Denmark Hill, 1st February, 1872.
My Friends,
In going steadily over our ground again, roughly broken last year,
you see that, after endeavouring, as I did last month, to make you see
somewhat more clearly the absurdity of fighting for a Holy Republic
before you are sure of having got so much as a single saint to make it
of, I have now to illustrate farther the admission made in page 8 of my
first Letter, that even the most courteous and perfect Monarchy cannot
make an unsaintly life into a saintly one, nor constitute thieving,
for instance, an absolutely praiseworthy profession, however glorious
or delightful. It is indeed more difficult to show this in the course
of past history than any other moral truth whatsoever. For, without
doubt or exception, thieving has not only hitherto been the most
respected of professions, but the most healthy, cheerful, and in the
practical outcome of it, though not in theory, even the honestest,
followed by men. Putting the higher traditional and romantic ideals,
such as that of our Robin Hood, and the Scottish Red Robin, for the
time, aside, and keeping to meagre historical facts, could any of you
help giving your heartiest sympathy to Master Francis Drake, setting
out in his little Paschal Lamb to seek his fortune on the Spanish seas,
and coming home, on that happy Sunday morning, to the unspeakable
delight of the Cornish congregation? Would you like to efface the
stories of Edward III., and his lion's whelp, from English history;
and do you wish that instead of pillaging the northern half of France,
as you read of them in the passages quoted in my fourth Letter, and
fighting the Battle of Creçy to get home again, they had stayed at home
all the time; and practised, shall we say, upon the flute, as I find
my moral friends think Frederick of Prussia should have done? Or would
you have chosen that your Prince Harry should never have played that
set with his French tennis-balls, which won him Harfleur, and Rouen,
and Orleans, and other such counters, which we might have kept, to this
day perhaps, in our pockets, but for the wood maid of Domremy? Are you
ready, even now, in the height of your morality, to give back India
to the Brahmins and their cows, and Australia to her aborigines and
their apes? You are ready? Well, my Christian friends, it does one's
heart good to hear it, providing only you are quite sure you know what
you are about. "Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him
labour." You are verily willing to accept that alternative? I inquire
anxiously, because I see that your Under Secretary of State for India,
Mr. Grant Duff, proposes to you, in his speech at Elgin, not at all
as the first object of your lives to be honest; but, as the first,
to be rich, and the second to be intelligent: now when you have all
become rich and intelligent, how do you mean to live? Mr. Grant Duff,
of course, means by being rich that you are each to have two powdered
footmen; but then who are to be the footmen, now that we mustn't have
blacks? And granting you all the intelligence in the world on the most
important subjects,--the spots in the sun, or the nodes of the moon,
as aforesaid,--will that help you to get your dinner, unless you steal
it in the old fashion? The subject is indeed discussed with closer
definition than by Mr. Grant Duff, by Mr. William Riddle, C.E., the
authority I quoted to you for taking property "under control." You
had better perhaps be put in complete possession of his views, as
stated by himself in the 'Republican,' of December last; the rather,
as that periodical has not had, according to Mr. Riddle, hitherto a
world-wide circulation:--
"THE SIMPLE AND ONLY REMEDY FOR THE WANTS OF NATIONS."
"It is with great grief that I hear that your periodical finds
but a limited sale. I ask you to insert a few words from me,
which may strike some of your readers as being important. These
are all in all. What all nations want, Sir, are--1, Shelter; 2,
Food; 3, Clothes; 4, Warmth; 5, Cleanliness; 6, Health; 7, Love;
8, Beauty. These are only to be got in one way. I will state
it. 1.--An International Congress must make a number of steam
engines, or use those now made, and taking all property under its
control (I fearlessly state it) must roll off iron and glass for
buildings to shelter hundreds of millions of people. 2.--Must,
by such engines, make steam apparatus to plough immense plains
of wheat, where steam has elbow-room abroad; must make engines to
grind it on an enormous scale, first fetching it in flat-bottomed
ships, made of simple form, larger than the Great Eastern, and of
simple form of plates, machine fastened; must bake it by machine
ovens commensurate. 3.--Machine looms must work unattended night
and day, rolling off textile yarns and fabrics, and machines must
make clothes, just as envelopes are knocked off. 4.--Machinery must
do laundress work, iron and mangling; and, in a word, our labour
must give place to machinery, laid down in gigantic factories
on common-sense principles by an International leverage. This
is the education you must inculcate. Then man will be at last
emancipated. All else is utter bosh, and I will prove it so when
and wherever I can get the means to lecture.
"Wm. Riddle, C.E.
"South Lambeth, Nov. 2."
Unfortunately, till those means can be obtained, (may it be soon),
it remains unriddled to us on what principles of "international
leverage" the love and beauty are to be provided. But the point I
wish you mainly to notice is, that for this general emancipation,
and elbow-room for men and steam, you are still required to find
"immense plains of wheat abroad." Is it not probable that these
immense plains may belong to somebody "abroad" already? And if not,
instead of bringing home their produce in flat-bottomed ships, why
not establish, on the plains themselves, your own flat-bottomed--I
beg pardon,--flat-bellied, persons, instead of living here in glass
cases, which surely, even at the British Museum, cannot be associated
in your minds with the perfect manifestation of love and beauty? It
is true that love is to be measured, in your perfected political
economy, by rectangular area, as you will find on reference to the
ingenious treatise of Mr. W. Stanley Jevons, M.A., Professor of Logic
and Political Economy in Owens College, Manchester, who informs you,
among other interesting facts, that pleasure and pain "are the ultimate
objects of the calculus of economy," and that a feeling, whether of
pleasure or pain, may be regarded as having two dimensions--namely,
in duration and intensity, so that the feeling, say of a minute, "may
be represented by a rectangle whose base corresponds to the duration of
a minute, and whose height is proportioned to the intensity." [5] The
collective area of the series of rectangles will mark the "aggregate
of feeling generated."
But the Professor appears unconscious that there is a third dimension
of pleasure and pain to be considered, besides their duration and
intensity; and that this third dimension is to some persons, the most
important of all--namely, their quality. It is possible to die of a
rose in aromatic pain; and, on the contrary, for flies and rats, even
pleasure may be the reverse of aromatic. There is swine's pleasure,
and dove's; villain's pleasure, and gentleman's, to be arranged,
the Professor will find, by higher analysis, in eternally dissimilar
rectangles.
My friends, the follies of Modern Liberalism, many and great though
they be, are practically summed in this denial or neglect of the
quality and intrinsic value of things. Its rectangular beatitudes,
and spherical benevolences,--theology of universal indulgence,
and jurisprudence which will hang no rogues, mean, one and all of
them, in the root, incapacity of discerning, or refusal to discern,
worth and unworth in anything, and least of all in man; whereas
Nature and Heaven command you, at your peril, to discern worth from
unworth in everything, and most of all in man. Your main problem is
that ancient and trite one, "Who is best man?" and the Fates forgive
much,--forgive the wildest, fiercest, cruellest experiments,--if fairly
made for the determination of that. Theft and blood-guiltiness are not
pleasing in their sight; yet the favouring powers of the spiritual
and material world will confirm to you your stolen goods; and their
noblest voices applaud the lifting of your spear, and rehearse the
sculpture of your shield, if only your robbing and slaying have been
in fair arbitrament of that question, "Who is best man?" But if you
refuse such inquiry, and maintain every man for his neighbour's match,
[6]--if you give vote to the simple, and liberty to the vile, the
powers of those spiritual and material worlds in due time present
you inevitably with the same problem, soluble now only wrong side
upwards; and your robbing and slaying must be done then to find out
"Who is worst man?" Which, in so wide an order of merit, is, indeed,
not easy; but a complete Tammany Ring, and lowest circle in the
Inferno of Worst, you are sure to find, and to be governed by.
And you may note that the wars of men, in this winnowing or sifting
function, separate themselves into three distinct stages. In healthy
times of early national development, the best men go out to battle,
and divide the spoil; in rare generosity, perhaps, giving as much to
those who tarry by the stuff, as to those who have followed to the
field. In the second, and more ingenious stage, which is the one
we have reached now in England and America, the best men still go
out to battle, and get themselves killed,--or, at all events, well
withdrawn from public affairs,--and the worst stop at home, manage
the government, and make money out of the commissariat. (See § 124 of
'Munera Pulveris,' and my note there on the last American War.) Then
the third and last stage, immediately preceding the dissolution of any
nation, is when its best men (such as they are)--stop at home too!--and
pay other people to fight for them. And this last stage, not wholly
reached in England yet, is, however, within near prospect; at least,
if we may again on this point refer to, and trust, the anticipations
of Mr. Grant Duff, 'who racks his brains, without success, to think
of any probable combination of European events in which the assistance
of our English force would be half so useful to our allies as money.'
Next month I will give you some farther account of the operations in
favour of their Italian allies in the fourteenth century, effected
by the White company under Sir John Hawkwood;--(they first crossed
the Alps with a German captain, however,)--not at all consisting in
disbursements of money; but such, on the contrary, as to obtain for
them--(as you read in my first Letter) the reputation, with good
Italian judges, of being the best thieves known at the time. It is
in many ways important for you to understand the origin and various
tendencies of mercenary warfare; the essential power of which,
in Christendom, dates, singularly enough, from the struggle of the
free burghers of Italy with a Tory gentleman, a friend of Frederick
II. of Germany; the quarrel, of which you shall hear the prettiest
parts, being one of the most dramatic and vital passages of mediæval
history. Afterwards we shall be able to examine, more intelligently,
the prospects in store for us according to the--I trust not too
painfully racked,--brains of our Under Secretary of State. But I
am tired to-day of following modern thought in these unexpectedly
attenuated conditions; and I believe you will also be glad to rest,
with me, by reading a few words of true history of such life as,
in here and there a hollow of the rocks of Europe, just persons have
sometimes lived, untracked by the hounds of war. And in laying them
before you, I begin to give these letters the completed character I
intend for them; first, as it may seem to me needful, commenting on
what is passing at the time, with reference always to the principles
and plans of economy I have to set before you; and then collecting
out of past literature, and in occasional frontispieces or woodcuts,
out of past art, what may confirm or illustrate things that are
for ever true: choosing the pieces of the series so that, both in
art and literature, they may become to you in the strictest sense,
educational, and familiarise you with the look and manner of fine work.
I want you, accordingly, now to read attentively some pieces of
agricultural economy, out of Marmontel's 'Contes Moraux,'--(we too
grandly translate the title into 'Moral Tales,' for the French word
Moeurs does not in accuracy correspond to our Morals); and I think
it first desirable that you should know something about Marmontel
himself. He was a French gentleman of the old school; not noble, nor,
in French sense, even "gentilhomme;" but a peasant's son, who made
his way into Parisian society by gentleness, wit, and a dainty and
candid literary power. He became one of the humblest, yet honestest,
placed scholars at the court of Louis XV., and wrote pretty, yet wise,
sentimental stories, in finished French, which I must render as I
can in broken English; but, however rudely translated, the sayings
and thoughts in them deserve your extreme attention, for in their
fine, tremulous way, like the blossoming heads of grass in May,
they are perfect. For introduction then, you shall have, to-day, his
own description of his native place, Bort, in central south France,
and of the circumstances of his child-life. You must take it without
further preamble--my pages running short.
"Bort, situated on the river Dordogne, between Auvergne and
the province of Limoges, is a frightful place enough, seen by the
traveller descending suddenly on it; lying, as it does, at the bottom
of a precipice, and looking as if the storm torrents would sweep it
away, or as if, some day, it must be crushed under a chain of volcanic
rocks, some planted like towers on the height which commands the town,
and others already overhanging, or half uprooted: but, once in the
valley, and with the eye free to wander there, Bort becomes full of
smiles. Above the town, on a green island which the river embraces with
equal streams, there is a thicket peopled with birds, and animated
also with the motion and noise of a mill. On each side of the river
are orchards and fields, cultivated with laborious care. Below the
village the valley opens, on one side of the river, into a broad, flat
meadow, watered by springs; on the other, into sloping fields, crowned
by a belt of hills whose soft slope contrasts with the opposing rocks,
and is divided, farther on, by a torrent which rolls and leaps through
the forest, and falls into the Dordogne in one of the most beautiful
cataracts on the Continent. Near that spot is situated the little farm
of St. Thomas, where I used to read Virgil under the blossoming trees
that surrounded our bee-hives, and where I made delicious lunches
of their honey. On the other side of the town, above the mill, and
on the slope to the river, was the enclosure where, on fête days, my
father took me to gather grapes from the vines he had himself planted,
or cherries, plums, and apples, from the trees he had grafted.
"But what in my memory is the chief charm of my native place is the
impression of the affection which my family had for me, and with
which my soul was penetrated in earliest infancy. If there is any
goodness in my character, it is to these sweet emotions, and the
perpetual happiness of loving and being loved that I believe it is
owing. What a gift does Heaven bestow on us in the virtue of parents!
"I owed much also to a certain gentleness of manners which reigned
then in my native town; and truly the sweet and simple life that
one led there must have had a strange attraction, for nothing was
more unusual than that the children of Bort should ever go away from
it. In their youth they were well educated, and in the neighbouring
colleges their colony distinguished itself; but they came back to
their homes as a swarm of bees comes back to the hive with its spoil.
"I learned to read in a little convent where the nuns were friends
of my mother. Thence I passed to the school of a priest of the town,
who gratuitously, and for his own pleasure, devoted himself to the
instruction of children; he was the only son of a shoemaker, one of
the honestest fellows in the world; and this churchman was a true
model of filial piety. I can yet remember, as if I had seen it but a
moment since, the air of quiet courtesy and mutual regard which the
old man and his son maintained to each other; the one never losing
sight of the dignity of the priesthood, nor the other of the sanctity
of the paternal character."
I interrupt my translation for a moment to ask you to notice how
this finished scholar applies his words. A vulgar writer would most
probably have said "the sanctity of the priesthood" and "the dignity
of the paternal character." But it is quite possible that a priest
may not be a saint, yet (admitting the theory of priesthood at all)
his authority and office are not, therefore, invalidated. On the
other hand, a father may be entirely inferior to his son, incapable
of advising him, and, if he be wise, claiming no strict authority
over him. But the relation between the two is always sacred.
"The Abbé Vaissère" (that was his name), "after he had fulfilled his
duty at the church, divided the rest of his time between reading,
and the lessons he gave to us. In fine weather, a little walk, and
sometimes for exercise a game at mall in the meadow, were his only
amusements. For all society he had two friends, people of esteem in
our town. They lived together in the most peaceful intimacy, seeing
each other every day, and every day with the same pleasure in their
meeting; and for fulfilment of good fortune, they died within a very
little while of each other. I have scarcely ever seen an example of
so sweet and constant equality in the course of human life.
"At this school I had a comrade, who was from my infancy an object of
emulation to me. His deliberate and rational bearing, his industry in
study, the care he took of his books, on which I never saw a stain;
his fair hair always so well combed, his dress always fresh in its
simplicity, his linen always white, were to me a constantly visible
example; and it is rare that a child inspires another child with such
esteem as I had for him. His father was a labourer in a neighbouring
village, and well known to mine. I used to walk with his son to
see him in his home. How he used to receive us, the white-haired
old man,--the good cream! the good brown bread that he gave us! and
what happy presages did he not please himself in making for my future
life, because of my respect for his old age. Twenty years afterwards,
his son and I met at Paris; I recognized in him the same character of
prudence and kindness which I had known in him at school, and it has
been to me no slight pleasure to name one of his children at baptism.
"When I was eleven years old, just past, my master judged me fit to
enter the fourth class of students; and my father consented, though
unwillingly, to take me to the College of Mauriac. His reluctance
was wise. I must justify it by giving some account of our household.
"I was the eldest of many children; my father, a little rigid, but
entirely good under his severe manner, loved his wife to idolatry;
and well he might! I have never been able to understand how, with the
simple education of our little convent at Bort, she had attained so
much pleasantness in wit, so much elevation in heart, and a sentiment
of propriety so just, pure, and subtle. My good Bishop of Limoges
has often spoken to me since, at Paris, with most tender interest,
of the letters that my mother wrote in recommending me to him.
"My father revered her as much as he loved; and blamed her only
for her too great tenderness for me: but my grandmother loved me no
less. I think I see her yet--the good little old woman! the bright
nature that she had! the gentle gaiety! Economist of the house,
she presided over its management, and was an example to us all of
filial tenderness, for she had also her own mother and her husband's
mother to take care of. I am now dating far back, being just able
to remember my great-grandmother drinking her little cup of wine at
the corner of the hearth; but, during the whole of my childhood,
my grandmother and her three sisters lived with us, and among all
these women, and a swarm of children, my father stood alone, their
support. With little means enough, all could live. Order, economy,
and labour,--a little commerce, but above all things, frugality"
(Note again the good scholar's accuracy of language: "Economy" the
right arrangement of things, "Frugality" the careful and fitting
use of them)--"these maintained us all in comfort. The little garden
produced vegetables enough for the need of the house; the orchard gave
us fruit, and our quinces, apples, and pears, preserved in the honey
of our bees, made, during the winter, for the children and old women,
the most exquisite breakfasts."
I interrupt again to explain to you, once for all, a chief principle
with me in translation. Marmontel says, "for the children and good
old women." Were I quoting the French I would give his exact words,
but in translating I miss the word "good," of which I know you are
not likely to see the application at the moment. You would not see
why the old women should be called good, when the question is only
what they had for breakfast. Marmontel means that if they had been
bad old women they would have wanted gin and bitters for breakfast,
instead of honey-candied quinces; but I can't always stop to tell
you Marmontel's meaning, or other people's, and therefore if I think
it not likely to strike you, and the word weakens the sentence in
the direction I want you to follow, I omit it in translating, as I
do also entire sentences, here and there; but never, as aforesaid,
in actual quotation.
"The flock of the fold of St. Thomas, clothed, with its wool, now the
women, and now the children; my aunt spun it, and spun also the hemp
which made our under-dress; the children of our neighbours came to
beat it with us in the evening by lamp-light, (our own walnut trees
giving us the oil,) and formed a ravishing picture. The harvest of our
little farm assured our subsistence; the wax and honey of our bees,
of which one of my aunts took extreme care, were a revenue, with little
capital. The oil of our fresh walnuts had flavour and smell, which we
liked better than those of the oil-olive, and our cakes of buck-wheat,
hot, with the sweet butter of Mont Dor, were for us the most inviting
of feasts. By the fireside, in the evening, while we heard the pot
boiling with sweet chestnuts in it, our grandmother would roast a
quince under the ashes and divide it among us children. The most
sober of women made us all gourmands. Thus, in a household, where
nothing was ever lost, very little expense supplied all our further
wants; the dead wood of the neighbouring forests was in abundance,
the fresh mountain butter and most delicate cheese cost little;
even wine was not dear, and my father used it soberly."
That is as much, I suppose, as you will care for at once. Insipid
enough, you think?--or perhaps, in one way, too sapid; one's soul and
affections mixed up so curiously with quince-marmalade? It is true, the
French have a trick of doing that; but why not take it the other way,
and say, one's quince-marmalade mixed up with affection? We adulterate
our affections in England, now-a-days, with a yellower, harder, baser
thing than that; and there would surely be no harm in our confectioners
putting a little soul into their sugar,--if they put in nothing worse?
But as to the simplicity--or, shall we say, wateriness,--of the style,
I can answer you more confidently. Milkiness would be a better word,
only one does not use it of styles. This writing of Marmontel's is
different from the writing you are accustomed to, in that there is
never an exaggerating phrase in it--never a needlessly strained or
metaphorical word, and never a misapplied one. Nothing is said pithily,
to show the author's power, diffusely, to show his observation, nor
quaintly, to show his fancy. He is not thinking of himself as an author
at all; but of himself as a boy. He is not remembering his native
valley as a subject for fine writing, but as a beloved real place,
about which he may be garrulous, perhaps, but not rhetorical. But is
it, or was it, or could it ever be, a real place, indeed?--you will
ask next. Yes, real in the severest sense; with realities that are
to last for ever, when this London and Manchester life of yours shall
have become a horrible, and, but on evidence, incredible, romance of
the past.
Real, but only partially seen; still more partially told. The
rightnesses only perceived; the felicities only remembered; the
landscape seen as if spring lasted always; the trees in blossom or
fruitage evermore: no shedding of leaf: of winter, nothing remembered
but its fireside.
Yet not untrue. The landscape is indeed there, and the life, seen
through glass that dims them, but not distorts; and which is only
dim to Evil.
But now supply, with your own undimmed insight, and better knowledge
of human nature; or invent, with imaginative malice, what evil you
think necessary to make the picture true. Still--make the worst of
it you will--it cannot but remain somewhat incredible to you, like
the pastoral scene in a pantomime, more than a piece of history.
Well; but the pastoral scene in a pantomime itself,--tell me,--is it
meant to be a bright or a gloomy part of your Christmas spectacle? Do
you mean it to exhibit, by contrast, the blessedness of your own
life in the streets outside; or, for one fond and foolish half-hour,
to recall the "ravishing picture" of days long lost? "The sheep-fold
of St. Thomas," (you have at least, in him, an incredulous saint,
and fit patron of a Republic at once holy and enlightened), the green
island full of singing birds, the cascade in the forest, the vines
on the steep river-shore;--the little Marmontel reading his Virgil
in the shade, with murmur of bees round him in the sunshine;--the
fair-haired comrade, so gentle, so reasonable, and, marvel of marvels,
beloved for being exemplary! Is all this incredible to you in its good
or in its evil? Those children rolling on the heaps of black and slimy
ground, mixed with brickbats and broken plates and bottles, in the
midst of Preston or Wigan, as edified travellers behold them when the
station is blocked, and the train stops anywhere outside,--the children
themselves, black, and in rags evermore, and the only water near them
either boiling, or gathered in unctuous pools, covered with rancid
clots of scum, in the lowest holes of the earth-heaps,--why do you
not paint these for pastime? Are they not what your machine gods have
produced for you? The mighty iron arms are visibly there at work;--no
St. Thomas can be incredulous about the existence of gods such as
they,--day and night at work--omnipotent, if not resplendent. Why do
you not rejoice in these; appoint a new Christmas for these, in memory
of the Nativity of Boilers, and put their realms of black bliss into
new Arcadias of pantomime--the harlequin, mask all over? Tell me,
my practical friends.
Believe me, faithfully yours,