I will begin my letter to-day with our Bible lesson, out of which other
necessary lessons will spring. We must take the remaining three sons of
Ham together, in relation to each other and to Israel.
Mizraim, the Egyptian; Phut, the Ethiopian; Sidon, the Sidonian: or, in
breadth of meaning the three African powers,—A, of the watered plain,
B, of the desert, and C, of the sea; the latter throning itself on the
opposite rocks of Tyre, and returning to culminate in Carthage.
A. Egypt is essentially the Hamite slavish strength of body and
intellect.
B. Ethiopia, the Hamite slavish affliction of body and intellect;
condemnation of the darkened race that can no more change its skin than
the leopard its spots; yet capable, in its desolation of nobleness.
Read the “What doth hinder me to be baptized?—If thou believest with
all thine heart thou mayest” of the Acts; and after that the
description in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ (first Monday of March), of the
Nubian king, with his sword and his Bible at his right hand, and the
tame lioness with her cubs, for his playmates, at his left.
C. Tyre is the Hamite slavish pleasure of sensual and idolatrous art,
clothing her nakedness with sea purple. She is lady of all beautiful
carnal pride, and of the commerce that feeds it,—her power over the
Israelite being to beguile, or help for pay, as Hiram.
But Ethiopia and Tyre are always connected with each other: Tyre, the
queen of commerce; Ethiopia, her gold-bringing slave; the redemption of
these being Christ’s utmost victory. “They of Tyre, with the
Morians—there, even there, was He born.” “Then shall princes come out
of Egypt, and Ethiopia stretch forth her hands unto God.” “He shall let
go my captives, not for price; and the labour of Egypt, and merchandise
of Ethiopia, shall come over unto thee, and shall be thine.” [25]
Learn now after the fifteenth, also the sixteenth verse of Genesis x.,
and read the fifteenth chapter with extreme care. If you have a good
memory, learn it by heart from beginning to end; it is one of the most
sublime and pregnant passages in the entire compass of ancient
literature.
Then understand generally that the spiritual meaning of Egyptian
slavery is labour without hope, but having all the reward, and all the
safety, of labour absolute. Its beginning is to discipline and adorn
the body,—its end is to embalm the body; its religion is first to
restrain, then to judge, “whatsoever things are done in the body,
whether they be good or evil.” Therefore, whatever may be well done by
measure and weight,—what force may be in geometry, mechanism, and
agriculture, bodily exercise, and dress; reverent esteem of earthly
birds, and beasts, and vegetables; reverent preparation of pottage,
good with flesh;—these shall Egypt teach and practise, to her much
comfort and power. “And when Jacob heard that there was corn in Egypt,
he called his sons.”
And now remember the scene at the threshing floor of Atad (Gen. 50th,
10 and 11).
“A grievous mourning.” They embalmed Jacob. They put him in a coffin.
They dutifully bore him home, for his son’s sake. Whatsoever may well
be done of earthly deed, they do by him and his race. And the end of it
all, for them, is a grievous mourning.
Then, for corollary, remember,—all fear of death, and embalming of
death, and contemplating of death, and mourning for death, is the pure
bondage of Egypt.
And whatsoever is formal, literal, miserable, material, in the deeds of
human life, is the preparatory bondage of Egypt; of which,
nevertheless, some formalism, some literalism, some misery, and some
flesh-pot comfort, will always be needful for the education of such
beasts as we are. So that, though, when Israel was a child, God loved
him, and called his son out of Egypt, He preparatorily sent him into
Egypt. And the first deliverer of Israel had to know the wisdom of
Egypt before the wisdom of Arabia; and for the last deliverer of
Israel, the dawn of infant thought, and the first vision of the earth
He came to save, was under the palms of Nile.
Now, therefore, also for all of us, Christians in our nascent state of
muddy childhood, when Professor Huxley is asking ironically, ‘Has a
frog a soul?’ and scientifically directing young ladies to cut out
frogs’ stomachs to see if they can find it,—whatsoever, I say, in our
necessary education among that scientific slime of Nile, is formal,
literal, miserable, and material, is necessarily Egyptian.
As, for instance, brickmaking, scripture, flogging, and cooking,—upon
which four heads of necessary art I take leave to descant a little.
And first of brickmaking. Every following day the beautiful
arrangements of modern political economists, obeying the law of
covetousness instead of the law of God, send me more letters from
gentlemen and ladies asking me ‘how they are to live’?
Well, my refined friends, you will find it needful to live, if it be
with success, according to God’s Law; and to love that law, and make it
your meditation all the day. And the first uttered article in it is,
“In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread.”
“But you don’t really expect us to work with our hands, and make
ourselves hot?”
Why, who, in the name of Him who made you, are you then, that you
shouldn’t? Have you got past the flaming sword, back into Eden; and is
your celestial opinion there that we miserable Egyptians are to work
outside, here, for your dinners, and hand them through the wall to you
at a tourniquet? or, as being yet true servants of the devil, while you
are blessed, dish it up to you, spiritually hot, through a trap-door?
Fine anti-slavery people you are, forsooth! who think it is right not
only to make slaves, but accursed slaves, of other people, that you may
slip your dainty necks out of the collar!
“Ah, but we thought Christ’s yoke had no collar!”
It is time to know better. There may come a day, indeed, when there
shall be no more curse;—in the meantime, you must be humble and honest
enough to take your share of it.
So what can you do, that’s useful? Not to ask too much at first; and,
since we are now coming to particulars, addressing myself first to
gentlemen,—Do you think you can make a brick, or a tile?
You rather think not? Well, if you are healthy, and fit for work, and
can do nothing better,—go and learn.
You would rather not? Very possibly: but you can’t have your dinner
unless you do. And why would you so much rather not?
“So ungentlemanly!”
No; to beg your dinner, or steal it, is ungentlemanly. But there is
nothing ungentlemanly, that I know of, in beating clay, and putting it
in a mould.
“But my wife wouldn’t like it!”
Well, that’s a strong reason: you shouldn’t vex your wife, if you can
help it; but why will she be vexed? If she is a nice English girl, she
has pretty surely been repeating to herself, with great unction, for
some years back, that highly popular verse,—
“The trivial round, the common task,
Will give us all we ought to ask,—
Room to deny ourselves; a road
To bring us daily nearer God.”
And this, which I recommend, is not a trivial round, but an important
square, of human business; and will certainly supply any quantity of
room to deny yourselves in; and will bring you quite as near God as,
for instance, writing lawyers’ letters to make appointments, and
charging five shillings each for them. The only difference will be
that, instead of getting five shillings for writing a letter, you will
only get it for a day and a half’s sweat of the brow.
“Oh, but my wife didn’t mean that sort of ‘common task’ at all!”
No; but your wife didn’t know what she meant; neither did Mr. Keble.
Women and clergymen have so long been in the habit of using pretty
words without ever troubling themselves to understand them, that they
now revolt from the effort, as if it were an impiety. So far as your
wife had any meaning at all, it was that until she was made an angel
of, and had nothing to do but be happy, and sing her flattering
opinions of God for evermore,—dressing herself and her children
becomingly, and leaving cards on her acquaintances, were sufficiently
acceptable services to Him, for which trivial though they were, He
would reward her with immediate dinner, and everlasting glory. That was
your wife’s real notion of the matter, and modern Christian women’s
generally, so far as they have got any notions at all under their
bonnets, and the skins of the dead robins they have stuck in them,—the
disgusting little savages. But that is by no means the way in which
either your hands are to be delivered from making the pots, or her head
from carrying them.
Oh, but you will do it by deputy, and by help of capital, will you?
Here is the Grand Junction Canal Brick, Tile, and Sanitary Pipe
Company, Limited; Capital, £50,000, in 10,000 shares of £5 each;
“formed for the purpose of purchasing and working an estate comprising
fifty-eight acres of land known as the ‘Millpost Field,’ and ‘The
Duddles,’ situate at Southall, in the county of Middlesex.” You will
sit at home, serene proprietor, not able, still less willing, to lift
so much as a spadeful of Duddles yourself; but you will feed a certain
number of brickmaking Ethiopian slaves thereon, as cheap as you can;
and teach them to make bricks, as basely as they can; and you will put
the meat out of their mouths into your own, and provide for their
eternal salvation by gracious ministries from Uxbridge. A clerical
friend of mine in that neighbourhood has, I hear, been greatly
afflicted concerning the degenerate natures of brickmakers. Let him go
and make, and burn, a pile or two with his own hands; he will thereby
receive apocalyptic visions of a nature novel to his soul. And if he
ever succeeds in making one good brick, (the clay must lie fallow in
wind and sun two years before you touch it, my master Carlyle tells
me,) he will have done a good deed for his generation which will be
acknowledged in its day by the Stone of Israel, when the words of many
a sermon will be counted against their utterers, every syllable as mere
insolent breaking of the third commandment.
In the meantime, it seems that no gracious ministries from Uxbridge, or
elsewhere, can redeem this untoward generation of brickmakers. Like the
navvies of Furness, (Letter XI., p. 5,) they are a fallen race, fit for
nothing but to have dividends got out of them, and then be damned. My
fine-lady friends resign themselves pacifically to that necessity,
though greatly excited, I perceive, at present, concerning vivisection.
In which warmth of feeling they are perfectly right, if they would only
also remember that England is spending some thirty millions of pounds a
year in making machines for the vivisection, not of dogs, but men; nor
is this expenditure at all for anatomical purposes; but, in the real
root of it, merely to maintain the gentlemanly profession of the Army,
and the ingenious profession of Engineers.
Oh, but we don’t want to live by soldiering, any more than by
brickmaking; behold, we are intellectual persons, and wish to live by
literature.
Well, it is a slavish trade,—true Hamite; nevertheless, if we will
learn our elements in true Egyptian bondage, some good may come of it.
For observe, my literary friends, the essential function of the slavish
Egyptian, in the arts of the world, is to lose the picture in the
letter; as the essential function of the Eleutherian Goth is to
illuminate the letter into the picture.
The Egyptian is therefore the scribe of scribes,—the supremely literary
person of earth. The banks of Nile give him his rock volume: the reeds
of Nile his paper roll. With cleaving chisel, and cloven reed, he
writes thereon, exemplarily: the ark which his princess found among the
paper reeds, is the true beginning of libraries,—Alexandrian, and all
other. What you call Scripture, in special, coming out of it; the first
portion written in Egyptian manner, (it is said,) with the finger of
God. Scribe and lawyer alike have too long forgotten the lesson,—come
now and learn it again, of Theuth, with the ibis beak. [26]
When next you are in London on a sunny morning, take leisure to walk
into the old Egyptian gallery of the British Museum, after traversing
which for a third of its length, you will find yourself in the midst of
a group of four massy sarcophagi,—two on your left, two on your right.
Assume that they are represented by the letters below, and that you are
walking in the direction of the arrow, so that you have the sarcophagi
A and B on your left, and the sarcophagi C and D on your right.
In my new Elements of Drawing, I always letter the corners of a square
all round thus, so that A C is always the diagonal, A B the upright
side on the left, and A D the base.
B ^ C
|
|
|
A | D
The sarcophagus A is a king’s; B, a scribe’s; C, a queen’s; and D, a
priest’s.
A is of a grand basaltic rock with veins full of agates, and white
onyx,—the most wonderful piece of crag I know; B and C are of grey
porphyry; D of red granite.
The official information concerning sarcophagus A, (Nectabenes,) is to
the effect that it dates from the 30th dynasty, or about 380 B.C.
B, (Hapimen,) of the 26th dynasty, or about 525.
C, (the Queen’s,) of the same dynasty and period.
D, (Naskatu,) of the 27th dynasty, or about 500 B.C.
The three sarcophagi, then, B, C, and D, were, (we are told,) cut
exactly at the time when, beyond the North Sea, Greek art, just before
Marathon, was at its grandest.
And if you look under the opened lid of the queen’s, you will see at
the bottom of it the outline portrait, or rather symbol, of her,
engraved, with the hawk for her crest, signifying what hope of
immortality or power after death remained to her.
But the manner of the engraving you must observe. This is all that the
Egyptian Holbein could do on stone, after a thousand years at least of
practised art; while the Greeks, who had little more than begun only
two hundred years before, were already near to the strength of carving
their Theseus, perfect for all time.
This is the Hamite bondage in Art: of which the causes will teach
themselves to us as we work, ourselves. Slavery is good for us in the
beginning, and for writing-masters we can find no better than these
Mizraimites: see what rich lines of Scripture they are, along the black
edges of those tombs. To understand at all how well they are done, we
must at once begin to do the like, in some sort ourselves.
By the exercise given in Fors of January, if you have practised it, you
have learned something of what is meant by merit and demerit in a pure
line, however produced. We must now consider of our tools a little.
You can make a mark upon things in three ways—namely, by scratching
them, painting on them with a brush, or letting liquid run on them out
of a pen. Pencil or chalk marks are merely a kind of coarse painting
with dry material.
The primitive and simplest mark is the scratch or cut, which shall be
our first mode of experiment. Take a somewhat blunt penknife, and a
composition candle; and scratch or cut a fine line on it with the point
of the knife, drawing the sharp edge of the knife towards you.
Examine the trace produced through a magnifying glass, and you will
find it is an angular ditch with a little ridge raised at its side, or
sides, pressed out of it.
Next, scratch the candle with the point of the knife, turning the side
of the blade forwards: you will now cut a broader furrow, but the wax
or composition will rise out of it before the knife in a beautiful
spiral shaving, formed like the most lovely little crimped or gathered
frill; which I’ve been trying to draw, but can’t; and if you can, you
will be far on the way to drawing spiral staircases, and many other
pretty things.
Nobody, so far as I have myself read, has yet clearly explained why a
wood shaving, or continuously driven portion of detached substance,
should thus take a spiral course; nor why a substance like wax or
water, capable of yielding to pressure, should rise or fall under a
steady force in successive undulations. Leaving these questions for
another time, observe that the first furrow, with the ridge at its
side, represents the entire group of incised lines ploughed in soft
grounds, the head of them all being the plough furrow itself. And the
line produced by the flat side of the knife is the type of those
produced by complete excision, the true engraver’s.
Next, instead of wax, take a surface of wood, and, drawing first as
deep and steady a furrow in it as you can with the edge of the knife,
proceed to deepen it by successive cuts.
You will, of course, find that you must cut from the two sides, sloping
to the middle, forming always a deeper angular ditch; but you will have
difficulty in clearing all out neatly at the two ends.
And if you think of it, you will perceive that the simplest conceivable
excision of a clear and neat kind must be that produced by three cuts
given triangularly. [27] For though you can’t clear out the hollow with
two touches, you need not involve yourself in the complexity of four.
And unless you take great pains in keeping the three sides of this
triangle equal, two will be longer than the third. So the type of the
primitive incised mark is what grand persons call
‘cuneiform’—wedge-shaped.
If you cut five such cuneiform incisions in a star group, thus, with a
little circle connecting them in the middle, you will have the element
of the decorative upper border both on the scribe’s coffin and the
queen’s. You will also have an elementary picture of a starfish—or the
portrait of the pentagonal and absorbent Adam and Eve who were your
ancestors, according to Mr. Darwin.
You will see, however, on the sarcophagi that the rays are not
equidistant, but arranged so as to express vertical position,—of that
afterwards; to-day observe only the manner of their cutting; and then
on a flat surface of porphyry,—do the like yourself.
You don’t know what porphyry is—nor where to get it? Write to Mr.
Tennant, 149, Strand, and he will send you a little bit as cheap as he
can. Then you must get a little vice to fix it, and a sharp-pointed
little chisel, and a well-poised little hammer; and, when you have cut
your asterisk, you will know more about Egypt than nine hundred and
ninety-nine people out of a thousand,—Oxford scholars and all. Awaiting
the result of your experiment, I proceed to the other instrument of
writing, the reed, or pen.
Of which the essential power is that it can make a narrow stroke
sideways, and a broad one when you press it open.
Now our own current writing, I told you, is to be equal in thickness of
line. You will find that method the quickest and servicablest. But in
quite beautiful writing, the power of the pen is to be exhibited with
decision; and of its purest and delicatest exertion, you will see the
result on the opposite page; facsimile by Mr. Burgess, coloured
afterwards by hand, from a piece of Lombardic writing, of about the
eleventh century,—(I shall not say where the original is, because I
don’t want it to be fingered)—which the scribe has entirely delighted
in doing, and of which every line and touch is perfect in its kind.
Copy it, with what precision you can, (and mind how you put in the
little blue dash to thicken the s of Fides,) for in its perfect
uprightness, exquisite use of the diamond-shaped touches obtained by
mere pressure on the point, and reserved administration of colour, it
is a model not to be surpassed; standing precisely half-way between old
Latin letters and mediæval Gothic. The legend of it is—
“Fides catholica edita ab Athanasio
Alexandrie sedis episcopo.”
Towards the better understanding of which Catholic faith, another step
may be made, if you will, by sending to Mr. Ward for the Etruscan
Leucothea, [28] with Dionysus on her knees, which also stands just
half-way in imagination, though only a quarter of the way in time,
between the Egyptian Madonna, (Isis with Horus,) of fifteen hundred
years before Christ, and the Florentine Madonna by Lippi, fifteen
hundred years after Christ. Lippi, being true-bred Etruscan, simply
raises the old sculpture into pure and sacred life, retaining all its
forms, even to the spiral of the throne ornament, and the transgression
of the figures on the bordering frame, acknowledging, in this
subjection to the thoughts and laws of his ancestors, a nobler Catholic
Faith than Athanasius wrote: faith, namely, in that one Lord by whose
breath, from the beginning of creation, the children of men are born;
and into whose hands, dying, they give up their spirit.
This photograph of Etruscan art is therefore to be the second of our
possessions, and means of study; affording us at once elements of
art-practice in many directions, according to our strength; and as we
began with drawing the beads of cap, and spiral of chair, in the Lippi,
rather than the Madonna, so here it will be well to be sure we can draw
the throne, before we try the Leucothea. Outline it first by the eye,
then trace the original, to correct your drawing; and by the time next
Fors comes out, I hope your power of drawing a fine curve, like that of
the back of this throne, will be materially increased; by that time
also I shall have got spirals to compare with these Etruscan ones,
drawn from shells only an hour or two old, sent me by my good friend
Mr. Sillar, (who taught me the wrongness of the infinite spiral of
money interest,) by which I am at present utterly puzzled, finding our
conclusions in last Fors on this point of zoology quite wrong; and that
the little snails have no less twisted houses than the large. But
neither for drawing nor architecture is there to-day more time, but
only to correct and clarify my accounts, which I have counted a little
too far on my power of keeping perspicuous without trouble; and have
thereby caused my subscribers and myself a good deal more than was
needful.
Henceforward I must ask their permission, unless I receive definite
instruction to the contrary, to give names in full, as the
subscriptions come in, and give up our occult notation.
I am not quite so well pleased with my good friend Mr. Girdlestone’s
pamphlet on luxury as I was with that on classification of society,
though I am heartily glad to be enabled by him to distribute it to my
readers, for its gentle statements may be more convincing than my
impatient ones. But I must protest somewhat against their mildness. It
is not now merely dangerous, but criminal, to teach the lie that the
poor live by the luxury of the rich. Able men—even Pope himself—have
been betrayed into thinking so in old times, (blaming the luxury,
however, no less,) but the assertion is now made by no intelligent
person, unless with the deliberate purpose of disguising abuses on
which all the selfish interests of society depend.
I have to acknowledge a quite magnificent gift of Japanese inlaid work
to our Sheffield Museum, from my kind friend Mr. Henry Willett, of
Arnold House, Brighton. A series of some fifty pieces was offered by
him for our selection: but I have only accepted a tithe of them,
thinking that the fewer examples of each school we possess, the better
we shall learn from them. Three out of the five pieces I have accepted
are of quite unsurpassable beauty, and the two others of extreme
interest. They are sent to the Curator at Sheffield.