Florence, 28th August, 1874.
I intended this letter to have been published on my mother’s birthday,
the second of next month. Fors, however, has entirely declared herself
against that arrangement, having given me a most unexpected piece of
work here, in drawing the Emperor, King, and Baron, who, throned by
Simone Memmi beneath the Duomo of Florence, beside a Pope, Cardinal,
and Bishop, represented, to the Florentine mind of the fourteenth
century, the sacred powers of the State in their fixed relation to
those of the Church. The Pope lifts his right hand to bless, and holds
the crosier in his left; having no powers but of benediction and
protection. The Emperor holds his sword upright in his right hand, and
a skull in his left, having alone the power of death. Both have triple
crowns; but the Emperor alone has a nimbus. The King has the diadem of
fleur-de-lys, and the ball and globe; the Cardinal, a book. The Baron
has his warrior’s sword; the Bishop, a pastoral staff. And the whole
scene is very beautifully expressive of what have been by learned
authors supposed the Republican or Liberal opinions of Florence, in her
day of pride.
The picture (fresco), in which this scene occurs, is the most complete
piece of theological and political teaching given to us by the elder
arts of Italy; and this particular portion of it is of especial
interest to me, not only as exponent of the truly liberal and communist
principles which I am endeavouring to enforce in these letters for the
future laws of the St. George’s Company; but also because my maternal
grandmother was the landlady of the Old King’s Head in Market Street,
Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and I could paint her Simone
Memmi’s King’s head, for a sign.
My maternal grandfather was, as I have said, a sailor, who used to
embark, like Robinson Crusoe, at Yarmouth, and come back at rare
intervals, making himself very delightful at home. I have an idea he
had something to do with the herring business, but am not clear on that
point; my mother never being much communicative concerning it. He
spoiled her, and her (younger) sister, with all his heart, when he was
at home; unless there appeared any tendency to equivocation, or
imaginative statements, on the part of the children, which were always
unforgiveable. My mother being once perceived by him to have distinctly
told him a lie, he sent the servant out forthwith to buy an entire
bundle of new broom twigs to whip her with. “They did not hurt me so
much as one would have done,” said my mother, “but I thought a good
deal of it.”
My grandfather was killed at two-and-thirty, by trying to ride, instead
of walk, into Croydon; he got his leg crushed by his horse against a
wall; and died of the hurt’s mortifying. My mother was then seven or
eight years old, and, with her sister, was sent to quite a fashionable
(for Croydon) day-school, (Mrs. Rice’s), where my mother was taught
evangelical principles, and became the pattern girl and best sewer in
the school; and where my aunt absolutely refused evangelical
principles, and became the plague and pet of it.
My mother, being a girl of great power, with not a little pride, grew
more and more exemplary in her entirely conscientious career, much
laughed at, though much beloved, by her sister; who had more wit, less
pride, and no conscience. At last my mother, being a consummate
housewife, was sent for to Scotland to take care of my paternal
grandfather’s house; who was gradually ruining himself; and who at last
effectually ruined, and killed, himself. My father came up to London;
was a clerk in a merchant’s house for nine years, without a holiday;
then began business on his own account; paid his father’s debts; and
married his exemplary Croydon cousin.
Meantime my aunt had remained in Croydon, and married a baker. By the
time I was four years old, and beginning to recollect things,—my father
rapidly taking higher commercial position in London,—there was
traceable—though to me, as a child, wholly incomprehensible—just the
least possible shade of shyness on the part of Hunter Street, Brunswick
Square, towards Market Street, Croydon. But whenever my father was
ill,—and hard work and sorrow had already set their mark on him,—we all
went down to Croydon to be petted by my homely aunt; and walk on Duppas
Hill, and on the heather of Addington.
(And now I go on with the piece of this letter written last month at
Assisi.)
My aunt lived in the little house still standing—or which was so four
months ago—the fashionablest in Market Street, having actually two
windows over the shop, in the second story; but I never troubled myself
about that superior part of the mansion, unless my father happened to
be making drawings in Indian ink, when I would sit reverently by and
watch; my chosen domains being, at all other times, the shop, the
bakehouse, and the stones round the spring of crystal water at the back
door (long since let down into the modern sewer); and my chief
companion, my aunt’s dog, Towzer, whom she had taken pity on when he
was a snappish, starved vagrant; and made a brave and affectionate dog
of: which was the kind of thing she did for every living creature that
came in her way, all her life long.
I am sitting now in the Sacristan’s cell at Assisi. Its roof is
supported by three massive beams,—not squared beams, but tree trunks
barked, with the grand knots left in them, answering all the purpose of
sculpture. The walls are of rude white plaster, though there is a
Crucifixion by Giottino on the back of one, outside the door; the
floor, brick; the table, olive wood; the windows two, and only about
four feet by two in the opening, (but giving plenty of light in the
sunny morning, aided by the white walls,) looking out on the valley of
the Tescio. Under one of them, a small arched stove for cooking; in a
square niche beside the other, an iron wash-hand stand,—that is to say,
a tripod of good fourteenth century work, carrying a grand brown
porringer, two feet across, and half a foot deep. Between the windows
is the fireplace, the wall above it rich brown with the smoke. Hung
against the wall behind me are a saucepan, gridiron, and toasting-fork;
and in the wall a little door, closed only by a brown canvas curtain,
opening to an inner cell nearly filled by the bedstead; and at the side
of the room a dresser, with cupboard below, and two wine flasks, and
three pots of Raphael ware on the top of it, together with the first
volume of the ‘Maraviglie di Dio nell’ anime del Purgatorio, del padre
Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli, della Compagnia de Gesu,’ (Roma, 1841). There
is a bird singing outside; a constant low hum of flies, making the ear
sure it is summer; a dove cooing, very low; and absolutely nothing else
to be heard, I find, after listening with great care. And I feel
entirely at home, because the room—except in the one point of being
extremely dirty—is just the kind of thing I used to see in my aunt’s
bakehouse; and the country and the sweet valley outside still rest in
peace, such as used to be on the Surrey hills in the olden days.
And now I am really going to begin my steady explanation of what the
St. George’s Company have to do.
1. You are to do good work, whether you live or die. ‘What is good
work?’ you ask. Well you may! For your wise pastors and teachers,
though they have been very careful to assure you that good works are
the fruits of faith, and follow after justification, have been so
certain of that fact that they never have been the least solicitous to
explain to you, and still less to discover for themselves, what good
works were; content if they perceived a general impression on the minds
of their congregations that good works meant going to church and
admiring the sermon on Sundays, and making as much money as possible in
the rest of the week.
It is true, one used to hear almsgiving and prayer sometimes
recommended by old-fashioned country ministers. But “the poor are now
to be raised without gifts,” says my very hard-and-well-working friend
Miss Octavia Hill; and prayer is entirely inconsistent with the laws of
hydro (and other) statics, says the Duke of Argyll.
It may be so, for aught I care, just now. Largesse and supplication may
or may not be still necessary in the world’s economy. They are not, and
never were, part of the world’s work. For no man can give till he has
been paid his own wages; and still less can he ask his Father for the
said wages till he has done his day’s duty for them.
Neither almsgiving nor praying, therefore, nor psalm-singing, nor
even—as poor Livingstone thought, to his own death, and our bitter
loss—discovering the mountains of the Moon, have anything to do with
“good work,” or God’s work. But it is not so very difficult to discover
what that work is. You keep the Sabbath, in imitation of God’s rest.
Do, by all manner of means, if you like; and keep also the rest of the
week in imitation of God’s work.
It is true that, according to tradition, that work was done a long time
ago, “before the chimneys in Zion were hot, and ere the present years
were sought out, and or ever the inventions of them that now sin, were
turned; and before they were sealed that have gathered faith for a
treasure.” [61] But the established processes of it continue, as his
Grace of Argyll has argutely observed;—and your own work will be good,
if it is in harmony with them, and duly sequent of them. Nor are even
the first main facts or operations by any means inimitable, on a duly
subordinate scale, for if Man be made in God’s image, much more is
Man’s work made to be the image of God’s work. So therefore look to
your model, very simply stated for you in the nursery tale of Genesis.
Day First.—The Making, or letting in, of Light.
Day Second.—The Discipline and Firmament of Waters.
Day Third.—The Separation of earth from water, and planting the
secure earth with trees.
Day Fourth.—The Establishment of time and seasons, and of the
authority of the stars.
Day Fifth.—Filling the water and air with fish and birds.
Day Sixth.—Filling the land with beasts; and putting divine life
into the clay of one of these, that it may have authority
over the others, and over the rest of the Creation.
Here is your nursery story,—very brief, and in some sort
unsatisfactory; not altogether intelligible, (I don’t know anything
very good that is,) nor wholly indisputable, (I don’t know anything
ever spoken usefully on so wide a subject that is); but substantially
vital and sufficient. So the good human work may properly divide itself
into the same six branches; and will be a perfectly literal and
practical following out of the Divine; and will have opposed to it a
correspondent Diabolic force of eternally bad work—as much worse than
idleness or death, as good work is better than idleness or death.