[1] See first article in Notes.
[2] Inferno, III. 60. I fear that few modern readers of Dante
understand the dreadful meaning of this hellish outer district, or
suburb, full of the refuse or worthless scum of Humanity—such numbers
that “non haverei creduto, che morte tanta n’ havesse disfatta,”—who
are stung to bloody torture by insects, and whose blood and tears
together—the best that human souls can give—are sucked up, on the
hell-ground, by worms.
[3] Essay XI.
[4] I leave this passage as it was written: though as it passes through
the press, it is ordered by Atropos that I should hear a piece of
evidence on this matter no less clear as to the present ministry of
such powers as that which led Peter out of prison, than all the former,
or nearly all, former evidence examined by me was of the presence of
the legion which ruled among the Tombs of Gennesaret.
[5] See second article in Notes.
[6] Quoted in last Fors, p. 341, lines 18–22, from ‘Contemporary
Review.’ Observe that it is blasphemy, definitively and calmly uttered,
first against Nature, and secondly against Christ.
[7] The most valuable notes of the kind correspondent who sent me this
leaf, with many others, and a perfect series of nests, must be reserved
till spring-time: my mind is not free for them, now.
[8] Compare Letter XVI. 11, and XVII. 7.
[9] “A Bishop by the altar stood,
A noble Lord of Douglas blood,
With mitre sheen, and rocquet white,
Yet showed his meek and thoughtful eye
But little pride of prelacy;
More pleased that, in a barbarous age,
He gave rude Scotland Virgil’s page,
Than that beneath his rule he held
The bishopric of fair Dunkeld.”
[10] Yes, dear lady; see, therefore, the next article.
[11] Yes, my dear, shares down; and—it is some poor comfort for you and
me to know that. For as I correct this sheet for press, I hear from the
proprietor of the chief slate quarry in the neighbourhood, that the
poor idiots of shareholders have been beguiled into tunnelling four
miles under Welsh hills—to carry slates! and even those from the chief
quarry in question, they cannot carry, for the proprietors are under
contract to send them by an existing line.
[12] Will any charitable Christian tell me who the owners are?—in the
meantime, “confusion on their banners wait.”
[13] Exodus xviii. 21.
[14] The law of its course will be given in the ‘Laws of Fésole,’ Plate
V.
[15] An under-estimate, at present prices for Turner drawings, and I
have hitherto insured for full thirty thousand, but am now going to
lower the insurance, for no money would replace the loss of them, and I
less and less regard them as exchangeable property.
[16] I have not space in this Fors to give the letter certifying me of
this.
[17] See my reason stated, Letter LIX., p. 322.
[18] See note at end of this letter.
[19] I have got no Turks yet in the Company: when any join it, I will
give them Koran enough for what I ask of them.
[20] Every day taking more away than the one before it.
[21] Compare Letter XXI., p. 13.
[22] I have desired Mr. Ward to prepare small photographs of this
design, in case any reader cares to have it,—but mind, it is not
altogether done according to Mr. Stopford Brooke’s notion of the object
of true art, “to please”—(see page 88 of the Manual of English
Literature, just published by that omniscient divine—under the auspices
of the all-and-sundry-scient Mr. T. R. Green, M.A.,—so, if you only
want to be pleased, you had better not order it. But at any rate,
order, if you wish to understand the next coming Fors, the Etruscan
Leucothea, for comparison with your Lippi Madonna. Mr. Ward will have
it ready with my signature about the time next Fors comes out;—or you
can get it, unmounted, for a shilling, from Mr. Parker’s agent in Rome.
[23] The £40 here acknowledged was an additional subscription from No.
8 subscriber, whose total subscription is therefore £60, not £20, as in
above subscriber’s account; in which also the initials of No. 38 should
be S. G., and the sum £2 2s. These errors will be corrected in next
Fors, in which also I will separate the interest from the
subscriptions.
[24] My friends (see a really kind article in the Monetary Gazette,)
much doubt, and very naturally, the wisdom of this exposition. I indeed
expected to appear to some better advantage; but that the confession is
not wholly pleasant, and appears imprudent, only makes it the better
example. Fors would have it so.
[25] Psalm lxviii. 31; lxxxiii. 7 and 8; lxxxvii. 4; Isaiah xlv. 14. I
am not sure of my interpretation of the 87th Psalm; but, as far as any
significance exists in it to our present knowledge, it can only be of
the power of the Nativity of Christ to save Rahab the harlot, Philistia
the giant, Tyre the trader, and Ethiopia the slave.
[26] Letter XVII., p. 6.
[27] You may indeed dip softly into the ground and rise gradually out
of it; but this will give you not a clear, but an infinitely graduated
excision, exquisite in drawing, but not good for writing.
[28] I take the title of this relief from Mr. Parker’s catalogue, not
being certain of the subject myself, and rather conceiving it to be
Latona with Apollo.
[29] Travelling and personal expenses since January 1st, of which I
have no space for the detail in this Fors; it will be given in its
place. Klein has ten pounds a month, himself, besides his expenses in
Oxford when I’ve no rooms for him.
[30] A youth, whom I am maintaining in art-study at Venice. He has £7
10s. monthly. This payment is to end of April.
[31] Water-colour drawing of a cottage at Coniston, likely to be soon
destroyed by ‘improvements.’
[32] £10 pocket-money, £25 to St. George, money of his in my hands
included in my banker’s January balance, acknowledged in St. George
accounts, March 7th.
[33] £21 of this my own upholsterer’s and other bills at Oxford; the
rest, Crawley will account for.
[34] Drawings made for me at Siena.
[35] Fifty drawings made for me by Signor Caldara of Venice, being part
of a complete Venetian Herbal in process of execution. I count none of
my money better spent than this.
[36] Annual gift to monastery of Assisi, for 1875; not sent last year
because I meant to go there. Due always on the Corpus Domini.
[37] Exaggerated a little, I’m afraid.—J. R.
[38] The shells sent, for which I heartily thank my correspondent, are,
I think, the same as mine, only not so white.
[39] Abram’s mountain home seems to have been much like Horace’s, as
far as I can make out: but see accounts of modern travellers. Our
translation “in the plain of Mamre” (Genesis xiii. 28; xiv. 13) is
clearly absurd; the gist of the separation between Lot and Abram being
Lot’s choice of the plain, as ‘the Paradise of God,’ and Abram’s taking
the rock ground. The Vulgate says ‘in the ravine’ of Mamre; the
Septuagint, ‘by the oak.’ I doubt not the Hebrew is meant to carry both
senses, as of a rocky Vallombrosa; the Amorites at that time knew how
to keep their rain, and guide their springs. Compare the petition of
Caleb’s daughter when she is married, after being brought up on this
very farm, Joshua xv. 17, 18; comparing also xiv. 14, 15, and of the
hill country generally, xvi. 15, and Deut. xi. 10–12, 17.
[40] I need scarcely desire the reader to correct the misprint of
‘maternal’ for ‘paternal’ in line 14 of p. 90 in Fors of March. In last
Fors, please put the i into ‘material’ in p. 112, line 16, and a comma
before and after ‘there’ in p. 113, line 8.
[41] Vulgar modern Puritanism has shown its degeneracy in nothing more
than in its incapability of understanding Scott’s exquisitely finished
portraits of the Covenanter. In ‘Old Mortality’ alone, there are four
which cannot be surpassed; the typical one, Elizabeth, faultlessly
sublime and pure; the second, Ephraim Macbriar, giving the too common
phase of the character, which is touched with ascetic insanity; the
third, Mause, coloured and made sometimes ludicrous by Scottish
conceit, but utterly strong and pure at heart; the last, Balfour, a
study of supreme interest, showing the effect of the Puritan faith,
sincerely held, on a naturally and incurably cruel and base spirit. His
last battle-cry—“Down with the Amorites,” the chief Amorite being Lord
Evandale, is intensely illustrative of all I have asked you to learn
to-day. Add to these four studies, from this single novel, those in the
‘Heart of Midlothian,’ and Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice from
‘Rob Roy,’ and you have a series of theological analyses far beyond
those of any other philosophical work that I know, of any period.
[42] For accounts in London, to save drawing small cheques. I have not
room for detail this month, the general correspondence being lengthy.
[43] ‘Early History of Mankind,’ (a book of rare value and research,
however,) p. 379.
[44] In the meantime, if any of my readers will look at the leading
articles of the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ whose editor I thank with all my
heart and soul, for the first honest commercial statements I ever saw
in English journals, they will get sufficient light on such matters.
[45] Corr., Art. VI.
[46] See, on that subject, the third number of Deucalion.
[47] Article III. of Correspondence.
[48] I should like my lady readers in general to have, of back Fors
numbers, at least, 30, 34, 36, 45, 46, and 48: those who have the
complete book should scratch out the eleventh line in p. 18 of the last
Index, and put the 10th line of it thus: “Ladies, and girls, advice to,
30, 2; 34, 29; 45, 212; 48, 271.”
[49] They may serve for the defence of the store, of course;—so may the
broken bottles, stuck on the top of a wall. But the lock of your
cupboard is not the contents of it.
[50] See Letter XI. (November ’71,) pages 3 to 7, the most pregnant
five pages in the entire series of these letters; and compare that for
January of this year, pp. 8–11, and for April, p. 113.
[51] Again, I have more myself—but that is because I have been
ill-bred; and I shall be most thankful to take less, as soon as other
people cease to be paid for doing nothing. People cry out upon me for
asking ten shillings for a year’s Fors; but never object to Mr.
Barber’s paying his clerk a guinea for opening his study door to me
five times, charging the same to St. George’s account. (See Fors of
April, pp. 134, 135, 136.)
[52] See Fors for January of this year, pp. 21, 22.
[53] This book I shall extend, if time be given me, from its first
proposed form into a parallel one with the two others.
[54] Such limitation being secured by the severity of the required
education in the public schools of art, and thought; and by the high
standard of examination fixed, before granting licence of exhibition,
in the public theatres, or picture galleries.
[55] Here is just an instance of what might at first seem to be a jest;
but is a serious and straightforward corollary from the eternally true
fact stated by St. Timothy: “They that will be rich fall into
temptation and a snare, and into many foolish lusts, which drown men in
destruction and perdition;” and by Horace:
“Quanto quisque sibi plura negaverit
Ab Dis plura feret.”
The passage might at first be thought inconsistent with what is said
above of the ‘degradation’ which perpetual toil involves. But toil and
poverty are two different things. Poverty ennobles, and secures; toil
degrades, and endangers. We are all bound to fulfil our task; but happy
only if we can also enter into our rest.
[56] It may always import such food as its climate cannot produce, in
exchange for such food as it can; it may buy oranges with corn, or
pepper with cheese. But not with articles that do not support life.
Separate cities may honourably produce saleable art; Limoges its
enamel, Sheffield its whittle; but a nation must not live on enamel or
whittles.
[57] Foolish people are continually quibbling and stupifying themselves
about the word ‘machine.’ Briefly, any instrument is a machine so far
as its action is, in any particular, or moment, beyond the control of
the human hand. A violin, a pencil, and a plough, are tools, not
machines. A grinding organ, or a windmill, is a machine, not a tool:
often the two are combined; thus a lathe is a machine, and the
workman’s chisel, used at it, a tool.
[58] The ghastly squalor of the once lovely fields of Dulwich, trampled
into mud, and strewn with rags and paper by the filthy London
population, bred in cigar smoke, which is attracted by the Crystal
Palace, would alone neutralize all possible gentlemanly education in
the district.
[59] See an entirely admirable paper on school-sports, in ‘The World’
for February of this year.
[60] ‘Threading My Way’—an excellent one.
[61] The twenty-third verse of the same chapter is to be the
shield-legend of the St. George’s Company.
[62] Meaning, to do his work instead of him. Compare Acts xx. 35. “I
have showed you all things, how that, so labouring, ye ought to support
the weak.”
[63] Dear Mr. Ruskin, 8th July, 1876.
I see that you intend to speak on the question of usury in next Fors.
Would it not be well, since the Bishops of the Established Church have
not a word to offer in defence of their conduct, to appeal to some of
the other sects that profess to take the teaching of the Bible and of
Christ for their guidance? The Wesleyans, for instance, teach that the
Bible was given almost verbally by the Spirit of God; and John Wesley
says his followers are “to die sooner than put anything in pawn, or
borrow and lend on usury.” Perhaps if you were to challenge the
President and Conference, and call on them either to state that they do
not accept the teaching of Moses, David, and Christ on this matter, or
to bring the sin clearly before the minds of the members of their body,
you might force the question on the attention of the professedly
religious persons in the country.
A Reader of Fors.
[64] Carriage expenses, of which the out-of-the-wayness of Brantwood
incurs many, from April 6th to June 19th.
[65] Twenty pounds more than usual, the monks being in distress there.
[66] I shall take a fit of selfish account-giving, one of these days,
but have neither time nor space this month.
[67] Please, some one, tell me if this something be true, or how far
true.
[68] What can be done, ultimately, it is not yet in human imagination
to conceive. What has been done, by one sensible man, for the land he
had under control, may be read in the fourth article of our
correspondence.
[69] Most London theatre-goers will recollect the Butterman’s pity for
his son, in “Our Boys,” as he examines the remains of the breakfast in
their lodgings.
[70] The law of symmetry, however, rests on deeper foundations than
that of mere order. It is here, in Greek terms, too subtle to be
translated except bit by bit, as we want them.
Τίς οὖν δὴ πρᾶξις φίλη καὶ ἀκόλουθος θεῷ; μία καὶ ἕνα λόγον ἔχουσα
ἀρχαῖον, ὅτι τῷ μὲν ὀμοίῳ τὸ ὅμοιον ὄντι μετρίῳ φίλον ἂν εἴη, τὰ δ’
ἄμετρα οὔτ’ ἀλλήλοις οὔτε τοῖς ἐμμέτροις.—(Plato, Laws, Book IV.)
[71] Note by printer:—“We did this to avoid an unseemly division of
balance-sheet, and of two evils thought this the least.”
[72] One of these is a perfect English Bible, folio, and in beautiful
state, sent to Sheffield for the first volume of our Museum library. Of
course I must make St. George a present of it.
[73] As I correct this sheet, Fors places another Carlisle paper in my
hand; from which I gather that Lord Lonsdale’s conceptions of what is
fit, and not, are probably now changed. But my correspondent is wrong
in assuming that the public will have to pay the extra rent. Very
probably they will if the farming improvements are fallacious; but if
indeed produce can be raised at less expense, the increased rent may
represent only the difference between past and present cost of
production. In this sense, however, the public do pay Lord Lonsdale’s
extra rent, that their market prices, but for his Lordship, would have
been lowered. As matters stand, they may be thankful if they are not
raised.
[74] I can’t be responsible for these Scotch names. I sent the slip of
paper to my printers, and ‘on their eyes be it.’
[75] Italics mine (throughout the article, the rest of which is in Mr.
Mackenzie’s own words). Have the vine-proprietors of Europe yet begun
to look to the Earth—not the air, as the power that fails them? (See
note d.)
[76] It will, I hope, not be thought an absurdity in the St. George’s
Company to retain on their estates ‘pleasure-grounds’ for their
tenants, instead of themselves. In this one respect, and in this only,
their public work will differ from this admirable piece of ‘private
enterprise.’
[77] Supposing the labour of all navvies, gold-diggers, and bad
architects, throughout the world during the last fifty years, had been
spent entirely in carting soil to where it was wanted for
vegetables,—my dinnerless friends, you would have found the difference,
by this time!
[78] This passage, in capitals, being wholly astounding to me, I
venture to put a note of interrogation to it. I have long myself been
questioning the farmers in Westmoreland about the quantity of rank bog
grass they let grow. But their only idea of improvement is to burn the
heather; this being a cheap operation, and dangerous only to their
neighbours’ woods. Brantwood was within an ace of becoming Brantashes
last summer.
[79] The name of the—certainly very efficient—teacher of these young
people, and the general principles of their tuition, would have been a
desirable addition, St. George thinks, to the information furnished by
Mr. Mackenzie.
[80] I suppose myself, in the rest of this letter, to be addressing a
“business man of the nineteenth century.”
[81] Thus, in the earlier numbers of Fors, I have observed more than
once, to the present landholders of England, that they may keep their
lands—if they can! Only let them understand that trial will soon be
made, by the Laws of Nature, of such capacity in them.
[82] A masterless dog, I should have written, but wanted to keep my
sentence short and down to my practical friend’s capacity. For if the
dog have the good fortune to find a master, he has a possession
thenceforth, better than bones; and which, indeed, he will, at any
moment, leave, not his meat only, but his life for.
[83] It is a very subtle and lovely one, not to be discussed hurriedly.
[84] See ‘definition’ quoted as satisfactory in ‘Anthropological
Magazine,’ “the belief in spiritual beings,” which would make the devil
a religious person, inasmuch as he both believes—and fears.
[85] See the last results of modern enlightenment on this subject in
Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins’s directions for the scientific representation
of Dogs, illustrated by the charming drawings of that great
artist;—especially compare the learned outlines of head and paw in
Plate II., and the delineation of head without Psyche in Plate III.,
with the ignorant efforts of Velasquez in such extremities and features
in our fourth photograph. Perhaps Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins will have the
goodness, in his next edition, to show us how Velasquez ought to have
expressed the Scapholinear, Cuneiform, Pisiform, Trapezium, Trapezoid,
Magnum, and Unciform bones in those miserably drawn fore-paws.
[86] Being somewhat interested in Croydon, as readers of past Fors
know, and in Museums also, I give large print to these proposals.
[87] I have no doubt of the mingled active sense of τίμιος in this
sentence, necessary by the context; while also the phrase would be a
mere flat truism, if the word were used only in its ordinary passive
meaning.
[88] To see clearly that whatever our fates may have been, the heaviest
calamity of them—and, in a sort, the only real calamity—is our own
causing, is the true humility which indeed we profess with our lips,
when our heart is far from it.
[89] Pleasures which the Word of God, or of the earthly Lawgiver
speaking in His Name, does not allow, nor praise; for all right
pleasures it praises, and forbids sadness as a grievous sin.
[90] This parenthesis is in Plato’s mind, visibly, though not in his
words.
[91] Quarterly wages.
[92] Representing some dinners to friends; also exploring drives in the
neighbourhood.
[93] Fast melting away in expensive inns, the only ones in which I can
be quiet. If some pious young English boys and girls, instead of
setting up for clergymen and clergywomen, would set up, on their
marriage, for publicans, and keep clean parlours, lavendered sheets,
and honest fare, all for honest price, for poor wanderers like myself,
I doubt not their reward would be great in Heaven.
[94] The primary form in which the legend shows itself is a Nature
myth, in which Ursula is the Bud of flowers, enclosed in its rough or
hairy calyx, and her husband, Æther—the air of spring. She opens into
lovely life with ‘eleven’ thousand other flowers—their fading is their
sudden martyrdom. And—says your modern philosopher—‘That’s all’!
[95] Correspondence, Article VI.
[96] Compare the last page of Fors, October 1875.
[97] I. Servant. II. Master. III. Lord. IV. Duke.
[98] I want to write a long note on Byzantine empire,—Commanders of the
Faithful,—Grand Turks,—and the “Eastern question.” But can’t: and
perhaps the reader will be thankful.
[99] This Life of St. Ursula has been gathered from some of the stories
concerning her which were current through Italy in the time of
Carpaccio. The northern form of the legend, localized at Cologne, is
neither so lovely nor so ancient.
[100] Molto incarnalmente.
[101] I could not see this symbol at the height at which the picture
hung from the ground, when I described it in 1872. The folds of the
drapery in the hand are all but invisible, even when the picture is
seen close; and so neutral in their gray-green colour that they pass
imperceptibly into violet, as the faint green of evening sky fades into
its purple. But the folds are continued under the wrist in the
alternate waves which the reader may see on the Etruscan tomb in the
first room of the British Museum, with a sculpturesque severity which I
could not then understand, and could only account for by supposing that
Carpaccio had meant the Princess to “dream out the angel’s dress so
particularly”! I mistook the fillet of victory also for a scroll; and
could not make out the flowers in the window. They are pinks, the
favourite ones in Italian windows to this day, and having a particular
relation to St. Ursula in the way they rend their calyx; and I believe
also in their peculiar relation to the grasses, (of which more in
‘Proserpina’). St. Ursula is not meant, herself, to recognize the
angel. He enters under the door over which she has put her little
statue of Venus; and through that door the room is filled with light,
so that it will not seem to her strange that his own form, as he
enters, should be in shade: and she cannot see his dark wings. On the
tassel of her pillow, (Etrurian also,) is written “Infantia”; and above
her head, the carving of the bed ends in a spiral flame, typical of the
finally ascending Spirit. She lies on her bier, in the last picture but
one, exactly as here on her bed; only the coverlid is there changed
from scarlet to pale violet. See notes on the meaning of these colours
in third ‘Deucalion.’
[102] By report from Bank; but the ‘repayments’ named in it should not
have been added to the cash account, being on separate account with the
Company. I will make all clear in December.
[103] For Signora Caldara (Venetian botany).
[104] Nominally loan, to poor relation, but I do not suppose he will
ever be able to pay me. The following £200 I do not doubt receiving
again.
[105] May St. George be informed of how many members the American
Legislature is finally to be composed; and over whom it is to exercise
the proud function of legislation, which is to be the reward of heroic
and rightly-minded flunkeys?
[106] As a painter, no less than a philanthropist, I am curious to see
the effect of scenery, in these ‘polite’ terms of description, “dotted
over with establishments.”
[107] My original sketch is now in the Schools of Oxford.
[108] See terminal Article of Correspondence.
[109] Conf. ‘Inferno,’ XXIII. 123.
[110] Mr. Darwin’s last discoveries of the gestures of honour and
courtesy among baboons are a singular completion of the types of this
truth in the natural world.
[111] In old English illuminated Psalters, of which I hope soon to send
a perfect example to Sheffield to companion our Bible, the vignette of
the Fool saying in his heart, ‘There is no God,’ nearly always
represents him in this action. Vanni Fucci makes the Italian sign of
the Fig,—‘A fig for you!’
[112] My friend Mr. W. C. Sillar rose in the church, and protested, in
the name of God, against the proceedings. He was taken into custody as
disorderly,—the press charitably suggested, only drunk;—and was I
believe discharged without fine or imprisonment, for we live in liberal
days.
[113] Compare Fors of October, 1874, page 224 to end, observing
especially the sentence out of 2nd Esdras, “before they were sealed,
that have gathered Faith for a Treasure.”
[114] Silver of strength.