"The expense! What would be the expense to you of gathering a few
stones from this hillside? And the idle minutes, gathered out of a
week, if a neighbour or two joined in the work, could do all the
building." He paused at this--the idea of neighbours joining in
work appearing to him entirely abortive, and untenable by a rational
being. Which indeed, throughout Christendom, it at present is,--thanks
to the beautiful instructions and orthodox catechisms impressed by
the two great sects of Evangelical and Papal pardoneres on the minds
of their respective flocks--(and on their lips also, early enough in
the lives of the little bleating things. "Che cosa è la fede?" I heard
impetuously interrogated of a seven years' old one, by a conscientious
lady in a black gown and white cap, in St. Michael's, at Lucca, and
answered in a glib speech a quarter of a minute long). Neither have I
ever thought of, far less seriously proposed, such a monstrous thing
as that neighbours should help one another; but I have proposed, and
do solemnly still propose, that people who have got no neighbours, but
are outcasts and Samaritans, as it were, should put whatever twopenny
charity they can afford into useful unity of action; and that, caring
personally for no one, practically for every one, they should undertake
"la spesa" of work that will pay no dividend on their twopences; but
will both produce and pour oil and wine where they are most wanted. And
I do solemnly propose that the St. George's Company in England, and
(please the University of Padua) a St. Anthony's Company in Italy,
should positively buy such bits of barren ground as this farmer's at
Verona, and make the most of them that agriculture and engineering can.
Venice, 23rd June.
My letter will be a day or two late, I fear, after all; for I can't
write this morning, because of the accursed whistling of the dirty
steam-engine of the omnibus for Lido, waiting at the quay of the Ducal
Palace for the dirty population of Venice, which is now neither fish
nor flesh, neither noble nor fisherman--cannot afford to be rowed,
nor has strength nor sense enough to row itself; but smokes and
spits up and down the piazzetta all day, and gets itself dragged by
a screaming kettle to Lido next morning, to sea-bathe itself into
capacity for more tobacco.
Yet I am grateful to the Third Fors for stopping my revise; because
just as I was passing by Padua yesterday I chanced upon this fact,
which I had forgotten (do me the grace to believe that I knew it
twenty years ago), in Antonio Caccianiga's 'Vita Campestre.' [19]
"The Venetian Republic founded in Padua"--(wait a minute; for
the pigeons are come to my window-sill and I must give them some
breakfast)--"founded in Padua, in 1765, the first chair of rural
economy appointed in Italy, annexed to it a piece of ground destined
for the study, and called Peter Ardouin, a Veronese botanist, to
honour the school with his lectures."
Yes; that is all very fine; nevertheless, I am not quite sure
that rural economy, during the 1760 years previous, had not done
pretty well without a chair, and on its own legs. For, indeed, since
the beginning of those philosophies in the eighteenth century, the
Venetian aristocracy has so ill prospered that instead of being any
more able to give land at Padua, it cannot so much as keep a poor
acre of it decent before its own Ducal Palace, in Venice; nor hinder
this miserable mob, which has not brains enough to know so much as
what o'clock it is, nor sense enough so much as to go aboard a boat
without being whistled for like dogs, from choking the sweet sea air
with pitch-black smoke, and filling it with entirely devilish noise,
which no properly bred human being could endure within a quarter of a
mile of them--that so they may be sufficiently assisted and persuaded
to embark, for the washing of themselves, at the Palace quay.
It is a strange pass for things to have reached, under politic
aristocracies and learned professors; but the policy and learning
became useless, through the same kind of mistake on both sides. The
professors of botany forgot that botany, in its original Greek, meant
a science of things to be eaten; they pursued it only as a science of
things to be named. And the politic aristocracy forgot that their own
"bestness" consisted essentially in their being fit--in a figurative
manner--to be eaten, and fancied rather that their superiority was
of a titular character, and that the beauty and power of their order
lay wholly in being fit to be--named.
I must go back to my wall-building, however, for a minute or two
more, because you might probably think that my answer to the farmer's
objection about expense, (even if I had possessed Italian enough to
make it intelligible,) would have been an insufficient one; and that
the operation of embanking hill-sides so as to stay the rain-flow,
is a work of enormous cost and difficulty.
Indeed, a work productive of good so infinite as this would be, and
contending for rule over the grandest forces of nature, cannot be
altogether cheap, nor altogether facile. But spend annually one-tenth
of the sum you now give to build embankments against imaginary enemies,
in building embankments for the help of people whom you may easily
make your real friends,--and see whether your budget does not become
more satisfactory, so; and, above all, learn a little hydraulics.
I wasted some good time, a year or two since, over a sensational novel
in one of our magazines, which I thought would tell me more of what the
public were thinking about strikes than I could learn elsewhere. But
it spent itself in dramatic effects with lucifer matches, and I
learned nothing from it, and the public mislearned much. It ended,
(no, I believe it didn't end,--but I read no farther,) with the
bursting of a reservoir, and the floating away of a village. The
hero, as far as I recollect, was in the half of a house which was
just going to be washed down; and the anti-hero was opposite him,
in the half of a tree which was just going to be torn up; and the
heroine was floating between them down the stream, and one wasn't
to know, till next month, which would catch her. But the hydraulics
were the essentially bad part of the book, for the author made great
play with the tremendous weight of water against his embankment;--it
never having occurred to him that the gate of a Liverpool dry dock
can keep out--and could just as easily for that matter keep in--the
Atlantic Ocean, to the necessary depth in feet and inches; the depth
giving the pressure, not the superficies.
Nay, you may see, not unfrequently, on Margate sands, your own
six-years-old engineers of children keep out the Atlantic ocean
quite successfully, for a little while, from a favourite hole; the
difficulty being not at all in keeping the Atlantic well out at the
side, but from surreptitiously finding its way in at the bottom. And
that is the real difficulty for old engineers; properly the only one;
you must not let the Atlantic begin to run surreptitiously either in
or out, else it soon becomes difficult to stop; and all reservoirs
ought to be wide, not deep, when they are artificial, and should not be
immediately above villages (though they might always be made perfectly
safe merely by dividing them by walls, so that the contents could
not run out all at once). But when reservoirs are not artificial,
when the natural rocks, with adamantine wall, and embankment built
up from the earth's centre, are ready to catch the rain for you,
and render it back as pure as their own crystal,--if you will only
here and there throw an iron valve across a cleft,--believe me--if
you choose to have a dividend out of Heaven, and sell the Rain, you
may get it a good deal more easily and at a figure or two higher per
cent. than you can on diaphanous mustard. There are certainly few men
of my age who have watched the ways of Alpine torrents so closely as
I have (and you need not think my knowing something of art prevents
me from understanding them, for the first good canal-engineer in
Italy was Lionardo da Vinci, and more drawings of water-wheels and
water-eddies exist of his, by far, than studies of hair and eyes);
and the one strong impression I have respecting them is their utter
docility and passiveness, if you will educate them young. But our wise
engineers invariably try to manage faggots instead of sticks; and,
leaving the rivulets of the Viso without training, debate what bridle
is to be put in the mouth of the Po! Which, by the way, is a running
reservoir, considerably above the level of the plain of Lombardy;
and if the bank of that one should break, any summer's day, there will
be news of it, and more cities than Venice with water in their streets.
June 24th.
You must be content with a short letter (I wish I could flatter myself
you would like a longer one) this month; but you will probably see
some news of the weather here, yesterday afternoon, which will give
some emphasis to what I have been saying, not for the first time by
any means; and so I leave you to think of it, and remain
Faithfully yours,