I have just been down to Barmouth to see the tenants on the first bit
of ground,—noble crystalline rock, I am thankful to say,—possessed by
St. George in the island.
I find the rain coming through roofs, and the wind through walls, more
than I think proper, and have ordered repairs; and for some time to
come, the little rents of these cottages will be spent entirely in the
bettering of them, or in extending some garden ground, fenced with
furze hedge against the west wind by the most ingenious of our tenants.
And in connection with this first—however small—beginning under my own
eyes of St. George’s work,—(already some repairs had been made by my
direction, under the superintendence of the donor of the land, Mrs.
Talbot, before I could go to see the place)—I must state again clearly
our St. George’s principle of rent. It is taken first as the
acknowledgment of the authority of the Society over the land, and in
the amount judged by the Master to be just, according to the
circumstances of the person and place, for the tenant to pay as a
contribution to the funds of the Society. The tenant has no claim to
the return of the rent in improvements on his ground or his house; and
I order the repairs at Barmouth as part of the Company’s general
action, not as return of the rent to the tenant. The reader will thus
see that our so-called ‘rents’ are in fact taxes laid on the tenants
for the advancement of the work of the Company. And all so-called rents
are, in like manner, taxes laid on the labourer for the advancement of
the work of his landlord. If that work be beneficial, on the whole, to
the estate, and of all who live on it, the rents are on a right
footing; but if they are abstracted by the landlord to his own private
uses, he is merely another form of the old mediæval Knight of
Evilstone, living as hawk in eyrie.
It chanced, while I set this work on foot at Barmouth, that a paragraph
was sent me out of a Carlisle paper, giving the information that all
Lord Lonsdale’s tenants have received notice to quit, that the farms
might be re-valued. I requested my correspondent to ascertain for me
the manner of the holdings on Lord Lonsdale’s estates;—his reply is the
third article in our correspondence this month, and I beg to recommend
it to the reader’s most earnest attention. What it says of rents, with
the exception indicated in my note, is right; and cannot be more
tersely or clearly expressed. What it says of ground-produce is only
partially right. To discover another America at our own doors would not
be any advantage to us;—nor even to make England bigger. We have no
business to want England to be bigger, any more than the world to be
bigger. The question is not, for us, how much land God ought to have
given us; but to fill the land He has given us, with the wisest and
best inhabitants we can. I could give a plan, if I chose, with great
ease, for the maintenance of a greatly increased quantity of
inhabitants, on iron scaffolding, by pulverizing our mountains, and
strewing the duly pulverized and, by wise medical geology, drugged,
materials, over the upper stages; carrying on our present ingenious
manufactures in the dark lower stories. But the arrangement, even if it
could be at once achieved, would be of no advantage to England.
Whereas St. George’s arrangements, which are to take the hills,
streams, and fields that God has made for us; to keep them as lovely,
pure, and orderly as we can; [68] to gather their carefully cultivated
fruit in due season; and if our children then multiply so that we
cannot feed them, to seek other lands to cultivate in like
manner,—these arrangements, I repeat, will be found very advantageous
indeed, as they always have been; wheresoever even in any minor degree
enforced. In some happy countries they have been so, many a long year
already; and the following letter from a recent traveller in one of
them, may further illustrate the description given in a Fors of early
date, of the felicity verily and visibly to be secured by their
practice.
“Salzburg, July 30, 1876.
“Dear Professor Ruskin,—I have long intended to write to you, but the
mountain of matters I had to tell you has increased till Pelion is
piled upon Ossa within my mind, and so I must confine myself to one or
two points. In the Black Forest, and more especially in remote mountain
valleys of Tyrol, I have found the people living more or less according
to principles laid down for the Company of St. George. I have seen the
rules so much decried, and even ridiculed, in England, wrought into the
whole life of the people. One may still find villages and communes
where lawsuits are impossible—a head-man of their own deciding all
disputes; where the simplest honesty and friendliness are all but
universal, and the stranger is taken in only in the better sense of the
phrase; where the nearest approach to steam power is the avalanche of
early summer; where there are no wheeled vehicles, and all burthens are
carried on the backs of men and mules,” (my dear friend, I really don’t
want people to do without donkey-carts, or pony-chaises; nay, I was
entirely delighted at Dolgelly, the other day, to meet a four-in-hand
coach—driven by the coachman’s daughter;) “where rich and poor must
fare alike on the simple food and cheap but sound wine of the country;
where the men still carve wood, and the women spin and weave, during
the long hours of winter; and where the folk still take genuine delight
in picturesque dress, and daily church-going, and have not reduced both
to the dreary felon’s uniform of English respectability. With these
unconscious followers of Ruskin, and Companions of St. George, I formed
deep friendships; and for me, if I ever revisit the wild recesses of
the Œtzthal, it will almost be like going amongst my own people and to
my own home. Indeed, wherever I left the beaten track of tourists, and
the further I left it, so did the friendliness of my entertainers
increase. It was evident they regarded me not as a mere purse-bearing
animal, but as an argosy of quite a different sort—a human spirit
coming from afar, from a land ‘belonging,’ as one of them conjectured,
‘to Spain,’ and laden with all kinds of new knowledge and strange
ideas, of which they would gladly have some share. And so towards the
close of a dinner, or supper, the meek-eyed hostess would come and sit
beside me, hoping I had enjoyed a ‘happy meal;’ and after a
complimentary sip from my glass, ask me all sorts of delightful and
simple questions about myself, and my family, and my country. Or the
landlord would come sometimes,—alas, at the very beginning of a
meal,—and from huge pipe bowl, wonderfully painted with Crucifixion or
Madonna, blow clouds of anything but incense smoke. But the intention
of honouring and amusing me were none the less apparent.”
With my friend’s pleasant days among this wise and happy people, I will
forthwith compare the very unpleasant day I spent myself on my journey
to Barmouth, among unwise and wretched ones; one incident occurring in
it being of extreme significance. I had driven from Brantwood in early
morning down the valley of the Crake, and took train first at the
Ulverston station, settling myself in the corner of a carriage next the
sea, for better prospect thereof. In the other corner was a
respectable, stolid, middle-aged man reading his paper.
I had left my Coniston lake in dashing ripples under a south wind,
thick with rain; but the tide lay smooth and silent along the sands;
melancholy in absolute pause of motion, nor ebb nor flow
distinguishable;—here and there, among the shelves of grey shore, a
little ruffling of their apparent pools marked stray threadings of
river-current.
At Grange, talking loud, got in two young coxcombs; who reclined
themselves on the opposite cushions. One had a thin stick, with which,
in a kind of St. Vitus’s dance, partly affectation of nonchalance,
partly real fever produced by the intolerable idleness of his mind and
body, he rapped on the elbow of his seat, poked at the button-holes of
the window strap, and switched his boots, or the air, all the way from
Grange to the last station before Carnforth,—he and his friend talking
yacht and regatta, listlessly;—the St. Vitus’s, meantime, dancing one
expressing his opinion that “the most dangerous thing to do on these
lakes was going before the wind.” The respectable man went on reading
his paper, without notice of them. None of the three ever looked out of
the windows at sea or shore. There was not much to look at, indeed,
through the driving, and gradually closer-driven, rain,—except the
drifting about of the seagulls, and their quiet dropping into the
pools, their wings kept open for an instant till their breasts felt the
water well; then closing their petals of white light, like suddenly
shut water flowers.
The two regatta men got out, in drenching rain, on the coverless
platform at the station before Carnforth, and all the rest of us at
Carnforth itself, to wait for the up train. The shed on the up-line
side, even there, is small, in which a crowd of third-class passengers
were packed close by the outside drip. I did not see one, out of some
twenty-five or thirty persons, tidily dressed, nor one with a contented
and serenely patient look. Lines of care, of mean hardship, of
comfortless submission, of gnawing anxiety, or ill-temper,
characterized every face.
The train came up, and my poor companions were shuffled into it
speedily, in heaps. I found an empty first-class carriage for myself:
wondering how long universal suffrage would allow itself to be packed
away in heaps, for my convenience.
At Lancaster, a father and daughter got in; presumably commercial.
Father stoutly built and firm-featured, sagacious and cool. The girl
hard and common; well dressed, except that her hat was cocked too high
on her hair. They both read papers all the way to Warrington. I was not
myself employed much better; the incessant rain making the windows a
mere wilderness of dirty dribblings; and neither Preston nor Wigan
presenting anything lively to behold, I had settled myself to Mrs.
Brown on Spelling Bees, (an unusually forced and poor number of Mrs.
Brown, by the way).
I had to change at Warrington for Chester. The weather bettered a
little, while I got a cup of tea and slice of bread in the small
refreshment room; contemplating, the while, in front of me, the panels
of painted glass on its swinging doors, which represented two
troubadours, in broadly striped blue and yellow breeches, purple
jackets, and plumed caps; with golden-hilted swords, and enormous
lyres. Both had soft curled moustaches, languishing eyes, open mouths,
and faultless legs. Meanwhile, lounged at the counter behind me, much
bemused in beer, a perfect example of the special type of youthful
blackguard now developing generally in England; more or less blackly
pulpous and swollen in all the features, and with mingled expression of
intense grossness and intense impudence,—half pig, half jackdaw.
There got in with me, when the train was ready, a middle-class person
of commercial-traveller aspect, who had possessed himself of a
‘Graphic’ from the news-boy; and whom I presently forgot, in examining
the country on a line new to me, which became quickly, under gleams of
broken sunlight, of extreme interest. Azure-green fields of deep corn;
undulations of sandstone hill, with here and there a broken crag at the
edge of a cutting; presently the far glittering of the Solway-like
sands of Dee, and rounded waves of the Welsh hills on the southern
horizon, formed a landscape more fresh and fair than I have seen for
many a day, from any great line of English rail. When I looked back to
my fellow-traveller, he was sprawling all his length on the cushion of
the back seat, with his boots on his ‘Graphic,’—not to save the
cushions assuredly, but in the foul modern carelessness of everything
which we have ‘done with’ for the moment;—his face clouded with sullen
thought, as of a person helplessly in difficulty, and not able to give
up thinking how to avoid the unavoidable.
In a minute or two more I found myself plunged into the general
dissolution and whirlpool of porters, passengers, and crook-boned
trucks, running round corners against one’s legs, of the great Chester
station. A simply-dressed upper-class girl of sixteen or seventeen,
strictly and swiftly piloting her little sister through the populace,
was the first human creature I had yet seen, on whom sight could rest
without pain. The rest of the crowd was a mere dismal fermentation of
the Ignominious.
The train to Ruabon was crowded, and I was obliged to get into a
carriage with two cadaverous sexagenarian spinsters, who had been
keeping the windows up, all but a chink, for fear a drop of rain or
breath of south wind should come in, and were breathing the richest
compound of products of their own indigestion. Pretending to be anxious
about the construction of the train, I got the farther window down, and
my body well out of it; then put it only half-way up when the train
left, and kept putting my head out without my hat; so as, if possible,
to impress my fellow-passengers with the imminence of a collision,
which could only be averted by extreme watchfulness on my part. Then
requesting, with all the politeness I could muster, to be allowed to
move a box with which they had occupied the corner-seat—“that I might
sit face to the air”—I got them ashamed to ask that the window might be
shut up again; but they huddled away into the opposite corner to make
me understand how they suffered from the draught. Presently they got
out two bags of blue grapes, and ate away unanimously, availing
themselves of my open window to throw out rolled-up pips and skins.
General change, to my extreme relief, as to their’s, was again required
at Ruabon, effected by a screwing backwards and forwards, for
three-quarters of an hour, of carriages which one was expecting every
five minutes to get into; and which were puffed and pushed away again
the moment one opened a door, with loud calls of ‘Stand back there.’ A
group of half a dozen children, from eight to fourteen—the girls all in
straw hats, with long hanging scarlet ribands—were more or less
pleasant to see meanwhile; and sunshine through the puffs of petulant
and cross-purposed steam, promised a pleasant run to Llangollen.
I had only the conventional ‘business man with a paper’ for this run;
and on his leaving the carriage at Llangollen, was just closing the
door, thinking to have both windows at command, when my hand was stayed
by the father of a family of four children, who, with their mother and
aunt, presently filled the carriage, the children fitting or scrambling
in anywhere, with expansive kicks and lively struggles. They belonged
to the lower middle-class; the mother an ideal of the worthy
commonplace, evidently hard put to it to make both ends meet, and
wholly occupied in family concerns; her face fixed in the ignoble
gravity of virtuous persons to whom their own troublesome households
have become monasteries. The father, slightly more conscious of
external things, submitting benevolently to his domestic happiness out
on its annual holiday. The children ugly, fidgety, and ill-bred, but
not unintelligent,—full of questionings, ‘when’ they were to get here,
or there? how many rails there were on the line; which side the station
was on, and who was to meet them. In such debate, varied by bodily
contortions in every direction, they contrived to pass the half-hour
which took us through the vale of Llangollen, past some of the
loveliest brook and glen scenery in the world. But neither the man, the
woman, nor any one of the children, looked out of the window once, the
whole way.
They got out at Corwen, leaving me to myself for the run past Bala lake
and down the Dolgelly valley; but more sorrowful than of late has been
my wont, in the sense of my total isolation from the thoughts and ways
of the present English people. For I was perfectly certain that among
all the crowd of living creatures whom I had that day seen,—scarlet
ribands and all,—there was not one to whom I could have spoken a word
on any subject interesting to me, which would have been intelligible to
them.
But the first broad sum of fact, for the sake of which I have given
this diary, is that among certainly not less than some seven or eight
hundred people, seen by me in the course of this day, I saw not one
happy face, and several hundreds of entirely miserable ones. The second
broad sum of fact is, that out of the few,—not happy,—but more or less
spirited and complacent faces I saw, among the lower and the mercantile
classes, what life or spirit they had depended on a peculiar
cock-on-a-dunghill character of impudence, which meant a total
inability to conceive any good or lovely thing in this world or any
other: and the third sum of fact is, that in this rich England I saw
only eight out of eight hundred persons gracefully dressed, and
decently mannered. But the particular sign, and prophetic vision of the
day, to me, was the man lying with his boots on his ‘Graphic.’ There is
a long article in the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ sent me this morning, on the
folly of the modern theory that the nation is suffering from
‘over-production.’ The writer is quite correct in his condemnation of
the fallacy in question; but it has not occurred to him, nor to any
other writer that I know of on such matters, to consider whether we may
not possibly be suffering from over-destruction. If you use a given
quantity of steam power and human ingenuity to produce your ‘Graphic’
in the morning, and travel from Warrington to Chester with your boots
upon it in the afternoon,—Is the net result, production, my dear
editor? The net result is labour with weariness A.M.,—idleness with
disgust P.M.,—and nothing to eat next day. And do not think our
Warrington friend other than a true type of your modern British
employer of industry. The universal British public has no idea of any
other use of art, or industry, than he! It reclines everlastingly with
its boots on its ‘Graphic.’ ‘To-morrow there will be another,—what use
is there in the old?’ Think of the quantity of energy used in the
‘production’ of the daily works of the British press? The first
necessity of our lives in the morning,—old rags in the evening! Or the
annual works of the British naval architect? The arrow of the Lord’s
deliverance in January, and old iron in June! The annual industry of
the European soldier,—of the European swindler,—of the European
orator,—will you tell me, good Mr. Editor, what it is that they
produce? Will you calculate for me, how much of all that is, they
destroy?
But even of what we do produce, under some colour or fancy, of service
to humanity,—How much of it is of any service to humanity, good Mr.
Editor? Here is a little bit of a note bearing on the matter, written
last Christmas in a fit of incontrollable provocation at a Christian
correspondent’s drawl of the popular sentiment, “living is so very
expensive, you know!”
Why, of course it is, living as you do, in a saucepan full of steam,
with no potatoes in it!
Here is the first economical fact I have been trying to teach, these
fifteen years; and can’t get it, yet, into the desperate,
leathern-skinned, death-helmeted skull of this wretched England—till
Jael-Atropos drive it down, through skull and all, into the
ground;—that you can’t have bread without corn, nor milk without kine;
and that being dragged about the country behind kettles won’t grow corn
on it; and speculating in stocks won’t feed mutton on it; and
manufacturing steel pens, and scrawling lies with them, won’t clothe
your backs or fill your bellies, though you scrawl England as black
with ink as you have strewed her black with cinders.
Now look here: I am writing in a friend’s house in a lovely bit of
pasture country, surrounding what was once a bright bit of purple and
golden heath—inlaid as gorse and heather chose to divide their
possession of it; and is now a dusty wilderness of unlet fashionable
villas, bricks, thistles, and crockery. My friend has a good estate,
and lets a large farm; but he can’t have cream to his tea, and has
‘Dorset’ butter. [69] If he ever gets any of these articles off his own
farm, they are brought to him from London, having been carried there
that they may pay toll to the railroad company once as they go up, and
again as they come down; and have two chances of helping to smash an
excursion train.
Meantime, at the apothecary’s shop in the village, I can buy, besides
drugs,—cigars, and stationery; and among other stationery, the ‘College
card,’ of “eighteen useful articles,”—namely, Bohemian glass ruler,
Bohemian glass penholder, pen-box with gilt and diapered lid, pen-wiper
with a gilt tin fern leaf for ornament, pencil, india-rubber, and
twelve steel pens,—all stitched separately and neatly on the card; and
the whole array of them to be bought for sixpence.
What times!—what civilization!—what ingenuity!—what cheapness!
Yes; but what does it mean? First, that I, who buy the card, can’t get
cream to my tea? And secondly, that the unhappy wretches,—Bohemian and
other,—glass blowers, iron diggers, pen manufacturers, and the
like,—who have made the eighteen useful articles, have sixpence to
divide among them for their trouble! What sort of cream have they to
their tea?
But the question of questions about it all, is—Are these eighteen
articles ‘useful articles’? For what? Here’s a—nominal—‘pencil’ on our
‘College card.’ But not a collegian, that I know of, wants to draw,—and
if he did, he couldn’t draw with this thing, which is not a pencil, but
some sand and coal-dust jammed in a stick. The ‘india-rubber’ also, I
perceive, is not india-rubber; but a composition for tearing up the
surface of paper,—useful only to filthy blunderers; the nasty
glass-handled things, which will break if I drop them, and cut the
housemaid’s fingers, I shall instantly turn out of the house; the pens,
for which I bought the card, will perhaps be useful to me, because I
have, to my much misery, writing to do: but you, happier animals, who
may exist without scratching either paper or your heads,—what is the
use of them to you? (N.B. I couldn’t write a word with one of them,
after all.)
I must go back to my Warrington friend; for there are more lessons to
be received from him. I looked at him, in one sense, not
undeferentially. He was, to the extent of his experience, as good a
judge of art as I. He knew what his ‘Graphic’ was worth. Pronounced an
entirely divine verdict upon it. Put it, beneficently, out of its
pictorial pain,—for ever.
Do not think that it is so difficult to know good art from bad. The
poorest-minded public cannot rest in its bad possessions,—wants them
new, and ever new. I have given my readers, who have trusted me, four
art-possessions, which I do not fear their wishing to destroy; and it
will be a long while before I wish them to get another. I have too long
delayed beginning to tell them why they are good; and one of my
Sheffield men asked Mr. Swan the other day what I had commended the
Leucothea for,—“he couldn’t see anything in it.” To whom the first
answer must be—Did you expect to, then? My good manufacturing friend,
be assured there was no more thought of pleasing you when Leucothea was
carved, than of pleasing—Ganymede, when Rosalind was christened. Some
day you will come to “like her name.”
But, whether you ever come to ‘see anything in it’ or not, be assured
that this, and the Lippi, and the Titian, and the Velasquez, are, all
four, alike in one quality, which you can respect, even if you do not
envy. They are work of men doing their best. And whose pride is in
doing their best and most. You modern British workmen’s pride, I find
more and more, is in doing ingeniously the worst, and least, you can.
Again: they all four agree in being the work of men trained under true
masters, and themselves able to be true masters to others. They belong,
therefore, to what are properly called ‘schools’ of art. Whereas your
modern British workman recognizes no master; but is, (as the result of
his increasing intelligence, according to Mr. Mill,) less and less
disposed “to be guided in the way which he should go by any prestige or
authority.” The result of which is that every British artist has to
find out how to paint as he best can; and usually begins to see his way
to it, by the time he is sixty.
Thirdly. They belong to schools which, orderly and obedient themselves,
understood the law of order in all things. Which is the chief
distinction between Art and Rudeness. And the first aim of every great
painter, is to express clearly his obedience to the law of Kosmos,
Order, or Symmetry. [70] The only perfect work of the four I have
given, the Titian, binds itself by this symmetry most severely.
Absolutely straight lines of screen behind the Madonna’s head,—a dark
head on one side, a dark head on the other; a child on one side, a
child on the other; a veil falling one way on one side, a scroll
curling the other way on the other; a group of leaves in the child’s
right hand balanced by another in the Madonna’s left; two opposed
sprays of leaves on the table, and the whole clasped by a single
cherry. In the Lippi, the symmetry is lateral; the Madonna fronting the
group of the child central, with supporting angel on each side. In the
Leucothea, the diminishing magnitudes of the attendant goddesses on the
right are answered by the diminishing magnitudes from the seated
goddess and the child, to the smallest figure at her knee, which clasps
both the sides of the chain.
Lastly, in the Velasquez, the little pyramid of a child, with her three
tassels and central brooch, and a chair on each side of her, would have
been too symmetrical, but for the interferent light in the dog.
I said just now, the Titian was the only perfect one of the four.
Everything there is done with absolute rightness: and you don’t see
how. The hair in the Lippi is too stiff,—in the Velasquez, too slight;
and one sees that it is drawn in the one, dashed in the other; but by
Titian only, ‘painted’—you don’t know how.
I say the Titian is the most perfect. It does not follow that it is the
best. There are gifts shown in the others, and feelings, which are not
in it; and of which the relative worth may be matter of question. For
instance, the Lippi, as I told you before, is a painting wrought in
real Religion;—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience
to the conceived nature and laws of God.
The Titian is wrought in what Mr. Harrison calls the Religion of
Humanity: but ought more accurately to call, the Religion of Manity,
(for the English use of the word ‘humane’ is continually making him
confuse benevolence with religion,)—that is to say, in the binding of
the heart in obedience to the nature and laws of Man.
And, finally, the Velasquez is wrought in the still more developed
Modern Religion of Dogity, or obedience of the heart to the nature and
laws of Dog; (the lovely little idol, you observe, dominant on velvet
throne, as formerly the Madonna). Of which religion, as faithfully held
by the brave British Squire, in its widest Catholic form of
horse-and-dog-ity, and passionately and tenderly indulged by the
devoted British matron in the sectarian limitation of Lapdogity,—there
is more to be told than Velasquez taught, or than we can learn, to-day.