November 28th, 1875.
(In the house of a friend who, being ashamed of me and my words,
requests that this Fors may not be dated from it.)
‘Live and learn.’ I trust it may yet be permitted me to fulfil the
adage a few years longer, for I find it takes a great deal of living to
get a little deal of learning. (Query, meaning of ‘deal’?—substantive
of verb deal—as at whist?—no Johnson by me, and shall be sure to forget
to look when I have.) But I have learned something this morning,—the
use of the holes in the bottom of a fireshovel, to wit. I recollect,
now, often and often, seeing my mother sift the cinders; but, alas, she
never taught me to do it. Did not think, perhaps, that I should ever
have occasion, as a Bishop, to occupy myself in that manner; nor
understand,—poor sweet mother,—how advisable it might be to have some
sort of holes in my shovel-hat, for sifting cinders of human soul.
Howsoever, I have found out the art, this morning, in the actual ashes;
thinking all the time how it was possible for people to live in this
weather, who had no cinders to sift. My hostess’s white cat, Lily, woke
me at half-past five by piteous mewing at my window; and being let in,
and having expressed her thanks by getting between my legs over and
over again as I was shaving, has at last curled herself up in my bed,
and gone to sleep,—looking as fat as a little pillow, only whiter; but
what are the cats to do, to-day, who have no one to let them in at the
windows, no beds to curl up into, and nothing but skin and bones to
curl?
‘It can’t be helped, you know;—meantime, let Lily enjoy her bed, and be
thankful, (if possible, in a more convenient manner). And do you enjoy
your fire, and be thankful,’ say the pious public: and subscribe, no
doubt, at their Rector’s request, for an early dole of Christmas coals.
Alas, my pious public, all this temporary doling and coaling is worse
than useless. It drags out some old women’s lives a month or two
longer,—makes, here and there, a hearth savoury with smell of dinner,
that little knew of such frankincense; but, for true help to the poor,
you might as well light a lucifer match to warm their fingers; and for
the good to your own hearts,—I tell you solemnly, all your comfort in,
such charity is simply, Christ’s dipped sop, given to you for signal to
somebody else than Christ, that it is his hour to find the windows of
your soul open—to the Night, whence very doleful creatures, of other
temper and colour than Lily, are mewing to get in.
Indeed, my pious public, you cannot, at present, by any coal or blanket
subscription, do more than blind yourselves to the plain order “Give to
him that asketh thee; and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not
thou away.”
To him that asketh us, say the public,—but then—everybody would ask us.
Yes, you pitiful public,—pretty nearly everybody would: that is indeed
the state of national dignity, and independence, and gushing
prosperity, you have brought your England into; a population mostly of
beggars, (at heart); or, worse, bagmen, not merely bearing the bag—but
nothing else but bags;—sloppy star-fishy, seven-suckered stomachs of
indiscriminate covetousness, ready to beg, borrow, gamble, swindle, or
write anything a publisher will pay for.
Nevertheless your order is precise, and clear; ‘Give to him that asketh
thee’—even to the half of your last cloak—says St. Martin; even to the
whole of it, says Christ: ‘whosoever of you forsaketh not all that he
hath, cannot be my disciple.’
‘And you yourself, who have a house among the lakes, and rooms at
Oxford, and pictures, and books, and a Dives dinner every day, how
about all that?’
Yes, you may well ask,—and I answer very distinctly and frankly, that
if once I am convinced (and it is not by any means unlikely I should be
so) that to put all these things into the hands of others, and live,
myself, in a cell at Assisi, or a shepherd’s cottage in Cumberland,
would be right, and wise, under the conditions of human life and
thought with which I have to deal—very assuredly I will do so.
Nor is it, I repeat, unlikely that such conviction may soon happen to
me; for I begin to question very strictly with myself, how it is that
St. George’s work does not prosper better in my hands.
Here is the half-decade of years, past, since I began the writing of
Fors, as a byework, to quiet my conscience, that I might be happy in
what I supposed to be my own proper life of Art-teaching, at Oxford and
elsewhere; and, through my own happiness, rightly help others.
But Atropos has ruled it quite otherwise. During these five years, very
signal distress has visited me, conclusively removing all possibilities
of cheerful action; separating and sealing a great space of former life
into one wide field of Machpelah; and leaving the rest sunless. Also,
everything I have set hand to has been unprosperous; much of it even
calamitous;—disappointment, coupled with heavy money loss, happening in
almost every quarter to me, and casting discredit on all I attempt;
while, in things partly under the influence and fortune of others, and
therefore more or less successful,—the schools at Oxford especially,
which owe the greater part of their efficiency to the fostering zeal of
Dr. Acland, and the steady teaching of Mr. Macdonald,—I have not been
able, for my own share, to accomplish the tenth part of what I planned.
Under which conditions, I proceed in my endeavour to remodel the world,
with more zeal, by much, than at the beginning of the year 1871.
For these following reasons.
First, that I would give anything to be quit of the whole business; and
therefore that I am certain it is not ambition, nor love of power, nor
anything but absolute and mere compassion, that drags me on. That
shoemaker, whom his son left lying dead with his head in the fireplace
the other day, [1]—I wish he and his son had never been born;—but as
the like of them will be born, and must so die, so long as things
remain as they are, there’s no choice for me but to do all I know to
change them, since others won’t.
Secondly. I observe that when all things, in early life, appeared to be
going well for me, they were by no means going well, in the deep of
them, but quite materially and rapidly otherwise. Whence I conclude
that though things appear at present adverse to my work and me, they
may not at all be adverse in the deep of them, but quite otherwise.
Thirdly. Though in my own fortune, unprosperous, and in my own thoughts
and labour, failing, I find more and more every day that I have helped
many persons unknown to me; that others, in spite of my failures, begin
to understand me, and are ready to follow; and that a certain power is
indeed already in my hands, woven widely into the threads of many human
lives; which power, if I now laid down, that line (which I have always
kept the murmur of in my ears, for warning, since first I read it
thirty years ago,)—
“Che fece per viltate’l gran rifiuto,” [2]
would be finally and fatally true of me.
Fourthly, not only is that saying of Bacon’s of great comfort to me,
“therefore extreme lovers of their country, or masters, were never
fortunate; neither can they be, for when a man placeth his thoughts
without himself, he goeth not his own way,” [3] for truly I have always
loved my masters, Turner, Tintoret, and Carlyle, to the exclusion of my
own thoughts; and my country more than my own garden: but also, I do
not find in the reading of history that any victory worth having was
ever won without cost; and I observe that too open and early prosperity
is rarely the way to it.
But lastly, and chiefly. If there be any truth in the vital doctrines
of Christianity whatsoever,—and assuredly there is more than most of us
recognise, or than any of us believe,—the offences committed in this
century by all the nations of Christendom against the law of Christ
have been so great, and insolent, that they cannot but be punished by
the withdrawal of spiritual guidance from them, and the especial
paralysis of efforts intelligently made for their good. In times of
more ignorant sinning, they were punished by plagues of the body; but
now, by plagues of the soul, and widely infectious insanities, making
every true physician of souls helpless, and every false effort
triumphant. Nor are we without great and terrible signs of supernatural
calamity, no less in grievous changes and deterioration of climate,
than in forms of mental disease, [4] claiming distinctly to be
necromantic, and, as far as I have examined the evidence relating to
them, actually manifesting themselves as such. For observe you, my
friends, countrymen, and brothers—Either, at this actual moment of your
merry Christmas-time, that has truly come to pass, in falling London,
which your greatest Englishman wrote of falling Rome, “the sheeted
dead, do squeak and gibber in your English streets,”—Or, such a system
of loathsome imposture and cretinous blasphemy is current among all
classes of England and America, as makes the superstition of all past
ages divine truth in comparison!
One of these things is so—gay friends;—have it which way you will: one
or other of these, to me, alike appalling; and in your principal street
of London society, you have a picture of highly dressed harlots
gambling, of naked ones, called Andromeda and Francesca of Rimini, and
of Christ led to be crucified, exhibited, for your better
entertainment, in the same room; and at the end of the same street, an
exhibition of jugglery, professedly imitating, for money, what a large
number of you believe to be the efforts of the returned Dead to
convince you of your Immortality.
Meantime, at the other end—no, at the very centre of your great
Babylon, a son leaves his father dead, with his head, instead of a
fire, in the fireplace, and goes out himself to his day’s darg.
‘We are very sorry;—What can we do? How can we help it? London is so
big, and living is so very expensive, you know.’
Miserables,—who makes London big, but you, coming to look at the
harlotries in it, painted and other? Who makes living expensive, but
you, who drink, and eat, [5] and dress, all you can; and never in your
lives did one stroke of work to get your living,—never drew a bucket of
water, never sowed a grain of corn, never spun a yard of thread;—but
you devour, and swill, and waste, to your fill, and think yourselves
good, and fine, and better creatures of God, I doubt not, than the poor
starved wretch of a shoemaker, who shod whom he could, while you gave
him food enough to keep him in strength to stitch.
We, of the so-called ‘educated’ classes, who take it upon us to be the
better and upper part of the world, cannot possibly understand our
relations to the rest better than we may where actual life may be seen
in front of its Shakespearean image, from the stalls of a theatre. I
never stand up to rest myself, and look round the house, without
renewal of wonder how the crowd in the pit, and shilling gallery, allow
us of the boxes and stalls to keep our places! Think of it;—those
fellows behind there have housed us and fed us; their wives have washed
our clothes, and kept us tidy;—they have bought us the best
places,—brought us through the cold to them; and there they sit behind
us, patiently, seeing and hearing what they may. There they pack
themselves, squeezed and distant, behind our chairs;—we, their elect
toys and pet puppets, oiled, and varnished, and incensed, lounge in
front, placidly, or for the greater part, wearily and sickly
contemplative. Here we are again, all of us, this Christmas! Behold the
artist in tumbling, and in painting with white and red,—our object of
worship, and applause: here sit we at our ease, the dressed dolls of
the place, with little more in our heads, most of us, than may be
contained inside of a wig of flax and a nose of wax; stuck up by these
poor little prentices, clerks, and orange-sucking mobility, Kit, and
his mother, and the baby—behind us, in the chief places of this our
evening synagogue. What for? ‘They did not stick you up’ say you,—you
paid for your stalls with your own money. Where did you get your money?
Some of you—if any Reverend gentlemen, as I hope, are among us,—by
selling the Gospel; others by selling Justice; others by selling their
Blood—(and no man has any right to sell aught of these three things,
any more than a woman her body,)—the rest, if not by swindling, by
simple taxation of the labour of the shilling gallery,—or of the yet
poorer or better persons who have not so much, or will not spend so
much, as the shilling to get there? How else should you, or could you,
get your money,—simpletons?
Not that it is essentially your fault, poor feathered moths,—any more
than the dead shoemaker’s. That blasphemous blockheadism of Mr. Greg’s,
[6] and the like of him, that you can swill salvation into other
people’s bodies out of your own champagne-bottles, is the main root of
all your national miseries. Indeed you are willing enough to believe
that devil’s-gospel, you rich ones; or most of you would have detected
the horror of it before now; but yet the chief wrong lies with the
assertors of it,—and once and again I tell you, the words of Christ are
true,—and not their’s; and that the day has come for fasting, and
prayer, not for feasting; but, above all, for labour—personal and
direct labour—on the Earth that bears you, and buries—as best it can.
9th December.—I heard yesterday that the son of the best English
portrait-painter we have had since Gainsborough, had learnt farming;
that his father had paid two hundred pounds a year to obtain that
instruction for him; and that the boy is gone, in high spirits, to
farm—in Jamaica! So far, so good. Nature and facts are beginning to
assert themselves to the British mind. But very dimly.
For, first, observe, the father should have paid nothing for that boy’s
farming education. As soon as he could hold a hoe, the little fellow
should have been set to do all he could for his living, under a good
farmer for master; and as he became able to do more, taught more, until
he knew all that his master knew,—winning, all the while he was
receiving that natural education, his bread by the sweat of his brow.
‘But there are no farmers who teach—none who take care of their boys,
or men.’
Miserables again, whose fault is that? The landlords choose to make the
farmers middlemen between the peasants and themselves—grinders, not of
corn, but of flesh,—for their rent. And of course you dare not put your
children under them to be taught.
Read Gotthelf’s ‘Ulric the Farm Servant’ on this matter. It is one of
his great novels,—great as Walter Scott’s, in the truth and vitality of
it, only inferior in power of design. I would translate it all in Fors,
if I had time; and indeed hope to make it soon one of my school series,
of which, and other promised matters, or delayed ones, I must now take
some order, and give some account, in this opening letter of the year,
as far as I can, only, before leaving the young farmer among the
Blacks, please observe that he goes there because you have all made
Artificial Blacks of yourselves, and unmelodious Christys,—nothing but
the whites of your eyes showing through the unclean skins of you, here,
in Merry England, where there was once green ground to farm instead of
ashes.
And first,—here’s the woodcut, long promised, of a rose-leaf cut by the
leaf-cutting bee, true in size and shape; a sound contribution to
Natural History, so far as it reaches. Much I had to say of it, but am
not in humour to-day. Happily, the letter from a valued Companion, Art.
III. in Notes, may well take place of any talk of mine. [7]
Secondly, I promised a first lesson in writing, of which, therefore,
(that we may see what is our present knowledge on the subject, and what
farther we may safely ask Theuth [8] to teach,) I have had engraved two
examples, one of writing in the most authoritative manner, used for
modern service, and the other of writing by a practised scribe of the
fourteenth century. To make the comparison fair, we must take the
religious, and therefore most careful, scripture of both dates; so, for
example of modern sacred scripture, I take the casting up of a column
in my banker’s book; and for the ancient, a letter A, with a few
following words, out of a Greek Psalter, which is of admirable and
characteristic, but not (by any honest copyist,) inimitable execution.
Here then, first, is modern writing; in facsimile of which I have
thought it worth while to employ Mr. Burgess’s utmost skill; for it
seems to me a fact of profound significance that all the expedients we
have invented for saving time, by steam and machinery, (not to speak of
the art of printing,) leave us yet so hurried, and flurried, that we
cannot produce any lovelier calligraphy than this, even to certify the
gratifying existence of a balance of eleven hundred and forty-two
pounds, thirteen shillings, and twopence, while the old writer, though
required, eventually, to produce the utmost possible number of entire
psalters with his own hand, yet has time for the execution of every
initial letter of them in the manner here exhibited.
Respecting which, you are to observe that this is pure writing; not
painting or drawing, but the expression of form by lines such as a pen
can easily produce, (or a brush used with the point, in the manner of a
pen;) and with a certain habitual currency and fluent habit of finger,
yet not dashing or flourishing, but with perfect command of direction
in advance, and moment of pause, at any point.
αγαπήσω σε κύριη ἠ ισχύς μου
You may at first, and very naturally, suppose, good reader, that it
will not advance your power of English writing to copy a Greek
sentence. But, with your pardon, the first need, for all beautiful
writing, is that your hand should be, in the true and virtuous sense,
free; that is to say, able to move in any direction it is ordered, and
not cramped to a given slope, or to any given form of letter. And also,
whether you can learn Greek or not, it is well, (and perfectly easy,)
to learn the Greek alphabet, that if by chance a questionable word
occur in your Testament, or in scientific books, you may be able to
read it, and even look it out in a dictionary. And this particular
manner of Greek writing I wish you to notice, because it is such as
Victor Carpaccio represents St. Jerome reading in his study; and I
shall be able to illustrate by it some points of Byzantine character of
extreme historical interest.
Copy, therefore, this letter A, and the following words, in as perfect
facsimile as you can, again and again, not being content till a tracing
from the original fits your copy to the thickness of its penstroke. And
even by the time next Fors comes out, you will begin to know how to use
a pen. Also, you may at spare times practise copying any
clearly-printed type, only without the difference of thickness in parts
of letters; the best writing for practical purposes is that which most
resembles print, connected only, for speed, by the current line.
Next, for some elementary practice of the same kind in the more
difficult art of Reading.
A young student, belonging to the working classes, who has been reading
books a little too difficult or too grand for him, asking me what he
shall read next, I have told him, ‘Waverley’—with extreme care.
It is true that, in grandeur and difficulty, I have not a whit really
lowered his standard; for it is an achievement as far beyond him, at
present, to understand ‘Waverley,’ as to understand the ‘Odyssey;’ but
the road, though as steep and high-reaching as any he has travelled, is
smoother for him. What further directions I am now going to give him,
will be good for all young men of active minds who care to make such
activity serviceable.
Read your ‘Waverley,’ I repeat, with extreme care: and of every
important person in the story, consider first what the virtues are;
then what the faults inevitable to them by nature and breeding; then
what the faults they might have avoided; then what the results to them
of their faults and virtues, under the appointment of fate.
Do this after reading each chapter; and write down the lessons which it
seems to you that Scott intended in it; and what he means you to
admire, what to despise.
Secondly,—supposing you to be, in any the smallest real measure, a
Christian,—begin the history of Abraham, as preparatory to that of the
first Law-giver whom you have in some understanding to obey. And the
history of Abraham must be led up to, by reading carefully from Genesis
ix. 20th, forward, and learning the main traditions which the
subsequent chapters contain.
And observe, it does not matter in the least to you, at present, how
far these traditions are true. Your business is only to know what is
said in Genesis. That does not matter to you, you think? Much less does
it matter what Mr. Smith or Mr. Robinson said last night at that public
meeting; or whether Mr. Black, or his brother, shot Mrs. White; or
anything else whatever, small or great, that you will find said or
related in the morning papers. But to know what is said in Genesis will
enable you to understand, in some sort, the effect of that saying on
men’s minds, through at least two thousand years of the World’s
History. Which, if you mean to be a scholar and gentleman, you must
make some effort to do.
And this is the way to set about it. You see the tenth chapter of
Genesis names to you the children, and children’s children, of Noah,
from whom the nations of the world (it says) came, and by whom the
lands of the world (it says) were divided.
You must learn them by rote, in order. You know already, I suppose, the
three names, Shem, Ham, and Japheth; begin with Shem, and learn the
names of his sons, thus:
Shem.
|
+----------+----------++-----------+---------+
| | | | |
Elam. Asshur. Arphaxad. Lud. Aram.
|
Salah.
Eber.
Peleg.
(In his days was the earth divided.)
Reu.
Serug.
Nahor.
Terah.
Abram.
Now, you see that makes a pretty ornamental letter T, with a little
joint in the middle of its stalk.
And this letter T you must always be able to write, out of your head,
without a moment’s hesitation. However stupid you may be at learning by
rote, thus much can always be done by dint of sheer patient repetition.
Read the centre column straight down, over and again, for an hour
together, and you will find it at last begin to stick in your head.
Then, as soon as it is fast there, say it over and over again when it
is dark, or when you are out walking, till you can’t make a mistake in
it.
Then observe farther that Peleg, in whose days the earth was divided,
had a brother named Joktan, who had thirteen children. Of these, you
need not mind the names of ten; but the odd three are important to you.
Sheba, Ophir, and Havilah. You have perhaps heard of these before; and
assuredly, if you go on reading Fors, you will hear of them again.
And these thirteen children of Joktan, you see, had their dwelling
“from Mesha, as thou goest unto Sephar, a mount of the East.” I don’t
know anything about Mesha and Sephar, yet; but I may: in the meantime,
learn the sentence, and recollect that these people are fixed
somewhere, at any rate, because they are to be Masters of Gold, which
is fixed in Eastern, or Western, mountains; but that the children of
the other brother, Peleg, can go wherever they like, and often where
they shouldn’t,—for “in his days was the earth divided.” Recollect also
that the children of both brothers, or, in brief, the great Indian
gold-possessing race, and the sacred race of prophets and kings of the
higher spiritual world, are in the 21st verse of this chapter called
“all the children of Eber.” If you learn so much as this well, it’s
enough for this month: but I may as well at once give you the forms you
have to learn for the other two sons.
Ham.
|
+------------+------+----+------------+
| | | |
Cush. Mizraim. Phut. Canaan.
| |
Nimrod. Sidon, his first-born,
and Heth.
The seventh verse is to be noted as giving the gold-masters of Africa,
under two of the same names as those of Asia, but must not be learned
for fear of confusion. The form above given must be amplified and
commented on variously, but is best learned first in its simplicity.
Japheth.
|
+---------+---------+---------+---------+----------+----------+
| | | | | | |
Gomer. Magog. Madai. Javan. Tubal. Meshech. Tiras.
|
Elisha.
Tarshish.
Kittim.
Dodanim.
I leave this blunt-stalked and flat-headed letter T, also, in its
simplicity, and we will take up the needful detail in next Fors.
Together with which, (all the sheets being now printed, and only my
editorial preface wanting,) I doubt not will be published the first
volume of the classical series of books which I purpose editing for St.
George’s library;—Xenophon’s Economist, namely, done into English for
us by two of my Oxford pupils; this volume, I hope, soon to be followed
by Gotthelf’s Ulric the Farm-servant, either in French or English, as
the Second Fors, faithfully observant of copyright and other dues, may
decide; meantime, our first historical work, relating the chief
decision of Atropos respecting the fate of England after the Conquest,
is being written for me by a friend, and Fellow of my college of Corpus
Christi, whose help I accept, in St. George’s name,—all the more
joyfully, because he is our head gardener, no less than our
master-historian.
And for the standard theological writings which are ultimately to be
the foundation of this body of secular literature, I have chosen seven
authors, whose lives and works, so far as the one can be traced or the
other certified, shall be, with the best help I can obtain from the
good scholars of Oxford, prepared one by one in perfect editions for
the St. George’s schools. These seven books will contain, in as many
volumes as may be needful, the lives and writings of the men who have
taught the purest theological truth hitherto known to the Jews, Greeks,
Latins, Italians, and English; namely, Moses, David, Hesiod, Virgil,
Dante, Chaucer, and, for seventh, summing the whole with vision of
judgment, St. John the Divine.
The Hesiod I purpose, if my life is spared, to translate myself (into
prose), and to give in complete form. Of Virgil I shall only take the
two first Georgics, and the sixth book of the Æneid, but with the
Douglas translation; [9] adding the two first books of Livy, for
completion of the image of Roman life. Of Chaucer, I take the authentic
poems, except the Canterbury Tales; together with, be they authentic or
not, the Dream, and the fragment of the translation of the Romance of
the Rose, adding some French chivalrous literature of the same date. I
shall so order this work, that, in such measure as it may be possible
to me, it shall be in a constantly progressive relation to the granted
years of my life. The plan of it I give now, and will explain in full
detail, that my scholars may carry it out, if I cannot.
And now let my general readers observe, finally, about all reading,—You
must read, for the nourishment of your mind, precisely under the moral
laws which, regulate your eating for the nourishment of the body. That
is to say, you must not eat for the pleasure of eating, nor read, for
the pleasure of reading. But, if you manage yourself rightly, you will
intensely enjoy your dinner, and your book. If you have any sense, you
can easily follow out this analogy: I have not time at present to do it
for you; only be sure it holds, to the minutest particular, with this
difference only, that the vices and virtues of reading are more harmful
on the one side, and higher on the other, as the soul is more precious
than the body. Gluttonous reading is a worse vice than gluttonous
eating; filthy and foul reading, a much more loathsome habit than
filthy eating. Epicurism in books is much more difficult of attainment
than epicurism in meat, but plain and virtuous feeding the most
entirely pleasurable.
And now, one step of farther thought will enable you to settle a great
many questions with one answer.
As you may neither eat, nor read, for the pleasure of eating or
reading, so you may do nothing else for the pleasure of it, but for the
use. The moral difference between a man and a beast is, that the one
acts primarily for use, the other for pleasure. And all acting for
pleasure before use, or instead of use, is, in one word, ‘Fornication.’
That is the accurate meaning of the words ‘harlotry,’ or ‘fornication,’
as used in the Bible, wherever they occur spoken of nations, and
especially in all the passages relating to the great or spiritual
Babylon.
And the Law of God concerning man is, that if he acts for use—that is
to say, as God’s servant;—he shall be rewarded with such pleasure as no
heart can conceive nor tongue tell; only it is revealed by the Spirit,
as that Holy Ghost of life and health possesses us; but if we act for
pleasure instead of use, we shall be punished by such misery as no
heart can conceive nor tongue tell; but which can only be revealed by
the adverse spirit, whose is the power of death. And that—I assure
you—is absolute, inevitable, daily and hourly Fact for us, to the
simplicity of which I to-day invite your scholarly and literary
attention.