Lucca, 2nd August, 1874.
The other day, in the Sacristan’s cell at Assisi, I got into a great
argument with the Sacristan himself, about the prophet Isaiah. It had
struck me that I should like to know what sort of a person his wife
was: and I asked my good host, over our morning’s coffee, whether the
Church knew anything about her. Brother Antonio, however, instantly and
energetically denied that he ever had a wife. He was a ‘Castissimo
profeta,’—how could I fancy anything so horrible of him! Vainly I
insisted that, since he had children, he must either have been married,
or been under special orders, like the prophet Hosea. But my Protestant
Bible was good for nothing, said the Sacristan. Nay, I answered, I
never read, usually, in anything later than a thirteenth century text;
let him produce me one out of the convent library, and see if I
couldn’t find Shearjashub in it. The discussion dropped upon
this,—because the library was inaccessible at the moment; and no
printed Vulgate to be found. But I think of it again to-day, because I
have just got into another puzzle about Isaiah,—to wit, what he means
by calling himself a “man of unclean lips.” [51] And that is a vital
question, surely, to all persons venturing to rise up, as
teachers;—vital, at all events, to me, here, and now, for these
following reasons.
Thirty years ago, I began my true study of Italian, and all other
art,—here, beside the statue of Ilaria di Caretto, recumbent on her
tomb. It turned me from the study of landscape to that of life, being
then myself in the fullest strength of labour, and joy of hope.
And I was thinking, last night, that the drawing which I am now trying
to make of it, in the weakness and despair of declining age, might
possibly be the last I should make before quitting the study of
Italian, and even all other, art, for ever.
I have no intent of doing so: quite the reverse of that. But I feel the
separation between me and the people round me, so bitterly, in the
world of my own which they cannot enter; and I see their entrance to it
now barred so absolutely by their own resolves, (they having
deliberately and self-congratulatingly chosen for themselves the
Manchester Cotton Mill instead of the Titian,) that it becomes every
hour more urged upon me that I shall have to leave,—not father and
mother, for they have left me; nor children, nor lands, for I have
none,—but at least this spiritual land and fair domain of human art and
natural peace,—because I am a man of unclean lips, and dwell in the
midst of a people of unclean lips, and therefore am undone, because
mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.
I say it, and boldly. Who else is there of you who can stand with me,
and say the same? It is an age of progress, you tell me. Is your
progress chiefly in this, that you cannot see the King, the Lord of
Hosts, but only Baal, instead of Him?
“The Sun is God,” said Turner, a few weeks before he died with the
setting rays of it on his face.
He meant it, as Zoroaster meant it; and was a Sun-worshipper of the old
breed. But the unheard-of foulness of your modern faith in Baal is its
being faith without worship. The Sun is—not God,—you say. Not by any
manner of means. A gigantic railroad accident, perhaps,—a coruscant
δινος,—put on the throne of God like a limelight; and able to serve
you, eventually, much better than ever God did.
I repeat my challenge. You,—Te Deum-singing princes, colonels, bishops,
choristers, and what else,—do any of you know what Te means? or what
Deum? or what Laudamus? Have any of your eyes seen the King, or His
Sabaoth? Will any of you say, with your hearts, ‘Heaven and earth are
full of His glory; and in His name we will set up our banners, and do
good work, whether we live or die’?
You, in especial, Squires of England, whose fathers were England’s
bravest and best,—by how much better and braver you are than your
fathers, in this Age of Progress, I challenge you: Have any of your
eyes seen the King? Are any of your hands ready for His work, and for
His weapons,—even though they should chance to be pruning-hooks instead
of spears?
Who am I, that should challenge you—do you ask? My mother was a
sailor’s daughter, so please you; one of my aunts was a baker’s
wife—the other, a tanner’s; and I don’t know much more about my family,
except that there used to be a greengrocer of the name in a small shop
near the Crystal Palace. Something of my early and vulgar life, if it
interests you, I will tell in next Fors: in this one, it is indeed my
business, poor gipsy herald as I am, to bring you such challenge,
though you shall hunt and hang me for it.
Squires, are you, and not Workmen, nor Labourers, do you answer next?
Yet, I have certainly sometimes seen engraved over your family vaults,
and especially on the more modern tablets, those comfortful words,
“Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.” But I observe that you
are usually content, with the help of the village stone-mason, to say
only this concerning your dead; and that you but rarely venture to add
the “yea” of the Spirit, “that they may rest from their Labours, and
their Works do follow them.” Nay, I am not even sure that many of you
clearly apprehend the meaning of such followers and following; nor, in
the most pathetic funeral sermons, have I heard the matter made
strictly intelligible to your hope. For indeed, though you have always
graciously considered your church no less essential a part of your
establishment than your stable, you have only been solicitous that
there should be no broken-winded steeds in the one, without collateral
endeavour to find clerks for the other in whom the breath of the Spirit
should be unbroken also.
As yet it is a text which, seeing how often we would fain take the
comfort of it, surely invites explanation. The implied difference
between those who die in the Lord, and die—otherwise; the essential
distinction between the labour from which these blessed ones rest, and
the work which in some mysterious way follows them; and the doubt—which
must sometimes surely occur painfully to a sick or bereaved
squire—whether the labours of his race are always severe enough to make
rest sweet, or the works of his race always distinguished enough to
make their following superb,—ought, it seems to me, to cause the verse
to glow on your (lately, I observe, more artistic) tombstones, like the
letters on Belshazzar’s wall; and with the more lurid and alarming
light, that this “following” of the works is distinctly connected, in
the parallel passage of Timothy, with “judgment” upon the works; and
that the kinds of them which can securely front such judgment, are
there said to be, in some cases, “manifest beforehand,” and, in no
case, ultimately obscure.
“It seems to me,” I say, as if such questions should occur to the
squire during sickness, or funeral pomp. But the seeming is far from
the fact. For I suppose the last idea which is likely ever to enter the
mind of a representative squire, in any vivid or tenable manner, would
be that anything he had ever done, or said, was liable to a judgment
from superior powers; or that any other law than his own will, or the
fashion of his society, stronger than his will, existed in relation to
the management of his estate. Whereas, according to any rational
interpretation of our Church’s doctrine, as by law established; if
there be one person in the world rather than another to whom it makes a
serious difference whether he dies in the Lord or out of Him; and if
there be one rather than another who will have strict scrutiny made
into his use of every instant of his time, every syllable of his
speech, and every action of his hand and foot,—on peril of having hand
and foot bound, and tongue scorched, in Tophet,—that responsible person
is the British Squire.
Very strange, the unconsciousness of this, in his own mind, and in the
minds of all belonging to him. Even the greatest painter of him—the
Reynolds who has filled England with the ghosts of her noble squires
and dames,—though he ends his last lecture in the Academy with “the
name of Michael Angelo,” never for an instant thought of following out
the purposes of Michael Angelo, and painting a Last Judgment upon
Squires, with the scene of it laid in Leicestershire. Appealing lords
and ladies on either hand;—“Behold, Lord, here is Thy land; which I
have—as far as my distressed circumstances would permit—laid up in a
napkin. Perhaps there may be a cottage or so less upon it than when I
came into the estate,—a tree cut down here and there imprudently;—but
the grouse and foxes are undiminished. Behold, there Thou hast that is
Thine.” And what capacities of dramatic effect in the cases of less
prudent owners,—those who had said in their hearts, “My Lord delayeth
His coming.” Michael Angelo’s St. Bartholomew, exhibiting his own skin
flayed off him, awakes but a minor interest in that classic picture.
How many an English squire might not we, with more pictorial advantage,
see represented as adorned with the flayed skins of other people? Micah
the Morasthite, throned above them on the rocks of the mountain of the
Lord, while his Master now takes up His parable, “Hear, I pray you, ye
heads of Jacob, and ye princes of the house of Israel; Is it not for
you to know judgment, who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay
their skin from off them, and they break their bones, and chop them in
pieces as for the pot.”
And how of the appeals on the other side? “Lord, Thou gavest me one
land; behold, I have gained beside it ten lands more.” You think that
an exceptionally economical landlord might indeed be able to say so
much for himself; and that the increasing of their estates has at least
been held a desirable thing by all of them, however Fortune, and the
sweet thyme-scented Turf of England, might thwart their best
intentions. Indeed it is well to have coveted—much more to have
gained—increase of estate, in a certain manner. But neither the
Morasthite nor his Master have any word of praise for you in
appropriating surreptitiously, portions, say, of Hampstead Heath, or
Hayes Common, or even any bit of gipsy-pot-boiling land at the
roadside. Far the contrary: In that day of successful appropriation,
there is one that shall take up a parable against you, and say, “We be
utterly spoiled. He hath changed the portion of my people; turning
away, he hath divided our fields. Therefore thou shalt have none that
shall cast a cord by lot in the congregation of the Lord.” In modern
words, you shall have quite unexpected difficulties in getting your
legal documents drawn up to your satisfaction; and truly, as you have
divided the fields of the poor, the poor, in their time, shall divide
yours.
Nevertheless, in their deepest sense, those triumphant words, “Behold,
I have gained beside it ten lands more,” must be on the lips of every
landlord who honourably enters into his rest; whereas there will soon
be considerable difficulty, as I think you are beginning to perceive,
not only in gaining more, but even in keeping what you have got.
For the gipsy hunt is up also, as well as Harry our King’s; and the hue
and cry loud against your land and you; your tenure of it is in dispute
before a multiplying mob, deaf and blind as you,—frantic for the
spoiling of you. The British Constitution is breaking fast. It never
was, in its best days, entirely what its stout owner flattered himself.
Neither British Constitution, nor British law, though it blanch every
acre with an acre of parchment, sealed with as many seals as the meadow
had buttercups, can keep your landlordships safe, henceforward, for an
hour. You will have to fight for them as your fathers did, if you mean
to keep them.
That is your only sound and divine right to them; and of late you seem
doubtful of appeal to it. You think political economy and peace
societies will contrive some arithmetical evangel of possession. You
will not find it so. If a man is not ready to fight for his land, and
for his wife, no legal forms can secure them to him. They can affirm
his possession; but neither grant, sanction, nor protect it. To his own
love, to his own resolution, the lordship is granted; and to those
only.
That is the first ‘labour’ of landlords, then. Fierce exercise of body
and mind, in so much pugnacity as shall supersede all office of legal
documents. Whatever labour you mean to put on your land, your first
entirely Divine labour is to keep hold of it. And are you ready for
that toil to-day? It will soon be called for. Sooner or later, within
the next few years, you will find yourselves in Parliament in front of
a majority resolved on the establishment of a Republic, and the
division of lands. Vainly the landed millowners will shriek for the
“operation of natural laws of political economy.” The vast natural law
of carnivorous rapine which they have declared their Baal-God, in so
many words, will be in equitable operation then; and not, as they
fondly hoped to keep it, all on their own side. Vain, then, your
arithmetical or sophistical defence. You may pathetically plead to the
people’s majority, that the divided lands will not give much more than
the length and breadth of his grave to each mob-proprietor. They will
answer, “We will have what we can get;—at all events, you shall keep it
no longer.” And what will you do? Send for the Life Guards and clear
the House, and then, with all the respectable members of society as
special constables, guard the streets? That answered well against the
Chartist meeting on Kennington Common in 1848. Yes; but in 1880 it will
not be a Chartist meeting at Kennington, but a
magna-and-maxima-Chartist Ecclesia at Westminster, that you must deal
with. You will find a difference, and to purpose. Are you prepared to
clear the streets with the Woolwich infant,—thinking that out of the
mouth of that suckling, God will perfect your praise, and ordain your
strength? Be it so; but every grocer’s and chandler’s shop in the
thoroughfares of London is a magazine of petroleum and percussion
powder; and there are those who will use both, among the Republicans.
And you will see your father the Devil’s will done on earth, as it is
in hell.
I call him your father, for you have denied your mortal fathers, and
the Heavenly One. You have declared, in act and thought, the ways and
laws of your sires—obsolete, and of your God—ridiculous; above all, the
habits of obedience, and the elements of justice. You were made lords
over God’s heritage. You thought to make it your own heritage; to be
lords of your own land, not of God’s land. And to this issue of
ownership you are come.
And what a heritage it was, you had the lordship over! A land of
fruitful vales and pastoral mountains; and a heaven of pleasant
sunshine and kindly rain; and times of sweet prolonged summer, and
cheerful transient winter; and a race of pure heart, iron sinew,
splendid fame, and constant faith.
All this was yours! the earth with its fair fruits and innocent
creatures;—the firmament with its eternal lights and dutiful
seasons;—the men, souls and bodies, your fathers’ true servants for a
thousand years,—their lives, and their children’s children’s lives
given into your hands, to save or to destroy; their food yours,—as the
grazing of the sheep is the shepherd’s; their thoughts yours,—priest
and tutor chosen for them by you; their hearts yours,—if you would but
so much as know them by sight and name, and give them the passing grace
of your own glance, as you dwelt among them, their king. And all this
monarchy and glory, all this power and love, all this land and its
people, you pitifullest, foulest of Iscariots, sopped to choking with
the best of the feast from Christ’s own fingers, you have deliberately
sold to the highest bidder;—Christ, and His Poor, and His Paradise
together; and instead of sinning only, like poor natural Adam,
gathering of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, you, who don’t want to
gather it, touch it with a vengeance,—cut it down, and sell the timber.
Judases with the big bag—game-bag to wit!—to think how many of your
dull Sunday mornings have been spent, for propriety’s sake, looking
chiefly at those carved angels blowing trumpets above your family
vaults; and never one of you has had Christianity enough in him to
think that he might as easily have his moors full of angels as of
grouse. And now, if ever you did see a real angel before the Day of
Judgment, your first thought would be,—to shoot it.
And for your ‘family’ vaults, what will be the use of them to you? Does
not Mr. Darwin show you that you can’t wash the slugs out of a lettuce
without disrespect to your ancestors? Nay, the ancestors of the modern
political economist cannot have been so pure;—they were not—he tells
you himself—vegetarian slugs, but carnivorous ones—those, to wit, that
you see also carved on your tombstones, going in and out at the eyes of
skulls. And truly, I don’t know what else the holes in the heads of
modern political economists were made for.
If there are any brighter windows in your’s—if any audience chambers—if
any council chambers—if any crown of walls that the pin of Death has
not yet pierced,—it is time for you to rise to your work, whether you
live or die.
What are you to do, then? First,—the act which will be the foundation
of all bettering and strength in your own lives, as in that of your
tenants,—fix their rent; under legal assurance that it shall not be
raised; and under moral assurance that, if you see they treat your land
well, and are likely to leave it to you, if they die, raised in value,
the said rent shall be diminished in proportion to the improvement;
that is to say, providing they pay you the fixed rent during the time
of lease, you are to leave to them the entire benefit of whatever
increase they can give to the value of the land. Put the bargain in a
simple instance. You lease them an orchard of crab-trees for so much a
year; they leave you at the end of the lease, an orchard of golden
pippins. Supposing they have paid you their rent regularly, you have no
right to anything more than what you lent them—crab-trees, to wit. You
must pay them for the better trees which by their good industry they
give you back, or, which is the same thing, previously reduce their
rent in proportion to the improvement in apples. “The exact contrary,”
you observe, “of your present modes of proceeding.” Just so, gentlemen;
and it is not improbable that the exact contrary in many other cases of
your present modes of proceeding will be found by you, eventually, the
proper one, and more than that, the necessary one. Then the second
thing you have to do is to determine the income necessary for your own
noble and peaceful country life; and setting that aside out of the
rents, for a constant sum, to be habitually lived well within limits
of, put your heart and strength into the right employment of the rest
for the bettering of your estates, in ways which the farmers for their
own advantage could not or would not; for the growth of more various
plants; the cherishing, not killing, of beautiful living
creatures—bird, beast, and fish; and the establishment of such schools
of History, Natural History, and Art, as may enable your farmers’
children, with your own, to know the meaning of the words Beauty,
Courtesy, Compassion, Gladness, and Religion. Which last word,
primarily, (you have not always forgotten to teach this one truth,
because it chanced to suit your ends, and even the teaching of this one
truth has been beneficent;)—Religion, primarily, means
‘Obedience’—binding to something, or some one. To be bound, or in
bonds, as apprentice; to be bound, or in bonds, by military oath; to be
bound, or in bonds, as a servant to man; to be bound, or in bonds,
under the yoke of God. These are all divinely instituted, eternally
necessary, conditions of Religion; beautiful, inviolable captivity and
submission of soul in life and death. This essential meaning of
Religion it was your office mainly to teach,—each of you captain and
king, leader and lawgiver, to his people;—vicegerents of your Captain,
Christ. And now—you miserable jockeys and gamesters—you can’t get a
seat in Parliament for those all but worn-out buckskin breeches of
yours, but by taking off your hats to the potboy. Pretty classical
statues you will make, Coriolanuses of the nineteenth century, humbly
promising, not to your people gifts of corn, but to your potboys,
stealthy sale of adulterated beer!
Obedience!—you dare not so much as utter the word, whether to potboy,
or any other sort of boy, it seems, lately; and the half of you still
calling themselves Lords, Marquises, Sirs, and other such ancient
names, which—though omniscient Mr. Buckle says they and their heraldry
are nought—some little prestige lingers about still. You yourselves,
what do you yet mean by them—Lords of what?—Herrs, Signors, Dukes of
what?—of whom? Do you mean merely, when you go to the root of the
matter, that you sponge on the British farmer for your living, and are
strong-bodied paupers compelling your dole?
To that extent, there is still, it seems, some force in you. Heaven
keep it in you; for, as I have said, it will be tried, and soon; and
you would even yourselves see what was coming, but that in your
hearts—not from cowardice, but from shame,—you are not sure whether you
will be ready to fight for your dole; and would fain persuade
yourselves it will still be given, you for form’s sake, or pity’s.
No, my lords and gentlemen,—you won it at the lance’s point, and must
so hold it, against the clubs of Sempach, if still you may. No
otherwise. You won ‘it,’ I say,—your dole,—as matters now stand. But
perhaps, as matters used to stand, something else. As receivers of
alms, you will find there is no fight in you. No beggar, nor herd of
beggars, can fortify so very wide circumference of dish. And the real
secret of those strange breakings of the lance by the clubs of Sempach,
is—“that villanous saltpetre”—you think? No, Shakespearian lord; nor
even the sheaf-binding of Arnold, which so stopped the shaking of the
fruitless spiculæ. The utter and inmost secret is, that you have been
fighting these three hundred years for what you could get, instead of
what you could give. You were ravenous enough in rapine in the olden
times; [52] but you lived fearlessly and innocently by it, because,
essentially, you wanted money and food to give,—not to consume; to
maintain your followers with, not to swallow yourselves. Your chivalry
was founded, invariably, by knights who were content all their lives
with their horse and armour and daily bread. Your kings, of true power,
never desired for themselves more,—down to the last of them, Friedrich.
What they did desire was strength of manhood round them, and, in their
own hands, the power of largesse.
‘Largesse.’ The French word is obsolete; one Latin equivalent,
Liberalitas, is fast receiving another, and not altogether similar
significance, among English Liberals. The other Latin equivalent,
Generosity, has become doubly meaningless, since modern political
economy and politics neither require virtue, nor breeding. The Greek,
or Greek-descended, equivalents—Charity, Grace, and the like, your
Grace the Duke of —— can perhaps tell me what has become of them.
Meantime, of all the words, ‘Largesse,’ the entirely obsolete one, is
the perfectly chivalric one; and therefore, next to the French
description of Franchise, we will now read the French description of
Largesse,—putting first, for comparison with it, a few more sentences
[53] from the secretary’s speech at the meeting of Social Science in
Glasgow; and remembering also the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’s’ exposition of
the perfection of Lord Derby’s idea of agriculture, in the hands of the
landowner—“Cultivating” (by machinery) “large farms for himself.”
“Exchange is the result, put into action, of the desire to possess
that which belongs to another, controlled by reason and
conscientiousness. It is difficult to conceive of any human
transaction that cannot be resolved, in some form or other, into
the idea of an exchange. All that is essential in production are,”
(sic, only italics mine,) “directly evolved from this source.”
* * *
“Man has therefore been defined to be an animal that exchanges. It
will be seen, however, that he not only exchanges, but from the
fact of his belonging, in part, to the order carnivora, that he
also inherits, to a considerable degree, the desire to possess
without exchanging; or, in other words, by fraud and violence, when
such can be used for his own advantage, without danger to himself.”
* * *
“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, and which, besides,
would put a stop to production altogether, both reason and a sense
of justice would suggest the act of exchange, as the only proper
mode of obtaining things from one another.”
* * *
To anybody who had either reason or a sense of justice, it might
possibly have suggested itself that, except for the novelty of the
thing, mere exchange profits nobody, and presupposes a coincidence, or
rather a harmonious dissent, of opinion not always attainable.
Mr. K. has a kettle, and Mr. P. has a pot. Mr. P. says to Mr. K., ‘I
would rather have your kettle than my pot;’ and if, coincidently, Mr.
K. is also in a discontented humour, and can say to Mr. P., ‘I would
rather have your pot than my kettle,’ why—both Hanses are in luck, and
all is well; but is their carnivorous instinct thus to be satisfied?
Carnivorous instinct says, in both cases, ‘I want both pot and kettle
myself, and you to have neither,’ and is entirely unsatisfiable on the
principle of exchange. The ineffable blockhead who wrote the paper
forgot that the principle of division of labour underlies that of
exchange, and does not arise out of it, but is the only reason for it.
If Mr. P. can make two pots, and Mr. K. two kettles, and so, by
exchange, both become possessed of a pot and a kettle, all is well. But
the profit of the business is in the additional production, and only
the convenience in the subsequent exchange. For, indeed, there are in
the main two great fallacies which the rascals of the world rejoice in
making its fools proclaim: the first, that by continually exchanging,
and cheating each other on exchange, two exchanging persons, out of one
pot, alternating with one kettle, can make their two fortunes. That is
the principle of Trade. The second, that Judas’ bag has become a
juggler’s, in which, if Mr. P. deposits his pot, and waits awhile,
there will come out two pots, both full of broth; and if Mr. K.
deposits his kettle, and waits awhile, there will come out two kettles,
both full of fish! That is the principle of Interest.
However, for the present, observe simply the conclusion of our social
science expositor, that “the art of exchange is the only proper mode of
obtaining things from one another;” and now compare with this theory
that of old chivalry, namely, that gift was also a good way, both of
losing and gaining.
“And after, in the dance, went
Largesse, that set all her intent
For to be honourable and free.
Of Alexander’s kin was she;
Her mostë joy was, I wis,
When that she gave, and said, ‘Have this.’ [54]
Not Avarice, the foul caitiff, [55]
Was half, to gripe, so ententive,
As Largesse is to give, and spend.
And God always enough her send, (sent)
So that the more she gave away,
The more, I wis, she had alway.
Largesse had on a robe fresh
Of rich purpure, sarlinish; [56]
Well formed was her face, and clear,
And open had she her colere, (collar)
For she right then had in present
Unto a lady made present
Of a gold brooch, full well wrought;
And certes, it mis-set her nought,
For through her smocke, wrought with silk,
The flesh was seen as white as milke.”
Think over that, ladies, and gentlemen who love them, for a pretty way
of being decolletée. Even though the flesh should be a little sunburnt
sometimes,—so that it be the Sun of Righteousness, and not Baal, who
shines on it—though it darken from the milk-like flesh to the colour of
the Madonna of Chartres,—in this world you shall be able to say, I am
black, but comely; and, dying, shine as the brightness of the
firmament—as the stars for ever and ever. They do not receive their
glories,—however one differeth in glory from another,—either by, or on,
Exchange.