I must construct my letters still, for a while, of swept-up fragments;
every day provokes me to write new matter; but I must not lose the
fruit of the old days. Here is some worth picking up, though
ill-ripened for want of sunshine, (the little we had spending itself on
the rain,) last year.
1st August, 1873.
“Not being able to work steadily this morning, because there was a
rainbow half a mile broad, and violet-bright, on the shoulders of the
Old Man of Coniston—(by calling it half a mile broad, I mean that half
a mile’s breadth of mountain was coloured by it,—and by calling it
violet-bright, I mean that the violet zone of it came pure against the
grey rocks; and note, by the way, that essentially all the colours of
the rainbow are secondary;—yellow exists only as a line—red as a
line—blue as a line; but the zone itself is of varied orange, green,
and violet,)—not being able, I say, for steady work, I opened an old
diary of 1849, and as the third Fors would have it, at this extract
from the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
(Venice.)
“The Prince of Saxony went to see the Arsenal three days ago, waited on
by a numerous nobility of both sexes; the Bucentaur was adorned and
launched, a magnificent collation given; and we sailed a little in it.
I was in company with the Signora Justiniani Gradenigo and Signora
Marina Crizzo. There were two cannons founded in his (the Prince of
Saxony’s) presence, and a galley built and launched in an hour’s time.”
(Well may Dante speak of that busy Arsenal!)
“Last night there was a concert of voices and instruments at the
Hospital of the Incurabili, where there were two girls that in the
opinion of all people excel either Faustina or Cuzzoni.
“I am invited to-morrow to the Foscarini to dinner, which is to be
followed by a concert and a ball.”
The account of a regatta follows, in which the various nobles had boats
costing £1000 sterling each, none less than £500, and enough of them to
look like a little fleet. The Signora Pisani Mocenigo’s represented the
Chariot of the Night, drawn by four sea-horses, and showing the rising
of the moon, accompanied with stars, the statues on each side
representing the Hours, to the number of twenty-four.
Pleasant times, these, for Venice! one’s Bucentaur launched, wherein to
eat, buoyantly, a magnificent collation—beautiful ladies driving their
ocean steeds in the Chariot of the Night—beautiful songs, at the
Hospital of the Incurabili. Much bettered, these, from the rough days
when one had to row and fight for life, thought Venice; better days
still, in the nineteenth century, being—as she appears to believe
now—in store for her.
You thought, I suppose, that in writing those numbers of Fors last year
from Venice and Verona, I was idling, or digressing?
Nothing of the kind. The business of Fors is to tell you of Venice and
Verona; and many things of them.
You don’t care about Venice and Verona? Of course not. Who does? And I
beg you to observe that the day is coming when, exactly in the same
sense, active working men will say to any antiquarian who purposes to
tell them something of England, “We don’t care about England.” And the
antiquarian will answer, just as I have answered you now, “Of course
not. Who does?”
Nay, the saying has been already said to me, and by a wise and good
man. When I asked, at the end of my inaugural lecture at Oxford, “Will
you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of
kings, a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light—a centre of
peace?”—my University friends came to me, with grave faces, to
remonstrate against irrelevant and Utopian topics of that nature being
introduced in lectures on art; and a very dear American friend wrote to
me, when I sent the lecture to him, in some such terms as these: “Why
will you diminish your real influence for good, by speaking as if
England could now take any dominant place in the world? How many
millions, think you, are there here, of the activest spirits of their
time, who care nothing for England, and would read no farther, after
coming upon such a passage?”
That England deserves little care from any man nowadays, is fatally
true; that in a century more she will be—where Venice is—among the dead
of nations, is far more than probable. And yet—that you do not care for
dead Venice, is the sign of your own ruin; and that the Americans do
not care for dying England, is only the sign of their inferiority to
her.
For this dead Venice once taught us to be merchants, sailors, and
gentlemen; and this dying England taught the Americans all they have of
speech, or thought, hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned from
England are foolish thoughts; what words they have not learned from
England, unseemly words; the vile among them not being able even to be
humorous parrots, but only obscene mocking birds. An American
republican woman, lately, describes a child which “like cherubim and
seraphim continually did cry;” [38] such their feminine learning of the
European fashions of ‘Te Deum’! And, as I tell you, Venice in like
manner taught us, when she and we were honest, our marketing, and our
manners. Then she began trading in pleasure, and souls of men, before
us; followed that Babylonish trade to her death,—we nothing loth to
imitate, so plausible she was, in her mythic gondola, and Chariot of
the Night! But where her pilotage has for the present carried her, and
is like to carry us, it may be well to consider. And therefore I will
ask you to glance back to my twentieth letter, giving account of the
steam music, the modern Tasso’s echoes, practised on her principal
lagoon. That is her present manner, you observe, of “whistling at her
darg.” But for festivity after work, or altogether superseding
work—launching one’s adorned Bucentaur for collation—let us hear what
she is doing in that kind.
From the Rinnovamento (Renewal, or Revival,) “Gazette of the people of
Venice” of 2nd July, 1872, I print, in my terminal notes, a portion of
one of their daily correspondent’s letters, describing his pleasures of
the previous day, of which I here translate a few pregnant sentences.
“I embarked on a little steamboat. It was elegant—it was vast. But its
contents were enormously greater than its capacity. The little
steamboat overflowed [39] with men, women, and boys. The Commandant, a
proud young man, cried, ‘Come in, come in!’ and the crowd became always
more close, and one could scarcely breathe” (the heroic exhortations of
the proud youth leading his public to this painful result). “All at
once a delicate person [40] of the piazza, feeling herself unwell,
cried ‘I suffocate.’ The Commandant perceived that suffocation did
veritably prevail, and gave the word of command, ‘Enough.’
“In eighteen minutes I had the good fortune to land safe at the
establishment, ‘The Favourite.’ And here my eyes opened for wonder. In
truth, only a respectable force of will could have succeeded in
transforming this place, only a few months ago still desert and
uncultivated, into a site of delights. Long alleys, grassy carpets,
small mountains, charming little banks, châlets, solitary and
mysterious paths, and then an interminable covered way which conducts
to the bathing establishment; and in that, attendants dressed in
mariners’ dresses, a most commodious basin, the finest linen, and the
most regular and solicitous service.
“Surprised, and satisfied, I plunged myself cheerfully into the sea.
After the bath, is prescribed a walk. Obedient to the dictates of
hygiene, I take my returning way along the pleasant shore of the sea to
‘The Favourite.’ A châlet, or rather an immense salon, is become a
concert room. And, in fact, an excellent orchestra is executing therein
most chosen pieces. The artists are all endued in dress coats, and wear
white cravats. I hear with delight a pot-pourri from Faust. I then take
a turn through the most vast park, and visit the Restaurant.
“To conclude. The Lido has no more need to become a place of delights.
It is, in truth, already become so.
“All honour to the brave who have effected the marvellous
transformation.”
Onori ai bravi!—Honour to the brave! Yes; in all times, among all
nations, that is entirely desirable. You know I told you, in last Fors,
that to honour the brave dead was to be our second child’s lesson. None
the less expedient if the brave we have to honour be alive, instead of
long dead. Here are our modern Venetian troubadours, in white cravats,
celebrating the victories of their Hardicanutes with collection of
choicest melody—pot-pourri—hotch-potch, from Faust. And, indeed, is not
this a notable conquest which resuscitated Venice has made of her Lido?
Where all was vague sea-shore, now, behold, “little mountains,
mysterious paths.” Those unmanufactured mountains—Eugeneans and
Alps—seen against the sunset, are not enough for the vast mind of
Venice born again; nor the canals between her palaces mysterious enough
paths. Here are mountains to our perfect mind, and more solemn ways,—a
new kingdom for us, conquered by the brave. Conquest, you observe also,
just of the kind which in our ‘Times’ newspaper is honoured always in
like manner, ‘Private Enterprise.’ The only question is, whether the
privacy of your enterprise is always as fearless of exposure as it used
to be,—or even, the enterprise of it as enterprising. Let me tell you a
little of the private enterprise of dead Venice, that you may compare
it with that of the living.
You doubted me just now, probably, when I told you that Venice taught
you to be sailors. You thought your Drakes and Grenvilles needed no
such masters. No! but a hundred years before Sir Francis’s time, the
blind captain of a Venetian galley,—of one of those things which the
Lady Mary saw built in an hour,—won the empire of the East. You did
fine things in the Baltic, and before Sebastopol, with your ironclads
and your Woolwich infants, did you? Here was a piece of fighting done
from the deck of a rowed boat, which came to more good, it seems to me.
“The Duke of Venice had disposed his fleet in one line along the
sea-wall (of Constantinople), and had cleared the battlements with his
shot (of stones and arrows); but still the galleys dared not take
ground. But the Duke of Venice, though he was old (ninety) and
stone-blind, stood, all armed, at the head of his galley, and had the
gonfalon of St. Mark before him; and he called to his people to ground
his ship, or they should die for it. So they ran the ship aground, and
leaped out, and carried St. Mark’s gonfalon to the shore before the
Duke. Then the Venetians, seeing their Duke’s galley ashore, followed
him; and they planted the flag of St. Mark on the walls, and took
twenty-five towers.”
The good issue of which piece of pantaloon’s play was that the city
itself, a little while after, with due help from the French, was taken,
and that the crusading army proceeded thereon to elect a new Emperor of
the Eastern Empire.
Which office six French Barons, and six Venetian, being appointed to
bestow, and one of the French naming first the Duke of Venice, he had
certainly been declared Emperor, but one of the Venetians themselves,
Pantaleone Barbo, declaring that no man could be Duke of Venice, and
Emperor too, gave his word for Baldwin of Flanders, to whom accordingly
the throne was given; while to the Venetian State was offered, with the
consent of all, if they chose to hold it—about a third of the whole
Roman Empire!
Venice thereupon deliberates with herself. Her own present national
territory—the true ‘State’ of Venice—is a marsh, which you can see from
end to end of;—some wooden houses, half afloat, and others wholly
afloat, in the canals of it; and a total population, in round numbers,
about as large as that of our parish of Lambeth. Venice feels some
doubt whether, out of this wild duck’s nest, and with that number of
men, she can at once safely, and in all the world’s sight, undertake to
govern Lacedæmon, Ægina, Ægos Potamos, Crete, and half the Greek
islands; nevertheless, she thinks she will try a little ‘private
enterprise’ upon them. So in 1207 the Venetian Senate published an
edict by which there was granted to all Venetian citizens permission to
arm, at their own expense, war-galleys, and to subdue, if they could
manage it in that private manner, such islands and Greek towns of the
Archipelago as might seem to them what we call “eligible residences,”
the Senate graciously giving them leave to keep whatever they could
get. Whereupon certain Venetian merchants—proud young men—stood, as we
see them standing now on their decks on the Riva, crying to the crowd,
‘Montate! Montate!’ and without any help from steam, or encumbrance
from the markets of Ascension Day, rowed and sailed—somewhat outside
the Lido. Mark Dandolo took Gallipoli; Mark Sanudo, Naxos, Paros, and
Melos;—(you have heard of marbles and Venuses coming from those places,
have not you?)—Marin Dandolo, Andros; Andrea Ghisi, Micone and Scyros;
Dominico Michieli, Ceos; and Philocola Navigieri, the island of Vulcan
himself, Lemnos. Took them, and kept them also! (not a little to our
present sorrow; for, being good Christians, these Venetian gentlemen
made wild work among the Parian and Melian gods). It was not till 1570
that the twenty-first Venetian Duke of Melos was driven out by the
Turks, and the career of modern white-cravated Venice virtually begun.
“Honour to the brave!” Yes, in God’s name, and by all manner of means!
And dishonour to the cowards: but, my good Italian and good English
acquaintances, are you so sure, then, you know which is which? Nay, are
you honestly willing to acknowledge there is any difference? Heaven be
praised if you are!—but I thought your modern gospel was, that all were
alike? Here’s the ‘Punch’ of last week lying beside me, for instance,
with its normal piece of pathos upon the advertisements of death. Dual
deaths this time; and pathetic epitaphs on the Bishop of Winchester and
the Baron Bethell. The best it can honestly say, (and ‘Punch’ as far as
I know papers, is an honest one,) is that the Bishop was a pleasant
kind of person; and the best it can say for the Chancellor is, that he
was witty;—but, fearing that something more might be expected, it
smooths all down with a sop of popular varnish, “How good the worst of
us!—how bad the best!” Alas, Mr. Punch, is it come to this? and is
there to be no more knocking down, then? and is your last scene in
future to be—shaking hands with the devil?—clerical pantaloon in white
cravat asking a blessing on the reconciliation, and the drum and pipe
finishing with a pot-pourri from Faust?
A popular tune, truly, everywhere, nowadays—“Devil’s hotch-potch,” and
listened to “avec delices!” And, doubtless, pious Republicans on their
death-beds will have a care to bequeath it, rightly played, to their
children, before they go to hear it, divinely executed, in their own
blessed country.
“How good the worst of us!—how bad the best!” Jeanie Deans, and St.
Agnes, and the Holy Thursday fairing, all the same!
My good working readers, I will try to-day to put you more clearly in
understanding of this modern gospel,—of what truth there is in it—for
some there is,—and of what pestilent evil.
I call it a modern gospel: in its deepest truth it is as old as
Christianity. “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.” And
it was the most distinctive character of Christianity. Here was a new,
astonishing religion indeed; one had heard before of righteousness;
before of resurrection;—never before of mercy to sin, or fellowship
with it.
But it is only in strictly modern times (that is to say, within the
last hundred years) that this has been fixed on, by a large sect of
thick-headed persons, as the essence of Christianity,—nay, as so much
its essence, that to be an extremely sinful sinner is deliberately
announced by them as the best of qualifications for becoming an
extremely Christian Christian.
But all the teachings of Heaven are given—by sad law—in so obscure,
nay, often in so ironical manner that a blockhead necessarily reads
them wrong. Very marvellous it is that Heaven, which really in one
sense is merciful to sinners, is in no sense merciful to fools, but
even lays pitfalls for them, and inevitable snares.
Again and again, in the New Testament, the publican (supposed at once
traitor to his country and thief) and the harlot are made the
companions of Christ. She out of whom He had cast seven devils, loves
Him best, sees Him first, after His resurrection. The sting of that old
verse, “When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst to him, and hast
been partaker with adulterers,” seems done away with. Adultery itself
uncondemned,—for, behold, in your hearts is not every one of you alike?
“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
And so, and so, no more stones shall be cast nowadays; and here, on the
top of our epitaph on the Bishop, lies a notice of the questionable
sentence which hanged a man for beating his wife to death with a stick.
“The jury recommended him strongly to mercy.”
They did so, because they knew not, in their own hearts, what mercy
meant. They were afraid to do anything so extremely compromising and
disagreeable as causing a man to be hanged,—had no ‘pity’ for any
creatures beaten to death—wives, or beasts; but only a cowardly fear of
commanding death, where it was due. Your modern conscience will not
incur the responsibility of shortening the hourly more guilty life of a
single rogue; but will contentedly fire a salvo of mitrailleuses into a
regiment of honest men—leaving Providence to guide the shot. But let us
fasten on the word they abused, and understand it. Mercy—misericordia:
it does not in the least mean forgiveness of sins,—it means pity of
sorrows. In that very instance which the Evangelicals are so fond of
quoting—the adultery of David—it is not the Passion for which he is to
be judged, but the want of Passion,—the want of Pity. This he is to
judge himself for, by his own mouth:—“As the Lord liveth, the man that
hath done this thing shall surely die,—because he hath done this thing,
and because he had no pity.”
And you will find, alike throughout the record of the Law and the
promises of the Gospel, that there is, indeed, forgiveness with God,
and Christ, for the passing sins of the hot heart, but none for the
eternal and inherent sin of the cold. ‘Blessed are the merciful, for
they shall obtain mercy’;—find it you written anywhere that the
unmerciful shall? ‘Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she
loved much.’ But have you record of any one’s sins being forgiven who
loved not at all?
I opened my oldest Bible just now, to look for the accurate words of
David about the killed lamb;—a small, closely, and very neatly printed
volume it is, printed in Edinburgh by Sir D. Hunter Blair and J. Bruce,
Printers to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty in 1816. Yellow, now,
with age, and flexible, but not unclean, with much use, except that the
lower corners of the pages at 8th of 1st Kings, and 32nd Deuteronomy
are worn somewhat thin and dark, the learning of these two chapters
having cost me much pains. My mother’s list of the chapters with which,
learned every syllable accurately, she established my soul in life, has
just fallen out of it. And as probably the sagacious reader has already
perceived that these letters are written in their irregular way, among
other reasons, that they may contain, as the relation may become
apposite, so much of autobiography as it seems to me desirable to
write, I will take what indulgence the sagacious reader will give me,
for printing the list thus accidentally occurrent:—
Exodus, chapters 15th and 20th.
2 Samuel ,, 1st, from 17th verse to the end.
1 Kings ,, 8th.
Psalms 23rd, 32nd, 90th, 91st, 103rd, 112th,
119th, 139th.
Proverbs ,, 2nd, 3rd, 8th, 12th.
Isaiah ,, 58th.
Matthew ,, 5th, 6th, 7th.
Acts ,, 26th.
1 Corinthians ,, 13th, 15th.
James ,, 4th.
Revelation ,, 5th, 6th.
And truly, though I have picked up the elements of a little further
knowledge,—in mathematics, meteorology, and the like, in after
life,—and owe not a little to the teaching of many people, this
maternal installation of my mind in that property of chapters, I count
very confidently the most precious, and, on the whole, the one
essential part of all my education.
For the chapters became, indeed, strictly conclusive and protective to
me in all modes of thought; and the body of divinity they contain,
acceptable through all fear or doubt: nor, through any fear or doubt or
fault have I ever lost my loyalty to them, nor betrayed the first
command in the one I was made to repeat oftenest, “Let not Mercy and
Truth forsake Thee.”
And at my present age of fifty-five, in spite of some enlarged
observations of what modern philosophers call the Reign of Law, I
perceive more distinctly than ever the Reign of a Spirit of Mercy and
Truth,—infinite in pardon and purification for its wandering and
faultful children, who have yet Love in their hearts; and altogether
adverse and implacable to its perverse and lying enemies, who have
resolute hatred in their hearts, and resolute falsehood on their lips.
This assertion of the existence of a Spirit of Mercy and Truth, as the
master first of the Law of Life, and then of the methods of knowledge
and labour by which it is sustained, and which the ‘Saturday Review’
calls the effeminate sentimentality of Mr. Ruskin’s political economy,
is accurately, you will observe, reversed by the assertion of the
Predatory and Carnivorous—or, in plainer English, flesh-eating spirit
in Man himself, as the regulator of modern civilization, in the paper
read by the Secretary at the Social Science meeting in Glasgow, 1860.
Out of which the following fundamental passage may stand for sufficient
and permanent example of the existent, practical, and unsentimental
English mind, being the most vile sentence which I have ever seen in
the literature of any country or time:—
“As no one will deny that Man possesses carnivorous teeth, or that all
animals that possess them are more or less predatory, it is unnecessary
to argue, à priori, that a predatory instinct naturally follows from
such organization. It is our intention here to show how this inevitable
result operates on civilized existence by its being one of the
conditions of Man’s nature, and, consequently, of all arrangements of
civilized society.”
The paper proceeds, and is entirely constructed, on the assumption that
the predatory spirit is not only one of the conditions of man’s nature,
but the particular condition on which the arrangements of Society are
to be founded. For “Reason would immediately suggest to one of superior
strength, that however desirable it might be to take possession by
violence, of what another had laboured to produce, he might be treated
in the same way by one stronger than himself, to which he, of course,
would have great objection. In order, therefore, to prevent or put a
stop to a practice which each would object to in his own case,” etc.,
etc. And so the Social Science interpreter proceeds to sing the present
non-sentimental Proverbs and Psalms of England,—with trumpets also and
shawms—and steam whistles. And there is concert of voices and
instruments at the Hospital of the Incurabili, and
Progress—indubitably—in Chariots of the Night.