Rome, Corpus-Domini, 1874.
I wrote, for a preface to the index at the end of the second volume of
Fors, part of an abstract of what had been then stated in the course of
this work. Fate would not let me finish it; but what was done will be
useful now, and shall begin my letter for this month. Completing three
and a half volumes of Fors, it may contain a more definite statement of
its purpose than any given hitherto; though I have no intention of
explaining that purpose entirely, until it is in sufficient degree
accomplished. I have a house to build; but none shall mock me by saying
I was not able to finish it, nor be vexed by not finding in it the
rooms they expected. But the current and continual purpose of Fors
Clavigera is to explain the powers of Chance, or Fortune (Fors), as she
offers to men the conditions of prosperity; and as these conditions are
accepted or refused, nails down and fastens their fate for ever, being
thus ‘Clavigera,’—‘nail-bearing.’ The image is one familiar in
mythology: my own conception of it was first got from Horace, and
developed by steady effort to read history with impartiality, and to
observe the lives of men around me with charity. “How you may make your
fortune, or mar it,” is the expansion of the title.
Certain authoritative conditions of life, of its happiness, and its
honour, are therefore stated, in this book, as far as they may be,
conclusively and indisputably, at present known. I do not enter into
any debates, nor advance any opinions. With what is debateable I am
unconcerned; and when I only have opinions about things, I do not talk
about them. I attack only what cannot on any possible ground be
defended; and state only what I know to be incontrovertibly true.
You will find, as you read Fors more, that it differs curiously from
most modern books in this. Modern fashion is, that the moment a man
strikes some little lucifer match, or is hit by any form of fancy, he
begins advertising his lucifer match, and fighting for his fancy,
totally ignoring the existing sunshine, and the existing substances of
things. But I have no matches to sell, no fancies to fight for. All
that I have to say is that the day is in heaven, and rock and wood on
earth, and that you must see by the one, and work with the other. You
have heard as much before, perhaps. I hope you have; I should be
ashamed if there were anything in Fors which had not been said
before,—and that a thousand times, and a thousand times of times,—there
is nothing in it, nor ever will be in it, but common truths, as clear
to honest mankind as their daily sunrise, as necessary as their daily
bread; and which the fools who deny can only live, themselves, because
other men know and obey.
You will therefore find that whatever is set down in Fors for you is
assuredly true,—inevitable,—trustworthy to the uttermost,—however
strange. [41] Not because I have any power of knowing more than other
people, but simply because I have taken the trouble to ascertain what
they also may ascertain if they choose. Compare on this point, Letter
VI., page 5.
The following rough abstract of the contents of the first seven letters
may assist the reader in their use.
Letter I. Men’s prosperity is in their own hands; and no forms of
government are, in themselves, of the least use. The first
beginnings of prosperity must be in getting food, clothes, and
fuel. These cannot be got either by the fine arts, or the military
arts. Neither painting nor fighting feed men; nor can capital, in
the form of money or machinery, feed them. All capital is imaginary
or unimportant, except the quantity of food existing in the world
at any given moment. Finally, men cannot live by lending money to
each other, and the conditions of such loan at present are absurd
and deadly. [42]
Letter II. The nature of Rent. It is an exaction, by force of hand,
for the maintenance of Squires: but had better at present be left
to them. The nature of useful and useless employment. When
employment is given by capitalists, it is sometimes useful, but
oftener useless; sometimes moralizing, but oftener demoralizing.
And we had therefore better employ ourselves, without any appeal to
the capitalists (page 22); and to do this successfully, it must be
with three resolutions; namely, to be personally honest, socially
helpful, and conditionally obedient (page 23): explained in Letter
VII., page 21 to end.
Letter III. The power of Fate is independent of the Moral Law, but
never supersedes it. Virtue ceases to be such, if expecting reward:
it is therefore never materially rewarded. (I ought to have said,
except as one of the appointed means of physical and mental
health.) The Fates of England, and proper mode of studying them.
Stories of Henry II. and Richard I.
Letter IV. The value and nature of Education. It may be good,
bad,—or neither the one nor the other. Knowledge is not education,
and can neither make us happy nor rich. Opening discussion of the
nature and use of riches. Gold and diamonds are not riches, and the
reader is challenged to specify their use. Opening discussion of
the origin of wealth. It does not fall from heaven, (compare Letter
VII., page 19,) but is certainly obtainable, and has been generally
obtained, by pillage of the poor. Modes in which education in
virtue has been made costly to them, and education in vice cheap.
(Page 23.)
Letter V. The powers of Production. Extremity of modern folly in
supposing there can be over-production. The power of machines. They
cannot increase the possibilities of life, but only the
possibilities of idleness. (Page 13.) The things which are
essential to life are mainly three material ones and three
spiritual ones. First sketch of the proposed action of St. George’s
Company.
Letter VI. The Elysium of modern days. This letter, written under
the excitement of continual news of the revolution in Paris, is
desultory, and limits itself to noticing some of the causes of that
revolution: chiefly the idleness, disobedience, and covetousness of
the richer and middle classes.
Letter VII. The Elysium of ancient days. The definitions of true,
and spurious, Communism. Explanation of the design of true
Communism, in Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia.” This letter, though
treating of matters necessary to the whole work, yet introduces
them prematurely, being written, incidentally, upon the ruin of
Paris.
Assisi, 18th May, 1874.
So ended, as Fors would have it, my abstraction, which I see Fors had
her reason for stopping me in; else the abstraction would have needed
farther abstracting. As it is, the reader may find in it the real gist
of the remaining letters, and discern what a stiff business we have in
hand,—rent, capital, and interest, all to be attacked at once! and a
method of education shown to be possible in virtue, as cheaply as in
vice!
I should have got my business, stiff though it may be, farther forward
by this time, but for that same revolution in Paris, and burning of the
Tuileries, which greatly confused my plan by showing me how much baser
the human material I had to deal with, was, than I thought in
beginning.
That a Christian army (or, at least, one which Saracens would have
ranked with that they attacked, under the general name of Franks,)
should fiercely devastate and rob an entire kingdom laid at their mercy
by the worst distress;—that the first use made by this distressed
country of the defeat of its armies would be to overthrow its
government; and that, when its metropolis had all but perished in
conflagration during the contest between its army and mob, no warning
should be taken by other civilized societies, but all go trotting on
again, next week, in their own several roads to ruin, persistently, as
they had trotted before,—bells jingling, and whips cracking,—these
things greatly appalled me, finding I had only slime to build with
instead of mortar; and shook my plan partly out of shape.
The frightfullest thing of all, to my mind, was the German temper, in
its naïve selfishness; on which point, having been brought round again
to it in my last letter, I have now somewhat more to say.
In the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ of 7th March, this year, under the head of
‘This Evening’s News,’ appeared an article of which I here reprint the
opening portion.
The well-known Hungarian author, Maurus Jokai, is at present a
visitor in the German capital. As a man of note he easily obtained
access to Prince Bismarck’s study, where an interesting
conversation took place, which M. Jokai reports pretty fully to the
Hungarian journal the Hon:—
“The Prince was, as usual, easy in his manner, and communicative,
and put a stop at the very outset to the Hungarian’s attempt at
ceremony. M. Jokai humorously remarked upon the prevalence of
‘iron’ in the surroundings of the ‘iron’ Prince. Among other
things, there is an iron couch, and an iron safe, in which the
Chancellor appears to keep his cigars. Prince Bismarck was struck
by the youthful appearance of his guest, who is ten years his
junior, but whose writings he remembers to have seen reviewed long
ago, in the Augsburg Gazette (at that time still, the Chancellor
said, a clever paper) when he bore a lieutenant’s commission. In
the ensuing conversation, Prince Bismarck pointed out the paramount
necessity to Europe of a consolidated State in the position of
Austro-Hungary. It was mainly on that account that he concluded
peace with so great despatch in 1866. Small independent States in
the East would be a misfortune to Europe. Austria and Hungary must
realize their mutual interdependence, and the necessity of being
one. However, the dualist system of government must be preserved,
because the task of developing the State, which on this side of the
Leitha falls to the Germans, beyond that river naturally falls to
the Magyars. The notion that Germany has an inclination to annex
more land, Prince Bismarck designated as a myth. God preserve the
Germans from such a wish! Whatever more territory they might
acquire would probably be undermined by Papal influence, and they
have enough of that already. Should the Germans of Austria want to
be annexed by Germany, the Chancellor would feel inclined to
declare war against them for that wish alone. A German Minister who
should conceive the desire to annex part of Austria would deserve
to be hanged—a punishment the Prince indicated by gesture. He does
not wish to annex even a square foot of fresh territory, not as
much as two pencils he kept on playing with during the conversation
would cover. Those pencils, however, M. Jokai remarks, were big
enough to serve as walking-sticks, and on the map they would have
reached quite from Berlin to Trieste. Prince Bismarck went on to
justify his annexation of Alsace-Loraine by geographical necessity.
Otherwise he would rather not have grafted the French twig upon the
German tree.
The French are enemies never to be appeased. Take away from them the
cook, the tailor, and the hairdresser, and what remains of them is a
copper-coloured Indian.”
Now it does not matter whether Prince Bismarck ever said this, or not.
That the saying should be attributed to him in a leading journal,
without indication of doubt or surprise, is enough to show what the
German temper is publicly recognized to be. And observe what a sentence
it is—thus attributed to him. The French are only copper-coloured
Indians, finely dressed. This said of the nation which gave us
Charlemagne, St. Louis, St. Bernard, and Joan of Arc; which founded the
central type of chivalry in the myth of Roland; which showed the utmost
height of valour yet recorded in history, in the literal life of
Guiscard; and which built Chartres Cathedral!
But the French are not what they were! No; nor the English, for that
matter; probably we have fallen the farther of the two: meantime the
French still retain, at the root, the qualities they always had; and of
one of these, a highly curious and commendable one, I wish you to take
some note to-day.
Among the minor nursery tales with which my mother allowed me to
relieve the study of the great nursery tale of Genesis, my favourite
was Miss Edgeworth’s “Frank.” The authoress chose this for the boy’s
name, because she meant him to be a type of Frankness, or openness of
heart:—truth of heart, that is to say, liking to lay itself open. You
are in the habit, I believe, some of you, still, of speaking
occasionally of English Frankness;—not recognizing, through the hard
clink of the letter K, that you are only talking, all the while, of
English Frenchness. Still less when you count your cargoes of gold from
San Francisco, do you pause to reflect what San means, or what Francis
means, without the Co;—or how it came to pass that the power of this
mountain town of Assisi, where not only no gold can be dug, but where
St. Francis forbade his Company to dig it anywhere else—came to give
names to Devil’s towns far across the Atlantic—(and by the way you may
note how clumsy the Devil is at christening; for if by chance he gets a
fresh York all to himself, he never has any cleverer notion than to
call it ‘New York’; and in fact, having no mother-wit from his dam, is
obliged very often to put up with the old names which were given by
Christians,—Nombre di Dios, Trinidad, Vera Cruz, and the like, even
when he has all his own way with everything else in the places, but
their names).
But to return. You have lately had a fine notion, have you not, of
English Liberty as opposed to French Slavery?
Well, whatever your English liberties may be, the French knew what the
word meant, before you. For France, if you will consider of it, means
nothing else than the Country of Franks;—the country of a race so
intensely Free that they for evermore gave name to Freedom. The Greeks
sometimes got their own way, as a mob; but nobody, meaning to talk of
liberty, calls it ‘Greekness.’ The Romans knew better what Libertas
meant, and their word for it has become common enough, in that
straitened form, on your English tongue; but nobody calls it
‘Romanness.’ But at last comes a nation called the Franks; and they are
so inherently free and noble in their natures, that their name becomes
the word for the virtue; and when you now want to talk of freedom of
heart, you say Frankness, and for the last political privilege which
you have it so much in your English minds to get, you haven’t so much
as an English word, but must call it by the French one, ‘Franchise.’
[43]
“Freedom of heart,” you observe, I say. Not the English freedom of
Insolence, according to Mr. B., (see above, Letter 29,) but pure French
openness of heart, Fanchette’s and her husband’s frankness, the source
of joy, and courtesy, and civility, and passing softness of human
meeting of kindly glance with glance. Of which Franchise, in her own
spirit Person, here is the picture for you, from the French Romance of
the Rose,—a picture which English Chaucer was thankful to copy.
“And after all those others came Franchise,
Who was not brown, nor grey,
But she was white as snow.
And she had not the nose of an Orleanois.
Aussi had she the nose long and straight.
Eyes green, and laughing—vaulted eyebrows;
She had her hair blonde and long,
And she was simple as a dove.
The body she had sweet, and brightly bred;
And she dared not do, nor say
To any one, anything she ought not.
And if she knew of any man
Who was in sorrow for love of her,
So soon she had great pity for him,
For she had the heart so pitiful,
And so sweet and so lovely,
That no one suffered pain about her,
But she would help him all she could.
And she wore a surquanye
Which was of no coarse cloth;
There’s none so rich as far as Arras.
And it was so gathered up, and so joined together,
That there was not a single point of it
Which was not set in its exact place, rightly.
Much well was dressed Franchise,
For no robe is so pretty
As the surquanye for a demoiselle.
A girl is more gentle and more darling
In surquanye than in coat,
And the white surquanye
Signifies that sweet and frank
Is she who puts it on her.”
May I ask you now to take to heart those two lines of this French
description of Frenchness:
“And she dared not do, nor say
To any one, anything she ought not.”
That is not your modern notion of Frenchness, or franchise, or
libertas, or liberty—for all these are synonyms for the same virtue.
And yet the strange thing is that the lowest types of the modern French
grisette are the precise corruption of this beautiful Franchise: and
still retain, at their worst, some of the grand old qualities; the
absolute sources of corruption being the neglect of their childhood by
the upper classes, the abandonment to their own resources, and the
development therefore of “Liberty and Independence,” in your beautiful
English, not French, sense.
“Livrée à elle-meme depuis l’âge de treize ans, habituée à ne compter
que sur elle seule, elle avait de la vie un expérience dont j’étais
confondue. De ce Paris où elle était née, elle savait tout, elle
connaissait tout.
Je n’avais pas idée d’une si complete absence de sens moral, d’une si
inconsciente dépravation, d’une impudeur si effrontément naïve.
La règle de sa conduite, c’était sa fantaisie, son instinct, le caprice
du moment.
Elle aimait les longues stations dans les cafés, les mélodrames
entremêlés de chopes et d’oranges pendant les entr’actes, les parties
de canot à Asnières, et surtout, et avant tout, le bal.
Elle était comme chez elle à l’Élysée—Montmartre et au Château-Rouge;
elle y connaissait tout le monde, le chef d’orchestre la saluait, ce
dont elle était extraordinairement fière, et quantité de gens la
tutoyaient.
Je l’accompagnais partout, dans les commencements, et bien que je
n’étais pas précisément naïve, ni gênée par les scrupules de mon
éducation, je fus tellement consternée de l’incroyable désordre de sa
vie, que je ne pus m’empêcher de lui en faire quelques représentations.
Elle se fâcha tout rouge.
Tu fais ce qui te plaît, me dit-elle, laisse-moi faire ce qui me
convient.
C’est un justice que je lui dois: jamais elle n’essaya sur moi son
influence, jamais elle ne m’engagea à suivre son exemple. Ivre de
liberté elle respectait la liberté des autres.”
Such is the form which Franchise has taken under republican
instruction. But of the true Franchise of Charlemagne and Roland, there
were, you must note also, two distinct forms. In the last stanzas of
the Chant de Roland, Normandy and France have two distinct
epithets,—“Normandie, la franche; France, la solue” (soluta). “Frank
Normandy; Loose France. Solute;”—we, adding the dis, use the words
loose and dissolute only in evil sense. But ‘France la solue’ has an
entirely lovely meaning. The frankness of Normandy is the soldier’s
virtue; but the unbinding, so to speak, of France, is the peasant’s.
“And having seen that lovely maid,
Why should I fear to say
That she is ruddy, fleet, and strong,
And down the rocks can leap along
Like rivulets in May?”
It is curious that the most beautiful descriptive line in all Horace,
“montibus altis
Levis crepante lympha desilit pede,”
comes in the midst of the dream of the blessed islands which are to be
won by following the founders of—what city, think you? The city that
first sang the “Marseillaise.”
“Juppiter illa piae secrevit litora genti.”
Recollect that line, my French readers, if I chance to find any, this
month, nor less the description of those ‘arva beata’ as if of your own
South France; and then consider also those prophetic lines, true of
Paris as of Rome,—
“Nec fera coerulea domuit Germania pube.
Impia, perdemus devoti sanguinis aetas.”
Consider them, I say, and deeply, thinking over the full force of those
words, “devoti sanguinis,” and of the ways in which the pure blood of
Normandie la franche, and France la solue, has corrupted itself, and
become accursed. Had I but time to go into the history of that word
‘devoveo,’ what a piece of philology it would lead us into! But, for
another kind of opposition to the sweet Franchise of old time, take
this sentence of description of another French maiden, by the same
author from whom I have just quoted the sketch of the grisette:
“C’était une vieille fille d’une cinquantaine d’années, sèche et jaune,
avec un grand nez d’oiseau de proie, très noble, encore plus dévote,
joueuse comme la dame de pique en personne, et médisante à faire battre
des montagnes.”
You see what accurate opposition that gives you of another kind, to
Franchise. You even have the ‘nez d’Orleanois’ specified, which the
song of the Rose is so careful to tell you Franchise had not.
Here is another illustrative sentence:
“La colère, à la fin, une de ces terribles colères blanches de dévote,
chassait des flots de bile au cerveau de Mademoiselle de la
Rochecardeau, et blêmissait ses lèvres.”
These three sentences I have taken from two novels of Emile Gaboriau,
“L’argent des autres,” and “La Degringolade.” They are average
specimens of modern French light literature, with its characteristic
qualities and defects, and are both of them in many respects worth
careful study; but chiefly in the representation they give, partly with
conscious blame, and partly in unconscious corruption, of the Devoti
sanguinis aetas; with which, if you would compare old France
accurately, read first Froude’s sketch of the life of Bishop Hugo of
Lincoln, and think over the scene between him and Cœur de Lion.
You have there, as in life before you, two typical Frenchmen of the
twelfth century—a true king, and a true priest, representing the powers
which the France of that day contrived to get set over her, and did, on
the whole, implicitly and with her heart obey.
They are not altogether—by taking the dancing-master and the
hairdresser away from them—reduced to copper-coloured Indians.
If, next, you will take the pains—and it will need some pains, for the
book is long and occasionally tiresome—to read the Degringolade, you
will find it nevertheless worth your while; for it gives you a modern
Frenchman’s account of the powers which France in the nineteenth
century contrived to get set over her; and obeyed—not with her heart,
but restively, like an ill-bred dog or mule, which have no honour in
their obedience, but bear the chain and bit all the same.
But there is a farther and much more important reason for my wish that
you should read this novel. It gives you types of existent Frenchmen
and Frenchwomen of a very different class. They are, indeed, only
heroes and heroines in a quite second-rate piece of literary work. But
these stereotypes, nevertheless, have living originals. There is to be
found in France, as truly the Commandant Delorge, as the Comte de
Combelaine. And as truly Mademoiselle de Maillefert as the Duchesse de
Maumussy. How is it, then, that the Count and Duchess command
everything in France, and that the Commandant and Demoiselle command
nothing?—that the best they can do is to get leave to live—unknown, and
unthought-of? The question, believe me, is for England also; and a very
pressing one.
Of the frantic hatred of all religion developed in the French
republican mind, the sentences I have quoted are interesting examples.
I have not time to speak of them in this letter, but they struck me
sharply as I corrected the press to-day; for I had been standing most
part of the morning by St. Paul’s grave, thinking over his work in the
world. A bewildered peasant, from some green dingle of Campagna, who
had seen me kneel when the Host passed, and took me therefore to be a
human creature and a friend, asked me ‘where St. Paul was’?
‘There, underneath,’ I answered.
‘There?’ he repeated, doubtfully,—as dissatisfied.
‘Yes,’ I answered; ‘his body at least;—his head is at the Lateran.’
‘Il suo corpo,’ again he repeated, still as in discontent. Then, after
a pause, ‘E la sua statua?’
Such a wicked thing to ask for that! wasn’t it, my Evangelical friends?
You would so much rather have had him ask for Hudson’s!