The accounts of the state of St. George’s Fund, given without any
inconvenience in crowding type, on the last leaf of this number of
Fors, will, I hope, be as satisfactory to my subscribers as they are to
me. In these days of financial operation, the subscribers to anything
may surely be content when they find that all their talents have been
laid up in the softest of napkins; and even farther, that, though they
are getting no interest themselves, that lichenous growth of vegetable
gold, or mould, is duly developing itself on their capital.
The amount of subscriptions received, during the four years of my
mendicancy, might have disappointed me, if, in my own mind, I had made
any appointments on the subject, or had benevolence pungent enough to
make me fret at the delay in the commencement of the national felicity
which I propose to bestow. On the contrary, I am only too happy to
continue amusing myself in my study, with stones and pictures; and
find, as I grow old, that I remain resigned to the consciousness of any
quantity of surrounding vice, distress, and disease, provided only the
sun shine in at my window over Corpus Garden, and there are no whistles
from the luggage trains passing the Waterworks.
I understand this state of even temper to be what most people call
‘rational;’ and, indeed, it has been the result of very steady effort
on my own part to keep myself, if it might be, out of Hanwell, or that
other Hospital which makes the name of Christ’s native village dreadful
in the ear of London. For, having long observed that the most perilous
beginning of trustworthy qualification for either of those
establishments consisted in an exaggerated sense of self-importance;
and being daily compelled, of late, to value my own person and opinions
at a higher and higher rate, in proportion to my extending experience
of the rarity of any similar creatures or ideas among mankind, it
seemed to me expedient to correct this increasing conviction of my
superior wisdom, by companionship with pictures I could not copy, and
stones I could not understand:—while, that this wholesome seclusion may
remain only self-imposed, I think it not a little fortunate for me that
the few relations I have left are generally rather fond of me;—don’t
know clearly which is the next of kin,—and perceive that the
administration of my inconsiderable effects [65] would be rather
troublesome than profitable to them. Not in the least, therefore,
wondering at the shyness of my readers to trust me with money of
theirs, I have made, during these four years past, some few experiments
with money of my own,—in hopes of being able to give such account of
them as might justify a more extended confidence. I am bound to state
that the results, for the present, are not altogether encouraging. On
my own little piece of mountain ground at Coniston, I grow a large
quantity of wood-hyacinths and heather, without any expense worth
mentioning; but my only industrious agricultural operations have been
the getting three pounds ten worth of hay, off a field for which I pay
six pounds rent; and the surrounding, with a costly wall six feet high,
to keep out rabbits, a kitchen garden, which, being terraced and trim,
my neighbours say is pretty; and which will probably, every third year,
when the weather is not wet, supply me with a dish of strawberries.
At Carshalton, in Surrey, I have indeed had the satisfaction of
cleaning out one of the springs of the Wandel, and making it pleasantly
habitable by trout; but find that the fountain, instead of taking care
of itself when once pure, as I expected it to do, requires continual
looking after, like a child getting into a mess; and involves me
besides in continual debate with the surveyors of the parish, who
insist on letting all the roadwashings run into it. For the present,
however, I persevere, at Carshalton, against the wilfulness of the
spring and the carelessness of the parish; and hope to conquer both:
but I have been obliged entirely to abandon a notion I had of
exhibiting ideally clean street pavement in the centre of London,—in
the pleasant environs of Church Lane, St. Giles’s. There I had every
help and encouragement from the authorities; and hoped, with the staff
of two men and a young rogue of a crossing-sweeper, added to the
regular force of the parish, to keep a quarter of a mile square of the
narrow streets without leaving so much as a bit of orange-peel on the
footway, or an eggshell in the gutters. I failed, partly because I
chose too difficult a district to begin with, (the contributions of
transitional mud being constant, and the inhabitants passive,) but
chiefly because I could no more be on the spot myself, to give spirit
to the men, when I left Denmark Hill for Coniston.
I next set up a tea-shop at 29, Paddington Street, W., (an
establishment which my Fors readers may as well know of,) to supply the
poor in that neighbourhood with pure tea, in packets as small as they
chose to buy, without making a profit on the subdivision,—larger orders
being of course equally acceptable from anybody who cares to promote
honest dealing. The result of this experiment has been my ascertaining
that the poor only like to buy their tea where it is brilliantly
lighted and eloquently ticketed; and as I resolutely refuse to compete
with my neighbouring tradesmen either in gas or rhetoric, the patient
subdivision of my parcels by the two old servants of my mother’s, who
manage the business for me, hitherto passes little recognized as an
advantage by my uncalculating public. Also, steady increase in the
consumption of spirits throughout the neighbourhood faster and faster
slackens the demand for tea; but I believe none of these circumstances
have checked my trade so much as my own procrastination in painting my
sign. Owing to that total want of imagination and invention which makes
me so impartial and so accurate a writer on subjects of political
economy, I could not for months determine whether the said sign should
be of a Chinese character, black upon gold; or of a Japanese, blue upon
white; or of pleasant English, rose-colour on green; and still less how
far legible scale of letters could be compatible, on a board only a
foot broad, with lengthy enough elucidation of the peculiar offices of
‘Mr. Ruskin’s tea-shop.’ Meanwhile the business languishes, and the
rent and taxes absorb the profits, and something more, after the salary
of my good servants has been paid.
In all these cases, however, I can see that I am defeated only because
I have too many things on hand: and that neither rabbits at Coniston,
road-surveyors at Croydon, or mud in St. Giles’s would get the better
of me, if I could give exclusive attention to any one business:
meantime, I learn the difficulties which are to be met, and shall make
the fewer mistakes when I venture on any work with other people’s
money.
I may as well, together with these confessions, print a piece written
for the end of a Fors letter at Assisi, a month or two back, but for
which I had then no room, referring to the increase of commercial,
religious, and egotistic insanity, [66] in modern society, and delicacy
of the distinction implied by that long wall at Hanwell, between the
persons inside it, and out.
‘Does it never occur to me,’ (thus the letter went on) ‘that I may be
mad myself?’
Well, I am so alone now in my thoughts and ways, that if I am not mad,
I should soon become so, from mere solitude, but for my work. But it
must be manual work. Whenever I succeed in a drawing, I am happy, in
spite of all that surrounds me of sorrow. It is a strange feeling;—not
gratified vanity: I can have any quantity of praise I like from some
sorts of people; but that does me no vital good, (though dispraise does
me mortal harm); whereas to succeed to my own satisfaction in a manual
piece of work, is life,—to me, as to all men; and it is only the peace
which comes necessarily from manual labour which in all time has kept
the honest country people patient in their task of maintaining the
rascals who live in towns. But we are in hard times, now, for all men’s
wits; for men who know the truth are like to go mad from isolation; and
the fools are all going mad in ‘Schwärmerei,’—only that is much the
pleasanter way. Mr. Lecky, for instance, quoted in last Fors; how
pleasant for him to think he is ever so much wiser than Aristotle; and
that, as a body, the men of his generation are the wisest that ever
were born—giants of intellect, according to Lord Macaulay, compared to
the pigmies of Bacon’s time, and the minor pigmies of Christ’s time,
and the minutest of all, the microscopic pigmies of Solomon’s time,
and, finally, the vermicular and infusorial pigmies—twenty-three
millions to the cube inch—of Mr. Darwin’s time, whatever that may be.
How pleasant for Mr. Lecky to live in these days of the Anakim,—“his
spear, to equal which, the tallest pine,” etc., etc., which no man
Stratford-born could have lifted, much less shaken.
But for us of the old race—few of us now left,—children who reverence
our fathers, and are ashamed of ourselves; comfortless enough in that
shame, and yearning for one word or glance from the graves of old, yet
knowing ourselves to be of the same blood, and recognizing in our
hearts the same passions, with the ancient masters of humanity;—we, who
feel as men, and not as carnivorous worms; we, who are every day
recognizing some inaccessible height of thought and power, and are
miserable in our shortcomings,—the few of us now standing here and
there, alone, in the midst of this yelping, carnivorous crowd, mad for
money and lust, tearing each other to pieces, and starving each other
to death, and leaving heaps of their dung and ponds of their spittle on
every palace floor and altar stone,—it is impossible for us, except in
the labour of our hands, not to go mad.
And the danger is tenfold greater for a man in my own position,
concerned with the arts which develope the more subtle brain
sensations; and, through them, tormented all day long. Mr. Leslie
Stephen rightly says how much better it is to have a thick skin and a
good digestion. Yes, assuredly; but what is the use of knowing that, if
one hasn’t? In one of my saddest moods, only a week or two ago, because
I had failed twice over in drawing the lifted hand of Giotto’s
‘Poverty;’ utterly beaten and comfortless, at Assisi, I got some
wholesome peace and refreshment by mere sympathy with a Bewickian
little pig in the roundest and conceitedest burst of pig-blossom. His
servant,—a grave old woman, with much sorrow and toil in the wrinkles
of her skin, while his was only dimpled in its divine thickness,—was
leading him, with magnanimous length of rope, down a grassy path behind
the convent; stopping, of course, where he chose. Stray stalks and
leaves of eatable things, in various stages of ambrosial rottenness,
lay here and there; the convent walls made more savoury by their
fumigation, as Mr. Leslie Stephen says the Alpine pines are by his
cigar. And the little joyful darling of Demeter shook his curly tail,
and munched; and grunted the goodnaturedest of grunts, and snuffled the
approvingest of snuffles, and was a balm and beatification to behold;
and I would fain have changed places with him for a little while, or
with Mr. Leslie Stephen for a little while,—at luncheon,
suppose,—anywhere but among the Alps. But it can’t be.
Hotel Meurice, Paris,
20th October, 1874.
I interrupt myself, for an instant or two, to take notice of two little
things that happen to me here—arriving to breakfast by night train from
Geneva.
Expecting to be cold, I had ordered fire, and sat down by it to read my
letters as soon as I arrived, not noticing that the little parlour was
getting much too hot. Presently, in comes the chambermaid, to put the
bedroom in order, which one enters through the parlour. Perceiving that
I am mismanaging myself, in the way of fresh air, as she passes
through, “Il fait bien chaud, monsieur, ici,” says she reprovingly, and
with entire self-possession. Now that is French servant-character of
the right old school. She knows her own position perfectly, and means
to stay in it, and wear her little white radiant frill of a cap all her
days. She knows my position also; and has not the least fear of my
thinking her impertinent because she tells me what it is right that I
should know. Presently afterwards, an evidently German-importation of
waiter brings me up my breakfast, which has been longer in appearing
than it would have been in old times. It looks all right at first,—the
napkin, china, and solid silver sugar basin, all of the old régime.
Bread, butter,—yes, of the best still. Coffee, milk,—all right too.
But, at last, here is a bit of the new régime. There are no
sugar-tongs; and the sugar is of beetroot, and in methodically similar
cakes, which I must break with my finger and thumb if I want a small
piece, and put back what I don’t want for my neighbour, to-morrow.
‘Civilization,’ this, you observe, according to Professor Liebig and
Mr. John Stuart Mill. Not according to old French manners, however.
Now, my readers are continually complaining that I don’t go on telling
them my plan of life, under the rule of St. George’s Company.
I have told it them, again and again, in broad terms: agricultural
life, with as much refinement as I can enforce in it. But it is
impossible to describe what I mean by ‘refinement,’ except in details
which can only be suggested by practical need; and which cannot at all
be set down at once.
Here, however, to-day, is one instance. At the best hotel in what has
been supposed the most luxurious city of modern Europe,—because people
are now always in a hurry to catch the train, they haven’t time to use
the sugar-tongs, or look for a little piece among differently sized
lumps, and therefore they use their fingers; have bad sugar instead of
good, and waste the ground that would grow blessed cherry trees,
currant bushes, or wheat, in growing a miserable root as a substitute
for the sugar-cane, which God has appointed to grow where cherries and
wheat won’t, and to give juice which will freeze into sweet snow as
pure as hoar-frost.
Now, on the poorest farm of the St. George’s Company, the servants
shall have white and brown sugar of the best—or none. If we are too
poor to buy sugar, we will drink our tea without; and have
suet-dumpling instead of pudding. But among the earliest school
lessons, and home lessons, decent behaviour at table will be primarily
essential; and of such decency, one little exact point will be—the
neat, patient, and scrupulous use of sugar-tongs instead of fingers. If
we are too poor to have silver basins, we will have delf ones; if not
silver tongs, we will have wooden ones; and the boys of the house shall
be challenged to cut, and fit together, the prettiest and handiest
machines of the sort they can contrive. In six months you would find
more real art fancy brought out in the wooden handles and claws, than
there is now in all the plate in London.
Now, there’s the cuckoo-clock striking seven, just as I sit down to
correct the press of this sheet, in my nursery at Herne Hill; and
though I don’t remember, as the murderer does in Mr. Crummles’ play,
having heard a cuckoo-clock strike seven—in my infancy, I do remember,
in my favourite ‘Frank,’ much talk of the housekeeper’s cuckoo-clock,
and of the boy’s ingenuity in mending it. Yet to this hour of seven in
the morning, ninth December of my fifty-fifth year, I haven’t the least
notion how any such clock says ‘Cuckoo,’ nor a clear one even of the
making of the commonest barking toy of a child’s Noah’s ark. I don’t
know how a barrel organ produces music by being ground; nor what real
function the pea has in a whistle. Physical science—all this—of a kind
which would have been boundlessly interesting to me, as to all boys of
mellifluous disposition, if only I had been taught it with due
immediate practice, and enforcement of true manufacture, or, in
pleasant Saxon, ‘handiwork.’ But there shall not be on St. George’s
estate a single thing in the house which the boys don’t know how to
make, nor a single dish on the table which the girls will not know how
to cook.
By the way, I have been greatly surprised by receiving some letters of
puzzled inquiry as to the meaning of my recipe, given last year, for
Yorkshire Pie. Do not my readers yet at all understand that the whole
gist of this book is to make people build their own houses, provide and
cook their own dinners, and enjoy both? Something else besides,
perhaps; but at least, and at first, those. St. Michael’s mass, and
Christ’s mass, may eventually be associated in your minds with other
things than goose and pudding; but Fors demands at first no more
chivalry nor Christianity from you than that you build your houses
bravely, and earn your dinners honestly, and enjoy them both, and be
content with them both. The contentment is the main matter; you may
enjoy to any extent, but if you are discontented, your life will be
poisoned. The little pig was so comforting to me because he was wholly
content to be a little pig; and Mr. Leslie Stephen is in a certain
degree exemplary and comforting to me, because he is wholly content to
be Mr. Leslie Stephen; while I am miserable because I am always wanting
to be something else than I am. I want to be Turner; I want to be
Gainsborough; I want to be Samuel Prout; I want to be Doge of Venice; I
want to be Pope; I want to be Lord of the Sun and Moon. The other day,
when I read that story in the papers about the dog-fight, [67] I wanted
to be able to fight a bulldog.
Truly, that was the only effect of the story upon me, though I heard
everybody else screaming out how horrible it was. What’s horrible in
it? Of course it is in bad taste, and the sign of a declining era of
national honour—as all brutal gladiatorial exhibitions are; and the
stakes and rings of the tethered combat meant precisely, for England,
what the stakes and rings of the Theatre of Taormina,—where I saw the
holes left for them among the turf, blue with Sicilian lilies, in this
last April,—meant, for Greece, and Rome. There might be something
loathsome, or something ominous, in such a story, to the old Greeks of
the school of Heracles; who used to fight with the Nemean lion, or with
Cerberus, when it was needful only, and not for money; and whom their
Argus remembered through all Trojan exile. There might be something
loathsome in it, or ominous, to an Englishman of the school of
Shakespeare or Scott; who would fight with men only, and loved his
hound. But for you—you carnivorous cheats—what, in dog’s or devil’s
name, is there horrible in it for you? Do you suppose it isn’t more
manly and virtuous to fight a bulldog, than to poison a child, or cheat
a fellow who trusts you, or leave a girl to go wild in the streets? And
don’t you live, and profess to live—and even insolently proclaim that
there’s no other way of living than—by poisoning and cheating? And
isn’t every woman of fashion’s dress, in Europe, now set the pattern of
to her by its prostitutes?
What’s horrible in it? I ask you, the third time. I hate, myself,
seeing a bulldog ill-treated; for they are the gentlest and
faithfullest of living creatures if you use them well. And the best dog
I ever had was a bull-terrier, whose whole object in life was to please
me, and nothing else; though, if he found he could please me by holding
on with his teeth to an inch-thick stick, and being swung round in the
air as fast as I could turn, that was his own idea of entirely
felicitous existence. I don’t like, therefore, hearing of a bulldog’s
being ill-treated; but I can tell you a little thing that chanced to me
at Coniston the other day, more horrible, in the deep elements of it,
than all the dog, bulldog, or bull fights, or baitings, of England,
Spain, and California. A fine boy, the son of an amiable English
clergyman, had come on the coach-box round the Water-head to see me,
and was telling me of the delightful drive he had had. “Oh,” he said,
in the triumph of his enthusiasm, “and just at the corner of the wood,
there was such a big squirrel! and the coachman threw a stone at it,
and nearly hit it!”
‘Thoughtlessness—only thoughtlessness’—say you—proud father? Well,
perhaps not much worse than that. But how could it be much worse?
Thoughtlessness is precisely the chief public calamity of our day; and
when it comes to the pitch, in a clergyman’s child, of not thinking
that a stone hurts what it hits of living things, and not caring for
the daintiest, dextrousest, innocentest living thing in the northern
forests of God’s earth, except as a brown excrescence to be knocked off
their branches,—nay, good pastor of Christ’s lambs, believe me, your
boy had better have been employed in thoughtfully and resolutely
stoning St. Stephen—if any St. Stephen is to be found in these days,
when men not only can’t see heaven opened, but don’t so much as care to
see it, shut.
For they, at least, meant neither to give pain nor death without
cause,—that unanimous company who stopped their ears,—they, and the
consenting bystander who afterwards was sorry for his mistake.
But, on the whole, the time has now come when we must cease throwing of
stones either at saints or squirrels; and, as I say, build our own
houses with them, honestly set: and similarly content ourselves in
peaceable use of iron and lead, and other such things which we have
been in the habit of throwing at each other dangerously, in
thoughtlessness; and defending ourselves against as thoughtlessly,
though in what we suppose to be an ingenious manner. Ingenious or not,
will the fabric of our new ship of the Line, ‘Devastation,’ think you,
follow its fabricator in heavenly places, when he dies in the Lord? In
such representations as I have chanced to see of probable Paradise,
Noah is never without his ark;—holding that up for judgment as the main
work of his life. Shall we hope at the Advent to see the builder of the
‘Devastation’ invite St. Michael’s judgment on his better style of
naval architecture, and four-foot-six-thick ‘armour of light’?
It is to-day the second Sunday in Advent, and all over England, about
the time that I write these words, full congregations will be for the
second time saying Amen to the opening collect of the Christian year.
I wonder how many individuals of the enlightened public understand a
single word of its first clause:
“Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of
darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of
this mortal life.”
How many of them, may it be supposed, have any clear knowledge of what
grace is, or of what the works of darkness are which they hope to have
grace to cast away; or will feel themselves, in the coming year, armed
with any more luminous mail than their customary coats and gowns, hosen
and hats? Or again, when they are told to “have no fellowship with the
unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them,”—what fellowship
do they recognize themselves to have guiltily formed; and whom, or
what, will they feel now called upon to reprove?
In last Fors, I showed you how the works of darkness were
unfruitful;—the precise reverse of the fruitful, or creative, works of
Light;—but why in this collect, which you pray over and over again all
Advent, do you ask for ‘armour’ instead of industry? You take your coat
off to work in your own gardens; why must you put a coat of mail on,
when you are to work in the Garden of God?
Well; because the earthworms in it are big—and have teeth and claws,
and venomous tongues. So that the first question for you is indeed, not
whether you have a mind to work in it—many a coward has that—but
whether you have courage to stand in it, and armour proved enough to
stand in.
Suppose you let the consenting bystander who took care of the coats
taken off to do that piece of work on St. Stephen, explain to you the
pieces out of St. Michael’s armoury needful to the husbandman, or
Georgos, of God’s garden.
“Stand therefore; having your loins girt about with Truth.”
That means, that the strength of your backbone depends on your meaning
to do true battle.
“And having on the breastplate of Justice.”
That means, there are to be no partialities in your heart, of anger or
pity;—but you must only in justice kill, and only in justice keep
alive.
“And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of Peace.”
That means, that where your foot pauses, moves, or enters, there shall
be peace; and where you can only shake the dust of it on the threshold,
mourning.
“Above all, take the shield of Faith.”
Of fidelity or obedience to your captain, showing his bearings, argent,
a cross gules; your safety, and all the army’s, being first in the
obedience of faith: and all casting of spears vain against such guarded
phalanx.
“And take the helmet of Salvation.”
Elsewhere, the hope of salvation, that being the defence of your
intellect against base and sad thoughts, as the shield of fidelity is
the defence of your heart against burning and consuming passions.
“And the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.”
That being your weapon of war,—your power of action, whether with sword
or ploughshare; according to the saying of St. John of the young
soldiers of Christ, “I have written unto you, young men, because ye are
strong, and the Word of God abideth in you.” The Word by which the
heavens were of old; and which, being once only Breath, became in man
Flesh, ‘quickening it by the spirit’ into the life which is, and is to
come; and enabling it for all the works nobly done by the quick, and
following the dead.
And now, finish your Advent collect, and eat your Christmas fare, and
drink your Christmas wine, thankfully; and with understanding that if
the supper is holy which shows your Lord’s death till He come, the
dinner is also holy which shows His life; and if you would think it
wrong at any time to go to your own baby’s cradle side, drunk, do not
show your gladness by Christ’s cradle in that manner; but eat your
meat, and carol your carol in pure gladness and singleness of heart;
and so gird up your loins with truth, that, in the year to come, you
may do such work as Christ can praise, whether He call you to judgment
from the quick or dead; so that among your Christmas carols there may
never any more be wanting the joyfullest,—
O sing unto the Lord a new song:
Sing unto the Lord, all the earth.
Say among the heathen that the Lord is King:
The world also shall be stablished that it shall not be moved.
Let the heavens rejoice,
And let the earth be glad;
Let the sea shout, and the fulness thereof.
Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein:
Then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice
Before the Lord:
For He cometh, for He cometh to judge the earth:
He shall judge the world with righteousness,
And the people with His truth.