Verona, 18th June, 1872.
My Friends,
What an age of progress it is, by help of advertisements! No wonder you
put some faith in them, friends. In summer one's work is necessarily
much before breakfast; so, coming home tired to-day, I order a
steak, with which is served to me a bottle of "Moutarde Diaphane,"
from Bordeaux.
What a beautiful arrangement have we here! Fancy the appropriate
mixture of manufactures of cold and hot at Bordeaux--claret and
diaphanous mustard! Then the quantity of printing and proclamation
necessary to make people in Verona understand that diaphanous mustard
is desirable, and may be had at Bordeaux. Fancy, then, the packing,
and peeping into the packages, and porterages, and percentages
on porterages; and the engineering, and the tunnelling, and the
bridge-building, and the steam whistling, and the grinding of iron,
and raising of dust in the Limousin (Marmontel's country), and in
Burgundy, and in Savoy, and under the Mont Cenis, and in Piedmont,
and in Lombardy, and at last over the field of Solferino, to fetch
me my bottle of diaphanous mustard!
And to think that, besides paying the railway officers all along the
line, and the custom-house officers at the frontier, and the original
expenses of advertisement, and the profits of its proprietors, my
diaphanous mustard paid a dividend to somebody or other, all the way
here! I wonder it is not more diaphanous by this time!
An age of progress, indeed, in which the founding of my poor
St. George's Company, growing its own mustard, and desiring no
dividends, may well seem difficult. I have scarcely had courage
yet to insist on that second particular, but will try to find it,
on this Waterloo day.
Observe, then, once for all, it is to be a company for Alms-giving, not
for dividend-getting. For I still believe in Alms-giving, though most
people now-a-days do not, but think the only hopeful way of serving
their neighbour is to make a profit out of him. I am of opinion,
on the contrary, that the hopefullest way of serving him is to let
him make a profit out of me, and I only ask the help of people who
are at one with me in that mind.
Alms-giving, therefore, is to be our function; yet alms only of a
certain sort. For there are bedesmen and bedesmen, and our charities
must be as discriminate as possible.
For instance, those two steely and stalwart horsemen, who sit, by the
hour, under the two arches opposite Whitehall, from ten to four per
diem, to receive the public alms. It is their singular and well-bred
manner of begging, indeed, to keep their helmets on their heads, and
sit erect on horseback; but one may, with slight effort of imagination,
conceive the two helmets held in a reversed manner, each in the mouth
of a well-bred and politely-behaving dog, Irish greyhound, or the like;
sitting erect, it also, paws in air, with the brass instead of copper
pan in its mouth, plume downwards, for reception of pence.
"Ready to fight for us, they are, on occasional 18ths of June."
Doubtless, and able-bodied;--barons of truest make: but I thought your
idea of discriminate charity was to give rather to the sick than the
able-bodied? and that you have no hope of interfering henceforward,
except by money payments, in any foreign affairs?
"But the Guards are necessary to keep order in the Park."
Yes, certainly, and farther than the Park. The two breastplated
figures, glittering in transfixed attitudes on each side of
the authoritative clock, are, indeed, very precious time-piece
ornamentation. No watchmaker's window in Paris or Geneva can
show the like. Finished little figures, perfect down to the toes
of their boots,--the enamelled clasp on the girdle of the British
Constitution!--You think the security of that depends on the freedom
of your press, and the purity of your elections?
Do but unclasp this piece of dainty jewellery; send the metal of it
to the melting-pot, and see where your British Constitution will
be, in a few turns of the hands of the faultless clock. They are
precious statues, these, good friends; set there to keep you and me
from having too much of our own way; and I joyfully and gratefully
drop my penny into each helmet as I pass by, though I expect no other
dividend from that investment than good order, picturesque effect,
and an occasional flourish on the kettle-drum.
Likewise, from their contributed pence, the St. George's Company must
be good enough to expect dividend only in good order and picturesque
effect of another sort. For my notion of discriminate charity is
by no means, like most other people's, the giving to unable-bodied
paupers. My alms-people are to be the ablest bodied I can find; the
ablest minded I can make; and from ten to four every day will be on
duty. Ten to four, nine to three, or perhaps six to twelve;--just
the time those two gilded figures sit with their tools idle on their
shoulders, (being fortunately without employment,) my ungilded,
but not unstately, alms-men shall stand with tools at work, mattock
or flail, axe or hammer. And I do not doubt but in little time, they
will be able to thresh or hew rations for their day out of the ground,
and that our help to them need only be in giving them that to hew them
out of. Which, you observe, is just what I ask may be bought for them.
"'May be bought,' but by whom? and for whom, how distributed, in whom
vested?" and much more you have to ask.
As soon as I am sure you understand what needs to be done, I will
satisfy you as to the way of doing it.
But I will not let you know my plans, till you acknowledge my
principles, which I have no expectation of your doing yet awhile.
June 22nd.
"Bought for them"--for whom? How should I know? The best people I can
find, or make, as chance may send them: the Third Fors must look to
it. Surely it cannot matter much, to you, whom the thing helps, so
long as you are quite sure, and quite content, that it won't help you?
That last sentence is wonderfully awkward English, not to say
ungrammatical; but I must write such English as may come to-day, for
there's something wrong with the Post, or the railroads, and I have
no revise of what I wrote for you at Florence, a fortnight since;
so that must be left for the August Letter, and meanwhile I must
write something quickly in its place, or be too late for the first
of July. Of the many things I have to say to you, it matters little
which comes first; indeed, I rather like the Third Fors to take the
order of them into her hands, out of mine.
I repeat my question. It surely cannot matter to you whom the thing
helps, so long as you are content that it won't, or can't, help
you? But are you content so? For that is the essential condition of
the whole business--I will not speak of it in terms of money--are you
content to give work? Will you build a bit of wall, suppose--to serve
your neighbour, expecting no good of the wall yourself? If so, you
must be satisfied to build the wall for the man who wants it built;
you must not be resolved first to be sure that he is the best man in
the village. Help any one, anyhow you can: so, in order, the greatest
possible number will be helped; nay, in the end, perhaps, you may
get some shelter from the wind under your charitable wall yourself;
but do not expect it, nor lean on any promise that you shall find
your bread again, once cast away; I can only say that of what I have
chosen to cast fairly on the waters myself, I have never yet, after
any number of days, found a crumb. Keep what you want; cast what you
can, and expect nothing back, once lost, or once given.
But for the actual detail of the way in which benefit might thus begin,
and diffuse itself, here is an instance close at hand. Yesterday
a thunder-shower broke over Verona in the early afternoon; and in
a quarter of an hour the streets were an inch deep in water over
large spaces, and had little rivers at each side of them. All these
little rivers ran away into the large river--the Adige, which plunges
down under the bridges of Verona, writhing itself in strong rage; for
Verona, with its said bridges, is a kind of lock-gate upon the Adige,
half open--lock-gate on the ebbing rain of all the South Tyrolese
Alps. The little rivers ran into it, not out of the streets only,
but from all the hillsides; millions of sudden streams. If you look at
Charles Dickens's letter about the rain in Glencoe, in Mr. Forster's
Life of him, it will give you a better idea of the kind of thing
than I can, for my forte is really not description, but political
economy. Two hours afterwards the sky was clear, the streets dry,
the whole thunder-shower was in the Adige, ten miles below Verona,
making the best of its way to the sea, after swelling the Po a little
(which is inconveniently high already), and I went out with my friends
to see the sun set clear, as it was likely to do, and did, over the
Tyrolese mountains.
The place fittest for such purpose is a limestone crag about five
miles nearer the hills, rising out of the bed of a torrent, which,
as usual, I found a bed only; a little washing of the sand into moist
masses here and there being the only evidence of the past rain.
Above it, where the rocks were dry, we sat down, to draw, or to look;
but I was too tired to draw, and cannot any more look at a sunset with
comfort, because, now that I am fifty-three, the sun seems to me to
set so horribly fast; when one was young, it took its time; but now
it always drops like a shell, and before I can get any image of it,
is gone, and another day with it.
So, instead of looking at the sun, I got thinking about the dry bed
of the stream, just beneath. Ugly enough it was; cut by occasional
inundation irregularly out of the thick masses of old Alpine shingle,
nearly every stone of it the size of an ostrich-egg. And, by the
way, the average size of shingle in given localities is worth your
thinking about, geologically. All through this Veronese plain the
stones are mostly of ostrich-egg size and shape; some forty times as
big as the pebbles of English shingle (say of the Addington Hills),
and not flat nor round; but resolvedly oval. Now there is no reason,
that I know of, why large mountains should break into large pebbles,
and small ones into small; and indeed the consistent reduction of
our own masses of flint, as big as a cauliflower, leaves and all,
into the flattish rounded pebble, seldom wider across than half
a crown, of the banks of Addington, is just as strange a piece of
systematic reduction as the grinding of Monte Baldo into sculpture
of ostrich-eggs:--neither of the processes, observe, depending upon
questions of time, but of method of fracture.
The evening drew on, and two peasants who had been cutting hay on a
terrace of meadow among the rocks, left their work, and came to look
at the sketchers, and make out, if they could, what we wanted on their
ground. They did not speak to us, but bright light came into the face
of one, evidently the master, on being spoken to, and excuse asked of
him for our presence among his rocks, by which he courteously expressed
himself as pleased, no less than (though this he did not say) puzzled.
Some talk followed, of cold and heat, and anything else one knew the
Italian for, or could understand the Veronese for (Veronese being more
like Spanish than Italian); and I praised the country, as was just, or
at least as I could, and said I should like to live there. Whereupon he
commended it also, in measured terms; and said the wine was good. "But
the water?" I asked, pointing to the dry river-bed. The water was
bitter, he said, and little wholesome. "Why, then, have you let all
that thunder-shower go down the Adige, three hours ago?" "That was the
way the showers came." "Yes, but not the way they ought to go." (We
were standing by the side of a cleft in the limestone which ran down
through ledge after ledge, from the top of the cliff, mostly barren;
but my farmer's man had led two of his grey oxen to make what they
could of supper from the tufts of grass on the sides of it, half an
hour before). "If you had ever been at the little pains of throwing
half-a-dozen yards of wall here, from rock to rock, you would have
had, at this moment, a pool of standing water as big as a mill-pond,
kept out of that thunder-shower, which very water, to-morrow morning,
will probably be washing away somebody's hay-stack into the Po."
The above was what I wanted to say; but didn't know the Italian for
hay-stack. I got enough out to make the farmer understand what I meant.