how do the atoms know theirs? And sometimes we dispute about
our places; do the atoms--(and, besides, we don't like being compared to
atoms at all)--never dispute about theirs?' Two wise questions these, if
you had a mind to put them! it was long before I asked them myself, of
myself. And I will not call you atoms any more. May I call you--let me
see--'primary molecules?' (_General dissent, indicated in subdued but
decisive murmurs._) No! not even, in familiar Saxon, 'dust?'
(_Pause, with expression on faces of sorrowful doubt_; LILY
_gives voice to the general sentiment in a timid 'Please
don't._')
No, children, I won't call you that; and mind, as you grow up, that you
do not get into an idle and wicked habit of calling yourselves that. You
are something better than dust, and have other duties to do than ever
dust can do; and the bonds of affection you will enter into are better
than merely 'getting into order.' But see to it, on the other hand, that
you always behave at least as well as 'dust;' remember, it is only on
compulsion, and while it has no free permission to do as it likes, that
_it_ ever gets out of order; but sometimes, with some of us, the
compulsion has to be the other way--hasn't it? (_Remonstratory whispers,
expressive of opinion that the_ LECTURER _is becoming too personal._)
I'm not looking at anybody in particular--indeed I am not. Nay, if you
blush so, Kathleen, how can one help looking? We'll go back to the
atoms.
'How do they know their places?' you asked, or should have asked. Yes,
and they have to do much more than know them: they have to find their
way to them, and that quietly and at once, without running against each
other.
We may, indeed, state it briefly thus:--Suppose you have to build a
castle, with towers and roofs and buttresses, out of bricks of a given
shape, and that these bricks are all lying in a huge heap at the bottom,
in utter confusion, upset out of carts at random. You would have to draw
a great many plans, and count all your bricks, and be sure you had
enough for this and that tower, before you began, and then you would
have to lay your foundation, and add layer by layer, in order, slowly.
But how would you be astonished, in these melancholy days, when children
don't read children's books, nor believe any more in fairies, if
suddenly a real benevolent fairy, in a bright brick-red gown, were to
rise in the midst of the red bricks, and to tap the heap of them with
her wand, and say: 'Bricks, bricks, to your places!' and then you saw in
an instant the whole heap rise in the air, like a swarm of red bees,
and--you have been used to see bees make a honeycomb, and to think that
strange enough, but now you would see the honeycomb make itself!--You
want to ask something, Florrie, by the look of your eyes.
FLORRIE. Are they turned into real bees, with stings?
L. No, Florrie; you are only to fancy flying bricks, as you saw the
slates flying from the roof the other day in the storm; only those
slates didn't seem to know where they were going, and, besides, were
going where they had no business: but my spell-bound bricks, though they
have no wings, and what is worse, no heads and no eyes, yet find their
way in the air just where they should settle, into towers and roofs,
each flying to his place and fastening there at the right moment, so
that every other one shall fit to him in his turn.
LILY. But who are the fairies, then, who build the crystals?
L. There is one great fairy, Lily, who builds much more than crystals;
but she builds these also. I dreamed that I saw her building a pyramid,
the other day, as she used to do, for the Pharaohs.
ISABEL. But that was only a dream?
L. Some dreams are truer than some wakings, Isabel; but I won't tell it
you unless you like.
ISABEL. Oh, please, please.
L. You are all such wise children, there's no talking to you; you won't
believe anything.
LILY. No, we are not wise, and we will believe anything, when you say we
ought.
L. Well, it came about this way. Sibyl, do you recollect that evening
when we had been looking at your old cave by Cumæ, and wondering why you
didn't live there still; and then we wondered how old you were; and
Egypt said you wouldn't tell, and nobody else could tell but she; and
you laughed--I thought very gaily for a Sibyl--and said you would
harness a flock of cranes for us, and we might fly over to Egypt if we
liked, and see.
SIBYL. Yes, and you went, and couldn't find out after all!
L. Why, you know, Egypt had been just doubling that third pyramid of
hers;[146] and making a new entrance into it; and a fine entrance it
was! First, we had to go through an ante-room, which had both its doors
blocked up with stones; and then we had three granite portcullises to
pull up, one after another; and the moment we had got under them, Egypt
signed to somebody above; and down they came again behind us, with a
roar like thunder, only louder; then we got into a passage fit for
nobody but rats, and Egypt wouldn't go any further herself, but said we
might go on if we liked; and so we came to a hole in the pavement, and
then to a granite trap-door--and then we thought we had gone quite far
enough, and came back, and Egypt laughed at us.
EGYPT. You would not have had me take my crown off, and stoop all the
way down a passage fit only for rats?
L. It was not the crown, Egypt--you know that very well. It was the
flounces that would not let you go any farther. I suppose, however, you
wear them as typical of the inundation of the Nile, so it is all right.
ISABEL. Why didn't you take me with you? Where rats can go, mice can. I
wouldn't have come back.
L. No, mousie; you would have gone on by yourself, and you might have
waked one of Pasht's cats.[147] and it would have eaten you. I was very
glad you were not there. But after all this, I suppose the imagination
of the heavy granite blocks and the underground ways had troubled me,
and dreams are often shaped in a strange opposition to the impressions
that have caused them; and from all that we had been reading in Bunsen
about stones that couldn't be lifted with levers, I began to dream about
stones that lifted themselves with wings.
SIBYL. Now you must just tell us all about it.
L. I dreamed that I was standing beside the lake, out of whose clay the
bricks were made for the great pyramid of Asychis.[148] They had just
been all finished, and were lying by the lake margin, in long ridges,
like waves. It was near evening; and as I looked towards the sunset, I
saw a thing like a dark pillar standing where the rock of the desert
stoops to the Nile valley. I did not know there was a pillar there, and
wondered at it; and it grew larger, and glided nearer, becoming like the
form of a man, but vast, and it did not move its feet, but glided like a
pillar of sand. And as it drew nearer, I looked by chance past it,
towards the sun; and saw a silver cloud, which was of all the clouds
closest to the sun (and in one place crossed it), draw itself back from
the sun, suddenly. And it turned, and shot towards the dark pillar;
leaping in an arch, like an arrow out of a bow. And I thought it was
lightning; but when it came near the shadowy pillar, it sank slowly down
beside it, and changed into the shape of a woman, very beautiful, and
with a strength of deep calm in her blue eyes. She was robed to the feet
with a white robe; and above that, to her knees, by the cloud which I
had seen across the sun; but all the golden ripples of it had become
plumes, so that it had changed into two bright wings like those of a
vulture, which wrapped round her to her knees. She had a weaver's
shuttle hanging over her shoulder, by the thread of it, and in her left
hand, arrows, tipped with fire.
ISABEL (_clapping her hands_). Oh! it was Neith, it was Neith! I know
now.
L. Yes; it was Neith herself; and as the two great spirits came nearer
to me, I saw they were the Brother and Sister--the pillared shadow was
the Greater Pthah.[149] And I heard them speak, and the sound of their
words was like a distant singing. I could not understand the words one
by one; yet their sense came to me; and so I knew that Neith had come
down to see her brother's work, and the work that he had put into the
mind of the king to make his servants do. And she was displeased at it;
because she saw only pieces of dark clay: and no porphyry, nor marble,
nor any fair stone that men might engrave the figures of the gods upon.
And she blamed her brother, and said, 'Oh, Lord of truth! is this then
thy will, that men should mould only four-square pieces of clay: and the
forms of the gods no more?' Then the Lord of truth sighed, and said,
'Oh! sister, in truth they do not love us; why should they set up our
images? Let them do what they may, and not lie--let them make their clay
four-square; and labour; and perish.'
Then Neith's dark blue eyes grew darker, and she said, 'Oh, Lord of
truth! why should they love us? their love is vain; or fear us? for
their fear is base. Yet let them testify of us, that they knew we lived
for ever.'
But the Lord of truth answered, 'They know, and yet they know not. Let
them keep silence; for their silence only is truth.'
But Neith answered, 'Brother, wilt thou also make league with Death,
because Death is true? Oh! thou potter, who hast cast these human things
from thy wheel, many to dishonour, and few to honour; wilt thou not let
them so much as see my face; but slay them in slavery?'
But Pthah only answered, 'Let them build, sister, let them build.'
And Neith answered, 'What shall they build, if I build not with them?'
And Pthah drew with his measuring rod upon the sand. And I saw suddenly,
drawn on the sand, the outlines of great cities, and of vaults, and
domes, and aqueducts, and bastions, and towers, greater than obelisks,
covered with black clouds. And the wind blew ripples of sand amidst the
lines that Pthah drew, and the moving sand was like the marching of men.
But I saw that wherever Neith looked at the lines, they faded, and were
effaced.
'Oh, Brother!' she said at last, 'what is this vanity? If I, who am
Lady of wisdom, do not mock the children of men, why shouldst thou mock
them, who art Lord of truth?' But Pthah answered, 'They thought to bind
me; and they shall be bound. They shall labour in the fire for vanity.'
And Neith said, looking at the sand, 'Brother, there is no true labour
here--there is only weary life and wasteful death.'
And Pthah answered, 'Is it not truer labour, sister, than thy sculpture
of dreams?'
Then Neith smiled; and stopped suddenly.
She looked to the sun; its edge touched the horizon-edge of the desert.
Then she looked to the long heaps of pieces of clay, that lay, each with
its blue shadow, by the lake shore.
'Brother,' she said, 'how long will this pyramid of thine be in
building?'
'Thoth will have sealed the scroll of the years ten times, before the
summit is laid.'
'Brother, thou knowest not how to teach thy children to labour,'
answered Neith. 'Look! I must follow Phre beyond Atlas; shall I build
your pyramid for you before he goes down?' And Pthah answered, 'Yea,
sister, if thou canst put thy winged shoulders to such work.' And Neith
drew herself to her height; and I heard a clashing pass through the
plumes of her wings, and the asp stood up on her helmet, and fire
gathered in her eyes. And she took one of the flaming arrows out of the
sheaf in her left hand, and stretched it out over the heaps of clay. And
they rose up like flights of locusts, and spread themselves in the air,
so that it grew dark in a moment. Then Neith designed them places with
her arrow point; and they drew into ranks, like dark clouds laid level
at morning. Then Neith pointed with her arrow to the north, and to the
south, and to the east, and to the west, and the flying motes of earth
drew asunder into four great ranked crowds; and stood, one in the north,
and one in the south, and one in the east, and one in the west--one
against another. Then Neith spread her wings wide for an instant, and
closed them with a sound like the sound of a rushing sea; and waved her
hand towards the foundation of the pyramid, where it was laid on the
brow of the desert. And the four flocks drew together and sank down,
like sea-birds settling to a level rock; and when they met, there was a
sudden flame, as broad as the pyramid, and as high as the clouds; and it
dazzled me; and I closed my eyes for an instant; and when I looked
again, the pyramid stood on its rock, perfect; and purple with the light
from the edge of the sinking sun.
THE YOUNGER CHILDREN (_variously pleased_). I'm so glad! How nice! But
what did Pthah say?
L. Neith did not wait to hear what he would say. When I turned back to
look at her, she was gone; and I only saw the level white cloud form
itself again, close to the arch of the sun as it sank. And as the last
edge of the sun disappeared, the form of Pthah faded into a mighty
shadow, and so passed away.
EGYPT. And was Neith's pyramid left?
L. Yes; but you could not think, Egypt, what a strange feeling of utter
loneliness came over me when the presence of the two gods passed away.
It seemed as if I had never known what it was to be alone before; and
the unbroken line of the desert was terrible.
EGYPT. I used to feel that, when I was queen: sometimes I had to carve
gods, for company, all over my palace. I would fain have seen real ones,
if I could.
L. But listen a moment yet, for that was not quite all my dream. The
twilight drew swiftly to the dark, and I could hardly see the great
pyramid; when there came a heavy murmuring sound in the air; and a
horned beetle, with terrible claws, fell on the sand at my feet, with a
blow like the beat of a hammer. Then it stood up on its hind claws, and
waved its pincers at me: and its fore claws became strong arms, and
hands; one grasping real iron pincers, and the other a huge hammer; and
it had a helmet on its head, without any eyelet holes, that I could see.
And its two hind claws became strong crooked legs, with feet bent
inwards. And so there stood by me a dwarf, in glossy black armour,
ribbed and embossed like a beetle's back, leaning on his hammer. And I
could not speak for wonder; but he spoke with a murmur like the dying
away of a beat upon a bell. He said, 'I will make Neith's great pyramid
small. I am the lower Pthah; and have power over fire. I can wither the
strong things, and strengthen the weak; and everything that is great I
can make small, and everything that is little I can make great.' Then he
turned to the angle of the pyramid and limped towards it. And the
pyramid grew deep purple; and then red like blood, and then pale
rose-colour, like fire. And I saw that it glowed with fire from within.
And the lower Pthah touched it with the hand that held the pincers; and
it sank down like the sand in an hour-glass,--then drew itself together,
and sank, still, and became nothing, it seemed to me; but the armed
dwarf stooped down, and took it into his hand, and brought it to me,
saying, 'Everything that is great I can make like this pyramid; and give
into men's hands to destroy.' And I saw that he had a little pyramid in
his hand, with as many courses in it as the large one; and built like
that, only so small. And because it glowed still, I was afraid to touch
it; but Pthah said, 'Touch it--for I have bound the fire within it, so
that it cannot burn.' So I touched it, and took it into my own hand; and
it was cold; only red, like a ruby. And Pthah laughed, and became like a
beetle again, and buried himself in the sand, fiercely; throwing it back
over his shoulders. And it seemed to me as if he would draw me down with
him into the sand; and I started back, and woke, holding the little
pyramid so fast in my hand that it hurt me.
EGYPT. Holding WHAT in your hand?
L. The little pyramid.
EGYPT. Neith's pyramid?
L. Neith's, I believe; though not built for Asychis. I know only that it
is a little rosy transparent pyramid, built of more courses of bricks
than I can count, it being made so small. You don't believe me, of
course, Egyptian infidel; but there it is. (_Giving crystal of rose
Fluor._)
(_Confused examination by crowded audience, over each
other's shoulders and under each other's arms.
Disappointment begins to manifest itself._)
SIBYL (_not quite knowing why she and others are disappointed_). But you
showed us this the other day!
L. Yes; but you would not look at it the other day.
SIBYL. But was all that fine dream only about this?
L. What finer thing could a dream be about than this! It is small, if
you will; but when you begin to think of things rightly, the ideas of
smallness and largeness pass away. The making of this pyramid was in
reality just as wonderful as the dream I have been telling you, and just
as incomprehensible. It was not, I suppose, as swift, but quite as grand
things are done as swiftly. When Neith makes crystals of snow, it needs
a great deal more marshalling of the atoms, by her flaming arrows, than
it does to make crystals like this one; and that is done in a moment.
EGYPT. But how you _do_ puzzle us! Why do you say Neith does it? You
don't mean that she is a real spirit, do you?
L. What _I_ mean, is of little consequence. What the Egyptians meant,
who called her 'Neith,'--or Homer, who called her 'Athena,'--or Solomon,
who called her by a word which the Greeks render as 'Sophia,' you must
judge for yourselves. But her testimony is always the same, and all
nations have received it: 'I was by Him as one brought up with Him, and
I was daily His delight; rejoicing in the habitable parts of the earth,
and my delights were with the sons of men.'
MARY. But is not that only a personification?
L. If it be, what will you gain by unpersonifying it, or what right have
you to do so? Cannot you accept the image given you, in its life; and
listen, like children, to the words which chiefly belong to you as
children: 'I love them that love me, and those that seek me early shall
find me?'
(_They are all quiet for a minute or two; questions begin to
appear in their eyes._)
I cannot talk to you any more to-day. Take that rose-crystal away with
you and think.
FOOTNOTES:
[146] Note i.
[147] Note iii.
[148] Note ii.
[149] Note iii.
LECTURE III.
_THE CRYSTAL LIFE._
_A very dull Lecture, wilfully brought upon themselves by
the elder children. Some of the young ones have, however,
managed to get in by mistake._ SCENE, _the Schoolroom._
L. So I am to stand up here merely to be asked questions, to-day, Miss
Mary, am I?
MARY. Yes; and you must answer them plainly; without telling us any more
stories. You are quite spoiling the children: the poor little things'
heads are turning round like kaleidoscopes; and they don't know in the
least what you mean. Nor do we old ones, either, for that matter: to-day
you must really tell us nothing but facts.
L. I am sworn; but you won't like it, a bit.
MARY. Now, first of all, what do you mean by 'bricks?'--Are the smallest
particles of minerals all of some accurate shape, like bricks?
L. I do not know, Miss Mary; I do not even know if anybody knows. The
smallest atoms which are visibly and practically put together to make
large crystals, may better be described as 'limited in fixed directions'
than as 'of fixed forms.' But I can tell you nothing clear about
ultimate atoms: you will find the idea of little bricks, or, perhaps, of
little spheres, available for all the uses you will have to put it to.
MARY. Well, it's very provoking; one seems always to be stopped just
when one is coming to the very thing one wants to know.
L. No, Mary, for we should not wish to know anything but what is easily
and assuredly knowable. There's no end to it If I could show you, or
myself, a group of ultimate atoms, quite clearly, in this magnifying
glass, we should both be presently vexed because we could not break them
in two pieces, and see their insides.
MARY. Well then, next, what do you mean by the flying of the bricks?
What is it the atoms do, that is like flying?
L. When they are dissolved, or uncrystallised, they are really separated
from each other, like a swarm of gnats in the air, or like a shoal of
fish in the sea;--generally at about equal distances. In currents of
solutions, or at different depths of them, one part may be more full of
the dissolved atoms than another; but on the whole, you may think of
them as equidistant, like the spots in the print of your gown. If they
are separated by force of heat only, the substance is said to be melted;
if they are separated by any other substance, as particles of sugar by
water, they are said to be 'dissolved.' Note this distinction carefully,
all of you.
DORA. I will be very particular. When next you tell me there isn't sugar
enough in your tea, I will say, 'It is not yet dissolved, sir.'
L. I tell you what shall be dissolved, Miss Dora; and that's the present
parliament, if the members get too saucy.
(DORA _folds her hands and casts down her eyes._)
L. (_proceeds in state_). Now, Miss Mary, you know already, I believe,
that nearly everything will melt, under a sufficient heat, like wax.
Limestone melts (under pressure); sand melts; granite melts; the lava of
a volcano is a mixed mass of many kinds of rocks, melted: and any melted
substance nearly always, if not always, crystallises as it cools; the
more slowly the more perfectly. Water melts at what we call the
freezing, but might just as wisely, though not as conveniently, call the
melting, point; and radiates as it cools into the most beautiful of all
known crystals. Glass melts at a greater heat, and will crystallise, if
you let it cool slowly enough, in stars, much like snow. Gold needs more
heat to melt it, but crystallises also exquisitely, as I will presently
show you. Arsenic and sulphur crystallise from their vapours. Now in any
of these cases, either of melted, dissolved, or vaporous bodies, the
particles are usually separated from each other, either by heat, or by
an intermediate substance; and in crystallising they are both brought
nearer to each other, and packed, so as to fit as closely as possible:
the essential part of the business being not the bringing together, but
the packing. Who packed your trunk for you, last holidays, Isabel?
ISABEL. Lily does, always.
L. And how much can you allow for Lily's good packing, in guessing what
will go into the trunk?
ISABEL. Oh! I bring twice as much as the trunk holds. Lily always gets
everything in.
LILY. Ah! but, Isey, if you only knew what a time it takes! and since
you've had those great hard buttons on your frocks, I can't do anything
with them. Buttons won't go anywhere, you know.
L. Yes, Lily, it would be well if she only knew what a time it takes;
and I wish any of us knew what a time crystallisation takes, for that is
consummately fine packing. The particles of the rock are thrown down,
just as Isabel brings her things--in a heap; and innumerable Lilies, not
of the valley, but of the rock, come to pack them. But it takes such a
time!
However, the best--out and out the best--way of understanding the thing,
is to crystallise yourselves.
THE AUDIENCE. Ourselves!
L. Yes; not merely as you did the other day, carelessly, on the
schoolroom forms; but carefully and finely, out in the playground. You
can play at crystallisation there as much as you please.
KATHLEEN _and_ JESSIE. Oh! how?--how?
L. First, you must put yourselves together, as close as you can, in the
middle of the grass, and form, for first practice any figure you like.
JESSIE. Any dancing figure, do you mean?
L. No; I mean a square, or a cross, or a diamond. Any figure you like,
standing close together. You had better outline it first on the turf,
with sticks, or pebbles, so as to see that it is rightly drawn; then get
into it and enlarge or diminish it at one side, till you are all quite
in it, and no empty space left.
DORA. Crinoline and all?
L. The crinoline may stand eventually for rough crystalline surface,
unless you pin it in; and then you may make a polished crystal of
yourselves.
LILY. Oh, we'll pin it in--we'll pin it in!
L. Then, when you are all in the figure, let every one note her place,
and who is next her on each side; and let the outsiders count how many
places they stand from the corners.
KATHLEEN. Yes, yes,--and then?
L. Then you must scatter all over the playground--right over it from
side to side, and end to end; and put yourselves all at equal distances
from each other, everywhere. You needn't mind doing it very accurately,
but so as to be nearly equidistant; not less than about three yards
apart from each other, on every side.
JESSIE. We can easily cut pieces of string of equal length, to hold. And
then?
L. Then, at a given signal, let everybody walk, at the same rate,
towards the outlined figure in the middle. You had better sing as you
walk; that will keep you in good time. And as you close in towards it,
let each take her place, and the next comers fit themselves in beside
the first ones, till you are all in the figure again.
KATHLEEN. Oh! how we shall run against each other! What fun it will be!
L. No, no, Miss Katie; I can't allow any running against each other. The
atoms never do that, whatever human creatures do. You must all know your
places, and find your way to them without jostling.
LILY. But how ever shall we do that?
ISABEL. Mustn't the ones in the middle be the nearest, and the outside
ones farther off--when we go away to scatter, I mean?
L. Yes; you must be very careful to keep your order; you will soon find
out how to do it; it is only like soldiers forming square, except that
each must stand still in her place as she reaches it, and the others
come round her; and you will have much more complicated figures,
afterwards, to form, than squares.
ISABEL. I'll put a stone at my place: then I shall know it.
L. You might each nail a bit of paper to the turf, at your place, with
your name upon it: but it would be of no use, for if you don't know your
places, you will make a fine piece of business of it, while you are
looking for your names. And, Isabel, if with a little head, and eyes,
and a brain (all of them very good and serviceable of their kind, as
such things go), you think you cannot know your place without a stone at
it, after examining it well,--how do you think each atom knows its
place, when it never was there before, and there's no stone at it?
ISABEL. But does every atom know its place?
L. How else could it get there?
MARY. Are they not attracted to their places?
L. Cover a piece of paper with spots, at equal intervals; and then
imagine any kind of attraction you choose, or any law of attraction, to
exist between the spots, and try how, on that permitted supposition, you
can attract them into the figure of a Maltese cross, in the middle of
the paper.
MARY (_having tried it_). Yes; I see that I cannot:--one would need all
kinds of attractions, in different ways, at different places. But you do
not mean that the atoms are alive?
L. What is it to be alive?
DORA. There now; you're going to be provoking, I know.
L. I do not see why it should be provoking to be asked what it is to be
alive. Do you think you don't know whether you are alive or not?
(ISABEL _skips to the end of the room and back._)
L. Yes, Isabel, that's all very fine; and you and I may call that being
alive: but a modern philosopher calls it being in a 'mode of motion.' It
requires a certain quantity of heat to take you to the sideboard; and
exactly the same quantity to bring you back again. That's all.
ISABEL. No, it isn't. And besides, I'm not hot.
L. I am, sometimes, at the way they talk. However, you know, Isabel, you
might have been a particle of a mineral, and yet have been carried round
the room, or anywhere else, by chemical forces, in the liveliest way.
ISABEL. Yes; but I wasn't carried: I carried myself.
L. The fact is, mousie, the difficulty is not so much to say what makes
a thing alive, as what makes it a Self. As soon as you are shut off from
the rest of the universe into a Self, you begin to be alive.
VIOLET (_indignant_). Oh, surely--surely that cannot be so. Is not all
the life of the soul in communion, not separation?
L. There can be no communion where there is no distinction. But we shall
be in an abyss of metaphysics presently, if we don't look out; and
besides, we must not be too grand, to-day, for the younger children.
We'll be grand, some day, by ourselves, if we must. (_The younger
children are not pleased, and prepare to remonstrate; but, knowing by
experience, that all conversations in which the word 'communion' occurs,
are unintelligible, think better of it._) Meantime, for broad answer
about the atoms. I do not think we should use the word 'life,' of any
energy which does not belong to a given form. A seed, or an egg, or a
young animal are properly called 'alive' with respect to the force
belonging to those forms, which consistently develops that form, and no
other. But the force which crystallises a mineral appears to be chiefly
external, and it does not produce an entirely determinate and individual
form, limited in size, but only an aggregation, in which some limiting
laws must be observed.
MARY. But I do not see much difference, that way, between a crystal and
a tree.
L. Add, then, that the mode of the energy in a living thing implies a
continual change in its elements; and a period for its end. So you may
define life by its attached negative, death; and still more by its
attached positive, birth. But I won't be plagued any more about this,
just now; if you choose to think the crystals alive, do, and welcome.
Rocks have always been called 'living' in their native place.
MARY. There's one question more; then I've done.
L. Only one?
MARY. Only one.
L. But if it is answered, won't it turn into two?
MARY. No; I think it will remain single, and be comfortable.
L. Let me hear it.
MARY. You know, we are to crystallise ourselves out of the whole
playground. Now, what playground have the minerals? Where are they
scattered before they are crystallised; and where are the crystals
generally made?
L. That sounds to me more like three questions than one, Mary. If it is
only one, it is a wide one.
MARY. I did not say anything about the width of it.
L. Well, I must keep it within the best compass I can. When rocks either
dry from a moist state, or cool from a heated state, they necessarily
alter in bulk; and cracks, or open spaces, form in them in all
directions. These cracks must be filled up with solid matter, or the
rock would eventually become a ruinous heap. So, sometimes by water,
sometimes by vapour, sometimes nobody knows how, crystallisable matter
is brought from somewhere, and fastens itself in these open spaces, so
as to bind the rock together again, with crystal cement. A vast quantity
of hollows are formed in lavas by bubbles of gas, just as the holes are
left in bread well baked. In process of time these cavities are
generally filled with various crystals.
MARY. But where does the crystallising substance come from?
L. Sometimes out of the rock itself; sometimes from below or above,
through the veins. The entire substance of the contracting rock may be
filled with liquid, pressed into it so as to fill every pore;--or with
mineral vapour;--or it may be so charged at one place, and empty at
another. There's no end to the 'may be's.' But all that you need fancy,
for our present purpose, is that hollows in the rocks, like the caves in
Derbyshire, are traversed by liquids or vapour containing certain
elements in a more or less free or separate state, which crystallise on
the cave walls.
SIBYL. There now;--Mary has had all her questions answered: it's my turn
to have mine.
L. Ah, there's a conspiracy among you, I see. I might have guessed as
much.
DORA. I'm sure you ask us questions enough! How can you have the heart,
when you dislike so to be asked them yourself?
L. My dear child, if people do not answer questions, it does not matter
how many they are asked, because they've no trouble with them. Now, when
I ask you questions, I never expect to be answered; but when you ask me,
you always do; and it's not fair.
DORA. Very well, we shall understand, next time.
SIBYL. No, but seriously, we all want to ask one thing more, quite
dreadfully.
L. And I don't want to be asked it, quite dreadfully; but you'll have
your own way, of course.
SIBYL. We none of us understand about the lower Pthah. It was not merely
yesterday; but in all we have read about him in Wilkinson, or in any
book, we cannot understand what the Egyptians put their god into that
ugly little deformed shape for.
L. Well, I'm glad it's that sort of question; because I can answer
anything I like, to that.
EGYPT. Anything you like will do quite well for us; we shall be pleased
with the answer, if you are.
L. I am not so sure of that, most gracious queen; for I must begin by
the statement that queens seem to have disliked all sorts of work, in
those days, as much as some queens dislike sewing to-day.
EGYPT. Now, it's too bad! and just when I was trying to say the
civillest thing I could!
L. But, Egypt, why did you tell me you disliked sewing so?
EGYPT. Did not I show you how the thread cuts my fingers? and I always
get cramp, somehow, in my neck, if I sew long.
L. Well, I suppose the Egyptian queens thought every body got cramp in
their neck, if they sewed long; and that thread always cut people's
fingers. At all events, every kind of manual labour was despised both by
them, and the Greeks; and, while they owned the real good and fruit of
it, they yet held it a degradation to all who practised it. Also,
knowing the laws of life thoroughly, they perceived that the special
practice necessary to bring any manual art to perfection strengthened
the body distortedly; one energy or member gaining at the expense of the
rest. They especially dreaded and despised any kind of work that had to
be done near fire: yet, feeling what they owed to it in metal-work, as
the basis of all other work, they expressed this mixed reverence and
scorn in the varied types of the lame Hephæstus, and the lower Pthah.
SIBYL. But what did you mean by making him say 'everything great I can
make small, and everything small great?'
L. I had my own separate meaning in that. We have seen in modern times
the power of the lower Pthah developed in a separate way, which no Greek
nor Egyptian could have conceived. It is the character of pure and
eyeless manual labour to conceive everything as subjected to it: and, in
reality, to disgrace and diminish all that is so subjected; aggrandising
itself, and the thought of itself, at the expense of all noble things. I
heard an orator, and a good one too, at the Working Men's College, the
other day, make a great point in a description of our railroads; saying,
with grandly conducted emphasis, 'They have made man greater, and the
world less.' His working audience were mightily pleased; they thought it
so very fine a thing to be made bigger themselves; and all the rest of
the world less. I should have enjoyed asking them (but it would have
been a pity--they were so pleased), how much less they would like to
have the world made;--and whether, at present, those of them really felt
the biggest men, who lived in the least houses.
SIBYL. But then, why did you make Pthah say that he could make weak
things strong, and small things great?
L. My dear, he is a boaster and self-assertor, by nature; but it is so
far true. For instance, we used to have a fair in our neighbourhood--a
very fine fair we thought it. You never saw such an one; but if you look
at the engraving of Turner's 'St. Catherine's Hill,' you will see what
it was like. There were curious booths, carried on poles; and
peep-shows; and music, with plenty of drums and cymbals; and much
barley-sugar and gingerbread, and the like: and in the alleys of this
fair the London populace would enjoy themselves, after their fashion,
very thoroughly. Well, the little Pthah set to work upon it one day; he
made the wooden poles into iron ones, and put them across, like his own
crooked legs, so that you always fall over them if you don't look where
you are going; and he turned all the canvas into panes of glass, and put
it up on his iron cross-poles; and made all the little booths into one
great booth; and people said it was very fine, and a new style of
architecture; and Mr. Dickens said nothing was ever like it in
Fairyland, which was very true. And then the little Pthah set to work to
put fine fairings in it; and he painted the Nineveh bulls afresh, with
the blackest eyes he could paint (because he had none himself), and he
got the angels down from Lincoln choir, and gilded their wings like his
gingerbread of old times; and he sent for everything else he could think
of, and put it in his booth. There are the casts of Niobe and her
children; and the Chimpanzee; and the wooden Caffres and New-Zealanders;
and the Shakespeare House; and Le Grand Blondin, and Le Petit Blondin;
and Handel; and Mozart; and no end of shops, and buns, and beer; and all
the little-Pthah-worshippers say, never was anything so sublime!
SIBYL. Now, do you mean to say you never go to these Crystal Palace
concerts? They're as good as good can be.
L. I don't go to the thundering things with a million of bad voices in
them. When I want a song, I get Julia Mannering and Lucy Bertram and
Counsellor Pleydell to sing 'We be three poor Mariners' to me; then I've
no headache next morning. But I do go to the smaller concerts, when I
can; for they are very good, as you say, Sibyl: and I always get a
reserved seat somewhere near the orchestra, where I am sure I can see
the kettle-drummer drum.
SIBYL. Now _do_ be serious, for one minute.
L. I am serious--never was more so. You know one can't see the
modulation of violinists' fingers, but one can see the vibration of the
drummer's hand; and it's lovely.
SIBYL. But fancy going to a concert, not to hear, but to see!
L. Yes, it is very absurd. The quite right thing, I believe, is to go
there to talk. I confess, however, that in most music, when very well
done, the doing of it is to me the chiefly interesting part of the
business. I'm always thinking how good it would be for the fat,
supercilious people, who care so little for their half-crown's worth, to
be set to try and do a half-crown's worth of anything like it.
MARY. But surely that Crystal Palace is a great good and help to the
people of London?
L. The fresh air of the Norwood hills is, or was, my dear; but they are
spoiling that with smoke as fast as they can. And the palace (as they
call it) is a better place for them, by much, than the old fair; and it
is always there, instead of for three days only; and it shuts up at
proper hours of night. And good use may be made of the things in it, if
you know how: but as for its teaching the people, it will teach them
nothing but the lowest of the lower Pthah's work--nothing but hammer and
tongs. I saw a wonderful piece, of his doing, in the place, only the
other day. Some unhappy metal-worker--I am not sure if it was not a
metal-working firm--had taken three years to make a Golden eagle.
SIBYL. Of real gold?
L. No; of bronze, or copper, or some of their foul patent metal--it is
no matter what. I meant a model of our chief British eagle. Every
feather was made separately; and every filament of every feather
separately, and so joined on; and all the quills modelled of the right
length and right section, and at last the whole cluster of them fastened
together. You know, children, I don't think much of my own drawing; but
take my proud word for once, that when I go to the Zoological Gardens,
and happen to have a bit of chalk in my pocket, and the Gray Harpy will
sit, without screwing his head round, for thirty seconds,--I can do a
better thing of him in that time than the three years' work of this
industrious firm. For, during the thirty seconds, the eagle is my
object,--not myself; and during the three years, the firm's object, in
every fibre of bronze it made, was itself, and not the eagle. That is
the true meaning of the little Pthah's having no eyes--he can see only
himself. The Egyptian beetle was not quite the full type of him; our
northern ground beetle is a truer one. It is beautiful to see it at
work, gathering its treasures (such as they are) into little round
balls; and pushing them home with the strong wrong end of it,--head
downmost all the way,--like a modern political economist with his ball
of capital, declaring that a nation can stand on its vices better than
on its virtues. But away with you, children, now, for I'm getting cross.
DORA. I'm going down-stairs; I shall take care, at any rate, that there
are no little Pthahs in the kitchen cupboards.
LECTURE IV.
_THE CRYSTAL ORDERS._
_A working Lecture, in the large Schoolroom; with
experimental Interludes The great bell has rung
unexpectedly._
KATHLEEN (_entering disconsolate, though first at the summons_). Oh
dear, oh dear, what a day! Was ever anything so provoking! just when we
wanted to crystallise ourselves;--and I'm sure it's going to rain all
day long.
L. So am I, Kate. The sky has quite an Irish way with it But I don't see
why Irish girls should also look so dismal. Fancy that you don't want to
crystallise yourselves: you didn't, the day before yesterday, and you
were not unhappy when it rained then.
FLORRIE. Ah! but we do want to-day; and the rain's so tiresome.
L. That is to say, children, that because you are all the richer by the
expectation of playing at a new game, you choose to make yourselves
unhappier than when you had nothing to look forward to, but the old
ones.
ISABEL. But then, to have to wait--wait--wait; and before we've tried
it;--and perhaps it will rain to-morrow, too!
L. It may also rain the day after to-morrow. We can make ourselves
uncomfortable to any extent with perhapses, Isabel. You may stick
perhapses into your little minds, like pins, till you are as
uncomfortable as the Lilliputians made Gulliver with their arrows, when
he would not lie quiet.
ISABEL. But what _are_ we to do to-day?
L. To be quiet, for one thing, like Gulliver when he saw there was
nothing better to be done. And to practise patience. I can tell you
children, _that_ requires nearly as much practising as music; and we are
continually losing our lessons when the master comes. Now, to-day,
here's a nice little adagio lesson for us, if we play it properly.
ISABEL. But I don't like that sort of lesson. I can't play it properly.
L. Can you play a Mozart sonata yet, Isabel? The more need to practise.
All one's life is a music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in
time. But there must be no hurry.
KATHLEEN. I'm sure there's no music in stopping in on a rainy day.
L. There's no music in a 'rest,' Katie, that I know of: but there's the
making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the
life-melody; and scrambling on without counting--not that it's easy to
count; but nothing on which so much depends ever _is_ easy. People are
always talking of perseverance, and courage, and fortitude; but patience
is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude,--and the rarest, too. I
know twenty persevering girls for one patient one: but it is only that
twenty-first who can do her work, out and out, or enjoy it. For patience
lies at the root of all pleasures, as well as of all powers. Hope
herself ceases to be happiness, when Impatience companions her.
(ISABEL _and_ LILY _sit down on the floor, and fold their
hands. The others follow their example._)
Good children! but that's not quite the way of it, neither. Folded hands
are not necessarily resigned ones. The Patience who really smiles at
grief usually stands, or walks, or even runs: she seldom sits; though
she may sometimes have to do it, for many a day, poor thing, by
monuments; or like Chaucer's, 'with facë pale, upon a hill of sand.' But
we are not reduced to that to-day. Suppose we use this calamitous
forenoon to choose the shapes we are to crystallise into? we know
nothing about them yet.
(_The pictures of resignation rise from the floor, not in
the patientest manner. General applause._)
MARY _(with one or two others_). The very thing we wanted to ask you
about!
LILY. We looked at the books about crystals, but they are so dreadful.
L. Well, Lily, we must go through a little dreadfulness, that's a fact:
no road to any good knowledge is wholly among the lilies and the grass;
there is rough climbing to be done always. But the crystal-books are a
little _too_ dreadful, most of them, I admit; and we shall have to be
content with very little of their help. You know, as you cannot stand on
each other's heads, you can only make yourselves into the sections of
crystals,--the figures they show when they are cut through; and we will
choose some that will be quite easy. You shall make diamonds of
yourselves----
ISABEL. Oh, no, no! we won't be diamonds, please.
L. Yes, you shall, Isabel; they are very pretty things, if the
jewellers, and the kings and queens, would only let them alone. You
shall make diamonds of yourselves, and rubies of yourselves, and
emeralds; and Irish diamonds; two of those--with Lily in the middle of
one, which will be very orderly, of course; and Kathleen in the middle
of the other, for which we will hope the best;--and you shall make
Derbyshire spar of yourselves, and Iceland spar, and gold, and silver,
and--Quicksilver there's enough of in you, without any making.
MARY. Now, you know, the children will be getting quite wild: we must
really get pencils and paper, and begin properly.
L. Wait a minute, Miss Mary; I think as we've the school room clear
to-day, I'll try to give you some notion of the three great orders or
ranks of crystals, into which all the others seem more or less to fall.
We shall only want one figure a day, in the playground; and that can be
drawn in a minute: but the general ideas had better be fastened first. I
must show you a great many minerals; so let me have three tables wheeled
into the three windows, that we may keep our specimens separate;--we
will keep the three orders of crystals on separate tables.
(_First Interlude, of pushing and pulling, and spreading of
baize covers._ VIOLET, _not particularly minding what she is
about, gets herself jammed into a corner, and bid to stand
out of the way; on which she devotes herself to
meditation._)
VIOLET (_after interval of meditation_). How strange it is that
everything seems to divide into threes!
L. Everything doesn't divide into threes. Ivy won't, though shamrock
will; and daisies won't, though lilies will.
VIOLET. But all the nicest things seem to divide into threes.
L. Violets won't.
VIOLET. No; I should think not, indeed! But I mean the great things.
L. I've always heard the globe had four quarters.
ISABEL. Well; but you know you said it hadn't any quarters at all. So
mayn't it really be divided into three?
L. If it were divided into no more than three, on the outside of it,
Isabel, it would be a fine world to live in; and if it were divided into
three in the inside of it, it would soon be no world to live in at all.
DORA. We shall never get to the crystals, at this rate. (_Aside to_
MARY.) He will get off into political economy before we know where we
are. (_Aloud._) But the crystals are divided into three, then?
L. No; but there are three general notions by which we may best get hold
of them. Then between these notions there are other notions.
LILY (_alarmed_). A great many? And shall we have to learn them all?
L. More than a great many--a quite infinite many. So you cannot learn
them all.
LILY (_greatly relieved_). Then may we only learn the three?
L. Certainly; unless, when you have got those three notions, you want to
have some more notions;--which would not surprise me. But we'll try for
the three, first. Katie, you broke your coral necklace this morning?
KATHLEEN. Oh! who told you? It was in jumping. I'm so sorry!
L. I'm very glad. Can you fetch me the beads of it?
KATHLEEN. I've lost some; here are the rest in my pocket, if I can only
get them out.
L. You mean to get them out some day, I suppose; so try now. I want
them.
(KATHLEEN _empties her pocket on the floor. The beads
disperse. The School disperses also. Second
Interlude--hunting piece._)
L. (_after waiting patiently for a quarter of an hour, to_ ISABEL, _who
comes up from under the table with her hair all about her ears, and the
last findable beads in her hand_). Mice are useful little things
sometimes. Now, mousie, I want all those beads crystallised. How many
ways are there of putting them in order?
ISABEL. Well, first one would string them, I suppose?
L. Yes, that's the first way. You cannot string ultimate atoms;
but you can put them in a row, and then they fasten themselves
together, somehow, into a long rod or needle. We will call these
'_Needle_-crystals.' What would be the next way?
ISABEL. I suppose, as we are to get together in the playground, when it
stops raining, in different shapes?
L. Yes; put the beads together, then, in the simplest form you can, to
begin with. Put them into a square, and pack them close.
ISABEL (_after careful endeavour_). I can't get them closer.
L. That will do. Now you may see, beforehand, that if you try to throw
yourselves into square in this confused way, you will never know your
places; so you had better consider every square as made of rods, put
side by side. Take four beads of equal size, first, Isabel; put them
into a little square. That, you may consider as made up of two rods of
two beads each. Then you can make a square a size larger, out of three
rods of three. Then the next square may be a size larger. How many rods,
Lily?
LILY. Four rods of four beads each, I suppose.
L. Yes, and then five rods of five, and so on. But now, look here; make
another square of four beads again. You see they leave a little opening
in the centre.
ISABEL (_pushing two opposite ones closer together_). Now they don't.
L. No; but now it isn't a square; and by pushing the two together you
have pushed the two others farther apart.
ISABEL. And yet, somehow, they all seem closer than they were!
L. Yes; for before, each of them only touched two of the others, but now
each of the two in the middle touches the other three. Take away one of
the outsiders, Isabel; now you have three in a triangle--the smallest
triangle you can make out of the beads. Now put a rod of three beads on
at one side. So, you have a triangle of six beads; but just the shape of
the first one. Next a rod of four on the side of that; and you have a
triangle of ten beads: then a rod of five on the side of that; and you
have a triangle of fifteen. Thus you have a square with five beads on
the side, and a triangle with five beads on the side; equal-sided,
therefore, like the square. So, however few or many you may be, you may
soon learn how to crystallise quickly into these two figures, which are
the foundation of form in the commonest, and therefore actually the most
important, as well as in the rarest, and therefore, by our esteem, the
most important, minerals of the world. Look at this in my hand.
VIOLET. Why, it is leaf-gold!
L. Yes; but beaten by no man's hammer; or rather, not beaten at all, but
woven. Besides, feel the weight of it. There is gold enough there to
gild the walls and ceiling, if it were beaten thin.
VIOLET. How beautiful! And it glitters like a leaf covered with frost.
L. You only think it so beautiful because you know it is gold. It is not
prettier, in reality, than a bit of brass: for it is Transylvanian gold;
and they say there is a foolish gnome in the mines there, who is always
wanting to live in the moon, and so alloys all the gold with a little
silver. I don't know how that may be: but the silver always _is_ in the
gold; and if he does it, it's very provoking of him, for no gold is
woven so fine anywhere else.
MARY (_who has been looking through her magnifying glass_). But this is
not woven. This is all made of little triangles.
L. Say 'patched,' then, if you must be so particular. But if you fancy
all those triangles, small as they are (and many of them are infinitely
small), made up again of rods, and those of grains, as we built our
great triangle of the beads, what word will you take for the
manufacture?
MAY. There's no word--it is beyond words.
L. Yes; and that would matter little, were it not beyond thoughts too.
But, at all events, this yellow leaf of dead gold, shed, not from the
ruined woodlands, but the ruined rocks, will help you to remember the
second kind of crystals, _Leaf_-crystals, or _Foliated_ crystals; though
I show you the form in gold first only to make a strong impression on
you, for gold is not generally, or characteristically, crystallised in
leaves; the real type of foliated crystals is this thing, Mica; which if
you once feel well, and break well, you will always know again; and you
will often have occasion to know it, for you will find it everywhere,
nearly, in hill countries.
KATHLEEN. If we break it well! May we break it?
L. To powder, if you like.
(_Surrenders plate of brown mica to public investigation.
Third Interlude. It sustains severely philosophical
treatment at all hands._)
FLORRIE. (_to whom the last fragments have descended_) Always leaves,
and leaves, and nothing but leaves, or white dust!
L. That dust itself is nothing but finer leaves.
(_Shows them to_ FLORRIE _through magnifying glass._)
ISABEL. (_peeping over_ FLORRIE'S _shoulder_). But then this bit under
the glass looks like that bit out of the glass! If we could break this
bit under the glass, what would it be like?
L. It would be all leaves still.
ISABEL. And then if we broke those again?
L. All less leaves still.
ISABEL (_impatient_). And if we broke them again, and again, and again,
and again, and again?
L. Well, I suppose you would come to a limit, if you could only see it.
Notice that the little flakes already differ somewhat from the large
ones: because I can bend them up and down, and they stay bent; while the
large flake, though it bent easily a little way, sprang back when you
let it go, and broke, when you tried to bend it far. And a large mass
would not bend at all.
MARY. Would that leaf gold separate into finer leaves, in the same way?
L. No; and therefore, as I told you, it is not a characteristic specimen
of a foliated crystallisation. The little triangles are portions of
solid crystals, and so they are in this, which looks like a black mica;
but you see it is made up of triangles like the gold, and stands, almost
accurately, as an intermediate link, in crystals, between mica and gold.
Yet this is the commonest, as gold the rarest, of metals.
MARY. Is it iron? I never saw iron so bright.
L. It is rust of iron, finely crystallised: from its resemblance to
mica, it is often called micaceous iron.
KATHLEEN. May we break this, too?
L. No, for I could not easily get such another crystal; besides, it
would not break like the mica; it is much harder. But take the glass
again, and look at the fineness of the jagged edges of the triangles
where they lap over each other. The gold has the same: but you see them
better here, terrace above terrace, countless, and in successive angles,
like superb fortified bastions.
MAY. But all foliated crystals are not made of triangles?
L. Far from it: mica is occasionally so, but usually of hexagons; and
here is a foliated crystal made of squares, which will show you that the
leaves of the rock-land have their summer green, as well as their
autumnal gold.
FLORRIE. Oh! oh! oh! (_jumps for joy_).
L. Did you never see a bit of green leaf before, Florrie?
FLORRIE. Yes, but never so bright as that, and not in a stone.
L. If you will look at the leaves of the trees in sunshine after a
shower, you will find they are much brighter than that; and surely they
are none the worse for being on stalks instead of in stones?
FLORRIE. Yes, but then there are so many of them, one never looks, I
suppose.
L. Now you have it, Florrie.
VIOLET (_sighing_). There are so many beautiful things we never see!
L. You need not sigh for that, Violet; but I will tell you what we
should all sigh for,--that there are so many ugly things we never see.
VIOLET. But we don't want to see ugly things!
L. You had better say, 'We don't want to suffer them.' You ought to be
glad in thinking how much more beauty God has made, than human eyes can
ever see; but not glad in thinking how much more evil man has made, than
his own soul can ever conceive, much more than his hands can ever heal.
VIOLET. I don't understand;--how is that like the leaves?
L. The same law holds in our neglect of multiplied pain, as in our
neglect of multiplied beauty. Florrie jumps for joy at sight of half an
inch of a green leaf in a brown stone; and takes more notice of it than
of all the green in the wood: and you, or I, or any of us, would be
unhappy if any single human creature beside us were in sharp pain; but
we can read, at breakfast, day after day, of men being killed, and of
women and children dying of hunger, faster than the leaves strew the
brooks in Vallombrosa;--and then go out to play croquet, as if nothing
had happened.
MAY. But we do not see the people being killed or dying.
L. You did not see your brother, when you got the telegram the other
day, saying he was ill, May; but you cried for him and played no
croquet. But we cannot talk of these things now; and what is more, you
must let me talk straight on, for a little while; and ask no questions
till I've done: for we branch ('exfoliate,' I should say,
mineralogically) always into something else,--though that's my fault
more than yours; but I must go straight on now. You have got a distinct
notion, I hope, of leaf-crystals; and you see the sort of look they
have: you can easily remember that 'folium' is Latin for a leaf, and
that the separate flakes of mica, or any other such stones, are called
'folia;' but, because mica is the most characteristic of these stones,
other things that are like it in structure are called 'micas;' thus we
have Uran-mica, which is the green leaf I showed you; and Copper-mica,
which is another like it, made chiefly of copper; and this foliated iron
is called 'micaceous iron.' You have then these two great orders,
Needle-crystals, made (probably) of grains in rows; and Leaf-crystals,
made (probably) of needles interwoven; now, lastly, there are crystals
of a third order, in heaps, or knots, or masses, which may be made,
either of leaves laid one upon another, or of needles bound like Roman
fasces; and mica itself, when it is well crystallised, puts itself into
such masses, as if to show us how others are made. Here is a brown
six-sided crystal, quite as beautifully chiselled at the sides as any
castle tower; but you see it is entirely built of folia of mica, one
laid above another, which break away the moment I touch the edge with my
knife. Now, here is another hexagonal tower, of just the same size and
colour, which I want you to compare with the mica carefully; but as I
cannot wait for you to do it just now, I must tell you quickly what main
differences to look for. First, you will feel it is far heavier than the
mica. Then, though its surface looks quite micaceous in the folia of it,
when you try them with the knife, you will find you cannot break them
away----
KATHLEEN. May I try?
L. Yes, you mistrusting Katie. Here's my strong knife for you.
(_Experimental pause._ KATHLEEN, _doing her best._) You'll have that
knife shutting on your finger presently, Kate; and I don't know a girl
who would like less to have her hand tied up for a week.
KATHLEEN (_who also does not like to be beaten--giving up the knife
despondently_). What _can_ the nasty hard thing be?
L. It is nothing but indurated clay, Kate: very hard set certainly, yet
not so hard as it might be. If it were thoroughly well crystallised, you
would see none of those micaceous fractures; and the stone would be
quite red and clear, all through.
KATHLEEN. Oh, cannot you show us one?
L. Egypt can, if you ask her; she has a beautiful one in the clasp of
her favourite bracelet.
KATHLEEN. Why, that's a ruby!
L. Well, so is that thing you've been scratching at.
KATHLEEN. My goodness!
(_Takes up the stone again, very delicately; and drops it.
General consternation._)
L. Never mind, Katie; you might drop it from the top of the house, and
do it no harm. But though you really are a very good girl, and as
good-natured as anybody can possibly be, remember, you have your faults,
like other people; and, if I were you, the next time I wanted to assert
anything energetically, I would assert it by 'my badness,' not 'my
goodness.'
KATHLEEN. Ah, now, it's too bad of you!
L. Well, then, I'll invoke, on occasion, my 'too-badness.' But you may
as well pick up the ruby, now you have dropped it; and look carefully at
the beautiful hexagonal lines which gleam on its surface; and here is a
pretty white sapphire (essentially the same stone as the ruby), in which
you will see the same lovely structure, like the threads of the finest
white cobweb. I do not know what is the exact method of a ruby's
construction; but you see by these lines, what fine construction there
_is_, even in this hardest of stones (after the diamond), which usually
appears as a massive lump or knot. There is therefore no real
mineralogical distinction between needle crystals and knotted crystals,
but, practically, crystallised masses throw themselves into one of the
three groups we have been examining to-day; and appear either as
Needles, as Folia, or as Knots; when they are in needles (or fibres),
they make the stones or rocks formed out of them '_fibrous_;' when they
are in folia, they make them '_foliated_;' when they are in knots (or
grains), '_granular_.' Fibrous rocks are comparatively rare, in mass;
but fibrous minerals are innumerable; and it is often a question which
really no one but a young lady could possibly settle, whether one should
call the fibres composing them 'threads' or 'needles.' Here is
amianthus, for instance, which is quite as fine and soft as any cotton
thread you ever sewed with; and here is sulphide of bismuth, with
sharper points and brighter lustre than your finest needles have; and
fastened in white webs of quartz more delicate than your finest lace;
and here is sulphide of antimony, which looks like mere purple wool, but
it is all of purple needle crystals; and here is red oxide of copper
(you must not breathe on it as you look, or you may blow some of the
films of it off the stone), which is simply a woven tissue of scarlet
silk. However, these finer thread forms are comparatively rare, while
the bolder and needle-like crystals occur constantly; so that, I
believe, 'Needle-crystal' is the best word (the grand one is 'Acicular
crystal,' but Sibyl will tell you it is all the same, only less easily
understood; and therefore more scientific). Then the Leaf-crystals, as I
said, form an immense mass of foliated rocks; and the Granular crystals,
which are of many kinds, form essentially granular, or granitic and
porphyritic rocks; and it is always a point of more interest to me (and
I think will ultimately be to you), to consider the causes which force a
given mineral to take any one of these three general forms, than what
the peculiar geometrical limitations are, belonging to its own
crystals.[150] It is more interesting to me, for instance, to try and
find out why the red oxide of copper, usually crystallising in cubes or
octahedrons, makes itself exquisitely, out of its cubes, into this red
silk in one particular Cornish mine, than what are the absolutely
necessary angles of the octahedron, which is its common form. At all
events, that mathematical part of crystallography is quite beyond girls'
strength; but these questions of the various tempers and manners of
crystals are not only comprehensible by you, but full of the most
curious teaching for you. For in the fulfilment, to the best of their
power, of their adopted form under given circumstances, there are
conditions entirely resembling those of human virtue; and indeed
expressible under no term so proper as that of the Virtue, or Courage of
crystals:--which, if you are not afraid of the crystals making you
ashamed of yourselves, we will try to get some notion of, to-morrow. But
it will be a bye-lecture, and more about yourselves than the minerals,
Don't come unless you like.
MARY. I'm sure the crystals will make us ashamed of ourselves; but we'll
come, for all that.
L. Meantime, look well and quietly over these needle, or thread
crystals, and those on the other two tables, with magnifying glasses,
and see what thoughts will come into your little heads about them. For
the best thoughts are generally those which come without being forced,
one does not know how. And so I hope you will get through your wet day
patiently.
FOOTNOTES:
[150] Note iv.
LECTURE V.
_CRYSTAL VIRTUES._
_A quiet talk, in the afternoon, by the sunniest window of
the Drawing-room. Present_, FLORRIE, ISABEL, MAY, LUCILLA,
KATHLEEN, DORA, MARY, _and some others, who have saved time
for the bye-Lecture._
L. So you have really come, like good girls, to be made ashamed of
yourselves?
DORA (_very meekly_). No, we needn't be made so; we always are.
L. Well, I believe that's truer than most pretty speeches: but you know,
you saucy girl, some people have more reason to be so than others. Are
you sure everybody is, as well as you?
THE GENERAL VOICE. Yes, yes; everybody.
L. What! Florrie ashamed of herself?
(FLORRIE _hides behind the curtain._)
L. And Isabel?
(ISABEL _hides under the table._)
L. And May?
(MAY _runs into the corner behind the piano._)
L. And Lucilla?
(LUCILLA _hides her face in her hands._)
L. Dear, dear; but this will never do. I shall have to tell you of the
faults of the crystals, instead of virtues, to put you in heart again.
MAY (_coming out of her corner_). Oh! have the crystals faults, like us?
L. Certainly, May. Their best virtues are shown in fighting their
faults. And some have a great many faults; and some are very naughty
crystals indeed.
FLORRIE (_from behind her curtain_). As naughty as me?
ISABEL (_peeping from under the table cloth_). Or me?
L. Well, I don't know. They never forget their syntax, children, when
once they've been taught it. But I think some of them are, on the whole,
worse than any of you. Not that it's amiable of you to look so radiant,
all in a minute, on that account.
DORA. Oh! but it's so much more comfortable.
(_Everybody seems to recover their spirits. Eclipse of_
FLORRIE _and_ ISABEL _terminates._)
L. What kindly creatures girls are, after all, to their neighbours'
failings! I think you may be ashamed of yourselves indeed, now,
children! I can tell you, you shall hear of the highest crystalline
merits that I can think of, to-day: and I wish there were more of them;
but crystals have a limited, though a stern, code of morals; and their
essential virtues are but two;--the first is to be pure, and the second
to be well shaped.
MARY. Pure! Does that mean clear--transparent?
L. No; unless in the case of a transparent substance. You cannot have a
transparent crystal of gold; but you may have a perfectly pure one.
ISABEL. But you said it was the shape that made things be crystals;
therefore, oughtn't their shape to be their first virtue, not their
second?
L. Right, you troublesome mousie. But I call their shape only their
second virtue, because it depends on time and accident, and things which
the crystal cannot help. If it is cooled too quickly, or shaken, it must
take what shape it can; but it seems as if, even then, it had in itself
the power of rejecting impurity, if it has crystalline life enough. Here
is a crystal of quartz, well enough shaped in its way; but it seems to
have been languid and sick at heart; and some white milky substance has
got into it, and mixed itself up with it, all through. It makes the
quartz quite yellow, if you hold it up to the light, and milky blue on
the surface. Here is another, broken into a thousand separate facets,
and out of all traceable shape; but as pure as a mountain spring. I like
this one best.
THE AUDIENCE. So do I--and I--and I.
MARY. Would a crystallographer?
L. I think so. He would find many more laws curiously exemplified in the
irregularly grouped but pure crystal. But it is a futile question, this
of first or second. Purity is in most cases a prior, if not a nobler,
virtue; at all events it is most convenient to think about it first.
MARY. But what ought we to think about it? Is there much to be
thought--I mean, much to puzzle one?
L. I don't know what you call 'much.' It is a long time since I met with
anything in which there was little. There's not much in this, perhaps.
The crystal must be either dirty or clean,--and there's an end. So it is
with one's hands, and with one's heart--only you can wash your hands
without changing them, but not hearts, nor crystals. On the whole, while
you are young, it will be as well to take care that your hearts don't
want much washing; for they may perhaps need wringing also, when they
do.
(_Audience doubtful and uncomfortable._ LUCILLA _at last
takes courage._)
LUCILLA. Oh! but surely, sir, we cannot make our hearts clean?
L. Not easily, Lucilla; so you had better keep them so when they are.
LUCILLA. When they are! But, sir--
L. Well?
LUCILLA. Sir--surely--are we not told that they are all evil?
L. Wait a little, Lucilla; that is difficult ground you are getting
upon; and we must keep to our crystals, till at least we understand what
_their_ good and evil consist in; they may help us afterwards to some
useful hints about our own. I said that their goodness consisted chiefly
in purity of substance, and perfectness of form: but those are rather
the _effects_ of their goodness, than the goodness itself. The inherent
virtues of the crystals, resulting in these outer conditions, might
really seem to be best described in the words we should use respecting
living creatures--'force of heart' and steadiness of purpose.' There
seem to be in some crystals, from the beginning, an unconquerable purity
of vital power, and strength of crystal spirit. Whatever dead substance,
unacceptant of this energy, comes in their way, is either rejected, or
forced to take some beautiful subordinate form; the purity of the
crystal remains unsullied, and every atom of it bright with coherent
energy. Then the second condition is, that from the beginning of its
whole structure, a fine crystal seems to have determined that it will be
of a certain size and of a certain shape; it persists in this plan, and
completes it. Here is a perfect crystal of quartz for you. It is of an
unusual form, and one which it might seem very difficult to build--a
pyramid with convex sides, composed of other minor pyramids. But there
is not a flaw in its contour throughout; not one of its myriads of
component sides but is as bright as a jeweller's facetted work (and far
finer, if you saw it close). The crystal points are as sharp as
javelins; their edges will cut glass with a touch. Anything more
resolute, consummate, determinate in form, cannot be conceived. Here, on
the other hand, is a crystal of the same substance, in a perfectly
simple type of form--a plain six-sided prism; but from its base to its
point,--and it is nine inches long,--it has never for one instant made
up its mind what thickness it will have. It seems to have begun by
making itself as thick as it thought possible with the quantity of
material at command. Still not being as thick as it would like to be, it
has clumsily glued on more substance at one of its sides. Then it has
thinned itself, in a panic of economy; then puffed itself out again;
then starved one side to enlarge another; then warped itself quite out
of its first line. Opaque, rough-surfaced, jagged on the edge, distorted
in the spine, it exhibits a quite human image of decrepitude and
dishonour; but the worst of all the signs of its decay and helplessness,
is that half-way up, a parasite crystal, smaller, but just as sickly,
has rooted itself in the side of the larger one, eating out a cavity
round its root, and then growing backwards, or downwards, contrary to
the direction of the main crystal. Yet I cannot trace the least
difference in purity of substance between the first most noble stone,
and this ignoble and dissolute one. The impurity of the last is in its
will, or want of will.
MARY. Oh, if we could but understand the meaning of it all!
L. We can understand all that is good for us. It is just as true for us,
as for the crystal, that the nobleness of life depends on its
consistency,--clearness of purpose,--quiet and ceaseless energy. All
doubt, and repenting, and botching, and retouching, and wondering what
it will be best to do next, are vice, as well as misery.
MARY (_much wondering_). But must not one repent when one does wrong,
and hesitate when one can't see one's way?
L. You have no business at all to do wrong; nor to get into any way that
you cannot see. Your intelligence should always be far in advance of
your act. Whenever you do not know what you are about, you are sure to
be doing wrong.
KATHLEEN. Oh, dear, but I never know what I am about!
L. Very true, Katie, but it is a great deal to know, if you know that.
And you find that you have done wrong afterwards; and perhaps some day
you may begin to know, or at least, think, what you are about.
ISABEL. But surely people can't do very wrong if they don't know, can
they? I mean, they can't be very naughty. They can be wrong, like
Kathleen or me, when we make mistakes; but not wrong in the dreadful
way. I can't express what I mean; but there are two sorts of wrong are
there not?
L. Yes, Isabel; but you will find that the great difference is between
kind and unkind wrongs, not between meant and unmeant wrong. Very few
people really mean to do wrong,--in a deep sense, none. They only don't
know what they are about. Cain did not mean to do wrong when he killed
Abel.
(ISABEL _draws a deep breath, and opens her eyes very
wide._)
L. No, Isabel; and there are countless Cains among us now, who kill
their brothers by the score a day, not only for less provocation than
Cain had, but for _no_ provocation,--and merely for what they can make
of their bones,--yet do not think they are doing wrong in the least.
Then sometimes you have the business reversed, as over in America these
last years, where you have seen Abel resolutely killing Cain, and not
thinking he is doing wrong. The great difficulty is always to open
people's eyes: to touch their feelings, and break their hearts, is easy;
the difficult thing is to break their heads. What does it matter, as
long as they remain stupid, whether you change their feelings or not?
You cannot be always at their elbow to tell them what is right: and they
may just do as wrong as before, or worse; and their best intentions
merely make the road smooth for them,--you know where, children. For it
is not the place itself that is paved with them, as people say so often.
You can't pave the bottomless pit; but you may the road to it.
MAY. Well, but if people do as well as they can see how, surely that is
the right for them, isn't it?
L. No, May, not a bit of it; right is right, and wrong is wrong. It is
only the fool who does wrong, and says he 'did it for the best.' And if
there's one sort of person in the world that the Bible speaks harder of
than another, it is fools. Their particular and chief way of saying
'There is no God' is this, of declaring that whatever their 'public
opinion' may be, is right: and that God's opinion is of no consequence.
MAY. But surely nobody can always know what is right?
L. Yes, you always can, for to-day; and if you do what you see of it
to-day, you will see more of it, and more clearly, to-morrow. Here, for
instance, you children are at school, and have to learn French, and
arithmetic, and music, and several other such things. That is your
'right' for the present; the 'right' for us, your teachers, is to see
that you learn as much as you can, without spoiling your dinner, your
sleep, or your play; and that what you do learn, you learn well. You all
know when you learn with a will, and when you dawdle. There's no doubt
of conscience about that, I suppose?
VIOLET. No; but if one wants to read an amusing book, instead of
learning one's lesson?
L. You don't call that a 'question,' seriously, Violet? You are then
merely deciding whether you will resolutely do wrong or not.
MARY. But, in after life, how many fearful difficulties may arise,
however one tries to know or to do what is right!
L. You are much too sensible a girl, Mary, to have felt that, whatever
you may have seen. A great many of young ladies' difficulties arise from
their falling in love with a wrong person: but they have no business to
let themselves fall in love, till they know he is the right one.
DORA. How many thousands ought he to have a year?
L. (_disdaining reply_). There are, of course, certain crises of fortune
when one has to take care of oneself, and mind shrewdly what one is
about. There is never any real doubt about the path, but you may have to
walk very slowly.
MARY. And if one is forced to do a wrong thing by some one who has
authority over you?
L. My dear, no one can be forced to do a wrong thing, for the guilt is
in the will: but you may any day be forced to do a fatal thing, as you
might be forced to take poison; the remarkable law of nature in such
cases being, that it is always unfortunate _you_ who are poisoned, and
not the person who gives you the dose. It is a very strange law, but it
_is_ a law. Nature merely sees to the carrying out of the normal
operation of arsenic. She never troubles herself to ask who gave it you.
So also you may be starved to death, morally as well as physically, by
other people's faults. You are, on the whole, very good children sitting
here to-day;--do you think that your goodness comes all by your own
contriving? or that you are gentle and kind because your dispositions
are naturally more angelic than those of the poor girls who are playing,
with wild eyes, on the dustheaps in the alleys of our great towns; and
who will one day fill their prisons,--or, better, their graves? Heaven
only knows where they, and we who have cast them there, shall stand at
last. But the main judgment question will be, I suppose, for all of us,
'Did you keep a good heart through it?' What you were, others may answer
for;--what you tried to be, you must answer for, yourself. Was the heart
pure and true--tell us that?
And so we come back to your sorrowful question, Lucilla, which I put
aside a little ago. You would be afraid to answer that your heart _was_
pure and true, would not you?
LUCILLA. Yes, indeed, sir.
L. Because you have been taught that it is all evil--'only evil
continually.' Somehow, often as people say that, they never seem, to me,
to believe it? Do you really believe it?
LUCILLA. Yes, sir; I hope so.
L. That you have an entirely bad heart?
LUCILLA (_a little uncomfortable at the substitution of the monosyllable
for the dissyllable, nevertheless persisting in her orthodoxy_). Yes,
sir.
L. Florrie, I am sure you are tired; I never like you to stay when you
are tired; but, you know, you must not play with the kitten while we're
talking.
FLORRIE. Oh! but I'm not tired; and I'm only nursing her. She'll be
asleep in my lap directly.
L. Stop! that puts me in mind of something I had to show you, about
minerals that are like hair. I want a hair out of Tittie's tail.
FLORRIE (_quite rude, in her surprise, even to the point of repeating
expressions_). Out of Tittie's tail!
L. Yes; a brown one: Lucilla, you can get at the tip of it nicely, under
Florrie's arm; just pull one out for me.
LUCILLA. Oh! but, sir, it will hurt her so!
L. Never mind; she can't scratch you while Florrie is holding her. Now
that I think of it, you had better pull out two.
LUCILLA. But then she may scratch Florrie! and it will hurt her so, sir!
if you only want brown hairs, wouldn't two of mine do?
L. Would you really rather pull out your own than Tittie's?
LUCILLA. Oh, of course, if mine will do.
L. But that's very wicked, Lucilla!
LUCILLA. Wicked, sir?
L. Yes; if your heart was not so bad, you would much rather pull all the
cat's hairs out, than one of your own.
LUCILLA. Oh! but sir, I didn't mean bad, like that.
L. I believe, if the truth were told, Lucilla, you would like to tie a
kettle to Tittie's tail, and hunt her round the playground.
LUCILLA. Indeed, I should not, sir.
L. That's not true, Lucilla; you know it cannot be.
LUCILLA. Sir?
L. Certainly it is not;--how can you possibly speak any truth out of
such a heart as you have? It is wholly deceitful.
LUCILLA. Oh! no, no; I don't mean that way; I don't mean that it makes
me tell lies, quite out.
L. Only that it tells lies within you?
LUCILLA. Yes.
L. Then, outside of it, you know what is true, and say so; and I may
trust the outside of your heart; but within, it is all foul and false.
Is that the way?
LUCILLA. I suppose so: I don't understand it, quite.
L. There is no occasion for understanding it; but do you feel it? Are
you sure that your heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately
wicked?
LUCILLA (_much relieved by finding herself among phrases with which she
is acquainted_). Yes, sir. I'm sure of that.
L. (_pensively_). I'm sorry for it, Lucilla.
LUCILLA. So am I, indeed.
L. What are you sorry with, Lucilla?
LUCILLA. Sorry with, sir?
L. Yes; I mean, where do you feel sorry? in your feet?
LUCILLA (_laughing a little_). No, sir, of course.
L. In your shoulders, then?
LUCILLA. No, sir.
L. You are sure of that? Because, I fear, sorrow in the shoulders would
not be worth much.
LUCILLA. I suppose I feel it in my heart, if I really am sorry.
L. If you really are! Do you mean to say that you are sure you are
utterly wicked, and yet do not care?
LUCILLA. No, indeed; I have cried about it often.
L. Well, then, you are sorry in your heart?
LUCILLA. Yes, when the sorrow is worth anything.
L. Even if it be not, it cannot be anywhere else but there. It is not
the crystalline lens of your eyes which is sorry, when you cry?
LUCILLA. No, sir, of course.
L. Then, have you two hearts; one of which is wicked, and the other
grieved? or is one side of it sorry for the other side?
LUCILLA (_weary of cross-examination, and a little vexed_). Indeed, sir,
you know I can't understand it; but you know how it is written--'another
law in my members, warring against the law of my mind.'
L. Yes, Lucilla, I know how it is written; but I do not see that it will
help us to know that, if we neither understand what is written, nor feel
it. And you will not get nearer to the meaning of one verse, if, as soon
as you are puzzled by it, you escape to another, introducing three new
words--'law,' 'members,' and 'mind'; not one of which you at present
know the meaning of; and respecting which, you probably never will be
much wiser; since men like Montesquieu and Locke have spent great part
of their lives in endeavouring to explain two of them.
LUCILLA. Oh! please, sir, ask somebody else.
L. If I thought anyone else could answer better than you, Lucilla, I
would; but suppose I try, instead, myself, to explain your feelings to
you?
LUCILLA. Oh, yes; please do.
L. Mind, I say your 'feelings,' not your 'belief.' For I cannot
undertake to explain anybody's beliefs. Still I must try a little,
first, to explain the belief also, because I want to draw it to some
issue. As far as I understand what you say, or any one else, taught as
you have been taught, says, on this matter,--you think that there is an
external goodness, a whited-sepulchre kind of goodness, which appears
beautiful outwardly, but is within full of uncleanness: a deep secret
guilt, of which we ourselves are not sensible; and which can only be
seen by the Maker of us all. (_Approving murmurs from audience._)
L. Is it not so with the body as well as the soul?
(_Looked notes of interrogation._)
L. A skull, for instance, is not a beautiful thing?
(_Grave faces, signifying 'Certainly not,' and 'What
next?'_)
L. And if you all could see in each other, with clear eyes, whatever God
sees beneath those fair faces of yours, you would not like it?
(_Murmured 'No's.'_)
L. Nor would it be good for you?
(_Silence._)
L. The probability being that what God does not allow you to see, He
does not wish you to see; nor even to think of?
(_Silence prolonged._)
L. It would not at all be good for you, for instance, whenever you were
washing your faces, and braiding your hair, to be thinking of the shapes
of the jawbones, and of the cartilage of the nose, and of the jagged
sutures of the scalp?
(_Resolutely whispered No's._)
L. Still less, to see through a clear glass the daily processes of
nourishment and decay?
(_No._)
L. Still less if instead of merely inferior and preparatory conditions
of structure, as in the skeleton,--or inferior offices of structure, as
in operations of life and death,--there were actual disease in the body;
ghastly and dreadful. You would try to cure it; but having taken such
measures as were necessary, you would not think the cure likely to be
promoted by perpetually watching the wounds, or thinking of them. On the
contrary, you would be thankful for every moment of forgetfulness: as,
in daily health, you must be thankful that your Maker has veiled
whatever is fearful in your frame under a sweet and manifest beauty; and
has made it your duty, and your only safety, to rejoice in that, both in
yourself and in others:--not indeed concealing, or refusing to believe
in sickness, if it come; but never dwelling on it.
Now, your wisdom and duty touching soul-sickness are just the same.
Ascertain clearly what is wrong with you; and so far as you know any
means of mending it, take those means, and have done: when you are
examining yourself, never call yourself merely a 'sinner,' that is very
cheap abuse; and utterly useless. You may even get to like it, and be
proud of it. But call yourself a liar, a coward, a sluggard, a glutton,
or an evil-eyed jealous wretch, if you indeed find yourself to be in any
wise any of these. Take steady means to check yourself in whatever fault
you have ascertained, and justly accused yourself of. And as soon as you
are in active way of mending, you will be no more inclined to moan over
an undefined corruption. For the rest, you will find it less easy to
uproot faults, than to choke them by gaining virtues. Do not think of
your faults; still less of others' faults: in every person who comes
near you, look for what is good and strong: honour that; rejoice in it;
and, as you can, try to imitate it: and your faults will drop off, like
dead leaves, when their time comes. If, on looking back, your whole life
should seem rugged as a palm tree stem; still, never mind, so long as it
has been growing; and has its grand green shade of leaves, and weight of
honied fruit, at top. And even if you cannot find much good in yourself
at last, think that it does not much matter to the universe either what
you were, or are; think how many people are noble, if you cannot be; and
rejoice in _their_ nobleness. An immense quantity of modern confession
of sin, even when honest, is merely a sickly egotism; which will rather
gloat over its own evil, than lose the centralisation of its interest in
itself.
MARY. But then, if we ought to forget ourselves so much, how did the old
Greek proverb 'Know thyself' come to be so highly esteemed?
L. My dear, it is the proverb of proverbs; Apollo's proverb, and the
sun's;--but do you think you can know yourself by looking _into_
yourself? Never. You can know what you are, only by looking _out_ of
yourself. Measure your own powers with those of others; compare your own
interests with those of others; try to understand what you appear to
them, as well as what they appear to you; and judge of yourselves, in
all things, relatively and subordinately; not positively: starting
always with a wholesome conviction of the probability that there is
nothing particular about you. For instance, some of you perhaps think
you can write poetry. Dwell on your own feelings and doings:--and you
will soon think yourselves Tenth Muses; but forget your own feelings;
and try, instead, to understand a line or two of Chaucer or Dante: and
you will soon begin to feel yourselves very foolish girls--which is much
like the fact.
So, something which befalls you may seem a great misfortune;--you
meditate over its effects on you personally; and begin to think that it
is a chastisement, or a warning, or a this or that or the other of
profound significance; and that all the angels in heaven have left their
business for a little while, that they may watch its effects on your
mind. But give up this egotistic indulgence of your fancy; examine a
little what misfortunes, greater a thousandfold, are happening, every
second, to twenty times worthier persons: and your self-consciousness
will change into pity and humility; and you will know yourself, so far
as to understand that 'there hath nothing taken thee but what is common
to man.'
Now, Lucilla, these are the practical conclusions which any person of
sense would arrive at, supposing the texts which relate to the inner
evil of the heart were as many, and as prominent, as they are often
supposed to be by careless readers. But the way in which common people
read their Bibles is just like the way that the old monks thought
hedgehogs ate grapes. They rolled themselves (it was said), over and
over, where the grapes lay on the ground. What fruit stuck to their
spines, they carried off, and ate. So your hedgehoggy readers roll
themselves over and over their Bibles, and declare that whatever sticks
to their own spines is Scripture; and that nothing else is. But you can
only get the skins of the texts that way. If you want their juice, you
must press them in cluster. Now, the clustered texts about the human
heart, insist, as a body, not on any inherent corruption in all hearts,
but on the terrific distinction between the bad and the good ones. 'A
good man, out of the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth that
which is good; and an evil man, out of the evil treasure, bringeth
forth that which is evil.' 'They on the rock are they which, in an
honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it.' 'Delight thyself
in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.' 'The
wicked have bent their bow, that they may privily shoot at him that is
upright in heart.' And so on; they are countless, to the same effect.
And, for all of us, the question is not at all to ascertain how much or
how little corruption there is in human nature; but to ascertain
whether, out of all the mass of that nature, we are of the sheep or the
goat breed; whether we are people of upright heart, being shot at, or
people of crooked heart, shooting. And, of all the texts bearing on the
subject, this, which is a quite simple and practical order, is the one
you have chiefly to hold in mind. 'Keep thy heart with all diligence,
for out of it are the issues of life.'
LUCILLA. And yet, how inconsistent the texts seem!
L. Nonsense, Lucilla! do you think the universe is bound to look
consistent to a girl of fifteen? Look up at your own room window;--you
can just see it from where you sit. I'm glad that it is left open, as it
ought to be, in so fine a day. But do you see what a black spot it
looks, in the sunlighted wall?
LUCILLA. Yes, it looks as black as ink.
L. Yet you know it is a very bright room when you are inside of it;
quite as bright as there is any occasion for it to be, that its little
lady may see to keep it tidy. Well, it is very probable, also, that if
you could look into your heart from the sun's point of view, it might
appear a very black hole indeed; nay, the sun may sometimes think good
to tell you that it looks so to Him; but He will come into it, and make
it very cheerful for you, for all that, if you don't put the shutters
up. And the one question for _you_, remember, is not 'dark or light?'
but 'tidy or untidy?' Look well to your sweeping and garnishing; and be
sure it is only the banished spirit, or some of the seven wickeder ones
at his back, who will still whisper to you that it is all black.
LECTURE VI.
_CRYSTAL QUARRELS._
_Full conclave, in Schoolroom. There has been a game at
crystallisation in the morning, of which various account has
to be rendered. In particular, everybody has to explain why
they were always where they were not intended to be._
L. (_having received and considered the report_). You have got on pretty
well, children: but you know these were easy figures you have been
trying. Wait till I have drawn you out the plans of some crystals of
snow!
MARY. I don't think those will be the most difficult:--they are so
beautiful that we shall remember our places better; and then they are
all regular, and in stars: it is those twisty oblique ones we are afraid
of.
L. Read Carlyle's account of the battle of Leuthen, and learn
Freidrich's 'oblique order.' You will 'get it done for once, I think,
provided you _can_ march as a pair of compasses would.' But remember,
when you can construct the most difficult single figures, you have only
learned half the game--nothing so much as the half, indeed, as the
crystals themselves play it.
MARY. Indeed; what else is there?
L. It is seldom that any mineral crystallises alone. Usually two or
three, under quite different crystalline laws, form together. They do
this absolutely without flaw or fault, when they are in fine temper: and
observe what this signifies. It signifies that the two, or more,
minerals of different natures agree, somehow, between themselves, how
much space each will want;--agree which of them shall give away to the
other at their junction; or in what measure each will accommodate itself
to the other's shape! And then each takes its permitted shape, and
allotted share of space; yielding, or being yielded to, as it builds,
till each crystal has fitted itself perfectly and gracefully to its
differently-natured neighbour. So that, in order to practise this, in
even the simplest terms, you must divide into two parties, wearing
different colours; each must choose a different figure to construct; and
you must form one of these figures through the other, both going on at
the same time.
MARY. I think _we_ may, perhaps, manage it; but I cannot at all
understand how the crystals do. It seems to imply so much preconcerting
of plan, and so much giving way to each other, as if they really were
living.
L. Yes, it implies both concurrence and compromise, regulating all
wilfulness of design: and, more curious still, the crystals do _not_
always give way to each other. They show exactly the same varieties of
temper that human creatures might. Sometimes they yield the required
place with perfect grace and courtesy; forming fantastic, but
exquisitely finished groups: and sometimes they will not yield at all;
but fight furiously for their places, losing all shape and honour, and
even their own likeness, in the contest.
MARY. But is not that wholly wonderful? How is it that one never sees it
spoken of in books?
L. The scientific men are all busy in determining the constant laws
under which the struggle takes place; these indefinite humours of the
elements are of no interest to them. And unscientific people rarely give
themselves the trouble of thinking at all when they look at stones. Not
that it is of much use to think; the more one thinks, the more one is
puzzled.
MARY. Surely it is more wonderful than anything in botany?
L. Everything has its own wonders; but, given the nature of the plant,
it is easier to understand what a flower will do, and why it does it,
than, given anything we as yet know of stone-nature, to understand what
a crystal will do, and why it does it. You at once admit a kind of
volition and choice, in the flower, but we are not accustomed to
attribute anything of the kind to the crystal. Yet there is, in reality,
more likeness to some conditions of human feeling among stones than
among plants. There is a far greater difference between kindly-tempered
and ill-tempered crystals of the same mineral, than between any two
specimens of the same flower: and the friendships and wars of crystals
depend more definitely and curiously on their varieties of disposition,
than any associations of flowers. Here, for instance, is a good garnet,
living with good mica; one rich red, and the other silver white: the
mica leaves exactly room enough for the garnet to crystallise
comfortably in; and the garnet lives happily in its little white house;
fitted to it, like a pholas in its cell. But here are wicked garnets
living with wicked mica. See what ruin they make of each other! You
cannot tell which is which; the garnets look like dull red stains on the
crumbling stone. By the way, I never could understand, if St. Gothard is
a real saint, why he can't keep his garnets in better order. These are
all under his care; but I suppose there are too many of them for him to
look after. The streets of Airolo are paved with them.
MAY. Paved with garnets?
L. With mica-slate and garnets; I broke this bit out of a paving stone.
Now garnets and mica are natural friends, and generally fond of each
other; but you see how they quarrel when they are ill brought up. So it
is always. Good crystals are friendly with almost all other good
crystals, however little they chance to see of each other, or however
opposite their habits may be; while wicked crystals quarrel with one
another, though they may be exactly alike in habits, and see each other
continually. And of course the wicked crystals quarrel with the good
ones.
ISABEL. Then do the good ones get angry?
L. No, never: they attend to their own work and life; and live it as
well as they can, though they are always the sufferers. Here, for
instance, is a rock-crystal of the purest race and finest temper, who
was born, unhappily for him, in a bad neighbourhood, near Beaufort in
Savoy; and he has had to fight with vile calcareous mud all his life.
See here, when he was but a child, it came down on him, and nearly
buried him; a weaker crystal would have died in despair; but he only
gathered himself together, like Hercules against the serpents, and threw
a layer of crystal over the clay; conquered it,--imprisoned it,--and
lived on. Then, when he was a little older, came more clay; and poured
itself upon him here, at the side; and he has laid crystal over that,
and lived on, in his purity. Then the clay came on at his angles, and
tried to cover them, and round them away; but upon that he threw out
buttress-crystals at his angles, all as true to his own central line as
chapels round a cathedral apse; and clustered them round the clay; and
conquered it again. At last the clay came on at his summit, and tried to
blunt his summit; but he could not endure that for an instant; and left
his flanks all rough, but pure; and fought the clay at his crest, and
built crest over crest, and peak over peak, till the clay surrendered at
last; and here is his summit, smooth and pure, terminating a pyramid of
alternate clay and crystal, half a foot high!
LILY. Oh, how nice of him! What a dear, brave crystal! But I can't bear
to see his flanks all broken, and the clay within them.
L. Yes; it was an evil chance for him, the being born to such
contention; there are some enemies so base that even to hold them
captive is a kind of dishonour. But look, here has been quite a
different kind of struggle: the adverse power has been more orderly, and
has fought the pure crystal in ranks as firm as its own. This is not
mere rage and impediment of crowded evil: here is a disciplined
hostility; army against army.
LILY. Oh, but this is much more beautiful!
L. Yes, for both the elements have true virtue in them; it is a pity
they are at war, but they war grandly.
MARY. But is this the same clay as in the other crystal?
L. I used the word clay for shortness. In both, the enemy is really
limestone; but in the first, disordered, and mixed with true clay;
while, here, it is nearly pure, and crystallises into its own primitive
form, the oblique six-sided one, which you know: and out of these it
makes regiments; and then squares of the regiments, and so charges the
rock crystal literally in square against column.
ISABEL. Please, please, let me see. And what does the rock crystal do?
L. The rock crystal seems able to do nothing. The calcite cuts it
through at every charge. Look here,--and here! The loveliest crystal in
the whole group is hewn fairly into two pieces.
ISABEL. Oh, dear; but is the calcite harder than the crystal then?
L. No, softer. Very much softer.
MARY. But then, how can it possibly cut the crystal?
L. It did not really cut it, though it passes through it. The two were
formed together, as I told you; but no one knows how. Still, it is
strange that this hard quartz has in all cases a good-natured way with
it, of yielding to everything else. All sorts of soft things make nests
for themselves in it; and it never makes a nest for itself in anything.
It has all the rough outside work; and every sort of cowardly and weak
mineral can shelter itself within it. Look; these are hexagonal plates
of mica; if they were outside of this crystal they would break, like
burnt paper; but they are inside of it,--nothing can hurt them,--the
crystal has taken them into its very heart, keeping all their delicate
edges as sharp as if they were under water, instead of bathed in rock.
Here is a piece of branched silver: you can bend it with a touch of your
finger, but the stamp of its every fibre is on the rock in which it lay,
as if the quartz had been as soft as wool.
LILY. Oh, the good, good quartz! But does it never get inside of
anything?
L. As it is a little Irish girl who asks, I may perhaps answer, without
being laughed at, that it gets inside of itself sometimes. But I don't
remember seeing quartz make a nest for itself in anything else.
ISABEL. Please, there was something I heard you talking about, last
term, with Miss Mary. I was at my lessons, but I heard something about
nests; and I thought it was birds' nests; and I couldn't help
listening; and then, I remember, it was about 'nests of quartz in
granite.' I remember, because I was so disappointed!
L. Yes, mousie, you remember quite rightly; but I can't tell you about
those nests to-day, nor perhaps to-morrow: but there's no contradiction
between my saying then, and now; I will show you that there is not, some
day. Will you trust me meanwhile?
ISABEL. Won't I!
L. Well, then, look, lastly, at this piece of courtesy in quartz; it is
on a small scale, but wonderfully pretty. Here is nobly born quartz
living with a green mineral, called epidote; and they are immense
friends. Now, you see, a comparatively large and strong quartz-crystal,
and a very weak and slender little one of epidote, have begun to grow,
close by each other, and sloping unluckily towards each other, so that
they at last meet. They cannot go on growing together; the quartz
crystal is five times as thick, and more than twenty times as
strong,[151] as the epidote; but he stops at once, just in the very
crowning moment of his life, when he is building his own summit! He lets
the pale little film of epidote grow right past him; stopping his own
summit for it; and he never himself grows any more.
LILY (_after some silence of wonder_). But is the quartz _never_ wicked
then?
L. Yes, but the wickedest quartz seems good-natured, compared to other
things. Here are two very characteristic examples; one is good quartz,
living with good pearlspar, and the other, wicked quartz, living with
wicked pearlspar. In both, the quartz yields to the soft carbonate of
iron: but, in the first place, the iron takes only what it needs of
room; and is inserted into the planes of the rock crystal with such
precision, that you must break it away before you can tell whether it
really penetrates the quartz or not; while the crystals of iron are
perfectly formed, and have a lovely bloom on their surface besides. But
here, when the two minerals quarrel, the unhappy quartz has all its
surfaces jagged and torn to pieces; and there is not a single iron
crystal whose shape you can completely trace. But the quartz has the
worst of it, in both instances.
VIOLET. Might we look at that piece of broken quartz again, with the
weak little film across it? it seems such a strange lovely thing, like
the self-sacrifice of a human being.
L. The self-sacrifice of a human being is not a lovely thing, Violet. It
is often a necessary and noble thing; but no form nor degree of suicide
can be ever lovely.
VIOLET. But self-sacrifice is not suicide!
L. What is it then?
VIOLET. Giving up one's self for another.
L. Well; and what do you mean by 'giving up one's self?'
VIOLET. Giving up one's tastes, one's feelings, one's time, one's
happiness, and so on, to make others happy.
L. I hope you will never marry anybody, Violet, who expects you to make
him happy in that way.
VIOLET (_hesitating_). In what way?
L. By giving up your tastes, and sacrificing your feelings, and
happiness.
VIOLET. No, no, I don't mean that; but you know, for other people, one
must.
L. For people who don't love you, and whom you know nothing about? Be it
so; but how does this 'giving up' differ from suicide then?
VIOLET. Why, giving up one's pleasures is not killing one's self?
L. Giving up wrong pleasure is not; neither is it self-sacrifice, but
self-culture. But giving up right pleasure is. If you surrender the
pleasure of walking, your foot will wither; you may as well cut it off:
if you surrender the pleasure of seeing, your eyes will soon be unable
to bear the light; you may as well pluck them out. And to maim yourself
is partly to kill yourself. Do but go on maiming, and you will soon
slay.
VIOLET. But why do you make me think of that verse then about the foot
and the eye?
L. You are indeed commanded to cut off and to pluck out, if foot or eye
offend you; but why _should_ they offend you?
VIOLET. I don't know; I never quite understood that.
L. Yet it is a sharp order; one needing to be well understood if it is
to be well obeyed! When Helen sprained her ancle the other day, you saw
how strongly it had to be bandaged: that is to say, prevented from all
work, to recover it. But the bandage was not 'lovely.'
VIOLET. No, indeed.
L. And if her foot had been crushed, or diseased, or snake-bitten,
instead of sprained, it might have been needful to cut it off. But the
amputation would not have been 'lovely.'
VIOLET. No.
L. Well, if eye and foot are dead already, and betray you--if the light
that is in you be darkness, and your feet run into mischief, or are
taken in the snare,--it is indeed time to pluck out, and cut off, I
think: but, so crippled, you can never be what you might have been
otherwise. You enter into life, at best, halt or maimed; and the
sacrifice is not beautiful, though necessary.
VIOLET (_after a pause_). But when one sacrifices one's self for others?
L. Why not rather others for you?
VIOLET. Oh! but I couldn't bear that.
L. Then why should they bear it?
DORA (_bursting in, indignant_). And Thermopylæ, and Protesilaus, and
Marcus Curtius, and Arnold de Winkelried, and Iphigenia, and Jephthah's
daughter?
L. (_sustaining the indignation unmoved_). And the Samaritan woman's
son?
DORA. Which Samaritan woman's?
L. Read 2 Kings vi. 29.
DORA (_obeys_). How horrid! As if we meant anything like that!
L. You don't seem to me to know in the least what you do mean, children.
What practical difference is there between 'that,' and what you are
talking about? The Samaritan children had no voice of their own in the
business, it is true; but neither had Iphigenia: the Greek girl was
certainly neither boiled, nor eaten; but that only makes a difference in
the dramatic effect; not in the principle.
DORA (_biting her lip_). Well, then, tell us what we ought to mean. As
if you didn't teach it all to us, and mean it yourself, at this moment,
more than we do, if you wouldn't be tiresome!
L. I mean, and have always meant, simply this, Dora;--that the will of
God respecting us is that we shall live by each other's happiness, and
life; not by each other's misery, or death. I made you read that verse
which so shocked you just now, because the relations of parent and child
are typical of all beautiful human help. A child may have to die for its
parents; but the purpose of Heaven is that it shall rather live for
them;--that, not by its sacrifice, but by its strength, its joy, its
force of being, it shall be to them renewal of strength; and as the
arrow in the hand of the giant. So it is in all other right relations.
Men help each other by their joy, not by their sorrow. They are not
intended to slay themselves for each other, but to strengthen themselves
for each other. And among the many apparently beautiful things which
turn, through mistaken use, to utter evil, I am not sure but that the
thoughtlessly meek and self-sacrificing spirit of good men must be named
as one of the fatallest. They have so often been taught that there is a
virtue in mere suffering, as such; and foolishly to hope that good may
be brought by Heaven out of all on which Heaven itself has set the stamp
of evil, that we may avoid it,--that they accept pain and defeat as if
these were their appointed portion; never understanding that their
defeat is not the less to be mourned because it is more fatal to their
enemies than to them. The one thing that a good man has to do, and to
see done, is justice; he is neither to slay himself nor others
causelessly: so far from denying himself, since he is pleased by good,
he is to do his utmost to get his pleasure accomplished. And I only wish
there were strength, fidelity, and sense enough, among the good
Englishmen of this day, to render it possible for them to band together
in a vowed brotherhood, to enforce, by strength of heart and hand, the
doing of human justice among all who came within their sphere. And
finally, for your own teaching, observe, although there may be need for
much self-sacrifice and self-denial in the correction of faults of
character, the moment the character is formed, the self-denial ceases.
Nothing is really well done, which it costs you pain to do.
VIOLET. But surely, sir, you are always pleased with us when we try to
please others, and not ourselves?
L. My dear child, in the daily course and discipline of right life, we
must continually and reciprocally submit and surrender in all kind and
courteous and affectionate ways: and these submissions and ministries to
each other, of which you all know (none better) the practice and the
preciousness, are as good for the yielder as the receiver: they
strengthen and perfect as much as they soften and refine. But the real
sacrifice of all our strength, or life, or happiness to others (though
it may be needed, and though all brave creatures hold their lives in
their hand, to be given, when such need comes, as frankly as a soldier
gives his life in battle), is yet always a mournful and momentary
necessity; not the fulfilment of the continuous law of being.
Self-sacrifice which is sought after, and triumphed in, is usually
foolish; and calamitous in its issue: and by the sentimental
proclamation and pursuit of it, good people have not only made most of
their own lives useless, but the whole framework of their religion so
hollow, that at this moment, while the English nation, with its lips,
pretends to teach every man to 'love his neighbour as himself,' with its
hands and feet it clutches and tramples like a wild beast; and
practically lives, every soul of it that can, on other people's labour.
Briefly, the constant duty of every man to his fellows is to ascertain
his own powers and special gifts; and to strengthen them for the help of
others. Do you think Titian would have helped the world better by
denying himself, and not painting; or Casella by denying himself, and
not singing? The real virtue is to be ready to sing the moment people
ask us; as he was, even in purgatory. The very word 'virtue' means not
'conduct' but 'strength,' vital energy in the heart. Were not you
reading about that group of words beginning with V,--vital, virtuous,
vigorous, and so on,--in Max Muller, the other day, Sibyl? Can't you
tell the others about it?
SIBYL. No, I can't; will you tell us, please?
L. Not now, it is too late. Come to me some idle time to-morrow, and
I'll tell you about it, if all's well. But the gist of it is, children,
that you should at least know two Latin words; recollect that 'mors'
means death and delaying; and 'vita' means life and growing: and try
always, not to mortify yourselves, but to vivify yourselves.
VIOLET. But, then, are we not to mortify our earthly affections? and
surely we are to sacrifice ourselves, at least in God's service, if not
in man's?
L. Really, Violet, we are getting too serious. I've given you enough
ethics for one talk, I think! Do let us have a little play. Lily, what
were you so busy about, at the ant-hill in the wood, this morning?
LILY. Oh, it was the ants who were busy, not I; I was only trying to
help them a little.
L. And they wouldn't be helped, I suppose?
LILY. No, indeed. I can't think why ants are always so tiresome, when
one tries to help them! They were carrying bits of stick, as fast as
they could, through a piece of grass; and pulling and pushing, _so_
hard; and tumbling over and over,--it made one quite pity them; so I
took some of the bits of stick, and carried them forward a little, where
I thought they wanted to put them; but instead of being pleased, they
left them directly, and ran about looking quite angry and frightened;
and at last ever so many of them got up my sleeves, and bit me all over,
and I had to come away.
L. I couldn't think what you were about. I saw your French grammar lying
on the grass behind you, and thought perhaps you had gone to ask the
ants to hear you a French verb.
ISABEL. Ah! but you didn't, though!
L. Why not, Isabel? I knew, well enough, Lily couldn't learn that verb
by herself.
ISABEL. No; but the ants couldn't help her.
L. Are you sure the ants could not have helped you, Lily?
LILY (_thinking_). I ought to have learned something from them, perhaps.
L. But none of them left their sticks to help you through the irregular
verb?
LILY. No, indeed. (_Laughing, with some others._)
L. What are you laughing at, children? I cannot see why the ants should
not have left their tasks to help Lily in her's,--since here is Violet
thinking she ought to leave _her_ tasks, to help God in His. Perhaps,
however, she takes Lily's more modest view, and thinks only that 'He
ought to learn something from her.'
(_Tears in_ VIOLET'S _eyes._)
DORA (_scarlet_). It's too bad--it's a shame:--poor Violet!
L. My dear children, there's no reason why one should be so red, and the
other so pale, merely because you are made for a moment to feel the
absurdity of a phrase which you have been taught to use, in common with
half the religious world. There is but one way in which man can ever
help God--that is, by letting God help him: and there is no way in which
his name is more guiltily taken in vain, than by calling the abandonment
of our own work, the performance of His.
God is a kind Father. He sets us all in the places where He wishes us to
be employed; and that employment is truly 'our Father's business.' He
chooses work for every creature which will be delightful to them, if
they do it simply and humbly. He gives us always strength enough, and
sense enough, for what He wants us to do; if we either tire ourselves or
puzzle ourselves, it is our own fault. And we may always be sure,
whatever we are doing, that we cannot be pleasing Him, if we are not
happy ourselves. Now, away with you, children; and be as happy as you
can. And when you cannot, at least don't plume yourselves upon pouting.
FOOTNOTES:
[151] Quartz is not much harder than epidote; the strength is only
supposed to be in some proportion to the squares of the diameters.
LECTURE VII.
_HOME VIRTUES._
_By the fireside, in the Drawing-room. Evening._
DORA. Now, the curtains are drawn, and the fire's bright and here's your
arm-chair--and you're to tell us all about what you promised.
L. All about what?
DORA. All about virtue.
KATHLEEN. Yes, and about the words that begin with V.
L. I heard you singing about a word that begins with V, in the
playground, this morning, Miss Katie.
KATHLEEN. Me singing?
MAY. Oh tell us--tell us.
L. 'Vilikens and his----'
KATHLEEN (_stopping his mouth_). Oh! please don't. Where were you?
ISABEL. I'm sure I wish I had known where he was! We lost him among the
rhododendrons, and I don't know where he got to; oh, you
naughty--naughty--(_climbs on his knee_).
DORA. Now, Isabel, we really want to talk.
L. _I_ don't.
DORA. Oh, but you must. You promised, you know.
L. Yes, if all was well; but all's ill. I'm tired, and cross; and I
won't.
DORA. You're not a bit tired, and you're not crosser than two sticks;
and we'll make you talk, if you were crosser than six. Come here, Egypt;
and get on the other side of him.
(EGYPT _takes up a commanding position near the
hearth-brush._)
DORA (_reviewing her forces_). Now, Lily, come and sit on the rug in
front.
(LILY _does as she is bid._)
L. (_seeing he has no chance against the odds_.) Well, well; but I'm
really tired. Go and dance a little, first; and let me think.
DORA. No; you mustn't think. You will be wanting to make us think next;
that will be tiresome.
L. Well, go and dance first, to get quit of thinking; and then I'll talk
as long as you like.
DORA. Oh, but we can't dance to-night. There isn't time; and we want to
hear about virtue.
L. Let me see a little of it first. Dancing is the first of girl's
virtues.
EGYPT. Indeed! And the second?
L. Dressing.
EGYPT. Now, you needn't say that! I mended that tear the first thing
before breakfast this morning.
L. I cannot otherwise express the ethical principle, Egypt; whether you
have mended your gown or not.
DORA. Now don't be tiresome. We really must hear about virtue, please;
seriously.
L. Well. I'm telling you about it, as fast as I can.
DORA. What! the first of girls' virtues is dancing?
L. More accurately, it is wishing to dance, and not wishing to tease,
nor hear about virtue.
DORA (_to_ EGYPT). Isn't he cross?
EGYPT. How many balls must we go to in the season, to be perfectly
virtuous?
L. As many as you can without losing your colour. But I did not say you
should wish to go to balls. I said you should be always wanting to
dance.
EGYPT. So we do; but everybody says it is very wrong.
L. Why, Egypt, I thought--
'There was a lady once,
That would not be a queen,--that would she not,
For all the mud in Egypt.'
You were complaining the other day of having to go out a great deal
oftener than you liked.
EGYPT. Yes, so I was; but then, it isn't to dance. There's no room to
dance: it's--(_Pausing to consider what it is for_).
L. It is only to be seen, I suppose. Well, there's no harm in that.
Girls ought to like to be seen.
DORA (_her eyes flashing_). Now, you don't mean that; and you're too
provoking; and we won't dance again, for a month.
L. It will answer every purpose of revenge, Dora, if you only banish me
to the library; and dance by yourselves: but I don't think Jessie and
Lily will agree to that. You like me to see you dancing, don't you Lily?
LILY. Yes, certainly,--when we do it rightly.
L. And besides, Miss Dora, if young ladies really do not want to be
seen, they should take care not to let their eyes flash when they
dislike what people say; and, more than that, it is all nonsense from
beginning to end, about not wanting to be seen. I don't know any more
tiresome flower in the borders than your especially 'modest' snowdrop;
which one always has to stoop down and take all sorts of tiresome
trouble with, and nearly break its poor little head off, before you can
see it; and then, half of it is not worth seeing. Girls should be like
daisies; nice and white, with an edge of red, if you look close; making
the ground bright wherever they are; knowing simply and quietly that
they do it, and are meant to do it, and that it would be very wrong if
they didn't do it. Not want to be seen, indeed! How long were you in
doing your back hair, this afternoon, Jessie?
(JESSIE _not immediately answering_, DORA _comes to her
assistance._)
DORA. Not above three-quarters of an hour, I think, Jess?
JESSIE (_putting her finger up_). Now, Dorothy, _you_ needn't talk, you
know!
L. I know she needn't, Jessie; I shall ask her about those dark plaits
presently. (DORA _looks round to see if there is any way open for
retreat._) But never mind; it was worth the time, whatever it was; and
nobody will ever mistake that golden wreath for a chignon; but if you
don't want it to be seen, you had better wear a cap.
JESSIE. Ah, now, are you really going to do nothing but play? And we all
have been thinking, and thinking, all day; and hoping you would tell us
things; and now--!
L. And now I am telling you things, and true things, and things good for
you; and you won't believe me. You might as well have let me go to sleep
at once, as I wanted to.
(_Endeavours again to make himself comfortable._)
ISABEL. Oh, no, no, you sha'n't go to sleep, you naughty--Kathleen, come
here.
L. (_knowing what he has to expect if_ KATHLEEN _comes_). Get away,
Isabel, you're too heavy. (_Sitting up._) What have I been saying?
DORA. I do believe he has been asleep all the time! You never heard
anything like the things you've been saying.
L. Perhaps not. If you have heard them, and anything like them, it is
all I want.
EGYPT. Yes, but we don't understand, and you know we don't; and we want
to.
L. What did I say first?
DORA. That the first virtue of girls was wanting to go to balls.
L. I said nothing of the kind.
JESSIE. 'Always wanting to dance,' you said.
L. Yes, and that's true. Their first virtue is to be intensely
happy;--so happy that they don't know what to do with themselves for
happiness,--and dance, instead of walking. Don't you recollect 'Louisa,'
'No fountain from a rocky cave
E'er tripped with foot so free;
She seemed as happy as a wave
That dances on the sea.'
A girl is always like that, when everything's right with her.
VIOLET. But, surely, one must be sad sometimes?
L. Yes, Violet; and dull sometimes, and stupid sometimes, and cross
sometimes. What must be, must; but it is always either our own fault,
or somebody else's. The last and worst thing that can be said of a
nation is, that it has made its young girls sad, and weary.
MAY. But I am sure I have heard a great many good people speak against
dancing?
L. Yes, May; but it does not follow they were wise as well as good. I
suppose they think Jeremiah liked better to have to write Lamentations
for his people, than to have to write that promise for them, which
everybody seems to hurry past, that they may get on quickly to the verse
about Rachel weeping for her children; though the verse they pass is the
counter-blessing to that one: 'Then shall the virgin rejoice in the
dance; and both young men and old together; and I will turn their
mourning into joy.'
(_The children get very serious, but look at each other, as
if pleased._)
MARY. They understand now: but, do you know what you said next?
L. Yes; I was not more than half asleep. I said their second virtue was
dressing.
MARY. Well! what did you mean by that?
L. What do _you_ mean by dressing?
MARY. Wearing fine clothes.
L. Ah! there's the mistake. _I_ mean wearing plain ones.
MARY. Yes, I daresay! but that's not what girls understand by dressing,
you know.
L. I can't help that. If they understand by dressing, buying dresses,
perhaps they also understand by drawing, buying pictures. But when I
hear them say they can draw, I understand that they can make a drawing;
and when I hear them say they can dress, I understand that they can make
a dress and--which is quite as difficult--wear one.
DORA. I'm not sure about the making; for the wearing, we can all wear
them--out, before anybody expects it.
EGYPT (_aside, to_ L., _piteously_). Indeed I have mended that torn
flounce quite neatly; look if I haven't!
L. (_aside, to_ EGYPT). All right; don't be afraid. (_Aloud to_ DORA.)
Yes, doubtless; but you know that is only a slow way of _un_dressing.
DORA. Then, we are all to learn dress-making, are we?
L. Yes; and always to dress yourselves beautifully--not finely, unless
on occasion; but then very finely and beautifully too. Also, you are to
dress as many other people as you can; and to teach them how to dress,
if they don't know; and to consider every ill-dressed woman or child
whom you see anywhere, as a personal disgrace; and to get at them,
somehow, until everybody is as beautifully dressed as birds.
(_Silence; the children drawing their breaths hard, as if
they had come from under a shower bath._)
L (_seeing objections begin to express themselves in the eyes_). Now you
needn't say you can't; for you can: and it's what you were meant to do,
always; and to dress your houses, and your gardens, too; and to do very
little else, I believe, except singing; and dancing, as we said, of
course; and--one thing more.
DORA. Our third and last virtue, I suppose?
L. Yes; on Violet's system of triplicities.
DORA. Well, we are prepared for anything now. What is it?
L. Cooking.
DORA. Cardinal, indeed! If only Beatrice were here with her seven
handmaids, that she might see what a fine eighth we had found for her!
MARY. And the interpretation? What does 'cooking' mean?
L. It means the knowledge of Medea, and of Circe, and of Calypso, and of
Helen, and of Rebekah, and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge
of all herbs, and fruits, and balms, and spices; and of all that is
healing and sweet in fields and groves, and savoury in meats; it means
carefulness, and inventiveness, and watchfulness, and willingness, and
readiness of appliance; it means the economy of your great-grandmothers,
and the science of modern chemists; it means much tasting, and no
wasting; it means English thoroughness, and French art, and Arabian
hospitality; and it means, in fine, that you are to be perfectly and
always 'ladies'--'loaf-givers;' and, as you are to see, imperatively
that everybody has something pretty to put on,--so you are to see, yet
more imperatively, that everybody has something nice to eat.
(_Another pause, and long drawn breath._)
DORA (_slowly recovering herself_) _to_ EGYPT. We had better have let
him go to sleep, I think, after all!
L. You had better let the younger ones go to sleep now: for I haven't
half done.
ISABEL (_panic-struck_). Oh! please, please! just one quarter of an
hour.
L. No, Isabel; I cannot say what I've got to say, in a quarter of an
hour; and it is too hard for you, besides:--you would be lying awake,
and trying to make it out, half the night. That will never do.
ISABEL. Oh, please!
L. It would please me exceedingly, mousie: but there are times when we
must both be displeased; more's the pity. Lily may stay for half an
hour, if she likes.
LILY. I can't; because Isey never goes to sleep, if she is waiting for
me to come.
ISABEL. Oh, yes, Lily; I'll go to sleep to-night, I will, indeed.
LILY. Yes, it's very likely, Isey, with those fine round eyes! (_To_ L.)
You'll tell me something of what you've been saying, to-morrow, won't
you?
L. No, I won't, Lily. You must choose. It's only in Miss Edgeworth's
novels that one can do right, and have one's cake and sugar afterwards,
as well (not that I consider the dilemma, to-night, so grave).
(LILY, _sighing, takes_ ISABEL's _hand._)
Yes, Lily dear, it will be better, in the outcome of it, so, than if you
were to hear all the talks that ever were talked, and all the stories
that ever were told. Good night.
(_The door leading to the condemned cells of the Dormitory
closes on_ LILY, ISABEL, FLORRIE, _and other diminutive and
submissive victims._)
JESSIE (_after a pause_). Why, I thought you were so fond of Miss
Edgeworth!
L. So I am; and so you ought all to be. I can read her over and over
again, without ever tiring; there's no one whose every page is so full,
and so delightful; no one who brings you into the company of pleasanter
or wiser people; no one who tells you more truly how to do right. And it
is very nice, in the midst of a wild world, to have the very ideal of
poetical justice done always to one's hand:--to have everybody found
out, who tells lies; and everybody decorated with a red riband, who
doesn't; and to see the good Laura, who gave away her half sovereign,
receiving a grand ovation from an entire dinner party disturbed for the
purpose; and poor, dear, little Rosamond, who chooses purple jars
instead of new shoes, left at last without either her shoes or her
bottle. But it isn't life: and, in the way children might easily
understand it, it isn't morals.
JESSIE. How do you mean we might understand it?
L. You might think Miss Edgeworth meant that the right was to be done
mainly because one was always rewarded for doing it. It is an injustice
to her to say that: her heroines always do right simply for its own
sake, as they should; and her examples of conduct and motive are wholly
admirable. But her representation of events is false and misleading. Her
good characters never are brought into the deadly trial of
goodness,--the doing right, and suffering for it, quite finally. And
that is life, as God arranges it. 'Taking up one's cross' does not at
all mean having ovations at dinner parties, and being put over everybody
else's head.
DORA. But what _does_ it mean then? That is just what we couldn't
understand, when you were telling us about not sacrificing ourselves,
yesterday.
L. My dear, it means simply that you are to go the road which you see to
be the straight one; carrying whatever you find is given you to carry,
as well and stoutly as you can; without making faces, or calling people
to come and look at you. Above all, you are neither to load, nor unload,
yourself; nor cut your cross to your own liking. Some people think it
would be better for them to have it large; and many, that they could
carry it much faster if it were small; and even those who like it
largest are usually very particular about its being ornamental, and made
of the best ebony. But all that you have really to do is to keep your
back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it--above
all, not to boast of what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of
'virtue' is in that straightness of back. Yes; you may laugh, children,
but it is. You know I was to tell about the words that began with V.
Sibyl, what does 'virtue' mean, literally?
SIBYL. Does it mean courage?
L. Yes; but a particular kind of courage. It means courage of the nerve;
vital courage. That first syllable of it, if you look in Max Müller, you
will find really means 'nerve,' and from it come 'vis,' and 'vir,' and
'virgin' (through vireo), and the connected word 'virga'--'a rod;'--the
green rod, or springing bough of a tree, being the type of perfect human
strength, both in the use of it in the Mosaic story, when it becomes a
serpent, or strikes the rock; or when Aaron's bears its almonds; and in
the metaphorical expressions, the 'Rod out of the stem of Jesse,' and
the 'Man whose name is the Branch,' and so on. And the essential idea of
real virtue is that of a vital human strength, which instinctively,
constantly, and without motive, does what is right. You must train men
to this by habit, as you would the branch of a tree; and give them
instincts and manners (or morals) of purity, justice, kindness, and
courage. Once rightly trained, they act as they should, irrespectively
of all motive, of fear, or of reward. It is the blackest sign of
putrescence in a national religion, when men speak as if it were the
only safeguard of conduct; and assume that, but for the fear of being
burned, or for the hope of being rewarded, everybody would pass their
lives in lying, stealing, and murdering. I think quite one of the
notablest historical events of this century (perhaps the very
notablest), was that council of clergymen, horror-struck at the idea of
any diminution in our dread of hell, at which the last of English
clergymen whom one would have expected to see in such a function, rose
as the devil's advocate; to tell us how impossible it was we could get
on without him.
VIOLET (_after a pause_). But, surely, if people weren't
afraid--(_hesitates again_).
L. They should be afraid of doing wrong, and of that only, my dear.
Otherwise, if they only don't do wrong for fear of being punished, they
_have_ done wrong in their hearts, already.
VIOLET. Well, but surely, at least one ought to be afraid of displeasing
God; and one's desire to please Him should be one's first motive?
L. He never would be pleased with us, if it were, my dear. When a father
sends his son out into the world--suppose as an apprentice--fancy the
boy's coming home at night, and saying, 'Father, I could have robbed the
till to-day; but I didn't, because I thought you wouldn't like it.' Do
you think the father would be particularly pleased?
(VIOLET _is silent._)
He would answer, would he not, if he were wise and good, 'My boy, though
you had no father, you must not rob tills'? And nothing is ever done so
as really to please our Great Father, unless we would also have done it,
though we had had no Father to know of it.
VIOLET (_after long pause_). But, then, what continual threatenings, and
promises of reward there are!
L. And how vain both! with the Jews, and with all of us. But the fact
is, that the threat and promise are simply statements of the Divine law,
and of its consequences. The fact is truly told you,--make what use you
may of it: and as collateral warning, or encouragement, or comfort, the
knowledge of future consequences may often be helpful to us; but helpful
chiefly to the better state when we can act without reference to them.
And there's no measuring the poisoned influence of that notion of future
reward on the mind of Christian Europe, in the early ages. Half the
monastic system rose out of that, acting on the occult pride and
ambition of good people (as the other half of it came of their follies
and misfortunes). There is always a considerable quantity of pride, to
begin with, in what is called 'giving one's self to God.' As if one had
ever belonged to anybody else!
DORA. But, surely, great good has come out of the monastic system--our
books,--our sciences--all saved by the monks?
L. Saved from what, my dear? From the abyss of misery and ruin which
that false Christianity allowed the whole active world to live in. When
it had become the principal amusement, and the most admired art, of
Christian men, to cut one another's throats, and burn one another's
towns; of course the few feeble or reasonable persons left, who desired
quiet, safety, and kind fellowship, got into cloisters; and the
gentlest, thoughtfullest, noblest men and women shut themselves up,
precisely where they could be of least use. They are very fine things,
for us painters, now,--the towers and white arches upon the tops of the
rocks; always in places where it takes a day's climbing to get at them;
but the intense tragi-comedy of the thing, when one thinks of it, is
unspeakable. All the good people of the world getting themselves hung up
out of the way of mischief, like Bailie Nicol Jarvie;--poor little
lambs, as it were, dangling there for the sign of the Golden Fleece; or
like Socrates in his basket in the 'Clouds'! (I must read you that bit
of Aristophanes again, by the way.) And believe me, children, I am no
warped witness, as far as regards monasteries; or if I am, it is in
their favour. I have always had a strong leaning that way; and have
pensively shivered with Augustines at St. Bernard; and happily made hay
with Franciscans at Fesolé; and sat silent with Carthusians in their
little gardens, south of Florence; and mourned through many a day-dream,
at Melrose and Bolton. But the wonder is always to me, not how much, but
how little, the monks have, on the whole, done, with all that leisure,
and all that goodwill! What nonsense monks characteristically
wrote;--what little progress they made in the sciences to which they
devoted themselves as a duty,--medicine especially;--and, last and
worst, what depths of degradation they can sometimes see one another,
and the population round them, sink into; without either doubting their
system, or reforming it!
(_Seeing questions rising to lips._) Hold your little tongues, children;
it's very late, and you'll make me forget what I've to say. Fancy
yourselves in pews, for five minutes. There's one point of possible good
in the conventual system, which is always attractive to young girls; and
the idea is a very dangerous one;--the notion of a merit, or exalting
virtue, consisting in a habit of meditation on the 'things above,' or
things of the next world. Now it is quite true, that a person of
beautiful mind, dwelling on whatever appears to them most desirable and
lovely in a possible future will not only pass their time pleasantly,
but will even acquire, at last, a vague and wildly gentle charm of
manner and feature, which will give them an air of peculiar sanctity in
the eyes of others. Whatever real or apparent good there may be in this
result, I want you to observe, children, that we have no real authority
for the reveries to which it is owing. We are told nothing distinctly of
the heavenly world; except that it will be free from sorrow, and pure
from sin. What is said of pearl gates, golden floors, and the like, is
accepted as merely figurative by religious enthusiasts themselves; and
whatever they pass their time in conceiving, whether of the happiness of
risen souls, of their intercourse, or of the appearance and employment
of the heavenly powers, is entirely the product of their own
imagination; and as completely and distinctly a work of fiction, or
romantic invention, as any novel of Sir Walter Scott's. That the romance
is founded on religious theory or doctrine;--that no disagreeable or
wicked persons are admitted into the story;--and that the inventor
fervently hopes that some portion of it may hereafter come true, does
not in the least alter the real nature of the effort or enjoyment.
Now, whatever indulgence may be granted to amiable people for pleasing
themselves in this innocent way, it is beyond question, that to seclude
themselves from the rough duties of life, merely to write religious
romances, or, as in most cases, merely to dream them, without taking so
much trouble as is implied in writing, ought not to be received as an
act of heroic virtue. But, observe, even in admitting thus much, I have
assumed that the fancies are just and beautiful, though fictitious. Now,
what right have any of us to assume that our own fancies will assuredly
be either the one or the other? That they delight us, and appear lovely
to us, is no real proof of its not being wasted time to form them: and
we may surely be led somewhat to distrust our judgment of them by
observing what ignoble imaginations have sometimes sufficiently, or even
enthusiastically, occupied the hearts of others. The principal source of
the spirit of religious contemplation is the East; now I have here in my
hand a Byzantine image of Christ, which, if you will look at it
seriously, may, I think, at once and for ever render you cautious in the
indulgence of a merely contemplative habit of mind. Observe, it is the
fashion to look at such a thing only as a piece of barbarous art; that
is the smallest part of its interest. What I want you to see, is the
baseness and falseness of a religious state of enthusiasm, in which such
a work could be dwelt upon with pious pleasure. That a figure, with two
small round black beads for eyes; a gilded face, deep cut into horrible
wrinkles; an open gash for a mouth, and a distorted skeleton for a body,
wrapped about, to make it fine, with striped enamel of blue and
gold;--that such a figure, I say, should ever have been thought helpful
towards the conception of a Redeeming Deity, may make you, I think, very
doubtful, even of the Divine approval,--much more of the Divine
inspiration,--of religious reverie in general. You feel, doubtless, that
your own idea of Christ would be something very different from this; but
in what does the difference consist? Not in any more divine authority in
your imagination; but in the intellectual work of six intervening
centuries; which, simply, by artistic discipline, has refined this crude
conception for you, and filled you, partly with an innate sensation,
partly with an acquired knowledge, of higher forms,--which render this
Byzantine crucifix as horrible to you, as it was pleasing to its maker.
More is required to excite your fancy; but your fancy is of no more
authority than his was: and a point of national art-skill is quite
conceivable, in which the best we can do now will be as offensive to the
religious dreamers of the more highly cultivated time, as this Byzantine
crucifix is to you.
MARY. But surely, Angelico will always retain his power over everybody?
L. Yes, I should think, always; as the gentle words of a child will: but
you would be much surprised, Mary, if you thoroughly took the pains to
analyse, and had the perfect means of analysing, that power of
Angelico,--to discover its real sources. Of course it is natural, at
first, to attribute it to the pure religious fervour by which he was
inspired; but do you suppose Angelico was really the only monk, in all
the Christian world of the middle ages, who laboured, in art, with a
sincere religious enthusiasm?
MARY. No, certainly not.
L. Anything more frightful, more destructive of all religious faith
whatever, than such a supposition, could not be. And yet, what other
monk ever produced such work? I have myself examined carefully upwards
of two thousand illuminated missals, with especial view to the discovery
of any evidence of a similar result upon the art, from the monkish
devotion; and utterly in vain.
MARY. But then, was not Fra Angelico a man of entirely separate and
exalted genius?
L. Unquestionably; and granting him to be that, the peculiar phenomenon
in his art is, to me, not its loveliness, but its weakness. The effect
of 'inspiration,' had it been real, on a man of consummate genius,
should have been, one would have thought, to make everything that he did
faultless and strong, no less than lovely. But of all men, deserving to
be called 'great,' Fra Angelico permits to himself the least pardonable
faults, and the most palpable follies. There is evidently within him a
sense of grace, and power of invention, as great as Ghiberti's:--we are
in the habit of attributing those high qualities to his religious
enthusiasm; but, if they were produced by that enthusiasm in him, they
ought to be produced by the same feelings in others; and we see they
are not. Whereas, comparing him with contemporary great artists, of
equal grace and invention, one peculiar character remains notable in
him--which, logically, we ought therefore to attribute to the religious
fervour;--and that distinctive character is, the contented indulgence of
his own weaknesses, and perseverance in his own ignorances.
MARY. But that's dreadful! And what _is_ the source of the peculiar
charm which we all feel in his work?
L. There are many sources of it, Mary; united and seeming like one. You
would never feel that charm but in the work of an entirely good man; be
sure of that; but the goodness is only the recipient and modifying
element, not the creative one. Consider carefully what delights you in
any original picture of Angelico's. You will find, for one minor thing,
an exquisite variety and brightness of ornamental work. That is not
Angelico's inspiration. It is the final result of the labour and thought
of millions of artists, of all nations; from the earliest Egyptian
potters downwards--Greeks, Byzantines, Hindoos, Arabs, Gauls, and
Northmen--all joining in the toil; and consummating it in Florence, in
that century, with such embroidery of robe and inlaying of armour as had
never been seen till then; nor, probably, ever will be seen more.
Angelico merely takes his share of this inheritance, and applies it in
the tenderest way to subjects which are peculiarly acceptant of it. But
the inspiration, if it exist anywhere, flashes on the knight's shield
quite as radiantly as on the monk's picture. Examining farther into the
sources of your emotion in the Angelico work, you will find much of the
impression of sanctity dependent on a singular repose and grace of
gesture, consummating itself in the floating, flying, and above all, in
the dancing groups. That is not Angelico's inspiration. It is only a
peculiarly tender use of systems of grouping which had been long before
developed by Giotto, Memmi, and Orcagna; and the real root of it all is
simply--What do you think, children? The beautiful dancing of the
Florentine maidens!
DORA (_indignant again_). Now, I wonder what next! Why not say it all
depended on Herodias' daughter, at once?
L. Yes; it is certainly a great argument against singing, that there
were once sirens.
DORA. Well, it may be all very fine and philosophical, but shouldn't I
just like to read you the end of the second volume of 'Modern Painters'!
L. My dear, do you think any teacher could be worth your listening to,
or anybody else's listening to, who had learned nothing, and altered his
mind in nothing, from seven and twenty to seven and forty? But that
second volume is very good for you as far as it goes. It is a great
advance, and a thoroughly straight and swift one, to be led, as it is
the main business of that second volume to lead you, from Dutch cattle
pieces, and ruffian-pieces, to Fra Angelico. And it is right for you
also, as you grow older, to be strengthened in the general sense and
judgment which may enable you to distinguish the weaknesses from the
virtues of what you love: else you might come to love both alike; or
even the weaknesses without the virtues. You might end by liking
Overbeck and Cornelius as well as Angelico. However, I have perhaps been
leaning a little too much to the merely practical side of things, in
to-night's talk; and you are always to remember, children, that I do not
deny, though I cannot affirm, the spiritual advantages resulting, in
certain cases, from enthusiastic religious reverie, and from the other
practices of saints and anchorites. The evidence respecting them has
never yet been honestly collected, much less dispassionately examined:
but assuredly, there is in that direction a probability, and more than a
probability, of dangerous error, while there is none whatever in the
practice of an active, cheerful, and benevolent life. The hope of
attaining a higher religious position, which induces us to encounter,
for its exalted alternative, the risk of unhealthy error, is often, as I
said, founded more on pride than piety; and those who, in modest
usefulness, have accepted what seemed to them here the lowliest place in
the kingdom of their Father, are not, I believe, the least likely to
receive hereafter the command, then unmistakable, 'Friend, go up
higher.'
LECTURE VIII.
_CRYSTAL CAPRICE._
_Formal Lecture in Schoolroom, after some practical examination of
minerals._
L. We have seen enough, children, though very little of what might be
seen if we had more time, of mineral structures produced by visible
opposition, or contest among elements; structures of which the variety,
however great, need not surprise us: for we quarrel, ourselves, for many
and slight causes;--much more, one should think, may crystals, who can
only feel the antagonism, not argue about it. But there is a yet more
singular mimicry of our human ways in the varieties of form which appear
owing to no antagonistic force; but merely to the variable humour and
caprice of the crystals themselves: and I have asked you all to come
into the schoolroom to-day, because, of course, this is a part of the
crystal mind which must be peculiarly interesting to a feminine
audience. (_Great symptoms of disapproval on the part of said
audience._) Now, you need not pretend that it will not interest you; why
should it not? It is true that we men are never capricious; but that
only makes us the more dull and disagreeable. You, who are crystalline
in brightness, as well as in caprice, charm infinitely, by infinitude of
change. (_Audible murmurs of 'Worse and worse!' 'As if we could be got
over that way!' &c. The_ LECTURER, _however, observing the expression of
the features to be more complacent, proceeds._) And the most curious
mimicry, if not of your changes of fashion, at least of your various
modes (in healthy periods) of national costume, takes place among the
crystals of different countries. With a little experience, it is quite
possible to say at a glance, in what districts certain crystals have
been found; and although, if we had knowledge extended and accurate
enough, we might of course ascertain the laws and circumstances which
have necessarily produced the form peculiar to each locality, this would
be just as true of the fancies of the human mind. If we could know the
exact circumstances which affect it, we could foretell what now seems to
us only caprice of thought, as well as what now seems to us only caprice
of crystal: nay, so far as our knowledge reaches, it is on the whole
easier to find some reason why the peasant girls of Berne should wear
their caps in the shape of butterflies; and the peasant girls of Munich
their's in the shape of shells, than to say why the rock-crystals of
Dauphiné should all have their summits of the shape of lip-pieces of
flageolets, while those of St. Gothard are symmetrical; or why the fluor
of Chamouni is rose-coloured, and in octahedrons, while the fluor of
Weardale is green, and in cubes. Still farther removed is the hope, at
present, of accounting for minor differences in modes of grouping and
construction. Take, for instance, the caprices of this single mineral,
quartz;--variations upon a single theme. It has many forms; but see what
it will make out of this _one_, the six-sided prism. For shortness'
sake, I shall call the body of the prism its 'column,' and the pyramid
at the extremities its 'cap.' Now, here, first you have a straight
column, as long and thin as a stalk of asparagus, with two little caps
at the ends; and here you have a short thick column, as solid as a
haystack, with two fat caps at the ends; and here you have two caps
fastened together, and no column at all between them! Then here is a
crystal with its column fat in the middle, and tapering to a little cap;
and here is one stalked like a mushroom, with a huge cap put on the top
of a slender column! Then here is a column built wholly out of little
caps, with a large smooth cap at the top. And here is a column built of
columns and caps; the caps all truncated about half way to their points.
And in both these last, the little crystals are set anyhow, and build
the large one in a disorderly way; but here is a crystal made of columns
and truncated caps, set in regular terraces all the way up.
MARY. But are not these, groups of crystals, rather than one crystal?
L. What do you mean by a group, and what by one crystal?
DORA (_audibly aside, to_ MARY, _who is brought to pause_). You know you
are never expected to answer, Mary.
L. I'm sure this is easy enough. What do you mean by a group of people?
MARY. Three or four together, or a good many together, like the caps in
these crystals.
L. But when a great many persons get together they don't take the shape
of one person?
(MARY _still at pause._)
ISABEL. No, because they can't; but, you know the crystals can; so why
shouldn't they?
L. Well, they don't; that is to say, they don't always, nor even often.
Look here, Isabel.
ISABEL. What a nasty ugly thing!
L. I'm glad you think it so ugly. Yet it is made of beautiful crystals;
they are a little grey and cold in colour, but most of them are clear.
ISABEL. But they're in such horrid, horrid disorder!
L. Yes; all disorder is horrid, when it is among things that are
naturally orderly. Some little girl's rooms are naturally _dis_orderly,
I suppose; or I don't know how they could live in them, if they cry out
so when they only see quartz crystals in confusion.
ISABEL. Oh! but how come they to be like that?
L. You may well ask. And yet you will always hear people talking as if
they thought order more wonderful than disorder! It _is_ wonderful--as
we have seen; but to me, as to you, child, the supremely wonderful thing
is that nature should ever be ruinous or wasteful, or deathful! I look
at this wild piece of crystallisation with endless astonishment.
MARY. Where does it come from?
L. The Tête Noire of Chamonix. What makes it more strange is that it
should be in a vein of fine quartz rock. If it were in a mouldering
rock, it would be natural enough; but in the midst of so fine substance,
here are the crystals tossed in a heap; some large, myriads small
(almost as small as dust), tumbling over each other like a terrified
crowd, and glued together by the sides, and edges, and backs, and heads;
some warped, and some pushed out and in, and all spoiled and each
spoiling the rest.
MARY. And how flat they all are!
L. Yes; that's the fashion at the Tête Noire.
MARY. But surely this is ruin, not caprice?
L. I believe it is in great part misfortune; and we will examine these
crystal troubles in next lecture. But if you want to see the
gracefullest and happiest caprices of which dust is capable, you must go
to the Hartz; not that I ever mean to go there myself, for I want to
retain the romantic feeling about the name; and I have done myself some
harm already by seeing the monotonous and heavy form of the Brocken from
the suburbs of Brunswick. But whether the mountains be picturesque or
not, the tricks which the goblins (as I am told) teach the crystals in
them, are incomparably pretty. They work chiefly on the mind of a
docile, bluish coloured, carbonate of lime; which comes out of a grey
limestone. The goblins take the greatest possible care of its education,
and see that nothing happens to it to hurt its temper; and when it may
be supposed to have arrived at the crisis which is, to a well brought up
mineral, what presentation at court is to a young lady--after which it
is expected to set fashions--there's no end to its pretty ways of
behaving. First it will make itself into pointed darts as fine as
hoar-frost; here, it is changed into a white fur as fine as silk; here
into little crowns and circlets, as bright as silver; as if for the
gnome princesses to wear; here it is in beautiful little plates, for
them to eat off; presently it is in towers which they might be
imprisoned in; presently in caves and cells, where they may make
nun-gnomes of themselves, and no gnome ever hear of them more; here is
some of it in sheaves, like corn; here, some in drifts, like snow; here,
some in rays, like stars: and, though these are, all of them,
necessarily, shapes that the mineral takes in other places, they are
all taken here with such a grace that you recognise the high caste and
breeding of the crystals wherever you meet them; and know at once they
are Hartz-born.
Of course, such fine things as these are only done by crystals which are
perfectly good, and good-humoured; and of course, also, there are
ill-humoured crystals who torment each other, and annoy quieter
crystals, yet without coming to anything like serious war. Here (for
once) is some ill-disposed quartz, tormenting a peaceable octahedron of
fluor, in mere caprice. I looked at it the other night so long, and so
wonderingly, just before putting my candle out, that I fell into another
strange dream. But you don't care about dreams.
DORA. No; we didn't, yesterday; but you know we are made up of caprice;
so we do, to-day: and you must tell it us directly.
L. Well, you see, Neith and her work were still much in my mind; and
then, I had been looking over these Hartz things for you, and thinking
of the sort of grotesque sympathy there seemed to be in them with the
beautiful fringe and pinnacle work of Northern architecture. So, when I
fell asleep, I thought I saw Neith and St. Barbara talking together.
DORA. But what had St. Barbara to do with it?[152]
L. My dear, I am quite sure St. Barbara is the patroness of good
architects: not St. Thomas, whatever the old builders thought. It might
be very fine, according to the monks' notions, in St. Thomas, to give
all his employer's money away to the poor: but breaches of contract are
bad foundations; and I believe, it was not he, but St. Barbara, who
overlooked the work in all the buildings you and I care about. However
that may be, it was certainly she whom I saw in my dream with Neith.
Neith was sitting weaving, and I thought she looked sad, and threw her
shuttle slowly; and St. Barbara was standing at her side, in a stiff
little gown, all ins and outs, and angles; but so bright with embroidery
that it dazzled me whenever she moved; the train of it was just like a
heap of broken jewels, it was so stiff, and full of corners, and so
many-coloured, and bright. Her hair fell over her shoulders in long,
delicate waves, from under a little three pinnacled crown, like a tower.
She was asking Neith about the laws of architecture in Egypt and Greece;
and when Neith told her the measures of the pyramids, St. Barbara said
she thought they would have been better three-cornered: and when Neith
told her the measures of the Parthenon, St. Barbara said she thought it
ought to have had two transepts. But she was pleased when Neith told her
of the temple of the dew, and of the Caryan maidens bearing its frieze:
and then she thought that perhaps Neith would like to hear what sort of
temples she was building herself, in the French valleys, and on the
crags of the Rhine. So she began gossiping, just as one of you might to
an old lady: and certainly she talked in the sweetest way in the world
to Neith; and explained to her all about crockets and pinnacles: and
Neith sat, looking very grave; and always graver as St. Barbara went on;
till at last, I'm sorry to say, St. Barbara lost her temper a little.
MAY (_very grave herself_). 'St. Barbara?'
L. Yes, May. Why shouldn't she? It was very tiresome of Neith to sit
looking like that.
MAY. But, then, St. Barbara was a saint!
L. What's that, May?
MAY. A saint! A saint is--I am sure you know!
L. If I did, it would not make me sure that you knew too, May: but I
don't.
VIOLET (_expressing the incredulity of the audience_). Oh,--sir!
L. That is to say, I know that people are called saints who are supposed
to be better than others: but I don't know how much better they must be,
in order to be saints; nor how nearly anybody may be a saint, and yet
not be quite one; nor whether everybody who is called a saint was one;
nor whether everybody who isn't called a saint, isn't one.
(_General silence; the audience feeling themselves on the
verge of the Infinities--and a little shocked--and much
puzzled by so many questions at once._)
L. Besides, did you never hear that verse about being 'called to be
saints'?
MAY (_repeats Rom._ i. 7.)
L. Quite right, May. Well, then, who are called to be that? People in
Rome only?
MAY. Everybody, I suppose, whom God loves.
L. What! little girls as well as other people?
MAY. All grown-up people, I mean.
L. Why not little girls? Are they wickeder when they are little?
MAY. Oh, I hope not.
L. Why not little girls, then?
(_Pause._)
LILY. Because, you know, we can't be worth anything if we're ever so
good;--I mean, if we try to be ever so good; and we can't do difficult
things--like saints.
L. I am afraid, my dear, that old people are not more able or willing
for their difficulties than you children are for yours. All I can say
is, that if ever I see any of you, when you are seven or eight and
twenty, knitting your brows over any work you want to do or to
understand, as I saw you, Lily, knitting your brows over your slate this
morning, I should think you very noble women. But--to come back to my
dream--St. Barbara _did_ lose her temper a little; and I was not
surprised. For you can't think how provoking Neith looked, sitting there
just like a statue of sandstone; only going on weaving, like a machine;
and never quickening the cast of her shuttle; while St. Barbara was
telling her so eagerly all about the most beautiful things, and
chattering away, as fast as bells ring on Christmas Eve, till she saw
that Neith didn't care; and then St. Barbara got as red as a rose, and
stopped, just in time;--or I think she would really have said something
naughty.
ISABEL. Oh, please, but didn't Neith say anything then?
L. Yes. She said, quite quietly, 'It may be very pretty, my love; but it
is all nonsense.'
ISABEL. Oh dear, oh dear; and then?
L. Well; then I was a little angry myself, and hoped St. Barbara would
be quite angry; but she wasn't. She bit her lips first; and then gave a
great sigh--such a wild, sweet sigh--and then she knelt down and hid her
face on Neith's knees. Then Neith smiled a little, and was moved.
ISABEL. Oh, I am so glad!
L. And she touched St. Barbara's forehead with a flower of white lotus;
and St. Barbara sobbed once or twice, and then said: 'If you only could
see how beautiful it is, and how much it makes people feel what is good
and lovely; and if you could only hear the children singing in the Lady
chapels!' And Neith smiled,--but still sadly,--and said, 'How do you
know what I have seen, or heard, my love? Do you think all those vaults
and towers of yours have been built without me? There was not a pillar
in your Giotto's Santa Maria del Fiore which I did not set true by my
spearshaft as it rose. But this pinnacle and flame work which has set
your little heart on fire, is all vanity; and you will see what it will
come to, and that soon; and none will grieve for it more than I. And
then every one will disbelieve your pretty symbols and types. Men must
be spoken simply to, my dear, if you would guide them kindly, and long.'
But St. Barbara answered, that, 'Indeed she thought every one liked her
work,' and that 'the people of different towns were as eager about their
cathedral towers as about their privileges or their markets;' and then
she asked Neith to come and build something with her, wall against
tower; and 'see whether the people will be as much pleased with your
building as with mine.' But Neith answered, 'I will not contend with
you, my dear. I strive not with those who love me; and for those who
hate me, it is not well to strive with me, as weaver Arachne knows. And
remember, child, that nothing is ever done beautifully, which is done in
rivalship; nor nobly, which is done in pride.'
Then St. Barbara hung her head quite down, and said she was very sorry
she had been so foolish; and kissed Neith; and stood thinking a minute:
and then her eyes got bright again, and she said, she would go directly
and build a chapel with five windows in it; four for the four cardinal
virtues, and one for humility, in the middle, bigger than the rest. And
Neith very nearly laughed quite out, I thought; certainly her beautiful
lips lost all their sternness for an instant; then she said, 'Well,
love, build it, but do not put so many colours into your windows as you
usually do; else no one will be able to see to read, inside: and when it
is built, let a poor village priest consecrate it, and not an
archbishop.' St. Barbara started a little, I thought, and turned as if
to say something; but changed her mind, and gathered up her train, and
went out. And Neith bent herself again to her loom, in which she was
weaving a web of strange dark colours, I thought; but perhaps it was
only after the glittering of St. Barbara's embroidered train: and I
tried to make out the figures in Neith's web, and confused myself among
them, as one always does in dreams; and then the dream changed
altogether, and I found myself, all at once, among a crowd of little
Gothic and Egyptian spirits, who were quarrelling: at least the Gothic
ones were trying to quarrel; for the Egyptian ones only sat with their
hands on their knees, and their aprons sticking out very stiffly; and
stared. And after a while I began to understand what the matter was. It
seemed that some of the troublesome building imps, who meddle and make
continually, even in the best Gothic work, had been listening to St.
Barbara's talk with Neith; and had made up their minds that Neith had no
workpeople who could build against them. They were but dull imps, as you
may fancy by their thinking that; and never had done much, except
disturbing the great Gothic building angels at their work, and playing
tricks to each other; indeed, of late they had been living years and
years, like bats, up under the cornices of Strasbourg and Cologne
cathedrals, with nothing to do but to make mouths at the people below.
However, they thought they knew everything about tower building; and
those who had heard what Neith said, told the rest; and they all flew
down directly, chattering in German, like jackdaws, to show Neith's
people what they could do. And they had found some of Neith's old
workpeople somewhere near Sais, sitting in the sun, with their hands on
their knees; and abused them heartily: and Neith's people did not mind
at first, but, after a while, they seemed to get tired of the noise; and
one or two rose up slowly, and laid hold of their measuring rods, and
said, 'If St. Barbara's people liked to build with them, tower against
pyramid, they would show them how to lay stones.' Then the little Gothic
spirits threw a great many double somersaults for joy; and put the tips
of their tongues out slily to each other, on one side; and I heard the
Egyptians say, 'they must be some new kind of frog--they didn't think
there was much building in _them_.' However, the stiff old workers took
their rods, as I said, and measured out a square space of sand; but as
soon as the German spirits saw that, they declared they wanted exactly
that bit of ground to build on, themselves. Then the Egyptian builders
offered to go farther off, and the Germans ones said, 'Ja wohl.' But as
soon as the Egyptians had measured out another square, the little
Germans said they must have some of that too. Then Neith's people
laughed; and said, 'they might take as much as they liked, but they
would not move the plan of their pyramid again.' Then the little Germans
took three pieces, and began to build three spires directly; one large,
and two little. And when the Egyptians saw they had fairly begun, they
laid their foundation all round, of large square stones: and began to
build, so steadily that they had like to have swallowed up the three
little German spires. So when the Gothic spirits saw that, they built
their spires leaning, like the tower of Pisa, that they might stick out
at the side of the pyramid. And Neith's people stared at them; and
thought it very clever, but very wrong; and on they went, in their own
way, and said nothing. Then the little Gothic spirits were terribly
provoked because they could not spoil the shape of the pyramid; and they
sat down all along the ledges of it to make faces; but that did no good.
Then they ran to the corners, and put their elbows on their knees, and
stuck themselves out as far as they could, and made more faces; but that
did no good, neither. Then they looked up to the sky, and opened their
mouths wide, and gobbled, and said it was too hot for work, and
wondered when it would rain; but that did no good, neither. And all the
while the Egyptian spirits were laying step above step, patiently. But
when the Gothic ones looked, and saw how high they had got, they said,
'Ach, Himmel!' and flew down in a great black cluster to the bottom; and
swept out a level spot in the sand with their wings, in no time, and
began building a tower straight up, as fast as they could. And the
Egyptians stood still again to stare at them; for the Gothic spirits had
got quite into a passion, and were really working very wonderfully. They
cut the sandstone into strips as fine as reeds; and put one reed on the
top of another, so that you could not see where they fitted: and they
twisted them in and out like basket work, and knotted them into
likenesses of ugly faces, and of strange beasts biting each other; and
up they went, and up still, and they made spiral staircases at the
corners, for the loaded workers to come up by (for I saw they were but
weak imps, and could not fly with stones on their backs), and then they
made traceried galleries for them to run round by; and so up again; with
finer and finer work, till the Egyptians wondered whether they meant the
thing for a tower or a pillar: and I heard them saying to one another,
'It was nearly as pretty as lotus stalks; and if it were not for the
ugly faces, there would be a fine temple, if they were going to build it
all with pillars as big as that!' But in a minute afterwards,--just as
the Gothic spirits had carried their work as high as the upper course,
but three or four, of the pyramid--the Egyptians called out to them to
'mind what they were about, for the sand was running away from under one
of their tower corners.' But it was too late to mind what they were
about; for, in another instant, the whole tower sloped aside; and the
Gothic imps rose out of it like a flight of puffins, in a single cloud;
but screaming worse than any puffins you ever heard: and down came the
tower, all in a piece, like a falling poplar, with its head right on the
flank of the pyramid; against which it snapped short off. And of course
that waked me!
MARY. What a shame of you to have such a dream, after all you have told
us about Gothic architecture!
L. If you have understood anything I ever told you about it, you know
that no architecture was ever corrupted more miserably; or abolished
more justly by the accomplishment of its own follies. Besides, even in
its days of power, it was subject to catastrophes of this kind. I have
stood too often, mourning, by the grand fragment of the apse of
Beauvais, not to have that fact well burnt into me. Still, you must have
seen, surely, that these imps were of the Flamboyant school; or, at
least, of the German schools correspondent with it in extravagance.
MARY. But, then, where is the crystal about which you dreamed all this?
L. Here; but I suppose little Pthah has touched it again, for it is very
small. But, you see, here is the pyramid, built of great square stones
of fluor spar, straight up; and here are the three little pinnacles of
mischievous quartz, which have set themselves, at the same time, on the
same foundation; only they lean like the tower of Pisa, and come out
obliquely at the side: and here is one great spire of quartz which seems
as if it had been meant to stand straight up, a little way off; and then
had fallen down against the pyramid base, breaking its pinnacle away. In
reality, it has crystallised horizontally, and terminated imperfectly:
but, then, by what caprice does one crystal form horizontally, when all
the rest stand upright? But this is nothing to the phantasies of fluor,
and quartz, and some other such companions, when they get leave to do
anything they like. I could show you fifty specimens, about every one of
which you might fancy a new fairy tale. Not that, in truth, any crystals
get leave to do quite what they like; and many of them are sadly tried,
and have little time for caprices--poor things!
MARY. I thought they always looked as if they were either in play or in
mischief! What trials have they?
L. Trials much like our own. Sickness, and starvation; fevers, and
agues, and palsy; oppression; and old age, and the necessity of passing
away in their time, like all else. If there's any pity in you, you must
come to-morrow, and take some part in these crystal griefs.
DORA. I am sure we shall cry till our eyes are red.
L. Ah, you may laugh, Dora: but I've been made grave, not once, nor
twice, to see that even crystals 'cannot choose but be old' at last. It
may be but a shallow proverb of the Justice's; but it is a shrewdly wide
one.
DORA (_pensive, for once_). I suppose it is very dreadful to be old! But
then (_brightening again_), what should we do without our dear old
friends, and our nice old lecturers?
L. If all nice old lecturers were minded as little as one I know of----
DORA. And if they all meant as little what they say, would they not
deserve it? But we'll come--we'll come, and cry.
FOOTNOTES:
[152] Note v.
LECTURE IX.
_CRYSTAL SORROWS._
_Working Lecture in Schoolroom._
L. We have been hitherto talking, children, as if crystals might live,
and play, and quarrel, and behave ill or well, according to their
characters, without interruption from anything else. But so far from
this being so, nearly all crystals, whatever their characters, have to
live a hard life of it, and meet with many misfortunes. If we could see
far enough, we should find, indeed, that, at the root, all their vices
were misfortunes: but to-day I want you to see what sort of troubles the
best crystals have to go through, occasionally, by no fault of their
own.
This black thing, which is one of the prettiest of the very few pretty
black things in the world, is called 'Tourmaline.' It may be
transparent, and green, or red, as well as black; and then no stone can
be prettier (only, all the light that gets into it, I believe, comes out
a good deal the worse; and is not itself again for a long while). But
this is the commonest state of it,--opaque, and as black as jet.
MARY. What does 'Tourmaline' mean?
L. They say it is Ceylanese, and I don't know Ceylanese; but we may
always be thankful for a graceful word, whatever it means.
MARY. And what is it made of?
L. A little of everything; there's always flint, and clay, and magnesia
in it; and the black is iron, according to its fancy; and there's
boracic acid, if you know what that is; and if you don't, I cannot tell
you to-day; and it doesn't signify; and there's potash, and soda; and,
on the whole, the chemistry of it is more like a mediæval doctor's
prescription, than the making of a respectable mineral: but it may,
perhaps, be owing to the strange complexity of its make, that it has a
notable habit which makes it, to me, one of the most interesting of
minerals. You see these two crystals are broken right across, in many
places, just as if they had been shafts of black marble fallen from a
ruinous temple; and here they lie, imbedded in white quartz, fragment
succeeding fragment, keeping the line of the original crystal, while the
quartz fills up the intervening spaces. Now tourmaline has a trick of
doing this, more than any other mineral I know: here is another bit
which I picked up on the glacier of Macugnaga; it is broken, like a
pillar built of very flat broad stones, into about thirty joints, and
all these are heaved and warped away from each other sideways, almost
into a line of steps; and then all is filled up with quartz paste. And
here, lastly, is a green Indian piece, in which the pillar is first
disjointed, and then wrung round into the shape of an S.
MARY. How _can_ this have been done?
L. There are a thousand ways in which it may have been done; the
difficulty is not to account for the doing of it; but for the showing of
it in some crystals, and not in others. You never by any chance get a
quartz crystal broken or twisted in this way. If it break or twist at
all, which it does sometimes, like the spire of Dijon, it is by its own
will or fault; it never seems to have been passively crushed. But, for
the forces which cause this passive ruin of the tourmaline,--here is a
stone which will show you multitudes of them in operation at once. It is
known as 'brecciated agate,' beautiful, as you see; and highly valued as
a pebble: yet, so far as I can read or hear, no one has ever looked at
it with the least attention. At the first glance, you see it is made of
very fine red striped agates, which have been broken into small pieces,
and fastened together again by paste, also of agate. There would be
nothing wonderful in this, if this were all. It is well known that by
the movements of strata, portions of rock are often shattered to
pieces:--well known also that agate is a deposit of flint by water under
certain conditions of heat and pressure: there is, therefore, nothing
wonderful in an agate's being broken; and nothing wonderful in its
being mended with the solution out of which it was itself originally
congealed. And with this explanation, most people, looking at a
brecciated agate, or brecciated anything, seem to be satisfied. I was so
myself, for twenty years; but, lately happening to stay for some time at
the Swiss Baden, where the beach of the Limmat is almost wholly composed
of brecciated limestones, I began to examine them thoughtfully; and
perceived, in the end, that they were, one and all, knots of as rich
mystery as any poor little human brain was ever lost in. That piece of
agate in your hand, Mary, will show you many of the common phenomena of
breccias; but you need not knit your brows over it in that way; depend
upon it, neither you nor I shall ever know anything about the way it was
made, as long as we live.
DORA. That does not seem much to depend upon.
L. Pardon me, puss. When once we gain some real notion of the extent and
the unconquerableness of our ignorance, it is a very broad and restful
thing to depend upon: you can throw yourself upon it at ease, as on a
cloud, to feast with the gods. You do not thenceforward trouble
yourself,--nor any one else,--with theories, or the contradiction of
theories; you neither get headache nor heartburning; and you never more
waste your poor little store of strength, or allowance of time.
However, there are certain facts, about this agate-making, which I can
tell you; and then you may look at it in a pleasant wonder as long as
you like; pleasant wonder is no loss of time.
First, then, it is not broken freely by a blow; it is slowly wrung, or
ground, to pieces. You can only with extreme dimness conceive the force
exerted on mountains in transitional states of movement. You have all
read a little geology; and you know how coolly geologists talk of
mountains being raised or depressed. They talk coolly of it, because
they are accustomed to the fact; but the very universality of the fact
prevents us from ever conceiving distinctly the conditions of force
involved. You know I was living last year in Savoy; my house was on the
back of a sloping mountain which rose gradually for two miles, behind
it; and then fell at once in a great precipice towards Geneva, going
down three thousand feet in four or five cliffs, or steps. Now that
whole group of cliffs had simply been torn away by sheer strength from
the rocks below, as if the whole mass had been as soft as biscuit. Put
four or five captains' biscuits on the floor, on the top of one another;
and try to break them all in half, not by bending, but by holding one
half down, and tearing the other halves straight up;--of course you will
not be able to do it, but you will feel and comprehend the sort of force
needed. Then, fancy each captains' biscuit a bed of rock, six or seven
hundred feet thick; and the whole mass torn straight through; and one
half heaved up three thousand feet, grinding against the other as it
rose,--and you will have some idea of the making of the Mont Saléve.
MAY. But it must crush the rocks all to dust!
L. No; for there is no room for dust. The pressure is too great;
probably the heat developed also so great that the rock is made partly
ductile; but the worst of it is, that we never can see these parts of
mountains in the state they were left in at the time of their elevation;
for it is precisely in these rents and dislocations that the crystalline
power principally exerts itself. It is essentially a styptic power, and
wherever the earth is torn, it heals and binds; nay, the torture and
grieving of the earth seem necessary to bring out its full energy; for
you only find the crystalline living power fully in action, where the
rents and faults are deep and many.
DORA. If you please, sir,--would you tell us--what are 'faults'?
L. You never heard of such things?
DORA. Never in all our lives.
L. When a vein of rock which is going on smoothly, is interrupted by
another troublesome little vein, which stops it, and puts it out, so
that it has to begin again in another place--that is called a fault. _I_
always think it ought to be called the fault of the vein that interrupts
it; but the miners always call it the fault of the vein that is
interrupted.
DORA. So it is, if it does not begin again where it left off.
L. Well, that is certainly the gist of the business: but, whatever
good-natured old lecturers may do, the rocks have a bad habit, when they
are once interrupted, of never asking 'Where was I?'
DORA. When the two halves of the dining table came separate, yesterday,
was that a 'fault'?
L. Yes; but not the table's. However, it is not a bad illustration,
Dora. When beds of rock are only interrupted by a fissure, but remain at
the same level, like the two halves of the table, it is not called a
fault, but only a fissure; but if one half of the table be either tilted
higher than the other, or pushed to the side, so that the two parts will
not fit, it is a fault. You had better read the chapter on faults in
Jukes's Geology; then you will know all about it. And this rent that I
am telling you of in the Saléve, is one only of myriads, to which are
owing the forms of the Alps, as, I believe, of all great mountain
chains. Wherever you see a precipice on any scale of real magnificence,
you will nearly always find it owing to some dislocation of this kind;
but the point of chief wonder to me, is the delicacy of the touch by
which these gigantic rents have been apparently accomplished. Note,
however, that we have no clear evidence, hitherto, of the time taken to
produce any of them. We know that a change of temperature alters the
position and the angles of the atoms of crystals, and also the entire
bulk of rocks. We know that in all volcanic, and the greater part of all
subterranean, action, temperatures are continually changing, and
therefore masses of rock must be expanding or contracting, with infinite
slowness, but with infinite force. This pressure must result in
mechanical strain somewhere, both in their own substance, and in that of
the rocks surrounding them; and we can form no conception of the result
of irresistible pressure, applied so as to rend and raise, with
imperceptible slowness of gradation, masses thousands of feet in
thickness. We want some experiments tried on masses of iron and stone;
and we can't get them tried, because Christian creatures never will
seriously and sufficiently spend money, except to find out the shortest
ways of killing each other. But, besides this slow kind of pressure,
there is evidence of more or less sudden violence, on the same terrific
scale; and, through it all, the wonder, as I said, is always to me the
delicacy of touch. I cut a block of the Saléve limestone from the edge
of one of the principal faults which have formed the precipice; it is a
lovely compact limestone, and the fault itself is filled up with a red
breccia formed of the crushed fragments of the torn rock, cemented by a
rich red crystalline paste. I have had the piece I cut from it smoothed,
and polished across the junction; here it is; and you may now pass your
soft little fingers over the surface, without so much as feeling the
place where a rock which all the hills of England might have been sunk
in the body of, and not a summit seen, was torn asunder through that
whole thickness, as a thin dress is torn when you tread upon it.
(_The audience examine the stone, and touch it timidly; but
the matter remains inconceivable to them._)
MARY (_struck by the beauty of the stone_). But this is almost marble?
L. It is quite marble. And another singular point in the business, to my
mind, is that these stones, which men have been cutting into slabs, for
thousands of years, to ornament their principal buildings with,--and
which, under the general name of 'marble,' have been the delight of the
eyes, and the wealth of architecture, among all civilised nations,--are
precisely those on which the signs and brands of these earth agonies
have been chiefly struck; and there is not a purple vein nor flaming
zone in them, which is not the record of their ancient torture. What a
boundless capacity for sleep, and for serene stupidity, there is in the
human mind! Fancy reflective beings, who cut and polish stones for three
thousand years, for the sake of the pretty stains upon them; and educate
themselves to an art at last (such as it is), of imitating these veins
by dexterous painting; and never a curious soul of them, all that while,
asks, 'What painted the rocks?'
(_The audience look dejected, and ashamed of themselves._)
The fact is, we are all, and always, asleep, through our lives; and it
is only by pinching ourselves very hard that we ever come to see, or
understand, anything. At least, it is not always we who pinch ourselves;
sometimes other people pinch us; which I suppose is very good of
them,--or other things, which I suppose is very proper of them. But it
is a sad life; made up chiefly of naps and pinches.
(_Some of the audience, on this, appearing to think that the
others require pinching, the_ LECTURER _changes the
subject._)
Now, however, for once, look at a piece of marble carefully, and think
about it. You see this is one side of the fault; the other side is down
or up, nobody knows where; but, on this side, you can trace the evidence
of the dragging and tearing action. All along the edge of this marble,
the ends of the fibres of the rock are torn, here an inch, and there
half an inch, away from each other; and you see the exact places where
they fitted, before they were torn separate; and you see the rents are
now all filled up with the sanguine paste, full of the broken pieces of
the rock; the paste itself seems to have been half melted, and partly to
have also melted the edge of the fragments it contains, and then to have
crystallised with them, and round them. And the brecciated agate I first
showed you contains exactly the same phenomena; a zoned crystallisation
going on amidst the cemented fragments, partly altering the structure of
those fragments themselves, and subject to continual change, either in
the intensity of its own power, or in the nature of the materials
submitted to it;--so that, at one time, gravity acts upon them, and
disposes them in horizontal layers, or causes them to droop in
stalactites; and at another, gravity is entirely defied, and the
substances in solution are crystallised in bands of equal thickness on
every side of the cell. It would require a course of lectures longer
than these (I have a great mind,--you have behaved so saucily--to stay
and give them) to describe to you the phenomena of this kind, in agates
and chalcedonies only;--nay, there is a single sarcophagus in the
British Museum, covered with grand sculpture of the 18th dynasty, which
contains in the magnificent breccia (agates and jaspers imbedded in
porphyry), out of which it is hewn, material for the thought of years;
and record of the earth-sorrow of ages in comparison with the duration
of which, the Egyptian letters tell us but the history of the evening
and morning of a day.
Agates, I think, of all stones, confess most of their past history; but
all crystallisation goes on under, and partly records, circumstances of
this kind--circumstances of infinite variety, but always involving
difficulty, interruption, and change of condition at different times.
Observe, first, you have the whole mass of the rock in motion, either
contracting itself, and so gradually widening the cracks; or being
compressed, and thereby closing them, and crushing their edges;--and, if
one part of its substance be softer, at the given temperature, than
another, probably squeezing that softer substance out into the veins.
Then the veins themselves, when the rock leaves them open by its
contraction, act with various power of suction upon its substance;--by
capillary attraction when they are fine,--by that of pure vacuity when
they are larger, or by changes in the constitution and condensation of
the mixed gases with which they have been originally filled. Those gases
themselves may be supplied in all variation of volume and power from
below; or, slowly, by the decomposition of the rocks themselves; and, at
changing temperatures, must exert relatively changing forces of
decomposition and combination on the walls of the veins they fill; while
water, at every degree of heat and pressure (from beds of everlasting
ice, alternate with cliffs of native rock, to volumes of red hot, or
white hot, steam), congeals, and drips, and throbs, and thrills, from
crag to crag; and breathes from pulse to pulse of foaming or fiery
arteries, whose beating is felt through chains of the great islands of
the Indian seas, as your own pulses lift your bracelets, and makes whole
kingdoms of the world quiver in deadly earthquake, as if they were light
as aspen leaves. And, remember, the poor little crystals have to live
their lives, and mind their own affairs, in the midst of all this, as
best they may. They are wonderfully like human creatures,--forget all
that is going on if they don't see it, however dreadful; and never think
what is to happen to-morrow. They are spiteful or loving, and indolent
or painstaking, and orderly or licentious, with no thought whatever of
the lava or the flood which may break over them any day; and evaporate
them into air-bubbles, or wash them into a solution of salts. And you
may look at them, once understanding the surrounding conditions of their
fate, with an endless interest. You will see crowds of unfortunate
little crystals, who have been forced to constitute themselves in a
hurry, their dissolving element being fiercely scorched away; you will
see them doing their best, bright and numberless, but tiny. Then you
will find indulged crystals, who have had centuries to form themselves
in, and have changed their mind and ways continually; and have been
tired, and taken heart again; and have been sick, and got well again;
and thought they would try a different diet, and then thought better of
it; and made but a poor use of their advantages, after all. And others
you will see, who have begun life as wicked crystals; and then have been
impressed by alarming circumstances, and have become converted crystals,
and behaved amazingly for a little while, and fallen away again, and
ended, but discreditably, perhaps even in decomposition; so that one
doesn't know what will become of them. And sometimes you will see
deceitful crystals, that look as soft as velvet, and are deadly to all
near them; and sometimes you will see deceitful crystals, that seem
flint-edged, like our little quartz-crystal of a housekeeper here,
(hush! Dora,) and are endlessly gentle and true wherever gentleness and
truth are needed. And sometimes you will see little child-crystals put
to school like school-girls, and made to stand in rows; and taken the
greatest care of, and taught how to hold themselves up, and behave: and
sometimes you will see unhappy little child-crystals left to lie about
in the dirt, and pick up their living, and learn manners, where they
can. And sometimes you will see fat crystals eating up thin ones, like
great capitalists and little labourers; and politico-economic crystals
teaching the stupid ones how to eat each other, and cheat each other;
and foolish crystals getting in the way of wise ones; and impatient
crystals spoiling the plans of patient ones, irreparably; just as things
go on in the world. And sometimes you may see hypocritical crystals
taking the shape of others, though they are nothing like in their minds;
and vampire crystals eating out the hearts of others; and hermit-crab
crystals living in the shells of others; and parasite crystals living on
the means of others; and courtier crystals glittering in attendance upon
others; and all these, besides the two great companies of war and peace,
who ally themselves, resolutely to attack, or resolutely to defend. And
for the close, you see the broad shadow and deadly force of inevitable
fate, above all this: you see the multitudes of crystals whose time has
come; not a set time, as with us, but yet a time, sooner or later, when
they all must give up their crystal ghosts:--when the strength by which
they grew, and the breath given them to breathe, pass away from them;
and they fail, and are consumed, and vanish away; and another generation
is brought to life, framed out of their ashes.
MARY. It is very terrible. Is it not the complete fulfilment, down into
the very dust, of that verse: 'The whole creation groaneth and
travaileth in pain'?
L. I do not know that it is in pain, Mary: at least, the evidence tends
to show that there is much more pleasure than pain, as soon as sensation
becomes possible.
LUCILLA. But then, surely, if we are told that it is pain, it must be
pain?
L. Yes; if we are told; and told in the way you mean, Lucilla; but
nothing is said of the proportion to pleasure. Unmitigated pain would
kill any of us in a few hours; pain equal to our pleasures would make us
loathe life; the word itself cannot be applied to the lower conditions
of matter, in its ordinary sense. But wait till to-morrow to ask me
about this. To-morrow is to be kept for questions and difficulties; let
us keep to the plain facts to-day. There is yet one group of facts
connected with this rending of the rocks, which I especially want you to
notice. You know, when you have mended a very old dress, quite
meritoriously, till it won't mend any more----
EGYPT (_interrupting_). Could not you sometimes take gentlemen's work to
illustrate by?
L. Gentlemen's work is rarely so useful as yours, Egypt; and when it is
useful, girls cannot easily understand it.
DORA. I am sure we should understand it better than gentlemen understand
about sewing.
L. My dear, I hope I always speak modestly, and under correction, when I
touch upon matters of the kind too high for me; and besides, I never
intend to speak otherwise than respectfully of sewing;--though you
always seem to think I am laughing at you. In all seriousness,
illustrations from sewing are those which Neith likes me best to use;
and which young ladies ought to like everybody to use. What do you think
the beautiful word 'wife' comes from?
DORA (_tossing her head_). I don't think it is a particularly beautiful
word.
L. Perhaps not. At your ages you may think 'bride' sounds better; but
wife's the word for wear, depend upon it. It is the great word in which
the English and Latin languages conquer the French and the Greek. I hope
the French will some day get a word for it, yet, instead of their
dreadful 'femme.' But what do you think it comes from?
DORA. I never _did_ think about it.
L. Nor you, Sibyl?
SIBYL. No; I thought it was Saxon, and stopped there.
L. Yes; but the great good of Saxon words is, that they usually do mean
something. Wife means 'weaver.' You have all the right to call
yourselves little 'housewives,' when you sew neatly.
DORA. But I don't think we want to call ourselves 'little housewives.'
L. You must either be house-Wives, or house-Moths; remember that. In the
deep sense, you must either weave men's fortunes, and embroider them; or
feed upon, and bring them to decay. You had better let me keep my sewing
illustration, and help me out with it.
DORA. Well we'll hear it, under protest.
L. You have heard it before; but with reference to other matters. When
it is said, 'no man putteth a piece of new cloth on an old garment, else
it taketh from the old,' does it not mean that the new piece tears the
old one away at the sewn edge?
DORA. Yes; certainly.
L. And when you mend a decayed stuff with strong thread, does not the
whole edge come away sometimes, when it tears again?
DORA. Yes; and then it is of no use to mend it any more.
L. Well, the rocks don't seem to think that: but the same thing happens
to them continually. I told you they were full of rents, or veins. Large
masses of mountain are sometimes as full of veins as your hand is; and
of veins nearly as fine (only you know a rock vein does not mean a tube,
but a crack or cleft). Now these clefts are mended, usually, with the
strongest material the rock can find; and often literally with threads;
for the gradually opening rent seems to draw the substance it is filled
with into fibres, which cross from one side of it to the other, and are
partly crystalline; so that, when the crystals become distinct, the
fissure has often exactly the look of a tear, brought together with
strong cross stitches. Now when this is completely done, and all has
been fastened and made firm, perhaps some new change of temperature may
occur, and the rock begin to contract again. Then the old vein must open
wider; or else another open elsewhere. If the old vein widen, it _may_
do so at its centre; but it constantly happens, with well filled veins,
that the cross stitches are too strong to break; the walls of the vein,
instead, are torn away by them; and another little supplementary
vein--often three or four successively--will be thus formed at the side
of the first.
MARY. That is really very much like our work. But what do the mountains
use to sew with?
L. Quartz, whenever they can get it: pure limestones are obliged to be
content with carbonate of lime; but most mixed rocks can find some
quartz for themselves. Here is a piece of black slate from the Buet: it
looks merely like dry dark mud;--you could not think there was any
quartz in it; but, you see, its rents are all stitched together with
beautiful white thread, which is the purest quartz, so close drawn that
you can break it like flint, in the mass; but, where it has been exposed
to the weather, the fine fibrous structure is shown: and, more than
that, you see the threads have been all twisted and pulled aside, this
way and the other, by the warpings and shifting of the sides of the vein
as it widened.
MARY. It is wonderful! But is that going on still? Are the mountains
being torn and sewn together again at this moment?
L. Yes, certainly, my dear: but I think, just as certainly (though
geologists differ on this matter), not with the violence, or on the
scale, of their ancient ruin and renewal. All things seem to be tending
towards a condition of at least temporary rest; and that groaning and
travailing of the creation, as, assuredly, not wholly in pain, is not,
in the full sense, 'until now.'
MARY. I want so much to ask you about that!
SIBYL. Yes; and we all want to ask you about a great many other things
besides.
L. It seems to me that you have got quite as many new ideas as are good
for any of you at present: and I should not like to burden you with
more; but I must see that those you have are clear, if I can make them
so; so we will have one more talk, for answer of questions, mainly.
Think over all the ground, and make your difficulties thoroughly
presentable. Then we'll see what we can make of them.
DORA. They shall all be dressed in their very best; and curtsey as they
come in.
L. No, no, Dora; no curtseys, if you please. I had enough of them the
day you all took a fit of reverence, and curtsied me out of the room.
DORA. But, you know, we cured ourselves of the fault, at once, by that
fit. We have never been the least respectful since. And the difficulties
will only curtsey themselves out of the room, I hope;--come in at one
door--vanish at the other.
L. What a pleasant world it would be, if all its difficulties were
taught to behave so! However, one can generally make something, or
(better still) nothing, or at least less, of them, if they thoroughly
know their own minds; and your difficulties--I must say that for you,
children,--generally do know their own minds, as you do yourselves.
DORA. That is very kindly said for us. Some people would not allow so
much as that girls had any minds to know.
L. They will at least admit that you have minds to change, Dora.
MARY. You might have left us the last speech, without a retouch. But
we'll put our little minds, such as they are, in the best trim we can,
for to-morrow.
LECTURE X.
_THE CRYSTAL REST._
_Evening. The fireside._ L's _arm-chair in the comfortablest
corner._
L. (_perceiving various arrangements being made of foot-stool, cushion,
screen, and the like_). Yes, yes, it's all very fine! and I am to sit
here to be asked questions till supper-time, am I?
DORA. I don't think you can have any supper to-night:--we've got so much
to ask.
LILY. Oh, Miss Dora! We can fetch it him here, you know, so nicely!
L. Yes, Lily, that will be pleasant, with competitive examination going
on over one's plate; the competition being among the examiners. Really,
now that I know what teasing things girls are, I don't so much wonder
that people used to put up patiently with the dragons who took _them_
for supper. But I can't help myself, I suppose;--no thanks to St.
George. Ask away, children, and I'll answer as civilly as may be.
DORA. We don't so much care about being answered civilly, as about not
being asked things back again.
L. 'Ayez seulement la patience que je le parle.' There shall be no
requitals.
DORA. Well, then, first of all--What shall we ask first, Mary?
MARY. It does not matter. I think all the questions come into one, at
last, nearly.
DORA. You know, you always talk as if the crystals were alive; and we
never understand how much you are in play, and how much in earnest.
That's the first thing.
L. Neither do I understand, myself, my dear, how much I am in earnest.
The stones puzzle me as much as I puzzle you. They look as if they were
alive, and make me speak as if they were; and I do not in the least know
how much truth there is in the appearance. I'm not to ask things back
again to-night, but all questions of this sort lead necessarily to the
one main question, which we asked, before, in vain, 'What is it to be
alive?'
DORA. Yes; but we want to come back to that: for we've been reading
scientific books about the 'conservation of forces,' and it seems all so
grand, and wonderful; and the experiments are so pretty; and I suppose
it must be all right: but then the books never speak as if there were
any such thing as 'life.'
L. They mostly omit that part of the subject, certainly, Dora; but they
are beautifully right as far as they go; and life is not a convenient
element to deal with. They seem to have been getting some of it into and
out of bottles, in their 'ozone' and 'antizone' lately; but they still
know little of it: and, certainly, I know less.
DORA. You promised not to be provoking, to-night.
L. Wait a minute. Though, quite truly, I know less of the secrets of
life than the philosophers do; I yet know one corner of ground on which
we artists can stand, literally as 'Life Guards' at bay, as steadily as
the Guards at Inkermann; however hard the philosophers push. And you may
stand with us, if once you learn to draw nicely.
DORA. I'm sure we are all trying! but tell us where we may stand.
L. You may always stand by Form, against Force. To a painter, the
essential character of anything is the form of it; and the philosophers
cannot touch that. They come and tell you, for instance, that there is
as much heat, or motion, or calorific energy (or whatever else they like
to call it), in a tea-kettle as in a Gier-eagle. Very good; that is so;
and it is very interesting. It requires just as much heat as will boil
the kettle, to take the Gier-eagle up to his nest; and as much more to
bring him down again on a hare or a partridge. But we painters,
acknowledging the equality and similarity of the kettle and the bird in
all scientific respects, attach, for our part, our principal interest to
the difference in their forms. For us, the primarily cognisable facts,
in the two things, are, that the kettle has a spout, and the eagle a
beak; the one a lid on its back, the other a pair of wings;--not to
speak of the distinction also of volition, which the philosophers may
properly call merely a form or mode of force;--but then, to an artist,
the form, or mode, is the gist of the business. The kettle chooses to
sit still on the hob; the eagle to recline on the air. It is the fact of
the choice, not the equal degree of temperature in the fulfilment of it,
which appears to us the more interesting circumstance;--though the other
is very interesting too. Exceedingly so! Don't laugh, children; the
philosophers have been doing quite splendid work lately, in their own
way: especially, the transformation of force into light is a great piece
of systematised discovery; and this notion about the sun's being
supplied with his flame by ceaseless meteoric hail is grand, and looks
very likely to be true. Of course, it is only the old gun-lock,--flint
and steel,--on a large scale: but the order and majesty of it are
sublime. Still, we sculptors and painters care little about it. 'It is
very fine,' we say, 'and very useful, this knocking the light out of the
sun, or into it, by an eternal cataract of planets. But you may hail
away, so, for ever, and you will not knock out what we can. Here is a
bit of silver, not the size of half-a-crown, on which, with a single
hammer stroke, one of us, two thousand and odd years ago, hit out the
head of the Apollo of Clazomenæ. It is merely a matter of form; but if
any of you philosophers, with your whole planetary system to hammer
with, can hit out such another bit of silver as this,--we will take off
our hats to you. For the present, we keep them on.'
MARY. Yes, I understand; and that is nice; but I don't think we shall
any of us like having only form to depend upon.
L. It was not neglected in the making of Eve, my dear.
MARY. It does not seem to separate us from the dust of the ground. It is
that breathing of the life which we want to understand.
L. So you should: but hold fast to the form, and defend that first, as
distinguished from the mere transition of forces. Discern the moulding
hand of the potter commanding the clay, from his merely beating foot,
as it turns the wheel. If you can find incense, in the vase,
afterwards,--well: but it is curious how far mere form will carry you
ahead of the philosophers. For instance, with regard to the most
interesting of all their modes of force--light;--they never consider how
far the existence of it depends on the putting of certain vitreous and
nervous substances into the formal arrangement which we call an eye. The
German philosophers began the attack, long ago, on the other side, by
telling us, there was no such thing as light at all, unless we chose to
see it: now, German and English, both, have reversed their engines, and
insist that light would be exactly the same light that it is, though
nobody could ever see it. The fact being that the force must be there,
and the eyes there; and 'light' means the effect of the one on the
other;--and perhaps, also--(Plato saw farther into that mystery than any
one has since, that I know of),--on something a little way within the
eyes; but we may stand quite safe, close behind the retina, and defy the
philosophers.
SIBYL. But I don't care so much about defying the philosophers, if only
one could get a clear idea of life, or soul, for one's self.
L. Well, Sibyl, you used to know more about it, in that cave of yours,
than any of us. I was just going to ask you about inspiration, and the
golden bough, and the like; only I remembered I was not to ask anything.
But, will not you, at least, tell us whether the ideas of Life, as the
power of putting things together, or 'making' them; and of Death, as the
power of pushing things separate, or 'unmaking' them, may not be very
simply held in balance against each other?
SIBYL. No, I am not in my cave to-night; and cannot tell you anything.
L. I think they may. Modern Philosophy is a great separator; it is
little more than the expansion of Molière's great sentence, 'Il s'ensuit
de là, que tout ce qu'il y a de beau est dans les dictionnaires; il n'y
a que les mots qui sont transposés.' But when you used to be in your
cave, Sibyl, and to be inspired, there was (and there remains still in
some small measure), beyond the merely formative and sustaining power,
another, which we painters call 'passion'--I don't know what the
philosophers call it; we know it makes people red, or white; and
therefore it must be something, itself; and perhaps it is the most truly
'poetic' or 'making' force of all, creating a world of its own out of a
glance, or a sigh: and the want of passion is perhaps the truest death,
or 'unmaking' of everything;--even of stones. By the way, you were all
reading about that ascent of the Aiguille Verte, the other day?
SIBYL. Because you had told us it was so difficult, you thought it could
not be ascended.
L. Yes; I believed the Aiguille Verte would have held its own. But do
you recollect what one of the climbers exclaimed, when he first felt
sure of reaching the summit?
SIBYL. Yes, it was, 'Oh, Aiguille Verte, vous êtes morte, vous êtes
morte!'
L. That was true instinct. Real philosophic joy. Now can you at all
fancy the difference between that feeling of triumph in a mountain's
death; and the exultation of your beloved poet, in its life--
'Quantus Athos, aut quantus Eryx, aut ipse coruscis
Quum fremit ilicibus quantus, gandetque nivali
Vertice, se attollens pater Apenninus ad auras.'
DORA. You must translate for us mere house-keepers, please,--whatever
the cave-keepers may know about it.
MARY. Will Dryden do?
L. No. Dryden is a far way worse than nothing, and nobody will 'do.' You
can't translate it. But this is all you need know, that the lines are
full of a passionate sense of the Apennines' fatherhood, or protecting
power over Italy; and of sympathy with their joy in their snowy strength
in heaven; and with the same joy, shuddering through all the leaves of
their forests.
MARY. Yes, that is a difference indeed! but then, you know, one can't
help feeling that it is fanciful. It is very delightful to imagine the
mountains to be alive; but then,--_are_ they alive?
L. It seems to me, on the whole, Mary, that the feelings of the purest
and most mightily passioned human souls are likely to be the truest.
Not, indeed, if they do not desire to know the truth, or blind
themselves to it that they may please themselves with passion; for then
they are no longer pure: but if, continually seeking and accepting the
truth as far as it is discernible, they trust their Maker for the
integrity of the instincts He has gifted them with, and rest in the
sense of a higher truth which they cannot demonstrate, I think they will
be most in the right, so.
DORA _and_ JESSIE (_clapping their hands_). Then we really may believe
that the mountains are living?
L. You may at least earnestly believe, that the presence of the spirit
which culminates in your own life, shows itself in dawning, wherever the
dust of the earth begins to assume any orderly and lovely state. You
will find it impossible to separate this idea of gradated manifestation
from that of the vital power. Things are not either wholly alive, or
wholly dead. They are less or more alive. Take the nearest, most easily
examined instance--the life of a flower. Notice what a different degree
and kind of life there is in the calyx and the corolla. The calyx is
nothing but the swaddling clothes of the flower; the child-blossom is
bound up in it, hand and foot; guarded in it, restrained by it, till the
time of birth. The shell is hardly more subordinate to the germ in the
egg, than the calyx to the blossom. It bursts at last; but it never
lives as the corolla does. It may fall at the moment its task is
fulfilled, as in the poppy; or wither gradually, as in the buttercup; or
persist in a ligneous apathy, after the flower is dead, as in the rose;
or harmonise itself so as to share in the aspect of the real flower, as
in the lily; but it never shares in the corolla's bright passion of
life. And the gradations which thus exist between the different members
of organic creatures, exist no less between the different ranges of
organism. We know no higher or more energetic life than our own; but
there seems to me this great good in the idea of gradation of life--it
admits the idea of a life above us, in other creatures, as much nobler
than ours, as ours is nobler than that of the dust.
MARY. I am glad you have said that; for I know Violet and Lucilla and
May want to ask you something; indeed, we all do; only you frightened
Violet so about the ant-hill, that she can't say a word; and May is
afraid of your teasing her, too: but I know they are wondering why you
are always telling them about heathen gods and goddesses, as if you half
believed in them; and you represent them as good; and then we see there
is really a kind of truth in the stories about them; and we are all
puzzled: and, in this, we cannot even make our difficulty quite clear to
ourselves;--it would be such a long confused question, if we could ask
you all we should like to know.
L. Nor is it any wonder, Mary; for this is indeed the longest, and the
most wildly confused question that reason can deal with; but I will try
to give you, quickly, a few clear ideas about the heathen gods, which
you may follow out afterwards, as your knowledge increases.
Every heathen conception of deity in which you are likely to be
interested, has three distinct characters:--
I. It has a physical character. It represents some of the great powers
or objects of nature--sun or moon, or heaven, or the winds, or the sea.
And the fables first related about each deity represent, figuratively,
the action of the natural power which it represents; such as the rising
and setting of the sun, the tides of the sea, and so on.
II. It has an ethical character, and represents, in its history, the
moral dealings of God with man. Thus Apollo is first, physically, the
sun contending with darkness; but morally, the power of divine life
contending with corruption. Athena is, physically, the air; morally, the
breathing of the divine spirit of wisdom. Neptune is, physically, the
sea; morally, the supreme power of agitating passion; and so on.
III. It has, at last, a personal character; and is realised in the minds
of its worshippers as a living spirit, with whom men may speak face to
face, as a man speaks to his friend.
Now it is impossible to define exactly, how far, at any period of a
national religion, these three ideas are mingled; or how far one
prevails over the other. Each enquirer usually takes up one of these
ideas, and pursues it, to the exclusion of the others: no impartial
effort seems to have been made to discern the real state of the heathen
imagination in its successive phases. For the question is not at all
what a mythological figure meant in its origin; but what it became in
each subsequent mental development of the nation inheriting the thought.
Exactly in proportion to the mental and moral insight of any race, its
mythological figures mean more to it, and become more real. An early and
savage race means nothing more (because it has nothing more to mean) by
its Apollo, than the sun; while a cultivated Greek means every operation
of divine intellect and justice. The Neith, of Egypt, meant, physically,
little more than the blue of the air; but the Greek, in a climate of
alternate storm and calm, represented the wild fringes of the
storm-cloud by the serpents of her ægis; and the lightning and cold of
the highest thunder-clouds, by the Gorgon on her shield: while morally,
the same types represented to him the mystery and changeful terror of
knowledge, as her spear and helm its ruling and defensive power. And no
study can be more interesting, or more useful to you, than that of the
different meanings which have been created by great nations, and great
poets, out of mythological figures given them, at first, in utter
simplicity. But when we approach them in their third, or personal,
character (and, for its power over the whole national mind, this is far
the leading one), we are met at once by questions which may well put all
of you at pause. Were they idly imagined to be real beings? and did they
so usurp the place of the true God? Or were they actually real
beings--evil spirits,--leading men away from the true God? Or is it
conceivable that they might have been real beings,--good
spirits,--entrusted with some message from the true God? These were the
questions you wanted to ask; were they not, Lucilla?
LUCILLA. Yes, indeed.
L. Well, Lucilla, the answer will much depend upon the clearness of your
faith in the personality of the spirits which are described in the book
of your own religion;--their personality, observe, as distinguished from
merely symbolical visions. For instance, when Jeremiah has the vision
of the seething pot with its mouth to the north, you know that this
which he sees is not a real thing; but merely a significant dream. Also,
when Zechariah sees the speckled horses among the myrtle trees in the
bottom, you still may suppose the vision symbolical;--you do not think
of them as real spirits, like Pegasus, seen in the form of horses. But
when you are told of the four riders in the Apocalypse, a distinct sense
of personality begins to force itself upon you. And though you might, in
a dull temper, think that (for one instance of all) the fourth rider on
the pale horse was merely a symbol of the power of death,--in your
stronger and more earnest moods you will rather conceive of him as a
real and living angel. And when you look back from the vision of the
Apocalypse to the account of the destruction of the Egyptian first-born,
and of the army of Sennacherib, and again to David's vision at the
threshing floor of Araunah, the idea of personality in this death-angel
becomes entirely defined, just as in the appearance of the angels to
Abraham, Manoah, or Mary.
Now, when you have once consented to this idea of a personal spirit,
must not the question instantly follow: 'Does this spirit exercise its
functions towards one race of men only, or towards all men? Was it an
angel of death to the Jew only, or to the Gentile also?' You find a
certain Divine agency made visible to a King of Israel, as an armed
angel, executing vengeance, of which one special purpose was to lower
his kingly pride. You find another (or perhaps the same) agency, made
visible to a Christian prophet as an angel standing in the sun, calling
to the birds that fly under heaven to come, that they may eat the flesh
of kings. Is there anything impious in the thought that the same agency
might have been expressed to a Greek king, or Greek seer, by similar
visions?--that this figure, standing in the sun, and armed with the
sword, or the bow (whose arrows were drunk with blood), and exercising
especially its power in the humiliation of the proud, might, at first,
have been called only 'Destroyer,' and afterwards, as the light, or sun,
of justice, was recognised in the chastisement, called also 'Physician'
or 'Healer?' If you feel hesitation in admitting the possibility of
such a manifestation, I believe you will find it is caused, partly
indeed by such trivial things as the difference to your ear between
Greek and English terms; but, far more, by uncertainty in your own mind
respecting the nature and truth of the visions spoken of in the Bible.
Have any of you intently examined the nature of your belief in them?
You, for instance, Lucilla, who think often, and seriously, of such
things?
LUCILLA. No; I never could tell what to believe about them. I know they
must be true in some way or other; and I like reading about them.
L. Yes; and I like reading about them too, Lucilla; as I like reading
other grand poetry. But, surely, we ought both to do more than like it?
Will God be satisfied with us, think you, if we read His words merely
for the sake of an entirely meaningless poetical sensation?
LUCILLA. But do not the people who give themselves to seek out the
meaning of these things, often get very strange, and extravagant?
L. More than that, Lucilla. They often go mad. That abandonment of the
mind to religious theory, or contemplation, is the very thing I have
been pleading with you against. I never said you should set yourself to
discover the meanings; but you should take careful pains to understand
them, so far as they _are_ clear; and you should always accurately
ascertain the state of your mind about them. I want you never to read
merely for the pleasure of fancy; still less as a formal religious duty
(else you might as well take to repeating Paters at once; for it is
surely wiser to repeat one thing we understand, than read a thousand
which we cannot). Either, therefore, acknowledge the passages to be, for
the present, unintelligible to you; or else determine the sense in which
you at present receive them; or, at all events, the different senses
between which you clearly see that you must choose. Make either your
belief, or your difficulty, definite; but do not go on, all through your
life, believing nothing intelligently, and yet supposing that your
having read the words of a divine book must give you the right to
despise every religion but your own. I assure you, strange as it may
seem, our scorn of Greek tradition depends, not on our belief, but our
disbelief, of our own traditions. We have, as yet, no sufficient clue to
the meaning of either; but you will always find that, in proportion to
the earnestness of our own faith, its tendency to accept a spiritual
personality increases: and that the most vital and beautiful Christian
temper rests joyfully in its conviction of the multitudinous ministry of
living angels, infinitely varied in rank and power. You all know one
expression of the purest and happiest form of such faith, as it exists
in modern times, in Richter's lovely illustrations of the Lord's Prayer.
The real and living death-angel, girt as a pilgrim for journey, and
softly crowned with flowers, beckons at the dying mother's door;
child-angels sit talking face to face with mortal children, among the
flowers;--hold them by their little coats, lest they fall on the
stairs;--whisper dreams of heaven to them, leaning over their pillows;
carry the sound of the church bells for them far through the air; and
even descending lower in service, fill little cups with honey, to hold
out to the weary bee. By the way, Lily, did you tell the other children
that story about your little sister, and Alice, and the sea?
LILY. I told it to Alice, and to Miss Dora. I don't think I did to
anybody else. I thought it wasn't worth.
L. We shall think it worth a great deal now, Lily, if you will tell it
us. How old is Dotty, again? I forget.
LILY. She is not quite three; but she has such odd little old ways,
sometimes.
L. And she was very fond of Alice?
LILY. Yes; Alice was so good to her always!
L. And so when Alice went away?
LILY. Oh, it was nothing, you know, to tell about; only it was strange
at the time.
L. Well; but I want you to tell it.
LILY. The morning after Alice had gone, Dotty was very sad and restless
when she got up; and went about, looking into all the corners, as if she
could find Alice in them, and at last she came to me, and said, 'Is Alie
gone over the great sea?' And I said, 'Yes, she is gone over the great,
deep sea, but she will come back again some day.' Then Dotty looked
round the room; and I had just poured some water out into the basin; and
Dotty ran to it, and got up on a chair, and dashed her hands through the
water, again and again; and cried, 'Oh, deep, deep sea! send little Alie
back to me.'
L. Isn't that pretty, children? There's a dear little heathen for you!
The whole heart of Greek mythology is in that; the idea of a personal
being in the elemental power;--of its being moved by prayer;--and of its
presence everywhere, making the broken diffusion of the element sacred.
Now, remember, the measure in which we may permit ourselves to think of
this trusted and adored personality, in Greek, or in any other,
mythology, as conceivably a shadow of truth, will depend on the degree
in which we hold the Greeks, or other great nations, equal, or inferior,
in privilege and character, to the Jews, or to ourselves. If we believe
that the great Father would use the imagination of the Jew as an
instrument by which to exalt and lead him; but the imagination of the
Greek only to degrade and mislead him: if we can suppose that real
angels were sent to minister to the Jews and to punish them; but no
angels, or only mocking spectra of angels, or even devils in the shapes
of angels, to lead Lycurgus and Leonidas from desolate cradle to
hopeless grave:--and if we can think that it was only the influence of
spectres, or the teaching of demons, which issued in the making of
mothers like Cornelia, and of sons like Cleobis and Bito, we may, of
course, reject the heathen Mythology in our privileged scorn: but, at
least, we are bound to examine strictly by what faults of our own it has
come to pass, that the ministry of real angels among ourselves is
occasionally so ineffectual, as to end in the production of Cornelias
who entrust their child-jewels to Charlotte Winsors for the better
keeping of them; and of sons like that one who, the other day, in
France, beat his mother to death with a stick; and was brought in by the
jury, 'guilty, with extenuating circumstances.'
MAY. Was that really possible?
L. Yes, my dear. I am not sure that I can lay my hand on the reference
to it (and I should not have said 'the other day'--it was a year or two
ago), but you may depend on the fact; and I could give you many like it,
if I chose. There was a murder done in Russia, very lately, on a
traveller. The murderess's little daughter was in the way, and found it
out, somehow. Her mother killed her, too, and put her into the oven.
There is a peculiar horror about the relations between parent and child,
which are being now brought about by our variously degraded forms of
European white slavery. Here _is_ one reference, I see, in my notes on
that story of Cleobis and Bito; though I suppose I marked this chiefly
for its quaintness, and the beautifully Christian names of the sons; but
it is a good instance of the power of the King of the Valley of
Diamonds[153] among us.
In 'Galignani' of July 21-22, 1862, is reported a trial of a farmer's
son in the department of the Yonne. The father, two years ago, at Malay
le Grand, gave up his property to his two sons, on condition of being
maintained by them. Simon fulfilled his agreement, but Pierre would not.
The tribunal of Sens condemns Pierre to pay eighty-four francs a year to
his father. Pierre replies, 'he would rather die than pay it.' Actually,
returning home, he throws himself into the river, and the body is not
found till next day.
MARY. But--but--I can't tell what you would have us think. Do you
seriously mean that the Greeks were better than we are; and that their
gods were real angels?
L. No, my dear. I mean only that we know, in reality, less than nothing
of the dealings of our Maker with our fellow-men; and can only reason or
conjecture safely about them, when we have sincerely humble thoughts of
ourselves and our creeds.
We owe to the Greeks every noble discipline in literature; every radical
principle of art; and every form of convenient beauty in our household
furniture and daily occupations of life. We are unable, ourselves, to
make rational use of half that we have received from them: and, of our
own, we have nothing but discoveries in science, and fine mechanical
adaptations of the discovered physical powers. On the other hand, the
vice existing among certain classes, both of the rich and poor, in
London, Paris, and Vienna, could have been conceived by a Spartan or
Roman of the heroic ages only as possible in a Tartarus, where fiends
were employed to teach, but not to punish, crime. It little becomes us
to speak contemptuously of the religion of races to whom we stand in
such relations; nor do I think any man of modesty or thoughtfulness will
ever speak so of any religion, in which God has allowed one good man to
die, trusting.
The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished
convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever
is right in them will become: and no error is so conclusively fatal as
the idea that God will not allow _us_ to err, though He has allowed all
other men to do so. There may be doubt of the meaning of other visions,
but there is none respecting that of the dream of St. Peter; and you may
trust the Rock of the Church's Foundation for true interpreting, when he
learned from it that, 'in every nation, he that feareth God and worketh
righteousness, is accepted with Him.' See that you understand what that
righteousness means; and set hand to it stoutly: you will always measure
your neighbors' creed kindly, in proportion to the substantial fruits of
your own. Do not think you will ever get harm by striving to enter into
the faith of others, and to sympathise, in imagination, with the guiding
principles of their lives. So only can you justly love them, or pity
them, or praise. By the gracious effort you will double, treble--nay,
indefinitely multiply, at once the pleasure, the reverence, and the
intelligence with which you read: and, believe me, it is wiser and
holier, by the fire of your own faith to kindle the ashes of expired
religions, than to let your soul shiver and stumble among their graves,
through the gathering darkness, and communicable cold.
MARY (_after some pause_). We shall all like reading Greek history so
much better after this! but it has put everything else out of our heads
that we wanted to ask.
L. I can tell you one of the things; and I might take credit for
generosity in telling you; but I have a personal reason--Lucilla's verse
about the creation.
DORA. Oh, yes--yes; and its 'pain together, until now.'
L. I call you back to that, because I must warn you against an old error
of my own. Somewhere in the fourth volume of 'Modern Painters,' I said
that the earth seemed to have passed through its highest state: and
that, after ascending by a series of phases, culminating in its
habitation by man, it seems to be now gradually becoming less fit for
that habitation.
MARY. Yes, I remember.
L. I wrote those passages under a very bitter impression of the gradual
perishing of beauty from the loveliest scenes which I knew in the
physical world;--not in any doubtful way, such as I might have
attributed to loss of sensation in myself--but by violent and definite
physical action; such as the filling up of the Lac de Chêde by landslips
from the Rochers des Fiz;--the narrowing of the Lake Lucerne by the
gaining delta of the stream of the Muotta-Thal, which, in the course of
years, will cut the lake into two, as that of Brientz has been divided
from that of Thun;--the steady diminishing of the glaciers north of the
Alps, and still more, of the sheets of snow on their southern slopes,
which supply the refreshing streams of Lombardy:--the equally steady
increase of deadly maremma round Pisa and Venice; and other such
phenomena, quite measurably traceable within the limits even of short
life, and unaccompanied, as it seemed, by redeeming or compensatory
agencies. I am still under the same impression respecting the existing
phenomena; but I feel more strongly, every day, that no evidence to be
collected within historical periods can be accepted as any clue to the
great tendencies of geological change; but that the great laws which
never fail, and to which all change is subordinate, appear such as to
accomplish a gradual advance to lovelier order, and more calmly, yet
more deeply, animated Rest. Nor has this conviction ever fastened itself
upon me more distinctly, than during my endeavour to trace the laws
which govern the lowly framework of the dust. For, through all the
phases of its transition and dissolution, there seems to be a continual
effort to raise itself into a higher state; and a measured gain, through
the fierce revulsion and slow renewal of the earth's frame, in beauty,
and order, and permanence. The soft white sediments of the sea draw
themselves, in process of time, into smooth knots of sphered symmetry;
burdened and strained under increase of pressure, they pass into a
nascent marble; scorched by fervent heat, they brighten and blanch into
the snowy rock of Paros and Carrara. The dark drift of the inland river,
or stagnant slime of inland pool and lake, divides, or resolves itself
as it dries, into layers of its several elements; slowly purifying each
by the patient withdrawal of it from the anarchy of the mass in which it
was mingled. Contracted by increasing drought, till it must shatter into
fragments, it infuses continually a finer ichor into the opening veins,
and finds in its weakness the first rudiments of a perfect strength.
Bent at last, rock from rock, nay, atom from atom, and tormented in
lambent fire, it knits, through the fusion, the fibres of a perennial
endurance; and, during countless subsequent centuries, declining, or
rather let me say, rising to repose, finishes the infallible lustre of
its crystalline beauty, under harmonies of law which are wholly
beneficent, because wholly inexorable.
(_The children seem pleased, but more inclined to think over
these matters than to talk._)
L. (_after giving them a little time_). Mary, I seldom ask you to read
anything out of books of mine; but there is a passage about the Law of
Help, which I want you to read to the children now, because it is of no
use merely to put it in other words for them. You know the place I mean,
do not you?
MARY. Yes (_presently finding it_); where shall I begin?
L. Here; but the elder ones had better look afterwards at the piece
which comes just before this.
MARY (_reads_):
* * * * *
'A pure or holy state of anything is that in which all its parts are
helpful or consistent. The highest and first law of the universe, and
the other name of life, is therefore, "help." The other name of death is
"separation." Government and co-operation are in all things, and
eternally, the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, eternally, and in
all things, the laws of death.
'Perhaps the best, though the most familiar, example we could take of
the nature and power of consistence, will be that of the possible
changes in the dust we tread on.
'Exclusive of animal decay, we can hardly arrive at a more absolute type
of impurity, than the mud or slime of a damp, over-trodden path, in the
outskirts of a manufacturing town. I do not say mud of the road, because
that is mixed with animal refuse; but take merely an ounce or two of the
blackest slime of a beaten footpath, on a rainy day, near a
manufacturing town. That slime we shall find in most cases composed of
clay (or brickdust, which is burnt clay), mixed with soot, a little sand
and water. All these elements are at helpless war with each other, and
destroy reciprocally each other's nature and power: competing and
fighting for place at every tread of your foot; sand squeezing out clay,
and clay squeezing out water, and soot meddling everywhere, and defiling
the whole. Let us suppose that this ounce of mud is left in perfect
rest, and that its elements gather together, like to like, so that their
atoms may get into the closest relations possible.
'Let the clay begin. Ridding itself of all foreign substance, it
gradually becomes a white earth, already very beautiful, and fit, with
help of congealing fire, to be made into finest porcelain, and painted
on, and be kept in kings' palaces. But such artificial consistence is
not its best. Leave it still quiet, to follow its own instinct of unity,
and it becomes, not only white but clear; not only clear, but hard; nor
only clear and hard, but so set that it can deal with light in a
wonderful way, and gather out of it the loveliest blue rays only,
refusing the rest. We call it then a sapphire.
'Such being the consummation of the clay, we give similar permission of
quiet to the sand. It also becomes, first, a white earth; then proceeds
to grow clear and hard, and at last arranges itself in mysterious,
infinitely fine parallel lines, which have the power of reflecting, not
merely the blue rays, but the blue, green, purple, and red rays, in the
greatest beauty in which they can be seen through any hard material
whatsoever. We call it then an opal.
'In next order the soot sets to work. It cannot make itself white at
first; but, instead of being discouraged, tries harder and harder; and
comes out clear at last; and the hardest thing in the world: and for
the blackness that it had, obtains in exchange the power of reflecting
all the rays of the sun at once, in the vividest blaze that any solid
thing can shoot. We call it then a diamond.
'Last of all, the water purifies, or unites itself; contented enough if
it only reach the form of a dewdrop: but, if we insist on its proceeding
to a more perfect consistence, it crystallises into the shape of a star.
And, for the ounce of slime which we had by political economy of
competition, we have, by political economy of co-operation, a sapphire,
an opal, and a diamond, set in the midst of a star of snow.'
* * * * *
L. I have asked you to hear that, children, because, from all that we
have seen in the work and play of these past days, I would have you gain
at least one grave and enduring thought. The seeming trouble,--the
unquestionable degradation,--of the elements of the physical earth, must
passively wait the appointed time of their repose, or their restoration.
It can only be brought about for them by the agency of external law. But
if, indeed, there be a nobler life in us than in these strangely moving
atoms;--if, indeed, there is an eternal difference between the fire
which inhabits them, and that which animates us,--it must be shown, by
each of us in his appointed place, not merely in the patience, but in
the activity of our hope; not merely by our desire, but our labour, for
the time when the Dust of the generations of men shall be confirmed for
foundations of the gates of the city of God. The human clay, now
trampled and despised, will not be,--cannot be,--knit into strength and
light by accident or ordinances of unassisted fate. By human cruelty and
iniquity it has been afflicted;--by human mercy and justice it must be
raised: and, in all fear or questioning of what is or is not, the real
message of creation, or of revelation, you may assuredly find perfect
peace, if you are resolved to do that which your Lord has plainly
required,--and content that He should indeed require no more of
you,--than to do Justice, to love Mercy, and to walk humbly with Him.
FOOTNOTES:
[153] Note vi.
NOTES.
NOTE I.
Page 24.
_'That third pyramid of hers.'_
Throughout the dialogues, it must be observed that 'Sibyl' is addressed
(when in play) as having once been the Cumæan Sibyl; and 'Egypt' as
having been queen Nitocris,--the Cinderella, and 'the greatest heroine
and beauty' of Egyptian story. The Egyptians called her 'Neith the
Victorious' (Nitocris), and the Greeks 'Face of the Rose' (Rhodope).
Chaucer's beautiful conception of Cleopatra in the 'Legend of Good
Women,' is much more founded on the traditions of her than on those of
Cleopatra; and, especially in its close, modified by Herodotus's
terrible story of the death of Nitocris, which, however, is
mythologically nothing more than a part of the deep monotonous ancient
dirge for the fulfilment of the earthly destiny of Beauty; 'She cast
herself into a chamber full of ashes.'
I believe this Queen is now sufficiently ascertained to have either
built, or increased to double its former size, the third pyramid of
Gizeh: and the passage following in the text refers to an imaginary
endeavour, by the Old Lecturer and the children together, to make out
the description of that pyramid in the 167th page of the second volume
of Bunsen's 'Egypt's Place in Universal History'--ideal
endeavour,--which ideally terminates as the Old Lecturer's real
endeavours to the same end always have terminated. There are, however,
valuable notes respecting Nitocris at page 210 of the same volume: but
the 'Early Egyptian History for the Young,' by the author of Sidney
Gray, contains, in a pleasant form, as much information as young readers
will usually need.
NOTE II.
Page 25.
_'Pyramid of Asychis.'_
This pyramid, in mythology, divides with the Tower of Babel the shame,
or vain glory, of being presumptuously, and first among great edifices,
built with 'brick for stone.' This was the inscription on it, according
to Herodotus:--
'Despise me not, in comparing me with the pyramids of stone;
for I have the pre-eminence over them, as far as Jupiter has
pre-eminence over the gods. For, striking with staves into
the pool, men gathered the clay which fastened itself to the
staff, and kneaded bricks out of it, and so made me.'
The word I have translated 'kneaded' is literally 'drew;' in the sense
of drawing, for which the Latins used 'duco;' and thus gave us our
'ductile' in speaking of dead clay, and Duke, Doge, or leader, in
speaking of living clay. As the asserted pre-eminence of the edifice is
made, in this inscription, to rest merely on the quantity of labour
consumed in it, this pyramid is considered, in the text, as the type, at
once, of the base building, and of the lost labour, of future ages, so
far at least as the spirits of measured and mechanical effort deal with
it: but Neith, exercising her power upon it, makes it a type of the work
of wise and inspired builders.
NOTE III.
Page 25.
_'The Greater Pthah.'_
It is impossible, as yet, to define with distinctness the personal
agencies of the Egyptian deities. They are continually associated in
function, or hold derivative powers, or are related to each other in
mysterious triads; uniting always symbolism of physical phenomena with
real spiritual power. I have endeavoured partly to explain this in the
text of the tenth Lecture: here, it is only necessary for the reader to
know that the Greater Pthah more or less represents the formative power
of order and measurement: he always stands on a four-square pedestal,
'the Egyptian cubit, metaphorically used as the hieroglyphic for truth;'
his limbs are bound together, to signify fixed stability, as of a
pillar; he has a measuring-rod in his hand; and at Philæ, is represented
as holding an egg on a potter's wheel; but I do not know if this symbol
occurs in older sculptures. His usual title is the 'Lord of Truth.'
Others, very beautiful: 'King of the Two Worlds, of Gracious
Countenance,' 'Superintendent of the Great Abode,' &c., are given by Mr.
Birch in Arundale's 'Gallery of Antiquities,' which I suppose is the
book of best authority easily accessible. For the full titles and
utterances of the gods, Rosellini is as yet the only--and I believe,
still a very questionable--authority; and Arundale's little book,
excellent in the text, has this great defect, that its drawings give the
statues invariably a ludicrous or ignoble character. Readers who have
not access to the originals must be warned against this frequent fault
in modern illustration (especially existing also in some of the painted
casts of Gothic and Norman work at the Crystal Palace). It is not owing
to any wilful want of veracity: the plates in Arundale's book are
laboriously faithful: but the expressions of both face and body in a
figure depend merely on emphasis of touch; and, in barbaric art, most
draughtsmen emphasise what they plainly see--the barbarism; and miss
conditions of nobleness, which they must approach the monument in a
different temper before they will discover, and draw with great subtlety
before they can express.
The character of the Lower Pthah, or perhaps I ought rather to say, of
Pthah in his lower office, is sufficiently explained in the text of the
third Lecture; only the reader must be warned that the Egyptian
symbolism of him by the beetle was not a scornful one; it expressed only
the idea of his presence in the first elements of life. But it may not
unjustly be used, in another sense, by us, who have seen his power in
new development; and, even as it was, I cannot conceive that the
Egyptians should have regarded their beetle-headed image of him
(Champollion, 'Pantheon,' pl. 12), without some occult scorn. It is the
most painful of all their types of any beneficent power; and even among
those of evil influences, none can be compared with it, except its
opposite, the tortoise-headed demon of indolence.
Pasht (p. 24, line 32) is connected with the Greek Artemis, especially
in her offices of judgment and vengeance. She is usually lioness-headed;
sometimes cat-headed; her attributes seeming often trivial or ludicrous
unless their full meaning is known; but the enquiry is much too wide to
be followed here. The cat was sacred to her; or rather to the sun, and
secondarily to her. She is alluded to in the text because she is always
the companion of Pthah (called 'the beloved of Pthah,' it may be as
Judgment, demanded and longed for by Truth); and it may be well for
young readers to have this fixed in their minds, even by chance
association. There are more statues of Pasht in the British Museum than
of any other Egyptian deity; several of them fine in workmanship; nearly
all in dark stone, which may be, presumably, to connect her, as the
moon, with the night; and in her office of avenger, with grief.
Thoth (p. 27, line 17), is the Recording Angel of Judgment; and the
Greek Hermes Phre (line 20), is the Sun.
Neith is the Egyptian spirit of divine wisdom; and the Athena of the
Greeks. No sufficient statement of her many attributes, still less of
their meanings, can be shortly given; but this should be noted
respecting the veiling of the Egyptian image of her by vulture
wings--that as she is, physically, the goddess of the air, this bird,
the most powerful creature of the air known to the Egyptians, naturally
became her symbol. It had other significations; but certainly this, when
in connection with Neith. As representing her, it was the most important
sign, next to the winged sphere, in Egyptian sculpture; and, just as in
Homer, Athena herself guides her heroes into battle, this symbol of
wisdom, giving victory, floats over the heads of the Egyptian kings. The
Greeks, representing the goddess herself in human form, yet would not
lose the power of the Egyptian symbol, and changed it into an angel of
victory. First seen in loveliness on the early coins of Syracuse and
Leontium, it gradually became the received sign of all conquest, and the
so-called 'Victory' of later times; which, little by little, loses its
truth, and is accepted by the moderns only as a personification of
victory itself,--not as an actual picture of the living Angel who led to
victory. There is a wide difference between these two conceptions,--all
the difference between insincere poetry, and sincere religion. This I
have also endeavoured farther to illustrate in the tenth Lecture; there
is however one part of Athena's character which it would have been
irrelevant to dwell upon there; yet which I must not wholly leave
unnoticed.
As the goddess of the air, she physically represents both its beneficent
calm, and necessary tempest: other storm-deities (as Chrysaor and Æolus)
being invested with a subordinate and more or less malignant function,
which is exclusively their own, and is related to that of Athena as the
power of Mars is related to hers in war. So also Virgil makes her able
to wield the lightning herself, while Juno cannot, but must pray for the
intervention of Æolus. She has precisely the correspondent moral
authority over calmness of mind, and just anger. She soothes Achilles,
as she incites Tydides; her physical power over the air being always
hinted correlatively. She grasps Achilles by his hair--as the wind would
lift it--softly,
'It fanned his cheek, it raised his hair,
Like a meadow gale in spring.'
She does not merely turn the lance of Mars from Diomed; but seizes it in
both her hands, and casts it aside, with a sense of making it vain, like
chaff in the wind;--to the shout of Achilles, she adds her own voice of
storm in heaven--but in all cases the moral power is still the principal
one--most beautifully in that seizing of Achilles by the hair, which was
the talisman of his life (because he had vowed it to the Sperchius if he
returned in safety), and which, in giving at Patroclus' tomb, he,
knowingly, yields up the hope of return to his country, and signifies
that he will die with his friend. Achilles and Tydides are, above all
other heroes, aided by her in war, because their prevailing characters
are the desire of justice, united in both with deep affections; and, in
Achilles, with a passionate tenderness, which is the real root of his
passionate anger. Ulysses is her favourite chiefly in her office as the
goddess of conduct and design.
NOTE IV.
Page 54.
_'Geometrical limitations.'_
It is difficult, without a tedious accuracy, or without full
illustration, to express the complete relations of crystalline
structure, which dispose minerals to take, at different times, fibrous,
massive, or foliated forms; and I am afraid this chapter will be
generally skipped by the reader: yet the arrangement itself will be
found useful, if kept broadly in mind; and the transitions of state are
of the highest interest, if the subject is entered upon with any
earnestness. It would have been vain to add to the scheme of this little
volume any account of the geometrical forms of crystals: an available
one, though still far too difficult and too copious, has been arranged
by the Rev. Mr. Mitchell, for Orr's 'Circle of the Sciences'; and, I
believe, the 'nets' of crystals, which are therein given to be cut out
with scissors and put prettily together, will be found more conquerable
by young ladies than by other students. They should also, when an
opportunity occurs, be shown, at any public library, the diagram of the
crystallisation of quartz referred to poles, at p. 8 of Cloizaux's
'Manuel de Minéralogie': that they may know what work is; and what the
subject is.
With a view to more careful examination of the nascent states of silica,
I have made no allusion in this volume to the influence of mere
segregation, as connected with the crystalline power. It has only been
recently, during the study of the breccias alluded to in page 113, that
I have fully seen the extent to which this singular force often modifies
rocks in which at first its influence might hardly have been suspected;
many apparent conglomerates being in reality formed chiefly by
segregation, combined with mysterious brokenly-zoned structures, like
those of some malachites. I hope some day to know more of these and
several other mineral phenomena (especially of those connected with the
relative sizes of crystals), which otherwise I should have endeavoured
to describe in this volume.
NOTE V.
Page 102.
_'St. Barbara.'_
I would have given the legends of St. Barbara, and St. Thomas, if I had
thought it always well for young readers to have everything at once told
them which they may wish to know. They will remember the stories better
after taking some trouble to find them: and the text is intelligible
enough as it stands. The idea of St. Barbara, as there given is founded
partly on her legend in Peter de Natalibus, partly on the beautiful
photograph of Van Eyck's picture of her at Antwerp: which was some time
since published at Lille.
NOTE VI.
Page 137.
_'King of the Valley of Diamonds.'_
Isabel interrupted the Lecturer here, and was briefly bid to hold her
tongue; which gave rise to some talk, apart, afterwards, between L. and
Sibyl, of which a word or two may be perhaps advisably set down.
SIBYL. We shall spoil Isabel, certainly, if we don't mind: I was glad
you stopped her, and yet sorry; for she wanted so much to ask about the
Valley of Diamonds again, and she has worked so hard at it, and made it
nearly all out by herself. She recollected Elisha's throwing in the
meal, which nobody else did.
L. But what did she want to ask?
SIBYL. About the mulberry trees and the serpents; we are all stopped by
that. Won't you tell us what it means?
L. Now, Sibyl, I am sure you, who never explained yourself, should be
the last to expect others to do so. I hate explaining myself.
SIBYL. And yet how often you complain of other people for not saying
what they meant. How I have heard you growl over the three stone steps
to purgatory; for instance!
L. Yes; because Dante's meaning is worth getting at; but mine matters
nothing: at least, if ever I think it is of any consequence, I speak it
as clearly as may be. But you may make anything you like of the serpent
forests. I could have helped you to find out what they were, by giving a
little more detail, but it would have been tiresome.
SIBYL. It is much more tiresome not to find out. Tell us, please, as
Isabel says, because we feel so stupid.
L. There is no stupidity; you could not possibly do more than guess at
anything so vague. But I think, you, Sibyl, at least, might have
recollected what first dyed the mulberry?
SIBYL. So I did; but that helped little; I thought of Dante's forest of
suicides, too, but you would not simply have borrowed that?
L. No. If I had had strength to use it, I should have stolen it, to beat
into another shape; not borrowed it. But that idea of souls in trees is
as old as the world; or at least, as the world of man. And I _did_ mean
that there were souls in those dark branches; the souls of all those who
had perished in misery through the pursuit of riches; and that the river
was of their blood, gathering gradually, and flowing out of the valley.
That I meant the serpents for the souls of those who had lived
carelessly and wantonly in their riches; and who have all their sins
forgiven by the world, because they are rich: and therefore they have
seven crimson crested heads, for the seven mortal sins; of which they
are proud: and these, and the memory and report of them, are the chief
causes of temptation to others, as showing the pleasantness and
absolving power of riches; so that thus they are singing serpents. And
the worms are the souls of the common money-getters and traffickers, who
do nothing but eat and spin: and who gain habitually by the distress or
foolishness of others (as you see the butchers have been gaining out of
the panic at the cattle plague, among the poor),--so they are made to
eat the dark leaves, and spin, and perish.
SIBYL. And the souls of the great, cruel, rich people who oppress the
poor, and lend money to government to make unjust war, where are they?
L. They change into the ice, I believe, and are knit with the gold; and
make the grave dust of the valley. I believe so, at least, for no one
ever sees those souls anywhere.
(SIBYL _ceases questioning._)
ISABEL (_who has crept up to her side without any one's seeing_). Oh,
Sibyl, please ask him about the fire-flies!
L. What, you there, mousie! No; I won't tell either Sibyl or you about
the fire-flies; nor a word more about anything else. You ought to be
little fire-flies yourselves, and find your way in twilight by your own
wits.
ISABEL. But you said they burned, you know?
L. Yes; and you may be fire-flies that way too, some of you, before
long, though I did not mean that. Away with you, children. You have
thought enough for to-day.
NOTE TO SECOND EDITION.
_Sentence_ out of letter from May (who is staying with Isabel just now
at Cassel), dated 15th June, 1877:--
"I am reading the Ethics with a nice Irish girl who is staying here, and
she's just as puzzled as I've always been about the fire-flies, and we
both want to know so much.--Please be a very nice old Lecturer, and tell
us, won't you?"
Well, May, you never were a vain girl; so could scarcely guess that I
meant them for the light, unpursued vanities, which yet blind us,
confused among the stars. One evening, as I came late into Siena, the
fire-flies were flying high on a stormy sirocco wind,--the stars
themselves no brighter, and all their host seeming, at moments, to fade
as the insects faded.
FICTION--FAIR AND FOUL.
On the first mild--or, at least, the first bright--day of March, in this
year, I walked through what was once a country lane, between the
hostelry of the Half-moon at the bottom of Herne Hill, and the secluded
College of Dulwich.
In my young days, Croxsted Lane was a green bye-road traversable for
some distance by carts; but rarely so traversed, and, for the most part,
little else than a narrow strip of untilled field, separated by
blackberry hedges from the better cared-for meadows on each side of it:
growing more weeds, therefore, than they, and perhaps in spring a
primrose or two--white archangel--daisies plenty, and purple thistles in
autumn. A slender rivulet, boasting little of its brightness, for there
are no springs at Dulwich, yet fed purely enough by the rain and morning
dew, here trickled--there loitered--through the long grass beneath the
hedges, and expanded itself, where it might, into moderately clear and
deep pools, in which, under their veils of duck-weed, a fresh-water
shell or two, sundry curious little skipping shrimps, any quantity of
tadpoles in their time, and even sometimes a tittlebat, offered
themselves to my boyhood's pleased, and not inaccurate, observation.
There, my mother and I used to gather the first buds of the hawthorn;
and there, in after years, I used to walk in the summer shadows, as in a
place wilder and sweeter than our garden, to think over any passage I
wanted to make better than usual in _Modern Painters_.
So, as aforesaid, on the first kindly day of this year, being thoughtful
more than usual of those old times, I went to look again at the place.
Often, both in those days, and since, I have put myself hard to it,
vainly, to find words wherewith to tell of beautiful things; but beauty
has been in the world since the world was made, and human language can
make a shift, somehow, to give account of it, whereas the peculiar
forces of devastation induced by modern city life have only entered the
world lately; and no existing terms of language known to me are enough
to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin, that varied
themselves along the course of Croxsted Lane. The fields on each side of
it are now mostly dug up for building, or cut through into gaunt corners
and nooks of blind ground by the wild crossings and concurrencies of
three railroads. Half a dozen handfuls of new cottages, with Doric
doors, are dropped about here and there among the gashed ground: the
lane itself, now entirely grassless, is a deep-rutted, heavy-hillocked
cart-road, diverging gatelessly into various brick-fields or pieces of
waste; and bordered on each side by heaps of--Hades only knows
what!--mixed dust of every unclean thing that can crumble in drought,
and mildew of every unclean thing that can rot or rust in damp: ashes
and rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery,
shreds of nameless clothes, door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen
garbage, back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber jagged with
out-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure,
indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering
foully here and there over all these,--remnants broadcast, of every
manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering and
flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of stinking dust and
mortal slime.
The lane ends now where its prettiest windings once began; being cut off
by a cross-road leading out of Dulwich to a minor railway station: and
on the other side of this road, what was of old the daintiest intricacy
of its solitude is changed into a straight, and evenly macadamised
carriage drive, between new houses of extreme respectability, with good
attached gardens and offices--most of these tenements being larger--all
more pretentious, and many, I imagine, held at greatly higher rent than
my father's, tenanted for twenty years at Herne Hill. And it became
matter of curious meditation to me what must here become of children
resembling my poor little dreamy quondam self in temper, and thus
brought up at the same distance from London, and in the same or better
circumstances of worldly fortune; but with only Croxsted Lane in its
present condition for their country walk. The trimly kept road before
their doors, such as one used to see in the fashionable suburbs of
Cheltenham or Leamington, presents nothing to their study but gravel,
and gas-lamp posts; the modern addition of a vermilion letter-pillar
contributing indeed to the splendour, but scarcely to the interest of
the scene; and a child of any sense or fancy would hastily contrive
escape from such a barren desert of politeness, and betake itself to
investigation, such as might be feasible, of the natural history of
Croxsted Lane.
But, for its sense or fancy, what food, or stimulus, can it find, in
that foul causeway of its youthful pilgrimage? What would have happened
to myself, so directed, I cannot clearly imagine. Possibly, I might have
got interested in the old iron and wood-shavings; and become an engineer
or a carpenter: but for the children of to-day, accustomed from the
instant they are out of their cradles, to the sight of this infinite
nastiness, prevailing as a fixed condition of the universe, over the
face of nature, and accompanying all the operations of industrious man,
what is to be the scholastic issue? unless, indeed, the thrill of
scientific vanity in the primary analysis of some unheard-of process of
corruption--or the reward of microscopic research in the sight of worms
with more legs, and acari of more curious generation than ever vivified
the more simply smelling plasma of antiquity.
One result of such elementary education is, however, already certain;
namely, that the pleasure which we may conceive taken by the children of
the coming time, in the analysis of physical corruption, guides, into
fields more dangerous and desolate, the expatiation of imaginative
literature: and that the reactions of moral disease upon itself, and the
conditions of languidly monstrous character developed in an atmosphere
of low vitality, have become the most valued material of modern
fiction, and the most eagerly discussed texts of modern philosophy.
The many concurrent reasons for this mischief may, I believe, be massed
under a few general heads.
I. There is first the hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of the
population crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter,
as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and
infectious each to his neighbour, in the smoking mass of decay. The
resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and in
a certain sense, worth study in their monstrosity: they have accordingly
developed a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with the
description of such forms of disease, like the botany of leaf-lichens.
In De Balzac's story of _Father Goriot_, a grocer makes a large fortune,
of which he spends on himself as much as may keep him alive; and on his
two daughters, all that can promote their pleasures or their pride. He
marries them to men of rank, supplies their secret expenses, and
provides for his favourite a separate and clandestine establishment with
her lover. On his deathbed, he sends for this favourite daughter, who
wishes to come, and hesitates for a quarter of an hour between doing so,
and going to a ball at which it has been for the last month her chief
ambition to be seen. She finally goes to the ball.
This story is, of course, one of which the violent contrasts and
spectral catastrophe could only take place, or be conceived, in a large
city. A village grocer cannot make a large fortune, cannot marry his
daughters to titled squires, and cannot die without having his children
brought to him, if in the neighbourhood, by fear of village gossip, if
for no better cause.
II. But a much more profound feeling than this mere curiosity of science
in morbid phenomena is concerned in the production of the carefullest
forms of modern fiction. The disgrace and grief resulting from the mere
trampling pressure and electric friction of town life, become to the
sufferers peculiarly mysterious in their undeservedness, and frightful
in their inevitableness. The power of all surroundings over them for
evil; the incapacity of their own minds to refuse the pollution, and of
their own wills to oppose the weight, of the staggering mass that chokes
and crushes them into perdition, brings every law of healthy existence
into question with them, and every alleged method of help and hope into
doubt. Indignation, without any calming faith in justice, and
self-contempt, without any curative self-reproach, dull the
intelligence, and degrade the conscience, into sullen incredulity of all
sunshine outside the dunghill, or breeze beyond the wafting of its
impurity; and at last a philosophy develops itself, partly satiric,
partly consolatory, concerned only with the regenerative vigour of
manure, and the necessary obscurities of fimetic Providence; showing how
everybody's fault is somebody else's, how infection has no law,
digestion no will, and profitable dirt no dishonour.
And thus an elaborate and ingenious scholasticism, in what may be called
the Divinity of Decomposition, has established itself in connection with
the more recent forms of romance, giving them at once a complacent tone
of clerical dignity, and an agreeable dash of heretical impudence; while
the inculcated doctrine has the double advantage of needing no laborious
scholarship for its foundation, and no painful self-denial for its
practice.
III. The monotony of life in the central streets of any great modern
city, but especially in those of London, where every emotion intended to
be derived by men from the sight of nature, or the sense of art, is
forbidden for ever, leaves the craving of the heart for a sincere, yet
changeful, interest, to be fed from one source only. Under natural
conditions the degree of mental excitement necessary to bodily health is
provided by the course of the seasons, and the various skill and fortune
of agriculture. In the country every morning of the year brings with it
a new aspect of springing or fading nature; a new duty to be fulfilled
upon earth, and a new promise or warning in heaven. No day is without
its innocent hope, its special prudence, its kindly gift, and its
sublime danger; and in every process of wise husbandry, and every
effort of contending or remedial courage, the wholesome passions, pride,
and bodily power of the labourer are excited and exerted in happiest
unison. The companionship of domestic, the care of serviceable, animals,
soften and enlarge his life with lowly charities, and discipline him in
familiar wisdoms and unboastful fortitudes; while the divine laws of
seed-time which cannot be recalled, harvest which cannot be hastened,
and winter in which no man can work, compel the impatiences and coveting
of his heart into labour too submissive to be anxious, and rest too
sweet to be wanton. What thought can enough comprehend the contrast
between such life, and that in streets where summer and winter are only
alternations of heat and cold; where snow never fell white, nor sunshine
clear; where the ground is only a pavement, and the sky no more than the
glass roof of an arcade; where the utmost power of a storm is to choke
the gutters, and the finest magic of spring, to change mud into dust:
where--chief and most fatal difference in state, there is no interest of
occupation for any of the inhabitants but the routine of counter or desk
within doors, and the effort to pass each other without collision
outside; so that from morning to evening the only possible variation of
the monotony of the hours, and lightening of the penalty of existence,
must be some kind of mischief, limited, unless by more than ordinary
godsend of fatality, to the fall of a horse, or the slitting of a
pocket.
I said that under these laws of inanition, the craving of the human
heart for some kind of excitement could be supplied from _one_ source
only. It might have been thought by any other than a sternly tentative
philosopher, that the denial of their natural food to human feelings
would have provoked a reactionary desire for it; and that the dreariness
of the street would have been gilded by dreams of pastoral felicity.
Experience has shown the fact to be otherwise; the thoroughly trained
Londoner can enjoy no other excitement than that to which he has been
accustomed, but asks for _that_ in continually more ardent or more
virulent concentration; and the ultimate power of fiction to entertain
him is by varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dulness
the horrors, of Death. In the single novel of _Bleak House_ there are
nine deaths (or left for death's, in the drop scene) carefully wrought
out or led up to, either by way of pleasing surprise, as the baby's at
the brickmaker's, or finished in their threatenings and sufferings, with
as much enjoyment as can be contrived in the anticipation, and as much
pathology as can be concentrated in the description. Under the following
varieties of method:--
One by assassination Mr. Tulkinghorn.
One by starvation, with phthisis Joe.
One by chagrin Richard.
One by spontaneous combustion Mr. Krook.
One by sorrow Lady Dedlock's lover.
One by remorse Lady Dedlock.
One by insanity Miss Flite.
One by paralysis Sir Leicester.
Besides the baby, by fever, and a lively young Frenchwoman left to be
hanged.
And all this, observe, not in a tragic, adventurous, or military story,
but merely as the further enlivenment of a narrative intended to be
amusing; and as a properly representative average of the statistics of
civilian mortality in the centre of London.
Observe further, and chiefly. It is not the mere number of deaths
(which, if we count the odd troopers in the last scene, is exceeded in
_Old Mortality_, and reached, within one or two, both in _Waverley_ and
_Guy Mannering_) that marks the peculiar tone of the modern novel. It is
the fact that all these deaths, but one, are of inoffensive, or at least
in the world's estimate respectable persons; and that they are all
grotesquely either violent or miserable, purporting thus to illustrate
the modern theology that the appointed destiny of a large average of our
population is to die like rats in a drain, either by trap or poison.
Not, indeed, that a lawyer in full practice can be usually supposed as
faultless in the eye of heaven as a dove or a woodcock; but it is not,
in former divinities, thought the will of Providence that he should be
dropped by a shot from a client behind his fire-screen, and retrieved in
the morning by his housemaid under the chandelier. Neither is Lady
Dedlock less reprehensible in her conduct than many women of fashion
have been and will be: but it would not therefore have been thought
poetically just, in old-fashioned morality, that she should be found by
her daughter lying dead, with her face in the mud of a St. Giles's
churchyard.
In the work of the great masters death is always either heroic,
deserved, or quiet and natural (unless their purpose be totally and
deeply tragic, when collateral meaner death is permitted, like that of
Polonius or Roderigo). In _Old Mortality_, four of the deaths,
Bothwell's, Ensign Grahame's, Macbriar's, and Evandale's, are
magnificently heroic; Burley's and Oliphant's long deserved, and swift;
the troopers', met in the discharge of their military duty, and the old
miser's, as gentle as the passing of a cloud, and almost beautiful in
its last words of--now unselfish--care.
'Ailie' (he aye ca'd me Ailie, we were auld acquaintance,)
'Ailie, take ye care and haud the gear weel thegither; for
the name of Morton of Milnwood's gane out like the last
sough of an auld sang.' And sae he fell out o' ae dwam into
another, and ne'er spak a word mair, unless it were
something we cou'dna mak out, about a dipped candle being
gude eneugh to see to dee wi'. He cou'd ne'er bide to see a
moulded ane, and there was ane, by ill luck, on the table.
In _Guy Mannering_, the murder, though unpremeditated, of a single
person, (himself not entirely innocent, but at least by heartlessness in
a cruel function earning his fate,) is avenged to the uttermost on all
the men conscious of the crime; Mr. Bertram's death, like that of his
wife, brief in pain, and each told in the space of half-a-dozen lines;
and that of the heroine of the tale, self-devoted, heroic in the
highest, and happy.
Nor is it ever to be forgotten, in the comparison of Scott's with
inferior work, that his own splendid powers were, even in early life,
tainted, and in his latter years destroyed, by modern conditions of
commercial excitement, then first, but rapidly, developing themselves.
There are parts even in his best novels coloured to meet tastes which he
despised; and many pages written in his later ones to lengthen his
article for the indiscriminate market.
But there was one weakness of which his healthy mind remained incapable
to the last. In modern stories prepared for more refined or fastidious
audiences than those of Dickens, the funereal excitement is obtained,
for the most part, not by the infliction of violent or disgusting death;
but in the suspense, the pathos, and the more or less by all felt, and
recognised, mortal phenomena of the sick-room. The temptation, to weak
writers, of this order of subject is especially great, because the study
of it from the living--or dying--model is so easy, and to many has been
the most impressive part of their own personal experience; while, if the
description be given even with mediocre accuracy, a very large section
of readers will admire its truth, and cherish its melancholy: Few
authors of second or third rate genius can either record or invent a
probable conversation in ordinary life; but few, on the other hand, are
so destitute of observant faculty as to be unable to chronicle the
broken syllables and languid movements of an invalid. The easily
rendered, and too surely recognised, image of familiar suffering is felt
at once to be real where all else had been false; and the historian of
the gestures of fever and words of delirium can count on the applause of
a gratified audience as surely as the dramatist who introduces on the
stage of his flagging action a carriage that can be driven or a fountain
that will flow. But the masters of strong imagination disdain such work,
and those of deep sensibility shrink from it.[154] Only under conditions
of personal weakness, presently to be noted, would Scott comply with the
cravings of his lower audience in scenes of terror like the death of
Front-de-Boeuf. But he never once withdrew the sacred curtain of the
sick-chamber, nor permitted the disgrace of wanton tears round the
humiliation of strength, or the wreck of beauty.
IV. No exception to this law of reverence will be found in the scenes in
Coeur de Lion's illness introductory to the principal incident in the
_Talisman_. An inferior writer would have made the king charge in
imagination at the head of his chivalry, or wander in dreams by the
brooks of Aquitaine; but Scott allows us to learn no more startling
symptoms of the king's malady than that he was restless and impatient,
and could not wear his armour. Nor is any bodily weakness, or crisis of
danger, permitted to disturb for an instant the royalty of intelligence
and heart in which he examines, trusts and obeys the physician whom his
attendants fear.
Yet the choice of the main subject in this story and its companion--the
trial, to a point of utter torture, of knightly faith, and several
passages in the conduct of both, more especially the exaggerated scenes
in the House of Baldringham, and hermitage of Engedi, are signs of the
gradual decline in force of intellect and soul which those who love
Scott best have done him the worst injustice in their endeavours to
disguise or deny. The mean anxieties, moral humiliations, and
mercilessly demanded brain-toil, which killed him, show their sepulchral
grasp for many and many a year before their final victory; and the
states of more or less dulled, distorted, and polluted imagination which
culminate in _Castle Dangerous_, cast a Stygian hue over _St. Ronan's
Well, The Fair Maid of Perth_, and _Anne of Geierstein_, which lowers
them, the first altogether, the other two at frequent intervals, into
fellowship with the normal disease which festers throughout the whole
body of our lower fictitious literature.
Fictitious! I use the ambiguous word deliberately; for it is impossible
to distinguish in these tales of the prison-house how far their vice and
gloom are thrown into their manufacture only to meet a vile demand, and
how far they are an integral condition of thought in the minds of men
trained from their youth up in the knowledge of Londinian and Parisian
misery. The speciality of the plague is a delight in the exposition of
the relations between guilt and decrepitude; and I call the results of
it literature 'of the prison-house,' because the thwarted habits of body
and mind, which are the punishment of reckless crowding in cities,
become, in the issue of that punishment, frightful subjects of exclusive
interest to themselves; and the art of fiction in which they finally
delight is only the more studied arrangement and illustration, by
coloured firelights, of the daily bulletins of their own wretchedness,
in the prison calendar, the police news, and the hospital report.
The reader will perhaps be surprised at my separating the greatest work
of Dickens, _Oliver Twist_, with honour, from the loathsome mass to
which it typically belongs. That book is an earnest and uncaricatured
record of states of criminal life, written with didactic purpose, full
of the gravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noble
passion. Even the _Mysteries of Paris_ and Gaboriau's _Crime d'Augival_
are raised, by their definiteness of historical intention and
forewarning anxiety, far above the level of their order, and may be
accepted as photographic evidence of an otherwise incredible
civilisation, corrupted in the infernal fact of it, down to the genesis
of such figures as the Vicomte d'Augival, the Stabber,[155] the
Skeleton, and the She-wolf. But the effectual head of the whole
cretinous school is the renowned novel in which the hunchbacked lover
watches the execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame; and
its strength passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for
the general market, of novels like _Poor Miss Finch_, in which the
heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found
dead with his hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions.[156]
This literature of the Prison-house, understanding by the word not only
the cell of Newgate, but also and even more definitely the cell of the
Hôtel-Dieu, the Hôpital des Fous, and the grated corridor with the
dripping slabs of the Morgue, having its central root thus in the Ile
de Paris--or historically and pre-eminently the 'Cité de Paris'--is,
when understood deeply, the precise counter-corruption of the religion
of the Sainte Chapelle, just as the worst forms of bodily and mental
ruin are the corruption of love. I have therefore called it 'Fiction
mécroyante,' with literal accuracy and precision; according to the
explanation of the word which the reader may find in any good French
dictionary,[157] and round its Arctic pole in the Morgue, he may gather
into one Caina of gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel
imagination, amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying
itself with aberration of the mind.
Aberration, palsy, or plague, observe, as distinguished from normal
evil, just as the venom of rabies or cholera differs from that of a wasp
or a viper. The life of the insect and serpent deserves, or at least
permits, our thoughts; not so, the stages of agony in the fury-driven
hound. There is some excuse, indeed, for the pathologic labour of the
modern novelist in the fact that he cannot easily, in a city population,
find a healthy mind to vivisect: but the greater part of such amateur
surgery is the struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, to
obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and colour in
healthy fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits
described exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight:
and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced
by harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the
faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled
into senseless change like the wards of a Chubb lock.
V. It is needless to insist on the vast field for this dice-cast or
card-dealt calamity which opens itself in the ignorance, money-interest,
and mean passion, of city marriage. Peasants know each other as
children--meet, as they grow up in testing labour; and if a stout
farmer's son marries a handless girl, it is his own fault. Also in the
patrician families of the field, the young people know what they are
doing, and marry a neighbouring estate, or a covetable title, with some
conception of the responsibilities they undertake. But even among these,
their season in the confused metropolis creates licentious and
fortuitous temptation before unknown; and in the lower middle orders, an
entirely new kingdom of discomfort and disgrace has been preached to
them in the doctrines of unbridled pleasure which are merely an apology
for their peculiar forms of illbreeding. It is quite curious how often
the catastrophe, or the leading interest, of a modern novel, turns upon
the want, both in maid and bachelor, of the common self-command which
was taught to their grandmothers and grandfathers as the first element
of ordinarily decent behaviour. Rashly inquiring the other day the plot
of a modern story from a female friend, I elicited, after some
hesitation, that it hinged mainly on the young people's 'forgetting
themselves in a boat;' and I perceive it to be accepted as nearly an
axiom in the code of modern civic chivalry that the strength of amiable
sentiment is proved by our incapacity on proper occasions to express,
and on improper ones to control it. The pride of a gentleman of the old
school used to be in his power of saying what he meant, and being silent
when he ought, (not to speak of the higher nobleness which bestowed love
where it was honourable, and reverence where it was due); but the
automatic amours and involuntary proposals of recent romance acknowledge
little further law of morality than the instinct of an insect, or the
effervescence of a chemical mixture.
There is a pretty little story of Alfred de Musset's,--_La Mouche_,
which, if the reader cares to glance at it, will save me further trouble
in explaining the disciplinarian authority of mere old-fashioned
politeness, as in some sort protective of higher things. It describes,
with much grace and precision, a state of society by no means
pre-eminently virtuous, or enthusiastically heroic; in which many people
do extremely wrong, and none sublimely right. But as there are heights
of which the achievement is unattempted, there are abysses to which fall
is barred; neither accident nor temptation will make any of the
principal personages swerve from an adopted resolution, or violate an
accepted principle of honour; people are expected as a matter of course
to speak with propriety on occasion, and to wait with patience when they
are bid: those who do wrong, admit it; those who do right don't boast of
it; everybody knows his own mind, and everybody has good manners.
Nor must it be forgotten that in the worst days of the self-indulgence
which destroyed the aristocracies of Europe, their vices, however
licentious, were never, in the fatal modern sense, 'unprincipled.' The
vainest believed in virtue; the vilest respected it. 'Chaque chose avait
son nom,'[158] and the severest of English moralists recognises the
accurate wit, the lofty intellect, and the unfretted benevolence, which
redeemed from vitiated surroundings the circle of d'Alembert and
Marmontel.[159]
I have said, with too slight praise, that the vainest, in those days,
'believed' in virtue. Beautiful and heroic examples of it were always
before them; nor was it without the secret significance attaching to
what may seem the least accidents in the work of a master, that Scott
gave to both his heroines of the age of revolution in England the name
of the queen of the highest order of English chivalry.[160]
It is to say little for the types of youth and maid which alone Scott
felt it a joy to imagine, or thought it honourable to portray, that they
act and feel in a sphere where they are never for an instant liable to
any of the weaknesses which disturb the calm, or shake the resolution,
of chastity and courage in a modern novel. Scott lived in a country and
time, when, from highest to lowest, but chiefly in that dignified and
nobly severe[161] middle class to which he himself belonged, a habit of
serene and stainless thought was as natural to the people as their
mountain air. Women like Rose Bradwardine and Ailie Dinmont were the
grace and guard of almost every household (God be praised that the race
of them is not yet extinct, for all that Mall or Boulevard can do), and
it has perhaps escaped the notice of even attentive readers that the
comparatively uninteresting character of Sir Walter's heroes had always
been studied among a class of youths who were simply incapable of doing
anything seriously wrong; and could only be embarrassed by the
consequences of their levity or imprudence.
But there is another difference in the woof of a Waverley novel from the
cobweb of a modern one, which depends on Scott's larger view of human
life. Marriage is by no means, in his conception of man and woman, the
most important business of their existence;[162] nor love the only
reward to be proposed to their virtue or exertion. It is not in his
reading of the laws of Providence a necessity that virtue should, either
by love or any other external blessing, be rewarded at all;[163] and
marriage is in all cases thought of as a constituent of the happiness of
life, but not as its only interest, still less its only aim. And upon
analysing with some care the motives of his principal stories, we shall
often find that the love in them is merely a light by which the sterner
features of character are to be irradiated, and that the marriage of the
hero is as subordinate to the main bent of the story as Henry the
Fifth's courtship of Katherine is to the battle of Agincourt. Nay, the
fortunes of the person who is nominally the subject of the tale are
often little more than a background on which grander figures are to be
drawn, and deeper fates forth-shadowed. The judgments between the faith
and chivalry of Scotland at Drumclog and Bothwell bridge owe little of
their interest in the mind of a sensible reader to the fact that the
captain of the Popinjay is carried a prisoner to one battle, and returns
a prisoner from the other: and Scott himself, while he watches the white
sail that bears Queen Mary for the last time from her native land, very
nearly forgets to finish his novel, or to tell us--and with small sense
of any consolation to be had out of that minor circumstance,--that
'Roland and Catherine were united, spite of their differing faiths.'
Neither let it be thought for an instant that the slight, and sometimes
scornful, glance with which Scott passes over scenes which a novelist of
our own day would have analysed with the airs of a philosopher, and
painted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicate any absence in his
heart of sympathy with the great and sacred elements of personal
happiness. An era like ours, which has with diligence and ostentation
swept its heart clear of all the passions once known as loyalty,
patriotism, and piety, necessarily magnifies the apparent force of the
one remaining sentiment which sighs through the barren chambers, or
clings inextricably round the chasms of ruin; nor can it but regard with
awe the unconquerable spirit which still tempts or betrays the
sagacities of selfishness into error or frenzy which is believed to be
love.
That Scott was never himself, in the sense of the phrase as employed by
lovers of the Parisian school, 'ivre d'amour,' may be admitted without
prejudice to his sensibility,[164] and that he never knew 'l'amor che
move 'l sol e l'altre stelle,' was the chief, though unrecognised,
calamity of his deeply chequered life. But the reader of honour and
feeling will not therefore suppose that the love which Miss Vernon
sacrifices, stooping for an instant from her horse, is of less noble
stamp, or less enduring faith, than that which troubles and degrades
the whole existence of Consuelo; or that the affection of Jeanie Deans
for the companion of her childhood, drawn like a field of soft blue
heaven beyond the cloudy wrack of her sorrow, is less fully in
possession of her soul than the hesitating and self-reproachful impulses
under which a modern heroine forgets herself in a boat, or compromises
herself in the cool of the evening.
I do not wish to return over the waste ground we have traversed,
comparing, point by point, Scott's manner with those of Bermondsey and
the Faubourgs; but it may be, perhaps, interesting at this moment to
examine, with illustration from those Waverley novels which have so
lately _re_tracted the attention of a fair and gentle public, the
universal conditions of 'style,' rightly so called, which are in all
ages, and above all local currents or wavering tides of temporary
manners, pillars of what is for ever strong, and models of what is for
ever fair.
But I must first define, and that within strict horizon, the works of
Scott, in which his perfect mind may be known, and his chosen ways
understood.
His great works of prose fiction, excepting only the first half-volume
of _Waverley_, were all written in twelve years, 1814-26 (of his own age
forty-three to fifty-five), the actual time employed in their
composition being not more than a couple of months out of each year; and
during that time only the morning hours and spare minutes during the
professional day. 'Though the first volume of _Waverley_ was begun long
ago, and actually lost for a time, yet the other two were begun and
finished between the 4th of June and the first of July, during all which
I attended my duty in court, and proceeded without loss of time or
hindrance of business.'[165]
Few of the maxims for the enforcement of which, in _Modern Painters_,
long ago, I got the general character of a lover of paradox, are more
singular, or more sure, than the statement, apparently so encouraging to
the idle, that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done
easily. But it is in that kind of ease with which a tree blossoms after
long years of gathered strength, and all Scott's great writings were the
recreations of a mind confirmed in dutiful labour, and rich with organic
gathering of boundless resource.
Omitting from our count the two minor and ill-finished sketches of the
_Black Dwarf_ and _Legend of Montrose_, and, for a reason presently to
be noticed, the unhappy _St. Ronan's_, the memorable romances of Scott
are eighteen, falling into three distinct groups, containing six each.
The first group is distinguished from the other two by characters of
strength and felicity which never more appeared after Scott was struck
down by his terrific illness in 1819. It includes _Waverley_, _Guy
Mannering_, _The Antiquary_, _Rob Roy_, _Old Mortality_, and _The Heart
of Midlothian_.
The composition of these occupied the mornings of his happiest days,
between the ages of 43 and 48. On the 8th of April, 1819 (he was 48 on
the preceding 15th of August) he began for the first time to
dictate--being unable for the exertion of writing--_The Bride of
Lammermuir_, 'the affectionate Laidlaw beseeching him to stop dictating,
when his audible suffering filled every pause. "Nay, Willie," he
answered "only see that the doors are fast. I would fain keep all the
cry as well as all the wool to ourselves; but as for giving over work,
that can only be when I am in woollen."'[166] From this time forward the
brightness of joy and sincerity of inevitable humour, which perfected
the imagery of the earlier novels, are wholly absent, except in the two
short intervals of health unaccountably restored, in which he wrote
_Redgauntlet_ and _Nigel_.
It is strange, but only a part of the general simplicity of Scott's
genius, that these revivals of earlier power were unconscious, and that
the time of extreme weakness in which he wrote _St. Ronan's Well_, was
that in which he first asserted his own restoration.
It is also a deeply interesting characteristic of his noble nature that
he never gains anything by sickness; the whole man breathes or faints
as one creature; the ache that stiffens a limb chills his heart, and
every pang of the stomach paralyses the brain. It is not so with
inferior minds, in the workings of which it is often impossible to
distinguish native from narcotic fancy, and throbs of conscience from
those of indigestion. Whether in exaltation or languor, the colours of
mind are always morbid, which gleam on the sea for the 'Ancient
Mariner,' and through the casements on 'St. Agnes' Eve;' but Scott is at
once blinded and stultified by sickness; never has a fit of the cramp
without spoiling a chapter, and is perhaps the only author of vivid
imagination who never wrote a foolish word but when he was ill.
It remains only to be noticed on this point that any strong natural
excitement, affecting the deeper springs of his heart, would at once
restore his intellectual powers in all their fullness, and that, far
towards their sunset: but that the strong will on which he prided
himself, though it could trample upon pain, silence grief, and compel
industry, never could warm his imagination, or clear the judgment in his
darker hours.
I believe that this power of the heart over the intellect is common to
all great men: but what the special character of emotion was, that alone
could lift Scott above the power of death, I am about to ask the reader,
in a little while, to observe with joyful care.
The first series of romances then, above named, are all that exhibit the
emphasis of his unharmed faculties. The second group, composed in the
three years subsequent to illness all but mortal, bear every one of them
more or less the seal of it.
They consist of the _Bride of Lammermuir_, _Ivanhoe_, the _Monastery_,
the _Abbot_, _Kenilworth_, and the _Pirate_.[167] The marks of broken
health on all these are essentially twofold--prevailing melancholy, and
fantastic improbability. Three of the tales are agonizingly tragic, the
_Abbot_ scarcely less so in its main event, and _Ivanhoe_ deeply wounded
through all its bright panoply; while even in that most powerful of the
series, the impossible archeries and axestrokes, the incredibly
opportune appearances of Locksley, the death of Ulrica, and the
resuscitation of Athelstane, are partly boyish, partly feverish. Caleb
in the _Bride_, Triptolemus and Halcro in the _Pirate_, are all
laborious, and the first incongruous; half a volume of the _Abbot_ is
spent in extremely dull detail of Roland's relations with his
fellow-servants and his mistress, which have nothing whatever to do with
the future story; and the lady of Avenel herself disappears after the
first volume, 'like a snaw wreath when it's thaw, Jeanie.' The public
has for itself pronounced on the _Monastery_, though as much too harshly
as it has foolishly praised the horrors of _Ravenswood_ and the nonsense
of _Ivanhoe_; because the modern public finds in the torture and
adventure of these, the kind of excitement which it seeks at an opera,
while it has no sympathy whatever with the pastoral happiness of
Glendearg, or with the lingering simplicities of superstition which give
historical likelihood to the legend of the White Lady.
But both this despised tale and its sequel have Scott's heart in them.
The first was begun to refresh himself in the intervals of artificial
labour on _Ivanhoe_. 'It was a relief,' he said, 'to interlay the
scenery most familiar to me[168] with the strange world for which I had
to draw so much on imagination.'[169] Through all the closing scenes of
the second he is raised to his own true level by his love for the
queen. And within the code of Scott's work to which I am about to appeal
for illustration of his essential powers, I accept the _Monastery_ and
_Abbot_, and reject from it the remaining four of this group.
The last series contains two quite noble ones, _Redgauntlet_ and
_Nigel_; two of very high value, _Durward_ and _Woodstock_; the slovenly
and diffuse _Peveril_, written for the trade; the sickly _Tales of the
Crusaders_, and the entirely broken and diseased _St. Ronan's Well_.
This last I throw out of count altogether, and of the rest, accept only
the four first named as sound work; so that the list of the novels in
which I propose to examine his methods and ideal standards, reduces
itself to these following twelve (named in order of production):
_Waverley_, _Guy Mannering_, the _Antiquary_, _Rob Roy_, _Old
Mortality_, the _Heart of Midlothian_, the _Monastery_, the _Abbot_, the
_Fortunes of Nigel_, _Quentin Durward_, and _Woodstock_.[170]
It is, however, too late to enter on my subject in this article, which I
may fitly close by pointing out some of the merely verbal
characteristics of his style, illustrative in little ways of the
questions we have been examining, and chiefly of the one which may be
most embarrassing to many readers, the difference, namely, between
character and disease.
One quite distinctive charm in the Waverleys is their modified use of
the Scottish dialect; but it has not generally been observed, either by
their imitators, or the authors of different taste who have written for
a later public, that there is a difference between the dialect of a
language, and its corruption.
A dialect is formed in any district where there are persons of
intelligence enough to use the language itself in all its fineness and
force, but under the particular conditions of life, climate, and temper,
which introduce words peculiar to the scenery, forms of word and idioms
of sentence peculiar to the race, and pronunciations indicative of their
character and disposition.
Thus 'burn' (of a streamlet) is a word possible only in a country where
there are brightly running waters, 'lassie,' a word possible only where
girls are as free as the rivulets, and 'auld,' a form of the southern
'old,' adopted by a race of finer musical ear than the English.
On the contrary, mere deteriorations, or coarse, stridulent, and, in the
ordinary sense of the phrase, 'broad' forms of utterance, are not
dialects at all, having nothing dialectic in them, and all phrases
developed in states of rude employment, and restricted intercourse, are
injurious to the tone and narrowing to the power of the language they
affect. Mere breadth of accent does not spoil a dialect as long as the
speakers are men of varied idea and good intelligence; but the moment
the life is contracted by mining, millwork, or any oppressive and
monotonous labour, the accents and phrases become debased. It is part of
the popular folly of the day to find pleasure in trying to write and
spell these abortive, crippled, and more or less brutal forms of human
speech.
Abortive, crippled, or brutal, are however not necessarily 'corrupted'
dialects. Corrupt language is that gathered by ignorance, invented by
vice, misused by insensibility, or minced and mouthed by affectation,
especially in the attempt to deal with words of which only half the
meaning is understood, or half the sound heard. Mrs. Gamp's 'aperiently
so'--and the 'undermined' with primal sense of undermine, of--I forget
which gossip, in the _Mill on the Floss_, are master- and
mistress-pieces in this latter kind. Mrs. Malaprop's 'allegories on the
banks of the Nile' are in a somewhat higher order of mistake: Miss
Tabitha Bramble's ignorance is vulgarised by her selfishness, and
Winifred Jenkins' by her conceit. The 'wot' of Noah Claypole, and the
other degradations of cockneyism (Sam Weller and his father are in
nothing more admirable than in the power of heart and sense that can
purify even these); the 'trewth' of Mr. Chadband, and 'natur' of Mr.
Squeers, are examples of the corruption of words by insensibility: the
use of the word 'bloody' in modern low English is a deeper corruption,
not altering the form of the word, but defiling the thought in it.
Thus much being understood, I shall proceed to examine thoroughly a
fragment of Scott's Lowland Scottish dialect; not choosing it of the
most beautiful kind; on the contrary, it shall be a piece reaching as
low down as he ever allows Scotch to go--it is perhaps the only unfair
patriotism in him, that if ever he wants a word or two of really
villainous slang, he gives it in English or Dutch--not Scotch.
I had intended in the close of this paper to analyse and compare the
characters of Andrew Fairservice and Richie Moniplies for examples, the
former of innate evil, unaffected by external influences, and
undiseased, but distinct from natural goodness as a nettle is distinct
from balm or lavender; and the latter of innate goodness, contracted and
pinched by circumstance, but still undiseased, as an oak-leaf crisped by
frost, not by the worm. This, with much else in my mind, I must put off;
but the careful study of one sentence of Andrew's will give us a good
deal to think of.
I take his account of the rescue of Glasgow Cathedral at the time of the
Reformation.
Ah! it's a brave kirk--nane o' yere whigmaleeries and
curliewurlies and opensteek hems about it--a' solid,
weel-jointed mason-wark, that will stand as lang as the
warld, keep hands and gunpowther aff it. It had amaist a
douncome lang syne at the Reformation, when they pu'd doun
the kirks of St. Andrews and Perth, and thereawa', to
cleanse them o' Papery, and idolatry, and image-worship, and
surplices, and sic-like rags o' the muckle hure that sitteth
on seven hills, as if ane wasna braid eneugh for her auld
hinder end. Sae the commons o' Renfrew, and o' the Barony,
and the Gorbals, and a' about, they behoved to come into
Glasgow ae fair morning, to try their hand on purging the
High Kirk o' Popish nicknackets. But the townsmen o'
Glasgow, they were feared their auld edifice might slip the
girths in gaun through siccan rough physic, sae they rang
the common bell, and assembled the train-bands wi' took o'
drum. By good luck, the worthy James Rabat was Dean o' Guild
that year--(and a gude mason he was himsell, made him the
keener to keep up the auld bigging), and the trades
assembled, and offered downright battle to the commons,
rather than their kirk should coup the crans, as others had
done elsewhere. It wasna for luve o' Paperie--na, na!--nane
could ever say that o' the trades o' Glasgow--Sae they sune
came to an agreement to take a' the idolatrous statues of
sants (sorrow be on them!) out o' their neuks--And sae the
bits o' stane idols were broken in pieces by Scripture
warrant, and flung into the Molendinar burn, and the auld
kirk stood as crouse as a cat when the flaes are kaimed aff
her, and a'body was alike pleased. And I hae heard wise folk
say, that if the same had been done in ilka kirk in
Scotland, the Reform wad just hae been as pure as it is e'en
now, and we wad hae mair Christian-like kirks; for I hae
been sae lang in England, that naething will drived out o'
my head, that the dog-kennel at Osbaldistone-Hall is better
than mony a house o' God in Scotland.
Now this sentence is in the first place a piece of Scottish history of
quite inestimable and concentrated value. Andrew's temperament
is the type of a vast class of Scottish--shall we call it
'_sow_-thistlian'--mind, which necessarily takes the view of either Pope
or saint that the thistle in Lebanon took of the cedar or lilies in
Lebanon; and the entire force of the passions which, in the Scottish
revolution, foretold and forearmed the French one, is told in this one
paragraph; the coarseness of it, observe, being admitted, not for the
sake of the laugh, any more than an onion in broth merely for its
flavour, but for the meat of it; the inherent constancy of that
coarseness being a fact in this order of mind, and an essential part of
the history to be told.
Secondly, observe that this speech, in the religious passion of it, such
as there may be, is entirely sincere. Andrew is a thief, a liar, a
coward, and, in the Fair service from which he takes his name, a
hypocrite; but in the form of prejudice, which is all that his mind is
capable of in the place of religion, he is entirely sincere. He does not
in the least pretend detestation of image worship to please his master,
or any one else; he honestly scorns the 'carnal morality[171] as dowd
and fusionless as rue-leaves at Yule' of the sermon in the upper
cathedral; and when wrapt in critical attention to the 'real savour o'
doctrine' in the crypt, so completely forgets the hypocrisy of his fair
service as to return his master's attempt to disturb him with hard
punches of the elbow.
Thirdly. He is a man of no mean sagacity, quite up to the average
standard of Scottish common sense, not a low one; and, though incapable
of understanding any manner of lofty thought or passion, is a shrewd
measurer of weaknesses, and not without a spark or two of kindly
feeling. See first his sketch of his master's character to Mr.
Hammorgaw, beginning: 'He's no a'thegither sae void o' sense, neither;'
and then the close of the dialogue: 'But the lad's no a bad lad after
a', and he needs some carefu' body to look after him.'
Fourthly. He is a good workman; knows his own business well, and can
judge of other craft, if sound, or otherwise.
All these four qualities of him must be known before we can understand
this single speech. Keeping them in mind, I take it up, word by word.
You observe, in the outset, Scott makes no attempt whatever to indicate
accents or modes of pronunciation by changed spelling, unless the word
becomes a quite definitely new and scarcely writeable one. The Scottish
way of pronouncing 'James,' for instance, is entirely peculiar, and
extremely pleasant to the ear. But it is so, just because it does _not_
change the word into Jeems, nor into Jims, nor into Jawms. A modern
writer of dialects would think it amusing to use one or other of these
ugly spellings. But Scott writes the name in pure English, knowing that
a Scots reader will speak it rightly, and an English one be wise in
letting it alone. On the other hand he writes 'weel' for 'well,' because
that word is complete in its change, and may be very closely expressed
by the double _e_. The ambiguous '_u_'s in 'gude' and 'sune' are
admitted, because far liker the sound than the double _o_ would be, and
that in 'hure,' for grace' sake, to soften the word;--so also 'flaes'
for 'fleas.' 'Mony' for 'many' is again positively right in sound, and
'neuk' differs from our 'nook' in sense, and is not the same word at
all, as we shall presently see.
Secondly, observe, not a word is corrupted in any indecent haste,
slowness, slovenliness, or incapacity of pronunciation. There is no
lisping, drawling, slobbering, or snuffling: the speech is as clear as
a bell and as keen as an arrow: and its elisions and contractions are
either melodious, ('na,' for 'not,'--'pu'd,' for 'pulled,') or as normal
as in a Latin verse. The long words are delivered without the slightest
bungling; and 'bigging' finished to its last _g_.
I take the important words now in their places.
_Brave._ The old English sense of the word in 'to go brave' retained,
expressing Andrew's sincere and respectful admiration. Had he meant to
insinuate a hint of the church's being too fine, he would have said
'braw.'
_Kirk._ This is of course just as pure and unprovincial a word as
'Kirche,' or 'église.'
_Whigmaleerie._ I cannot get at the root of this word, but it is one
showing that the speaker is not bound by classic rules, but will use any
syllables that enrich his meaning. 'Nipperty-tipperty' (of his master's
'poetry-nonsense') is another word of the same class. 'Curlieurlie' is
of course just as pure as Shakespeare's 'Hurly-burly.' But see first
suggestion of the idea to Scott at Blair-Adam (L. vi. 264).
_Opensteek hems._ More description, or better, of the later Gothic
cannot be put into four syllables. 'Steek,' melodious for stitch, has a
combined sense of closing or fastening. And note that the later Gothic,
being precisely what Scott knew best (in Melrose) and liked best, it is,
here as elsewhere, quite as much himself[172] as Frank, that he is
laughing at, when he laughs _with_ Andrew, whose 'opensteek hems' are
only a ruder metaphor for his own 'willow-wreaths changed to stone.'
_Gunpowther._ '-Ther' is a lingering vestige of the French '-dre.'
_Syne._ One of the melodious and mysterious Scottish words which have
partly the sound of wind and stream in them, and partly the range of
softened idea which is like a distance of blue hills over border land
('far in the distant Cheviot's blue'). Perhaps even the least
sympathetic 'Englisher' might recognise this, if he heard 'Old Long
Since' vocally substituted for the Scottish words to the air. I do not
know the root; but the word's proper meaning is not 'since,' but before
or after an interval of some duration, 'as weel sune as syne.' 'But
first on Sawnie gies a ca', Syne, bauldly in she enters.'
_Behoved_ (_to come_). A rich word, with peculiar idiom, always used
more or less ironically of anything done under a partly mistaken and
partly pretended notion of duty.
_Siccan._ Far prettier, and fuller in meaning than 'such.' It contains
an added sense of wonder; and means properly 'so great' or 'so unusual.'
_Took_ (_o' drum_). Classical 'tuck' from Italian 'toccata,' the
preluding 'touch' or flourish, on any instrument (but see Johnson under
word 'tucket,' quoting _Othello_). The deeper Scottish vowels are used
here to mark the deeper sound of the bass drum, as in more solemn
warning.
_Bigging._ The only word in all the sentence of which the Scottish form
is less melodious than the English, 'and what for no,' seeing that
Scottish architecture is mostly little beyond Bessie Bell's and Mary
Gray's? 'They biggit a bow're by yon burnside, and theekit it ow're wi
rashes.' But it is pure Anglo-Saxon in roots; see glossary to
Fairbairn's edition of the Douglas _Virgil_, 1710.
_Coup._ Another of the much-embracing words; short for 'upset,' but with
a sense of awkwardness as the inherent cause of fall; compare Richie
Moniplies (also for sense of 'behoved'): 'Ae auld hirplin deevil of a
potter behoved just to step in my way, and offer me a pig (earthern
pot--etym. dub.), as he said "just to put my Scotch ointment in;" and I
gave him a push, as but natural, and the tottering deevil coupit owre
amang his own pigs, and damaged a score of them.' So also Dandie Dinmont
in the postchaise: ''Od! I hope they'll no coup us.'
_The Crans._ Idiomatic; root unknown to me, but it means in this use,
full, total, and without recovery.
_Molendinar._ From 'molendinum,' the grinding-place. I do not know if
actually the local name,[173] or Scott's invention. Compare Sir
Piercie's 'Molinaras.' But at all events used here with bye-sense of
degradation of the formerly idle saints to grind at the mill.
_Crouse._ Courageous, softened with a sense of comfort.
_Ilka._ Again a word with azure distance, including the whole sense of
'each' and 'every.' The reader must carefully and reverently distinguish
these comprehensive words, which gather two or more perfectly understood
meanings into one _chord_ of meaning, and are harmonies more than words,
from the above-noted blunders between two half-hit meanings, struck as a
bad piano-player strikes the edge of another note. In English we have
fewer of these combined thoughts; so that Shakespeare rather plays with
the distinct lights of his words, than melts them into one. So again
Bishop Douglas spells, and doubtless spoke, the word 'rose,'
differently, according to his purpose; if as the chief or governing
ruler of flowers, 'rois,' but if only in her own beauty, rose.
_Christian-like._ The sense of the decency and order proper to
Christianity is stronger in Scotland than in any other country, and the
word 'Christian' more distinctly opposed to 'beast.' Hence the
back-handed cut at the English for their over-pious care of dogs.
I am a little surprised myself at the length to which this examination
of one small piece of Sir Walter's first-rate work has carried us, but
here I must end for this time, trusting, if the Editor of the
_Nineteenth Century_ permit me, yet to trespass, perhaps more than once,
on his readers' patience; but, at all events, to examine in a following
paper the technical characteristics of Scott's own style, both in prose
and verse, together with Byron's, as opposed to our fashionably recent
dialects and rhythms; the essential virtues of language, in both the
masters of the old school, hinging ultimately, little as it might be
thought, on certain unalterable views of theirs concerning the code
called 'of the Ten Commandments,' wholly at variance with the dogmas of
automatic morality which, summed again by the witches' line, 'Fair is
foul, and foul is fair,' hover through the fog and filthy air of our
prosperous England.
JOHN RUSKIN.
* * * * *
'_He hated greetings in the market-place_, and there were generally
loiterers in the streets to persecute him _either about the events of
the day_, or about some petty pieces of business.'
These lines, which the reader will find near the beginning of the
sixteenth chapter of the first volume of the _Antiquary_, contain two
indications of the old man's character, which, receiving the ideal of
him as a portrait of Scott himself, are of extreme interest to me. They
mean essentially that neither Monkbarns nor Scott had any mind to be
called of men, Rabbi, in mere hearing of the mob; and especially that
they hated to be drawn back out of their far-away thoughts, or forward
out of their long-ago thoughts, by any manner of 'daily' news, whether
printed or gabbled. Of which two vital characteristics, deeper in both
the men, (for I must always speak of Scott's creations as if they were
as real as himself,) than any of their superficial vanities, or passing
enthusiasms, I have to speak more at another time. I quote the passage
just now, because there was one piece of the daily news of the year 1815
which did extremely interest Scott, and materially direct the labour of
the latter part of his life; nor is there any piece of history in this
whole nineteenth century quite so pregnant with various instruction as
the study of the reasons which influenced Scott and Byron in their
opposite views of the glories of the battle of Waterloo.
But I quote it for another reason also. The principal greeting which Mr.
Oldbuck on this occasion receives in the market-place, being compared
with the speech of Andrew Fairservice, examined in my first paper, will
furnish me with the text of what I have mainly to say in the present
one.
'"Mr. Oldbuck," said the town-clerk (a more important person, who came
in front and ventured to stop the old gentleman), "the provost,
understanding you were in town, begs on no account that you'll quit it
without seeing him; he wants to speak to ye about bringing the water
frae the Fairwell spring through a part o' your lands."
'"What the deuce!--have they nobody's land but mine to cut and carve
on?--I won't consent, tell them."
'"And the provost," said the clerk, going on, without noticing the
rebuff, "and the council, wad be agreeable that you should hae the auld
stanes at Donagild's Chapel, that ye was wussing to hae."
'"Eh?--what?--Oho! that's another story--Well, well, I'll call upon the
provost, and we'll talk about it."
'"But ye maun speak your mind on't forthwith, Monkbarns, if ye want the
stanes; for Deacon Harlewalls thinks the carved through-stanes might be
put with advantage on the front of the new council-house--that is, the
twa cross-legged figures that the callants used to ca' Robbin and
Bobbin, ane on ilka door-cheek; and the other stane, that they ca'd
Ailie Dailie, abune the door. It will be very tastefu', the Deacon says,
and just in the style of modern Gothic."
'"Good Lord deliver me from this Gothic generation!" exclaimed the
Antiquary,--"a monument of a knight-templar on each side of a Grecian
porch, and a Madonna on the top of it!--_O crimini!_--Well, tell the
provost I wish to have the stones, and we'll not differ about the
water-course.--It's lucky I happened to come this way to-day."
'They parted mutually satisfied; but the wily clerk had most reason to
exult in the dexterity he had displayed, since the whole proposal of an
exchange between the monuments (which the council had determined to
remove as a nuisance, because they encroached three feet upon the public
road) and the privilege of conveying the water to the burgh, through the
estate of Monkbarns, was an idea which had originated with himself upon
the pressure of the moment.'
In this single page of Scott, will the reader please note the kind of
prophetic instinct with which the great men of every age mark and
forecast its destinies? The water from the Fairwell is the future
Thirlmere carried to Manchester; the 'auld stanes'[174] at Donagild's
Chapel, removed as a _nuisance_, foretell the necessary view taken by
modern cockneyism, Liberalism, and progress, of all things that remind
them of the noble dead, of their father's fame, or of their own duty;
and the public road becomes their idol, instead of the saint's shrine.
Finally, the roguery of the entire transaction--the mean man seeing the
weakness of the honourable, and 'besting' him--in modern slang, in the
manner and at the pace of modern trade--'on the pressure of the moment.'
But neither are these things what I have at present quoted the passage
for.
I quote it, that we may consider how much wonderful and various history
is gathered in the fact, recorded for us in this piece of entirely fair
fiction, that in the Scottish borough of Fairport, (Montrose, really,)
in the year 17-- of Christ, the knowledge given by the pastors and
teachers provided for its children by enlightened Scottish
Protestantism, of their fathers' history, and the origin of their
religion, had resulted in this substance and sum;--that the statues of
two crusading knights had become, to their children, Robin and Bobbin;
and the statue of the Madonna, Ailie Dailie.
A marvellous piece of history, truly: and far too comprehensive for
general comment here. Only one small piece of it I must carry forward
the readers' thoughts upon.
The pastors and teachers aforesaid, (represented typically in another
part of this errorless book by Mr. Blattergowl) are not, whatever else
they may have to answer for, answerable for these names. The names are
of the children's own choosing and bestowing, but not of the children's
own inventing. 'Robin' is a classically endearing cognomen, recording
the _errant_ heroism of old days--the name of the Bruce and of Rob Roy.
'Bobbin' is a poetical and symmetrical fulfilment and adornment of the
original phrase. 'Ailie' is the last echo of 'Ave,' changed into the
softest Scottish Christian name familiar to the children, itself the
beautiful feminine form of royal 'Louis;' the 'Dailie' again
symmetrically added for kinder and more musical endearment. The last
vestiges, you see, of honour for the heroism and religion of their
ancestors, lingering on the lips of babes and sucklings.
But what is the meaning of this necessity the children find themselves
under of completing the nomenclature rhythmically and rhymingly? Note
first the difference carefully, and the attainment of both qualities by
the couplets in question. Rhythm is the syllabic and quantitative
measure of the words, in which Robin, both in weight and time, balances
Bobbin; and Dailie holds level scale with Ailie. But rhyme is the added
correspondence of sound; unknown and undesired, so far as we can learn,
by the Greek Orpheus, but absolutely essential to, and, as special
virtue, becoming titular of, the Scottish Thomas.
The 'Ryme,'[175] you may at first fancy, is the especially childish part
of the work. Not so. It is the especially chivalric and Christian part
of it. It characterises the Christian chant or canticle, as a higher
thing than a Greek ode, melos, or hymnos, or than a Latin carmen.
Think of it, for this again is wonderful! That these children of
Montrose should have an element of music in their souls which Homer had
not,--which a melos of David the Prophet and King had not,--which
Orpheus and Amphion had not,--which Apollo's unrymed oracles became mute
at the sound of.
A strange new equity this,--melodious justice and judgment as it
were,--in all words spoken solemnly and ritualistically by Christian
human creatures;--Robin and Bobbin--by the Crusader's tomb, up to 'Dies
iræ, dies illa,' at judgment of the crusading soul.
You have to understand this most deeply of all Christian minstrels, from
first to last; that they are more musical, because more joyful, than any
others on earth: ethereal minstrels, pilgrims of the sky, true to the
kindred points of heaven and home; their joy essentially the sky-lark's,
in light, in purity; but, with their human eyes, looking for the
glorious appearing of something in the sky, which the bird cannot.
This it is that changes Etruscan murmur into Terza rima--Horatian Latin
into Provençal troubadour's melody; not, because less artful, less wise.
Here is a little bit, for instance, of French ryming just before
Chaucer's time--near enough to our own French to be intelligible to us
yet.
'O quant très-glorieuse vie,
Quant cil quit out peut et maistrie,
Veult esprouver pour nécessaire,
Ne pour quant il ne blasma mie
La vie de Marthe sa mie:
Mais il lui donna exemplaire
D'autrement vivre, et de bien plaire
A Dieu; et plut de bien à faire:
Pour se conclut-il que Marie
Qui estoit à ses piedz sans braire,
Et pensait d'entendre et de taire,
Estleut la plus saine partie.
La meilleur partie esleut-elle
Et la plus saine et la plus belle,
Qui jà ne luy sera ostée
Car par vérité se fut celle
Qui fut tousjours fresche et nouvelle,
D'aymer Dieu et d'en estre aymée;
Car jusqu'au cueur fut entamée,
Et si ardamment enflammée.
Que tous-jours ardoit l'estincelle;
Par quoi elle fut visitée
Et de Dieu premier comfortée;
Car charité est trop ysnelle.'
The only law of _metre_, observed in this song, is that each line shall
be octosyllabic:
Qui fut | tousjours | fresche et | nouvelle,
D'autre | ment vi | vret de | bien (ben) plaire,
Et pen | soit den | tendret | de taire
But the reader must note that words which were two-syllabled in Latin
mostly remain yet so in the French.
La _vi_ | -_e_ de | Marthe | sa mie,
although _mie_, which is pet language, loving abbreviation of _amica_
through _amie_, remains monosyllabic. But _vie_ elides its _e_ before a
vowel:
Car Mar- | the me | nait vie | active
Et Ma- | ri-e | contemp | lative;
and custom endures many exceptions. Thus _Marie_ may be three-syllabled
as above, or answer to _mie_ as a dissyllable; but _vierge_ is always, I
think, dissyllabic, _vier-ge_, with even stronger accent on the -_ge_,
for the Latin -_go_.
Then, secondly, of quantity, there is scarcely any fixed law. The metres
may be timed as the minstrel chooses--fast or slow--and the iambic
current checked in reverted eddy, as the words chance to come.
But, thirdly, there is to be rich ryming and chiming, no matter how
simply got, so only that the words jingle and tingle together with due
art of interlacing and answering in different parts of the stanza,
correspondent to the involutions of tracery and illumination. The whole
twelve-line stanza is thus constructed with two rymes only, six of each,
thus arranged:
AAB | AAB | BBA | BBA |
dividing the verse thus into four measures, reversed in ascent and
descent, or _descant_ more properly; and doubtless with correspondent
phases in the voice-given, and duly accompanying, or following, music;
Thomas the Rymer's own precept, that 'tong is chefe in mynstrelsye,'
being always kept faithfully in mind.[176]
Here then you have a sufficient example of the pure chant of the
Christian ages; which is always at heart joyful, and divides itself into
the four great forms, Song of Praise, Song of Prayer, Song of Love, and
Song of Battle; praise, however, being the keynote of passion through
all the four forms; according to the first law which I have already
given in the laws of Fesolé; 'all great Art is Praise,' of which the
contrary is also true, all foul or miscreant Art is accusation, [Greek:
diabolê]: 'She gave me of the tree and I did eat' being an entirely
museless expression on Adam's part, the briefly essential contrary of
Love-song.
With these four perfect forms of Christian chant, of which we may take
for pure examples the 'Te Deum,' the 'Te Lucis Ante,' the 'Amor che
nella mente,'[177] and the 'Chant de Roland,' are mingled songs of
mourning, of Pagan origin (whether Greek or Danish), holding grasp still
of the races that have once learned them, in times of suffering and
sorrow; and songs of Christian humiliation or grief, regarding chiefly
the sufferings of Christ, or the conditions of our own sin: while
through the entire system of these musical complaints are interwoven
moralities, instructions, and related histories, in illustration of
both, passing into Epic and Romantic verse, which gradually, as the
forms and learnings of society increase, becomes less joyful, and more
didactic, or satiric, until the last echoes of Christian joy and melody
vanish in the 'Vanity of human wishes.'
And here I must pause for a minute or two to separate the different
branches of our inquiry clearly from one another. For one thing, the
reader must please put for the present out of his head all thought of
the progress of 'civilisation'--that is to say, broadly, of the
substitution of wigs for hair, gas for candles, and steam for legs. This
is an entirely distinct matter from the phases of policy and religion.
It has nothing to do with the British Constitution, or the French
Revolution, or the unification of Italy. There are, indeed, certain
subtle relations between the state of mind, for instance, in Venice,
which makes her prefer a steamer to a gondola, and that which makes her
prefer a gazetteer to a duke; but these relations are not at all to be
dealt with until we solemnly understand that whether men shall be
Christians and poets, or infidels and dunces, does not depend on the way
they cut their hair, tie their breeches, or light their fires. Dr.
Johnson might have worn his wig in fulness conforming to his dignity,
without therefore coming to the conclusion that human wishes were vain;
nor is Queen Antoinette's civilised hair-powder, as opposed to Queen
Bertha's savagely loose hair, the cause of Antoinette's laying her head
at last in scaffold dust, but Bertha in a pilgrim-haunted tomb.
Again, I have just now used the words 'poet' and 'dunce,' meaning the
degree of each quality possible to average human nature. Men are
eternally divided into the two classes of poet (believer, maker, and
praiser) and dunce (or unbeliever, unmaker, and dispraiser). And in
process of ages they have the power of making faithful and formative
creatures of themselves, or unfaithful and _de_formative. And this
distinction between the creatures who, blessing, are blessed, and
evermore _benedicti_, and the creatures who, cursing, are cursed, and
evermore _maledicti_, is one going through all humanity; antediluvian in
Cain and Abel, diluvian in Ham and Shem. And the question for the public
of any given period is not whether they are a constitutional or
unconstitutional vulgus, but whether they are a benignant or malignant
vulgus. So also, whether it is indeed the gods who have given any
gentleman the grace to despise the rabble, depends wholly on whether it
is indeed the rabble, or he, who are the malignant persons.
But yet again. This difference between the persons to whom Heaven,
according to Orpheus, has granted 'the hour of delight,'[178] and those
whom it has condemned to the hour of detestableness, being, as I have
just said, of all times and nations,--it is an interior and more
delicate difference which we are examining in the gift of _Christian_,
as distinguished from unchristian, song. Orpheus, Pindar, and Horace are
indeed distinct from the prosaic rabble, as the bird from the snake; but
between Orpheus and Palestrina, Horace and Sidney, there is another
division, and a new power of music and song given to the humanity which
has hope of the Resurrection.
_This_ is the root of all life and all rightness in Christian harmony,
whether of word or instrument; and so literally, that in precise manner
as this hope disappears, the power of song is taken away, and taken away
utterly. When the Christian falls back out of the bright hope of the
Resurrection, even the Orpheus song is forbidden him. Not to have known
the hope is blameless: one may sing, unknowing, as the swan, or
Philomela. But to have known and fall away from it, and to declare that
the human wishes, which are summed in that one--'Thy kingdom come'--are
vain! The Fates ordain there shall be no singing after that denial.
For observe this, and earnestly. The old Orphic song, with its dim hope
of yet once more Eurydice,--the Philomela song--granted after the cruel
silence,--the Halcyon song--with its fifteen days of peace, were all
sad, or joyful only in some vague vision of conquest over death. But the
Johnsonian vanity of wishes is on the whole satisfactory to
Johnson--accepted with gentlemanly resignation by Pope--triumphantly and
with bray of penny trumpets and blowing of steam-whistles, proclaimed
for the glorious discovery of the civilised ages, by Mrs. Barbauld, Miss
Edgeworth, Adam Smith, and Co. There is no God, but have we not
invented gunpowder?--who wants a God, with that in his pocket?[179]
There is no Resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but have we not
paper and pens, and cannot every blockhead print his opinions, and the
Day of Judgment become Republican, with everybody for a judge, and the
flat of the universe for the throne? There is no law, but only
gravitation and congelation, and we are stuck together in an everlasting
hail, and melted together in everlasting mud, and great was the day in
which our worships were born. And there is no Gospel, but only, whatever
we've got, to get more, and, wherever we are, to go somewhere else. And
are not these discoveries, to be sung of, and drummed of, and fiddled
of, and generally made melodiously indubitable in the eighteenth century
song of praise?
The Fates will not have it so. No word of song is possible, in that
century, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententious
pentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enough
without dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping,
suddenly Astræa returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort,
and there bursts out a song at last again, a most curtly melodious
triplet of Amphisbænic ryme. '_Ça ira._'
Amphisbænic, fanged in each ryme with fire, and obeying Ercildoune's
precept, 'Tong is chefe of mynstrelsye,' to the syllable.--Don
Giovanni's hitherto fondly chanted 'Andiam, andiam,' become suddenly
impersonal and prophetic: IT shall go, and you also. A cry--before it is
a song, then song and accompaniment together--perfectly done; and the
march 'towards the field of Mars. The two hundred and fifty
thousand--they to the sound of stringed music--preceded by young girls
with tricolor streamers, they have shouldered soldier-wise their shovels
and picks, and with one throat are singing _Ça ira_.'[180]
Through all the springtime of 1790, 'from Brittany to Burgundy, on most
plains of France, under most city walls, there march and
constitutionally wheel to the Ça-iraing mood of fife and drum--our clear
glancing phalanxes;--the song of the two hundred and fifty thousand,
virgin led, is in the long light of July.' Nevertheless, another song is
yet needed, for phalanx, and for maid. For, two springs and summers
having gone--amphisbænic,--on the 28th of August 1792, 'Dumouriez rode
from the camp of Maulde, eastwards to _Sedan_.'[181]
And Longwi has fallen basely, and Brunswick and the Prussian king will
beleaguer Verdun, and Clairfait and the Austrians press deeper in over
the northern marches, Cimmerian Europe behind. And on that same night
Dumouriez assembles council of war at his lodgings in Sedan. Prussians
here, Austrians there, triumphant both. With broad highway to Paris and
little hindrance--_we_ scattered, helpless here and there--what to
advise? The generals advise retreating, and retreating till Paris be
sacked at the latest day possible. Dumouriez, silent, dismisses
_them_,--keeps only, with a sign, Thouvenot. Silent, thus, when needful,
yet having voice, it appears, of what musicians call tenor-quality, of a
rare kind. Rubini-esque, even, but scarcely producible to fastidious
ears at opera. The seizure of the forest of Argonne follows--the
cannonade of Valmy. The Prussians do not march on Paris _this_ time, the
autumnal hours of fate pass on--_ça ira_--and on the 6th of November,
Dumouriez meets the Austrians also. 'Dumouriez wide-winged, they
wide-winged--at and around Jemappes, its green heights fringed and maned
with red fire. And Dumouriez is swept back on this wing and swept back
on that, and is like to be swept back utterly, when he rushes up in
person, speaks a prompt word or two, and then, with clear tenor-pipe,
uplifts the hymn of the Marseillaise, ten thousand tenor or bass pipes
joining, or say some forty thousand in all, for every heart leaps up at
the sound; and so, with rhythmic march melody, they rally, they advance,
they rush death-defying, and like the fire whirlwind sweep all manner of
Austrians from the scene of action.' Thus, through the lips of
Dumouriez, sings Tyrtæus, Rouget de Lisle,[182] 'Aux armes--marchons!'
Iambic measure with a witness! in what wide strophe here beginning--in
what unthought-of antistrophe returning to that council chamber in
Sedan!
While these two great songs were thus being composed, and sung, and
danced to in cometary cycle, by the French nation, here in our less
giddy island there rose, amidst hours of business in Scotland and of
idleness in England, three troubadours of quite different temper.
Different also themselves, but not opponent; forming a perfect chord,
and adverse all the three of them alike to the French musicians, in this
main point--that while the _Ça ira_ and Marseillaise were essentially
songs of blame and wrath, the British bards wrote, virtually, always
songs of praise, though by no means psalmody in the ancient keys. On the
contrary, all the three are alike moved by a singular antipathy to the
priests, and are pointed at with fear and indignation by the pietists,
of their day;--not without latent cause. For they are all of them, with
the most loving service, servants of that world which the Puritan and
monk alike despised; and, in the triple chord of their song, could not
but appear to the religious persons around them as respectively and
specifically the praisers--Scott of the world, Burns of the flesh, and
Byron of the devil.
To contend with this carnal orchestra, the religious world, having long
ago rejected its Catholic Psalms as antiquated and unscientific, and
finding its Puritan melodies sunk into faint jar and twangle from their
native trumpet-tone, had nothing to oppose but the innocent, rather than
religious, verses of the school recognised as that of the English
Lakes; very creditable to them; domestic at once and refined; observing
the errors of the world outside of the Lakes with a pitying and tender
indignation, and arriving in lacustrine seclusion at many valuable
principles of philosophy, as pure as the tarns of their mountains, and
of corresponding depth.[183]
I have lately seen, and with extreme pleasure, Mr. Matthew Arnold's
arrangement of Wordsworth's poems; and read with sincere interest his
high estimate of them. But a great poet's work never needs arrangement
by other hands; and though it is very proper that Silver How should
clearly understand and brightly praise its fraternal Rydal Mount, we
must not forget that, over yonder, are the Andes, all the while.
Wordsworth's rank and scale among poets were determined by himself, in a
single exclamation:--
'What was the great Parnassus' self to thee,
Mount Skiddaw?'
Answer his question faithfully, and you have the relation between the
great masters of the Muse's teaching, and the pleasant fingerer of his
pastoral flute among the reeds of Rydal.
Wordsworth is simply a Westmoreland peasant, with considerably less
shrewdness than most border Englishmen or Scotsmen inherit; and no sense
of humour: but gifted (in this singularly) with vivid sense of natural
beauty, and a pretty turn for reflections, not always acute, but, as far
as they reach, medicinal to the fever of the restless and corrupted life
around him. Water to parched lips may be better than Samian wine, but do
not let us therefore confuse the qualities of wine and water. I much
doubt there being many inglorious Miltons in our country churchyards;
but I am very sure there are many Wordsworths resting there, who were
inferior to the renowned one only in caring less to hear themselves
talk.
With an honest and kindly heart, a stimulating egoism, a wholesome
contentment in modest circumstances, and such sufficient ease, in that
accepted state, as permitted the passing of a good deal of time in
wishing that daisies could see the beauty of their own shadows, and
other such profitable mental exercises, Wordsworth has left us a series
of studies of the graceful and happy shepherd life of our lake country,
which to me personally, for one, are entirely sweet and precious; but
they are only so as the mirror of an existent reality in many ways more
beautiful than its picture.
But the other day I went for an afternoon's rest into the cottage of one
of our country people of old statesman class; cottage lying nearly
midway between two village churches, but more conveniently for downhill
walk towards one than the other. I found, as the good housewife made tea
for me, that nevertheless she went up the hill to church. 'Why do not
you go to the nearer church?' I asked. 'Don't you like the clergyman?'
'Oh no, sir,' she answered, 'it isn't that; but you know I couldn't
leave my mother.' 'Your mother! she is buried at H---- then?' 'Yes, sir;
and you know I couldn't go to church anywhere else.'
That feelings such as these existed among the peasants, not of
Cumberland only, but of all the tender earth that gives forth her fruit
for the living, and receives her dead to peace, might perhaps have been,
to our great and endless comfort, discovered before now, if Wordsworth
had been content to tell us what he knew of his own villages and people,
not as the leader of a new and only correct school of poetry, but simply
as a country gentleman of sense and feeling, fond of primroses, kind to
the parish children, and reverent of the spade with which Wilkinson had
tilled his lands: and I am by no means sure that his influence on the
stronger minds of his time was anywise hastened or extended by the
spirit of tunefulness under whose guidance he discovered that heaven
rhymed to seven, and Foy to boy.
Tuneful nevertheless at heart, and of the heavenly choir, I gladly and
frankly acknowledge him; and our English literature enriched with a new
and a singular virtue in the aërial purity and healthful rightness of
his quiet song;--but _aërial_ only,--not ethereal; and lowly in its
privacy of light.
A measured mind, and calm; innocent, unrepentant; helpful to sinless
creatures and scatheless, such of the flock as do not stray. Hopeful at
least, if not faithful; content with intimations of immortality such as
may be in skipping of lambs, and laughter of children,--incurious to see
in the hands the print of the Nails.
A gracious and constant mind; as the herbage of its native hills,
fragrant and pure;--yet, to the sweep and the shadow, the stress and
distress, of the greater souls of men, as the tufted thyme to the laurel
wilderness of Tempe,--as the gleaming euphrasy to the dark branches of
Dodona.
* * * * *
[I am obliged to defer the main body of this paper to next
month,--revises penetrating all too late into my lacustrine seclusion;
as chanced also unluckily with the preceding paper, in which the reader
will perhaps kindly correct the consequent misprints, p. 29, l. 20, of
'scarcely' to 'securely,' and p. 31, l. 34, 'full,' with comma, to
'fall,' without one; noticing besides that _Redgauntlet_ has been
omitted in the italicised list, p. 25, l. 16; and that the reference to
note 2 should not be at the word 'imagination,' p. 24, but at the word
'trade,' p. 25, l. 7. My dear old friend, Dr. John Brown, sends me, from
Jamieson's _Dictionary_, the following satisfactory end to one of my
difficulties:--'Coup the crans.' The language is borrowed from the
'cran,' or trivet on which small pots are placed in cookery, which is
sometimes turned with its feet uppermost by an awkward assistant. Thus
it signifies to be _completely_ upset.]
JOHN RUSKIN.
[BYRON.]
'Parching summer hath no warrant
To consume this crystal well;
Rains, that make each brook a torrent,
Neither sully it, nor swell.'
So was it, year by year, among the unthought-of hills. Little Duddon and
child Rotha ran clear and glad; and laughed from ledge to pool, and
opened from pool to mere, translucent, through endless days of peace.
But eastward, between her orchard plains, Loire locked her embracing
dead in silent sands; dark with blood rolled Iser; glacial-pale,
Beresina-Lethe, by whose shore the weary hearts forgot their people, and
their father's house.
Nor unsullied, Tiber; nor unswoln, Arno and Aufidus; and Euroclydon high
on Helle's wave; meantime, let our happy piety glorify the garden rocks
with snowdrop circlet, and breathe the spirit of Paradise, where life is
wise and innocent.
Maps many have we, now-a-days clear in display of earth constituent, air
current, and ocean tide. Shall we ever engrave the map of meaner
research, whose shadings shall content themselves in the task of showing
the depth, or drought,--the calm, or trouble, of Human Compassion?
For this is indeed all that is noble in the life of Man, and the source
of all that is noble in the speech of Man. Had it narrowed itself then,
in those days, out of all the world, into this peninsula between
Cockermouth and Shap?
Not altogether so; but indeed the _Vocal_ piety seemed conclusively to
have retired (or excursed?) into that mossy hermitage, above Little
Langdale. The _Un_vocal piety, with the uncomplaining sorrow, of Man,
may have had a somewhat wider range, for aught we know: but history
disregards those items; and of firmly proclaimed and sweetly canorous
religion, there really seemed at that juncture none to be reckoned upon,
east of Ingleborough, or north of Criffel. Only under Furness Fells, or
by Bolton Priory, it seems we can still write Ecclesiastical Sonnets,
stanzas on the force of Prayer, Odes to Duty, and complimentary
addresses to the Deity upon His endurance for adoration. Far otherwise,
over yonder, by Spezzia Bay, and Ravenna Pineta, and in ravines of
Hartz. There, the softest voices speak the wildest words; and Keats
discourses of Endymion, Shelley of Demogorgon, Goethe of Lucifer, and
Bürger of the Resurrection of Death unto Death--while even Puritan
Scotland and Episcopal Anglia produce for us only these three minstrels
of doubtful tone, who show but small respect for the 'unco guid,' put
but limited faith in gifted Gilfillan, and translate with unflinching
frankness the _Morgante Maggiore_.[184]
Dismal the aspect of the spiritual world, or at least the sound of it,
might well seem to the eyes and ears of Saints (such as we had) of the
period--dismal in angels' eyes also assuredly! Yet is it possible that
the dismalness in angelic sight may be otherwise quartered, as it were,
from the way of mortal heraldry; and that seen, and heard, of
angels,--again I say--hesitatingly--_is_ it possible that the goodness
of the Unco Guid, and the gift of Gilfillan, and the word of Mr.
Blattergowl, may severally not have been the goodness of God, the gift
of God, nor the word of God: but that in the much blotted and broken
efforts at goodness, and in the careless gift which they themselves
despised,[185] and in the sweet ryme and murmur of their unpurposed
words, the Spirit of the Lord had, indeed, wandering, as in chaos days
on lightless waters, gone forth in the hearts and from the lips of those
other three strange prophets, even though they ate forbidden bread by
the altar of the poured-out ashes, and even though the wild beast of the
desert found them, and slew.
This, at least, I know, that it had been well for England, though all
her other prophets, of the Press, the Parliament, the Doctor's chair,
and the Bishop's throne, had fallen silent; so only that she had been
able to understand with her heart here and there the simplest line of
these, her despised.
I take one at mere chance:
'Who thinks of self, when gazing on the sky?'[186]
Well, I don't know; Mr. Wordsworth certainly did, and observed, with
truth, that its clouds took a sober colouring in consequence of his
experiences. It is much if, indeed, this sadness be unselfish, and our
eyes _have_ kept loving watch o'er Man's Mortality. I have found it
difficult to make any one now-a-days believe that such sobriety can be;
and that Turner saw deeper crimson than others in the clouds of Goldau.
But that any should yet think the clouds brightened by Man's
_Im_mortality instead of dulled by his death,--and, gazing on the sky,
look for the day when every eye must gaze also--for behold, He cometh
with the clouds--this it is no more possible for Christian England to
apprehend, however exhorted by her gifted and guid.
'But Byron was not thinking of such things!'--He, the reprobate! how
should such as he think of Christ?
Perhaps not wholly as you or I think of Him. Take, at chance, another
line or two, to try:
'Carnage (so Wordsworth tells you) is God's daughter;[187]
If _he_ speak truth, she is Christ's sister, and
Just now, behaved as in the Holy Land.'
Blasphemy, cry you, good reader? Are you sure you understand it? The
first line I gave you was easy Byron--almost shallow Byron--these are of
the man in his depth, and you will not fathom them, like a tarn,--nor in
a hurry.
'Just now behaved as in the Holy Land.' How _did_ Carnage behave in the
Holy Land then? You have all been greatly questioning, of late, whether
the sun, which you find to be now going out, ever stood still. Did you
in any lagging minute, on those scientific occasions, chance to reflect
what he was bid stand still _for_? or if not--will you please look--and
what, also, going forth again as a strong man to run his course, he saw,
rejoicing?
'Then Joshua passed from Makkedah unto Libnah--and fought against
Libnah. And the Lord delivered it and the king thereof into the hand of
Israel, and he smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls
that were therein.' And from Lachish to Eglon, and from Eglon to
Kirjath-Arba, and Sarah's grave in the Amorites' land, 'and Joshua smote
all the country of the hills and of the south--and of the vale and of
the springs, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly
destroyed all that breathed--as the Lord God of Israel commanded.'
Thus 'it is written:' though you perhaps do not so often hear _these_
texts preached from, as certain others about taking away the sins of the
world. I wonder how the world would like to part with them! hitherto it
has always preferred parting first with its Life--and God has taken it
at its word. But Death is not _His_ Begotten Son, for all that; nor is
the death of the innocent in battle carnage His 'instrument for working
out a pure intent' as Mr. Wordsworth puts it; but Man's instrument for
working out an impure one, as Byron would have you to know. Theology
perhaps less orthodox, but certainly more reverent;--neither is the
Woolwich Infant a Child of God; neither does the iron-clad 'Thunderer'
utter thunders of God--which facts, if you had had the grace or sense to
learn from Byron, instead of accusing him of blasphemy, it had been
better at this day for _you_, and for many a savage soul also, by Euxine
shore, and in Zulu and Afghan lands.
It was neither, however, for the theology, nor the use, of these lines
that I quoted them; but to note this main point of Byron's own
character. He was the first great Englishman who felt the cruelty of
war, and, in its cruelty, the shame. Its guilt had been known to George
Fox--its folly shown practically by Penn. But the _compassion_ of the
pious world had still for the most part been shown only in keeping its
stock of Barabbases unhanged if possible: and, till Byron came, neither
Kunersdorf, Eylau, nor Waterloo, had taught the pity and the pride of
men that
'The drying up a single tear has more
Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.'[188]
Such pacific verse would not indeed have been acceptable to the
Edinburgh volunteers on Portobello sands. But Byron can write a battle
song too, when it is _his_ cue to fight. If you look at the introduction
to the _Isles of Greece_, namely the 85th and 86th stanzas of the 3rd
canto of _Don Juan_,--you will find--what will you _not_ find, if only
you understand them! 'He' in the first line, remember, means the typical
modern poet.
'Thus usually, when he was asked to sing,
He gave the different nations something national.
'Twas all the same to him--"God save the King"
Or "Ça ira" according to the fashion all;
His muse made increment of anything
From the high lyric down to the low rational:
If Pindar sang horse races, what should hinder
Himself from being as pliable as Pindar?
'In France, for instance, he would write a chanson;
In England a six-canto quarto tale;
In Spain, he'd make a ballad or romance on
The last war--much the same in Portugal;
In Germany, the Pegasus he'd prance on
Would be old Goethe's--(see what says de Staël)
In Italy he'd ape the 'Trecentisti;'
In Greece, he'd sing some sort of hymn like this t' ye.
Note first here, as we did in Scott, the concentrating and foretelling
power. The 'God Save the Queen' in England, fallen hollow now, as the
'Ça ira' in France--not a man in France knowing where either France or
'that' (whatever 'that' may be) is going to; nor the Queen of England
daring, for her life, to ask the tiniest Englishman to do a single thing
he doesn't like;--nor any salvation, either of Queen or Realm, being any
more possible to God, unless under the direction of the Royal Society:
then, note the estimate of height and depth in poetry, swept in an
instant, 'high lyric to low rational.' Pindar to Pope (knowing Pope's
height, too, all the while, no man better); then, the poetic power of
France--resumed in a word--Béranger; then the cut at Marmion, entirely
deserved, as we shall see, yet kindly given, for everything he names in
these two stanzas is the best of its kind; then Romance in Spain on--the
_last_ war, (_present_ war not being to Spanish poetical taste), then,
Goethe the real heart of all Germany, and last, the aping of the
Trecentisti which has since consummated itself in Pre-Raphaelitism! that
also being the best thing Italy has done through England, whether in
Rossetti's 'blessed damozels' or Burne Jones's 'days of creation.'
Lastly comes the mock at himself--the modern English Greek--(followed up
by the 'degenerate into hands like mine' in the song itself); and
then--to amazement, forth he thunders in his Achilles voice. We have had
one line of him in his clearness--five of him in his depth--sixteen of
him in his play. Hear now but these, out of his whole heart:--
'What,--silent yet? and silent _all_?
Ah no, the voices of the dead
Sound like a distant torrent's fall,
And answer, "Let _one_ living head,
But one, arise--we come--we come:"
--'Tis but the living who are dumb.'
Resurrection, this, you see like Bürger's; but not of death unto death.
'Sound like a distant torrent's fall.' I said the _whole_ heart of Byron
was in this passage. First its compassion, then its indignation, and the
third element, not yet examined, that love of the beauty of this world
in which the three--unholy--children, of its Fiery Furnace were like to
each other; but Byron the widest-hearted. Scott and Burns love Scotland
more than Nature itself: for Burns the moon must rise over Cumnock
Hills,--for Scott, the Rymer's glen divide the Eildons; but, for Byron,
Loch-na-Gar _with Ida_, looks o'er Troy, and the soft murmurs of the Dee
and the Bruar change into voices of the dead on distant Marathon.
Yet take the parallel from Scott, by a field of homelier rest:--
'And silence aids--though the steep hills
Send to the lake a thousand rills;
In summer tide, so soft they weep,
The sound but lulls the ear asleep;
Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude,
So stilly is the solitude.
Naught living meets the eye or ear,
But well I ween the dead are near;
For though, in feudal strife, a foe
Hath laid our Lady's Chapel low,
Yet still beneath the hallowed soil,
The peasant rests him from his toil,
And, dying, bids his bones be laid
Where erst his simple fathers prayed.'
And last take the same note of sorrow--with Burns's finger on the fall
of it:
'Mourn, ilka grove the cushat kens,
Ye hazly shaws and briery dens,
Ye burnies, wimplin' down your glens
Wi' toddlin' din,
Or foamin' strang wi' hasty stens
Frae lin to lin.'
As you read, one after another, these fragments of chant by the great
masters, does not a sense come upon you of some element in their
passion, no less than in their sound, different, specifically, from that
of 'Parching summer hath no warrant'? Is it more profane, think you--or
more tender--nay, perhaps, in the core of it, more true?
For instance, when we are told that
'Wharfe, as he moved along,
To matins joined a mournful voice,'
is this disposition of the river's mind to pensive psalmody quite
logically accounted for by the previous statement (itself by no means
rhythmically dulcet,) that
'The boy is in the arms of Wharfe,
And strangled by a merciless force'?
Or, when we are led into the improving reflection,
'How sweet were leisure, could it yield no more
Then 'mid this wave-washed churchyard to recline,
From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine!'
--is the divinity of the extract assured to us by its being made at
leisure, and in a reclining attitude--as compared with the meditations
of otherwise active men, in an erect one? Or are we perchance, many of
us, still erring somewhat in our notions alike of Divinity and
Humanity,--poetical extraction, and moral position?
On the chance of its being so, might I ask hearing for just a few words
more of the school of Belial?
Their occasion, it must be confessed, is a quite unjustifiable one. Some
very wicked people--mutineers, in fact--have retired, misanthropically,
into an unfrequented part of the country, and there find themselves
safe, indeed, but extremely thirsty. Whereupon Byron thus gives them to
drink:
'A little stream came tumbling from the height
And straggling into ocean as it might.
Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray
And gushed from cliff to crag with saltless spray,
Close on the wild wide ocean,--yet as pure
And fresh as Innocence; and more secure.
Its silver torrent glittered o'er the deep
As the shy chamois' eye o'erlooks the steep,
While, far below, the vast and sullen swell
Of ocean's Alpine azure rose and fell.'[189]
Now, I beg, with such authority as an old workman may take concerning
his trade, having also looked at a waterfall or two in my time, and not
unfrequently at a wave, to assure the reader that here _is_ entirely
first-rate literary work. Though Lucifer himself had written it, the
thing is itself good, and not only so, but unsurpassably good, the
closing line being probably the best concerning the sea yet written by
the race of the sea-kings.
But Lucifer himself _could_ not have written it; neither any servant of
Lucifer. I do not doubt but that most readers were surprised at my
saying, in the close of my first paper, that Byron's 'style' depended in
any wise on his views respecting the Ten Commandments. That so
all-important a thing as 'style' should depend in the least upon so
ridiculous a thing as moral sense: or that Allegra's father, watching
her drive by in Count G.'s coach and six, had any remnant of so
ridiculous a thing to guide,--or check,--his poetical passion, may alike
seem more than questionable to the liberal and chaste philosophy of the
existing British public. But, first of all, putting the question of who
writes, or speaks, aside, do you, good reader, _know_ good 'style' when
you get it? Can you say, of half-a-dozen given lines taken anywhere out
of a novel, or poem, or play, That is good, essentially, in style, or
bad, essentially? and can you say why such half-dozen lines are good, or
bad?
I imagine that in most cases, the reply would be given with hesitation,
yet if you will give me a little patience, and take some accurate pains,
I can show you the main tests of style in the space of a couple of
pages.
I take two examples of absolutely perfect, and in manner highest, _i.
e._ kingly, and heroic, style: the first example in expression of anger,
the second of love.
(1) 'We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us,
His present, and your pains, we thank you for.
When we have match'd our rackets to these balls,
We will in France, by God's grace, play a set,
Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.'
(2) 'My gracious Silence, hail!
Would'st thou have laughed, had I come coffin'd home
That weep'st to see me triumph? Ah, my dear,
Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear,
And mothers that lack sons.'
Let us note, point by point, the conditions of greatness common to both
these passages, so opposite in temper.
A. Absolute command over all passion, however intense; this the
first-of-first conditions, (see the King's own sentence just before, 'We
are no tyrant, but a Christian King, Unto _whose grace_ our passion is
as subject As are our wretches fettered in our prisons'); and with this
self-command, the supremely surveying grasp of every thought that is to
be uttered, before its utterance; so that each may come in its exact
place, time, and connection. The slightest hurry, the misplacing of a
word, or the unnecessary accent on a syllable, would destroy the 'style'
in an instant.
B. Choice of the fewest and simplest words that can be found in the
compass of the language, to express the thing meant: these few words
being also arranged in the most straightforward and intelligible way;
allowing inversion only when the subject can be made primary without
obscurity; thus, 'his present, and your pains, we thank you for' is
better than 'we thank you for his present and your pains,' because the
Dauphin's gift is by courtesy put before the Ambassador's pains; but
'when to these balls our rackets we have matched' would have spoiled the
style in a moment, because--I was going to have said, ball and racket
are of equal rank, and therefore only the natural order proper; but also
here the natural order is the desired one, the English racket to have
precedence of the French ball. In the fourth line the 'in France' comes
first, as announcing the most important resolution of action; the 'by
God's grace' next, as the only condition rendering resolution possible;
the detail of issue follows with the strictest limit in the final word.
The King does not say 'danger,' far less 'dishonour,' but 'hazard' only;
of _that_ he is, humanly speaking, sure.
C. Perfectly emphatic and clear utterance of the chosen words; slowly
in the degree of their importance, with omission however of every word
not absolutely required; and natural use of the familiar contractions of
final dissyllable. Thus, 'play a set shall strike' is better than 'play
a set _that_ shall strike,' and 'match'd' is kingly short--no necessity
could have excused 'matched' instead. On the contrary, the three first
words, 'We are glad,' would have been spoken by the king more slowly and
fully than any other syllables in the whole passage, first pronouncing
the kingly 'we' at its proudest, and then the 'are' as a continuous
state, and then the 'glad,' as the exact contrary of what the
ambassadors expected him to be.[190]
D. Absolute spontaneity in doing all this, easily and necessarily as the
heart beats. The king _cannot_ speak otherwise than he does--nor the
hero. The words not merely come to them, but are compelled to them. Even
lisping numbers 'come,' but mighty numbers are ordained, and inspired.
E. Melody in the words, changeable with their passion fitted to it
exactly and the utmost of which the language is capable--the melody in
prose being Eolian and variable--in verse, nobler by submitting itself
to stricter law. I will enlarge upon this point presently.
F. Utmost spiritual contents in the words; so that each carries not only
its instant meaning, but a cloudy companionship of higher or darker
meaning according to the passion--nearly always indicated by metaphor:
'play a set'--sometimes by abstraction--(thus in the second passage
'silence' for silent one) sometimes by description instead of direct
epithet ('coffined' for dead) but always indicative of there being more
in the speaker's mind than he has said, or than he can say, full though
his saying be. On the quantity of this attendant fulness depends the
majesty of style; that is to say, virtually, on the quantity of
contained thought in briefest words, such thought being primarily loving
and true: and this the sum of all--that nothing can be well said, but
with truth, nor beautifully, but by love.
These are the essential conditions of noble speech in prose and verse
alike, but the adoption of the form of verse, and especially rymed
verse, means the addition to all these qualities of one more; of music,
that is to say, not Eolian merely, but Apolline; a construction or
architecture of words fitted and befitting, under external laws of time
and harmony.
When Byron says 'rhyme is of the rude,'[191] he means that Burns needs
it,--while Henry the Fifth does not, nor Plato, nor Isaiah--yet in this
need of it by the simple, it becomes all the more religious: and thus
the loveliest pieces of Christian language are all in ryme--the best of
Dante, Chaucer, Douglas, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney.
I am not now able to keep abreast with the tide of modern scholarship;
(nor, to say the truth, do I make the effort, the first edge of its
waves being mostly muddy, and apt to make a shallow sweep of the shore
refuse:) so that I have no better book of reference by me than the
confused essay on the antiquity of ryme at the end of Turner's
_Anglo-Saxons_. I cannot however conceive a more interesting piece of
work, if not yet done, than the collection of sifted earliest fragments
known of rymed song in European languages. Of Eastern I know nothing;
but, this side Hellespont, the substance of the matter is all given in
King Canute's impromptu
'Gaily (or is it sweetly?--I forget which, and it's no matter)
sang the monks of Ely,
As Knut the king came sailing by;'
much to be noted by any who make their religion lugubrious, and their
Sunday the eclipse of the week. And observe further, that if Milton does
not ryme, it is because his faculty of Song was concerning Loss,
chiefly; and he has little more than faculty of Croak, concerning Gain;
while Dante, though modern readers never go further with him than into
the Pit, is stayed only by Casella in the ascent to the Rose of Heaven.
So, Gibbon can write in _his_ manner the Fall of Rome; but Virgil, in
_his_ manner, the rise of it; and finally Douglas, in _his_ manner,
bursts into such rymed passion of praise both of Rome and Virgil, as
befits a Christian Bishop, and a good subject of the Holy See.
'Master of Masters--sweet source, and springing well,
Wide where over all ringes thy heavenly bell;
* * * *
Why should I then with dull forehead and vain,
With rude ingene, and barane, emptive brain,
With bad harsh speech, and lewit barbare tongue
Presume to write, where thy sweet bell is rung,
Or counterfeit thy precious wordis dear?
Na, na--not so; but kneel when I them hear.
But farther more--and lower to descend
Forgive me, Virgil, if I thee offend
Pardon thy scolar, suffer him to ryme
Since _thou_ wast but ane mortal man sometime.'
'Before honour is humility.' Does not clearer light come for you on that
law after reading these nobly pious words? And note you _whose_
humility? How is it that the sound of the bell comes so instinctively
into his chiming verse? This gentle singer is the son of--Archibald
Bell-the-Cat!
And now perhaps you can read with right sympathy the scene in _Marmion_
between his father and King James.
'His hand the monarch sudden took--
Now, by the Bruce's soul,
Angus, my hasty speech forgive,
For sure as doth his spirit live
As he said of the Douglas old
I well may say of you,--
That never king did subject hold,
In speech more free, in war more bold,
More tender and more true:
And while the king his hand did strain
The old man's tears fell down like rain.'
I believe the most infidel of scholastic readers can scarcely but
perceive the relation between the sweetness, simplicity, and melody of
expression in these passages, and the gentleness of the passions they
express, while men who are not scholastic, and yet are true scholars,
will recognise further in them that the simplicity of the educated is
lovelier than the simplicity of the rude. Hear next a piece of Spenser's
teaching how rudeness itself may become more beautiful even by its
mistakes, if the mistakes are made lovingly.
'Ye shepherds' daughters that dwell on the green,
Hye you there apace;
Let none come there but that virgins been
To adorn her grace:
And when you come, whereas she in place,
See that your rudeness do not you disgrace;
Bind your fillets fast,
And gird in your waste,
For more fineness, with a taudry lace.'
'Bring hither the pink and purple cullumbine
With gylliflowers;
Bring coronatiöns, and sops in wine,
Worn of paramours;
Strow me the ground with daffadowndillies
And cowslips, and kingcups, and loved lilies;
The pretty paunce
And the chevisaunce
Shall match with the fair flowre-delice.'[192]
Two short pieces more only of master song, and we have enough to test
all by.
(2) 'No more, no more, since thou art dead,
Shall we e'er bring coy brides to bed,
No more, at yearly festivals,
We cowslip balls
Or chains of columbines shall make,
For this or that occasion's sake.
No, no! our maiden pleasures be
Wrapt in thy winding-sheet with thee.'[193]
(3) 'Death is now the phoenix rest,
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest.
Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she:
Truth and beauty buried be.'[194]
If now, with the echo of these perfect verses in your mind, you turn to
Byron, and glance over, or recall to memory, enough of him to give means
of exact comparison, you will, or should, recognise these following
kinds of mischief in him. First, if any one offends him--as for instance
Mr. Southey, or Lord Elgin--'his manners have not that repose that marks
the caste,' &c. _This_ defect in his Lordship's style, being myself
scrupulously and even painfully reserved in the use of vituperative
language, I need not say how deeply I deplore.[195]
Secondly. In the best and most violet-bedded bits of his work there is
yet, as compared with Elizabethan and earlier verse, a strange taint;
and indefinable--evening flavour of Covent Garden, as it were;--not to
say, escape of gas in the Strand. That is simply what it proclaims
itself--London air. If he had lived all his life in Green-head Ghyll,
things would of course have been different. But it was his fate to come
to town--modern town--like Michael's son; and modern London (and Venice)
are answerable for the state of their drains, not Byron.
Thirdly. His melancholy is without any relief whatsoever; his jest
sadder than his earnest; while, in Elizabethan work, all lament is full
of hope, and all pain of balsam.
Of this evil he has himself told you the cause in a single line,
prophetic of all things since and now. 'Where _he_ gazed, a gloom
pervaded space.'[196]
So that, for instance, while Mr. Wordsworth, on a visit to town, being
an exemplary early riser, could walk, felicitous, on Westminster Bridge,
remarking how the city now did like a garment wear the beauty of the
morning; Byron, rising somewhat later, contemplated only the garment
which the beauty of the morning had by that time received for wear from
the city: and again, while Mr. Wordsworth, in irrepressible religious
rapture, calls God to witness that the houses seem asleep, Byron, lame
demon as he was, flying smoke-drifted, unroofs the houses at a glance,
and sees what the mighty cockney heart of them contains in the still
lying of it, and will stir up to purpose in the waking business of it,
'The sordor of civilisation, mixed
With all the passions which Man's fall hath fixed.'[197]
Fourthly, with this steadiness of bitter melancholy, there is joined a
sense of the material beauty, both of inanimate nature, the lower
animals, and human beings, which in the iridescence, colour-depth, and
morbid (I use the word deliberately) mystery and softness of it,--with
other qualities indescribable by any single words, and only to be
analysed by extreme care,--is found, to the full, only in five men that
I know of in modern times; namely Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Turner, and
myself,--differing totally and throughout the entire group of us, from
the delight in clear-struck beauty of Angelico and the Trecentisti; and
separated, much more singularly, from the cheerful joys of Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Scott, by its unaccountable affection for 'Rokkes blak'
and other forms of terror and power, such as those of the ice-oceans,
which to Shakespeare were only Alpine rheum; and the Via Malas and
Diabolic Bridges which Dante would have condemned none but lost souls to
climb, or cross;--all this love of impending mountains, coiled
thunder-clouds, and dangerous sea, being joined in us with a sulky,
almost ferine, love of retreat in valleys of Charmettes, gulphs of
Spezzia, ravines of Olympus, low lodgings in Chelsea, and close
brushwood at Coniston.
And, lastly, also in the whole group of us, glows volcanic instinct of
Astræan justice returning not to, but up out of, the earth, which will
not at all suffer us to rest any more in Pope's serene 'whatever is, is
right;' but holds, on the contrary, profound conviction that about
ninety-nine hundredths of whatever at present is, is wrong: conviction
making four of us, according to our several manners, leaders of
revolution for the poor, and declarers of political doctrine monstrous
to the ears of mercenary mankind; and driving the fifth, less sanguine,
into mere painted-melody of lament over the fallacy of Hope and the
implacableness of Fate.
In Byron the indignation, the sorrow, and the effort are joined to the
death: and they are the parts of his nature (as of mine also in its
feebler terms), which the selfishly comfortable public have, literally,
no conception of whatever; and from which the piously sentimental
public, offering up daily the pure emotion of divine tranquillity,
shrink with anathema not unembittered by alarm.
Concerning which matters I hope to speak further and with more precise
illustration in my next paper; but, seeing that this present one has
been hitherto somewhat sombre, and perhaps, to gentle readers, not a
little discomposing, I will conclude it with a piece of light biographic
study, necessary to my plan, and as conveniently admissible in this
place as afterwards;--namely, the account of the manner in which
Scott--whom we shall always find, as aforesaid, to be in salient and
palpable elements of character, of the World, worldly, as Burns is of
the Flesh, fleshly, and Byron of the Deuce, damnable,--spent his Sunday.
As usual, from Lockhart's farrago we cannot find out the first thing we
want to know,--whether Scott worked after his week-day custom, on the
Sunday morning. But, I gather, not; at all events his household and his
cattle rested (L. iii. 108). I imagine he walked out into his woods, or
read quietly in his study. Immediately after breakfast, whoever was in
the house, 'Ladies and gentlemen, I shall read prayers at eleven, when I
expect you all to attend' (vii. 306). Question of college and other
externally unanimous prayers settled for us very briefly: 'if you have
no faith, have at least manners.' He read the Church of England service,
lessons and all, the latter, if interesting, eloquently (_ibid._). After
the service, one of Jeremy Taylor's sermons (vi. 188). After the sermon,
if the weather was fine, walk with his family, dogs included and guests,
to _cold_ picnic (iii. 109), followed by short extempore biblical
novelettes; for he had his Bible, the Old Testament especially, by
heart, it having been his mother's last gift to him (vi. 174). These
lessons to his children in Bible history were always given, whether
there was picnic or not. For the rest of the afternoon he took his
pleasure in the woods with Tom Purdie, who also always appeared at his
master's elbow on Sunday after dinner was over, and drank long life to
the laird and his lady and all the good company, in a quaigh of whiskey
or a tumbler of wine, according to his fancy (vi. 195). Whatever might
happen on the other evenings of the week, Scott always dined at home on
Sunday; and with old friends: never, unless inevitably, receiving any
person with whom he stood on ceremony (v. 335). He came into the room
rubbing his hands like a boy arriving at home for the holidays, his
Peppers and Mustards gambolling about him, 'and even the stately Maida
grinning and wagging his tail with sympathy.' For the usquebaugh of the
less honoured week-days, at the Sunday board he circulated the champagne
briskly during dinner, and considered a pint of claret each man's fair
share afterwards (v. 339). In the evening, music being to the Scottish
worldly mind indecorous, he read aloud some favourite author, for the
amusement or edification of his little circle. Shakespeare it might be,
or Dryden,--Johnson, or Joanna Baillie,--Crabbe, or Wordsworth. But in
those days 'Byron was pouring out his spirit fresh and full, and if a
new piece from _his_ hand had appeared, it was _sure to be read by Scott
the Sunday evening afterwards_; and that with such delighted emphasis as
showed how completely the elder bard had kept up his enthusiasm for
poetry at pitch of youth, and all his admiration of genius, free, pure,
and unstained by the least drop of literary jealousy' (v. 341).
With such necessary and easily imaginable varieties as chanced in having
Dandy Dinmont or Captain Brown for guests at Abbotsford, or Colonel
Mannering, Counsellor Pleydell, and Dr. Robertson in Castle Street, such
was Scott's habitual Sabbath: a day, we perceive, of eating the fat,
(_dinner_, presumably not cold, being a work of necessity and
mercy--thou also, even thou, Saint Thomas of Trumbull, hast thine!) and
drinking the sweet, abundant in the manner of Mr. Southey's cataract of
Lodore,--'Here it comes, sparkling.' A day bestrewn with coronatiöns and
sops in wine; deep in libations to good hope and fond memory; a day of
rest to beast, and mirth to man, (as also to sympathetic beasts that can
be merry,) and concluding itself in an Orphic hour of delight,
signifying peace on Tweedside, and goodwill to men, there or far
away;--always excepting the French, and Boney.
'Yes, and see what it all came to in the end.'
Not so, dark-virulent Minos-Mucklewrath; the end came of quite other
things: of _these_, came such length of days and peace as Scott had in
his Fatherland, and such immortality as he has in all lands.
Nathless, firm, though deeply courteous, rebuke, for his sometimes
overmuch light-mindedness, was administered to him by the more grave and
thoughtful Byron. For the Lord Abbot of Newstead knew his Bible by heart
as well as Scott, though it had never been given him by his mother as
her dearest possession. Knew it, and, what was more, had thought of it,
and sought in it what Scott had never cared to think, nor been fain to
seek.
And loving Scott well, and always doing him every possible pleasure in
the way he sees to be most agreeable to him--as, for instance,
remembering with precision, and writing down the very next morning,
every blessed word that the Prince Regent had been pleased to say of him
before courtly audience,--he yet conceived that such cheap ryming as his
own _Bride of Abydos_, for instance, which he had written from beginning
to end in four days, or even the travelling reflections of Harold and
Juan on men and women, were scarcely steady enough Sunday afternoon's
reading for a patriarch-Merlin like Scott. So he dedicates to him a work
of a truly religious tendency, on which for his own part he has done his
best,--the drama of _Cain_. Of which dedication the virtual significance
to Sir Walter might be translated thus. Dearest and last of Border
soothsayers, thou hast indeed told us of Black Dwarfs, and of White
Maidens, also of Grey Friars, and Green Fairies; also of sacred hollies
by the well, and haunted crooks in the glen. But of the bushes that the
black dogs rend in the woods of Phlegethon; and of the crooks in the
glen, and the bickerings of the burnie where ghosts meet the mightiest
of us; and of the black misanthrope, who is by no means yet a dwarfed
one, and concerning whom wiser creatures than Hobbie Elliot may
tremblingly ask 'Gude guide us, what's yon?' hast thou yet known, seeing
that thou hast yet told, _nothing_.
Scott may perhaps have his answer. We shall in good time hear.
JOHN RUSKIN
FOOTNOTES:
[154] Nell, in the _Old Curiosity Shop_, was simply killed for the
market, as a butcher kills a lamb (see Forster's _Life_), and Paul was
written under the same conditions of illness which affected Scott--a
part of the ominous palsies, grasping alike author and subject, both in
_Dombey_ and _Little Dorrit_.
[155] Chourineur' not striking with dagger-point, but ripping with
knife-edge. Yet I do him, and La Louve, injustice in classing them with
the two others; they are put together only as parts in the same
phantasm. Compare with La Louve, the strength of wild virtue in the
'Louvécienne' (Lucienne) of Gaboriau--she, province-born and bred; and
opposed to Parisian civilisation in the character of her sempstress
friend. 'De ce Paris, où elle était née, elle savait tout--elle
connaissait tout. Rien ne l'étonnait, nul ne l'intimidait. Sa science
des détails matériels de l'existence était inconcevable. Impossible de
la duper!--Eh bien! cette fille si laborieuse et si économe n'avait même
pas la plus vague notion des sentiments qui sont l'honneur de la femme.
Je n'avais pas idée d'une si complète absence de sens moral; d'une si
inconsciente dépravation, d'une impudence si effrontément
naïve.'--_L'Argent des autres_, vol. i. p. 358.
[156] The reader who cares to seek it may easily find medical evidence
of the physical effects of certain states of brain disease in producing
especially images of truncated and Hermes-like deformity, complicated
with grossness. Horace, in the _Epodes_, scoffs at it, but not without
horror. Luca Signorelli and Raphael in their arabesques are deeply
struck by it: Durer, defying and playing with it alternately, is almost
beaten down again and again in the distorted faces, hewing halberts, and
suspended satyrs of his arabesques round the polyglot Lord's Prayer; it
takes entire possession of Balzac in the _Contes Drolatiques_; it struck
Scott in the earliest days of his childish 'visions' intensified by the
axe-stroke murder of his grand aunt; L. i. 142, and see close of this
note. It chose for him the subject of the _Heart of Midlothian_, and
produced afterwards all the recurrent ideas of executions, tainting
_Nigel_, almost spoiling _Quentin Durward_--utterly the _Fair Maid of
Perth_: and culminating in _Bizarro_, L. x. 149. It suggested all the
deaths by falling, or sinking, as in delirious sleep--Kennedy, Eveline
Neville (nearly repeated in Clara Mowbray), Amy Robsart, the Master of
Ravenswood in the quicksand, Morris, and Corporal Grace-be-here--compare
the dream of Gride, in _Nicholas Nickleby_, and Dickens's own last
words, _on the ground_, (so also, in my own inflammation of the brain,
two years ago, I dreamed that I fell through the earth and came out on
the other side). In its grotesque and distorting power, it produced all
the figures of the Lay Goblin, Pacolet, Flibbertigibbet, Cockledemoy,
Geoffrey Hudson, Fenella, and Nectabanus; in Dickens it in like manner
gives Quilp, Krook, Smike, Smallweed, Miss Mowcher, and the dwarfs and
wax-work of Nell's caravan; and runs entirely wild in _Barnaby Rudge_,
where, with a _corps de drame_ composed of one idiot, two madmen, a
gentleman fool who is also a villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a
blackguard, a hangman, a shrivelled virago, and a doll in
ribands--carrying this company through riot and fire, till he hangs the
hangman, one of the madmen, his mother, and the idiot, runs the
gentleman-fool through in a bloody duel, and burns and crushes the
shop-boy fool into shapelessness, he cannot yet be content without
shooting the spare lover's leg off, and marrying him to the doll in a
wooden one; the shapeless shop-boy being finally also married in _two_
wooden ones. It is this mutilation, observe, which is the very sign
manual of the plague; joined, in the artistic forms of it, with a love
of thorniness--(in their mystic root, the truncation of the limbless
serpent and the spines of the dragon's wing. Compare _Modern Painters_,
vol. iv., 'Chapter on the Mountain Gloom,' s. 19); and in _all_ forms of
it, with petrifaction or loss of power by cold in the blood, whence the
last Darwinian process of the witches' charm--'cool it with a baboon's
_blood_, _then_ the charm is firm and good.' The two frescoes in the
colossal handbills which have lately decorated the streets of London
(the baboon with the mirror, and the Maskelyne and Cooke decapitation)
are the final English forms of Raphael's arabesque under this influence;
and it is well worth while to get the number for the week ending April
3, 1880, of _Young Folks_--'A magazine of instructive and entertaining
literature for boys and girls of all ages,' containing 'A Sequel to
Desdichado' (the modern development of Ivanhoe), in which a quite
monumental example of the kind of art in question will be found as a
leading illustration of this characteristic sentence, "See, good
Cerberus," said Sir Rupert, "_my hand has been struck off. You must make
me a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can make it grasp a
dagger._" The text is also, as it professes to be, instructive; being
the ultimate degeneration of what I have above called the 'folly' of
_Ivanhoe_; for folly begets folly down, and down; and whatever Scott and
Turner did wrong has thousands of imitators--their wisdom none will so
much as hear, how much less follow!
In both of the Masters, it is always to be remembered that the evil and
good are alike conditions of literal _vision_: and therefore also,
inseparably connected with the state of the health. I believe the first
elements of all Scott's errors were in the milk of his consumptive
nurse, which all but killed him as an infant, L. i. 19--and was without
doubt the cause of the teething fever that ended in his lameness (L. i.
20). Then came (if the reader cares to know what I mean by Fors, let him
read the page carefully) the fearful accidents to his only sister, and
her death, L. i. 17; then the madness of his nurse, who planned his own
murder (21), then the stories continually told him of the executions at
Carlisle (24), his aunt's husband having seen them; issuing, he himself
scarcely knows how, in the unaccountable terror that came upon him at
the sight of statuary, 31--especially Jacob's ladder; then the murder of
Mrs. Swinton, and finally the nearly fatal bursting of the blood vessel
at Kelso, with the succeeding nervous illness, 65-67--solaced, while he
was being 'bled and blistered till he had scarcely a pulse left,' by
that history of the Knights of Malta--fondly dwelt on and realised by
actual modelling of their fortress, which returned to his mind for the
theme of its last effort in passing away.
[157] 'Se dit par dénigrement, d'un chrétien qui ne croit pas les dogmes
de sa religion.'--Fleming, vol. ii. p. 659.
[158] 'A son nom,' properly. The sentence is one of Victor Cherbuliez's,
in _Prosper Randoce_, which is full of other valuable ones. See the old
nurse's 'ici bas les choses vont de travers, comme un chien qui va à
vêpres, p. 93; and compare Prosper's treasures, 'la petite Vénus, et le
petit Christ d'ivoire,' p. 121; also Madame Brehanne's request for the
divertissement of 'quelque belle batterie à coups de couteau' with
Didier's answer. 'Hélas! madame, vous jouez de malheur, ici dans la
Drôme, l'on se massacre aussi peu que possible,' p. 33.
[159] Edgeworth's _Tales_ (Hunter, 1827), 'Harrington and Ormond,' vol.
iii. p. 260.
[160] Alice of Salisbury, Alice Lee, Alice Bridgnorth.
[161] Scott's father was habitually ascetic. 'I have heard his son tell
that it was common with him, if any one observed that the soup was good,
to taste it again, and say, "Yes--it is too good, bairns," and dash a
tumbler of cold water into his plate.'--Lockhart's _Life_ (Black,
Edinburgh, 1869), vol. i. p. 312. In other places I refer to this book
in the simple form of 'L.'
[162] A young lady sang to me, just before I copied out this page for
press, a Miss Somebody's 'great song,' 'Live, and Love, and Die.' Had it
been written for nothing better than silkworms, it should at least have
added--Spin.
[163] See passage of introduction to _Ivanhoe_, wisely quoted in L. vi.
106.
[164] See below, note, p. 25, on the conclusion of _Woodstock_.
[165] L. iv. 177.
[166] L. vi. 67.
[167] 'One other such novel, and there's an end; but who can last for
ever? who ever lasted so long?'--Sydney Smith (of the _Pirate_) to
Jeffrey, December 30, 1821. (_Letters_, vol. ii. p. 223.)
[168] L. vi. p. 188. Compare the description of Fairy Dean, vii. 192.
[169] All, alas! were now in a great measure so written. _Ivanhoe_, _The
Monastery_, _The Abbot_ and _Kenilworth_ were all published between
December 1819 and January 1821, Constable & Co. giving five thousand
guineas for the remaining copyright of them, Scott clearing ten thousand
before the bargain was completed; and before the _Fortunes of Nigel_
issued from the press Scott had exchanged instruments and received his
bookseller's bills for no less than four 'works of fiction,' not one of
them otherwise described in the deeds of agreement, to be produced in
unbroken succession, _each of them to fill up at least three volumes,
but with proper saving clauses as to increase of copy money in case any
of them should run to four_; and within two years all this anticipation
had been wiped off by _Peveril of the Peak_, _Quentin Durward_, _St.
Ronan's Well_, and _Redgauntlet_.
[170] _Woodstock_ was finished 26th March 1826. He knew then of his
ruin; and wrote in bitterness, but not in weakness. The closing pages
are the most beautiful of the book. But a month afterwards Lady Scott
died; and he never wrote glad word more.
[171] Compare Mr. Spurgeon's not unfrequent orations on the same
subject.
[172] There are three definite and intentional portraits of himself, in
the novels, each giving a separate part of himself: Mr. Oldbuck, Frank
Osbaldistone, and Alan Fairford.
[173] Andrew knows Latin, and might have coined the word in his conceit;
but, writing to a kind friend in Glasgow, I find the brook was called
'Molyndona' even before the building of the Sub-dean Mill in 1446. See
also account of the locality in Mr. George's admirable volume, _Old
Glasgow_, pp. 129, 149, &c. The Protestantism of Glasgow, since throwing
that powder of saints into her brook Kidron, has presented it with other
pious offerings; and my friend goes on to say that the brook, once famed
for the purity of its waters (much used for bleaching), 'has for nearly
a hundred years been a crawling stream of loathsomeness. It is now
bricked over, and a carriage way made on the top of it; underneath the
foul mess still passes through the heart of the city, till it falls into
the Clyde close to the harbour.'
[174] The following fragments out of the letters in my own possession,
written by Scott to the builder of Abbotsford, as the outer decorations
of the house were in process of completion, will show how accurately
Scott had pictured himself in Monkbarns.
'Abbotsford: April 21, 1817.
'Dear Sir,--Nothing can be more obliging than your attention to the old
stones. You have been as true as the sundial itself.' [The sundial had
just been erected.] 'Of the two I would prefer the larger one, as it is
to be in front of a parapet quite in the old taste. But in case of
accidents it will be safest in your custody till I come to town again on
the 12th of May. Your former favours (which were weighty as acceptable)
have come safely out here, and will be disposed of with great effect.'
'Abbotsford: July 30.
'I fancy the Tolbooth still keeps its feet, but, as it must soon
descend, I hope you will remember me. I have an important use for the
niche above the door; and though many a man has got a niche _in_ the
Tolbooth by building, I believe I am the first that ever got a niche out
of it on such an occasion. For which I have to thank your kindness, and
to remain very much your obliged humble servant,
'WALTER SCOTT.'
'August 16.
'My dear Sir,--I trouble you with this [_sic_] few lines to thank you
for the very accurate drawings and measurements of the Tolbooth door,
and for your kind promise to attend to my interest and that of
Abbotsford in the matter of the Thistle and Fleur de Lis. Most of our
scutcheons are now mounted, and look very well, as the house is
something after the model of an old hall (not a castle), where such
things are well in character.' [Alas--Sir Walter, Sir Walter!] 'I intend
the old lion to predominate over a well which the children have
christened the Fountain of the Lions. His present den, however,
continues to be the hall at Castle Street.'
'September 5.
'Dear Sir,--I am greatly obliged to you for securing the stone. I am not
sure that I will put up the gate quite in the old form, but I would like
to secure the means of doing so. The ornamental stones are now put up,
and have a very happy effect. If you will have the kindness to let me
know when the Tolbooth door comes down, I will send in my carts for the
stones; I have an admirable situation for it. I suppose the door itself'
[he means, the wooden one] 'will be kept for the new jail; if not, and
not otherwise wanted, I would esteem it curious to possess it. Certainly
I hope so many sore hearts will not pass through the celebrated door
when in my possession as heretofore.'
* * * * *
'September 8.
'I should esteem it very fortunate if I could have the door also, though
I suppose it is modern, having been burned down at the time of
Porteous-mob.
'I am very much obliged to the gentlemen who thought these remains of
the Heart of Midlothian are not ill bestowed on their intended
possessor.'
[175] Henceforward, not in affectation, but for the reader's better
convenience, I shall continue to spell 'Ryme' without our wrongly added
_h_.
[176] L. ii. 278.
[177] 'Che nella mente mia _ragiona_.' Love--you observe, the highest
_Reasonableness_, instead of French _ivresse_, or even Shakespearian
'mere folly'; and Beatrice as the Goddess of Wisdom in this third song
of the _Convito_, to be compared with the Revolutionary Goddess of
Reason; remembering of the whole poem chiefly the line:--
'Costei penso chi che mosso l'universo.'
(See Lyell's _Canzoniere_, p. 104.)
[178] [Greek: hôran tês terpsios]--Plato, _Laws_, ii., Steph. 669.
'Hour' having here nearly the power of 'Fate' with added sense of being
a daughter of Themis.
[179] 'Gunpowder is one of the greatest inventions of modern times, _and
what has given such a superiority to civilised nations over barbarous_'!
(_Evenings at Home_--fifth evening.) No man can owe more than I both to
Mrs. Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth; and I only wish that in the substance
of what they wisely said, they had been more listened to. Nevertheless,
the germs of all modern conceit and error respecting manufacture and
industry, as rivals to Art and to Genius, are concentrated in '_Evenings
at Home_' and '_Harry and Lucy_'--being all the while themselves works
of real genius, and prophetic of things that have yet to be learned and
fulfilled. See for instance the paper, 'Things by their Right Names,'
following the one from which I have just quoted (The Ship), and closing
the first volume of the old edition of the _Evenings_.
[180] Carlyle, _French Revolution_ (Chapman, 1869), vol. ii. p. 70;
conf. p. 25, and the _Ça ira_ at Arras, vol. iii. p. 276.
[181] _Ibid._ iii. 26.
[182] Carlyle, _French Revolution_, iii. 106, the last sentence altered
in a word or two.
[183] I have been greatly disappointed, in taking soundings of our most
majestic mountain pools, to find them, in no case, verge on the
unfathomable.
[184] 'It must be put by the original, stanza for stanza, and verse for
verse; and you will see what was permitted in a Catholic country and a
bigoted age to Churchmen, on the score of Religion--and so tell those
buffoons who accuse me of attacking the Liturgy.
'I write in the greatest haste, it being the hour of the Corso, and I
must go and buffoon with the rest. My daughter Allegra is just gone with
the Countess G. in Count G.'s coach and six. Our old Cardinal is dead,
and the new one not appointed yet--but the masquing goes on the same.'
(Letter to Murray, 355th in Moore, dated Ravenna, Feb. 7, 1828.) 'A
dreadfully moral place, for you must not look at anybody's wife, except
your neighbour's.'
[185] See quoted _infra_ the mock, by Byron, of himself and all other
modern poets, _Juan_, canto iii. stanza 86, and compare canto xiv.
stanza 8. In reference of future quotations the first numeral will stand
always for canto; the second for stanza; the third, if necessary, for
line.
[186] _Island_, ii. 16, where see context.
[187] _Juan_, viii. 5; but, by your Lordship's quotation, Wordsworth
says 'instrument'--not 'daughter.' Your Lordship had better have said
'Infant' and taken the Woolwich authorities to witness: only Infant
would not have rymed.
[188] _Juan_, viii. 3; compare 14 and 63, with all its lovely context
61--68: then 82, and afterwards slowly and with thorough attention, the
Devil's speech, beginning, 'Yes, Sir, you forget' in scene 2 of _The
Deformed Transformed_: then Sardanapalus's, act i. scene 2, beginning
'he is gone, and on his finger bears my signet,' and finally, the
_Vision of Judgment_, stanzas 3 to 5.
[189] _Island_, iii. 3, and compare, of shore surf, the 'slings its high
flakes, shivered into sleet' of stanza 7.
[190] A modern editor--of whom I will not use the expressions which
occur to me--finding the 'we' a redundant syllable in the iambic line,
prints 'we're.' It is a little thing--but I do not recollect, in the
forty years of my literary experience, any piece of editor's retouch
quite so base. But I don't read the new editions much; that must be
allowed for.
[191] _Island_, ii. 5. I was going to say, 'Look to the context.' but am
fain to give it here; for the stanza, learned by heart, ought to be our
school-introduction to the literature of the world.
'Such was this ditty of Tradition's days,
Which to the dead a lingering fame conveys
In song, where fame as yet hath left no sign
Beyond the sound whose charm is half divine;
Which leaves no record to the sceptic eye,
But yields young history all to harmony;
A boy Achilles, with the centaur's lyre
In hand, to teach him to surpass his sire.
For one long-cherish'd ballad's simple stave
Rung from the rock, or mingled with the wave,
Or from the bubbling streamlet's grassy side,
Or gathering mountain echoes as they glide,
Hath greater power o'er each true heart and ear,
Than all the columns Conquest's minions rear;
Invites, when hieroglyphics are a theme
For sages' labours or the student's dream;
Attracts, when History's volumes are a toil--
The first, the freshest bud of Feeling's soil.
Such was this rude rhyme--rhyme is of the rude,
But such inspired the Norseman's solitude,
Who came and conquer'd; such, wherever rise
Lands which no foes destroy or civilise,
Exist; and what can our accomplish'd art
Of verse do more than reach the a waken'd heart?'
[192] _Shepherd's Calendar._ 'Coronatiön,' loyal-pastoral for Carnation;
'sops in wine,' jolly-pastoral for double pink; 'paunce,' thoughtless
pastoral for pansy; 'chevisaunce' I don't know, (not in Gerarde);
'flowre-delice'--pronounce dellice--half made up of 'delicate' and
'delicious.'
[193] Herrick, _Dirge for Jephthah's Daughter_.
[194] _Passionate Pilgrim._
[195] In this point, compare the _Curse of Minerva_ with the _Tears of
the Muses_.
[196] 'He,'--Lucifer; (_Vision of Judgment_, 24). It is precisely
because Byron was _not_ his servant, that he could see the gloom. To the
Devil's true servants, their Master's presence brings both cheerfulness
and prosperity;--with a delightful sense of their own wisdom and virtue;
and of the 'progress' of things in general:--in smooth sea and fair
weather,--and with no need either of helm touch, or oar toil: as when
once one is well within the edge of Maelstrom.
[197] _Island_, ii. 4; perfectly orthodox theology, you observe; no
denial of the fall,--nor substitution of Bacterian birth for it. Nay,
nearly Evangelical theology, in contempt for the human heart; but with
deeper than Evangelical humility, acknowledging also what is sordid in
its civilisation.
THE
ELEMENTS OF DRAWING
IN
THREE LETTERS TO BEGINNERS
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN BY THE AUTHOR
PREFACE.
It may perhaps be thought, that in prefacing a Manual of Drawing, I
ought to expatiate on the reasons why drawing should be learned; but
those reasons appear to me so many and so weighty, that I cannot quickly
state or enforce them. With the reader's permission, as this volume is
too large already, I will waive all discussion respecting the importance
of the subject, and touch only on those points which may appear
questionable in the method of its treatment.
In the first place, the book is not calculated for the use of children
under the age of twelve or fourteen. I do not think it advisable to
engage a child in any but the most voluntary practice of art. If it has
talent for drawing, it will be continually scrawling on what paper it
can get; and should be allowed to scrawl at its own free will, due
praise being given for every appearance of care, or truth, in its
efforts. It should be allowed to amuse itself with cheap colours almost
as soon as it has sense enough to wish for them. If it merely daubs the
paper with shapeless stains, the colour-box may be taken away till it
knows better: but as soon as it begins painting red coats on soldiers,
striped flags to ships, etc., it should have colours at command; and,
without restraining its choice of subject in that imaginative and
historical art, of a military tendency, which children delight in,
(generally quite as valuable, by the way, as any historical art
delighted in by their elders,) it should be gently led by the parents to
try to draw, in such childish fashion as may be, the things it can see
and likes,--birds, or butterflies, or flowers, or fruit. In later
years, the indulgence of using the colour should only be granted as a
reward, after it has shown care and progress in its drawings with
pencil. A limited number of good and amusing prints should always be
within a boy's reach: in these days of cheap illustration he can hardly
possess a volume of nursery tales without good woodcuts in it, and
should be encouraged to copy what he likes best of this kind; but should
be firmly restricted to a _few_ prints and to a few books. If a child
has many toys, it will get tired of them and break them; if a boy has
many prints he will merely dawdle and scrawl over them; it is by the
limitation of the number of his possessions that his pleasure in them is
perfected, and his attention concentrated. The parents need give
themselves no trouble in instructing him, as far as drawing is
concerned, beyond insisting upon economical and neat habits with his
colours and paper, showing him the best way of holding pencil and rule,
and, so far as they take notice of his work, pointing out where a line
is too short or too long, or too crooked, when compared with the copy;
_accuracy_ being the first and last thing they look for. If the child
shows talent for inventing or grouping figures, the parents should
neither check, nor praise it. They may laugh with it frankly, or show
pleasure in what it has done, just as they show pleasure in seeing it
well, or cheerful; but they must not praise it for being clever, any
more than they would praise it for being stout. They should praise it
only for what costs it self-denial, namely attention and hard work;
otherwise they will make it work for vanity's sake, and always badly.
The best books to put into its hands are those illustrated by George
Cruikshank or by Richter. (See Appendix.) At about the age of twelve or
fourteen, it is quite time enough to set youth or girl to serious work;
and then this book will, I think, be useful to them; and I have good
hope it may be so, likewise, to persons of more advanced age wishing to
know something of the first principles of art.
Yet observe, that the method of study recommended is not brought forward
as absolutely the best, but only as the best which I can at present
devise for an isolated student. It is very likely that farther
experience in teaching may enable me to modify it with advantage in
several important respects; but I am sure the main principles of it are
sound, and most of the exercises as useful as they can be rendered
without a master's superintendence. The method differs, however, so
materially from that generally adopted by drawing-masters, that a word
or two of explanation may be needed to justify what might otherwise be
thought wilful eccentricity.
The manuals at present published on the subject of drawing are all
directed, as far as I know, to one or other of two objects. Either they
propose to give the student a power of dexterous sketching with pencil
or water-colour, so as to emulate (at considerable distance) the
slighter work of our second-rate artists; or they propose to give him
such accurate command of mathematical forms as may afterwards enable him
to design rapidly and cheaply for manufactures. When drawing is taught
as an accomplishment, the first is the aim usually proposed; while the
second is the object kept chiefly in view at Marlborough House, and in
the branch Government Schools of Design.
Of the fitness of the modes of study adopted in those schools, to the
end specially intended, judgment is hardly yet possible; only, it seems
to me, that we are all too much in the habit of confusing art as
_applied_ to manufacture, with manufacture itself. For instance, the
skill by which an inventive workman designs and moulds a beautiful cup,
is skill of true art; but the skill by which that cup is copied and
afterwards multiplied a thousandfold, is skill of manufacture: and the
faculties which enable one workman to design and elaborate his original
piece, are not to be developed by the same system of instruction as
those which enable another to produce a maximum number of approximate
copies of it in a given time. Farther: it is surely inexpedient that any
reference to purposes of manufacture should interfere with the education
of the artist himself. Try first to manufacture a Raphael; then let
Raphael direct your manufacture. He will design you a plate, or cup, or
a house, or a palace, whenever you want it, and design them in the most
convenient and rational way; but do not let your anxiety to reach the
platter and the cup interfere with your education of the Raphael. Obtain
first the best work you can, and the ablest hands, irrespective of any
consideration of economy or facility of production. Then leave your
trained artist to determine how far art can be popularised, or
manufacture ennobled.
Now, I believe that (irrespective of differences in individual temper
and character) the excellence of an artist, as such, depends wholly on
refinement of perception, and that it is this, mainly, which a master or
a school can teach; so that while powers of invention distinguish man
from man, powers of perception distinguish school from school. All great
schools enforce delicacy of drawing and subtlety of sight: and the only
rule which I have, as yet, found to be without exception respecting art,
is that all great art is delicate.
Therefore, the chief aim and bent of the following system is to obtain,
first, a perfectly patient, and, to the utmost of the pupil's power, a
delicate method of work, such as may ensure his seeing truly. For I am
nearly convinced, that when once we see keenly enough, there is very
little difficulty in drawing what we see; but, even supposing that this
difficulty be still great, I believe that the sight is a more important
thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils
may learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may
learn to draw. It is surely also a more important thing for young people
and unprofessional students, to know how to appreciate the art of
others, than to gain much power in art themselves. Now the modes of
sketching ordinarily taught are inconsistent with this power of
judgment. No person trained to the superficial execution of modern
water-colour painting, can understand the work of Titian or Leonardo;
they must for ever remain blind to the refinement of such men's
pencilling, and the precision of their thinking. But, however slight a
degree of manipulative power the student may reach by pursuing the mode
recommended to him in these letters, I will answer for it that he cannot
go once through the advised exercises without beginning to understand
what masterly work means; and, by the time he has gained some
proficiency in them, he will have a pleasure in looking at the painting
of the great schools, and a new perception of the exquisiteness of
natural scenery, such as would repay him for much more labour than I
have asked him to undergo.
That labour is, nevertheless, sufficiently irksome, nor is it possible
that it should be otherwise, so long as the pupil works unassisted by a
master. For the smooth and straight road which admits unembarrassed
progress must, I fear, be dull as well as smooth; and the hedges need to
be close and trim when there is no guide to warn or bring back the
erring traveller. The system followed in this work will, therefore, at
first, surprise somewhat sorrowfully those who are familiar with the
practice of our class at the Working Men's College; for there, the
pupil, having the master at his side to extricate him from such
embarrassments as his first efforts may lead into, is _at once_ set to
draw from a solid object, and soon finds entertainment in his efforts
and interest in his difficulties. Of course the simplest object which it
is possible to set before the eye is a sphere; and practically, I find a
child's toy, a white leather ball, better than anything else; as the
gradations on balls of plaster of Paris, which I use sometimes to try
the strength of pupils who have had previous practice, are a little too
delicate for a beginner to perceive. It has been objected that a circle,
or the outline of a sphere, is one of the most difficult of all lines to
draw. It is so; but I do not want it to be drawn. All that his study of
the ball is to teach the pupil, is the way in which shade gives the
appearance of projection. This he learns most satisfactorily from a
sphere; because any solid form, terminated by straight lines or flat
surfaces, owes some of its appearance of projection to its perspective;
but in the sphere, what, without shade, was a flat circle, becomes,
merely by the added shade, the image of a solid ball; and this fact is
just as striking to the learner, whether his circular outline be true or
false. He is, therefore, never allowed to trouble himself about it; if
he makes the ball look as oval as an egg, the degree of error is simply
pointed out to him, and he does better next time, and better still the
next. But his mind is always fixed on the gradation of shade, and the
outline left to take, in due time, care of itself. I call it outline,
for the sake of immediate intelligibility,--strictly speaking, it is
merely the edge of the shade; no pupil in my class being ever allowed to
draw an outline, in the ordinary sense. It is pointed out to him, from
the first, that Nature relieves one mass, or one tint, against another;
but outlines none. The outline exercise, the second suggested in this
letter, is recommended, not to enable the pupil to draw outlines, but as
the only means by which, unassisted, he can test his accuracy of eye,
and discipline his hand. When the master is by, errors in the form and
extent of shadows can be pointed out as easily as in outline, and the
handling can be gradually corrected in details of the work. But the
solitary student can only find out his own mistakes by help of the
traced limit, and can only test the firmness of his hand by an exercise
in which nothing but firmness is required; and during which all other
considerations (as of softness, complexity, &c.) are entirely excluded.
Both the system adopted at the Working Men's College, and that
recommended here, agree, however, in one principle, which I consider the
most important and special of all that are involved in my teaching:
namely, the attaching its full importance, from the first, to local
colour. I believe that the endeavour to separate, in the course of
instruction, the observation of light and shade from that of local
colour, has always been, and must always be, destructive of the
student's power of accurate sight, and that it corrupts his taste as
much as it retards his progress. I will not occupy the reader's time by
any discussion of the principle here, but I wish him to note it as the
only distinctive one in my system, so far as it is a system. For the
recommendation to the pupil to copy faithfully, and without alteration,
whatever natural object he chooses to study, is serviceable, among other
reasons, just because it gets rid of systematic rules altogether, and
teaches people to draw, as country lads learn to ride, without saddle or
stirrups; my main object being, at first, not to get my pupils to hold
their reins prettily, but to "sit like a jackanapes, never off."
In these written instructions, therefore, it has always been with regret
that I have seen myself forced to advise anything like monotonous or
formal discipline. But, to the unassisted student, such formalities are
indispensable, and I am not without hope that the sense of secure
advancement, and the pleasure of independent effort, may render the
following out of even the more tedious exercises here proposed, possible
to the solitary learner, without weariness. But if it should be
otherwise, and he finds the first steps painfully irksome, I can only
desire him to consider whether the acquirement of so great a power as
that of pictorial expression of thought be not worth some toil; or
whether it is likely, in the natural order of matters in this working
world, that so great a gift should be attainable by those who will give
no price for it.
One task, however, of some difficulty, the student will find I have not
imposed upon him: namely, learning the laws of perspective. It would be
worth while to learn them, if he could do so easily; but without a
master's help, and in the way perspective is at present explained in
treatises, the difficulty is greater than the gain. For perspective is
not of the slightest use, except in rudimentary work. You can draw the
rounding line of a table in perspective, but you cannot draw the sweep
of a sea bay; you can foreshorten a log of wood by it, but you cannot
foreshorten an arm. Its laws are too gross and few to be applied to any
subtle form; therefore, as you must learn to draw the subtle forms by
the eye, certainly you may draw the simple ones. No great painters ever
trouble themselves about perspective, and very few of them know its
laws; they draw everything by the eye, and, naturally enough, disdain in
the easy parts of their work rules which cannot help them in difficult
ones. It would take about a month's labour to draw imperfectly, by laws
of perspective, what any great Venetian will draw perfectly in five
minutes, when he is throwing a wreath of leaves round a head, or bending
the curves of a pattern in and out among the folds of drapery. It is
true that when perspective was first discovered, everybody amused
themselves with it; and all the great painters put fine saloons and
arcades behind their madonnas, merely to show that they could draw in
perspective: but even this was generally done by them only to catch the
public eye, and they disdained the perspective so much, that though they
took the greatest pains with the circlet of a crown, or the rim of a
crystal cup, in the heart of their picture, they would twist their
capitals of columns and towers of churches about in the background in
the most wanton way, wherever they liked the lines to go, provided only
they left just perspective enough to please the public. In modern days,
I doubt if any artist among us, except David Roberts, knows so much
perspective as would enable him to draw a Gothic arch to scale, at a
given angle and distance. Turner, though he was professor of perspective
to the Royal Academy, did not know what he professed, and never, as far
as I remember, drew a single building in true perspective in his life;
he drew them only with as much perspective as suited him. Prout also
knew nothing of perspective, and twisted his buildings, as Turner did,
into whatever shapes he liked. I do not justify this; and would
recommend the student at least to treat perspective with common
civility, but to pay no court to it. The best way he can learn it, by
himself, is by taking a pane of glass, fixed in a frame, so that it can
be set upright before the eye, at the distance at which the proposed
sketch is intended to be seen. Let the eye be placed at some fixed
point, opposite the middle of the pane of glass, but as high or as low
as the student likes; then with a brush at the end of a stick, and a
little body-colour that will adhere to the glass, the lines of the
landscape may be traced on the glass, as you see them through it. When
so traced they are all in true perspective. If the glass be sloped in
any direction, the lines are still in true perspective, only it is
perspective calculated for a sloping plane, while common perspective
always supposes the plane of the picture to be vertical. It is good, in
early practice, to accustom yourself to enclose your subject, before
sketching it, with a light frame of wood held upright before you; it
will show you what you may legitimately take into your picture, and
what choice there is between a narrow foreground near you, and a wide
one farther off; also, what height of tree or building you can properly
take in, &c.[198]
Of figure drawing, nothing is said in the following pages, because I do
not think figures, as chief subjects, can be drawn to any good purpose
by an amateur. As accessaries in landscape, they are just to be drawn on
the same principles as anything else.
Lastly: If any of the directions given subsequently to the student
should be found obscure by him, or if at any stage of the recommended
practice he finds himself in difficulties which I have not provided
enough against, he may apply by letter to Mr. Ward, who is my under
drawing-master at the Working Men's College (45 Great Ormond Street),
and who will give any required assistance, on the lowest terms that can
remunerate him for the occupation of his time. I have not leisure myself
in general to answer letters of inquiry, however much I may desire to do
so; but Mr. Ward has always the power of referring any question to me
when he thinks it necessary. I have good hope, however, that enough
guidance is given in this work to prevent the occurrence of any serious
embarrassment; and I believe that the student who obeys its directions
will find, on the whole, that the best answer of questions is
perseverance; and the best drawing-masters are the woods and hills.
FOOTNOTES:
[198] If the student is fond of architecture, and wishes to know more of
perspective than he can learn in this rough way, Mr. Runciman (of 40
Accacia Road, St. John's Wood), who was my first drawing-master, and to
whom I owe many happy hours, can teach it him quickly, easily, and
rightly.
THE
ELEMENTS OF DRAWING.
LETTER I.
ON FIRST PRACTICE.
MY DEAR READER:
Whether this book is to be of use to you or not, depends wholly on your
reason for wishing to learn to draw. If you desire only to possess a
graceful accomplishment, to be able to converse in a fluent manner about
drawing, or to amuse yourself listlessly in listless hours, I cannot
help you: but if you wish to learn drawing that you may be able to set
down clearly, and usefully, records of such things as cannot be
described in words, either to assist your own memory of them, or to
convey distinct ideas of them to other people; if you wish to obtain
quicker perceptions of the beauty of the natural world, and to preserve
something like a true image of beautiful things that pass away, or which
you must yourself leave; if, also, you wish to understand the minds of
great painters, and to be able to appreciate their work sincerely,
seeing it for yourself, and loving it, not merely taking up the thoughts
of other people about it; then I _can_ help you, or, which is better,
show you how to help yourself.
Only you must understand, first of all, that these powers which indeed
are noble and desirable, cannot be got without work. It is much easier
to learn to draw well, than it is to learn to play well on any musical
instrument; but you know that it takes three or four years of practice,
giving three or four hours a day, to acquire even ordinary command over
the keys of a piano; and you must not think that a masterly command of
your pencil, and the knowledge of what may be done with it, can be
acquired without painstaking, or in a very short time. The kind of
drawing which is taught, or supposed to be taught, in our schools, in a
term or two, perhaps at the rate of an hour's practice a week, is not
drawing at all. It is only the performance of a few dexterous (not
always even that) evolutions on paper with a black-lead pencil;
profitless alike to performer and beholder, unless as a matter of
vanity, and that the smallest possible vanity. If any young person,
after being taught what is, in polite circles, called "drawing," will
try to copy the commonest piece of real _work_--suppose a lithograph on
the title-page of a new opera air, or a woodcut in the cheapest
illustrated newspaper of the day--they will find themselves entirely
beaten. And yet that common lithograph was drawn with coarse chalk, much
more difficult to manage than the pencil of which an accomplished young
lady is supposed to have command; and that woodcut was drawn in urgent
haste, and half spoiled in the cutting afterwards; and both were done by
people whom nobody thinks of as artists, or praises for their power;
both were done for daily bread, with no more artist's pride than any
simple handicraftsmen feel in the work they live by.
Do not, therefore, think that you can learn drawing, any more than a new
language, without some hard and disagreeable labour. But do not, on the
other hand, if you are ready and willing to pay this price, fear that
you may be unable to get on for want of special talent. It is indeed
true that the persons who have peculiar talent for art, draw
instinctively and get on almost without teaching; though never without
toil. It is true, also, that of inferior talent for drawing there are
many degrees; it will take one person a much longer time than another to
attain the same results, and the results thus painfully attained are
never quite so satisfactory as those got with greater ease when the
faculties are naturally adapted to the study. But I have never yet, in
the experiments I have made, met with a person who could not learn to
draw at all; and, in general, there is a satisfactory and available
power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all
persons have the power of learning French, Latin, or arithmetic, in a
decent and useful degree, if their lot in life requires them to possess
such knowledge.
Supposing then that you are ready to take a certain amount of pains, and
to bear a little irksomeness and a few disappointments bravely, I can
promise you that an hour's practice a day for six months, or an hour's
practice every other day for twelve months, or, disposed in whatever way
you find convenient, some hundred and fifty hours' practice, will give
you sufficient power of drawing faithfully whatever you want to draw,
and a good judgment, up to a certain point, of other people's work: of
which hours, if you have one to spare at present, we may as well begin
at once.
EXERCISE I.
Everything that you can see, in the world around you, presents itself to
your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours
variously shaded.[199] Some of these patches of colour have an
appearance of lines or texture within them, as a piece of cloth or silk
has of threads, or an animal's skin shows texture of hairs; but whether
this be the case or not, the first broad aspect of the thing is that of
a patch of some definite colour; and the first thing to be learned is,
how to produce extents of smooth colour, without texture.
This can only be done properly with a brush; but a brush, being soft at
the point, causes so much uncertainty in the touch of an unpractised
hand, that it is hardly possible to learn to draw first with it, and it
is better to take, in early practice, some instrument with a hard and
fine point, both that we may give some support to the hand, and that by
working over the subject with so delicate a point, the attention may be
properly directed to all the most minute parts of it. Even the best
artists need occasionally to study subjects with a pointed instrument,
in order thus to discipline their attention: and a beginner must be
content to do so for a considerable period.
Also, observe that before we trouble ourselves about differences of
colour, we must be able to lay on _one_ colour properly, in whatever
gradations of depth and whatever shapes we want. We will try, therefore,
first to lay on tints or patches of _grey_, of whatever depth we want,
with a pointed instrument. Take any finely-pointed steel pen (one of
Gillott's lithographic crow-quills is best), and a piece of quite
smooth, but not shining, note-paper, cream-laid, and get some ink that
has stood already some time in the inkstand, so as to be quite black,
and as thick as it can be without clogging the pen. Take a rule, and
draw four straight lines, so as to enclose a square or nearly a square,
about as large as _a_, Fig. 1. I say nearly a square, because it does
not in the least matter whether it is quite square or not, the object
being merely to get a space enclosed by straight lines.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
Now, try to fill in that square space with crossed lines, so completely
and evenly that it shall look like a square patch of grey silk or cloth,
cut out and laid on the white paper, as at _b_. Cover it quickly, first
with straightish lines, in any direction you like, not troubling
yourself to draw them much closer or neater than those in the square
_a_. Let them quite dry before retouching them. (If you draw three or
four squares side by side, you may always be going on with one while the
others are drying). Then cover these lines with others in a different
direction, and let those dry; then in another direction still, and let
those dry. Always wait long enough to run no risk of blotting, and then
draw the lines as quickly as you can. Each ought to be laid on as
swiftly as the dash of the pen of a good writer; but if you try to reach
this great speed at first you will go over the edge of the square, which
is a fault in this exercise. Yet it is better to do so now and then than
to draw the lines very slowly; for if you do, the pen leaves a little
dot of ink at the end of each line, and these dots spoil your work. So
draw each line quickly, stopping always as nearly as you can at the edge
of the square. The ends of lines which go over the edge are afterwards
to be removed with the penknife, but not till you have done the whole
work, otherwise you roughen the paper, and the next line that goes over
the edge makes a blot.
When you have gone over the whole three or four times, you will find
some parts of the square look darker than other parts. Now try to make
the lighter parts as dark as the rest, so that the whole may be of equal
depth or darkness. You will find, on examining the work, that where it
looks darkest the lines are closest, or there are some much darker
lines, than elsewhere; therefore you must put in other lines, or little
scratches and dots, _between_ the lines in the paler parts; and where
there are very conspicuous dark lines, scratch them out lightly with the
penknife, for the eye must not be attracted by any line in particular.
The more carefully and delicately you fill in the little gaps and holes
the better; you will get on faster by doing two or three squares
perfectly than a great many badly. As the tint gets closer and begins to
look even, work with very little ink in your pen, so as hardly to make
any mark on the paper; and at last, where it is too dark, use the edge
of your penknife very lightly, and for some time, to wear it softly into
an even tone. You will find that the greatest difficulty consists in
getting evenness: one bit will always look darker than another bit of
your square; or there will be a granulated and sandy look over the
whole. When you find your paper quite rough and in a mess, give it up
and begin another square, but do not rest satisfied till you have done
your best with every square. The tint at last ought _at least_ to be as
close and even as that in _b_, Fig. 1. You will find, however, that it
is very difficult to get a _pale_ tint; because, naturally, the ink
lines necessary to produce a close tint at all, blacken the paper more
than you want. You must get over this difficulty not so much by leaving
the lines wide apart as by trying to draw them excessively fine, lightly
and swiftly; being very cautious in filling in; and, at last, passing
the penknife over the whole. By keeping several squares in progress at
one time, and reserving your pen for the light one just when the ink is
nearly exhausted, you may get on better. The paper ought, at last, to
look lightly and evenly toned all over, with no lines distinctly
visible.
EXERCISE II.
As this exercise in shading is very tiresome, it will be well to vary it
by proceeding with another at the same time. The power of shading
rightly depends mainly on _lightness_ of hand and _keenness_ of sight;
but there are other qualities required in drawing, dependent not merely
on lightness, but steadiness of hand; and the eye, to be perfect in its
power, must be made _accurate_ as well as keen, and not only see
shrewdly, but measure justly.
Possess yourself, therefore, of any cheap work on botany containing
_outline_ plates of leaves and flowers, it does not matter whether bad
or good: "Baxter's British Flowering Plants" is quite good enough. Copy
any of the simplest outlines, first with a soft pencil, following it, by
the eye, as nearly as you can; if it does not look right in proportions,
rub out and correct it, always by the eye, till you think it is right:
when you have got it to your mind, lay tracing-paper on the book, on
this paper trace the outline you have been copying, and apply it to your
own; and having thus ascertained the faults, correct them all patiently,
till you have got it as nearly accurate as may be. Work with a very soft
pencil, and do not rub out so hard[200] as to spoil the surface of your
paper; never mind how _dirty_ the paper gets, but do not roughen it;
and let the false outlines alone where they do not really interfere with
the true one. It is a good thing to accustom yourself to hew and shape
your drawing out of a dirty piece of paper. When you have got it as
right as you can, take a quill pen, not very fine at the point; rest
your hand on a book about an inch and a half thick, so as to hold the
pen long; and go over your pencil outline with ink, raising your pen
point as seldom as possible, and never leaning more heavily on one part
of the line than on another. In most outline drawings of the present
day, parts of the curves are thickened to give an effect of shade; all
such outlines are bad, but they will serve well enough for your
exercises, provided you do not imitate this character: it is better,
however, if you can, to choose a book of pure outlines. It does not in
the least matter whether your pen outline be thin or thick; but it
matters greatly that it should be _equal_, not heavier in one place than
in another. The power to be obtained is that of drawing an even line
slowly and in any direction; all _dashing_ lines, or approximations to
penmanship, are bad. The pen should, as it were, walk slowly over the
ground, and you should be able at any moment to stop it, or to turn it
in any other direction, like a well-managed horse.
As soon as you can copy every curve _slowly_ and accurately, you have
made satisfactory progress; but you will find the difficulty is in the
_slowness_. It is easy to draw what appears to be a good line with a
sweep of the hand, or with what is called freedom;[201] the real
difficulty and masterliness is in never letting the hand _be_ free, but
keeping it under entire control at every part of the line.
EXERCISE III.
Meantime, you are always to be going on with your shaded squares, and
chiefly with these, the outline exercises being taken up only for rest.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
As soon as you find you have some command of the pen as a shading
instrument, and can lay a pale or dark tint as you choose, try to
produce gradated spaces like Fig. 2., the dark tint passing gradually
into the lighter ones. Nearly _all_ expression of form, in drawing,
depends on your power of gradating delicately; and the gradation is
always most skilful which passes from one tint into another _very
little_ paler. Draw, therefore, two parallel lines for limits to your
work, as in Fig. 2., and try to gradate the shade evenly from white to
black, passing over the greatest possible distance, yet so that every
part of the band may have visible change in it. The perception of
gradation is very deficient in all beginners (not to say, in many
artists), and you will probably, for some time, think your gradation
skilful enough when it is quite patchy and imperfect. By getting a piece
of grey shaded riband, and comparing it with your drawing, you may
arrive, in early stages of your work, at a wholesome dissatisfaction
with it. Widen your band little by little as you get more skilful, so as
to give the gradation more lateral space, and accustom yourself at the
same time to look for gradated spaces in Nature. The sky is the largest
and the most beautiful; watch it at twilight, after the sun is down, and
try to consider each pane of glass in the window you look through as a
piece of paper coloured blue, or grey, or purple, as it happens to be,
and observe how quietly and continuously the gradation extends over the
space in the window, of one or two feet square. Observe the shades on
the outside and inside of a common white cup or bowl, which make it look
round and hollow;[202] and then on folds of white drapery; and thus
gradually you will be led to observe the more subtle transitions of the
light as it increases or declines on flat surfaces. At last, when your
eye gets keen and true, you will see gradation on everything in Nature.
But it will not be in your power yet awhile to draw from any objects in
which the gradations are varied and complicated; nor will it be a bad
omen for your future progress, and for the use that art is to be made of
by you, if the first thing at which you aim should be a little bit of
sky. So take any narrow space of evening sky, that you can usually see,
between the boughs of a tree, or between two chimneys, or through the
corner of a pane in the window you like best to sit at, and try to
gradate a little space of white paper as evenly as that is gradated--as
_tenderly_ you cannot gradate it without colour, no, nor with colour
either; but you may do it as evenly; or, if you get impatient with your
spots and lines of ink, when you look at the beauty of the sky, the
sense you will have gained of that beauty is something to be thankful
for. But you ought not to be impatient with your pen and ink; for all
great painters, however delicate their perception of colour, are fond of
the peculiar effect of light which may be got in a pen-and-ink sketch,
and in a woodcut, by the gleaming of the white paper between the black
lines; and if you cannot gradate well with pure black lines, you will
never gradate well with pale ones. By looking at any common woodcuts, in
the cheap publications of the day, you may see how gradation is given to
the sky by leaving the lines farther and farther apart; but you must
make your lines as _fine_ as you can, as well as far apart, towards the
light; and do not try to make them long or straight, but let them cross
irregularly in any direction easy to your hand, depending on nothing but
their gradation for your effect. On this point of direction of lines,
however, I shall have to tell you more presently; in the meantime, do
not trouble yourself about it.
EXERCISE IV.
As soon as you find you can gradate tolerably with the pen, take an H.
or HH. pencil, using its point to produce shade, from the darkest
possible to the palest, in exactly the same manner as the pen,
lightening, however, now with India-rubber instead of the penknife. You
will find that all _pale_ tints of shade are thus easily producible with
great precision and tenderness, but that you cannot get the same dark
power as with the pen and ink, and that the surface of the shade is apt
to become glossy and metallic, or dirty-looking, or sandy. Persevere,
however, in trying to bring it to evenness with the fine point, removing
any single speck or line that may be too black, with the _point_ of the
knife: you must not scratch the whole with the knife as you do the ink.
If you find the texture very speckled-looking, lighten it all over with
India-rubber, and recover it again with sharp, and excessively fine
touches of the pencil point, bringing the parts that are too pale to
perfect evenness with the darker spots.
You cannot use the point too delicately or cunningly in doing this; work
with it as if you were drawing the down on a butterfly's wing.
At this stage of your progress, if not before, you may be assured that
some clever friend will come in, and hold up his hands in mocking
amazement, and ask you who could set you to that "niggling;" and if you
persevere in it, you will have to sustain considerable persecution from
your artistical acquaintances generally, who will tell you that all good
drawing depends on "boldness." But never mind them. You do not hear them
tell a child, beginning music, to lay its little hand with a crash among
the keys, in imitation of the great masters; yet they might, as
reasonably as they may tell you to be bold in the present state of your
knowledge. Bold, in the sense of being undaunted, yes; but bold in the
sense of being careless, confident, or exhibitory,--no,--no, and a
thousand times no; for, even if you were not a beginner, it would be bad
advice that made you bold. Mischief may easily be done quickly, but good
and beautiful work is generally done slowly; you will find no boldness
in the way a flower or a bird's wing is painted; and if Nature is not
bold at _her_ work, do you think you ought to be at _yours_? So never
mind what people say, but work with your pencil point very patiently;
and if you can trust me in anything, trust me when I tell you, that
though there are all kinds and ways of art,--large work for large
places, small work for narrow places, slow work for people who can wait,
and quick work for people who cannot,--there is one quality, and, I
think, only one, in which all great and good art agrees;--it is all
_delicate_ art. Coarse art is always bad art. You cannot understand this
at present, because you do not know yet how much tender thought, and
subtle care, the great painters put into touches that at first look
coarse; but, believe me, it is true, and you will find it is so in due
time.
You will be perhaps also troubled, in these first essays at pencil
drawing, by noticing that more delicate gradations are got in an instant
by a chance touch of the India-rubber, than by an hour's labour with the
point; and you may wonder why I tell you to produce tints so painfully,
which might, it appears, be obtained with ease. But there are two
reasons: the first, that when you come to draw forms, you must be able
to gradate with absolute precision, in whatever place and direction you
wish; not in any wise vaguely, as the India-rubber does it; and,
secondly, that all natural shadows are more or less mingled with gleams
of light. In the darkness of ground there is the light of the little
pebbles or dust; in the darkness of foliage, the glitter of the leaves;
in the darkness of flesh, transparency; in that of a stone, granulation:
in every case there is some mingling of light, which cannot be
represented by the leaden tone which you get by rubbing, or by an
instrument known to artists as the "stump." When you can manage the
point properly, you will indeed be able to do much also with this
instrument, or with your fingers; but then you will have to retouch the
flat tints afterwards, so as to put life and light into them, and that
can only be done with the point. Labour on, therefore, courageously,
with that only.
EXERCISE V.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.]
When you can manage to tint and gradate tenderly with the pencil point,
get a good large alphabet, and try to _tint_ the letters into shape with
the pencil point. Do not outline them first, but measure their height
and extreme breadth with the compasses, as _a b_, _a c_, Fig. 3., and
then scratch in their shapes gradually; the letter A, enclosed within
the lines, being in what Turner would have called a "state of
forwardness."
Then, when you are satisfied with the shape of the letter, draw pen and
ink lines firmly round the tint, as at _d_, and remove any touches
outside the limit, first with the India-rubber, and then with the
penknife, so that all may look clear and right. If you rub out any of
the pencil inside the outline of the letter, retouch it, closing it up
to the inked line. The straight lines of the outline are all to be
_ruled_,[203] but the curved lines are to be drawn by the eye and hand;
and you will soon find what good practice there is in getting the curved
letters, such as Bs, Cs, &c., to stand quite straight, and come into
accurate form.
All these exercises are very irksome, and they are not to be persisted
in alone; neither is it necessary to acquire perfect power in any of
them. An entire master of the pencil or brush ought, indeed, to be able
to draw any form at once, as Giotto his circle; but such skill as this
is only to be expected of the consummate master, having pencil in hand
all his life, and all day long, hence the force of Giotto's proof of his
skill; and it is quite possible to draw very beautifully, without
attaining even an approximation to such a power; the main point being,
not that every line should be precisely what we intend or wish, but that
the line which we intended or wished to draw should be right. If we
always see rightly and mean rightly, we shall get on, though the hand
may stagger a little; but if we mean wrongly, or mean nothing, it does
not matter how firm the hand is. Do not, therefore, torment yourself
because you cannot do as well as you would like; but work patiently,
sure that every square and letter will give you a certain increase of
power; and as soon as you can draw your letters pretty well, here is a
more amusing exercise for you.
EXERCISE VI.
Choose any tree that you think pretty, which is nearly bare of leaves,
and which you can see against the sky, or against a pale wall, or other
light ground: it must not be against strong light, or you will find the
looking at it hurts your eyes; nor must it be in sunshine, or you will
be puzzled by the lights on the boughs. But the tree must be in shade;
and the sky blue, or grey, or dull white. A wholly grey or rainy day is
the best for this practice.
You will see that _all_ the boughs of the tree are _dark_ against the
sky. Consider them as so many dark rivers, to be laid down in a map with
absolute accuracy; and, without the least thought about the _roundness_
of the stems, map them all out in flat shade, scrawling them in with
pencil, just as you did the limbs of your letters; then correct and
alter them, rubbing out and out again, never minding how much your paper
is dirtied (only not destroying its surface), until every bough is
exactly, or as near as your utmost power can bring it, right in
curvature and in thickness. Look at the white interstices between them
with as much scrupulousness as if they were little estates which you had
to survey, and draw maps of, for some important lawsuit, involving heavy
penalties if you cut the least bit of a corner off any of them, or gave
the hedge anywhere too deep a curve; and try continually to fancy the
whole tree nothing but a flat ramification on a white ground. Do not
take any trouble about the little twigs, which look like a confused
network or mist; leave them all out,[204] drawing only the main branches
as far as you can see them distinctly, your object at present being not
to draw a tree, but to _learn how_ to do so. When you have got the thing
as nearly right as you can--and it is better to make one good study than
twenty left unnecessarily inaccurate--take your pen, and put a fine
outline to all the boughs, as you did to your letter, taking care, as
far as possible, to put the outline within the edge of the shade, so as
not to make the boughs thicker: the main use of the outline is to
_affirm_ the whole more clearly; to do away with little accidental
roughnesses and excrescences, and especially to mark where boughs cross,
or come in front of each other, as at such points their arrangement in
this kind of sketch is unintelligible without the outline. It may
perfectly well happen that in Nature it should be less distinct than
your outline will make it; but it is better in this kind of sketch to
mark the facts clearly. The temptation is always to be slovenly and
careless, and the outline is like a bridle, and forces our indolence
into attention and precision. The outline should be about the thickness
of that in Fig. 4, which represents the ramification of a small stone
pine, only I have not endeavoured to represent the pencil shading within
the outline, as I could not easily express it in a woodcut; and you have
nothing to do at present with the indication of the foliage above, of
which in another place. You may also draw your trees as much larger
than this figure as you like; only, however large they may be, keep the
outline as delicate, and draw the branches far enough into their outer
sprays to give quite as slender ramification as you have in this figure,
otherwise you do not get good enough practice out of them.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.]
You cannot do too many studies of this kind: every one will give you
some new notion about trees: but when you are tired of tree boughs, take
any forms whatever which are drawn in flat colour, one upon another; as
patterns on any kind of cloth, or flat china (tiles, for instance),
executed in two colours only; and practice drawing them of the right
shape and size by the eye, and filling them in with shade of the depth
required.
In doing this, you will first have to meet the difficulty of
representing depth of colour by depth of shade. Thus a pattern of
ultramarine blue will have to be represented by a darker tint of grey
than a pattern of yellow.
And now it is both time for you to begin to learn the mechanical use of
the brush, and necessary for you to do so in order to provide yourself
with the gradated scale of colour which you will want. If you can, by
any means, get acquainted with any ordinarily skilful water-colour
painter, and prevail on him to show you how to lay on tints with a
brush, by all means do so; not that you are yet, nor for a long while
yet, to begin to colour, but because the brush is often more convenient
than the pencil for laying on masses or tints of shade, and the sooner
you know how to manage it as an instrument the better. If, however, you
have no opportunity of seeing how water-colour is laid on by a workman
of any kind, the following directions will help you:--
EXERCISE VII.
Get a shilling cake of Prussian blue. Dip the end of it in water so as
to take up a drop, and rub it in a white saucer till you cannot rub much
more, and the colour gets dark, thick, and oily-looking. Put two
teaspoonfuls of water to the colour you have rubbed down, and mix it
well up with a camel's-hair brush about three quarters of an inch long.
Then take a piece of smooth, but not glossy, Bristol board or
pasteboard; divide it, with your pencil and rule, into squares as large
as those of the very largest chess-board: they need not be perfect
squares, only as nearly so as you can quickly guess. Rest the pasteboard
on something sloping as much as an ordinary desk; then, dipping your
brush into the colour you have mixed, and taking up as much of the
liquid as it will carry, begin at the top of one of the squares, and lay
a pond or runlet of colour along the top edge. Lead this pond of colour
gradually downwards, not faster at one place than another, but as if you
were adding a row of bricks to a building, all along (only building down
instead of up), dipping the brush frequently so as to keep the colour as
full in that, and in as great quantity on the paper, as you can, so only
that it does not run down anywhere in a little stream. But if it should,
never mind; go on quietly with your square till you have covered it all
in. When you get to the bottom, the colour will lodge there in a great
wave. Have ready a piece of blotting-paper; dry your brush on it, and
with the dry brush take up the superfluous colour as you would with a
sponge, till it all looks even.
In leading the colour down, you will find your brush continually go over
the edge of the square, or leave little gaps within it. Do not endeavour
to retouch these, nor take much care about them; the great thing is to
get the colour to lie smoothly where it reaches, not in alternate blots
and pale patches; try, therefore, to lead it over the square as fast as
possible, with such attention to your limit as you are able to give. The
use of the exercise is, indeed, to enable you finally to strike the
colour up to the limit with perfect accuracy; but the first thing is to
get it even, the power of rightly striking the edge comes only by time
and practice; even the greatest artists rarely can do this quite
perfectly.
When you have done one square, proceed to do another which does not
communicate with it. When you have thus done all the alternate squares,
as on a chess-board, turn the pasteboard upside down, begin again with
the first, and put another coat over it, and so on over all the others.
The use of turning the paper upside down is to neutralise the increase
of darkness towards the bottom of the squares, which would otherwise
take place from the ponding of the colour.
Be resolved to use blotting-paper, or a piece of rag, instead of your
lips, to dry the brush. The habit of doing so, once acquired, will save
you from much partial poisoning. Take care, however, always to draw the
brush from root to point, otherwise you will spoil it. You may even wipe
it as you would a pen when you want it very dry, without doing harm,
provided you do not crush it upwards. Get a good brush at first, and
cherish it; it will serve you longer and better than many bad ones.
When you have done the squares all over again, do them a third time,
always trying to keep your edges as neat as possible. When your colour
is exhausted, mix more in the same proportions, two teaspoonfuls to as
much as you can grind with a drop; and when you have done the alternate
squares three times over, as the paper will be getting very damp, and
dry more slowly, begin on the white squares, and bring them up to the
same tint in the same way. The amount of jagged dark line which then
will mark the limits of the squares will be the exact measure of your
unskilfulness.
As soon as you tire of squares draw circles (with compasses); and then
draw straight lines irregularly across circles, and fill up the spaces
so produced between the straight line and the circumference; and then
draw any simple shapes of leaves, according to the exercise No. 2., and
fill up those, until you can lay on colour quite evenly in any shape you
want.
You will find in the course of this practice, as you cannot always put
exactly the same quantity of water to the colour, that the darker the
colour is, the more difficult it becomes to lay it on evenly. Therefore,
when you have gained some definite degree of power, try to fill in the
forms required with a full brush, and a dark tint, at once, instead of
laying several coats one over another; always taking care that the tint,
however dark, be quite liquid; and that, after being laid on, so much of
it is absorbed as to prevent its forming a black line at the edge as it
dries. A little experience will teach you how apt the colour is to do
this, and how to prevent it; not that it needs always to be prevented,
for a great master in water-colours will sometimes draw a firm outline,
when he _wants_ one, simply by letting the colour dry in this way at the
edge.
When, however, you begin to cover complicated forms with the darker
colour, no rapidity will prevent the tint from drying irregularly as it
is led on from part to part. You will then find the following method
useful. Lay in the colour very pale and liquid; so pale, indeed, that
you can only just see where it is on the paper. Lead it up to all the
outlines, and make it precise in form, keeping it thoroughly wet
everywhere. Then, when it is all in shape, take the darker colour, and
lay some of it _into_ the middle of the liquid colour. It will spread
gradually in a branchy kind of way, and you may now lead it up to the
outlines already determined, and play it with the brush till it fills
its place well; then let it dry, and it will be as flat and pure as a
single dash, yet defining all the complicated forms accurately.
Having thus obtained the power of laying on a tolerably flat tint, you
must try to lay on a gradated one. Prepare the colour with three or four
teaspoonfuls of water; then, when it is mixed, pour away about
two-thirds of it, keeping a teaspoonful of pale colour. Sloping your
paper as before, draw two pencil lines all the way down, leaving a space
between them of the width of a square on your chess-board. Begin at the
top of your paper, between the lines; and having struck on the first
brushful of colour, and led it down a little, dip your brush deep in
water, and mix up the colour on the plate quickly with as much more
water as the brush takes up at that one dip: then, with this paler
colour, lead the tint farther down. Dip in water again, mix the colour
again, and thus lead down the tint, always dipping in water once between
each replenishing of the brush, and stirring the colour on the plate
well, but as quickly as you can. Go on until the colour has become so
pale that you cannot see it; then wash your brush thoroughly in water,
and carry the wave down a little farther with that, and then absorb it
with the dry brush, and leave it to dry.
If you get to the bottom of your paper before your colour gets pale, you
may either take longer paper, or begin, with the tint as it was when you
left off, on another sheet; but be sure to exhaust it to pure whiteness
at last. When all is quite dry, recommence at the top with another
similar mixture of colour, and go down in the same way. Then again, and
then again, and so continually until the colour at the top of the paper
is as dark as your cake of Prussian blue, and passes down into pure
white paper at the end of your column, with a perfectly smooth gradation
from one into the other.
You will find at first that the paper gets mottled or wavy, instead of
evenly gradated; this is because at some places you have taken up more
water in your brush than at others, or not mixed it thoroughly on the
plate, or led one tint too far before replenishing with the next.
Practice only will enable you to do it well; the best artists cannot
always get gradations of this kind quite to their minds; nor do they
ever leave them on their pictures without after touching.
As you get more power, and can strike the colour more quickly down, you
will be able to gradate in less compass;[205] beginning with a small
quantity of colour, and adding a drop of water, instead of a brushful;
with finer brushes, also, you may gradate to a less scale. But slight
skill will enable you to test the relations of colour to shade as far as
is necessary for your immediate progress, which is to be done thus:--
Take cakes of lake, of gamboge, of sepia, of blue-black, of cobalt, and
vermilion; and prepare gradated columns (exactly as you have done with
the Prussian blue) of the lake and blue-black.[206] Cut a narrow slip
all the way down, of each gradated colour, and set the three slips side
by side; fasten them down, and rule lines at equal distances across all
the three, so as to divide them into fifty degrees, and number the
degrees of each, from light to dark, 1, 2, 3, &c. If you have gradated
them rightly, the darkest part either of the red or blue will be nearly
equal in power to the darkest part of the blue-black, and any degree of
the black slip will also, accurately enough for our purpose, balance in
weight the degree similarly numbered in the red or the blue slip. Then,
when you are drawing from objects of a crimson or blue colour, if you
can match their colour by any compartment of the crimson or blue in your
scales, the grey in the compartment of the grey scale marked with the
same number is the grey which must represent that crimson or blue in
your light and shade drawing.
Next, prepare scales with gamboge, cobalt, and vermilion. You will find
that you cannot darken these beyond a certain point;[207] for yellow and
scarlet, so long as they remain yellow and scarlet, cannot approach to
black; we cannot have, properly speaking, a dark yellow or dark scarlet.
Make your scales of full yellow, blue, and scarlet, half-way down;
passing _then_ gradually to white. Afterwards use lake to darken the
upper half of the vermilion and gamboge; and Prussian blue to darken the
cobalt. You will thus have three more scales, passing from white nearly
to black, through yellow and orange, through sky-blue, and through
scarlet. By mixing the gamboge and Prussian blue you may make another
with green; mixing the cobalt and lake, another with violet; the sepia
alone will make a forcible brown one; and so on, until you have as many
scales as you like, passing from black to white through different
colours. Then, supposing your scales properly gradated and equally
divided, the compartment or degree No. 1. of the grey will represent in
chiaroscuro the No. 1. of all the other colours; No. 2. of grey the No.
2. of the other colours, and so on.
It is only necessary, however, in this matter that you should understand
the principle; for it would never be possible for you to gradate your
scales so truly as to make them practically accurate and serviceable;
and even if you could, unless you had about ten thousand scales, and
were able to change them faster than ever juggler changed cards, you
could not in a day measure the tints on so much as one side of a
frost-bitten apple: but when once you fully understand the principle,
and see how all colours contain as it were a certain quantity of
darkness, or power of dark relief from white--some more, some less; and
how this pitch or power of each may be represented by equivalent values
of grey, you will soon be able to arrive shrewdly at an approximation by
a glance of the eye, without any measuring scale at all.
You must now go on, again with the pen, drawing patterns, and any shapes
of shade that you think pretty, as veinings in marble, or
tortoise-shell, spots in surfaces of shells, &c., as tenderly as you
can, in the darknesses that correspond to their colours; and when you
find you can do this successfully, it is time to begin rounding.
EXERCISE VIII.
Go out into your garden, or into the road, and pick up the first round
or oval stone you can find, not very white, nor very dark; and the
smoother it is the better, only it must not _shine_. Draw your table
near the window, and put the stone, which I will suppose is about the
size of _a_ in Fig. 5. (it had better not be much larger), on a piece of
not very white paper, on the table in front of you. Sit so that the
light may come from your left, else the shadow of the pencil point
interferes with your sight of your work. You must not let the _sun_ fall
on the stone, but only ordinary light: therefore choose a window which
the sun does not come in at. If you can shut the shutters of the other
windows in the room it will be all the better; but this is not of much
consequence.
Now, if you can draw that stone, you can draw anything: I mean, anything
that is drawable. Many things (sea foam, for instance) cannot be drawn
at all, only the idea of them more or less suggested; but if you can
draw the stone _rightly_, every thing within reach of art is also within
yours.
For all drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing
_Roundness_. If you can once do that, all the rest is easy and
straightforward; if you cannot do that, nothing else that you may be
able to do will be of any use. For Nature is all made up of roundnesses;
not the roundness of perfect globes, but of variously curved surfaces.
Boughs are rounded, leaves are rounded, stones are rounded, clouds are
rounded, cheeks are rounded, and curls are rounded: there is no more
flatness in the natural world than there is vacancy. The world itself is
round, and so is all that is in it, more or less, except human work,
which is often very flat indeed.
Therefore, set yourself steadily to conquer that round stone, and you
have won the battle.
Look your stone antagonist boldly in the face. You will see that the
side of it next the window is lighter than most of the paper: that the
side of it farthest from the window is darker than the paper; and that
the light passes into the dark gradually, while a shadow is thrown to
the right _on_ the paper itself by the stone: the general appearance of
things being more or less as in _a_, Fig. 5., the spots on the stone
excepted, of which more presently.
Now, remember always what was stated in the outset, that every thing you
can see in Nature is seen only so far as it is lighter or darker than
the things about it, or of a different colour from them. It is either
seen as a patch of one colour on a ground of another; or as a pale thing
relieved from a dark thing, or a dark thing from a pale thing. And if
you can put on patches of colour or shade of exactly the same size,
shape, and gradations as those on the object and its ground, you will
produce the appearance of the object and its ground. The best
draughtsman--Titian and Paul Veronese themselves--could do no more than
this; and you will soon be able to get some power of doing it in an
inferior way, if you once understand the exceeding simplicity of what is
to be done. Suppose you have a brown book on a white sheet of paper, on
a red tablecloth. You have nothing to do but to put on spaces of red,
white, and brown, in the same shape, and gradated from dark to light in
the same degrees, and your drawing is done. If you will not look at what
you see, if you try to put on brighter or duller colours than are there,
if you try to put them on with a dash or a blot, or to cover your paper
with "vigorous" lines, or to produce anything, in fact, but the plain,
unaffected, and finished tranquillity of the thing before you, you need
not hope to get on. Nature will show you nothing if you set yourself up
for her master. But forget yourself, and try to obey _her_, and you will
find obedience easier and happier than you think.
The real difficulties are to get the _refinement_ of the forms and the
_evenness_ of the gradations. You may depend upon it, when you are
dissatisfied with your work, it is always too coarse or too uneven. It
may not be wrong--in all probability is not wrong, in any (so-called)
_great_ point. But its edges are not true enough in outline; and its
shades are in blotches, or scratches, or full of white holes. Get it
more tender and more true, and you will find it is more powerful.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.]
Do not, therefore, think your drawing must be weak because you have a
finely pointed pen in your hand. Till you can draw with that, you can
draw with nothing; when you can draw with that, you can draw with a log
of wood charred at the end. True boldness and power are only to be
gained by care. Even in fencing and dancing, all ultimate ease depends
on early precision in the commencement; much more in singing or
drawing.
Now, I do not want you to copy Fig. 5., but to copy the stone before you
in the way that Fig. 5. is done. To which end, first measure the extreme
length of the stone with compasses, and mark that length on your paper;
then, between the points marked, leave something like the form of the
stone in light, scrawling the paper all over, round it, as at _b_, Fig.
5. You cannot rightly see what the form of the stone really is till you
begin finishing, so sketch it in quite rudely; only rather leave too
_much_ room for the high light, than too little: and then more
cautiously fill in the shade, shutting the light gradually up, and
putting in the dark cautiously on the dark side. You need not plague
yourself about accuracy of shape, because, till you have practised a
great deal, it is impossible for you to draw that shape quite truly, and
you must gradually gain correctness by means of these various exercises:
what you have mainly to do at present is, to get the stone to look solid
and round, not much minding what its exact contour is--only draw it as
nearly right as you can without vexation; and you will get it _more_
right by thus feeling your way to it in shade, than if you tried to draw
the outline at first. For you can _see_ no outline; what you see is only
a certain space of gradated shade, with other such spaces about it; and
those pieces of shade you are to imitate as nearly as you can, by
scrawling the paper over till you get them to the right shape, with the
same gradations which they have in Nature. And this is really more
likely to be done well, if you have to fight your way through a little
confusion in the sketch, than if you have an accurately traced outline.
For instance, I was going to draw, beside _a_, another effect on the
stone; reflected light bringing its dark side out from the background:
but when I had laid on the first few touches, I thought it would be
better to stop, and let you see how I had begun it, at _b_. In which
beginning it will be observed that nothing is so determined but that I
can more or less modify, and add to or diminish the contour as I work
on, the lines which suggest the outline being blended with the others if
I do not want them; and the having to fill up the vacancies and conquer
the irregularities of such a sketch, will probably secure a higher
completion at last, than if half an hour had been spent in getting a
true outline before beginning.
In doing this, however, take care not to get the drawing too dark. In
order to ascertain what the shades of it really are, cut a round hole,
about half the size of a pea, in a piece of white paper, the colour of
that you use to draw on. Hold this bit of paper, with the hole in it,
between you and your stone; and pass the paper backwards and forwards,
so as to see the different portions of the stone (or other subject)
through the hole. You will find that, thus, the circular hole looks like
one of the patches of colour you have been accustomed to match, only
changing in depth as it lets different pieces of the stone be seen
through it. You will be able thus actually to _match_ the colour of the
stone, at any part of it, by tinting the paper beside the circular
opening. And you will find that this opening never looks quite _black_,
but that all the roundings of the stone are given by subdued greys.[208]
You will probably find, also, that some parts of the stone, or of the
paper it lies on, look luminous through the opening, so that the little
circle then tells as a light spot instead of a dark spot. When this is
so, you cannot imitate it, for you have no means of getting light
brighter than white paper: but by holding the paper more sloped towards
the light, you will find that many parts of the stone, which before
looked light through the hole, then look dark through it; and if you can
place the paper in such a position that every part of the stone looks
slightly dark, the little hole will tell always as a spot of shade, and
if your drawing is put in the same light, you can imitate or match every
gradation. You will be amazed to find, under these circumstances, how
slight the differences of tint are, by which, through infinite delicacy
of gradation, Nature can express form.
If any part of your subject will obstinately show itself as a light
through the hole, that part you need not hope to imitate. Leave it
white, you can do no more.
When you have done the best you can to get the general form, proceed to
finish, by imitating the texture and all the cracks and stains of the
stone as closely as you can; and note, in doing this, that cracks or
fissures of any kind, whether between stones in walls, or in the grain
of timber or rocks, or in any of the thousand other conditions they
present, are never expressible by single black lines, or lines of simple
shadow. A crack must always have its complete system of light and shade,
however small its scale. It is in reality a little _ravine_, with a dark
or shady side, and light or sunny side, and, usually, shadow in the
bottom. This is one of the instances in which it may be as well to
understand the reason of the appearance; it is not often so in drawing,
for the aspects of things are so subtle and confused that they cannot in
general be explained; and in the endeavour to explain some, we are sure
to lose sight of others, while the natural overestimate of the
importance of those on which the attention is fixed, causes us to
exaggerate them, so that merely _scientific_ draughtsmen caricature a
third part of Nature, and miss two-thirds. The best scholar is he whose
eye is so keen as to see at once how the thing looks, and who need not,
therefore, trouble himself with any reasons why it looks so: but few
people have this acuteness of perception; and to those who are destitute
of it, a little pointing out of rule and reason will be a help,
especially when a master is not near them. I never allow my own pupils
to ask the reason of anything, because, as I watch their work, I can
always show them how the thing is, and what appearance they are missing
in it; but when a master is not by to direct the sight, science may,
here and there, be allowed to do so in his stead.
Generally, then, every solid illumined object--for instance, the stone
you are drawing--has a light side turned towards the light, a dark side
turned away from the light, and a shadow, which is cast on something
else (as by the stone on the paper it is set upon). You may sometimes be
placed so as to see only the light side and shadow, and sometimes only
the dark side and shadow, and sometimes both, or either, without the
shadow; but in most positions solid objects will show all the three, as
the stone does here.
Hold up your hand with the edge of it towards you, as you sit now with
your side to the window, so that the flat of your hand is turned to the
window. You will see one side of your hand distinctly lighted, the other
distinctly in shade. Here are light side and dark side, with no seen
shadow; the shadow being detached, perhaps on the table, perhaps on the
other side of the room; you need not look for it at present.
Take a sheet of note-paper, and holding it edgeways, as you hold your
hand, wave it up and down past the side of your hand which is turned
from the light, the paper being, of course, farther from the window. You
will see, as it passes a strong gleam of light strike on your hand, and
light it considerably on its dark side. This light is _reflected_ light.
It is thrown back from the paper (on which it strikes first in coming
from the window) to the surface of your hand, just as a ball would be if
somebody threw it through the window at the wall and you caught it at
the rebound.
Next, instead of the note-paper, take a red book, or a piece of scarlet
cloth. You will see that the gleam of light falling on your hand, as you
wave the book is now reddened. Take a blue book, and you will find the
gleam is blue. Thus every object will cast some of its own colour back
in the light that it reflects.
Now it is not only these books or papers that reflect light to your
hand: every object in the room, on that side of it, reflects some, but
more feebly, and the colours mixing all together form a neutral[209]
light, which lets the colour of your hand itself be more distinctly seen
than that of any object which reflects light to it; but if there were no
reflected light, that side of your hand would look as black as a coal.
Objects are seen, therefore in general, partly by direct light, and
partly by light reflected from the objects around them, or from the
atmosphere and clouds. The colour of their light sides depends much on
that of the direct light, and that of the dark sides on the colours of
the objects near them. It is therefore impossible to say beforehand
what colour an object will have at any point of its surface, that colour
depending partly on its own tint, and partly on infinite combinations of
rays reflected from other things. The only certain fact about dark sides
is, that their colour will be changeful, and that a picture which gives
them merely darker shades of the colour of the light sides must
assuredly be bad.
Now, lay your hand flat on the white paper you are drawing on. You will
see one side of each finger lighted, one side dark, and the shadow of
your hand on the paper. Here, therefore, are the three divisions of
shade seen at once. And although the paper is white, and your hand of a
rosy colour somewhat darker than white, yet you will see that the shadow
all along, just under the finger which casts it, is darker than the
flesh, and is of a very deep grey. The reason of this is, that much
light is reflected from the paper to the dark side of your finger, but
very little is reflected from other things to the paper itself in that
chink under your finger.
In general, for this reason, a shadow, or, at any rate, the part of the
shadow nearest the object, is darker than the dark side of the object. I
say in general, because a thousand accidents may interfere to prevent
its being so. Take a little bit of glass, as a wine-glass, or the
ink-bottle, and play it about a little on the side of your hand farthest
from the window; you will presently find you are throwing gleams of
light all over the dark side of your hand, and in some positions of the
glass the reflection from it will annihilate the shadow altogether, and
you will see your hand dark on the white paper. Now a stupid painter
would represent, for instance, a drinking-glass beside the hand of one
of his figures, and because he had been taught by rule that "shadow was
darker than the dark side," he would never think of the reflection from
the glass, but paint a dark grey under the hand, just as if no glass
were there. But a great painter would be sure to think of the true
effect, and paint it; and then comes the stupid critic, and wonders why
the hand is so light on its dark side.
Thus it is always dangerous to assert anything as a _rule_ in matters of
art; yet it is useful for you to remember that, in a general way, a
shadow is darker than the dark side of the thing that casts it,
supposing the colours otherwise the same; that is to say, when a white
object casts a shadow on a white surface, or a dark object on a dark
surface: the rule will not hold if the colours are different, the shadow
of a black object on a white surface being, of course, not so dark,
usually, as the black thing casting it. The only way to ascertain the
ultimate truth in such matters is to _look_ for it; but, in the
meantime, you will be helped by noticing that the cracks in the stone
are little ravines, on one side of which the light strikes sharply,
while the other is in shade. This dark side usually casts a little
darker shadow at the bottom of the crack; and the general tone of the
stone surface is not so bright as the light bank of the ravine. And,
therefore, if you get the surface of the object of a uniform tint, more
or less indicative of shade, and then scratch out a white spot or streak
in it of any shape; by putting a dark touch beside this white one, you
may turn it, as you choose, into either a ridge or an incision, into
either a boss or a cavity. If you put the dark touch on the side of it
nearest the sun, or rather, nearest the place that the light comes from,
you will make it a cut or cavity; if you put it on the opposite side,
you will make it a ridge or mound: and the complete success of the
effect depends less on depth of shade than on the rightness of the
drawing; that is to say, on the evident correspondence of the form of
the shadow with the form that casts it. In drawing rocks, or wood, or
anything irregularly shaped, you will gain far more by a little patience
in following the forms carefully, though with slight touches, than by
laboured finishing of textures of surface and transparencies of shadow.
When you have got the whole well into shape, proceed to lay on the
stains and spots with great care, quite as much as you gave to the
forms. Very often, spots or bars of local colour do more to express form
than even the light and shade, and they are always interesting as the
means by which Nature carries light into her shadows, and shade into her
lights, an art of which we shall have more to say hereafter, in speaking
of composition. Fig. 5. is a rough sketch of a fossil sea-urchin, in
which the projections of the shell are of black flint, coming through a
chalky surface. These projections form dark spots in the light; and
their sides, rising out of the shadow, form smaller whitish spots in the
dark. You may take such scattered lights as these out with the penknife,
provided you are just as careful to place them rightly, as if you got
them by a more laborious process.
When you have once got the feeling of the way in which gradation
expresses roundness and projection, you may try your strength on
anything natural or artificial that happens to take your fancy, provided
it be not too complicated in form. I have asked you to draw a stone
first, because any irregularities and failures in your shading will be
less offensive to you, as being partly characteristic of the rough stone
surface, than they would be in a more delicate subject; and you may as
well go on drawing rounded stones of different shapes for a little
while, till you find you can really shade delicately. You may then take
up folds of thick white drapery, a napkin or towel thrown carelessly on
the table is as good as anything, and try to express them in the same
way; only now you will find that your shades must be wrought with
perfect unity and tenderness, or you will lose the flow of the folds.
Always remember that a little bit perfected is worth more than many
scrawls; whenever you feel yourself inclined to scrawl, give up work
resolutely, and do not go back to it till next day. Of course your towel
or napkin must be put on something that may be locked up, so that its
folds shall not be disturbed till you have finished. If you find that
the folds will not look right, get a photograph of a piece of drapery
(there are plenty now to be bought, taken from the sculpture of the
cathedrals of Rheims, Amiens, and Chartres, which will at once educate
your hand and your taste), and copy some piece of that; you will then
ascertain what it is that is wanting in your studies from nature,
whether more gradation, or greater watchfulness of the disposition of
the folds. Probably for some time you will find yourself failing
painfully in both, for drapery is very difficult to follow in its
sweeps; but do not lose courage, for the greater the difficulty, the
greater the gain in the effort. If your eye is more just in measurement
of form than delicate in perception of tint, a pattern on the folded
surface will help you. Try whether it does or not; and if the patterned
drapery confuses you, keep for a time to the simple white one; but if it
helps you, continue to choose patterned stuffs (tartans, and simple
chequered designs are better at first than flowered ones), and even
though it should confuse you, begin pretty soon to use a pattern
occasionally, copying all the distortions and perspective modifications
of it among the folds with scrupulous care.
Neither must you suppose yourself condescending in doing this. The
greatest masters are always fond of drawing patterns; and the greater
they are, the more pains they take to do it truly.[210] Nor can there be
better practice at any time, as introductory to the nobler complication
of natural detail. For when you can draw the spots which follow the
folds of a printed stuff, you will have some chance of following the
spots which fall into the folds of the skin of a leopard as he leaps;
but if you cannot draw the manufacture, assuredly you will never be able
to draw the creature. So the cloudings on a piece of wood, carefully
drawn, will be the best introduction to the drawing of the clouds of the
sky, or the waves of the sea; and the dead leaf-patterns on a damask
drapery, well rendered, will enable you to disentangle masterfully the
living leaf-patterns of a thorn thicket, or a violet bank.
Observe, however, in drawing any stuffs, or bindings of books, or other
finely textured substances, do not trouble yourself, as yet, much about
the woolliness or gauziness of the thing; but get it right in shade and
fold, and true in pattern. We shall see, in the course of
after-practice, how the penned lines may be made indicative of texture;
but at present attend only to the light, and shade, and pattern. You
will be puzzled at first by _lustrous_ surfaces, but a little attention
will show you that the expression of these depends merely on the right
drawing of their light, and shade, and reflections. Put a small black
japanned tray on the table in front of some books; and you will see it
reflects the objects beyond it as in a little black rippled pond; its
own colour mingling always with that of the reflected objects. Draw
these reflections of the books properly, making them dark and distorted,
as you will see that they are, and you will find that this gives the
lustre to your tray. It is not well, however, to draw polished objects
in general practice; only you should do one or two in order to
understand the aspect of any lustrous portion of other things, such as
you cannot avoid; the gold, for instance, on the edges of books, or the
shining of silk and damask, in which lies a great part of the expression
of their folds. Observe, also, that there are very few things which are
totally without lustre: you will frequently find a light which puzzles
you, on some apparently dull surface, to be the dim image of another
object.
And now, as soon as you can conscientiously assure me that with the
point of the pen or pencil you can lay on any form and shade you like, I
give you leave to use the brush with one colour,--sepia, or blue-black,
or mixed cobalt and blue-black, or neutral tint; and this will much
facilitate your study, and refresh you. But, preliminarily, you must do
one or two more exercises in tinting.
EXERCISE IX.
Prepare your colour as before directed. Take a brush full of it, and
strike it on the paper in any irregular shape; as the brush gets dry
sweep the surface of the paper with it as if you were dusting the paper
very lightly; every such sweep of the brush will leave a number of more
or less minute interstices in the colour. The lighter and faster every
dash the better. Then leave the whole to dry, and as soon as it is dry,
with little colour in your brush, so that you can bring it to a fine
point, fill up all the little interstices one by one, so as to make the
whole as even as you can, and fill in the larger gaps with more colour,
always trying to let the edges of the first and of the newly applied
colour exactly meet, and not lap over each other. When your new colour
dries, you will find it in places a little paler than the first. Retouch
it, therefore, trying to get the whole to look quite one piece. A very
small bit of colour thus filled up with your very best care, and brought
to look as if it had been quite even from the first, will give you
better practice and more skill than a great deal filled in carelessly;
so do it with your best patience, not leaving the most minute spot of
white; and do not fill in the large pieces first and then go to the
small, but quietly and steadily cover in the whole up to a marked limit;
then advance a little farther, and so on; thus always seeing distinctly
what is done and what undone.
EXERCISE X.
Lay a coat of the blue, prepared as usual, over a whole square of paper.
Let it dry. Then another coat over four-fifths of the square, or
thereabouts, leaving the edge rather irregular than straight, and let it
dry. Then another coat over three-fifths; another over two-fifths; and
the last over one-fifth; so that the square may present the appearance
of gradual increase in darkness in five bands, each darker than the one
beyond it. Then, with the brush rather dry (as in the former exercise,
when filling up the interstices), try, with small touches, like those
used in the pen etching, only a little broader, to add shade delicately
beyond each edge, so as to lead the darker tints into the paler ones
imperceptibly. By touching the paper very lightly, and putting a
multitude of little touches, crossing and recrossing in every direction,
you will gradually be able to work up to the darker tints, outside of
each, so as quite to efface their edges, and unite them tenderly with
the next tint. The whole square, when done, should look evenly shaded
from dark to pale, with no bars; only a crossing texture of touches,
something like chopped straw, over the whole.[211]
Next, take your rounded pebble; arrange it in any light and shade you
like; outline it very loosely with the pencil. Put on a wash of colour,
prepared _very_ pale, quite flat over all of it, except the highest
light, leaving the edge of your colour quite sharp. Then another wash,
extending only over the darker parts, leaving the edge of that sharp
also, as in tinting the square. Then another wash over the still darker
parts, and another over the darkest, leaving each edge to dry sharp.
Then, with the small touches, efface the edges, reinforce the darks, and
work the whole delicately together, as you would with the pen, till you
have got it to the likeness of the true light and shade. You will find
that the tint underneath is a great help, and that you can now get
effects much more subtle and complete than with the pen merely.
The use of leaving the edges always sharp is that you may not trouble or
vex the colour, but let it lie as it falls suddenly on the paper; colour
looks much more lovely when it has been laid on with a dash of the
brush, and left to dry in its own way, than when it has been dragged
about and disturbed; so that it is always better to let the edges and
forms be a _little_ wrong, even if one cannot correct them afterwards,
than to lose this fresh quality of the tint. Very great masters in
water-colour can lay on the true forms at once with a dash, and _bad_
masters in water-colour lay on grossly false forms with a dash, and
leave them false; for people in general, not knowing false from true,
are as much pleased with the appearance of power in the irregular blot
as with the presence of power in the determined one; but _we_, in our
beginnings, must do as much as we can with the broad dash, and then
correct with the point, till we are quite right. We must take care to be
right, at whatever cost of pains; and then gradually we shall find we
can be right with freedom.
I have hitherto limited you to colour mixed with two or three
teaspoonfuls of water; but in finishing your light and shade from the
stone, you may, as you efface the edge of the palest coat towards the
light, use the colour for the small touches with more and more water,
till it is so pale as not to be perceptible. Thus you may obtain a
_perfect_ gradation to the light. And in reinforcing the darks, when
they are very dark, you may use less and less water. If you take the
colour tolerably dark on your brush, only always liquid (not pasty), and
dash away the superfluous colour on blotting-paper, you will find that,
touching the paper very lightly with the dry brush, you can, by repeated
touches, produce a dusty kind of bloom, very valuable in giving depth to
shadow; but it requires great patience and delicacy of hand to do this
properly. You will find much of this kind of work in the grounds and
shadows of William Hunt's drawings.[212]
As you get used to the brush and colour, you will gradually find out
their ways for yourself, and get the management of them. Nothing but
practice will do this perfectly; but you will often save yourself much
discouragement by remembering what I have so often asserted,--that if
anything goes wrong, it is nearly sure to be refinement that is wanting,
not force; and connexion, not alteration. If you dislike the state your
drawing is in, do not lose patience with it, nor dash at it, nor alter
its plan, nor rub it desperately out, at the place you think wrong; but
look if there are no shadows you can gradate more perfectly; no little
gaps and rents you can fill; no forms you can more delicately define:
and do not _rush_ at any of the errors or incompletions thus discerned,
but efface or supply slowly, and you will soon find your drawing take
another look. A very useful expedient in producing some effects, is to
wet the paper, and then lay the colour on it, more or less wet,
according to the effect you want. You will soon see how prettily it
gradates itself as it dries; when dry, you can reinforce it with
delicate stippling when you want it darker. Also, while the colour is
still damp on the paper, by drying your brush thoroughly, and touching
the colour with the brush so dried, you may take out soft lights with
great tenderness and precision. Try all sorts of experiments of this
kind, noticing how the colour behaves; but remembering always that your
final results must be obtained, and can only be obtained, by pure work
with the point, as much as in the pen drawing.
You will find also, as you deal with more and more complicated subjects,
that Nature's resources in light and shade are so much richer than
yours, that you cannot possibly get all, or anything _like_ all, the
gradations of shadow in any given group. When this is the case,
determine first to keep the broad masses of things distinct: if, for
instance, there is a green book, and a white piece of paper, and a black
inkstand in the group, be sure to keep the white paper as a light mass,
the green book as a middle tint mass, the black inkstand as a dark mass;
and do not shade the folds in the paper, or corners of the book, so as
to equal in depth the darkness of the inkstand. The great difference
between the masters of light and shade, and imperfect artists, is the
power of the former to draw so delicately as to express form in a
dark-coloured object with little light, and in a light-coloured object
with little darkness; and it is better even to leave the forms here and
there unsatisfactorily rendered than to lose the general relations of
the great masses. And this observe, not because masses are grand or
desirable things in your composition (for with composition at present
you have nothing whatever to do), but because it is a _fact_ that things
do so present themselves to the eyes of men, and that we see paper,
book, and inkstand as three separate things, before we see the wrinkles,
or chinks, or corners of any of the three. Understand, therefore, at
once, that no detail can be as strongly expressed in drawing as it is in
the reality; and strive to keep all your shadows and marks and minor
markings on the masses, lighter than they appear to be in Nature, you
are sure otherwise to get them too dark. You will in doing this find
that you cannot get the _projection_ of things sufficiently shown; but
never mind that; there is no need that they should appear to project,
but great need that their relations of shade to each other should be
preserved. All deceptive projection is obtained by partial exaggeration
of shadow; and whenever you see it, you may be sure the drawing is more
or less bad; a thoroughly fine drawing or painting will always show a
slight tendency towards _flatness_.
Observe, on the other hand, that however white an object may be, there
is always some small point of it whiter than the rest. You must
therefore have a slight tone of grey over everything in your picture
except on the extreme high lights; even the piece of white paper, in
your subject, must be toned slightly down, unless (and there are a
thousand chances to one against its being so) it should all be turned so
as fully to front the light. By examining the treatment of the white
objects in any pictures accessible to you by Paul Veronese or Titian,
you will soon understand this.[213]
As soon as you feel yourself capable of expressing with the brush the
undulations of surfaces and the relations of masses, you may proceed to
draw more complicated and beautiful things.[214] And first, the boughs
of trees, now not in mere dark relief, but in full rounding. Take the
first bit of branch or stump that comes to hand, with a fork in it; cut
off the ends of the forking branches, so as to leave the whole only
about a foot in length; get a piece of paper the same size, fix your bit
of branch in some place where its position will not be altered, and draw
it thoroughly, in all its light and shade, full size; striving, above
all things, to get an accurate expression of its structure at the fork
of the branch. When once you have mastered the tree at its _armpits_,
you will have little more trouble with it.
Always draw whatever the background happens to be, exactly as you see
it. Wherever you have fastened the bough, you must draw whatever is
behind it, ugly or not, else you will never know whether the light and
shade are right; they may appear quite wrong to you, only for want of
the background. And this general law is to be observed in all your
studies: whatever you draw, draw completely and unalteringly, else you
never know if what you have done is right, or whether you _could_ have
done it rightly had you tried. There is nothing _visible_ out of which
you may not get useful practice.
Next, to put the leaves on your boughs. Gather a small twig with four or
five leaves on it, put it into water, put a sheet of light-coloured or
white paper behind it, so that all the leaves may be relieved in dark
from the white field; then sketch in their dark shape carefully with
pencil as you did the complicated boughs, in order to be sure that all
their masses and interstices are right in shape before you begin
shading, and complete as far as you can with pen and ink, in the manner
of Fig. 6., which is a young shoot of lilac.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.]
You will probably, in spite of all your pattern drawings, be at first
puzzled by leaf foreshortening; especially because the look of
retirement or projection depends not so much on the perspective of the
leaves themselves as on the double sight of the two eyes. Now there are
certain artifices by which good painters can partly conquer this
difficulty; as slight exaggerations of force or colour in the nearer
parts, and of obscurity in the more distant ones; but you must not
attempt anything of this kind. When you are first sketching the leaves,
shut one of your eyes, fix a point in the background, to bring the point
of one of the leaves against, and so sketch the whole bough as you see
it in a fixed position, looking with one eye only. Your drawing never
can be made to look like the object itself, as you see that object with
_both_ eyes,[215] but it can be made perfectly like the object seen with
one, and you must be content when you have got a resemblance on these
terms.
In order to get clearly at the notion of the thing to be done, take a
single long leaf, hold it with its point towards you, and as flat as you
can, so as to see nothing of it but its thinness, as if you wanted to
know how thin it was; outline it so. Then slope it down gradually
towards you, and watch it as it lengthens out to its full length, held
perpendicularly down before you. Draw it in three or four different
positions between these extremes, with its ribs as they appear in each
position, and you will soon find out how it must be.
Draw first only two or three of the leaves; then larger clusters; and
practise, in this way, more and more complicated pieces of bough and
leafage, till you find you can master the most difficult arrangements,
not consisting of more than ten or twelve leaves. You will find as you
do this, if you have an opportunity of visiting any gallery of pictures,
that you take a much more lively interest than before in the work of the
great masters; you will see that very often their best backgrounds are
composed of little more than a few sprays of leafage, carefully studied,
brought against the distant sky; and that another wreath or two form the
chief interest of their foregrounds. If you live in London you may test
your progress _accurately_ by the degree of admiration you feel for the
leaves of vine round the head of the Bacchus, in Titian's Bacchus and
Ariadne. All this, however, will not enable you to draw a mass of
foliage. You will find, on looking at any rich piece of vegetation, that
it is only one or two of the nearer clusters that you can by any
possibility draw in this complete manner. The mass is too vast, and too
intricate, to be thus dealt with.
[Illustration: FIG. 7. a b c]
You must now therefore have recourse to some confused mode of execution,
capable of expressing the confusion of Nature. And, first, you must
understand what the character of that confusion is. If you look
carefully at the outer sprays of any tree at twenty or thirty yards'
distance, you will see them defined against the sky in masses, which, at
first, look quite definite; but if you examine them, you will see,
mingled with the real shapes of leaves, many indistinct lines, which
are, some of them, stalks of leaves, and some, leaves seen with the edge
turned towards you, and coming into sight in a broken way; for,
supposing the real leaf shape to be as at _a_, Fig. 7., this, when
removed some yards from the eye, will appear dark against the sky, as at
_b_; then, when removed some yards farther still, the stalk and point
disappear altogether, the middle of the leaf becomes little more than a
line; and the result is the condition at _c_, only with this farther
subtlety in the look of it, inexpressible in the woodcut, that the stalk
and point of the leaf, though they have disappeared to the eye, have yet
some influence in _checking the light_ at the places where they exist,
and cause a slight dimness about the part of the leaf which remains
visible, so that its perfect effect could only be rendered by two layers
of colour, one subduing the sky tone a little, the next drawing the
broken portions of the leaf, as at _c_, and carefully indicating the
greater darkness of the spot in the middle, where the under side of the
leaf is.
This is the perfect theory of the matter. In practice we cannot reach
such accuracy; but we shall be able to render the general look of the
foliage satisfactorily by the following mode of practice.
Gather a spray of any tree, about a foot or eighteen inches long. Fix it
firmly by the stem in anything that will support it steadily; put it
about eight feet away from you, or ten if you are far-sighted. Put a
sheet of not very white paper behind it, as usual. Then draw very
carefully, first placing them with pencil, and then filling them up with
ink, every leaf, mass and stalk of it in simple black profile, as you
see them against the paper: Fig. 8. is a bough of Phillyrea so drawn. Do
not be afraid of running the leaves into a black mass when they come
together; this exercise is only to teach you what the actual shapes of
such masses are when seen against the sky.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
Make two careful studies of this kind of one bough of every common
tree--oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, &c.; in fact, if you are good, and
industrious, you will make one such study carefully at least three times
a week, until you have examples of every sort of tree and shrub you can
get branches of. You are to make two studies of each bough, for this
reason--all masses of foliage have an upper and under surface, and the
side view of them, or profile, shows a wholly different organisation of
branches from that seen in the view from above. They are generally seen
more or less in profile, as you look at the whole tree, and Nature puts
her best composition into the profile arrangement. But the view from
above or below occurs not unfrequently, also, and it is quite necessary
you should draw it if you wish to understand the anatomy of the tree.
The difference between the two views is often far greater than you could
easily conceive. For instance, in Fig. 9., _a_ is the upper view, and
_b_ the profile, of a single spray of Phillyrea. Fig. 8. is an
intermediate view of a larger bough; seen from beneath, but at some
lateral distance also.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.]
When you have done a few branches in this manner, take one of the
_drawings_, and put it first a yard away from you, then a yard and a
half, then two yards; observe how the thinner stalks and leaves
gradually disappear, leaving only a vague and slight darkness where they
were, and make another study of the effect at each distance, taking care
to draw nothing more than you really see, for in this consists all the
difference between what would be merely a _miniature_ drawing of the
leaves seen _near_, and a _full-size_ drawing of the same leaves at a
distance. By full size, I mean the size which they would really appear
of if their outline were traced through a pane of glass held at the
same distance from the eye at which you mean to hold your drawing. You
can always ascertain this full size of any object by holding your paper
upright before you, at the distance from your eye at which you wish your
drawing to be seen. Bring its edge across the object you have to draw,
and mark upon this edge the points where the outline of the object
crosses, or goes behind, the edge of the paper. You will always find it,
thus measured, smaller than you supposed.
When you have made a few careful experiments of this kind on your own
drawings, (which are better for practice, at first, than the real trees,
because the black profile in the drawing is quite stable, and does not
shake, and is not confused by sparkles of lustre on the leaves,) you may
try the extremities of the real trees, only not doing much at a time,
for the brightness of the sky will dazzle and perplex your sight. And
this brightness causes, I believe, some loss of the outline itself; at
least the chemical action of the light in a photograph extends much
within the edges of the leaves, and, as it were, eats them away so that
no tree extremity, stand it ever so still, nor any other form coming
against bright sky, is truly drawn by a photograph; and if you once
succeed in drawing a few sprays rightly, you will find the result much
more lovely and interesting than any photograph can be.
All this difficulty, however, attaches to the rendering merely the dark
form of the sprays as they come against the sky. Within those sprays,
and in the heart of the tree, there is a complexity of a much more
embarrassing kind; for nearly all leaves have some lustre, and _all_ are
more or less translucent (letting light through them); therefore, in any
given leaf, besides the intricacies of its own proper shadows and
foreshortenings, there are three series of circumstances which alter or
hide its forms. First, shadows cast on it by other leaves--often very
forcibly. Secondly, light reflected from its lustrous surface, sometimes
the blue of the sky, sometimes the white of clouds, or the sun itself
flashing like a star. Thirdly, forms and shadows of other leaves, seen
as darkness _through_ the translucent parts of the leaf; a most
important element of foliage effect, but wholly neglected by landscape
artists in general.
The consequence of all this is, that except now and then by chance, the
form of a complete leaf is never seen; but a marvellous and quaint
confusion, very definite, indeed, in its evidence of direction of
growth, and unity of action, but wholly indefinable and inextricable,
part by part, by any amount of patience. You cannot possibly work it out
in fac simile, though you took a twelvemonth's time to a tree; and you
must therefore try to discover some mode of execution which will more or
less imitate, by its own variety and mystery, the variety and mystery of
Nature, without absolute delineation of detail.
Now I have led you to this conclusion by observation of tree form only,
because in that the thing to be proved is clearest. But no natural
object exists which does not involve in some part or parts of it this
inimitableness, this mystery of quantity, which needs peculiarity of
handling and trick of touch to express it completely. If leaves are
intricate, so is moss, so is foam, so is rock cleavage, so are fur and
hair, and texture of drapery, and of clouds. And although methods and
dexterities of handling are wholly useless if you have not gained first
the thorough knowledge of the form of the thing; so that if you cannot
draw a branch perfectly, then much less a tree; and if not a wreath of
mist perfectly, much less a flock of clouds; and if not a single grass
blade perfectly, much less a grass bank; yet having once got this power
over decisive form, you may safely--and must, in order to perfection of
work--carry out your knowledge by every aid of method and dexterity of
hand.
But, in order to find out what method can do, you must now look at Art
as well as at Nature, and see what means painters and engravers have
actually employed for the expression of these subtleties. Whereupon
arises the question, what opportunity have you to obtain engravings? You
ought, if it is at all in your power, to possess yourself of a certain
number of good examples of Turner's engraved works: if this be not in
your power, you must just make the best use you can of the shop
windows, or of any plates of which you can obtain a loan. Very possibly,
the difficulty of getting sight of them may stimulate you to put them to
better use. But, supposing your means admit of your doing so, possess
yourself, first, of the illustrated edition either of Rogers's Italy or
Rogers's Poems, and then of about a dozen of the plates named in the
annexed lists. The prefixed letters indicate the particular points
deserving your study in each engraving.[216] Be sure, therefore, that
your selection includes, at all events, one plate marked with each
letter--of course the plates marked with two or three letters are, for
the most part, the best. Do not get more than twelve of these plates,
nor even all the twelve at first. For the more engravings you have, the
less attention you will pay to them. It is a general truth, that the
enjoyment derivable from art cannot be increased in quantity, beyond a
certain point, by quantity of possession; it is only spread, as it were,
over a larger surface, and very often dulled by finding ideas repeated
in different works. Now, for a beginner, it is always better that his
attention should be concentrated on one or two good things, and all his
enjoyment founded on them, than that he should look at many, with
divided thoughts. He has much to discover; and his best way of
discovering it is to think long over few things, and watch them
earnestly. It is one of the worst errors of this age to try to know and
to see too much: the men who seem to know everything, never in reality
know anything rightly. Beware of _hand-book_ knowledge.
These engravings are, in general, more for you to look at than to copy;
and they will be of more use to you when we come to talk of composition,
than they are at present; still, it will do you a great deal of good,
sometimes to try how far you can get their delicate texture, or
gradations of tone; as your pen-and-ink drawing will be apt to incline
too much to a scratchy and broken kind of shade. For instance, the
texture of the white convent wall, and the drawing of its tiled roof, in
the vignette at p. 227. of Rogers's Poems, is as exquisite as work can
possibly be; and it will be a great and profitable achievement if you
can at all approach it. In like manner, if you can at all imitate the
dark distant country at p. 7., or the sky at p. 80., of the same volume,
or the foliage at pp. 12. and 144., it will be good gain; and if you can
once draw the rolling clouds and running river at p. 9. of the "Italy,"
or the city in the vignette of Aosta at p. 25., or the moonlight at p.
223., you will find that even Nature herself cannot afterwards very
terribly puzzle you with her torrents, or towers, or moonlight.
You need not copy touch for touch, but try to get the same effect. And
if you feel discouraged by the delicacy required, and begin to think
that engraving is not drawing, and that copying it cannot help you to
draw, remember that it differs from common drawing only by the
difficulties it has to encounter. You perhaps have got into a careless
habit of thinking that engraving is a mere _business_, easy enough when
one has got into the knack of it. On the contrary, it is a form of
drawing more difficult than common drawing, by exactly so much as it is
more difficult to cut steel than to move the pencil over paper. It is
true that there are certain mechanical aids and methods which reduce it
at certain stages either to pure machine work, or to more or less a
habit of hand and arm; but this is not so in the foliage you are trying
to copy, of which the best and prettiest parts are always etched--that
is, drawn with a fine steel point and free hand: only the line made is
white instead of black, which renders it much more difficult to judge of
what you are about. And the trying to copy these plates will be good for
you, because it will awaken you to the real labour and skill of the
engraver, and make you understand a little how people must work, in
this world, who have really to _do_ anything in it.
Do not, however, suppose that I give you the engraving as a model--far
from it; but it is necessary you should be able to do as well[217]
before you think of doing better, and you will find many little helps
and hints in the various work of it. Only remember that _all_ engravers'
foregrounds are bad; whenever you see the peculiar wriggling parallel
lines of modern engravings become distinct, you must not copy; nor
admire: it is only the softer masses, and distances; and portions of the
foliage in the plates marked _f_, which you may copy. The best for this
purpose, if you can get it, is the "Chain bridge over the Tees," of the
England series; the thicket on the right is very beautiful and
instructive, and very like Turner. The foliage in the "Ludlow" and
"Powis" is also remarkably good.
Besides these line engravings, and to protect you from what harm there
is in their influence, you are to provide yourself, if possible, with a
Rembrandt etching, or a photograph of one (of figures, not landscape).
It does not matter of what subject, or whether a sketchy or finished
one, but the sketchy ones are generally cheapest, and will teach you
most. Copy it as well as you can, noticing especially that Rembrandt's
most rapid lines have steady purpose; and that they are laid with almost
inconceivable precision when the object becomes at all interesting. The
"Prodigal Son," "Death of the Virgin," "Abraham and Isaac," and such
others, containing incident and character rather than chiaroscuro, will
be the most instructive. You can buy one; copy it well; then exchange
it, at little loss, for another; and so, gradually, obtain a good
knowledge of his system. Whenever you have an opportunity of examining
his work at museums, &c., do so with the greatest care, not looking at
_many_ things, but a long time at each. You must also provide yourself,
if possible, with an engraving of Albert Durer's. This you will not be
able to copy; but you must keep it beside you, and refer to it as a
standard of precision in line. If you can get one with a _wing_ in it,
it will be best. The crest with the cock, that with the skull and satyr,
and the "Melancholy," are the best you could have, but any will do.
Perfection in chiaroscuro drawing lies between these two masters,
Rembrandt and Durer. Rembrandt is often too loose and vague; and Durer
has little or no effect of mist or uncertainty. If you can see anywhere
a drawing by Leonardo, you will find it balanced between the two
characters; but there are no engravings which present this perfection,
and your style will be best formed, therefore, by alternate study of
Rembrandt and Durer. Lean rather to Durer; it is better for amateurs to
err on the side of precision than on that of vagueness: and though, as I
have just said, you cannot copy a Durer, yet try every now and then a
quarter of an inch square or so, and see how much nearer you can come;
you cannot possibly try to draw the leafly crown of the "Melancholia"
too often.
If you cannot get either a Rembrandt or a Durer, you may still learn
much by carefully studying any of George Cruikshank's etchings, or
Leech's woodcuts in Punch, on the free side; with Alfred Rethel's and
Richter's[218] on the severe side. But in so doing you will need to
notice the following points:
When either the material (as the copper or wood) or the time of an
artist, does not permit him to make a perfect drawing,--that is to say,
one in which no lines shall be prominently visible,--and he is reduced
to show the black lines, either drawn by the pen, or on the wood, it is
better to make these lines help, as far as may be, the expression of
texture and form. You will thus find many textures, as of cloth or grass
or flesh, and many subtle effects of light, expressed by Leech with
zigzag or crossed or curiously broken lines; and you will see that
Alfred Rethel and Richter constantly express the direction and rounding
of surfaces by the direction of the lines which shade them. All these
various means of expression will be useful to you, as far as you can
learn them, provided you remember that they are merely a kind of
shorthand; telling certain facts, not in quite the _right_ way, but in
the only possible way under the conditions: and provided in any after
use of such means, you never try to show your own dexterity; but only to
get as much record of the object as you can in a given time; and that
you continually make efforts to go beyond shorthand, and draw portions
of the objects rightly.
And touching this question of _direction_ of lines as indicating that of
surface, observe these few points:
[Illustration: FIG. 10.]
If lines are to be distinctly shown, it is better that, so far as they
_can_ indicate any thing by their direction, they should explain rather
than oppose the general character of the object. Thus, in the piece of
woodcut from Titian, Fig. 10., the lines are serviceable by expressing,
not only the shade of the trunk, but partly also its roundness, and the
flow of its grain. And Albert Durer, whose work was chiefly engraving,
sets himself always thus to make his lines as _valuable_ as possible;
telling much by them, both of shade and direction of surface: and if you
were always to be limited to engraving on copper (and did not want to
express effects of mist or darkness, as well as delicate forms), Albert
Durer's way of work would be the best example for you. But, inasmuch as
the perfect way of drawing is by shade without lines, and the great
painters always conceive their subject as complete, even when they are
sketching it most rapidly, you will find that, when they are not
limited in means, they do not much trust to direction of line, but will
often scratch in the shade of a rounded surface with nearly straight
lines, that is to say, with the easiest and quickest lines possible to
themselves. When the hand is free, the easiest line for it to draw is
one inclining from the left upward to the right, or _vice versâ_, from
the right downwards to the left; and when done very quickly, the line is
hooked a little at the end by the effort at return to the next. Hence,
you will always find the pencil, chalk, or pen sketch of a _very_ great
master full of these kind of lines; and even if he draws carefully, you
will find him using simple straight lines from left to right, when an
inferior master will have used curved ones. Fig. 11. is a fair facsimile
of part of a sketch of Raphael's, which exhibits these characters very
distinctly. Even the careful drawings of Leonardo da Vinci are shaded
most commonly with straight lines; and you may always assume it as a
point increasing the probability of a drawing being by a great master if
you find rounded surfaces, such as those of cheeks or lips, shaded with
straight lines.
[Illustration: FIG. 11.]
But you will also now understand how easy it must be for dishonest
dealers to forge or imitate scrawled sketches like Figure 11., and pass
them for the work of great masters; and how the power of determining the
genuineness of a drawing depends entirely on your knowing the _facts_ of
the object drawn, and perceiving whether the hasty handling is _all_
conducive to the expression of those truths. In a great man's work, at
its fastest, no line is thrown away, and it is not by the rapidity, but
the _economy_ of the execution that you know him to be great. Now to
judge of this economy, you must know exactly what he meant to do,
otherwise you cannot of course discern how far he has done it; that is,
you must know the beauty and nature of the thing he was drawing. All
judgment of art thus finally founds itself on knowledge of Nature.
But farther observe, that this scrawled, or economic, or impetuous
execution is never _affectedly_ impetuous. If a great man is not in a
hurry, he never pretends to be; if he has no eagerness in his heart, he
puts none into his hand; if he thinks his effect would be better got
with _two_ lines, he never, to show his dexterity, tries to do it with
one. Be assured, therefore (and this is a matter of great importance),
that you will never produce a great drawing by imitating the _execution_
of a great master. Acquire his knowledge and share his feelings, and the
easy execution will fall from your hand as it did from his; but if you
merely scrawl because he scrawled, or blot because he blotted, you will
not only never advance in power, but every able draughtsman, and every
judge whose opinion is worth having, will know you for a cheat, and
despise you accordingly.
Again, observe respecting the use of outline:
All merely outlined drawings are bad, for the simple reason, that an
artist of any power can always do more, and tell more, by quitting his
outlines occasionally, and scratching in a few lines for shade, than he
can by restricting himself to outline only. Hence the fact of his so
restricting himself, whatever may be the occasion, shows him to be a bad
draughtsman, and not to know how to apply his power economically. This
hard law, however, bears only on drawings meant to remain in the state
in which you see them; not on those which were meant to be proceeded
with, or for some mechanical use. It is sometimes necessary to draw pure
outlines, as an incipient arrangement of a composition, to be filled up
afterwards with colour, or to be pricked through and used as patterns or
tracings; but if, with no such ultimate object, making the drawing
wholly for its own sake, and meaning it to remain in the state he leaves
it, an artist restricts himself to outline, he is a bad draughtsman, and
his work is bad. There is no exception to this law. A good artist
habitually sees masses, not edges, and can in every case make his
drawing more expressive (with any given quantity of work) by rapid shade
than by contours; so that all good work whatever is more or less touched
with shade, and more or less interrupted as outline.
[Illustration: FIG. 12.]
Hence, the published works of Retsch, and all the English imitations of
them, and all outline engravings from pictures, are bad work, and only
serve to corrupt the public taste, and of such outlines, the worst are
those which are darkened in some part of their course by way of
expressing the dark side, as Flaxman's from Dante, and such others;
because an outline can only be true so long as it accurately represents
the form of the given object with _one_ of its edges. Thus, the outline
_a_ and the outline _b_, Fig. 12., are both _true_ outlines of a ball;
because, however thick the line may be, whether we take the interior or
exterior edge of it, that edge of it always draws a true circle. But _c_
is a false outline of a ball, because either the inner or outer edge of
the black line must be an untrue circle, else the line could not be
thicker in one place than another. Hence all "force," as it is called,
is gained by falsification of the contours; so that no artist whose eye
is true and fine could endure to look at it. It does indeed often happen
that a painter, sketching rapidly, and trying again and again for some
line which he cannot quite strike, blackens or loads the first line by
setting others beside and across it; and then a careless observer
supposes it has been thickened on purpose; or, sometimes also, at a
place where shade is afterwards to enclose the form, the painter will
strike a broad dash of this shade beside his outline at once, looking as
if he meant to thicken the outline; whereas this broad line is only the
first instalment of the future shadow, and the outline is really drawn
with its inner edge. And thus, far from good draughtsmen darkening the
lines which turn away from the light, the _tendency_ with them is rather
to darken them towards the light, for it is there in general that shade
will ultimately enclose them. The best example of this treatment that I
know is Raphael's sketch, in the Louvre, of the head of the angel
pursuing Heliodorus, the one that shows part of the left eye; where the
dark strong lines which terminate the nose and forehead towards the
light are opposed to tender and light ones behind the ear, and in other
places towards the shade. You will see in Fig. 11. the same principle
variously exemplified; the principal dark lines, in the head and drapery
of the arms, being on the side turned to the light.
All these refinements and ultimate principles, however, do not affect
your drawing for the present. You must try to make your outlines as
_equal_ as possible; and employ pure outline only for the two following
purposes: either (1.) to steady your hand, as in Exercise II., for if
you cannot draw the line itself, you will never be able to terminate
your shadow in the precise shape required, when the line is absent; or
(2.) to give you shorthand memoranda of forms, when you are pressed for
time. Thus the forms of distant trees in groups are defined, for the
most part, by the light edge of the rounded mass of the nearer one being
shown against the darker part of the rounded mass of a more distant one;
and to draw this properly, nearly as much work is required to round each
tree as to round the stone in Fig. 5. Of course you cannot often get
time to do this; but if you mark the terminal line of each tree as is
done by Durer in Fig. 13., you will get a most useful memorandum of
their arrangement, and a very interesting drawing. Only observe in doing
this, you must not, because the procedure is a quick one, hurry that
procedure itself. You will find, on copying that bit of Durer, that
every one of his lines is firm, deliberate, and accurately descriptive
as far as it goes. It means a bush of such a size and such a shape,
definitely observed and set down; it contains a true "signalement" of
every nut-tree, and apple-tree, and higher bit of hedge, all round that
village. If you have not time to draw thus carefully, do not draw at
all--you are merely wasting your work and spoiling your taste. When you
have had four or five years' practice you may be able to make useful
memoranda at a rapid rate, but not yet; except sometimes of light and
shade, in a way of which I will tell you presently. And this use of
outline, note farther, is wholly confined to objects which have _edges_
or _limits_. You can outline line a tree or a stone, when it rises
against another tree or stone; but you cannot outline folds in drapery,
or waves in water; if these are to be expressed at all it must be by
some sort of shade, and therefore the rule that no good drawing can
consist throughout of pure outline remains absolute. You see, in that
woodcut of Durer's, his reason for even limiting himself so much to
outline as he has, in those distant woods and plains, is that he may
leave them in bright light, to be thrown out still more by the dark sky
and the dark village spire; and the scene becomes real and sunny only by
the addition of these shades.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.]
Understanding, then, thus much of the use of outline, we will go back to
our question about tree drawing left unanswered at page 60.
[Illustration: FIG. 14.]
[Illustration: FIG. 15.]
We were, you remember, in pursuit of mystery among the leaves. Now, it
is quite easy to obtain mystery and disorder, to any extent; but the
difficulty is to keep organisation in the midst of mystery. And you will
never succeed in doing this unless you lean always to the definite side,
and allow yourself rarely to become quite vague, at least through all
your early practice. So, after your single groups of leaves, your first
step must be to conditions like Figs. 14. and 15., which are careful
facsimiles of two portions of a beautiful woodcut of Durer's, the Flight
into Egypt. Copy these carefully,--never mind how little at a time, but
thoroughly; then trace the Durer, and apply it to your drawing, and do
not be content till the one fits the other, else your eye is not true
enough to carry you safely through meshes of real leaves. And in the
course of doing this, you will find that not a line nor dot of Durer's
can be displaced without harm; that all add to the effect, and either
express something, or illumine something, or relieve something. If,
afterwards, you copy any of the pieces of modern tree drawing, of which
so many rich examples are given constantly in our cheap illustrated
periodicals (any of the Christmas numbers of last year's _Illustrated
News_ or _Times_ are full of them), you will see that, though good and
forcible general effect is produced, the lines are thrown in by
thousands without special intention, and might just as well go one way
as another, so only that there be enough of them to produce all together
a well-shaped effect of intricacy: and you will find that a little
careless scratching about with your pen will bring you very near the
same result without an effort; but that no scratching of pen, nor any
fortunate chance, nor anything but downright skill and thought, will
imitate so much as one leaf of Durer's. Yet there is considerable
intricacy and glittering confusion in the interstices of those vine
leaves of his, as well as of the grass.
[Illustration: FIG. 16.]
When you have got familiarised to this firm manner, you may draw from
Nature as much as you like in the same way, and when you are tired of
the intense care required for this, you may fall into a little more easy
massing of the leaves, as in Fig. 10. p. 66. This is facsimiled from an
engraving after Titian, but an engraving not quite first-rate in manner,
the leaves being a little too formal; still, it is a good enough model
for your times of rest; and when you cannot carry the thing even so far
as this, you may sketch the forms of the masses, as in Fig. 16.,[219]
taking care always to have thorough command over your hand; that is, not
to let the mass take a free shape because your hand ran glibly over the
paper, but because in nature it has actually a free and noble shape, and
you have faithfully followed the same.
And now that we have come to questions of _noble_ shape, as well as true
shape, and that we are going to draw from nature at our pleasure, other
considerations enter into the business, which are by no means confined
to _first_ practice, but extend to all practice; these (as this letter
is long enough, I should think, to satisfy even the most exacting of
correspondents) I will arrange in a second letter; praying you only to
excuse the tiresomeness of this first one--tiresomeness inseparable from
directions touching the beginning of any art,--and to believe me, even
though I am trying to set you to dull and hard work.
Very faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[199] (N. B. This note is only for the satisfaction of incredulous or
curious readers. You may miss it if you are in a hurry, or are willing
to take the statement in the text on trust.)
The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience. We
_see_ nothing but flat colours; and it is only by a series of
experiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey indicates the
dark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates that the
object in which it appears is far away. The whole technical power of
painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the _innocence of
the eye_; that is to say, a sort of childish perception of these flat
stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they
signify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.
For instance; when grass is lighted strongly by the sun in certain
directions, it is turned from green into a peculiar and somewhat
dusty-looking yellow. If we had been born blind, and were suddenly
endowed with sight on a piece of grass thus lighted in some parts by the
sun, it would appear to us that part of the grass was green, and part a
dusty yellow (very nearly of the colour of primroses); and, if there
were primroses near, we should think that the sunlighted grass was
another mass of plants of the same sulphur-yellow colour. We should try
to gather some of them, and then find that the colour went away from the
grass when we stood between it and the sun, but not from the primroses;
and by a series of experiments we should find out that the sun was
really the cause of the colour in the one,--not in the other. We go
through such processes of experiment unconsciously in childhood; and
having once come to conclusions touching the signification of certain
colours, we always suppose that we _see_ what we only know, and have
hardly any consciousness of the real aspect of the signs we have learned
to interpret. Very few people have any idea that sunlighted grass is
yellow.
Now, a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as nearly
as possible to this condition of infantine sight. He sees the colours of
nature exactly as they are, and therefore perceives at once in the
sunlighted grass the precise relation between the two colours that form
its shade and light. To him it does not seem shade and light, but bluish
green barred with gold.
Strive, therefore, first of all, to convince yourself of this great fact
about sight. This, in your hand, which you know by experience and touch
to be a book, is to your eye nothing but a patch of white, variously
gradated and spotted; this other thing near you, which by experience you
know to be a table, is to your eye only a patch of brown, variously
darkened and veined; and so on: and the whole art of Painting consists
merely in perceiving the shape and depth of these patches of colour, and
putting patches of the same size, depth, and shape on canvas. The only
obstacle to the success of painting is, that many of the real colours
are brighter and paler than it is possible to put on canvas: we must put
darker ones to represent them.
[200] Stale crumb of bread is better, if you are making a delicate
drawing, than India-rubber, for it disturbs the surface of the paper
less: but it crumbles about the room and makes a mess; and, besides, you
waste the good bread, which is wrong; and your drawing will not for a
long while be worth the crumbs. So use India-rubber very lightly; or, if
heavily pressing it only, not passing it over the paper, and leave what
pencil marks that will not come away so, without minding them. In a
finished drawing the uneffaced penciling is often serviceable, helping
the general tone, and enabling you to take out little bright lights.
[201] What is usually so much sought after under the term "freedom" is
the character of the drawing of a great master in a hurry, whose hand is
so thoroughly disciplined, that when pressed for time he can let it fly
as it will, and it will not go far wrong. But the hand of a great master
at real _work_ is _never_ free: its swiftest dash is under perfect
government. Paul Veronese or Tintoret could pause within a hair's
breadth of any appointed mark, in their fastest touches; and follow,
within a hair's breadth, the previously intended curve. You must never,
therefore, aim at freedom. It is not required of your drawing that it
should be free, but that it should be _right_: in time you will be able
to do right easily, and then your work will be free in the best sense;
but there is no merit in doing _wrong_ easily.
These remarks, however, do not apply to the lines used in shading,
which, it will be remembered, are to be made as _quickly_ as possible.
The reason of this is, that the quicker a line is drawn, the lighter it
is at the ends, and therefore the more easily joined with other lines,
and concealed by them; the object in perfect shading being to conceal
the lines as much as possible.
And observe, in this exercise, the object is more to get firmness of
hand than accuracy of eye for outline; for there are no outlines in
Nature, and the ordinary student is sure to draw them falsely if he
draws them at all. Do not, therefore, be discouraged if you find
mistakes continue to occur in your outlines; be content at present if
you find your hand gaining command over the curves.
[202] If you can get any pieces of _dead_ white porcelain, not glazed,
they will be useful models.
[203] Artists who glance at this book may be surprised at this
permission. My chief reason is, that I think it more necessary that the
pupil's eye should be trained to accurate perception of the relations of
curve and right lines, by having the latter absolutely true, than that
he should practice drawing straight lines. But also, I believe, though I
am not quite sure of this, that he never _ought_ to be able to draw a
straight line. I do not believe a perfectly trained hand ever can draw a
line without some curvature in it, or some variety of direction. Prout
could draw a straight line, but I do not believe Raphael could, nor
Tintoret. A great draughtsman can, as far as I have observed, draw every
line _but_ a straight one.
[204] Or, if you feel able to do so, scratch them in with confused quick
touches, indicating the general shape of the cloud or mist of twigs
round the main branches; but do not take much trouble about them.
[205] It is more difficult, at first, to get, in colour, a narrow
gradation than an extended one; but the ultimate difficulty is, as with
the pen, to make the gradation go _far_.
[206] Of course, all the columns of colour are to be of equal length.
[207] The degree of darkness you can reach with the given colour is
always indicated by the colour of the solid cake in the box.
[208] The figure _a_, Fig. 5., is very dark, but this is to give an
example of all kinds of depth of tint, without repeated figures.
[209] Nearly neutral in ordinary circumstances, but yet with quite
different tones in its neutrality, according to the colours of the
various reflected rays that compose it.
[210] If we had any business with the reasons of this, I might, perhaps,
be able to show you some metaphysical ones for the enjoyment, by truly
artistical minds, of the changes wrought by light, and shade, and
perspective in patterned surfaces; but this is at present not to the
point; and all that you need to know is that the drawing of such things
is good exercise, and moreover a kind of exercise which Titian,
Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, and Turner, all enjoyed, and strove to
excel in.
[211] The use of acquiring this habit of execution is that you may be
able, when you begin to colour, to let one hue be seen in minute
portions, gleaming between the touches of another.
[212] William Hunt, of the Old Water-colour Society.
[213] At Marlborough House, among the four principal examples of
Turner's later water-colour drawing, perhaps the most neglected is that
of fishing-boats and fish at sunset. It is one of his most wonderful
works, though unfinished. If you examine the larger white fishing-boat
sail, you will find it has a little spark of pure white in its
right-hand upper corner, about as large as a minute pin's head, and that
all the surface of the sail is gradated to that focus. Try to copy this
sail once or twice, and you will begin to understand Turner's work.
Similarly, the wing of the Cupid in Correggio's large picture in the
National Gallery is focussed to two little grains of white at the top of
it. The points of light on the white flower in the wreath round the head
of the dancing child-faun, in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, exemplify
the same thing.
[214] I shall not henceforward _number_ the exercises recommended; as
they are distinguished only by increasing difficulty of subject, not by
difference of method.
[215] If you understand the principle of the stereoscope you will know
why; if not, it does not matter; trust me for the truth of the
statement, as I cannot explain the principle without diagrams and much
loss of time.
[216] If you can, get first the plates marked with a star. The letters
mean as follows:--
_a_ stands for architecture, including distant grouping of towns,
cottages, &c.
_c_ clouds, including mist and aërial effects.
_f_ foliage.
_g_ ground, including low hills, when not rocky.
_l_ effects of light.
_m_ mountains, or bold rocky ground.
_p_ power of general arrangement and effect.
_q_ quiet water.
_r_ running or rough water; or rivers, even if calm, when their line of
flow is beautifully marked.
_From the England Series._
_a c f r._ Arundel.
_a f l._ Ashby de la Zouche.
_a l q r._ Barnard Castle.*
_f m r._ Bolton Abbey.
_f g r._ Buckfastleigh.*
_a l p._ Caernarvon.
_c l q._ Castle Upnor.
_a f l._ Colchester.
_l q._ Cowes.
_c f p._ Dartmouth Cove.
_c l q._ Flint Castle.*
_a f g l._ Knaresborough.*
_m r._ High Force of Tees.*
_a f q._ Trematon.
_a f p._ Lancaster.
_c l m r._ Lancaster Sands.*
_a g f._ Launceston.
_c f l r._ Leicester Abbey.
_f r._ Ludlow.
_a f l._ Margate.
_a l q._ Orford.
_c p._ Plymouth.
_f._ Powis Castle.
_l m q._ Prudhoe Castle.
_f l m r._ Chain Bridge over Tees.*
_m q._ Ulleswater.
_f m._ Valle Crucis.
_From the Keepsake._
_m p q._ Arona.
_m._ Drachenfells.
_f l._ Marley.*
_p._ St. Germain en Laye.
_l p q._ Florence.
_l m._ Ballyburgh Ness.*
_From the Bible Series._
_f m._ Mount Lebanon.
_m._ Rock of Moses at Sinai.
_a l m._ Jericho.
_a c g._ Joppa.
_c l p q._ Solomon's Pools.*
_a l._ Santa Saba.
_a l._ Pool of Bethesda.
_From Scott's Works._
_p r._ Melrose.
_f r._ Dryburgh.*
_c m._ Glencoe.
_c m._ Loch Coriskin.
_a l._ Caerlaverock.
_From the "Rivers of France."_
_a q._ Château of Amboise, with large bridge on right.
_l p r._ Rouen, looking down the river, poplars on right.*
_a l p._ Rouen, with cathedral and rainbow, avenue on the left.
_a p._ Rouen Cathedral.
_f p._ Pont de l'Arche.
_f l p._ View on the Seine, with avenue.
_a c p._ Bridge of Meulan.
_c g p r._ Caudebec.*
[217] As _well_;--not as minutely: the diamond cuts finer lines on the
steel than you can draw on paper with your pen; but you must be able to
get tones as even, and touches as firm.
[218] See, for account of these plates, the Appendix on "Works to be
studied."
[219] This sketch is not of a tree standing on its head, though it looks
like it. You will find it explained presently.
LETTER II.
SKETCHING FROM NATURE.
MY DEAR READER:--
The work we have already gone through together has, I hope, enabled you
to draw with fair success, either rounded and simple masses, like
stones, or complicated arrangements of form, like those of leaves;
provided only these masses or complexities will stay quiet for you to
copy, and do not extend into quantity so great as to baffle your
patience. But if we are now to go out to the fields, and to draw
anything like a complete landscape, neither of these conditions will any
more be observed for us. The clouds will not wait while we copy their
heaps or clefts; the shadows will escape from us as we try to shape
them, each, in its stealthy minute march, still leaving light where its
tremulous edge had rested the moment before, and involving in eclipse
objects that had seemed safe from its influence; and instead of the
small clusters of leaves which we could reckon point by point,
embarrassing enough even though numerable, we have now leaves as little
to be counted as the sands of the sea, and restless, perhaps, as its
foam.
In all that we have to do now, therefore, direct imitation becomes more
or less impossible. It is always to be aimed at so far as it _is_
possible; and when you have time and opportunity, some portions of a
landscape may, as you gain greater skill, be rendered with an
approximation almost to mirrored portraiture. Still, whatever skill you
may reach, there will always be need of judgment to choose, and of speed
to seize, certain things that are principal or fugitive; and you must
give more and more effort daily to the observance of characteristic
points, and the attainment of concise methods.
I have directed your attention early to foliage for two reasons. First,
that it is always accessible as a study; and secondly, that its modes of
growth present simple examples of the importance of leading or
governing lines. It is by seizing these leading lines, when we cannot
seize _all_, that likeness and expression are given to a portrait, and
grace and a kind of _vital_ truth to the rendering of every natural
form. I call it _vital_ truth, because these chief lines are always
expressive of the past history and present action of the thing. They
show in a mountain, first, how it was built or heaped up; and secondly,
how it is now being worn away, and from what quarter the wildest storms
strike it. In a tree, they show what kind of fortune it has had to
endure from its childhood; how troublesome trees have come in its way,
and pushed it aside, and tried to strangle or starve it; where and when
kind trees have sheltered it, and grown up lovingly together with it,
bending as it bent; what winds torment it most; what boughs of it behave
best, and bear most fruit; and so on. In a wave or cloud, these leading
lines show the run of the tide and of the wind, and the sort of change
which the water or vapour is at any moment enduring in its form, as it
meets shore, or counterwave, or melting sunshine. Now remember, nothing
distinguishes great men from inferior men more than their always,
whether in life or in art, _knowing the way things are going_. Your
dunce thinks they are standing still, and draws them all fixed; your
wise man sees the change or changing in them, and draws them so--the
animal in its motion, the tree in its growth, the cloud in its course,
the mountain in its wearing away. Try always, whenever you look at a
form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate,
and will have power over its futurity. Those are its _awful_ lines; see
that you seize on those, whatever else you miss. Thus, the leafage in
Fig. 16. (p. 291.) grew round the root of a stone pine, on the brow of a
crag at Sestri, near Genoa, and all the sprays of it are thrust away in
their first budding by the great rude root, and spring out in every
direction round it, as water splashes when a heavy stone is thrown into
it. Then, when they have got clear of the root, they begin to bend up
again; some of them, being little stone pines themselves, have a great
notion of growing upright, if they can; and this struggle of theirs to
recover their straight road towards the sky, after being obliged to
grow sideways in their early years, is the effort that will mainly
influence their future destiny, and determine if they are to be crabbed,
forky pines, striking from that rock of Sestri, whose clefts nourish
them, with bared red lightning of angry arms towards the sea; or if they
are to be goodly and solemn pines, with trunks like pillars of temples,
and the purple burning of their branches sheathed in deep globes of
cloudy green. Those, then, are their fateful lines; see that you give
that spring and resilience, whatever you leave ungiven: depend upon it,
their chief beauty is in these.
[Illustration: FIG. 17.]
[Illustration: FIG. 18.]
[Illustration: FIG. 19.]
So in trees in general and bushes, large or small, you will notice that,
though the boughs spring irregularly and at various angles, there is a
tendency in all to stoop less and less as they near the top of the tree.
This structure, typified in the simplest possible terms at _c_, Fig.
17., is common to all trees, that I know of, and it gives them a certain
plumy character, and aspect of unity in the hearts of their branches,
which are essential to their beauty. The stem does not merely send off a
wild branch here and there to take its own way, but all the branches
share in one great fountain-like impulse; each has a curve and a path to
take which fills a definite place, and each terminates all its minor
branches at its outer extremity, so as to form a great outer curve,
whose character and proportion are peculiar for each species; that is to
say, the general type or idea of a tree is not as _a_, Fig. 17., but as
_b_, in which, observe, the boughs all carry their minor divisions right
out to the bounding curve; not but that smaller branches, by thousands,
terminate in the heart of the tree, but the idea and main purpose in
every branch are to carry all its child branches well out to the air and
light, and let each of them, however small, take its part in filling the
united flow of the bounding curve, so that the type of each separate
bough is again not _a_ but _b_, Fig. 18.; approximating, that is to
say, so far to the structure of a plant of broccoli as to throw the
great mass of spray and leafage out to a rounded surface; therefore,
beware of getting into a careless habit of drawing boughs with
successive sweeps of the pen or brush, one hanging to the other, as in
Fig. 19. If you look at the tree-boughs in any painting of Wilson's, you
will see this structure, and nearly every other that is to be avoided,
in their intensest types. You will also notice that Wilson never
conceives a tree as a round mass, but flat, as if it had been pressed
and dried. Most people, in drawing pines, seem to fancy, in the same
way, that the boughs come out only on two sides of the trunk, instead of
all round it; always, therefore, take more pains in trying to draw the
boughs of trees that grow _towards_ you, than those that go off to the
sides; anybody can draw the latter, but the foreshortened ones are not
so easy. It will help you in drawing them to observe that in most trees
the ramification of each branch, though not of the tree itself, is more
or less flattened, and approximates, in its position, to the look of a
hand held out to receive something, or shelter something. If you take a
looking-glass, and hold your hand before it slightly hollowed, with the
palm upwards, and the fingers open, as if you were going to support the
base of some great bowl, larger than you could easily hold, and sketch
your hand as you see it in the glass, with the points of the fingers
towards you, it will materially help you in understanding the way trees
generally hold out their hands; and if then you will turn yours with its
palm downwards, as if you were going to try to hide something, but with
the fingers expanded, you will get a good type of the action of the
lower boughs in cedars and such other spreading trees.
[Illustration: FIG. 20.]
Fig. 20. will give you a good idea of the simplest way in which these
and other such facts can be rapidly expressed; if you copy it carefully,
you will be surprised to find how the touches all group together, in
expressing the plumy toss of the tree branches, and the springing of the
bushes out of the bank, and the undulation of the ground: note the
careful drawing of the footsteps made by the climbers of the little
mound on the left.[220] It is facsimiled from an etching of Turner's,
and is as good an example as you can have of the use of pure and firm
lines; it will also show you how the particular action in foliage, or
anything else to which you wish to direct attention, may be intensified
by the adjuncts. The tall and upright trees are made to look more tall
and upright still, because their line is continued below by the figure
of the farmer with his stick; and the rounded bushes on the bank are
made to look more rounded because their line is continued in one broad
sweep by the black dog and the boy climbing the wall. These figures are
placed entirely with this object, as we shall see more fully hereafter
when we come to talk about composition; but, if you please, we will not
talk about that yet awhile. What I have been telling you about the
beautiful lines and action of foliage has nothing to do with
composition, but only with fact, and the brief and expressive
representation of fact. But there will be no harm in your looking
forward, if you like to do so, to the account, in Letter III. of the
"Law of Radiation," and reading what it said there about tree growth:
indeed it would in some respects have been better to have said it here
than there, only it would have broken up the account of the principles
of composition somewhat awkwardly.
Now, although the lines indicative of action are not always quite so
manifest in other things as in trees, a little attention will soon
enable you to see that there _are_ such lines in everything. In an old
house roof, a bad observer and bad draughtsman will only see and draw
the spotty irregularity of tiles or slates all over; but a good
draughtsman will see all the bends of the under timbers, where they are
weakest and the weight is telling on them most, and the tracks of the
run of the water in time of rain, where it runs off fastest, and where
it lies long and feeds the moss; and he will be careful, however few
slates he draws, to mark the way they bend together towards those
hollows (which have the future fate of the roof in them), and crowd
gradually together at the top of the gable, partly diminishing in
perspective, partly, perhaps, diminished on purpose (they are so in most
English old houses) by the slate-layer. So in ground, there is always
the direction of the run of the water to be noticed, which rounds the
earth and cuts it into hollows; and, generally, in any bank, or height
worth drawing, a trace of bedded or other internal structure besides.
The figure 20. will give you some idea of the way in which such facts
may be expressed by a few lines. Do you not feel the depression in the
ground all down the hill where the footsteps are, and how the people
always turn to the left at the top, losing breath a little, and then how
the water runs down in that other hollow towards the valley, behind the
roots of the trees?
Now, I want you in your first sketches from nature to aim exclusively at
understanding and representing these vital facts of form; using the
pen--not now the steel, but the quill--firmly and steadily, never
scrawling with it, but saying to yourself before you lay on a single
touch,--"_That_ leaf is the main one, _that_ bough is the guiding one,
and this touch, _so_ long, _so_ broad, means that part of it,"--point or
side or knot, as the case may be. Resolve always, as you look at the
thing, what you will take, and what miss of it, and never let your hand
run away with you, or get into any habit or method of touch. If you want
a continuous line, your hand should pass calmly from one end of it to
the other, without a tremor; if you want a shaking and broken line, your
hand should shake, or break off, as easily as a musician's finger shakes
or stops on a note: only remember this, that there is no general way of
doing _any_ thing; no recipe can be given you for so much as the drawing
of a cluster of grass. The grass may be ragged and stiff, or tender and
flowing; sunburnt and sheep-bitten, or rank and languid; fresh or dry;
lustrous or dull: look at it, and try to draw it as it is, and don't
think how somebody "told you to _do_ grass." So a stone may be round and
angular, polished or rough, cracked all over like an ill-glazed teacup,
or as united and broad as the breast of Hercules. It may be as flaky as
a wafer, as powdery as a field puff-ball; it may be knotted like a
ship's hawser, or kneaded like hammered iron, or knit like a Damascus
sabre, or fused like a glass bottle, or crystallised like a hoar-frost,
or veined like a forest leaf: look at it, and don't try to remember how
anybody told you to "do a stone."
As soon as you find that your hand obeys you thoroughly and that you can
render any form with a firmness and truth approaching that of Turner's
and Durer's work,[221] you must add a simple but equally careful light
and shade to your pen drawing, so as to make each study as complete as
possible: for which you must prepare yourself thus. Get, if you have the
means, a good impression of one plate of Turner's Liber Studiorum; if
possible, one of the subjects named in the note below.[222]
If you cannot obtain, or even borrow for a little while, any of these
engravings, you must use a photograph instead (how, I will tell you
presently); but, if you can get the Turner, it will be best. You will
see that it is composed of a firm etching in line, with mezzotint shadow
laid over it. You must first copy the etched part of it accurately; to
which end put the print against the window, and trace slowly with the
_greatest_ care every black line; retrace this on smooth drawing-paper;
and, finally, go over the whole with your pen, looking at the original
plate always, so that if you err at all, it may be on the right side,
not making a line which is too curved or too straight already in the
tracing, _more_ curved or _more_ straight, as you go over it. And in
doing this, never work after you are tired, nor to "get the thing done,"
for if it is badly done, it will be of no use to you. The true zeal and
patience of a quarter of an hour are better than the sulky and
inattentive labour of a whole day. If you have not made the touches
right at the first going over with the pen, retouch them delicately,
with little ink in your pen, thickening or reinforcing them as they
need: you cannot give too much care to the facsimile. Then keep this
etched outline by you, in order to study at your ease the way in which
Turner uses his line as preparatory for the subsequent shadow;[223] it
is only in getting the two separate that you will be able to reason on
this. Next, copy once more, though for the fourth time, any part of this
etching which you like, and put on the light and shade with the brush,
and any brown colour that matches that of the plate;[224] working it
with the point of the brush as delicately as if you were drawing with
pencil, and dotting and cross-hatching as lightly as you can touch the
paper, till you get the gradations of Turner's engraving. In this
exercise, as in the former one, a quarter of an inch worked to close
resemblance of the copy is worth more than the whole subject carelessly
done. Not that in drawing afterwards from nature, you are to be obliged
to finish every gradation in this way, but that, once having fully
accomplished the drawing _something_ rightly, you will thenceforward
feel and aim at a higher perfection than you could otherwise have
conceived, and the brush will obey you, and bring out quickly and
clearly the loveliest results, with a submissiveness which it would have
wholly refused if you had not put it to severest work. Nothing is more
strange in art than the way that chance and materials seem to favour
you, when once you have thoroughly conquered them. Make yourself quite
independent of chance, get your result in spite of it, and from that day
forward all things will somehow fall as you would have them. Show the
camel's-hair, and the colour in it, that no bending nor blotting are of
any use to escape your will; that the touch and the shade _shall_
finally be right, if it cost you a year's toil; and from that hour of
corrective conviction, said camel's-hair will bend itself to all your
wishes, and no blot will dare to transgress its appointed border. If you
cannot obtain a print from the Liber Studiorum, get a photograph[225]
of some general landscape subject, with high hills and a village, or
picturesque town, in the middle distance, and some calm water of varied
character (a stream with stones in it, if possible), and copy any part
of it you like, in this same brown colour, working, as I have just
directed you to do from the Liber, a great deal with the point of the
brush. You are under a twofold disadvantage here, however; first, there
are portions in every photograph too delicately done for you at present
to be at all able to copy; and secondly, there are portions always more
obscure or dark than there would be in the real scene, and involved in a
mystery which you will not be able, as yet, to decipher. Both these
characters will be advantageous to you for future study, after you have
gained experience, but they are a little against you in early attempts
at tinting; still you must fight through the difficulty, and get the
power of producing delicate gradations with brown or grey, like those of
the photograph.
Now observe; the perfection of work would be tinted shadow, like
photography, _without_ any obscurity or exaggerated darkness; and as
long as your effect depends in anywise on visible _lines_, your art is
not perfect, though it may be first-rate of its kind. But to get
complete results in tints merely, requires both long time and consummate
skill; and you will find that a few well-put pen lines, with a tint
dashed over or under them, get more expression of facts than you could
reach in any other way, by the same expenditure of time. The use of the
Liber Studiorum print to you is chiefly as an example of the simplest
shorthand of this kind, a shorthand which is yet capable of dealing with
the most subtle natural effects; for the firm etching gets at the
expression of complicated details, as leaves, masonry, textures of
ground, &c., while the overlaid tint enables you to express the most
tender distances of sky, and forms of playing light, mist or cloud. Most
of the best drawings by the old masters are executed on this principle,
the touches of the pen being useful also to give a look of transparency
to shadows, which could not otherwise be attained but by great finish
of tinting; and if you have access to any ordinarily good public
gallery, or can make friends of any print-sellers who have folios of old
drawings, or facsimiles of them, you will not be at a loss to find some
example of this unity of pen with tinting. Multitudes of photographs
also are now taken from the best drawings by the old masters, and I hope
that our Mechanics' Institutes, and other societies organized with a
view to public instruction, will not fail to possess themselves of
examples of these, and to make them accessible to students of drawing in
the vicinity; a single print from Turner's Liber, to show the unison of
tint with pen etching, and the "St. Catherine," lately photographed by
Thurston Thompson, from Raphael's drawing in the Louvre, to show the
unity of the soft tinting of the stump with chalk, would be all that is
necessary, and would, I believe, be in many cases more serviceable than
a larger collection, and certainly than a whole gallery of second-rate
prints. Two such examples are peculiarly desirable, because all other
modes of drawing, with pen separately, or chalk separately, or colour
separately, may be seen by the poorest student in any cheap illustrated
book, or in shop windows. But this unity of tinting with line he cannot
generally see but by some especial enquiry, and in some out of the way
places he could not find a single example of it. Supposing that this
should be so in your own case, and that you cannot meet with any example
of this kind, try to make the matter out alone, thus:
Take a small and simple photograph; allow yourself half an hour to
express its subjects with the pen only, using some permanent liquid
colour instead of ink, outlining its buildings or trees firmly, and
laying in the deeper shadows, as you have been accustomed to do in your
bolder pen drawings; then, when this etching is dry, take your sepia or
grey, and tint it over, getting now the finer gradations of the
photograph; and finally, taking out the higher lights with penknife or
blotting-paper. You will soon find what can be done in this way; and by
a series of experiments you may ascertain for yourself how far the pen
may be made serviceable to reinforce shadows, mark characters of
texture, outline unintelligible masses, and so on. The more time you
have, the more delicate you may make the pen drawing, blending it with
the tint; the less you have, the more distinct you must keep the two.
Practice in this way from one photograph, allowing yourself sometimes
only a quarter of an hour for the whole thing, sometimes an hour,
sometimes two or three hours; in each case drawing the whole subject in
full depth of light and shade, but with such degree of finish in the
parts as is possible in the given time. And this exercise, observe, you
will do well to repeat frequently whether you can get prints and
drawings as well as photographs, or not.
And now at last, when you can copy a piece of Liber Studiorum, or its
photographic substitute, faithfully, you have the complete means in your
power of working from nature on all subjects that interest you, which
you should do in four different ways.
First. When you have full time, and your subject is one that will stay
quiet for you, make perfect light and shade studies, or as nearly
perfect as you can, with grey or brown colour of any kind, reinforced
and defined with the pen.
Secondly. When your time is short, or the subject is so rich in detail
that you feel you cannot complete it intelligibly in light and shade,
make a hasty study of the effect, and give the rest of the time to a
Dureresque expression of the details. If the subject seems to you
interesting, and there are points about it which you cannot understand,
try to get five spare minutes to go close up to it, and make a nearer
memorandum; not that you are ever to bring the details of this nearer
sketch into the farther one, but that you may thus perfect your
experience of the aspect of things, and know that such and such a look
of a tower or cottage at five hundred yards off means _that_ sort of
tower or cottage near; while, also, this nearer sketch will be useful to
prevent any future misinterpretation of your own work. If you have time,
however far your light and shade study in the distance may have been
carried, it is always well, for these reasons, to make also your
Dureresque and your near memoranda; for if your light and shade drawing
be good, much of the interesting detail must be lost in it, or
disguised.
Your hasty study of effect may be made most easily and quickly with a
soft pencil, dashed over when done with one tolerably deep tone of grey,
which will fix the pencil. While this fixing colour is wet, take out the
higher lights with the dry brush; and, when it is quite dry, scratch out
the highest lights with the penknife. Five minutes, carefully applied,
will do much by these means. Of course the paper is to be white. I do
not like studies on grey paper so well; for you can get more gradation
by the taking off your wet tint, and laying it on cunningly a little
darker here and there, than you can with body-colour white, unless you
are consummately skilful. There is no objection to your making your
Dureresque memoranda on grey or yellow paper, and touching or relieving
them with white; only, do not depend much on your white touches, nor
make the sketch for their sake.
Thirdly. When you have neither time for careful study nor for Dureresque
detail, sketch the outline with pencil, then dash in the shadows with
the brush boldly, trying to do as much as you possibly can at once, and
to get a habit of expedition and decision; laying more colour again and
again into the tints as they dry, using every expedient which your
practice has suggested to you of carrying out your chiaroscuro in the
manageable and moist material, taking the colour off here with the dry
brush, scratching out lights in it there with the wooden handle of the
brush, rubbing it in with your fingers, drying it off with your sponge,
&c. Then, when the colour is in, take your pen and mark the outline
characters vigorously, in the manner of the Liber Studiorum. This kind
of study is very convenient for carrying away pieces of effect which
depend not so much on refinement as on complexity, strange shapes of
involved shadows, sudden effects of sky, &c.; and it is most useful as a
safeguard against any too servile or slow habits which the minute
copying may induce in you; for although the endeavour to obtain velocity
merely for velocity's sake, and dash for display's sake, is as baneful
as it is despicable; there _are_ a velocity and a dash which not only
are compatible with perfect drawing, but obtain certain results which
cannot be had otherwise. And it is perfectly safe for you to study
occasionally for speed and decision, while your continual course of
practice is such as to ensure your retaining an accurate judgment and a
tender touch. Speed, under such circumstances, is rather fatiguing than
tempting; and you will find yourself always beguiled rather into
elaboration than negligence.
[Illustration: FIG. 21.]
Fourthly. You will find it of great use, whatever kind of landscape
scenery you are passing through, to get into the habit of making
memoranda of the shapes of shadows. You will find that many objects of
no essential interest in themselves, and neither deserving a finished
study, nor a Dureresque one, may yet become of singular value in
consequence of the fantastic shapes of their shadows; for it happens
often, in distant effect, that the shadow is by much a more important
element than the substance. Thus, in the Alpine bridge, Fig. 21., seen
within a few yards of it, as in the figure, the arrangement of timbers
to which the shadows are owing is perceptible; but at half a mile's
distance, in bright sunlight, the timbers would not be seen; and a good
painter's expression of the bridge would be merely the large spot, and
the crossed bars, of pure grey; wholly without indication of their
cause, as in Fig. 22. _a_; and if we saw it at still greater distances,
it would appear, as in Fig. 22. _b_ and _c_, diminishing at last to a
strange, unintelligible, spider-like spot of grey on the light
hill-side. A perfectly great painter, throughout his distances,
continually reduces his objects to these shadow abstracts; and the
singular, and to many persons unaccountable, effect of the confused
touches in Turner's distances, is owing chiefly to this thorough
accuracy and intense meaning of the shadow abstracts.
[Illustration: FIG. 22.]
Studies of this kind are easily made when you are in haste, with an F.
or HB. pencil: it requires some hardness of the point to ensure your
drawing delicately enough when the forms of the shadows are very subtle;
they are sure to be so somewhere, and are generally so everywhere. The
pencil is indeed a very precious instrument after you are master of the
pen and brush, for the pencil, cunningly used, is both, and will draw a
line with the precision of the one and the gradation of the other;
nevertheless, it is so unsatisfactory to see the sharp touches, on which
the best of the detail depends, getting gradually deadened by time, or
to find the places where force was wanted look shiny, and like a
fire-grate, that I should recommend rather the steady use of the pen, or
brush, and colour, whenever time admits of it; keeping only a small
memorandum-book in the breast-pocket, with its well-cut, sheathed
pencil, ready for notes on passing opportunities: but never being
without this.
Thus much, then, respecting the _manner_ in which you are at first to
draw from nature. But it may perhaps be serviceable to you, if I also
note one or two points respecting your _choice_ of subjects for study,
and the best special methods of treating some of them; for one of by no
means the least difficulties which you have at first to encounter is a
peculiar instinct, common, as far as I have noticed, to all beginners,
to fix on exactly the most unmanageable feature in the given scene.
There are many things in every landscape which can be drawn, if at all,
only by the most accomplished artists; and I have noticed that it is
nearly always these which a beginner will dash at; or, if not these, it
will be something which, though pleasing to him in itself, is unfit for
a picture, and in which, when he has drawn it, he will have little
pleasure. As some slight protection against this evil genius of
beginners, the following general warnings may be useful:
1. Do not draw things that you love, on account of their associations;
or at least do not draw them because you love them; but merely when you
cannot get anything else to draw. If you try to draw places that you
love, you are sure to be always entangled amongst neat brick walls, iron
railings, gravel walks, greenhouses, and quickset hedges; besides that
you will be continually led into some endeavour to make your drawing
pretty, or complete, which will be fatal to your progress. You need
never hope to get on, if you are the least anxious that the drawing you
are actually at work upon should look nice when it is done. All you have
to care about is to make it _right_, and to learn as much in doing it as
possible. So then, though when you are sitting in your friend's parlour,
or in your own, and have nothing else to do, you may draw any thing that
is there, for practice; even the fire-irons or the pattern on the
carpet: be sure that it _is_ for practice, and not because it is a
beloved carpet, nor a friendly poker and tongs, nor because you wish to
please your friend by drawing her room.
Also, never make presents of your drawings. Of course I am addressing
you as a _beginner_--a time may come when your work will be precious to
everybody; but be resolute not to give it away till you know that it is
worth something (as soon as it is worth anything you will know that it
is so). If any one asks you for a present of a drawing, send them a
couple of cakes of colour and a piece of Bristol board: those materials
are, for the present, of more value in that form than if you had spread
the one over the other.
The main reason for this rule is, however, that its observance will
much protect you from the great danger of trying to make your drawings
pretty.
2. Never, by choice, draw anything polished; especially if complicated
in form. Avoid all brass rods and curtain ornaments, chandeliers, plate,
glass, and fine steel. A shining knob of a piece of furniture does not
matter if it comes in your way; but do not fret yourself if it will not
look right, and choose only things that do not shine.
3. Avoid all very neat things. They are exceedingly difficult to draw,
and very ugly when drawn. Choose rough, worn, and clumsy-looking things
as much as possible; for instance, you cannot have a more difficult or
profitless study than a newly-painted Thames wherry, nor a better study
than an old empty coal-barge, lying ashore at low-tide: in general,
everything that you think very ugly will be good for you to draw.
4. Avoid, as much as possible, studies in which one thing is seen
_through_ another. You will constantly find a thin tree standing before
your chosen cottage, or between you and the turn of the river; its near
branches all entangled with the distance. It is intensely difficult to
represent this; and though, when the tree _is_ there, you must not
imaginarily cut it down, but do it as well as you can, yet always look
for subjects that fall into definite masses, not into network; that is,
rather for a cottage with a dark tree _beside_ it, than for one with a
thin tree in front of it; rather for a mass of wood, soft, blue, and
rounded, than for a ragged copse, or confusion of intricate stems.
5. Avoid, as far as possible, country divided by hedges. Perhaps nothing
in the whole compass of landscape is so utterly unpicturesque and
unmanageable as the ordinary English patchwork of field and hedge, with
trees dotted over it in independent spots, gnawed straight at the cattle
line.
Still, do not be discouraged if you find you have chosen ill, and that
the subject overmasters you. It is much better that it should, than that
you should think you had entirely mastered _it_. But at first, and even
for some time, you must be prepared for very discomfortable failure;
which, nevertheless, will not be without some wholesome result.
As, however, I have told you what most definitely to avoid, I may,
perhaps, help you a little by saying what to seek. In general, all
_banks_ are beautiful things, and will reward work better than large
landscapes. If you live in a lowland country, you must look for places
where the ground is broken to the river's edges, with decayed posts, or
roots of trees; or, if by great good luck there should be such things
within your reach, for remnants of stone quays or steps, mossy
mill-dams, &c. Nearly every other mile of road in chalk country will
present beautiful bits of broken bank at its sides; better in form and
colour than high chalk cliffs. In woods, one or two trunks, with the
flowery ground below, are at once the richest and easiest kind of study:
a not very thick trunk, say nine inches or a foot in diameter, with ivy
running up it sparingly, is an easy, and always a rewarding subject.
Large nests of buildings in the middle distance are always beautiful,
when drawn carefully, provided they are not modern rows of pattern
cottages; or villas with Ionic and Doric porticos. Any old English
village, or cluster of farm-houses, drawn with all its ins and outs, and
haystacks, and palings, is sure to be lovely; much more a French one.
French landscape is generally as much superior to English as Swiss
landscape is to French; in some respects, the French is incomparable.
Such scenes as that avenue on the Seine, which I have recommended you to
buy the engraving of, admit no rivalship in their expression of graceful
rusticity and cheerful peace, and in the beauty of component lines.
In drawing villages, take great pains with the gardens; a rustic garden
is in every way beautiful. If you have time, draw all the rows of
cabbages, and hollyhocks, and broken fences, and wandering eglantines,
and bossy roses: you cannot have better practice, nor be kept by
anything in purer thoughts.
Make intimate friends of all the brooks in your neighbourhood, and study
them ripple by ripple.
Village churches in England are not often good subjects; there is a
peculiar meanness about most of them, and awkwardness of line. Old
manor-houses are often pretty. Ruins are usually, with us, too prim, and
cathedrals too orderly. I do not think there is a single cathedral in
England from which it is possible to obtain _one_ subject for an
impressive drawing. There is always some discordant civility, or jarring
vergerism about them.
If you live in a mountain or hill country, your only danger is
redundance of subject. Be resolved, in the first place, to draw a piece
of rounded rock, with its variegated lichens, quite rightly, getting its
complete roundings, and all the patterns of the lichen in true local
colour. Till you can do this, it is of no use your thinking of sketching
among hills; but when once you have done this, the forms of distant
hills will be comparatively easy.
When you have practised for a little time from such of these subjects as
may be accessible to you, you will certainly find difficulties arising
which will make you wish more than ever for a master's help: these
difficulties will vary according to the character of your own mind (one
question occurring to one person, and one to another), so that it is
impossible to anticipate them all; and it would make this too large a
book if I answered all that I _can_ anticipate; you must be content to
work on, in good hope that nature will, in her own time, interpret to
you much for herself; that farther experience on your own part will make
some difficulties disappear; and that others will be removed by the
occasional observation of such artists' work as may come in your way.
Nevertheless, I will not close this letter without a few general
remarks, such as may be useful to you after you are somewhat advanced in
power; and these remarks may, I think, be conveniently arranged under
three heads, having reference to the drawing of vegetation, water, and
skies.
And, first, of vegetation. You may think, perhaps, we have said enough
about trees already; yet if you have done as you were bid, and tried to
draw them frequently enough, and carefully enough, you will be ready by
this time to hear a little more of them. You will also recollect that we
left our question, respecting the mode of expressing intricacy of
leafage, partly unsettled in the first letter. I left it so because I
wanted you to learn the real structure of leaves, by drawing them for
yourself, before I troubled you with the most subtle considerations as
to _method_ in drawing them. And by this time, I imagine, you must have
found out two principal things, universal facts, about leaves; namely,
that they always, in the main tendencies of their lines, indicate a
beautiful divergence of growth, according to the law of radiation,
already referred to;[226] and the second, that this divergence is never
formal, but carried out with endless variety of individual line. I must
now press both these facts on your attention a little farther.
You may perhaps have been surprised that I have not yet spoken of the
works of J. D. Harding, especially if you happen to have met with the
passages referring to them in "Modern Painters," in which they are
highly praised. They are deservedly praised, for they are the only works
by a modern draughtsman which express in any wise the energy of trees,
and the laws of growth, of which we have been speaking. There are no
lithographic sketches which, for truth of general character, obtained
with little cost of time, at all rival Harding's. Calame, Robert, and
the other lithographic landscape sketchers are altogether inferior in
power, though sometimes a little deeper in meaning. But you must not
take even Harding for a model, though you may use his works for
occasional reference; and if you can afford to buy his "Lessons on
Trees,"[227] it will be serviceable to you in various ways, and will at
present help me to explain the point under consideration. And it is well
that I should illustrate this point by reference to Harding's works,
because their great influence on young students renders it desirable
that their real character should be thoroughly understood.
You will find, first, in the title-page of the "Lessons on Trees," a
pretty woodcut, in which the tree stems are drawn with great truth, and
in a very interesting arrangement of lines. Plate 1. is not quite worthy
of Mr. Harding, tending too much to make his pupil, at starting, think
everything depends on black dots; still the main lines are good, and
very characteristic of tree growth. Then, in Plate 2., we come to the
point at issue. The first examples in that plate are given to the pupil
that he may practise from them till his hand gets into the habit of
arranging lines freely in a similar manner; and they are stated by Mr.
Harding to be universal in application; "all outlines expressive of
foliage," he says, "are but modifications of them." They consist of
groups of lines, more or less resembling our Fig. 23.; and the
characters especially insisted upon are, that they "tend at their inner
ends to a common centre;" that "their ends terminate in [are enclosed
by] ovoid curves;" and that "the outer ends are most emphatic."
[Illustration: FIG. 23.]
Now, as thus expressive of the great laws of radiation and enclosure,
the main principle of this method of execution confirms, in a very
interesting way, our conclusions respecting foliage composition. The
reason of the last rule, that the outer end of the line is to be most
emphatic, does not indeed at first appear; for the line at one end of a
natural leaf is not more emphatic than the line at the other: but
ultimately, in Harding's method, this darker part of the touch stands
more or less for the shade at the outer extremity of the leaf mass; and,
as Harding uses these touches, they express as much of tree character as
any mere habit of touch _can_ express. But, unfortunately, there is
another law of tree growth, quite as fixed as the law of radiation,
which this and all other conventional modes of execution wholly lose
sight of. This second law is, that the radiating tendency shall be
carried out only as a ruling spirit in reconcilement with perpetual
individual caprice on the part of the separate leaves. So that the
moment a touch is monotonous, it must be also false, the liberty of the
leaf individually being just as essential a truth, as its unity of
growth with its companions in the radiating group.
[Illustration: FIG. 24.]
It does not matter how small or apparently symmetrical the cluster may
be, nor how large or vague. You can hardly have a more formal one than
_b_ in Fig. 9. p. 276., nor a less formal one than this shoot of Spanish
chestnut, shedding its leaves, Fig. 24.; but in either of them, even the
general reader, unpractised in any of the previously recommended
exercises, must see that there are wandering lines mixed with the
radiating ones, and radiating lines with the wild ones: and if he takes
the pen and tries to copy either of these examples, he will find that
neither play of hand to left nor to right, neither a free touch nor a
firm touch, nor any learnable or describable touch whatsoever, will
enable him to produce, currently, a resemblance of it; but that he must
either draw it slowly, or give it up. And (which makes the matter worse
still) though gathering the bough, and putting it close to you, or
seeing a piece of near foliage against the sky, you may draw the entire
outline of the leaves, yet if the spray has light upon it, and is ever
so little a way off, you will miss, as we have seen, a point of a leaf
here, and an edge there; some of the surfaces will be confused by
glitter, and some spotted with shade; and if you look carefully through
this confusion for the edges or dark stems which you really _can see_,
and put only those down, the result will be neither like Fig. 9. nor
Fig. 24., but such an interrupted and puzzling piece of work as Fig.
25.[228]
Now, it is in the perfect acknowledgment and expression of these _three_
laws that all good drawing of landscape consists. There is, first, the
organic unity; the law, whether of radiation, or parallelism, or
concurrent action, which rules the masses of herbs and trees, of rocks,
and clouds, and waves; secondly, the individual liberty of the members
subjected to these laws of unity; and, lastly, the mystery under which
the separate character of each is more or less concealed.
I say, first, there must be observance of the ruling organic law. This
is the first distinction between good artists and bad artists. Your
common sketcher or bad painter puts his leaves on the trees as if they
were moss tied to sticks; he cannot see the lines of action or growth;
he scatters the shapeless clouds over his sky, not perceiving the sweeps
of associated curves which the real clouds are following as they fly;
and he breaks his mountain side into rugged fragments, wholly
unconscious of the lines of force with which the real rocks have risen,
or of the lines of couch in which they repose. On the contrary, it is
the main delight of the great draughtsman to trace these laws of
government; and his tendency to error is always in the exaggeration of
their authority rather than in its denial.
[Illustration: FIG. 25.]
Secondly, I say, we have to show the individual character and liberty of
the separate leaves, clouds, or rocks. And herein the great masters
separate themselves finally from the inferior ones; for if the men of
inferior genius ever express law at all, it is by the sacrifice of
individuality. Thus, Salvator Rosa has great perception of the sweep of
foliage and rolling of clouds, but never draws a single leaflet or mist
wreath accurately. Similarly, Gainsborough, in his landscape, has great
feeling for masses of form and harmony of colour; but in the detail
gives nothing but meaningless touches; not even so much as the species
of tree, much less the variety of its leafage, being ever discernable.
Now, although both these expressions of government and individuality are
essential to masterly work, the individuality is the _more_ essential,
and the more difficult of attainment; and, therefore, that attainment
separates the great masters _finally_ from the inferior ones. It is the
more essential, because, in these matters of beautiful arrangement in
visible things, the same rules hold that hold in moral things. It is a
lamentable and unnatural thing to see a number of men subject to no
government, actuated by no ruling principle, and associated by no common
affection: but it would be a more lamentable thing still, were it
possible to see a number of men so oppressed into assimilation as to
have no more any individual hope or character, no differences in aim, no
dissimilarities of passion, no irregularities of judgment; a society in
which no man could help another, since none would be feebler than
himself; no man admire another, since none would be stronger than
himself; no man be grateful to another, since by none he could be
relieved; no man reverence another, since by none he could be
instructed; a society in which every soul would be as the syllable of a
stammerer instead of the word of a speaker, in which every man would
walk as in a frightful dream, seeing spectres of himself, in everlasting
multiplication, gliding helplessly around him in a speechless darkness.
Therefore it is that perpetual difference, play, and change in groups of
form are more essential to them even than their being subdued by some
great gathering law: the law is needful to them for their perfection and
their power, but the difference is needful to them for their _life_.
And here it may be noted in passing, that if you enjoy the pursuit of
analogies and types, and have any ingenuity of judgment in discerning
them, you may always accurately ascertain what are the noble characters
in a piece of painting, by merely considering what are the noble
characters of man in his association with his fellows. What grace of
manner and refinement of habit are in society, grace of line and
refinement of form are in the association of visible objects. What
advantage or harm there may be in sharpness, ruggedness, or quaintness
in the dealings or conversations of men; precisely that relative degree
of advantage or harm there is in them as elements of pictorial
composition. What power is in liberty or relaxation to strengthen or
relieve human souls; that power, precisely in the same relative degree,
play and laxity of line have to strengthen or refresh the expression of
a picture. And what goodness or greatness we can conceive to arise in
companies of men, from chastity of thought, regularity of life,
simplicity of custom, and balance of authority; precisely that kind of
goodness and greatness may be given to a picture by the purity of its
colour, the severity of its forms, and the symmetry of its masses.
You need not be in the least afraid of pushing these analogies too far.
They cannot be pushed too far; they are so precise and complete, that
the farther you pursue them, the clearer, the more certain, the more
useful you will find them. They will not fail you in one particular, or
in any direction of enquiry. There is no moral vice, no moral virtue,
which has not its _precise_ prototype in the art of painting; so that
you may at your will illustrate the moral habit by the art, or the art
by the moral habit. Affection and discord, fretfulness and quietness,
feebleness and firmness, luxury and purity, pride and modesty, and all
other such habits, and every conceivable modification and mingling of
them, may be illustrated, with mathematical exactness, by conditions of
line and colour; and not merely these definable vices and virtues, but
also every conceivable shade of human character and passion, from the
righteous or unrighteous majesty of the king, to the innocent or
faultful simplicity of the shepherd boy.
The pursuit of this subject belongs properly, however, to the
investigation of the higher branches of composition, matters which it
would be quite useless to treat of in this book; and I only allude to
them here, in order that you may understand how the utmost nobleness of
art are concerned in this minute work, to which I have set you in your
beginning of it. For it is only by the closest attention, and the most
noble execution, that it is possible to express these varieties of
individual character, on which all excellence of portraiture depends,
whether of masses of mankind, or of groups of leaves.
Now you will be able to understand, among other matters, wherein
consists the excellence, and wherein the shortcoming, of the
tree-drawing of Harding. It is excellent in so far as it fondly
observes, with more truth than any other work of the kind, the great
laws of growth and action in trees: it fails--and observe, not in a
minor, but in a principal point--because it cannot rightly render any
one individual detail or incident of foliage. And in this it fails, not
from mere carelessness or incompletion, but of necessity; the true
drawing of detail being for evermore _impossible_ to a hand which has
contracted a _habit_ of execution. The noble draughtsman draws a leaf,
and stops, and says calmly--That leaf is of such and such a character; I
will give him a friend who will entirely suit him: then he considers
what his friend ought to be, and having determined, he draws his friend.
This process may be as quick as lightning when the master is great--one
of the sons of the giants; or it may be slow and timid: but the process
is always gone through, no touch or form is ever added to another by a
good painter without a mental determination and affirmation. But when
the hand has got into a habit, leaf No. 1. necessitates leaf No. 2.; you
cannot stop, your hand is as a horse with the bit in its teeth; or
rather is, for the time, a machine, throwing out leaves to order and
pattern, all alike. You must stop that hand of yours, however painfully;
make it understand that it is not to have its own way any more, that it
shall never more slip from, one touch to another without orders;
otherwise it is not you who are the master, but your fingers. You may
therefore study Harding's drawing, and take pleasure in it;[229] and you
may properly admire the dexterity which applies the habit of the hand
so well, and produces results on the whole so satisfactory: but you
must never copy it, otherwise your progress will be at once arrested.
The utmost you can ever hope to do, would be a sketch in Harding's
manner, but of far inferior dexterity; for he has given his life's toil
to gain his dexterity, and you, I suppose, have other things to work at
besides drawing. You would also incapacitate yourself from ever
understanding what truly great work was, or what Nature was; but by the
earnest and complete study of facts, you will gradually come to
understand the one and love the other more and more, whether you can
draw well yourself or not.
I have yet to say a few words respecting the third law above stated,
that of mystery; the law, namely, that nothing is ever seen perfectly,
but only by fragments, and under various conditions of obscurity.[230]
This last fact renders the visible objects of Nature complete as a type
of the human nature. We have, observe, first, Subordination; secondly,
Individuality; lastly, and this not the least essential character,
Incomprehensibility; a perpetual lesson in every serrated point and
shining vein which escape or deceive our sight among the forest leaves,
how little we may hope to discern clearly, or judge justly, the rents
and veins of the human heart; how much of all that is round us, in men's
actions or spirits, which we at first think we understand, a closer and
more loving watchfulness would show to be full of mystery, never to be
either fathomed or withdrawn.
[Illustration: FIG. 26.]
[Illustration: FIG. 27.]
The expression of this final character in landscape has never been
completely reached by any except Turner; nor can you hope to reach it at
all until you have given much time to the practice of art. Only try
always when you are sketching any object with a view to completion in
light and shade, to draw only those parts of it which you really see
definitely; _preparing_ for the after development of the forms by
chiaroscuro. It is this preparation by isolated touches for a future
arrangement of superimposed light and shade which renders the etchings
of the Liber Studiorum so inestimable as examples and so peculiar. The
character exists more or less in them exactly in proportion to the pains
that Turner has taken. Thus the Æsacus and Hespérie was wrought out with
the greatest possible care; and the principal branch on the near tree is
etched as in Fig. 26. The work looks at first like a scholar's instead
of a master's; but when the light and shade are added, every touch falls
into its place, and a perfect expression of grace and complexity
results. Nay even before the light and shade are added, you ought to be
able to see that these irregular and broken lines, especially where the
expression is given of the way the stem loses itself in the leaves, are
more true than the monotonous though graceful leaf-drawing which, before
Turner's time, had been employed, even by the best masters, in their
distant masses. Fig. 27. is sufficiently characteristic of the manner of
the old woodcuts after Titian; in which, you see, the leaves are too
much of one shape, like bunches of fruit; and the boughs too completely
seen, besides being somewhat soft and leathery in aspect, owing to the
want of angles in their outline. By great men like Titian, this somewhat
conventional structure was only given in haste to distant masses; and
their exquisite delineation of the foreground, kept their
conventionalism from degeneracy: but in the drawing of the Caracci and
other derivative masters, the conventionalism prevails everywhere, and
sinks gradually into scrawled work, like Fig. 28., about the worst which
it is possible to get into the habit of using, though an ignorant person
might perhaps suppose it more "free," and therefore better than Fig. 26.
Note, also, that in noble outline drawing, it does not follow that a
bough is wrongly drawn, because it looks contracted unnaturally
somewhere, as in Fig. 26., just above the foliage. Very often the
muscular action which is to be expressed by the line, runs into the
_middle_ of the branch, and the actual outline of the branch at that
place may be dimly seen, or not at all; and it is then only by the
future shade that its actual shape, or the cause of its disappearance,
will be indicated.
[Illustration: FIG. 28.]
One point more remains to be noted about trees, and I have done. In the
minds of our ordinary water-colour artists, a distant tree seems only to
be conceived as a flat green blot, grouping pleasantly with other
masses, and giving cool colour to the landscape, but differing nowise,
in _texture_, from the blots of other shapes, which these painters use
to express stones, or water, or figures. But as soon as you have drawn
trees carefully a little while, you will be impressed, and impressed
more strongly the better you draw them, with the idea of their
_softness_ of surface. A distant tree is not a flat and even piece of
colour, but a more or less globular mass of a downy or bloomy texture,
partly passing into a misty vagueness. I find, practically, this lovely
softness of far-away trees the most difficult of all characters to
reach, because it cannot be got by mere scratching or roughening the
surface, but is always associated with such delicate expressions of form
and growth as are only imitable by very careful drawing. The penknife
passed lightly _over_ this careful drawing, will do a good deal; but you
must accustom yourself, from the beginning, to aim much at this softness
in the lines of the drawing itself, by crossing them delicately, and
more or less effacing and confusing the edges. You must invent,
according to the character of tree, various modes of execution adapted
to express its texture; but always keep this character of softness in
your mind and in your scope of aim; for in most landscapes it is the
intention of nature that the tenderness and transparent infinitude of
her foliage should be felt, even at the far distance, in the most
distinct opposition to the solid masses and flat surfaces of rocks or
buildings.
* * * * *
II. We were, in the second place, to consider a little the modes of
representing water, of which important feature of landscape I have
hardly said anything yet.
Water is expressed, in common drawings, by conventional lines, whose
horizontality is supposed to convey the idea of its surface. In
paintings, white dashes or bars of light are used for the same purpose.
But these and all other such expedients are vain and absurd. A piece of
calm water always contains a picture in itself, an exquisite reflection
of the objects above it. If you give the time necessary to draw these
reflections, disturbing them here and there as you see the breeze or
current disturb them, you will get the effect of the water; but if you
have not patience to draw the reflections, no expedient will give you a
true effect. The picture in the pool needs nearly as much delicate
drawing as the picture above the pool; except only that if there be the
least motion on the water, the horizontal lines of the images will be
diffused and broken, while the vertical ones will remain decisive, and
the oblique ones decisive in proportion to their steepness.
A few close studies will soon teach you this: the only thing you need to
be told is to watch carefully the lines of _disturbance_ on the surface,
as when a bird swims across it, or a fish rises, or the current plays
round a stone, reed, or other obstacle. Take the greatest pains to get
the _curves_ of these lines true; the whole value of your careful
drawing of the reflections may be lost by your admitting a single false
curve of ripple from a wild duck's breast. And (as in other subjects) if
you are dissatisfied with your result, always try for more unity and
delicacy: if your reflections are only soft and gradated enough, they
are nearly sure to give you a pleasant effect. When you are taking
pains, work the softer reflections, where they are drawn out by motion
in the water, with touches as nearly horizontal as may be; but when you
are in a hurry, indicate the place and play of the images with vertical
lines. The actual _construction_ of a calm elongated reflection is with
horizontal lines: but it is often impossible to draw the descending
shades delicately enough with a horizontal touch; and it is best always
when you are in a hurry, and sometimes when you are not, to use the
vertical touch. When the ripples are large, the reflections become
shaken, and must be drawn with bold undulatory descending lines.
I need not, I should think, tell you that it is of the greatest possible
importance to draw the curves of the shore rightly. Their perspective
is, if not more subtle, at least more stringent than that of any other
lines in Nature. It will not be detected by the general observer, if you
miss the curve of a branch, or the sweep of a cloud, or the perspective
of a building;[231] but every intelligent spectator will feel the
difference between a rightly drawn bend of shore or shingle, and a false
one. _Absolutely_ right, in difficult river perspectives seen from
heights, I believe no one but Turner ever has been yet; and observe,
there is NO rule for them. To develope the curve mathematically would
require a knowledge of the exact quantity of water in the river, the
shape of its bed, and the hardness of the rock or shore; and even with
these data, the problem would be one which no mathematician could solve
but approximatively. The instinct of the eye can do it; nothing else.
If, after a little study from Nature, you get puzzled by the great
differences between the aspect of the reflected image and that of the
object casting it; and if you wish to know the law of reflection, it is
simply this: Suppose all the objects above the water _actually_ reversed
(not in appearance, but in fact) beneath the water, and precisely the
same in form and in relative position, only all topsy-turvy. Then,
whatever you can see, from the place in which you stand, of the solid
objects so reversed under the water, you will see in the reflection,
always in the true perspective of the solid objects so reversed.
If you cannot quite understand this in looking at water, take a mirror,
lay it horizontally on the table, put some books and papers upon it, and
draw them and their reflections; moving them about, and watching how
their reflections alter, and chiefly how their reflected colours and
shades differ from their own colours and shades, by being brought into
other oppositions. This difference in chiaroscuro is a more important
character in water painting than mere difference in form.
When you are drawing shallow or muddy water, you will see shadows on the
bottom, or on the surface, continually modifying the reflections; and in
a clear mountain stream, the most wonderful complications of effect
resulting from the shadows and reflections of the stones in it, mingling
with the aspect of the stones themselves seen through the water. Do not
be frightened at the complexity; but, on the other hand, do not hope to
render it hastily. Look at it well, making out everything that you see,
and distinguishing each component part of the effect. There will be,
first, the stones seen through the water, distorted always by
refraction, so that if the general structure of the stone shows straight
parallel lines above the water, you may be sure they will be bent where
they enter it; then the reflection of the part of the stone above the
water crosses and interferes with the part that is seen through it, so
that you can hardly tell which is which; and wherever the reflection is
darkest, you will see through the water best, and _vice versâ_. Then the
real shadow of the stone crosses both these images, and where that
shadow falls, it makes the water more reflective, and where the sunshine
falls, you will see more of the surface of the water, and of any dust
or motes that may be floating on it: but whether you are to see, at the
same spot, most of the bottom of the water, or of the reflection of the
objects above, depends on the position of the eye. The more you look
down into the water, the better you see objects through it; the more you
look along it, the eye being low, the more you see the reflection of
objects above it. Hence the colour of a given space of surface in a
stream will entirely change while you stand still in the same spot,
merely as you stoop or raise your head; and thus the colours with which
water is painted are an indication of the position of the spectator, and
connected inseparably with the perspective of the shores. The most
beautiful of all results that I know in mountain streams is when the
water is shallow, and the stones at the bottom are rich reddish-orange
and black, and the water is seen at an angle which exactly divides the
visible colours between those of the stones and that of the sky, and the
sky is of clear, full blue. The resulting purple obtained by the
blending of the blue and the orange-red, broken by the play of
innumerable gradations in the stones, is indescribably lovely.
All this seems complicated enough already; but if there be a strong
colour in the clear water itself, as of green or blue in the Swiss
lakes, all these phenomena are doubly involved; for the darker
reflections now become of the colour of the water. The reflection of a
black gondola, for instance, at Venice, is never black, but pure dark
green. And, farther, the colour of the water itself is of three kinds:
one, seen on the surface, is a kind of milky bloom; the next is seen
where the waves let light through them, at their edges; and the third,
shown as a change of colour on the objects seen through the water. Thus,
the same wave that makes a white object look of a clear blue, when seen
through it, will take a red or violet-coloured bloom on its surface, and
will be made pure emerald green by transmitted sunshine through its
edges. With all this, however, you are not much concerned at present,
but I tell it you partly as a preparation for what we have afterwards to
say about colour, and partly that you may approach lakes and streams
with reverence, and study them as carefully as other things, not hoping
to express them by a few horizontal dashes of white, or a few tremulous
blots.[232] Not but that much may be done by tremulous blots, when you
know precisely what you mean by them, as you will see by many of the
Turner sketches, which are now framed at the National Gallery; but you
must have painted water many and many a day--yes, and all day
long--before you can hope to do anything like those.
* * * * *
III. Lastly. You may perhaps wonder why, before passing to the clouds, I
say nothing special about _ground_.[233] But there is too much to be
said about that to admit of my saying it here. You will find the
principal laws of its structure examined at length in the fourth volume
of "Modern Painters;" and if you can get that volume, and copy carefully
Plate 21., which I have etched after Turner with great pains, it will
give you as much help as you need in the linear expression of
ground-surface. Strive to get the retirement and succession of masses in
irregular ground: much may be done in this way by careful watching of
the perspective diminutions of its herbage, as well as by contour; and
much also by shadows. If you draw the shadows of leaves and tree trunks
on any undulating ground with entire carefulness, you will be surprised
to find how much they explain of the form and distance of the earth on
which they fall.
Passing then to skies, note that there is this great peculiarity about
sky subject, as distinguished from earth subject;--that the clouds, not
being much liable to man's interference, are always beautifully
arranged. You cannot be sure of this in any other features of landscape.
The rock on which the effect of a mountain scene especially depends is
always precisely that which the roadmaker blasts or the landlord
quarries; and the spot of green which Nature left with a special purpose
by her dark forest sides, and finished with her most delicate grasses,
is always that which the farmer ploughs or builds upon. But the clouds,
though we can hide them with smoke, and mix them with poison, cannot be
quarried nor built over, and they are always therefore gloriously
arranged; so gloriously, that unless you have notable powers of memory
you need not hope to approach the effect of any sky that interests you.
For both its grace and its glow depend upon the united influence of
every cloud within its compass: they all move and burn together in a
marvellous harmony; not a cloud of them is out of its appointed place,
or fails of its part in the choir: and if you are not able to recollect
(which in the case of a complicated sky it is impossible you should)
precisely the form and position of all the clouds at a given moment, you
cannot draw the sky at all; for the clouds will not fit if you draw one
part of them three or four minutes before another. You must try
therefore to help what memory you have, by sketching at the utmost
possible speed the whole range of the clouds; marking, by any shorthand
or symbolic work you can hit upon, the peculiar character of each, as
transparent, or fleecy, or linear, or undulatory; giving afterwards such
completion to the parts as your recollection will enable you to do.
This, however, only when the sky is interesting from its general aspect;
at other times, do not try to draw all the sky, but a single cloud:
sometimes a round cumulus will stay five or six minutes quite steady
enough to let you mark out his principal masses: and one or two white or
crimson lines which cross the sunrise will often stay without serious
change for as long. And in order to be the readier in drawing them,
practise occasionally drawing lumps of cotton, which will teach you
better than any other stable thing the kind of softness there is in
clouds. For you will find when you have made a few genuine studies of
sky, and then look at any ancient or modern painting, that ordinary
artists have always fallen into one of two faults: either, in rounding
the clouds, they make them as solid and hard-edged as a heap of stones
tied up in a sack, or they represent them not as rounded at all, but as
vague wreaths of mist or flat lights in the sky; and think they have
done enough in leaving a little white paper between dashes of blue, or
in taking an irregular space out with the sponge. Now clouds are not as
solid as flour-sacks; but, on the other hand, they are neither spongy
nor flat. They are definite and very beautiful forms of sculptured mist;
sculptured is a perfectly accurate word; they are not more _drifted_
into form than they are _carved_ into form, the warm air around them
cutting them into shape by absorbing the visible vapour beyond certain
limits; hence their angular and fantastic outlines, as different from a
swollen, spherical, or globular formation, on the one hand, as from that
of flat films or shapeless mists on the other. And the worst of all is,
that while these forms are difficult enough to draw on any terms,
especially considering that they never stay quiet, they must be drawn
also at greater disadvantage of light and shade than any others, the
force of light in clouds being wholly unattainable by art; so that if we
put shade enough to express their form as positively as it is expressed
in reality, we must make them painfully too dark on the dark sides.
Nevertheless, they are so beautiful, if you in the least succeed with
them, that you will hardly, I think, lose courage. Outline them often
with the pen, as you can catch them here and there; one of the chief
uses of doing this will be, not so much the memorandum so obtained as
the lesson you will get respecting the softness of the cloud-outlines.
You will always find yourself at a loss to see where the outline really
is; and when drawn it will always look hard and false, and will
assuredly be either too round or too square, however often you alter it,
merely passing from the one fault to the other and back again, the real
cloud striking an inexpressible mean between roundness and squareness in
all its coils or battlements. I speak at present, of course, only of the
cumulus cloud: the lighter wreaths and flakes of the upper sky cannot
be outlined--they can only be sketched, like locks of hair, by many
lines of the pen. Firmly developed bars of cloud on the horizon are in
general easy enough, and may be drawn with decision. When you have thus
accustomed yourself a little to the placing and action of clouds, try to
work out their light and shade, just as carefully as you do that of
other things, looking _exclusively_ for examples of treatment to the
vignettes in Rogers's Italy and Poems, and to the Liber Studiorum,
unless you have access to some examples of Turner's own work. No other
artist ever yet drew the sky: even Titian's clouds, and Tintoret's, are
conventional. The clouds in the "Ben Arthur," "Source of Arveron," and
"Calais Pier," are among the best of Turner's storm studies; and of the
upper clouds, the vignettes to Rogers's Poems furnish as many examples
as you need.
And now, as our first lesson was taken from the sky, so, for the
present, let our last be. I do not advise you to be in any haste to
master the contents of my next letter. If you have any real talent for
drawing, you will take delight in the discoveries of natural loveliness,
which the studies I have already proposed will lead you into, among the
fields and hills; and be assured that the more quietly and
single-heartedly you take each step in the art, the quicker, on the
whole, will your progress be. I would rather, indeed, have discussed the
subjects of the following letter at greater length, and in a separate
work addressed to more advanced students; but as there are one or two
things to be said on composition which may set the young artist's mind
somewhat more at rest, or furnish him with defence from the urgency of
ill-advisers, I will glance over the main heads of the matter here;
trusting that my doing so may not beguile you, my dear reader, from your
serious work, or lead you to think me, in occupying part of this book
with talk not altogether relevant to it, less entirely or
Faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[220] It is meant, I believe, for "Salt Hill."
[221] I do not mean that you can approach Turner or Durer in their
strength, that is to say, in their imagination or power of design. But
you may approach them, by perseverance, in truth of manner.
[222] The following are the most desirable plates:
Grande Chartreuse.
Æsacus and Hespérie.
Cephalus and Procris.
Source of Arveron.
Ben Arthur.
Watermill.
Hindhead Hill.
Hedging and Ditching.
Dumblane Abbey.
Morpeth.
Calais Pier.
Pembury Mill.
Little Devil's Bridge.
River Wye (_not_ Wye and Severn).
Holy Island.
Clyde.
Lauffenbourg.
Blair Athol.
Alps from Grenoble.
Raglan. (Subject with quiet brook, trees, and castle on the right.)
If you cannot get one of these, any of the others will be serviceable,
except only the twelve following, which are quite useless:--
1. Scene in Italy, with goats on a walled road, and trees above.
2. Interior of church.
3. Scene with bridge, and trees above; figures on left, one playing a
pipe.
4. Scene with figure playing on tambourine.
5. Scene on Thames with high trees, and a square tower of a church seen
through them.
6. Fifth Plague of Egypt.
7. Tenth Plague of Egypt.
8. Rivaulx Abbey.
9. Wye and Severn.
10. Scene with castle in centre, cows under trees on the left.
11. Martello Towers.
12. Calm.
It is very unlikely that you should meet with one of the original
etchings; if you should, it will be a drawing-master in itself alone,
for it is not only equivalent to a pen-and-ink drawing by Turner, but to
a very careful one: only observe, the Source of Arveron, Raglan, and
Dumblane were not etched by Turner; and the etchings of those three are
not good for separate study, though it is deeply interesting to see how
Turner, apparently provoked at the failure of the beginnings in the
Arveron and Raglan, took the plates up himself, and either conquered or
brought into use the bad etching by his marvellous engraving. The
Dumblane was, however, well etched by Mr. Lupton, and beautifully
engraved by him. The finest Turner etching is of an aqueduct with a
stork standing in a mountain stream, not in the published series; and
next to it, are the unpublished etchings of the Via Mala and Crowhurst.
Turner seems to have been so fond of these plates that he kept
retouching and finishing them, and never made up his mind to let them
go. The Via Mala is certainly, in the state in which Turner left it, the
finest of the whole series: its etching is, as I said, the best after
that of the aqueduct. Figure 20., above, is part of another fine
unpublished etching, "Windsor, from Salt Hill." Of the published
etchings, the finest are the Ben Arthur, Æsacus, Cephalus, and Stone
Pines, with the Girl washing at a Cistern; the three latter are the more
generally instructive. Hindhead Hill, Isis, Jason, and Morpeth, are also
very desirable.
[223] You will find more notice of this point in the account of
Harding's tree-drawing, a little farther on.
[224] The impressions vary so much in colour that no brown can be
specified.
[225] You had better get such a photograph, even if you have a Liber
print as well.
[226] See the closing letter in this volume.
[227] Bogue, Fleet Street. If you are not acquainted with Harding's
works (an unlikely supposition, considering their popularity), and
cannot meet with the one in question, the diagrams given here will
enable you to understand all that is needful for our purposes.
[228] I draw this figure (a young shoot of oak) in outline only, it
being impossible to express the refinements of shade in distant foliage
in a woodcut.
[229] His lithographic sketches, those, for instance, in the Park and
the Forest, and his various lessons on foliage, possess greater merit
than the more ambitious engravings in his "Principles and Practice of
Art." There are many useful remarks, however, dispersed through this
latter work.
[230] On this law you will do well, if you can get access to it, to look
at the fourth chapter of the fourth volume of "Modern Painters."
[231] The student may hardly at first believe that the perspective of
buildings is of little consequence: but he will find it so ultimately.
See the remarks on this point in the Preface.
[232] It is a useful piece of study to dissolve some Prussian blue in
water, so as to make the liquid definitely blue: fill a large white
basin with the solution, and put anything you like to float on it, or
lie in it; walnut shells, bits of wood, leaves of flowers, &c. Then
study the effects of the reflections, and of the stems of the flowers or
submerged portions of the floating objects, as they appear through the
blue liquid; noting especially how, as you lower your head and look
along the surface, you see the reflections clearly; and how, as you
raise your head, you lose the reflections, and see the submerged stems
clearly.
[233] Respecting Architectural Drawing, see the notice of the works of
Prout in the Appendix.
LETTER III.
ON COLOUR AND COMPOSITION.
MY DEAR READER:--
If you have been obedient, and have hitherto done all that I have told
you, I trust it has not been without much subdued remonstrance, and some
serious vexation. For I should be sorry if, when you were led by the
course of your study to observe closely such things as are beautiful in
colour, you had not longed to paint them, and felt considerable
difficulty in complying with your restriction to the use of black, or
blue, or grey. You _ought_ to love colour, and to think nothing quite
beautiful or perfect without it; and if you really do love it, for its
own sake, and are not merely desirous to colour because you think
painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some chance you may colour
well. Nevertheless, you need not hope ever to produce anything more than
pleasant helps to memory, or useful and suggestive sketches in colour,
unless you mean to be wholly an artist. You may, in the time which other
vocations leave at your disposal, produce finished, beautiful, and
masterly drawings in light and shade. But to colour well, requires your
life. It cannot be done cheaper. The difficulty of doing right is
increased--not twofold nor threefold, but a thousandfold, and more--by
the addition of colour to your work. For the chances are more than a
thousand to one against your being right both in form and colour with a
given touch: it is difficult enough to be right in form, if you attend
to that only; but when you have to attend, at the same moment, to a much
more subtle thing than the form, the difficulty is strangely
increased--and multiplied almost to infinity by this great fact, that,
while form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any
line that it is either right or wrong, colour is wholly _relative_.
Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in
other places; so that what was warm a minute ago, becomes cold when you
have put a hotter colour in another place, and what was in harmony when
you left it, becomes discordant as you set other colours beside it; so
that every touch must be laid, not with a view to its effect at the
time, but with a view to its effect in futurity, the result upon it of
all that is afterwards to be done being previously considered. You may
easily understand that, this being so, nothing but the devotion of life,
and great genius besides, can make a colourist.
But though you cannot produce finished coloured drawings of any value,
you may give yourself much pleasure, and be of great use to other
people, by occasionally sketching with a view to colour only; and
preserving distinct statements of certain colour facts--as that the
harvest-moon at rising was of such and such a red, and surrounded by
clouds of such and such a rosy grey; that the mountains at evening were
in truth so deep in purple; and the waves by the boat's side were indeed
of that incredible green. This only, observe, if you have an eye for
colour; but you may presume that you have this, if you enjoy colour.
And, though of course you should always give as much form to your
subject as your attention to its colour will admit of, remember that the
whole value of what you are about depends, in a coloured sketch, on the
colour _merely_. If the colour is wrong, everything is wrong: just as,
if you are singing, and sing false notes, it does not matter how true
the words are. If you sing at all, you must sing sweetly; and if you
colour at all, you must colour rightly. Give up _all_ the form, rather
than the slightest part of the colour: just as, if you felt yourself in
danger of a false note, you would give up the word, and sing a
meaningless sound, if you felt that so you could save the note. Never
mind though your houses are all tumbling down--though your clouds are
mere blots, and your trees mere knobs, and your sun and moon like
crooked sixpences--so only that trees, clouds, houses, and sun or moon,
are of the right colours. Of course, the discipline you have gone
through will enable you to hint something of form, even in the fastest
sweep of the brush; but do not let the thought of form hamper you in the
least, when you begin to make coloured memoranda. If you want the form
of the subject, draw it in black and white. If you want its colour, take
its colour, and be sure you _have_ it, and not a spurious, treacherous,
half-measured piece of mutual concession, with the colours all wrong,
and the forms still anything but right. It is best to get into the habit
of considering the coloured work merely as supplementary to your other
studies; making your careful drawings of the subject first, and then a
coloured memorandum separately, as shapeless as you like, but faithful
in hue, and entirely minding its own business. This principle, however,
bears chiefly on large and distant subjects; in foregrounds and near
studies, the colour cannot be had without a good deal of definition of
form. For if you do not map the mosses on the stones accurately, you
will not have the right quantity of colour in each bit of moss pattern,
and then none of the colours will look right; but it always simplifies
the work much if you are clear as to your point of aim, and satisfied,
when necessary, to fail of all but that.
Now, of course, if I were to enter into detail respecting colouring,
which is the beginning and end of a painter's craft, I should need to
make this a work in three volumes instead of three letters, and to
illustrate it in the costliest way. I only hope at present to set you
pleasantly and profitably to work, leaving you, within the tethering of
certain leading-strings, to gather what advantages you can from the
works of art of which every year brings a greater number within your
reach;--and from the instruction which, every year, our rising artists
will be more ready to give kindly, and better able to give wisely.
And, first, of materials. Use hard cake colours, not moist colours:
grind a sufficient quantity of each on your palette every morning,
keeping a separate plate, large and deep, for colours to be used in
broad washes, and wash both plate and palette every evening, so as to be
able always to get good and pure colour when you need it; and force
yourself into cleanly and orderly habits about your colours. The two
best colourists of modern times, Turner and Rossetti,[234] afford us, I
am sorry to say, no confirmation of this precept by their practice.
Turner was, and Rossetti is, as slovenly in all their procedures as men
can well be; but the result of this was, with Turner, that the colours
have altered in all his pictures, and in many of his drawings; and the
result of it with Rossetti is, that, though his colours are safe, he has
sometimes to throw aside work that was half done, and begin over again.
William Hunt, of the Old Water-colour, is very neat in his practice; so,
I believe, is Mulready; so is John Lewis; and so are the leading
Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti only excepted. And there can be no doubt about
the goodness of the advice, if it were only for this reason, that the
more particular you are about your colours the more you will get into a
deliberate and methodical habit in using them, and all true _speed_ in
colouring comes of this deliberation.
Use Chinese white, well ground, to mix with your colours in order to
pale them, instead of a quantity of water. You will thus be able to
shape your masses more quietly, and play the colours about with more
ease; they will not damp your paper so much, and you will be able to go
on continually, and lay forms of passing cloud and other fugitive or
delicately shaped lights, otherwise unattainable except by time.
This mixing of white with the pigments, so as to render them opaque,
constitutes _body_-colour drawing as opposed to _transparent_-colour
drawing and you will, perhaps, have it often said to you that this
body-colour is "illegitimate." It is just as legitimate as oil-painting,
being, so far as handling is concerned, the same process, only without
its uncleanliness, its unwholesomeness, or its inconvenience; for oil
will not dry quickly, nor carry safely, nor give the same effects of
atmosphere without tenfold labour. And if you hear it said that the
body-colour looks chalky or opaque, and, as is very likely, think so
yourself, be yet assured of this, that though certain effects of glow
and transparencies of gloom are not to be reached without transparent
colour, those glows and glooms are _not_ the noblest aim of art. After
many years' study of the various results of fresco and oil painting in
Italy, and of body-colour and transparent colour in England, I am now
entirely convinced that the greatest things that are to be done in art
must be done in dead colour. The habit of depending on varnish or on
lucid tints transparency, makes the painter comparatively lose sight of
the nobler translucence which is obtained by breaking various colours
amidst each other: and even when, as by Correggio, exquisite play of hue
is joined with exquisite transparency, the delight in the depth almost
always leads the painter into mean and false chiaroscuro; it leads him
to like dark backgrounds instead of luminous ones,[235] and to enjoy, in
general, quality of colour more than grandeur of composition, and
confined light rather than open sunshine: so that the really greatest
thoughts of the greatest men have always, so far as I remember, been
reached in dead colour, and the noblest oil pictures of Tintoret and
Veronese are those which are likest frescos.
Besides all this, the fact is, that though sometimes a little chalky and
coarse-looking, body-colour is, in a sketch, infinitely liker nature
than transparent colour: the bloom and mist of distance are accurately
and instantly represented by the film of opaque blue (_quite_
accurately, I think, by _nothing_ else); and for ground, rocks, and
buildings, the earthy and solid surface is, of course, always truer than
the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can
ever be.
Against one thing, however, I must steadily caution you. All kinds of
colour are equally illegitimate, if you think they will allow you to
alter at your pleasure, or blunder at your ease. There is _no_ vehicle
or method of colour which admits of alteration or repentance; you must
be right at once, or never; and you might as well hope to catch a rifle
bullet in your hand, and put it straight, when it was going wrong, as to
recover a tint once spoiled. The secret of all good colour in oil,
water, or anything else, lies primarily in that sentence spoken to me by
Mulready: "Know what you have to do." The process may be a long one,
perhaps: you may have to ground with one colour; to touch it with
fragments of a second; to crumble a third into the interstices; a fourth
into the interstices of the third; to glaze the whole with a fifth; and
to reinforce in points with a sixth: but whether you have one, or ten,
or twenty processes to go through, you must go _straight_ through them,
knowingly and foreseeingly all the way; and if you get the thing once
wrong, there is no hope for you but in washing or scraping boldly down
to the white ground, and beginning again.
The drawing in body-colour will tend to teach you all this, more than
any other method, and above all it will prevent you from falling into
the pestilent habit of sponging to get texture; a trick which has nearly
ruined our modern water-colour school of art. There are sometimes places
in which a skilful artist will roughen his paper a little to get certain
conditions of dusty colour with more ease than he could otherwise; and
sometimes a skilfully rased piece of paper will, in the midst of
transparent tints, answer nearly the purpose of chalky body-colour in
representing the surfaces of rocks or buildings. But artifices of this
kind are always treacherous in a tyro's hands, tempting him to trust in
them; and you had better always work on white or grey paper as smooth as
silk;[236] and never disturb the surface of your colour or paper, except
finally to scratch out the very highest lights if you are using
transparent colours.
I have said above that body-colour drawing will teach you the use of
colour better than working with merely transparent tints; but this is
not because the process is an easier one, but because it is a more
_complete_ one, and also because it involves _some_ working with
transparent tints in the best way. You are not to think that because you
use body-colour you may make any kind of mess that you like, and yet get
out of it. But you are to avail yourself of the characters of your
material, which enable you most nearly to imitate the processes of
Nature. Thus, suppose you have a red rocky cliff to sketch, with blue
clouds floating over it. You paint your cliff first firmly, then take
your blue, mixing it to such a tint (and here is a great part of the
skill needed), that when it is laid over the red, in the thickness
required for the effect of the mist, the warm rock-colour showing
through the blue cloud-colour, may bring it to exactly the hue you want;
(your upper tint, therefore, must be mixed colder than you want it;)
then you lay it on, varying it as you strike it, getting the forms of
the mist at once, and, if it be rightly done, with exquisite quality of
colour, from the warm tint's showing through and between the particles
of the other. When it is dry, you may add a little colour to retouch the
edges where they want shape, or heighten the lights where they want
roundness, or put another tone over the whole; but you can take none
away. If you touch or disturb the surface, or by any untoward accident
mix the under and upper colours together, all is lost irrecoverably.
Begin your drawing from the ground again if you like, or throw it into
the fire if you like. But do not waste time in trying to mend it.[237]
This discussion of the relative merits of transparent and opaque colour
has, however, led us a little beyond the point where we should have
begun; we must go back to our palette, if you please. Get a cake of each
of the hard colours named in the note below[238] and try experiments on
their simple combinations, by mixing each colour with every other. If
you like to do it in an orderly way, you may prepare a squared piece of
pasteboard, and put the pure colours in columns at the top and side;
the mixed tints being given at the intersections, thus (the letters
standing for colours):
b c d e f &c.
a ab ac ad ae af
b -- bc bd be bf
c -- -- cd ce cf
d -- -- -- de df
e -- -- -- -- ef
&c.
This will give you some general notion of the characters of mixed tints
of two colours only, and it is better in practice to confine yourself as
much as possible to these, and to get more complicated colours, either
by putting a third _over_ the first blended tint, or by putting the
third into its interstices. Nothing but watchful practice will teach you
the effects that colours have on each other when thus put over, or
beside, each other.
[Illustration: FIG. 29.]
When you have got a little used to the principal combinations, place
yourself at a window which the sun does not shine in at, commanding some
simple piece of landscape; outline this landscape roughly; then take a
piece of white cardboard, cut out a hole in it about the size of a large
pea; and supposing _R_ is the room, _a d_ the window, and you are
sitting at _a_, Fig. 29., hold this cardboard a little outside of the
window, upright, and in the direction _b d_, parallel a little turned to
the side of the window, or so as to catch more light, as at _a d_, never
turned as at _c d_, or the paper will be dark. Then you will see the
landscape, bit by bit, through the circular hole. Match the colours of
each important bit as nearly as you can, mixing your tints with white,
beside the aperture. When matched, put a touch of the same tint at the
top of your paper, writing under it: "dark tree colour," "hill colour,"
"field colour," as the case may be. Then wash the tint away from beside
the opening, and the cardboard will be ready to match another piece of
the landscape.[239] When you have got the colours of the principal
masses thus indicated, lay on a piece of each in your sketch in its
right place, and then proceed to complete the sketch in harmony with
them, by your eye.
In the course of your early experiments, you will be much struck by two
things: the first, the inimitable brilliancy of light in sky and in
sunlighted things: and the second, that among the tints which you can
imitate, those which you thought the darkest will continually turn out
to be in reality the lightest. Darkness of objects is estimated by us,
under ordinary circumstances, much more by _knowledge_ than by sight;
thus, a cedar or Scotch fir, at 200 yards off, will be thought of darker
green than an elm or oak near us; because we know by experience that the
peculiar colour they exhibit, at that distance, is the _sign_ of
darkness of foliage. But when we try them through the cardboard, the
near oak will be found, indeed, rather dark green, and the distant
cedar, perhaps, pale gray-purple. The quantity of purple and grey in
Nature is, by the way, another somewhat surprising subject of discovery.
Well, having ascertained thus your principal tints, you may proceed to
fill up your sketch; in doing which observe these following particulars:
1. Many portions of your subject appeared through the aperture in the
paper brighter than the paper, as sky, sunlighted grass, &c. Leave these
portions, for the present, white; and proceed with the parts of which
you can match the tints.
2. As you tried your subject with the cardboard, you must have observed
how many changes of hue took place over small spaces. In filling up your
work, try to educate your eye to perceive these differences of hue
without the help of the cardboard, and lay them deliberately, like a
mosaic-worker, as separate colours, preparing each carefully on your
palatte, and laying it as if it were a patch of coloured cloth, cut out,
to be fitted neatly by its edge to the next patch; so that the _fault_
of your work may be, not a slurred or misty look, but a patched
bed-cover look, as if it had all been cut out with scissors. For
instance, in drawing the trunk of a birch tree, there will be probably
white high lights, then a pale rosy grey round them on the light side,
then a (probably greenish) deeper grey on the dark side, varied by
reflected colours, and over all, rich black strips of bark and brown
spots of moss. Lay first the rosy grey, leaving white for the high
lights _and for the spots of moss_, and not touching the dark side. Then
lay the grey for the dark side, fitting it well up to the rosy grey of
the light, leaving also in this darker grey the white paper in the
places for the black and brown moss; then prepare the moss colours
separately for each spot, and lay each in the white place left for it.
Not one grain of white, except that purposely left for the high lights,
must be visible when the work is done, even through a magnifying-glass,
so cunningly must you fit the edges to each other. Finally, take your
background colours, and put them on each side of the tree-trunk, fitting
them carefully to its edge.
Fine work you would make of this, wouldn't you, if you had not learned
to draw first, and could not now draw a good outline for the stem, much
less terminate a colour mass in the outline you wanted?
Your work will look very odd for some time, when you first begin to
paint in this way, and before you can modify it, as I shall tell you
presently how; but never mind; it is of the greatest possible importance
that you should practice this separate laying on of the hues, for all
good colouring finally depends on it. It is, indeed, often necessary,
and sometimes desirable, to lay one colour and form boldly over another:
thus, in laying leaves on blue sky, it is impossible always in large
pictures, or when pressed for time, to fill in the blue through the
interstices of the leaves; and the great Venetians constantly lay their
blue ground first, and then, having let it dry, strike the golden brown
over it in the form of the leaf, leaving the under blue to shine through
the gold, and subdue it to the olive green they want. But in the most
precious and perfect work each leaf is inlaid, and the blue worked round
it: and, whether you use one or other mode of getting your result, it is
equally necessary to be absolute and decisive in your laying the colour.
Either your ground must be laid firmly first, and then your upper colour
struck upon it in perfect form, for ever, thenceforward, unalterable; or
else the two colours must be individually put in their places, and led
up to each other till they meet at their appointed border, equally,
thenceforward, unchangeable. Either process, you see, involves
_absolute_ decision. If you once begin to slur, or change, or sketch, or
try this way and that with your colour, it is all over with it and with
you. You will continually see bad copyists trying to imitate the
Venetians, by daubing their colours about, and retouching, and
finishing, and softening: when every touch and every added hue only lead
them farther into chaos. There is a dog between two children in a
Veronese in the Louvre, which gives the copyist much employment. He has
a dark ground behind him, which Veronese has painted first, and then
when it was dry, or nearly so, struck the locks of the dog's white hair
over it with some half-dozen curling sweeps of his brush, right at once,
and forever. Had one line or hair of them gone wrong, it would have been
wrong forever; no retouching could have mended it. The poor copyists
daub in first some background, and then some dog's hair; then retouch
the background, then the hair, work for hours at it, expecting it always
to come right to-morrow--"when it is finished." They _may_ work for
centuries at it, and they will never do it. If they can do it with
Veronese's allowance of work, half a dozen sweeps of the hand over the
dark background, well; if not, they may ask the dog himself whether it
will ever come right, and get true answer from him--on Launce's
conditions: "If he say 'ay,' it will; if he say 'no,' it will; if he
shake his tail and say nothing, it will."
Whenever you lay on a mass of colour, be sure that however large it may
be, or however small, it shall be gradated. No colour exists in Nature
under ordinary circumstances without gradation. If you do not see this,
it is the fault of your inexperience; you _will_ see it in due time, if
you practise enough. But in general you may see it at once. In the birch
trunk, for instance, the rosy grey _must_ be gradated by the roundness
of the stem till it meets the shaded side; similarly the shaded side is
gradated by reflected, light. Accordingly, whether by adding water, or
white paint, or by unequal force of touch (this you will do at pleasure,
according to the texture you wish to produce), you must, in every tint
you lay on, make it a little paler at one part than another, and get an
even gradation between the two depths. This is very like laying down a
formal law or recipe for you; but you will find it is merely the
assertion of a natural fact. It is not indeed physically impossible to
meet with an ungradated piece of colour, but it is so supremely
improbable, that you had better get into the habit of asking yourself
invariably, when you are going to copy a tint,--not "_Is_ that
gradated?" but "_Which way_ is it gradated?" and at least in ninety-nine
out of a hundred instances, you will be able to answer decisively after
a careful glance, though the gradation may have been so subtle that you
did not see it at first. And it does not matter how small the touch of
colour may be, though not larger than the smallest pin's head, if one
part of it is not darker than the rest, it is a bad touch; for it is not
merely because the natural fact is so, that your colour should be
gradated; the preciousness and pleasantness of the colour itself depends
more on this than on any other of its qualities, for gradation is to
colours just what curvature is to lines, both being felt to be beautiful
by the pure instinct of every human mind, and both, considered as types,
expressing the law of gradual change and progress in the human soul
itself. What the difference is in mere beauty between a gradated and
ungradated colour, may be seen easily by laying an even tint of
rose-colour on paper, and putting a rose leaf beside it. The victorious
beauty of the rose as compared with other flowers, depends wholly on the
delicacy and quantity of its colour gradations, all other flowers being
either less rich in gradation, not having so many folds of leaf; or less
tender, being patched and veined instead of flushed.
4. But observe, it is not enough in general that colour should be
gradated by being made merely paler or darker at one place than another.
Generally colour _changes_ as it _diminishes_, and is not merely
_darker_ at one spot, but also _purer_ at one spot than anywhere else.
It does not in the least follow that the darkest spot should be the
purest; still less so that the lightest should be the purest. Very often
the two gradations more or less cross each other, one passing in one
direction from paleness to darkness, another in another direction from
purity to dullness, but there will almost always be both of them,
however reconciled; and you must never be satisfied with a piece of
colour until you have got both: that is to say, every piece of blue that
you lay on must be _quite_ blue only at some given spot, nor that a
large spot; and must be gradated from that into less pure blue--greyish
blue, or greenish blue, or purplish blue, over all the rest of the space
it occupies. And this you must do in one of three ways: either, while
the colour is wet, mix it with the colour which is to subdue it, adding
gradually a little more and a little more; or else, when the colour is
quite dry, strike a gradated touch of another colour over it, leaving
only a point of the first tint visible: or else, lay the subduing tints
on in small touches, as in the exercise of tinting the chess-board. Of
each of these methods I have something to tell you separately: but that
is distinct from the subject of gradation, which I must not quit without
once more pressing upon you the preëminent necessity of introducing it
everywhere. I have profound dislike of anything like _habit_ of hand,
and yet, in this one instance, I feel almost tempted to encourage you to
get into a habit of never touching paper with colour, without securing a
gradation. You will not in Turner's largest oil pictures, perhaps six or
seven feet long by four or five high, find one spot of colour as large
as a grain of wheat ungradated: and you will find in practice, that
brilliancy of hue, and vigour of light, and even the aspect of
transparency in shade, are essentially dependent on this character
alone; hardness, coldness, and opacity resulting far more from
_equality_ of colour than from nature of colour. Give me some mud off a
city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit, a little whitening, and
some coal-dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me
time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust: but though you had the red
of the ruby, the blue of the gentian, snow for the light, and amber for
the gold, you cannot paint a luminous picture, if you keep the masses of
those colours unbroken in purity, and unvarying in depth.
5. Next note the three processes by which gradation and other characters
are to be obtained:
A. Mixing while the colour is wet.
You may be confused by my first telling you to lay on the hues in
separate patches, and then telling you to mix hues together as you lay
them on: but the separate masses are to be laid, when colours distinctly
oppose each other at a given limit; the hues to be mixed, when they
palpitate one through the other, or fade one into the other. It is
better to err a little on the distinct side. Thus I told you to paint
the dark and light sides of the birch trunk separately, though in
reality, the two tints change, as the trunk turns away from the light,
gradually one into the other: and, after being laid separately on, will
need some farther touching to harmonize them: but they do so in a very
narrow space, marked distinctly all the way up the trunk; and it is
easier and safer, therefore, to keep them separate at first. Whereas it
often happens that the whole beauty of two colours will depend on the
one being continued well through the other, and playing in the midst of
it: blue and green often do so in water: blue and grey, or purple and
scarlet, in sky; in hundreds of such instances the most beautiful and
truthful results may be obtained by laying one colour into the other
while wet; judging wisely how far it will spread, or blending it with
the brush in somewhat thicker consistence of wet body-colour; only
observe, never mix in this way two _mixtures_; let the colour you lay
into the other be always a simple, not a compound tint.
B. Laying one colour over another.
If you lay on a solid touch of vermilion, and, after it is quite dry,
strike a little very wet carmine quickly over it, you will obtain a much
more brilliant red than by mixing the carmine and vermilion. Similarly,
if you lay a dark colour first, and strike a little blue or white
body-colour lightly over it, you will get a more beautiful grey than by
mixing the colour and the blue or white. In very perfect painting,
artifices of this kind are continually used; but I would not have you
trust much to them; they are apt to make you think too much of quality
of colour. I should like you to depend on little more than the dead
colours, simply laid on, only observe always this, that the _less_
colour you do the work with, the better it will always be:[240] so that
if you have laid a red colour, and you want a purple one above, do not
mix the purple on your palette and lay it on so thick as to overpower
the red, but take a little thin blue from your palette, and lay it
lightly over the red, so as to let the red be seen through, and thus
produce the required purple; and if you want a green hue over a blue
one, do not lay a quantity of green on the blue, but a _little_ yellow,
and so on, always bringing the under colour into service as far as you
possibly can. If, however, the colour beneath is wholly opposed to the
one you have to lay on, as, suppose, if green is to be laid over
scarlet, you must either remove the required parts of the under colour
daintily first with your knife, or with water; or else, lay solid white
over it massively, and leave that to dry, and then glaze the white with
the upper colour. This is better, in general, than laying the upper
colour itself so thick as to conquer the ground, which, in fact, if it
be a transparent colour, you cannot do. Thus, if you have to strike
warm boughs and leaves of trees over blue sky, and they are too
intricate to have their places left for them in laying the blue, it is
better to lay them first in solid white, and then glaze with sienna and
ochre, than to mix the sienna and white; though, of course, the process
is longer and more troublesome. Nevertheless, if the forms of touches
required are very delicate, the after glazing is impossible. You must
then mix the warm colour thick at once, and so use it: and this is often
necessary for delicate grasses, and such other fine threads of light in
foreground work.
C. Breaking one colour in small points through or over another.
This is the most important of all processes in good modern[241] oil and
water-colour painting, but you need not hope to attain very great skill
in it. To do it well is very laborious, and requires such skill and
delicacy of hand as can only be acquired by unceasing practice. But you
will find advantage in noting the following points:
(_a._) In distant effects of rich subjects, wood, or rippled water, or
broken clouds, much may be done by touches or crumbling dashes of rather
dry colour, with other colours afterwards put cunningly into the
interstices. The more you practise this, when the subject evidently
calls for it, the more your eye will enjoy the higher qualities of
colour. The process is, in fact, the carrying out of the principle of
separate colours to the utmost possible refinement; using atoms of
colour in juxtaposition, instead of large spaces. And note, in filling
up minute interstices of this kind, that if you want the colour you fill
them with to show brightly, it is better to put a rather positive point
of it, with a little white left beside or round it in the interstice,
than to put a pale tint of the colour over the whole interstice. Yellow
or orange will hardly show, if pale, in small spaces; but they show
brightly in firm touches, however small, with white beside them.
(_b._) If a colour is to be darkened by superimposed portions of
another, it is, in many cases, better to lay the uppermost colour in
rather vigorous small touches, like finely chopped straw, over the under
one, than to lay it on as a tint, for two reasons: the first, that the
play of the two colours together is pleasant to the eye; the second,
that much expression of form may be got by wise administration of the
upper dark touches. In distant mountains they may be made pines of, or
broken crags, or villages, or stones, or whatever you choose; in clouds
they may indicate the direction of the rain, the roll and outline of the
cloud masses; and in water, the minor waves. All noble effects of dark
atmosphere are got in good water-colour drawing by these two expedients,
interlacing the colours, or retouching the lower one with fine darker
drawing in an upper. Sponging and washing for dark atmospheric effect is
barbarous, and mere tyro's work, though it is often useful for passages
of delicate atmospheric light.
(_c._) When you have time, practice the production of mixed tints by
interlaced touches of the pure colours out of which they are formed, and
use the process at the parts of your sketches where you wish to get rich
and luscious effects. Study the works of William Hunt, of the Old
Water-colour Society, in this respect, continually, and make frequent
memoranda of the variegations in flowers; not painting the flower
completely, but laying the ground colour of one petal, and painting the
spots on it with studious precision: a series of single petals of
lilies, geraniums, tulips, &c., numbered with proper reference to their
position in the flower, will be interesting to you on many grounds
besides those of art. Be careful to get the _gradated_ distribution of
the spots well followed in the calceolarias, foxgloves, and the like;
and work out the odd, indefinite hues of the spots themselves with
minute grains of pure interlaced colour, otherwise you will never get
their richness of bloom. You will be surprised to find, as you do this,
first the universality of the law of gradation we have so much insisted
upon; secondly, that Nature is just as economical of _her_ fine colours
as I have told you to be of yours. You would think, by the way she
paints, that her colours cost her something enormous: she will only give
you a single pure touch just where the petal turns into light; but down
in the bell all is subdued, and under the petal all is subdued, even in
the showiest flower. What you thought was bright blue is, when you look
close, only dusty grey, or green, or purple, or every colour in the
world at once, only a single gleam or streak of pure blue in the centre
of it. And so with all her colours. Sometimes I have really thought her
miserliness intolerable: in a gentian, for instance, the way she
economises her ultramarine down in the bell is a little too bad.
Next, respecting general tone. I said, just now, that, for the sake of
students, my tax should not be laid on black or on white pigments; but
if you mean to be a colourist, you must lay a tax on them yourselves
when you begin to use true colour; that is to say, you must use them
little and make of them much. There is no better test of your colour
tones being good, than your having made the white in your picture
precious, and the black conspicuous.
I say, first, the white precious. I do not mean merely glittering or
brilliant; it is easy to scratch white seagulls out of black clouds and
dot clumsy foliage with chalky dew; but, when white is well managed, it
ought to be strangely delicious--tender as well as bright--like inlaid
mother of pearl, or white roses washed in milk. The eye ought to seek it
for rest, brilliant though it may be; and to feel it as a space of
strange, heavenly paleness in the midst of the flushing of the colours.
This effect you can only reach by general depth of middle tint, by
absolutely refusing to allow any white to exist except where you need
it, and by keeping the white itself subdued by grey, except at a few
points of chief lustre.
Secondly, you must make the black conspicuous. However small a point of
black may be, it ought to catch the eye, otherwise your work is too
heavy in the shadow. All the ordinary shadows should be of some
_colour_--never black, nor approaching black, they should be evidently
and always of a luminous nature, and the black should look strange among
them; never occurring except in a black object, or in small points
indicative of intense shade in the very centre of masses of shadow.
Shadows of absolutely negative grey, however, may be beautifully used
with white, or with gold; but still though the black thus, in subdued
strength, becomes _spacious_, it should always be _conspicuous_; the
spectator should notice this grey neutrality with some wonder, and
enjoy, all the more intensely on account of it, the gold colour and the
white which it relieves. Of all the great colourists Velasquez is the
greatest master of the black chords. His black is more precious than
most other people's crimson.
It is not, however, only white and black which you must make valuable;
you must give rare worth to every colour you use; but the white and
black ought to separate themselves quaintly from the rest, while the
other colours should be continually passing one into the other, being
all evidently companions in the same gay world; while the white, black,
and neutral grey should stand monkishly aloof in the midst of them. You
may melt your crimson into purple, your purple into blue and your blue
into green, but you must not melt any of them into black. You should,
however, try, as I said, to give _preciousness_ to all your colours; and
this especially by never using a grain more than will just do the work,
and giving each hue the highest value by opposition. All fine colouring,
like fine drawing, is _delicate_; and so delicate that if, at last, you
_see_ the colour you are putting on, you are putting on too much. You
ought to feel a change wrought in the general tone, by touches of colour
which individually are too pale to be seen; and if there is one atom of
any colour in the whole picture which is unnecessary to it, that atom
hurts it.
Notice also, that nearly all good compound colours are _odd_ colours.
You shall look at a hue in a good painter's work ten minutes before you
know what to call it. You thought it was brown, presently, you feel that
it is red; next that there is, somehow, yellow in it; presently
afterwards that there is blue in it. If you try to copy it you will
always find your colour too warm or too cold--no colour in the box will
seem to have any affinity with it; and yet it will be as pure as if it
were laid at a single touch with a single colour.
As to the choice and harmony of colours in general, if you cannot
choose and harmonize them by instinct, you will never do it at all. If
you need examples of utterly harsh and horrible colour, you may find
plenty given in treatises upon colouring, to illustrate the laws of
harmony; and if you want to colour beautifully, colour as best pleases
yourself at _quiet times_, not so as to catch the eye, nor to look as if
it were clever or difficult to colour in that way, but so that the
colour may be pleasant to you when you are happy, or thoughtful. Look
much at the morning and evening sky, and much at simple
flowers--dog-roses, wood hyacinths, violets, poppies, thistles, heather,
and such like--as Nature arranges them in the woods and fields. If ever
any scientific person tells you that two colours are "discordant," make
a note of the two colours, and put them together whenever you can. I
have actually heard people say that blue and green were discordant; the
two colours which Nature seems to intend never to be separated and never
to be felt, either of them, in its full beauty without the other!--a
peacock's neck, or a blue sky through green leaves, or a blue wave with
green lights though it, being precisely the loveliest things, next to
clouds at sunrise, in this coloured world of ours. If you have a good
eye for colours, you will soon find out how constantly Nature puts
purple and green together, purple and scarlet, green and blue, yellow
and neutral grey, and the like; and how she strikes these
colour-concords for general tones, and then works into them with
innumerable subordinate ones; and you will gradually come to like what
she does, and find out new and beautiful chords of colour in her work
every day. If you _enjoy_ them, depend upon it you will paint them to a
certain point right: or, at least, if you do not enjoy them, you are
certain to paint them wrong. If colour does not give you _intense_
pleasure, let it alone; depend upon it, you are only tormenting the eyes
and senses of people who feel colour, whenever you touch it; and that is
unkind and improper. You will find, also, your power of colouring depend
much on your state of health and right balance of mind; when you are
fatigued or ill you will not see colours well, and when you are
ill-tempered you will not choose them well: thus, though not infallibly
a test of character in individuals, colour power is a great sign of
mental health in nations; when they are in a state of intellectual
decline, their colouring always gets dull.[242] You must also take great
care not to be misled by affected talk about colour from people who have
not the gift of it: numbers are eager and voluble about it who probably
never in all their lives received one genuine colour-sensation. The
modern religionists of the school of Overbeck are just like people who
eat slate-pencil and chalk, and assure everybody that they are nicer and
purer than strawberries and plums.
Take care also never to be misled into any idea that colour can help or
display _form_; colour[243] always disguises form, and is meant to do
so.
It is a favourite dogma among modern writers on colour that "warm
colours" (reds and yellows) "approach" or express nearness, and "cold
colours" (blue and grey) "retire" or express distance. So far is this
from being the case, that no expression of distance in the world is so
great as that of the gold and orange in twilight sky. Colours, as such,
are ABSOLUTELY inexpressive respecting distance. It is their _quality_
(as depth, delicacy, &c.) which expresses distance, not their tint. A
blue bandbox set on the same shelf with a yellow one will not look an
inch farther off, but a red or orange cloud, in the upper sky, will
always appear to be beyond a blue cloud close to us, as it is in
reality. It is quite true that in certain objects, blue is a _sign_ of
distance; but that is not because blue is a retiring colour, but because
the mist in the air is blue, and therefore any warm colour which has not
strength of light enough to pierce the mist is lost or subdued in its
blue: but blue is no more, on this account, a "retiring colour," than
brown is a retiring colour, because, when stones are seen through brown
water, the deeper they lie the browner they look; or than yellow is a
retiring colour, because when objects are seen through a London fog, the
farther off they are the yellower they look. Neither blue, nor yellow,
nor red, can have, as such, the _smallest_ power of expressing either
nearness or distance: they express them only under the peculiar
circumstances which render them at the moment, or in that place, _signs_
of nearness or distance. Thus, vivid orange in an orange is a sign of
nearness, for if you put the orange a great way off, its colour will not
look so bright; but vivid orange in sky is a sign of distance, because
you cannot get the colour of orange in a cloud near you. So purple in a
violet or a hyacinth is a sign of nearness, because the closer you look
at them the more purple you see. But purple in a mountain is a sign of
distance, because a mountain close to you is not purple, but green or
grey. It may, indeed, be generally assumed that a tender or pale colour
will more or less express distance, and a powerful or dark colour
nearness; but even this is not always so. Heathery hills will usually
give a pale and tender purple near, and an intense and dark purple far
away; the rose colour of sunset on snow is pale on the snow at your
feet, deep and full on the snow in the distance; and the green of a
Swiss lake is pale in the clear waves on the beach, but intense as an
emerald in the sunstreak, six miles from shore. And in any case, when
the foreground is in strong light, with much water about it, or white
surface, casting intense reflections, all its colours may be perfectly
delicate, pale, and faint; while the distance, when it is in shadow, may
relieve the whole foreground with intense darks of purple, blue green,
or ultramarine blue. So that, on the whole, it is quite hopeless and
absurd to expect any help from laws of "aërial perspective." Look for
the natural effects, and set them down as fully as you can, and as
faithfully, and _never_ alter a colour because it won't look in its
right place. Put the colour strong, if it be strong, though far off;
faint, if it be faint, though close to you. Why should you suppose that
Nature always means you to know exactly how far one thing is from
another? She certainly intends you always to enjoy her colouring, but
she does not wish you always to measure her space. You would be hard put
to it, every time you painted the sun setting, if you had to express his
95,000,000 miles of distance in "aërial perspective."
There is, however, I think, one law about distance, which has some
claims to be considered a constant one: namely, that dullness and
heaviness of colour are more or less indicative of nearness. All distant
colour is _pure_ colour: it may not be bright, but it is clear and
lovely, not opaque nor soiled; for the air and light coming between us
and any earthy or imperfect colour, purify or harmonise it; hence a bad
colourist is peculiarly incapable of expressing distance. I do not of
course mean that you are to use bad colours in your foreground by way of
making it come forward; but only that a failure in colour, there, will
not put it out of its place; while a failure in colour in the distance
will at once do away with its remoteness: your dull-coloured foreground
will still be a foreground, though ill-painted; but your ill-painted
distance will not be merely a dull distance,--it will be no distance at
all.
I have only one thing more to advise you, namely, never to colour
petulantly or hurriedly. You will not, indeed, be able, if you attend
properly to your colouring, to get anything like the quantity of form
you could in a chiaroscuro sketch; nevertheless, if you do not dash or
rush at your work, nor do it lazily, you may always get enough form to
be satisfactory. An extra quarter of an hour, distributed in quietness
over the course of the whole study, may just make the difference
between a quite intelligible drawing, and a slovenly and obscure one. If
you determine well beforehand what outline each piece of colour is to
have; and, when it is on the paper, guide it without nervousness, as far
as you can, into the form required; and then, after it is dry, consider
thoroughly what touches are needed to complete it, before laying one of
them on; you will be surprised to find how masterly the work will soon
look, as compared with a hurried or ill-considered sketch. In no process
that I know of--least of all in sketching--can time be really gained by
precipitation. It is gained only by caution; and gained in all sorts of
ways: for not only truth of form, but force of light, is always added by
an intelligent and shapely laying of the shadow colours. You may often
make a simple flat tint, rightly gradated and edged, express a
complicated piece of subject without a single retouch. The two Swiss
cottages, for instance, with their balconies, and glittering windows,
and general character of shingly eaves, are expressed in Fig. 30., with
one tint of grey, and a few dispersed spots and lines of it; all of
which you ought to be able to lay on without more than thrice dipping
your brush, and without a single touch after the tint is dry.
[Illustration: FIG. 30.]
Here, then, for I cannot without coloured illustrations tell you more, I
must leave you to follow out the subject for yourself, with such help as
you may receive from the water-colour drawings accessible to you; or
from any of the little treatises on their art which have been published
lately by our water-colour painters.[244] But do not trust much to works
of this kind. You may get valuable hints from them as to mixture of
colours; and here and there you will find a useful artifice or process
explained; but nearly all such books are written only to help idle
amateurs to a meretricious skill, and they are full of precepts and
principles which may, for the most part, be interpreted by their
_precise_ negatives, and then acted upon, with advantage. Most of them
praise boldness, when the only safe attendant spirit of a beginner is
caution;--advise velocity, when the first condition of success is
deliberation;--and plead for generalisation, when all the foundations of
power must be laid in knowledge of specialty.
And now, in the last place, I have a few things to tell you respecting
that dangerous nobleness of consummate art,--COMPOSITION. For though it
is quite unnecessary for you yet awhile to attempt it, and it _may_ be
inexpedient for you to attempt it at all, you ought to know what it
means, and to look for and enjoy it in the art of others.
Composition means, literally and simply, putting several things
together, so as to make _one_ thing out of them; the nature and goodness
of which they all have a share in producing. Thus a musician composes an
air, by putting notes together in certain relations; a poet composes a
poem; by putting thoughts and words in pleasant order; and a painter a
picture, by putting thoughts, forms, and colours in pleasant order.
In all these cases, observe, an intended unity must be the result of
composition. A paviour cannot be said to compose the heap of stones
which he empties from his cart, nor the sower the handful of seed which
he scatters from his hand. It is the essence of composition that
everything should be in a determined place, perform an intended part,
and act, in that part, advantageously for everything that is connected
with it.
Composition, understood in this pure sense, is the type, in the arts of
mankind, of the Providential government of the world.[245] It is an
exhibition, in the order given to notes, or colours, or forms, of the
advantage of perfect fellowship, discipline, and contentment. In a
well-composed air, no note, however short or low, can be spared, but the
least is as necessary as the greatest: no note, however prolonged, is
tedious; but the others prepare for, and are benefited by, its duration;
no note, however high, is tyrannous; the others prepare for and are
benefited by, its exaltation: no note, however low, is overpowered, the
others prepare for, and sympathise with, its humility: and the result
is, that each and every note has a value in the position assigned to it,
which by itself, it never possessed, and of which by separation from the
others, it would instantly be deprived.
Similarly, in a good poem, each word and thought enhances the value of
those which precede and follow it; and every syllable has a loveliness
which depends not so much on its abstract sound as on its position. Look
at the same word in a dictionary, and you will hardly recognise it.
Much more in a great picture; every line and colour is so arranged as to
advantage the rest. None are inessential, however slight; and none are
independent, however forcible. It is not enough that they truly
represent natural objects; but they must fit into certain places, and
gather into certain harmonious groups: so that, for instance, the red
chimney of a cottage is not merely set in its place as a chimney, but
that it may affect, in a certain way pleasurable to the eye, the pieces
of green or blue in other parts of the picture; and we ought to see that
the work is masterly, merely by the positions and quantities of these
patches of green, red, and blue, even at a distance which renders it
perfectly impossible to determine what the colours represent: or to see
whether the red is a chimney, or an old woman's cloak; and whether the
blue is smoke, sky, or water.
It seems to be appointed, in order to remind us, in all we do, of the
great laws of Divine government and human polity, that composition in
the arts should strongly affect every order of mind, however unlearned
or thoughtless. Hence the popular delight in rhythm and metre, and in
simple musical melodies. But it is also appointed that _power_ of
composition in the fine arts should be an exclusive attribute of great
intellect All men can more or less copy what they see, and, more or
less, remember it: powers of reflection and investigation are also
common to us all, so that the decision of inferiority in these rests
only on questions of _degree_. A. has a better memory than B., and C.
reflects more profoundly than D. But the gift of composition is not
given _at all_ to more than one man in a thousand; in its highest range,
it does not occur above three or four times in a century.
It follows, from these general truths, that it is impossible to give
rules which will enable you to compose. You might much more easily
receive rules to enable you to be witty. If it were possible to be witty
by rule, wit would cease to be either admirable or amusing: if it were
possible to compose melody by rule, Mozart and Cimarosa need not have
been born: if it were possible to compose pictures by rule, Titian and
Veronese would be ordinary men. The essence of composition lies
precisely in the fact of its being unteachable, in its being the
operation of an individual mind of range and power exalted above others.
But though no one can _invent_ by rule, there are some simple laws of
arrangement which it is well for you to know, because, though they will
not enable you to produce a good picture, they will often assist you to
set forth what goodness may be in your work in a more telling way than
you could have done otherwise; and by tracing them in the work of good
composers, you may better understand the grasp of their imagination, and
the power it possesses over their materials I shall briefly state the
chief of these laws.
1. THE LAW OF PRINCIPALITY.
The great object of composition being always to secure unity; that is,
to make out of many things one whole; the first mode in which this can
be effected is, by determining that _one_ feature shall be more
important than all the rest, and that the others shall group with it in
subordinate positions.
This is the simplest law of ordinary ornamentation. Thus the group of
two leaves, _a_, Fig. 31., is unsatisfactory, because it has no leading
leaf; but that at _b_ _is_ prettier, because it has a head or master
leaf; and _c_ more satisfactory still, because the subordination of the
other members to this head leaf is made more manifest by their gradual
loss of size as they fall back from it. Hence part of the pleasure we
have in the Greek honeysuckle ornament, and such others.
[Illustration: FIG. 31.]
Thus, also, good pictures have always one light larger or brighter than
the other lights, or one figure more prominent than the other figures,
or one mass of colour dominant over all the other masses; and in general
you will find it much benefit your sketch if you manage that there shall
be one light on the cottage wall, or one blue cloud in the sky, which
may attract the eye as leading light, or leading gloom, above all
others. But the observance of the rule is often so cunningly concealed
by the great composers, that its force is hardly at first traceable; and
you will generally find that they are vulgar pictures in which the law
is _strikingly_ manifest. This may be simply illustrated by musical
melody; for instance, in such phrases as this:
[Illustration]
one note (here the upper G) rules the whole passage, and has the full
energy of it concentrated in itself. Such passages, corresponding to
completely subordinated compositions in painting, are apt to be
wearisome if often repeated. But in such a phrase as this:
[Illustration]
it is very difficult to say, which is the principal note. The A in the
last bar is lightly dominant, but there is a very equal current of
power running through the whole; and such passages rarely weary. And
this principle holds through vast scales of arrangement; so that in the
grandest compositions, such as Paul Veronese's Marriage in Cana, or
Raphael's Disputa, it is not easy to fix at once on the principal
figure; and very commonly the figure which is really chief does not
catch the eye at first, but is gradually felt to be more and more
conspicuous as we gaze. Thus in Titian's grand composition of the
Cornaro Family, the figure meant to be principal is a youth of fifteen
or sixteen, whose portrait it was evidently the painter's object to make
as interesting as possible. But a grand Madonna, and a St. George with a
drifting banner, and many figures more, occupy the centre of the
picture, and first catch the eye; little by little we are led away from
them to a gleam of pearly light in the lower corner, and find that, from
the head which it shines upon, we can turn our eyes no more.
As, in every good picture, nearly all laws of design are more or less
exemplified, it will, on the whole, be an easier way of explaining them
to analyse one composition thoroughly, than to give instances from
various works. I shall therefore take one of Turner's simplest; which
will allow us, so to speak, easily to decompose it, and illustrate each
law by it as we proceed.
Figure 32. is a rude sketch of the arrangement of the whole subject; the
old bridge over the Moselle at Coblentz, the town of Coblentz on the
right, Ehrenbreitstein on the left. The leading or master feature is, of
course the tower on the bridge. It is kept from being _too_ principal by
an important group on each side of it; the boats, on the right, and
Ehrenbreitstein beyond. The boats are large in mass, and more forcible
in colour, but they are broken into small divisions, while the tower is
simple, and therefore it still leads. Ehrenbreitstein is noble in its
mass, but so reduced by aërial perspective of colour that it cannot
contend with the tower, which therefore holds the eye, and becomes the
key of the picture. We shall see presently how the very objects which
seem at first to contend with it for the mastery are made, occultly to
increase its preëminence.
[Illustration: FIG. 32.]
2. THE LAW OF REPETITION.
Another important means of expressing unity is to mark some kind of
sympathy among the different objects, and perhaps the pleasantest,
because most surprising, kind of sympathy, is when one group imitates or
repeats another; not in the way of balance or symmetry, but
subordinately, like a far-away and broken echo of it. Prout has insisted
much on this law in all his writings on composition; and I think it is
even more authoritatively present in the minds of most great composers
than the law of principality. It is quite curious to see the pains that
Turner sometimes takes to echo an important passage of colour; in the
Pembroke Castle for instance, there are two fishing-boats, one with a
red, and another with a white sail. In a line with them, on the beach,
are two fish in precisely the same relative positions; one red and one
white. It is observable that he uses the artifice chiefly in pictures
where he wishes to obtain an expression of repose: in my notice of the
plate of Scarborough, in the series of the "Harbours of England," I have
already had occasion to dwell on this point, and I extract in the
note[246] one or two sentences which explain the principle. In the
composition I have chosen for our illustration, this reduplication is
employed to a singular extent. The tower, or leading feature, is first
repeated by the low echo of it to the left; put your finger over this
lower tower, and see how the picture is spoiled. Then the spires of
Coblentz are all arranged in couples (how they are arranged in reality
does not matter; when we are composing a great picture, we must play the
towers about till they come right, as fearlessly as if they were
chessmen instead of cathedrals). The dual arrangement of these towers
would have been too easily seen, were it not for a little one which
pretends to make a triad of the last group on the right, but is so faint
as hardly to be discernible: it just takes off the attention from the
artifice, helped in doing so by the mast at the head of the boat, which,
however, has instantly its own duplicate put at the stern.[247] Then
there is the large boat near, and its echo beyond it. That echo is
divided into two again, and each of those two smaller boats has two
figures in it; while two figures are also sitting together on the great
rudder that lies half in the water, and half aground. Then, finally, the
great mass of Ehrenbreitstein, which appears at first to have no
answering form, has almost its _facsimile_ in the bank on which the girl
is sitting; this bank is as absolutely essential to the completion of
the picture as any object in the whole series. All this is done to
deepen the effect of repose.
Symmetry or the balance of parts or masses in nearly equal opposition,
is one of the conditions of treatment under the law of Repetition. For
the opposition, in a symmetrical object, is of like things reflecting
each other; it is not the balance of contrary natures (like that of day
and night) but of like natures or like forms; one side of a leaf being
set like the reflection of the other in water.
Symmetry in Nature is, however, never formal nor accurate. She takes the
greatest care to secure some difference between the corresponding things
or parts of things; and an approximation to accurate symmetry is only
permitted in animals because their motions secure perpetual difference
between the balancing parts. Stand before a mirror; hold your arms in
precisely the same position at each side, your head upright your body
straight; divide your hair exactly in the middle, and get it as nearly
as you can into exactly the same shape over each ear, and you will see
the effect of accurate symmetry; you will see, no less, how all grace
and power in the human form result from the interference of motion and
life with symmetry, and from the reconciliation of its balance with its
changefulness. Your position, as seen in the mirror, is the highest type
of symmetry as understood by modern architects.
In many sacred compositions, living symmetry, the balance of harmonious
opposites, is one of the profoundest sources of their power: almost any
works of the early painters, Angelico, Perugino, Giotto, &c., will
furnish you with notable instances of it. The Madonna of Perugino in the
National Gallery, with the angel Michael on one side and Raphael on the
other, is as beautiful an example as you can have.
In landscape, the principle of balance is more or less carried out in
proportion to the wish of the painter to express disciplined calmness.
In bad compositions as in bad architecture, it is formal, a tree on one
side answering a tree on the other; but in good compositions, as in
graceful statues, it is always easy, and sometimes hardly traceable. In
the Coblentz, however, you cannot have much difficulty in seeing how the
boats on one side of the tower and the figures on the other are set in
nearly equal balance; the tower, as a central mass uniting both.
3. THE LAW OF CONTINUITY.
Another important and pleasurable way of expressing unity is by giving
some orderly succession to a number of objects more or less similar. And
this succession is most interesting when it is connected with some
gradual change in the aspect or character of the objects. Thus the
succession of the pillars of a cathedral aisle is most interesting when
they retire in perspective, becoming more and more obscure in distance;
so the succession of mountain promontories one behind another, on the
flanks of a valley; so the succession of clouds, fading farther and
farther towards the horizon; each promontory and each cloud being of
different shape, yet all evidently following in a calm and appointed
order. If there be no change at all in the shape or size of the objects,
there is no continuity; there is only repetition--monotony. It is the
change in shape which suggests the idea of their being individually
free, and able to escape, if they liked, from the law that rules them,
and yet submitting to it. I will leave our chosen illustrative
composition for a moment to take up another, still more expressive of
this law. It is one of Turner's most tender studies, a sketch on Calais
Sands at sunset; so delicate in the expression of wave and cloud, that
it is of no use for me to try to reach it with any kind of outline in a
woodcut; but the rough sketch, Fig. 33., is enough to give an idea of
its arrangement. The aim of the painter has been to give the intensest
expression of repose, together with the enchanted lulling, monotonous
motion of cloud and wave. All the clouds are moving in innumerable ranks
after the sun, meeting towards the point in the horizon where he has
set; and the tidal waves gain in winding currents upon the sand, with
that stealthy haste in which they cross each other so quietly, at their
edges: just folding one over another as they meet, like a little piece
of ruffled silk, and leaping up a little as two children kiss and clap
their hands, and then going on again, each in its silent hurry, drawing
pointed arches on the sand as their thin edges intersect in parting; but
all this would not have been enough expressed without the line of the
old pier-timbers, black with weeds, strained and bent by the storm
waves, and now seeming to stoop in following one another, like dark
ghosts escaping slowly from the cruelty of the pursuing sea.
I need not, I hope, point out to the reader the illustration of this law
of continuance in the subject chosen for our general illustration. It
was simply that gradual succession of the retiring arches of the bridge
which induced Turner to paint the subject at all; and it was this same
principle which led him always to seize on subjects including long
bridges where-ever he could find them; but especially, observe, unequal
bridges, having the highest arch at one side rather than at the centre.
There is a reason for this, irrespective of general laws of composition,
and connected with the nature of rivers, which I may as well stop a
minute to tell you about, and let you rest from the study of
composition.
[Illustration: FIG. 33.]
All rivers, small or large, agree in one character, they like to lean a
little on one side: they cannot bear to have their channels deepest in
the middle, but will always, if they can, have one bank to sun
themselves upon, and another to get cool under; one shingly shore to
play over, where they may be shallow, and foolish, and childlike, and
another steep shore, under which they can pause, and purify themselves,
and get their strength of waves fully together for due occasion. Rivers
in this way are just like wise men, who keep one side of their life for
play, and another for work; and can be brilliant, and chattering, and
transparent, when they are at ease, and yet take deep counsel on the
other side when they set themselves to their main purpose. And rivers
are just in this divided, also, like wicked and good men: the good
rivers have serviceable deep places all along their banks, that ships
can sail in; but the wicked rivers go scoopingly irregularly under their
banks until they get full of strangling eddies, which no boat can row
over without being twisted against the rocks; and pools like wells,
which no one can get out of but the water-kelpie that lives at the
bottom;--but, wicked or good, the rivers all agree in having two kinds
of sides. Now the natural way in which a village stonemason therefore
throws a bridge over a strong stream is, of course, to build a great
door to let the cat through, and little doors to let the kittens
through; a great arch for the great current, to give it room in flood
time, and little arches for the little currents along the shallow shore.
This, even without any prudential respect for the floods of the great
current, he would do in simple economy of work and stone; for the
smaller your arches are, the less material you want on their flanks. Two
arches over the same span of river, supposing the butments are at the
same depth, are cheaper than one, and that by a great deal; so that,
where the current is shallow, the village mason makes his arches many
and low; as the water gets deeper, and it becomes troublesome to build
his piers up from the bottom, he throws his arches wider; at last he
comes to the deep stream, and, as he cannot build at the bottom of that,
he throws his largest arch over it with a leap, and with another little
one or so gains the opposite shore. Of course as arches are wider they
must be higher, or they will not stand; so the roadway must rise as the
arches widen. And thus we have the general type of bridge, with its
highest and widest arch towards one side, and a train of minor arches
running over the flat shore on the other; usually a steep bank at the
river-side next the large arch; always, of course, a flat shore on the
side of the small ones; and the bend of the river assuredly concave
towards this flat, cutting round, with a sweep into the steep bank; or,
if there is no steep bank, still assuredly cutting into the shore at the
steep end of the bridge.
Now this kind of bridge, sympathising, as it does, with the spirit of
the river, and marking the nature of the thing it has to deal with and
conquer, is the ideal of a bridge; and all endeavours to do the thing in
a grand engineer's manner, with a level roadway and equal arches, are
barbarous; not only because all monotonous forms are ugly in themselves,
but because the mind perceives at once that there has been cost
uselessly thrown away for the sake of formality.[248]
Well, to return to our continuity. We see that the Turnerian bridge in
Fig. 32. is of the absolutely perfect type, and is still farther
interesting by having its main arch crowned by a watch-tower. But as I
want you to note especially what perhaps was not the case in the real
bridge, but is entirely Turner's doing, you will find that though the
arches diminish gradually, not one is _regularly_ diminished--they are
all of different shapes and sizes: you cannot see this clearly in 32.,
but in the larger diagram, Fig. 34., opposite, you will with ease. This
is indeed also part of the ideal of a bridge, because the lateral
currents near the shore are of course irregular in size, and a simple
builder would naturally vary his arches accordingly; and also, if the
bottom was rocky, build his piers where the rocks came. But it is not as
a part of bridge ideal, but as a necessity of all noble composition,
that this irregularity is introduced by Turner. It at once raises the
object thus treated from the lower or vulgar unity of rigid law to the
greater unity of clouds, and waves, and trees, and human souls, each
different, each obedient, and each in harmonious service.
4. THE LAW OF CURVATURE.
There is, however, another point to be noticed in this bridge of
Turner's. Not only does it slope away unequally at its sides, but it
slopes in a gradual though very subtle curve. And if you substitute a
straight line for this curve (drawing one with a rule from the base of
the tower on each side to the ends of the bridge, in Fig. 34., and
effacing the curve), you will instantly see that the design has suffered
grievously. You may ascertain, by experiment, that all beautiful objects
whatsoever are thus terminated by delicately curved lines, except where
the straight line is indispensable to their use or stability: and that
when a complete system of straight lines, throughout the form, is
necessary to that stability, as in crystals, the beauty, if any exists,
is in colour and transparency, not in form. Cut out the shape of any
crystal you like, in white wax or wood, and put it beside a white lily,
and you will feel the force of the curvature in its purity, irrespective
of added colour, or other interfering elements of beauty.
[Illustration: FIG. 34.]
Well, as curves are more beautiful than straight lines, it is necessary
to a good composition that its continuities of object, mass, or colour
should be, if possible, in curves, rather than straight lines or angular
ones. Perhaps one of the simplest and prettiest examples of a graceful
continuity of this kind is in the line traced at any moment by the corks
of a net as it is being drawn: nearly every person is more or less
attracted by the beauty of the dotted line. Now it is almost always
possible, not only to secure such a continuity in the arrangement or
boundaries of objects which, like these bridge arches or the corks of
the net, are actually connected with each other, but--and this is a
still more noble and interesting kind of continuity--among features
which appear at first entirely separate. Thus the towers of
Ehrenbreitstein, on the left, in Fig. 32., appear at first independent
of each other; but when I give their profile, on a larger scale, Fig.
35., the reader may easily perceive that there is a subtle cadence and
harmony among them. The reason of this is, that they are all bounded by
one grand curve, traced by the dotted line; out of the seven towers,
four precisely touch this curve, the others only falling back from it
here and there to keep the eye from discovering it too easily.
[Illustration: FIG. 35.]
And it is not only always _possible_ to obtain continuities of this
kind: it is, in drawing large forest or mountain forms essential to
truth. The towers of Ehrenbreitstein might or might not in reality fall
into such a curve, but assuredly the basalt rock on which they stand
did; for all mountain forms not cloven into absolute precipice, nor
covered by straight slopes of shales, are more or less governed by these
great curves, it being one of the aims of Nature in all her work to
produce them. The reader must already know this, if he has been able to
sketch at all among the mountains; if not, let him merely draw for
himself, carefully, the outlines of any low hills accessible to him,
where they are tolerably steep, or of the woods which grow on them. The
steeper shore of the Thames at Maidenhead, or any of the downs at
Brighton or Dover, or, even nearer, about Croydon (as Addington Hills),
are easily accessible to a Londoner; and he will soon find not only how
constant, but how graceful the curvature is. Graceful curvature is
distinguished from ungraceful by two characters: first, its moderation,
that is to say, its close approach to straightness in some parts of its
course;[249] and, secondly, by its variation, that is to say, its never
remaining equal in degree at different parts of its course.
This variation is itself twofold in all good curves.
[Illustration: FIG. 36.]
A. There is, first, a steady change through the whole line from less to
more curvature, or more to less, so that _no_ part of the line is a
segment of a circle, or can be drawn by compasses in any way whatever.
Thus, in Fig. 36., _a_ is a bad curve, because it is part of a circle,
and is therefore monotonous throughout; but _b_ is a good curve, because
it continually changes its direction as it proceeds.
[Illustration: FIG. 37.]
The _first_ difference between good and bad drawing of tree boughs
consists in observance of this fact. Thus, when I put leaves on the line
_b_, as in Fig. 37., you can immediately feel the springiness of
character dependent on the changefulness of the curve. You may put
leaves on the other line for yourself, but you will find you cannot make
a right tree spray of it. For _all_ tree boughs, large or small, as well
as all noble natural lines whatsoever, agree in this character; and it
is a point of primal necessity that your eye should always seize and
your hand trace it. Here are two more portions of good curves, with
leaves put on them at the extremities instead of the flanks, Fig. 38.;
and two showing the arrangement of masses of foliage seen a little
farther off, Fig. 39., which you may in like manner amuse yourself by
turning into segments of circles--you will see with what result. I hope,
however, you have beside you by this time, many good studies of tree
boughs carefully made, in which you may study variations of curvature in
their most complicated and lovely forms.[250]
[Illustration: FIG. 38.]
[Illustration: FIG. 39.]
B. Not only does every good curve vary in general tendency, but it is
modulated, as it proceeds, by myriads of subordinate curves. Thus the
outlines of a tree trunk are never as at _a_, Fig. 40, but as at _b_. So
also in waves, clouds, and all other nobly formed masses. Thus another
essential difference between good and bad drawing, or good and bad
sculpture, depends on the quantity and refinement of minor curvatures
carried, by good work, into the great lines. Strictly speaking, however,
this is not variation in large curves, but composition of large curves
out of small ones; it is an increase in the quantity of the beautiful
element, _but not a change in its nature_.
5. THE LAW OF RADIATION.
[Illustration: FIG. 40.]
We have hitherto been concerned only with the binding of our various
objects into beautiful lines or processions. The next point we have to
consider is, how we may unite these lines or processions themselves, so
as to make groups of _them_.
Now, there are two kinds of harmonies of lines. One in which, moving
more or less side by side, they variously, but evidently with consent,
retire from or approach each other, intersect or oppose each other:
currents of melody in music, for different voices, thus approach and
cross, fall and rise, in harmony; so the waves of the sea, as they
approach the shore, flow into one another or cross, but with a great
unity through all; and so various lines of composition often flow
harmoniously through and across each other in a picture. But the most
simple and perfect connexion of lines is by radiation; that is, by their
all springing from one point, or closing towards it: and this harmony is
often, in Nature almost always, united with the other; as the boughs of
trees, though they intersect and play amongst each other irregularly,
indicate by their general tendency their origin from one root. An
essential part of the beauty of all vegetable form is in this radiation:
it is seen most simply in a single flower or leaf, as in a convolvulus
bell, or chestnut leaf; but more beautifully in the complicated
arrangements of the large boughs and sprays. For a leaf is only a flat
piece of radiation; but the tree throws its branches on all sides, and
even in every profile view of it, which presents a radiation more or
less correspondent to that of its leaves, it is more beautiful, because
varied by the freedom of the separate branches. I believe it has been
ascertained that, in all trees, the angle at which, in their leaves, the
lateral ribs are set on their central rib is approximately the same at
which the branches leave the great stem; and thus each section of the
tree would present a kind of magnified view of its own leaf, were it not
for the interfering force of gravity on the masses of foliage. This
force in proportion to their age, and the lateral leverage upon them,
bears them downwards at the extremities, so that, as before noticed, the
lower the bough grows on the stem, the more it droops (Fig. 17, p.
295.); besides this, nearly all beautiful trees have a tendency to
divide into two or more principal masses, which give a prettier and more
complicated symmetry than if one stem ran all the way up the centre.
Fig. 41. may thus be considered the simplest type of tree radiation, as
opposed to leaf radiation. In this figure, however, all secondary
ramification is unrepresented, for the sake of simplicity; but if we
take one half of such a tree, and merely give two secondary branches to
each main branch (as represented in the general branch structure shown
at _b_, Fig. 18., p. 296), we shall have the form, Fig. 42. This I
consider the perfect general type of tree structure; and it is curiously
connected with certain forms of Greek, Byzantine, and Gothic
ornamentation, into the discussion of which, however, we must not enter
here. It will be observed, that both in Figs. 41. and 42. all the
branches so spring from the main stem as very nearly to suggest their
united radiation from the root R. This is by no means universally the
case; but if the branches do not bend towards a point in the root, they
at least converge to some point or other. In the examples in Fig. 43.,
the mathematical centre of curvature, _a_, is thus, in one case, on the
ground at some distance from the root, and in the other, near the top of
the tree. Half, only, of each tree is given, for the sake of clearness:
Fig. 44. gives both sides of another example, in which the origins of
curvature are below the root. As the positions of such points may be
varied without end, and as the arrangement of the lines is also farther
complicated by the fact of the boughs springing for the most part in a
spiral order round the tree, and at proportionate distances, the systems
of curvature which regulate the form of vegetation are quite infinite.
Infinite is a word easily said, and easily written, and people do not
always mean it when they say it; in this case I _do_ mean it; the number
of systems is incalculable, and even to furnish any thing like a
representative number of types, I should have to give several hundreds
of figures such as Fig. 44.[251]
[Illustration: FIG. 41.]
[Illustration: FIG. 42.]
[Illustration: FIG. 43.]
[Illustration: FIG. 44.]
Thus far, however, we have only been speaking of the great relations of
stem and branches. The forms of the branches themselves are regulated by
still more subtle laws, for they occupy an intermediate position between
the form of the tree and of the leaf. The leaf has a flat ramification;
the tree a completely rounded one; the bough is neither rounded nor
flat, but has a structure exactly balanced between the two, in a
half-flattened, half-rounded flake, closely resembling in shape one of
the thick leaves of an artichoke or the flake of a fir cone; by
combination forming the solid mass of the tree, as the leaves compose
the artichoke head. I have before pointed out to you the general
resemblance of these branch flakes to an extended hand; but they may be
more accurately represented by the ribs of a boat. If you can imagine a
very broad-headed and flattened boat applied by its keel to the end of a
main branch,[252] as in Fig. 45., the lines which its ribs will take,
and the general contour of it, as seen in different directions, from
above and below; and from one side and another, will give you the
closest approximation to the perspectives and foreshortenings of a
well-grown branch-flake. Fig. 25. above, page 316., is an unharmed and
unrestrained shoot of healthy young oak; and if you compare it with Fig.
45., you will understand at once the action of the lines of leafage; the
boat only failing as a type in that its ribs are too nearly parallel to
each other at the sides, while the bough sends all its ramification well
forwards, rounding to the head, that it may accomplish its part in the
outer form of the whole tree, yet always securing the compliance with
the great universal law that the branches nearest the root bend most
back; and, of course, throwing _some_ always back as well as forwards;
the appearance of reversed action being much increased, and rendered
more striking and beautiful, by perspective. Figure 25. shows the
perspective of such a bough as it is seen from below; Fig. 46. gives
rudely the look it would have from above.
[Illustration: FIG. 45.]
[Illustration: FIG. 46.]
You may suppose, if you have not already discovered, what subtleties of
perspective and light and shade are involved in the drawing of these
branch-flakes, as you see them in different directions and actions; now
raised, now depressed; touched on the edges by the wind, or lifted up
and bent back so as to show all the white under surfaces of the leaves
shivering in light, as the bottom of a boat rises white with spray at
the surge-crest; or drooping in quietness towards the dew of the grass
beneath them in windless mornings, or bowed down under oppressive grace
of deep-charged snow. Snow time, by the way, is one of the best for
practice in the placing of tree masses; but you will only be able to
understand them thoroughly by beginning with a single bough and a few
leaves placed tolerably even, as in Fig. 38. page 372. First one with
three leaves, a central and two lateral ones, as at _a_; then with five,
as at _b_, and so on; directing your whole attention to the expression,
both by contour and light and shade, of the boat-like arrangements,
which in your earlier studies, will have been a good deal confused,
partly owing to your inexperience, and partly to the depth of shade, or
absolute blackness of mass required in those studies.
One thing more remains to be noted, and I will let you out of the wood.
You see that in every generally representative figure I have surrounded
the radiating branches with a dotted line: such lines do indeed
terminate every vegetable form; and you see that they are themselves
beautiful curves, which, according to their flow, and the width or
narrowness of the spaces they enclose, characterize the species of tree
or leaf, and express its free or formal action, its grace of youth or
weight of age. So that, throughout all the freedom of her wildest
foliage, Nature is resolved on expressing an encompassing limit; and
marking a unity in the whole tree, caused not only by the rising of its
branches from a common root, but by their joining in one work, and being
bound by a common law. And having ascertained this, let us turn back for
a moment to a point in leaf structure which, I doubt not, you must
already have observed in your earlier studies, but which it is well to
state here, as connected with the unity of the branches in the great
trees. You must have noticed, I should think, that whenever a leaf is
compound,--that is to say, divided into other leaflets which in any way
repeat or imitate the form of the whole leaf,--those leaflets are not
symmetrical as the whole leaf is, but always smaller on the side towards
the point of the great leaf, so as to express their subordination to it,
and show, even when they are pulled off, that they are not small
independent leaves, but members of one large leaf.
[Illustration: FIG. 47.]
Fig. 47., which is a block-plan of a leaf of columbine, without its
minor divisions on the edges, will illustrate the principle clearly. It
is composed of a central large mass, A, and two lateral ones, of which
the one on the right only is lettered, B. Each of these masses is again
composed of three others, a central and two lateral ones; but observe,
the minor one, _a_ of A, is balanced equally by its opposite; but the
minor _b_1 of B is larger than its opposite _b_2. Again, each of these
minor masses is divided into three; but while the central mass, A of A,
is symmetrically divided, the B of B is unsymmetrical, its largest
side-lobe being lowest. Again _b_2, the lobe _c_1 (its lowest lobe in
relation to B) is larger than _c_2; and so also in _b_1. So that
universally one lobe of a lateral leaf is always larger than the other,
and the smaller lobe is that which is nearer the central mass; the lower
leaf, as it were by courtesy, subduing some of its own dignity or
power, in the immediate presence of the greater or captain leaf; and
always expressing, therefore, its own subordination and secondary
character. This law is carried out even in single leaves. As far as I
know, the upper half, towards the point of the spray, is always the
smaller; and a slightly different curve, more convex at the springing,
is used for the lower side, giving an exquisite variety to the form of
the whole leaf; so that one of the chief elements in the beauty of every
subordinate leaf throughout the tree, is made to depend on its
confession of its own lowliness and subjection.
And now, if we bring together in one view the principles we have
ascertained in trees, we shall find they may be summed under four great
laws; and that all perfect[253] vegetable form is appointed to express
these four laws in noble balance of authority.
1. Support from one living root.
2. Radiation, or tendency of force from some one given point, either in
the root, or in some stated connexion with it.
3. Liberty of each bough to seek its own livelihood and happiness
according to its needs, by irregularities of action both in its play and
its work, either stretching out to get its required nourishment from
light and rain, by finding some sufficient breathing-place among the
other branches, or knotting and gathering itself up to get strength for
any load which its fruitful blossoms may lay upon it, and for any stress
of its storm-tossed luxuriance of leaves; or playing hither and thither
as the fitful sunshine may tempt its young shoots, in their undecided
states of mind about their future life.
4. Imperative requirement of each bough to stop within certain limits,
expressive of its kindly fellowship and fraternity with the boughs in
its neighborhood; and to work with them according to its power,
magnitude, and state of health, to bring out the general perfectness of
the great curve, and circumferent stateliness of the whole tree.
I think I may leave you, unhelped, to work out the moral analogies of
these laws; you may, perhaps, however, be a little puzzled to see the
meeting of the second one. It typically expresses that healthy human
actions should spring radiantly (like rays) from some single heart
motive; the most beautiful systems of action taking place when this
motive lies at the root of the whole life, and the action is clearly
seen to proceed from it; while also many beautiful secondary systems of
action taking place from motives not so deep or central, but in some
beautiful subordinate connexion with the central or life motive.
The other laws, if you think over them, you will find equally
significative; and as you draw trees more and more in their various
states of health and hardship, you will be every day more struck by the
beauty of the types they present of the truths most essential for
mankind to know;[254] and you will see what this vegetation of the
earth, which is necessary to our life, first, as purifying the air for
us and then as food, and just as necessary to our joy in all places of
the earth,--what these trees and leaves, I say, are meant to teach us as
we contemplate them, and read or hear their lovely language, written or
spoken for us, not in frightful black letters, nor in dull sentences,
but in fair green and shadowy shapes of waving words, and blossomed
brightness of odoriferous wit, and sweet whispers of unintrusive wisdom,
and playful morality.
Well, I am sorry myself to leave the wood, whatever my reader may be;
but leave it we must, or we shall compose no more pictures to-day.
This law of radiation, then, enforcing unison of action in arising from,
or proceeding to, some given point, is perhaps, of all principles of
composition, the most influential in producing the beauty of groups of
form. Other laws make them forcible or interesting, but this generally
is chief in rendering them beautiful. In the arrangement of masses in
pictures, it is constantly obeyed by the great composers; but, like the
law of principality, with careful concealment of its imperativeness, the
point to which the lines of main curvature are directed being very often
far away out of the picture. Sometimes, however, a system of curves will
be employed definitely to exalt, by their concurrence, the value of some
leading object, and then the law becomes traceable enough.
In the instance before us, the principal object being, as we have seen,
the tower on the bridge, Turner has determined that his system of
curvature should have its origin in the top of this tower. The diagram
Fig. 34. page 369, compared with Fig. 32. page 361, will show how this
is done. One curve joins the two towers, and is continued by the back of
the figure sitting on the bank into the piece of bent timber. This is a
limiting curve of great importance, and Turner has drawn a considerable
part of it with the edge of the timber very carefully, and then led the
eye up to the sitting girl by some white spots and indications of a
ledge in the bank; then the passage to the tops of the towers cannot be
missed.
The next curve is begun and drawn carefully for half an inch of its
course by the rudder; it is then taken up by the basket and the heads of
the figures, and leads accurately to the tower angle. The gunwales of
both the boats begin the next two curves, which meet in the same point;
and all are centralised by the long reflection which continues the
vertical lines.
Subordinated to this first system of curves there is another, begun by
the small crossing bar of wood inserted in the angle behind the rudder;
continued by the bottom of the bank on which the figure sits,
interrupted forcibly beyond it,[255] but taken up again by the
water-line leading to the bridge foot, and passing on in delicate
shadows under the arches, not easily shown in so rude a diagram, towards
the other extremity of the bridge. This is a most important curve,
indicating that the force and sweep of the river have indeed been in old
times under the large arches; while the antiquity of the bridge is told
us by the long tongue of land, either of carted rubbish, or washed down
by some minor stream, which has interrupted this curve, and is now used
as a landing-place for the boats, and for embarkation of merchandise, of
which some bales and bundles are laid in a heap, immediately beneath the
great tower. A common composer would have put these bales to one side or
the other, but Turner knows better; he uses them as a foundation for his
tower, adding to its importance precisely as the sculptured base adorns
a pillar; and he farther increases the aspect of its height by throwing
the reflection of it far down in the nearer water. All the great
composers have this same feeling about sustaining their vertical masses:
you will constantly find Prout using the artifice most dexterously (see,
for instance, the figure with the wheelbarrow under the great tower, in
the sketch of St. Nicolas, at Prague, and the white group of figures
under the tower in the sketch of Augsburg[256]); and Veronese, Titian,
and Tintoret continually put their principal figures at bases of
pillars. Turner found out their secret very early, the most prominent
instance of his composition on this principle being the drawing of Turin
from the Superga, in Hakewell's Italy.
I chose Fig. 20., already given to illustrate foliage drawing, chiefly
because, being another instance of precisely the same arrangement, it
will serve to convince you of its being intentional. There, the
vertical, formed by the larger tree, is continued by the figure of the
farmer, and that of one of the smaller trees by his stick. The lines of
the interior mass of the bushes radiate, under the law of radiation,
from a point behind the farmer's head; but their outline curves are
carried on and repeated, under the law of continuity, by the curves of
the dog and boy--by the way, note the remarkable instance in these of
the use of darkest lines towards the light;--all more or less guiding
the eye up to the right, in order to bring it finally to the Keep of
Windsor, which is the central object of the picture, as the bridge tower
is in the Coblentz. The wall on which the boy climbs answers the purpose
of contrasting, both in direction and character, with these greater
curves; thus corresponding as nearly as possible to the minor tongue of
land in the Coblentz. This, however, introduces us to another law, which
we must consider separately.
6. THE LAW OF CONTRAST.
Of course the character of everything is best manifested by Contrast.
Rest can only be enjoyed after labour; sound, to be heard clearly, must
rise out of silence; light is exhibited by darkness, darkness by light;
and so on in all things. Now in art every colour has an opponent colour,
which, if brought near it, will relieve it more completely than any
other; so, also, every form and line may be made more striking to the
eye by an opponent form or line near them; a curved line is set off by a
straight one, a massy form by a slight one, and so on; and in all good
work nearly double the value, which any given colour or form would have
uncombined, is given to each by contrast.[257]
In this case again, however, a too manifest use of the artifice
vulgarises a picture. Great painters do not commonly, or very visibly,
admit violent contrast. They introduce it by stealth and with
intermediate links of tender change; allowing, indeed, the opposition to
tell upon the mind as a surprise, but not as a shock.[258]
Thus in the rock of Ehrenbreitstein, Fig. 35., the main current of the
lines being downwards, in a convex swell, they are suddenly stopped at
the lowest tower by a counter series of beds, directed nearly straight
across them. This adverse force sets off and relieves the great
curvature, but it is reconciled to it by a series of radiating lines
below, which at first sympathize with the oblique bar, then gradually
get steeper, till they meet and join in the fall of the great curve. No
passage, however intentionally monotonous, is ever introduced by a good
artist without _some_ slight counter current of this kind; so much,
indeed, do the great composers feel the necessity of it, that they will
even do things purposely ill or unsatisfactorily, in order to give
greater value to their well-doing in other places. In a skilful poet's
versification the so-called bad or inferior lines are not inferior
because he could not do them better, but because he feels that if all
were equally weighty, there would be no real sense of weight anywhere;
if all were equally melodious, the melody itself would be fatiguing; and
he purposely introduces the labouring or discordant verse, that the full
ring may be felt in his main sentence, and the finished sweetness in his
chosen rhythm.[259] And continually in painting, inferior artists
destroy their work by giving too much of all that they think is good,
while the great painter gives just enough to be enjoyed, and passes to
an opposite kind of enjoyment, or to an inferior state of enjoyment: he
gives a passage of rich, involved, exquisitely wrought colour, then
passes away into slight, and pale and simple colour; he paints for a
minute or two with intense decision, then suddenly becomes, as the
spectator thinks, slovenly; but he is not slovenly: you could not have
_taken_ any more decision from him just then; you have had as much as is
good for you; he paints over a great space of his picture forms of the
most rounded and melting tenderness, and suddenly, as you think by a
freak, gives you a bit as jagged and sharp as a leafless blackthorn.
Perhaps the most exquisite piece of subtle contrast in the world of
painting is the arrow point, laid sharp against the white side and among
the flowing hair of Correggio's Antiope. It is quite singular how very
little contrast will sometimes serve to make an entire group of forms
interesting which would otherwise have been valueless. There is a good
deal of picturesque material, for instance, in this top of an old tower,
Fig. 48., tiles and stones and sloping roof not disagreeably mingled;
but all would have been unsatisfactory if there had not happened to be
that iron ring on the inner wall, which by its vigorous black
_circular_ line precisely opposes all the square and angular characters
of the battlements and roof. Draw the tower without the ring, and see
what a difference it will make.
[Illustration: FIG. 48.]
One of the most important applications of the law of contrast is in
association with the law of continuity, causing an unexpected but gentle
break in a continuous series. This artifice is perpetual in music, and
perpetual also in good illumination; the way in which little surprises
of change are prepared in any current borders, or chains of ornamental
design, being one of the most subtle characteristics of the work of the
good periods. We take, for instance, a bar of ornament between two
written columns of an early 14th Century MS., and at the first glance we
suppose it to be quite monotonous all the way up, composed of a winding
tendril, with alternately a blue leaf and a scarlet bud. Presently,
however, we see that, in order to observe the law of principality there
is one large scarlet leaf instead of a bud, nearly half-way up, which
forms a centre to the whole rod; and when we begin to examine the order
of the leaves, we find it varied carefully. Let A stand for scarlet bud,
_b_ for blue leaf, _c_ for two blue leaves on one stalk, _s_ for a stalk
without a leaf, and R for the large red leaf. Then counting from the
ground, the order begins as follows:
_b_, _b_, A; _b_, _s_, _b_, A; _b_, _b_, A; _b_, _b_, A; and we think we
shall have two _b_'s and an A all the way, when suddenly it becomes _b_,
A; _b_, R; _b_, A; _b_, A; _b_, A; and we think we are going to have
_b_, A continued; but no: here it becomes _b_, _s_; _b_, _s_; _b_, A;
_b_, _s_; _b_, _s_; _c_, _s_; _b_, _s_; _b_, _s_; and we think we are
surely going to have _b_, _s_ continued, but behold it runs away to the
end with a quick _b_, _b_, A; _b_, _b_, _b_, _b_![260] Very often,
however, the designer is satisfied with _one_ surprise, but I never saw
a good illuminated border without one at least; and no series of any
kind is ever introduced by a great composer in a painting without a snap
somewhere. There is a pretty one in Turner's drawing of Rome, with the
large balustrade for a foreground in the Hakewell's Italy series: the
single baluster struck out of the line, and showing the street below
through the gap, simply makes the whole composition right, when
otherwise, it would have been stiff and absurd.
If you look back to Fig. 48. you will see, in the arrangement of the
battlements, a simple instance of the use of such variation. The whole
top of the tower, though actually three sides of a square, strikes the
eye as a continuous series of five masses. The first two, on the left,
somewhat square and blank; then the next two higher and richer, the
tiles being seen on their slopes. Both these groups being couples, there
is enough monotony in the series to make a change pleasant; and the last
battlement, therefore, is a little higher than the first two,--a little
lower than the second two,--and different in shape from either. Hide it
with your finger, and see how ugly and formal the other four battlements
look.
There are in this figure several other simple illustrations of the laws
we have been tracing. Thus the whole shape of the wall's mass being
square, it is well, still for the sake of contrast, to oppose it not
only by the element of curvature, in the ring, and lines of the roof
below, but by that of sharpness; hence the pleasure which the eye takes
in the projecting point of the roof. Also because the walls are thick
and sturdy, it is well to contrast their strength with weakness;
therefore we enjoy the evident decrepitude of this roof as it sinks
between them. The whole mass being nearly white, we want a contrasting
shadow somewhere; and get it, under our piece of decrepitude. This
shade, with the tiles of the wall below, forms another pointed mass,
necessary to the first by the law of repetition. Hide this inferior
angle with your finger, and see how ugly the other looks. A sense of the
law of symmetry, though you might hardly suppose it, has some share in
the feeling with which you look at the battlements; there is a certain
pleasure in the opposed slopes of their top, on one side down to the
left, on the other to the right. Still less would you think the law of
radiation had anything to do with the matter: but if you take the
extreme point of the black shadow on the left for a centre and follow
first the low curve of the eaves of the wall, it will lead you, if you
continue it, to the point of the tower cornice; follow the second curve,
the top of the tiles of the wall, and it will strike the top of the
right-hand battlement; then draw a curve from the highest point of the
angle battlement on the left, through the points of the roof and its
dark echo; and you will see how the whole top of the tower radiates from
this lowest dark point. There are other curvatures crossing these main
ones, to keep them from being too conspicuous. Follow the curve of the
upper roof, it will take you to the top of the highest battlement; and
the stones indicated at the right-hand side of the tower are more
extended at the bottom, in order to get some less direct expression of
sympathy, such as irregular stones may be capable of, with the general
flow of the curves from left to right.
You may not readily believe, at first, that all these laws are indeed
involved in so trifling a piece of composition. But as you study longer,
you will discover that these laws, and many more, are obeyed by the
powerful composers in every _touch_: that literally, there is never a
dash of their pencil which is not carrying out appointed purposes of
this kind in twenty various ways at once; and that there is as much
difference, in way of intention and authority, between one of the great
composers ruling his colours, and a common painter confused by them, as
there is between a general directing the march of an army, and an old
lady carried off her feet by a mob.
7. THE LAW OF INTERCHANGE.
Closely connected with the law of contrast is a law which enforces the
unity of opposite things, by giving to each a portion of the character
of the other. If, for instance, you divide a shield into two masses of
colour, all the way down--suppose blue and white, and put a bar, or
figure of an animal, partly on one division, partly on the other, you
will find it pleasant to the eye if you make the part of the animal blue
which comes upon the white half, and white which comes upon the blue
half. This is done in heraldry, partly for the sake of perfect
intelligibility, but yet more for the sake of delight in interchange of
colour, since, in all ornamentation whatever, the practice is
continual, in the ages of good design.
Sometimes this alternation is merely a reversal of contrasts; as that,
after red has been for some time on one side, and blue on the other, red
shall pass to blue's side and blue to red's. This kind of alternation
takes place simply in four-quartered shields; in more subtle pieces of
treatment, a little bit only of each colour is carried into the other,
and they are as it were dovetailed together. One of the most curious
facts which will impress itself upon you, when you have drawn some time
carefully from Nature in light and shade, is the appearance of
intentional artifice with which contrasts of this alternate kind are
produced by her; the artistry with which she will darken a tree trunk as
long as it comes against light sky, and throw sunlight on it precisely
at the spot where it comes against a dark hill, and similarly treat all
her masses of shade and colour, is so great, that if you only follow her
closely, every one who looks at your drawing with attention will think
that you have been inventing the most artifically and unnaturally
delightful interchanges of shadow that could possibly be devised by
human wit.
You will find this law of interchange insisted upon at length by Prout
in his "Lessons on Light and Shade:" it seems, of all his principles of
composition, to be the one he is most conscious of; many others he obeys
by instinct, but this he formally accepts and forcibly declares.
The typical purpose of the law of interchange is, of course, to teach us
how opposite natures may be helped and strengthened by receiving each,
as far as they can, some impress or imparted power, from the other.
8. THE LAW OF CONSISTENCY.
It is to be remembered, in the next place, that while contrast exhibits
the _characters_ of things, it very often neutralises or paralyses their
_power_. A number of white things may be shown to be clearly white by
opposition of a black thing, but if you want the full power of their
gathered light, the black thing may be seriously in our way. Thus, while
contrast displays things, it is unity and sympathy which employ them,
concentrating the power of several into a mass. And, not in art merely,
but in all the affairs of life, the wisdom of man is continually called
upon to reconcile these opposite methods of exhibiting, or using, the
materials in his power. By change he gives them pleasantness, and by
consistency value; by change he is refreshed, and by perseverence
strengthened.
Hence many compositions address themselves to the spectator by aggregate
force of colour or line, more than by contrasts of either; many noble
pictures are painted almost exclusively in various tones of red, or
grey, or gold, so as to be instantly striking by their breadth of flush,
or glow, or tender coldness, these qualities being exhibited only by
slight and subtle use of contrast. Similarly as to form; some
compositions associate massive and rugged forms, others slight and
graceful ones, each with few interruptions by lines of contrary
character. And, in general, such compositions possess higher sublimity
than those which are more mingled in their elements. They tell a special
tale, and summon a definite state of feeling, while the grand
compositions merely please the eye.
This unity or breadth of character generally attaches most to the works
of the greatest men; their separate pictures have all separate aims. We
have not, in each, grey colour set against sombre, and sharp forms
against soft, and loud passages against low; but we have the bright
picture, with its delicate sadness; the sombre picture, with its single
ray of relief; the stern picture, with only one tender group of lines;
the soft and calm picture, with only one rock angle at its flank; and so
on. Hence the variety of their work, as well as its impressiveness. The
principal bearing of this law, however, is on the separate masses or
divisions of a picture: the character of the whole composition may be
broken or various, if we please, but there must certainly be a tendency
to consistent assemblage in its divisions. As an army may act on several
points at once, but can only act effectually by having somewhere formed
and regular masses, and not wholly by skirmishers; so a picture may be
various in its tendencies, but must be somewhere united and coherent in
its masses. Good composers are always associating their colours in great
groups; binding their forms together by encompassing lines, and
securing, by various dexterities of expedient, what they themselves call
"breadth:" that is to say, a large gathering of each kind of thing into
one place; light being gathered to light, darkness to darkness, and
colour to colour. If, however, this be done by introducing false lights
or false colours, it is absurd and monstrous; the skill of a painter
consists in obtaining breadth by rational arrangement of his objects,
not by forced or wanton treatment of them. It is an easy matter to paint
one thing all white, and another all black or brown; but not an easy
matter to assemble all the circumstances which will naturally produce
white in one place, and brown in another. Generally speaking, however,
breadth will result in sufficient degree from fidelity of study: Nature
is always broad; and if you paint her colours in true relations, you
will paint them in majestic masses. If you find your work look broken
and scattered, it is, in all probability, not only ill composed, but
untrue.
The opposite quality to breadth, that of division or scattering of light
and colour, has a certain contrasting charm, and is occasionally
introduced with exquisite effect by good composers.[261] Still, it is
never the mere scattering, but the order discernible through this
scattering, which is the real source of pleasure; not the mere
multitude, but the constellation of multitude. The broken lights in the
work of a good painter wander like flocks upon the hills, not
unshepherded; speaking of life and peace: the broken lights of a bad
painter fall like hailstones, and are capable only of mischief, leaving
it to be wished they were also of dissolution.
9. THE LAW OF HARMONY.
This last law is not, strictly speaking, so much one of composition as
of truth, but it must guide composition, and is properly, therefore, to
be stated in this place.
Good drawing is, as we have seen, an _abstract_ of natural facts; you
cannot represent all that you would, but must continually be falling
short, whether you will or no, of the force, or quantity, of Nature.
Now, suppose that your means and time do not admit of your giving the
depth of colour in the scene, and that you are obliged to paint it
paler. If you paint all the colours proportionately paler, as if an
equal quantity of tint had been washed away from each of them, you still
obtain a harmonious, though not an equally forcible statement of natural
fact. But if you take away the colours unequally, and leave some tints
nearly as deep as they are in Nature, while others are much subdued, you
have no longer a true statement. You cannot say to the observer, "Fancy
all those colours a little deeper, and you will have the actual fact."
However he adds in imagination, or takes away, something is sure to be
still wrong. The picture is out of harmony.
It will happen, however, much more frequently, that you have to darken
the whole system of colours, than to make them paler. You remember, in
your first studies of colour from Nature, you were to leave the passages
of light which were too bright to be imitated, as white paper. But, in
completing the picture, it becomes necessary to put colour into them;
and then the other colours must be made darker, in some fixed relation
to them. If you deepen all proportionately, though the whole scene is
darker than reality, it is only as if you were looking at the reality in
a lower light: but if, while you darken some of the tints, you leave
others undarkened, the picture is out of harmony, and will not give the
impression of truth.
It is not, indeed, possible to deepen _all_ the colours so much as to
relieve the lights in their natural degree; you would merely sink most
of your colours, if you tried to do so, into a broad mass of blackness:
but it is quite possible to lower them harmoniously, and yet more in
some parts of the picture than in others, so as to allow you to show the
light you want in a visible relief. In well-harmonised pictures this is
done by gradually deepening the tone of the picture towards the lighter
parts of it, without materially lowering it in the very dark parts; the
tendency in such pictures being, of course, to include large masses of
middle tints. But the principal point to be observed in doing this, is
to deepen the individual tints without dirtying or obscuring them. It is
easy to lower the tone of the picture by washing it over with grey or
brown; and easy to see the effect of the landscape, when its colours are
thus universally polluted with black, by using the black convex mirror,
one of the most pestilent inventions for falsifying nature and degrading
art which ever was put into an artist's hand.[262] For the thing
required is not to darken pale yellow by mixing grey with it, but to
deepen the pure yellow; not to darken crimson by mixing black with it,
but by making it deeper and richer crimson: and thus the required effect
could only be seen in Nature, if you had pieces of glass of the colour
of every object in your landscape, and of every minor hue that made up
those colours, and then could see the real landscape through this deep
gorgeousness of the varied glass. You cannot do this with glass, but you
can do it for yourself as you work; that is to say, you can put deep
blue for pale blue, deep gold for pale gold, and so on, in the
proportion you need; and then you may paint as forcibly as you choose,
but your work will still be in the manner of Titian, not of Caravaggio
or Spagnoletto, or any other of the black slaves of painting.[263]
Supposing those scales of colour, which I told you to prepare in order
to show you the relations of colour to grey, were quite accurately made,
and numerous enough, you would have nothing more to do, in order to
obtain a deeper tone in any given mass of colour, than to substitute for
each of its hues the hue as many degrees deeper in the scale as you
wanted, that is to say, if you want to deepen the whole two degrees,
substituting for the yellow No. 5. the yellow No. 7., and for the red
No. 9. the red No. 11., and so on; but the hues of any object in Nature
are far too numerous, and their degrees too subtle, to admit of so
mechanical a process. Still, you may see the principle of the whole
matter clearly by taking a group of colours out of your scale, arranging
them prettily, and then washing them all over with grey: that represents
the treatment of Nature by the black mirror. Then arrange the same group
of colours, with the tints five or six degrees deeper in the scale; and
that will represent the treatment of Nature by Titian.
You can only, however, feel your way fully to the right of the thing by
working from Nature.
The best subject on which to begin a piece of study of this kind is a
good thick tree trunk, seen against blue sky with some white clouds in
it. Paint the clouds in true and tenderly gradated white; then give the
sky a bold full blue, bringing them well out; then paint the trunk and
leaves grandly dark against all, but in such glowing dark green and
brown as you see they will bear. Afterwards proceed to more complicated
studies, matching the colours carefully first by your old method; then
deepening each colour with its own tint, and being careful, above all
things, to keep truth of equal change when the colours are connected
with each other, as in dark and light sides of the same object. Much
more aspect and sense of harmony are gained by the precision with which
you observe the relation of colours in dark sides and light sides, and
the influence of modifying reflections, than by mere accuracy of added
depth in independent colours.
This harmony of tone, as it is generally called, is the most important
of those which the artist has to regard. But there are all kinds of
harmonies in a picture, according to its mode of production. There is
even a harmony of _touch_. If you paint one part of it very rapidly and
forcibly, and another part slowly and delicately, each division of the
picture may be right separately, but they will not agree together: the
whole will be effectless and valueless, out of harmony. Similarly, if
you paint one part of it by a yellow light in a warm day, and another by
a grey light in a cold day, though both may have been sunlight, and both
may be well toned, and have their relative shadows truly cast, neither
will look like light: they will destroy each other's power, by being out
of harmony. These are only broad and definable instances of discordance;
but there is an extent of harmony in all good work much too subtle for
definition; depending on the draughtsman's carrying everything he draws
up to just the balancing and harmonious point, in finish, and colour,
and depth of tone, and intensity of moral feeling, and style of touch,
all considered at once; and never allowing himself to lean too
emphatically on detached parts, or exalt one thing at the expense of
another, or feel acutely in one place and coldly in another. If you have
got some of Cruikshank's etchings, you will be able, I think, to feel
the nature of harmonious treatment in a simple kind, by comparing them
with any of Richter's illustrations to the numerous German story-books
lately published at Christmas, with all the German stories spoiled.
Cruikshank's work is often incomplete in character and poor in incident,
but, as drawing, it is _perfect_ in harmony. The pure and simple effects
of daylight which he gets by his thorough mastery of treatment in this
respect, are quite unrivalled, as far as I know, by any other work
executed with so few touches. His vignettes to Grimm's German stories,
already recommended, are the most remarkable in this quality. Richter's
illustrations, on the contrary, are of a very high stamp as respects
understanding of human character, with infinite playfulness and
tenderness of fancy; but, as drawings, they are almost unendurably out
of harmony, violent blacks in one place being continually opposed to
trenchant white in another; and, as is almost sure to be the case with
bad harmonists, the local colour hardly felt anywhere. All German work
is apt to be out of harmony, in consequence of its too frequent
conditions of affectation, and its wilful refusals of fact; as well as
by reason of a feverish kind of excitement, which dwells violently on
particular points, and makes all the lines of thought in the picture to
stand on end, as it were, like a cat's fur electrified; while good work
is always as quiet as a couchant leopard, and as strong.
I have now stated to you all the laws of composition which occur to me
as capable of being illustrated or defined; but there are multitudes of
others which, in the present state of my knowledge, I cannot define, and
others which I never hope to define; and these the most important, and
connected with the deepest powers of the art. Among those which I hope
to be able to explain when I have thought of them more, are the laws
which relate to nobleness and ignobleness; that ignobleness especially
which we commonly call "vulgarity," and which, in its essence, is one of
the most curious subjects of inquiry connected with human feeling. Among
those which I never hope to explain, are chiefly laws of expression, and
others bearing simply on simple matters; but, for that very reason, more
influential than any others. These are, from the first, as inexplicable
as our bodily sensations are; it being just as impossible, I think, to
explain why one succession of musical notes[264] shall be noble and
pathetic, and such as might have been sung by Casella to Dante, and why
another succession is base and ridiculous, and would be fit only for the
reasonably good ear of Bottom, as to explain why we like sweetness, and
dislike bitterness. The best part of every great work is always
inexplicable: it is good because it is good; and innocently gracious,
opening as the green of the earth, or falling as the dew of heaven.
But though you cannot explain them, you may always render yourself more
and more sensitive to these higher qualities by the discipline which you
generally give to your character, and this especially with regard to the
choice of incidents; a kind of composition in some sort easier than the
artistical arrangements of lines and colours, but in every sort nobler,
because addressed to deeper feelings.
For instance, in the "Datur Hora Quieti," the last vignette to Roger's
Poems, the plough in the foreground has three purposes. The first
purpose is to meet the stream of sunlight on the river, and make it
brighter by opposition; but any dark object whatever would have done
this. Its second purpose is by its two arms, to repeat the cadence of
the group of the two ships, and thus give a greater expression of
repose; but two sitting figures would have done this. Its third and
chief, or pathetic, purpose is, as it lies abandoned in the furrow (the
vessels also being moored, and having their sails down), to be a type of
human labour closed with the close of day. The parts of it on which the
hand leans are brought most clearly into sight; and they are the chief
dark of the picture, because the tillage of the ground is required of
man as a punishment; but they make the soft light of the setting sun
brighter, because rest is sweetest after toil. These thoughts may never
occur to us as we glance carelessly at the design; and yet their under
current assuredly affects the feelings, and increases, as the painter
meant it should, the impression of melancholy, and of peace.
Again, in the "Lancaster Sands," which is one of the plates I have
marked as most desirable for your possession; the stream of light which
falls from the setting sun on the advancing tide stands similarly in
need of some force of near object to relieve its brightness. But the
incident which Turner has here adopted is the swoop of an angry seagull
at a dog, who yelps at it, drawing back as the wave rises over his feet,
and the bird shrieks within a foot of his face. Its unexpected boldness
is a type of the anger of its ocean element, and warns us of the sea's
advance just as surely as the abandoned plough told us of the ceased
labour of the day.
It is not, however, so much in the selection of single incidents of
this kind as in the feeling which regulates the arrangement of the whole
subject that the mind of a great composer is known. A single incident
may be suggested by a felicitous chance, as a pretty motto might be for
the heading of a chapter. But the great composers so arrange _all_ their
designs that one incident illustrates another, just as one colour
relieves another. Perhaps the "Heysham," of the Yorkshire series which,
as to its locality, may be considered a companion to the last drawing we
have spoken of, the "Lancaster Sands," presents as interesting an
example as we could find of Turner's feeling in this respect. The
subject is a simple north-country village, on the shore of Morecambe
Bay; not in the common sense, a picturesque village: there are no pretty
bow-windows, or red roofs, or rocky steps of entrance to the rustic
doors, or quaint gables; nothing but a single street of thatched and
chiefly clay-built cottages, ranged in a somewhat monotonous line, the
roofs so green with moss that at first we hardly discern the houses from
the fields and trees. The village street is closed at the end by a
wooden gate, indicating the little traffic there is on the road through
it, and giving it something the look of a large farmstead, in which a
right of way lies through the yard. The road which leads to this gate is
full of ruts, and winds down a bad bit of hill between two broken banks
of moor ground, succeeding immediately to the few enclosures which
surround the village; they can hardly be called gardens; but a decayed
fragment or two of fencing fill the gaps in the bank; and a
clothes-line, with some clothes on it, striped blue and red, and a
smock-frock, is stretched between the trunks of some stunted willows; a
_very_ small haystack and pigstye being seen at the back of the cottage
beyond. An empty, two-wheeled, lumbering cart, drawn by a pair of horses
with huge wooden collars, the driver sitting lazily in the sun, sideways
on the leader, is going slowly home along the rough road, it being about
country dinner-time. At the end of the village there is a better house,
with three chimneys and a dormer window in its roof, and the roof is of
stone shingle instead of thatch, but very rough. This house is no doubt
the clergyman's; there is some smoke from one of its chimneys, none
from any other in the village; this smoke is from the lowest chimney at
the back, evidently that of the kitchen, and it is rather thick, the
fire not having been long lighted. A few hundred yards from the
clergyman's house, nearer the shore, is the church, discernible from the
cottage only by its low-arched belfry, a little neater than one would
expect in such a village; perhaps lately built by the Puseyite
incumbent;[265] and beyond the church, close to the sea, are two
fragments of a border war-tower, standing on their circular mound, worn
on its brow deep into edges and furrows by the feet of the village
children. On the bank of moor, which forms the foreground, are a few
cows, the carter's dog barking at a vixenish one: the milkmaid is
feeding another, a gentle white one, which turns its head to her,
expectant of a handful of fresh hay, which she has brought for it in her
blue apron, fastened up round her waist; she stands with her pail on her
head, evidently the village coquette, for she has a neat bodice, and
pretty striped petticoat under the blue apron, and red stockings. Nearer
us, the cowherd, barefooted, stands on a piece of the limestone rock
(for the ground is thistly and not pleasurable to bare feet);--whether
boy or girl we are not sure; it may be a boy, with a girl's worn-out
bonnet on, or a girl with a pair of ragged trowsers on; probably the
first, as the old bonnet is evidently useful to keep the sun out of our
eyes when we are looking for strayed cows among the moorland hollows,
and helps us at present to watch (holding the bonnet's edge down) the
quarrel of the vixenish cow with the dog, which, leaning on our long
stick, we allow to proceed without any interference. A little to the
right the hay is being got in, of which the milkmaid has just taken her
apronful to the white cow; but the hay is very thin, and cannot well be
raked up because of the rocks; we must glean it like corn, hence the
smallness of our stack behind the willows, and a woman is pressing a
bundle of it hard together, kneeling against the rock's edge, to carry
it safely to the hay-cart without dropping any. Beyond the village is a
rocky hill, deep set with brushwood, a square crag or two of limestone
emerging here and there, with pleasant turf on their brows, heaved in
russet and mossy mounds against the sky, which, clear and calm, and as
golden as the moss, stretches down behind it towards the sea. A single
cottage just shows its roof over the edge of the hill, looking seaward;
perhaps one of the village shepherds is a sea captain now, and may have
built it there, that his mother may first see the sails of his ship
whenever it runs into the bay. Then under the hill, and beyond the
border tower, is the blue sea itself, the waves flowing in over the sand
in long curved lines, slowly; shadows of cloud and gleams of shallow
water on white sand alternating--miles away; but no sail is visible, not
one fisherboat on the beach, not one dark speck on the quiet horizon.
Beyond all are the Cumberland mountains, clear in the sun, with rosy
light on all their crags.
I should think the reader cannot but feel the kind of harmony there is
in this composition; the entire purpose of the painter to give us the
impression of wild, yet gentle, country life, monotonous as the
succession of the noiseless waves, patient and enduring as the rocks;
but peaceful, and full of health and quiet hope, and sanctified by the
pure mountain air and baptismal dew of heaven, falling softly between
days of toil and nights of innocence.
All noble composition of this kind can be reached only by instinct: you
cannot set yourself to arrange such a subject; you may see it, and seize
it, at all times, but never laboriously invent it. And your power of
discerning what is best in expression, among natural subjects, depends
wholly on the temper in which you keep your own mind; above all, on your
living so much alone as to allow it to become acutely sensitive in its
own stillness. The noisy life of modern days is wholly incompatible with
any true perception of natural beauty. If you go down into Cumberland by
the railroad, live in some frequented hotel, and explore the hills with
merry companions, however much you may enjoy your tour or their
conversation, depend upon it you will never choose so much as one
pictorial subject rightly; you will not see into the depth of any. But
take knapsack and stick, walk towards the hills by short day's
journeys--ten or twelve miles a day--taking a week from some
starting-place sixty or seventy miles away: sleep at the pretty little
wayside inns, or the rough village ones; then take the hills as they
tempt you, following glen or shore as your eye glances or your heart
guides, wholly scornful of local fame or fashion, and of everything
which it is the ordinary traveller's duty to see or pride to do. Never
force yourself to admire anything when you are not in the humour; but
never force yourself away from what you feel to be lovely, in search of
anything better: and gradually the deeper scenes of the natural world
will unfold themselves to you in still increasing fulness of passionate
power; and your difficulty will be no more to seek or to compose
subjects, but only to choose one from among the multitude of melodious
thoughts with which you will be haunted, thoughts which will of course
be noble or original in proportion to your own depth of character and
general power of mind: for it is not so much by the consideration you
give to any single drawing, as by the previous discipline of your powers
of thought, that the character of your composition will be determined.
Simplicity of life will make you sensitive to the refinement and modesty
of scenery, just as inordinate excitement and pomp of daily life will
make you enjoy coarse colours and affected forms. Habits of patient
comparison and accurate judgment will make your art precious, as they
will make your actions wise; and every increase of noble enthusiasm in
your living spirit will be measured by the reflection of its light upon
the works of your hands.
Faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[234] I give Rossetti this preëminence, because, though the leading
Pre-Raphaelites have all about equal power over colour in the abstract,
Rossetti and Holman Hunt are distinguished above the rest for rendering
colour under effects of light; and of these two, Rossetti composes with
richer fancy and with a deeper sense of beauty, Hunt's stern realism
leading him continually into harshness. Rossetti's carelessness, to do
him justice, is only in water-colour, never in oil.
[235] All the degradation of art which was brought about, after the rise
of the Dutch school, by asphaltum, yellow varnish, and brown trees,
would have been prevented, if only painters had been forced to work in
dead colour. Any colour will do for some people, if it is browned and
shining; but fallacy in dead colour is detected on the instant. I even
believe that whenever a painter begins to _wish_ that he could touch any
portion of his work with gum, he is going wrong.
It is necessary, however, in this matter, carefully to distinguish
between translucency and lustre. Translucency, though, as I have said
above, a dangerous temptation, is, in its place, beautiful; but lustre,
or _shininess_, is always, in painting, a defect. Nay, one of my best
painter-friends (the "best" being understood to attach to both divisions
of that awkward compound word), tried the other day to persuade me
thatlustre was an ignobleness in _anything_; and it was only the fear of
treason to ladies' eyes, and to mountain streams, and to morning dew,
which kept me from yielding the point to him. One is apt always to
generalise too quickly in such matters; but there can be no question
that lustre is destructive of loveliness in colour, as it is of
intelligibility in form. Whatever may be the pride of a young beauty in
the knowledge that her eyes shine (though perhaps even eyes are most
beautiful in dimness), she would be sorry if her cheeks did; and which
of us would wish to polish a rose?
[236] But not shiny or greasy. Bristol board, or hot-pressed imperial,
or grey paper that feels slightly adhesive to the hand, is best. Coarse,
gritty, and sandy papers are fit only for blotters and blunderers; no
good draughtsman would lay a line on them. Turner worked much on a thin
tough paper, dead in surface; rolling up his sketches in tight bundles
that would go deep into his pockets.
[237] I insist upon this unalterability of colour the more because I
address you as a beginner, or an amateur; a great artist can sometimes
get out of a difficulty with credit, or repent without confession. Yet
even Titian's alterations usually show as stains on his work.
[238] It is, I think, a piece of affectation to try to work with few
colours; it saves time to have enough tints prepared without mixing, and
you may at once allow yourself these twenty-four. If you arrange them in
your colour-box in the order I have set them down, you will always
easily put your finger on the one you want.
Cobalt. Smalt. Antwerp blue. Prussian blue.
Black. Gamboge. Emerald green. Hooker's green.
Lemon yellow. Cadmium yellow. Yellow ochre. Roman ochre.
Raw sienna. Burnt sienna. Light red. Indian red.
Mars orange. Ext't of vermilion. Carmine. Violet carmine.
Brown madder. Burnt umber. Vandyke brown. Sepia.
Antwerp blue and Prussian blue are not very permanent colours, but you
need not care much about permanence in your own work as yet, and they
are both beautiful; while Indigo is marked by Field as more fugitive
still, and is very ugly. Hooker's green is a mixed colour, put in the
box merely to save you loss of time in mixing gamboge and Prussian blue.
No. 1. is the best tint of it. Violet carmine is a noble colour for
laying broken shadows with, to be worked into afterwards with other
colours.
If you wish to take up colouring seriously, you had better get Field's
"Chromatography" at once; only do not attend to anything it says about
principles or harmonies of colour; but only to its statements of
practical serviceableness in pigments, and of their operations on each
other when mixed, &c.
[239] A more methodical, though, under general circumstances, uselessly
prolix way, is to cut a square hole, some half an inch wide, in the
sheet of cardboard, and a series of small circular holes in a slip of
cardboard an inch wide. Pass the slip over the square opening, and match
each colour beside one of the circular openings. You will thus have no
occasion to wash any of the colours away. But the first rough method is
generally all you want, as after a little practice, you only need to
_look_ at the hue through the opening in order to be able to transfer it
to your drawing at once.
[240] If colours were twenty times as costly as they are, we should have
many more good painters. If I were Chancellor of the Exchequer I would
lay a tax of twenty shillings a cake on all colours except black,
Prussian blue, Vandyke brown, and Chinese white, which I would leave for
students. I don't say this jestingly; I believe such a tax would do more
to advance real art than a great many schools of design.
[241] I say _modern_, because Titian's quiet way of blending colours,
which is the perfectly right one, is not understood now by any artist.
The best colour we reach is got by stippling; but this not quite right.
[242] The worst general character that colour can possibly have is a
prevalent tendency to a dirty yellowish green, like that of a decaying
heap of vegetables; this colour is _accurately_ indicative of decline or
paralysis in missal-painting.
[243] That is to say, local colour inherent in the object. The
gradations of colour in the various shadows belonging to various lights
exhibit form, and therefore no one but a colourist can ever draw _forms_
perfectly (see "Modern Painters," vol. iv. chap. iii. at the end); but
all notions of explaining form by superimposed colour, as in
architectural mouldings, are absurd. Colour adorns form, but does not
interpret it. An apple is prettier, because it is striped, but it does
not look a bit rounder; and a cheek is prettier because it is flushed,
but you would see the form of the cheek bone better if it were not.
Colour may, indeed, detach one shape from another, as in grounding a
bas-relief, but it always diminishes the appearance of projection, and
whether you put blue, purple, red, yellow, or green, for your ground,
the bas-relief will be just as clearly or just as imperfectly relieved,
as long as the colours are of equal depth. The blue ground will not
retire the hundredth part of an inch more than the red one.
[244] See, however, at the close of this letter, the notice of one more
point connected with the management of colour, under the head "Law of
Harmony."
[245] See farther, on this subject, "Modern Painters," vol. iv. chap.
viii § 6.
[246] "In general, throughout Nature, reflection and repetition are
peaceful things, associated with the idea of quiet succession in events,
that one day should be like another day, or one history the repetition
of another history, being more or less results of quietness, while
dissimilarity and non-succession are results of interference and
disquietude. Thus, though an echo actually increases the quantity of
sound heard, its repetition of the note or syllable gives an idea of
calmness attainable in no other way; hence also the feeling of calm
given to a landscape by the voice of a cuckoo."
[247] This is obscure in the rude woodcut, the masts being so delicate
that they are confused among the lines of reflection. In the original
they have orange light upon them, relieved against purple behind.
[248] The cost of art in getting a bridge level is _always_ lost, for
you must get up to the height of the central arch at any rate, and you
only can make the whole bridge level by putting the hill farther back,
and pretending to have got rid of it when you have not, but have only
wasted money in building an unnecessary embankment. Of course, the
bridge should not be difficultly or dangerously steep, but the necessary
slope, whatever it may be, should be in the bridge itself, as far as the
bridge can take it, and not pushed aside into the approach, as in our
Waterloo road; the only rational excuse for doing which is that when the
slope must be long it is inconvenient to put on a drag at the top of the
bridge, and that any restiveness of the horse is more dangerous on the
bridge than on the embankment. To this I answer: first, it is not more
dangerous in reality, though it looks so, for the bridge is always
guarded by an effective parapet, but the embankment is sure to have no
parapet, or only a useless rail; and secondly, that it is better to have
the slope on the bridge, and make the roadway wide in proportion, so as
to be quite safe, because a little waste of space on the river is no
loss, but your wide embankment at the side loses good ground; and so my
picturesque bridges are right as well as beautiful, and I hope to see
them built again some day, instead of the frightful straight-backed
things which we fancy are fine, and accept from the pontifical
rigidities of the engineering mind.
[249] I cannot waste space here by reprinting what I have said in other
books: but the reader ought, if possible, to refer to the notices of
this part of our subject in "Modern Painters," vol. iv. chap. xviii.,
and "Stones of Venice," vol. iii. chap. i. § 8.
[250] If you happen to be reading at this part of the book, without
having gone through any previous practice, turn back to the sketch of
the ramification of stone pine, Fig. 4. page 30., and examine the curves
of its boughs one by one, trying them by the conditions here stated
under the heads A. and B.
[251] The reader, I hope, observes always that every line in these
figures is itself one of varying curvature, and cannot be drawn by
compasses.
[252] I hope the reader understands that these woodcuts are merely
facsimiles of the sketches I make at the side of my paper to illustrate
my meaning as I write--often sadly scrawled if I want to get on to
something else. This one is really a little too careless; but it would
take more time and trouble to make a proper drawing of so odd a boat
than the matter is worth. It will answer the purpose well enough as it
is.
[253] Imperfect vegetable form I consider that which is in its nature
dependent, as in runners and climbers; or which is susceptible of
continual injury without materially losing the power of giving pleasure
by its aspect, as in the case of the smaller grasses. I have not, of
course, space here to explain these minor distinctions, but the laws
above stated apply to all the more important trees and shrubs likely to
be familiar to the student.
[254] There is a very tender lesson of this kind in the shadows of
leaves upon the ground; shadows which are the most likely of all to
attract attention, by their pretty play and change. If you examine them,
you will find that the shadows do not take the forms of the leaves, but
that, through each interstice, the light falls, at a little distance, in
the form of a round or oval spot; that is to say, it produces the image
of the sun itself, cast either vertically or obliquely, in circle or
ellipse according to the slope of the ground. Of course the sun's rays
produce the same effect, when they fall through any small aperture: but
the openings between leaves are the only ones likely to show it to an
ordinary observer, or to attract his attention to it by its frequency,
and lead him to think what this type may signify respecting the greater
Sun; and how it may show us that, even when the opening through which
the earth receives light is too small to let us see the Sun himself, the
ray of light that enters, if it comes straight from Him, will still bear
with it His image.
[255] In the smaller figure (32.), it will be seen that this
interruption is caused by a cart coming down to the water's edge; and
this object is serviceable as beginning another system of curves leading
out of the picture on the right, but so obscurely drawn as not to be
easily represented in outline. As it is unnecessary to the explanation
of our point here, it has been omitted in the larger diagram, the
direction of the curve it begins being indicated by the dashes only.
[256] Both in the Sketches in Flanders and Germany.
[257] If you happen to meet with the plate of Durer's representing a
coat of arms with a skull in the shield, note the value given to the
concave curves and sharp point of the helmet by the convex leafage
carried round it in front; and the use of the blank white part of the
shield in opposing the rich folds of the dress.
[258] Turner hardly ever, as far as I remember, allows a strong light to
oppose a full dark, without some intervening tint. His suns never set
behind dark mountains without a film of cloud above the mountain's edge.
[259]
"A prudent chief not always must display
His powers in equal ranks and fair array,
But with the occasion and the place comply,
Conceal his force; nay, seem sometimes to fly.
Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,
Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream."
_Essay on Criticism._
[260] I am describing from a MS., _circa_ 1300, of Gregory's
"Decretalia" in my own possession.
[261] One of the most wonderful compositions of Tintoret in Venice, is
little more than a field of subdued crimson, spotted with flakes of
scattered gold. The upper clouds in the most beautiful skies owe great
part of their power to infinitude of division; order being marked
through this division.
[262] I fully believe that the strange grey gloom, accompanied by
considerable power of effect, which prevails in modern French art must
be owing to the use of this mischievous instrument; the French landscape
always gives me the idea of Nature seen carelessly in the dark mirror,
and painted coarsely, but scientifically, through the veil of its
perversion.
[263] Various other parts of this subject are entered into, especially
in their bearing on the ideal of painting, in "Modern Painters," vol.
iv. chap. iii.
[264] In all the best arrangements of colour, the delight occasioned by
their mode of succession is entirely inexplicable, nor can it be
reasoned about; we like it just as we like an air in music, but cannot
reason any refractory person into liking it, if they do not: and yet
there is distinctly a right and a wrong in it, and a good taste and bad
taste respecting it, as also in music.
[265] "Puseyism" was unknown in the days when this drawing was made; but
the kindly and helpful influences of what may be called ecclesiastical
sentiment, which, in a morbidly exaggerated condition, forms one of the
principal elements of "Puseyism,"--I use this word regretfully, no other
existing which will serve for it,--had been known and felt in our wild
northern districts long before.
APPENDIX.
THINGS TO BE STUDIED.
The worst danger by far, to which a solitary student is exposed, is that
of liking things that he should not. It is not so much his difficulties,
as his tastes, which he must set himself to conquer; and although, under
the guidance of a master, many works of art may be made instructive,
which are only of partial excellence (the good and bad of them being
duly distinguished), his safeguard, as long as he studies alone, will be
in allowing himself to possess only things, in their way, so free from
faults, that nothing he copies in them can seriously mislead him, and to
contemplate only those works of art which he knows to be either perfect
or noble in their errors. I will therefore set down in clear order, the
names of the masters whom you may safely admire, and a few of the books
which you may safely possess. In these days of cheap illustration, the
danger is always rather of your possessing too much than too little. It
may admit of some question, how far the looking at bad art may set off
and illustrate the characters of the good; but, on the whole, I believe
it is best to live always on quite wholesome food, and that our taste of
it will not be made more acute by feeding, however temporarily, on
ashes. Of course the works of the great masters can only be serviceable
to the student after he has made considerable progress himself. It only
wastes the time and dulls the feelings of young persons, to drag them
through picture galleries; at least, unless they themselves wish to look
at particular pictures. Generally, young people only care to enter a
picture gallery when there is a chance of getting leave to run a race to
the other end of it; and they had better do that in the garden below.
If, however, they have any real enjoyment of pictures, and want to look
at this one or that, the principal point is never to disturb them in
looking at what interests them, and never to make them look at what does
not. Nothing is of the least use to young people (nor, by the way, of
much use to old ones), but what interests them; and therefore, though it
is of great importance to put nothing but good art into their
possession, yet when they are passing through great houses or galleries,
they should be allowed to look precisely at what pleases them: if it is
not useful to them as art, it will be in some other way: and the
healthiest way in which art can interest them is when they look at it,
not as art, but because it represents something they like in nature. If
a boy has had his heart filled by the life of some great man, and goes
up thirstily to a Vandyck portrait of him, to see what he was like, that
is the wholesomest way in which he can begin the study of portraiture;
if he love mountains, and dwell on a Turner drawing because he sees in
it a likeness to a Yorkshire scar, or an Alpine pass, that is the
wholesomest way in which he can begin the study of landscape; and if a
girl's mind is filled with dreams of angels and saints, and she pauses
before an Angelico because she thinks it must surely be indeed like
heaven, that is the wholesomest way for her to begin the study of
religious art.
When, however, the student has made some definite progress, and every
picture becomes really a guide to him, false or true, in his own work,
it is of great importance that he should never so much as look at bad
art; and then, if the reader is willing to trust me in the matter, the
following advice will be useful to him. In which, with his permission, I
will quit the indirect and return to the epistolary address, as being
the more convenient.
First, in Galleries of Pictures:
1. You may look, with trust in their being always right, at Titian,
Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, John Bellini, and Velasquez; the
authenticity of the picture being of course established for you by
proper authority.
2. You may look with admiration, admitting, however question of right
and wrong,[266] at Van Eyck, Holbein, Perugino, Francia, Angelico,
Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, Vandyck, Rembrandt, Reynolds,
Gainsborough, Turner, and the modern Pre-Raphaelites.[267] You had
better look at no other painters than these, for you run a chance,
otherwise, of being led far off the road, or into grievous faults, by
some of the other great ones, as Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Rubens;
and of being, besides, corrupted in taste by the base ones, as Murillo,
Salvator, Claude, Gasper Poussin, Teniers, and such others. You may
look, however, for examples of evil, with safe universality of
reprobation, being sure that everything you see is bad, at Domenichino,
the Caracci, Bronzino, and the figure pieces of Salvator.
Among those named for study under question, you cannot look too much at,
nor grow too enthusiastically fond of, Angelico, Correggio, Reynolds,
Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites; but, if you find yourself getting
especially fond of any of the others, leave off looking at them, for you
must be going wrong some way or other. If, for instance, you begin to
like Rembrandt or Leonardo especially, you are losing your feeling for
colour; if you like Van Eyck or Perugino especially, you must be getting
too fond of rigid detail; and if you like Vandyck or Gainsborough
especially, you must be too much attracted by gentlemanly flimsiness.
Secondly, of published, or otherwise multiplied, art, such as you may be
able to get yourself, or to see at private houses or in shops, the works
of the following masters are the most desirable, after the Turners,
Rembrandts, and Durers, which I have asked you to get first:
1. Samuel Prout.
All his published lithographic sketches are of the greatest value,
wholly unrivalled in power of composition, and in love and feeling of
architectural subject. His somewhat mannered linear execution, though
not to be imitated in your own sketches from Nature, may be occasionally
copied, for discipline's sake, with great advantage; it will give you a
peculiar steadiness of hand, not quickly attainable in any other way;
and there is no fear of your getting into any faultful mannerism as long
as you carry out the different modes of more delicate study above
recommended.
If you are interested in architecture, and wish to make it your chief
study, you should draw much from photographs of it; and then from the
architecture itself, with the same completion of detail and gradation,
only keeping the shadows of due paleness, in photographs they are always
about four times as dark as they ought to be; and treat buildings with
as much care and love as artists do their rock foregrounds, drawing all
the moss and weeds, and stains upon them. But if, without caring to
understand architecture, you merely want the picturesque character of
it, and to be able to sketch it fast, you cannot do better than take
Prout for your _exclusive_ master; only do not think that you are
copying Prout by drawing straight lines with dots at the end of them.
Get first his "Rhine," and draw the subjects that have most hills, and
least architecture in them, with chalk on smooth paper, till you can lay
on his broad flat tints, and get his gradations of light, which are very
wonderful; then take up the architectural subjects in the "Rhine," and
draw again and again the groups of figures, &c., in his "Microcosm," and
"Lessons on Light and Shadow." After that, proceed to copy the grand
subjects in the sketches in "Flanders and Germany;" or in "Switzerland
and Italy," if you cannot get the Flanders; but the Switzerland is very
far inferior. Then work from Nature, not trying to Proutise Nature, by
breaking smooth buildings into rough ones, but only drawing _what you
see_, with Prout's simple method and firm lines. Don't copy his coloured
works. They are good, but not at all equal to his chalk and pencil
drawings, and you will become a mere imitator, and a very feeble
imitator, if you use colour at all in Prout's method. I have not space
to explain why this is so, it would take a long piece of reasoning;
trust me for the statement.
2. John Lewis.
His sketches in Spain, lithographed by himself, are very valuable. Get
them, if you can, and also some engravings (about eight or ten, I think,
altogether) of wild beasts, executed by his own hand a long time ago;
they are very precious in every way. The series of the "Alhambra" is
rather slight, and few of the subjects are lithographed by himself;
still it is well worth having.
But let _no_ lithographic work come into the house, if you can help it,
nor even look at any, except Prout's, and those sketches of Lewis's.
3. George Cruikshank.
If you ever happen to meet with the two volumes of "Grimm's German
Stories," which were illustrated by him long ago, pounce upon them
instantly; the etchings in them are the finest things, next to
Rembrandt's, that, as far as I know, have been done since etching was
invented. You cannot look at them too much, nor copy them too often.
All his works are very valuable, though disagreeable when they touch on
the worst vulgarities of modern life; and often much spoiled by a
curiously mistaken type of face, divided so as to give too much to the
mouth and eyes, and leave too little for forehead, the eyes being set
about two thirds up, instead of at half the height of the head. But his
manner of work is always right; and his tragic power, though rarely
developed, and warped by habits of caricature, is, in reality, as great
as his grotesque power.
There is no fear of his hurting your taste, as long as your principal
work lies among art of so totally different a character as most of that
which I have recommended to you; and you may, therefore, get great good
by copying almost anything of his that may come in your way; except only
his illustrations lately published to "Cinderella," and "Jack and the
Beanstalk," and "Tom Thumb," which are much over-laboured, and confused
in line. You should get them, but do not copy them.
4. Alfred Rethel.
I only know two publications by him; one, the "Dance of Death," with
text by Reinick, published in Leipsic, but to be had now of any London
bookseller for the sum, I believe, of eighteen pence, and containing six
plates full of instructive character; the other, of two plates only,
"Death the Avenger," and "Death the Friend." These two are far superior
to the "Todtentanz," and, if you can get them, will be enough in
themselves, to show all that Rethel can teach you. If you dislike
ghastly subjects, get "Death the Friend" only.
5. Bewick.
The execution of the plumage in Bewick's birds is the most masterly
thing ever yet done in wood-cutting; it is just worked as Paul Veronese
would have worked in wood, had he taken to it. His vignettes, though too
coarse in execution, and vulgar in types of form, to be good copies,
show, nevertheless, intellectual power of the highest order; and there
are pieces of sentiment in them, either pathetic or satirical, which
have never since been equalled in illustrations of this simple kind; the
bitter intensity of the feeling being just like that which characterises
some of the leading Pre-Raphaelites. Bewick is the Burns of painting.
6. Blake.
The "Book of Job," engraved by himself, is of the highest rank in
certain characters of imagination and expression; in the mode of
obtaining certain effects of light it will also be a very useful example
to you. In expressing conditions of glaring and flickering light, Blake
is greater than Rembrandt.
7. Richter.
I have already told you what to guard against in looking at his works. I
am a little doubtful whether I have done well in including them in this
catalogue at all; but the fancies in them are so pretty and numberless,
that I must risk, for their sake, the chance of hurting you a little in
judgment of style. If you want to make presents of story-books to
children, his are the best you can now get.
8. Rossetti.
An edition of Tennyson, lately published, contains woodcuts from
drawings by Rossetti and other chief Pre-Raphaelite masters. They are
terribly spoiled in the cutting, and generally the best part, the
expression of feature, _entirely_ lost;[268] still they are full of
instruction, and cannot be studied too closely. But observe, respecting
these woodcuts, that if you have been in the habit of looking at much
spurious work, in which sentiment, action, and style are borrowed or
artificial, you will assuredly be offended at first by all genuine work,
which is intense in feeling. Genuine art, which is merely art, such as
Veronese's or Titian's, may not offend you, though the chances are that
you will not care about it: but genuine works of feeling, such as Maude
and Aurora Leigh in poetry, or the grand Pre-Raphaelite designs in
painting, are sure to offend you; and if you cease to work hard, and
persist in looking at vicious and false art, they will continue to
offend you. It will be well, therefore, to have one type of entirely
false art, in order to know what to guard against. Flaxman's outlines to
Dante contain, I think, examples of almost every kind of falsehood and
feebleness which it is possible for a trained artist, not base in
thought, to commit or admit, both in design and execution. Base or
degraded choice of subject, such as you will constantly find in Teniers
and others of the Dutch painters, I need not, I hope, warn you against;
you will simply turn away from it in disgust; while mere bad or feeble
drawing, which makes mistakes in every direction at once, cannot teach
you the particular sort of educated fallacy in question. But, in these
designs of Flaxman's, you have gentlemanly feeling, and fair knowledge
of anatomy, and firm setting down of lines, all applied in the
foolishest and worst possible way; you cannot have a more finished
example of learned error, amiable want of meaning, and bad drawing with
a steady hand.[269] Retsch's outlines have more real material in them
than Flaxman's, occasionally showing true fancy and power; in artistic
principle they are nearly as bad, and in taste worse. All outlines from
statuary, as given in works on classical art, will be very hurtful to
you if you in the least like them; and _nearly_ all finished line
engravings. Some particular prints I could name which possess
instructive qualities, but it would take too long to distinguish them,
and the best way is to avoid line engravings of figures altogether. If
you happen to be a rich person, possessing quantities of them, and if
you are fond of the large finished prints from Raphael, Correggio, &c.,
it is wholly impossible that you can make any progress in knowledge of
real art till you have sold them all--or burnt them, which would be a
greater benefit to the world. I hope that some day, true and noble
engravings will be made from the few pictures of the great schools,
which the restorations undertaken by the modern managers of foreign
galleries may leave us; but the existing engravings have nothing
whatever in common with the good in the works they profess to represent,
and if you like them, you like in the originals of them hardly anything
but their errors.
Finally, your judgment will be, of course, much affected by your taste
in literature. Indeed, I know many persons who have the purest taste in
literature, and yet false taste in art, and it is a phenomenon which
puzzles me not a little: but I have never known any one with false taste
in books, and true taste in pictures. It is also of the greatest
importance to you, not only for art's sake, but for all kinds of sake,
in these days of book deluge, to keep out of the salt swamps of
literature, and live on a rocky island of your own, with a spring and a
lake in it, pure and good. I cannot, of course, suggest the choice of
your library to you, every several mind needs different books; but there
are some books which we all need, and assuredly, if you read Homer,[270]
Plato, Æschylus, Herodotus, Dante,[271] Shakspeare, and Spenser, as much
as you ought, you will not require wide enlargement of shelves to right
and left of them for purposes of perpetual study. Among modern books,
avoid generally magazine and review literature. Sometimes it may contain
a useful abridgement or a wholesome piece of criticism; but the chances
are ten to one it will either waste your time or mislead you. If you
want to understand any subject whatever, read the best book upon it you
can hear of; not a review of the book. If you don't like the first book
you try, seek for another; but do not hope ever to understand the
subject without pains, by a reviewer's help. Avoid especially that class
of literature which has a knowing tone; it is the most poisonous of all.
Every good book, or piece of book, is full of admiration and awe; it may
contain firm assertion or stern satire, but it never sneers coldly, nor
asserts haughtily, and it always leads you to reverence or love
something with your whole heart. It is not always easy to distinguish
the satire of the venomous race of books from the satire of the noble
and pure ones; but in general you may notice that the cold-blooded
Crustacean and Batrachian books will sneer at sentiment; and the
warm-blooded, human books, at sin. Then, in general, the more you can
restrain your serious reading to reflective or lyric poetry, history,
and natural history, avoiding fiction and the drama, the healthier your
mind will become. Of modern poetry keep to Scott, Wordsworth, Keats,
Crabbe, Tennyson, the two Brownings, Lowell, Longfellow, and Coventry
Patmore, whose "Angel in the House" is a most finished piece of writing,
and the sweetest analysis we possess of quiet modern domestic feeling;
while Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh" is, as far as I know, the greatest
poem which the century has produced in any language. Cast Coleridge at
once aside, as sickly and useless; and Shelley as shallow and verbose;
Byron, until your taste is fully formed, and you are able to discern the
magnificence in him from the wrong. Never read bad or common poetry, nor
write any poetry yourself; there is, perhaps, rather too much than too
little in the world already.
Of reflective prose, read chiefly Bacon, Johnson, and Helps. Carlyle is
hardly to be named as a writer for "beginners," because his teaching,
though to some of us vitally necessary, may to others be hurtful. If you
understand and like him, read him; if he offends you, you are not yet
ready for him, and perhaps may never be so; at all events, give him up,
as you would sea-bathing if you found it hurt you, till you are
stronger. Of fiction, read Sir Charles Grandison, Scott's novels, Miss
Edgeworth's, and, if you are a young lady, Madame de Genlis', the French
Miss Edgeworth; making these, I mean, your constant companions. Of
course you must, or will read other books for amusement, once or twice;
but you will find that these have an element of perpetuity in them,
existing in nothing else of their kind: while their peculiar quietness
and repose of manner will also be of the greatest value in teaching you
to feel the same characters in art. Read little at a time, trying to
feel interest in little things, and reading not so much for the sake of
the story as to get acquainted with the pleasant people into whose
company these writers bring you. A common book will often give you much
amusement, but it is only a noble book which will give you dear friends.
Remember also that it is of less importance to you in your earlier
years, that the books you read should be clever, than that they should
be right. I do not mean oppressively or repulsively instructive; but
that the thoughts they express should be just, and the feelings they
excite generous. It is not necessary for you to read the wittiest or the
most suggestive books: it is better, in general, to hear what is already
known, and may be simply said. Much of the literature of the present
day, though good to be read by persons of ripe age, has a tendency to
agitate rather than confirm, and leaves its readers too frequently in a
helpless or hopeless indignation, the worst possible state into which
the mind of youth can be thrown. It may, indeed, become necessary for
you, as you advance in life, to set your hand to things that need to be
altered in the world, or apply your heart chiefly to what must be pitied
in it, or condemned; but, for a young person, the safest temper is one
of reverence, and the safest place one of obscurity. Certainly at
present, and perhaps through all your life, your teachers are wisest
when they make you content in quiet virtue, and that literature and art
are best for you which point out, in common life and familiar things,
the objects for hopeful labour, and for humble love.
FOOTNOTES:
[266] I do not mean necessarily to imply inferiority of rank, in saying
that this second class of painters have questionable qualities. The
greatest men have often many faults, and sometimes their faults are a
part of their greatness; but such men are not, of course, to be looked
upon by the student with absolute implicitness of faith.
[267] Including under this term, John Lewis, and William Hunt of the Old
Water-colour, who, take him all in all, is the best painter of still
life, I believe, that ever existed.
[268] This is especially the case in the St. Cecily, Rossetti's first
illustration to the "palace of art," which would have been the best in
the book had it been well engraved. The whole work should be taken up
again, and done by line engraving, perfectly; and wholly from
Pre-Raphaelite designs, with which no other modern work can bear the
least comparison.
[269] The praise I have given incidentally to Flaxman's sculpture in the
"Seven Lamps," and elsewhere, refers wholly to his studies from Nature,
and simple groups in marble, which were always good and interesting.
Still, I have overrated him, even in this respect; and it is generally
to be remembered that, in speaking of artists whose works I cannot be
supposed to have specially studied, the errors I fall into will always
be on the side of praise. For, of course, praise is most likely to be
given when the thing praised is above one's knowledge; and, therefore,
as our knowledge increases, such things may be found less praiseworthy
than we thought. But blame can only be justly given when the thing
blamed is below one's level of sight; and, practically, I never do blame
anything until I have got well past it, and am certain that there is
demonstrable falsehood in it. I believe, therefore, all my blame to be
wholly trustworthy, having never yet had occasion to repent of one
depreciatory word that I have ever written, while I have often found
that, with respect to things I had not time to study closely, I was led
too far by sudden admiration, helped, perhaps, by peculiar associations,
or other deceptive accidents; and this the more, because I never care to
check an expression of delight, thinking the chances are, that, even if
mistaken, it will do more good than harm; but I weigh every word of
blame with scrupulous caution. I have sometimes erased a strong passage
of blame from second editions of my books; but this was only when I
found it offended the reader without convincing him, never because I
repented of it myself.
[270] Chapman's, if not the original.
[271] Carey's or Cayley's, if not the original. I do not know which are
the best translations of Plato. Herodotus and Æschylus can only be read
in the original. It may seem strange that I name books like these for
"beginners:" but all the greatest books contain food for all ages; and
an intelligent and rightly bred youth or girl ought to enjoy much, even
in Plato, by the time they are fifteen or sixteen.
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