Venice, 3rd July, 1872.
My Friends,
You probably thought I had lost my temper, and written inconsiderately,
when I called the whistling of the Lido steamer 'accursed.'
I never wrote more considerately; using the longer and weaker word
'accursed' instead of the simple and proper one, 'cursed,' to take
away, as far as I could, the appearance of unseemly haste; and using
the expression itself on set purpose, not merely as the fittest for
the occasion, but because I have more to tell you respecting the
general benediction engraved on the bell of Lucca, and the particular
benediction bestowed on the Marquis of B.; several things more,
indeed, of importance for you to know, about blessing and cursing.
Some of you may perhaps remember the saying of St. James about the
tongue: "Therewith bless we God, and therewith curse we men; out of
the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these
things ought not so to be."
It is not clear whether St. James means that there should be no cursing
at all, (which I suppose he does,) or merely that the blessing and
cursing should not be uttered by the same lips. But his meaning,
whatever it was, did not, in the issue, matter; for the Church of
Christendom has always ignored this text altogether, and appointed
the same persons in authority to deliver on all needful occasions,
benediction or malediction, as either might appear to them due;
while our own most learned sect, wielding State power, has not only
appointed a formal service of malediction in Lent, but commanded
the Psalms of David, in which the blessing and cursing are inlaid as
closely as the black and white in a mosaic floor, to be solemnly sung
through once a month.
I do not wish, however, to-day to speak to you of the practice of
the churches; but of your own, which, observe, is in one respect
singularly different. All the churches, of late years, paying less
and less attention to the discipline of their people, have felt an
increasing compunction in cursing them when they did wrong; while also,
the wrong doing, through such neglect of discipline, becoming every day
more complex, ecclesiastical authorities perceived that, if delivered
with impartiality, the cursing must be so general, and the blessing
so defined, as to give their services an entirely unpopular character.
Now, there is a little screw steamer just passing, with no deck, an
omnibus cabin, a flag at both ends, and a single passenger; she is not
twelve yards long, yet the beating of her screw has been so loud across
the lagoon for the last five minutes, that I thought it must be a large
new steamer coming in from the sea, and left my work to go and look.
Before I had finished writing that last sentence, the cry of a boy
selling something black out of a basket on the quay became so sharply
distinguished above the voices of the always-debating gondoliers,
that I must needs stop again, and go down to the quay to see what he
had got to sell. They were half-rotten figs, shaken down, untimely,
by the midsummer storms: his cry of "Fighiaie" scarcely ceased,
being delivered, as I observed, just as clearly between his legs,
when he was stooping to find an eatable portion of the black mess to
serve a customer with, as when he was standing up. His face brought
the tears into my eyes, so open, and sweet, and capable it was;
and so sad. I gave him three very small halfpence, but took no figs,
to his surprise: he little thought how cheap the sight of him and his
basket was to me, at the money; nor what this fruit, "that could not
be eaten, it was so evil," sold cheap before the palace of the Dukes
of Venice, meant, to any one who could read signs, either in earth,
or her heaven and sea. [20]
Well; the blessing, as I said, not being now often legitimately
applicable to particular people by Christian priests, they gradually
fell into the habit of giving it of pure grace and courtesy to their
congregations; or more especially to poor persons, instead of money,
or to rich ones, in exchange for it,--or generally to any one to
whom they wished to be polite: while, on the contrary, the cursing,
having now become widely applicable, and even necessary, was left
to be understood, but not expressed; and at last, to all practical
purpose, abandoned altogether, (the rather that it had become very
disputable whether it ever did any one the least mischief); so that,
at this time being, the Pope, in his charmingest manner, blesses the
bridecake of the Marquis of B., making, as it were, an ornamental
confectionery figure of himself on the top of it; but has not, in
anywise, courage to curse the King of Italy, although that penniless
monarch has confiscated the revenues of every time-honoured religious
institution in Italy; and is about, doubtless, to commission some
of the Raphaels in attendance at his court, (though, I believe,
grooms are more in request there,) to paint an opposition fresco
in the Vatican, representing the Sardinian instead of the Syrian
Heliodorus, successfully abstracting the treasures of the temple,
and triumphantly putting its angels to flight.
Now the curious difference between your practice, and the Church's, to
which I wish to-day to direct your attention, is, that while thus the
clergy, in what efforts they make to retain their influence over human
mind, use cursing little, and blessing much, you working-men more and
more frankly every day adopt the exactly contrary practice of using
benediction little, and cursing much: so that, even in the ordinary
course of conversation among yourselves, you very rarely bless,
audibly, so much as one of your own children; but not unfrequently
damn, audibly, them, yourselves, and your friends.
I wish you to think over the meaning of this habit of yours very
carefully with me. I call it a habit of yours, observe, only with
reference to your recent adoption of it. You have learned it from
your superiors; but they, partly in consequence of your too eager
imitation of them, are beginning to mend their manners; and it would
excite much surprise, nowadays, in any European court, to hear the
reigning monarch address the heir-apparent on an occasion of state
festivity, as a Venetian ambassador heard our James the First address
Prince Charles,--"Devil take you, why don't you dance?" But, strictly
speaking, the prevalence of the habit among all classes of laymen is
the point in question.
4th July.
And first, it is necessary that you should understand accurately
the difference between swearing and cursing, vulgarly so often
confounded. They are entirely different things: the first is invoking
the witness of a Spirit to an assertion you wish to make; the second
is invoking the assistance of a Spirit, in a mischief you wish
to inflict. When ill-educated and ill-tempered people clamorously
confuse the two invocations, they are not, in reality, either cursing
or swearing; but merely vomiting empty words indecently. True swearing
and cursing must always be distinct and solemn; here is an old Latin
oath, for instance, which, though borrowed from a stronger Greek one,
and much diluted, is still grand:
"I take to witness the Earth, and the stars, and the sea; the two
lights of heaven; the falling and rising of the year; the dark power
of the gods of sorrow; the sacredness of unbending Death; and may
the Father of all things hear me, who sanctifies covenants with his
lightning. For I lay my hand on the altar, and by the fires thereon,
and the gods to whom they burn, I swear that no future day shall
break this peace for Italy, nor violate the covenant she has made."
That is old swearing: but the lengthy forms of it appearing partly
burdensome to the celerity, and partly superstitious to the wisdom,
of modern minds, have been abridged,--in England, for the most part,
into the extremely simple "By God;" in France into "Sacred name of God"
(often the first word of the sentence only pronounced), and in Italy
into "Christ" or "Bacchus;" the superiority of the former Deity being
indicated by omitting the preposition before the name. The oaths are
"Christ,"--never "by Christ;" and "by Bacchus,"--never "Bacchus."
Observe also that swearing is only by extremely ignorant persons
supposed to be an infringement of the Third Commandment. It is
disobedience to the teaching of Christ; but the Third Commandment has
nothing to do with the matter. People do not take the name of God in
vain when they swear; they use it, on the contrary, very earnestly
and energetically to attest what they wish to say. But when the
Monster Concert at Boston begins, on the English day, with the hymn,
"The will of God be done," while the audience know perfectly well
that there is not one in a thousand of them who is trying to do it,
or who would have it done, if he could help it, unless it was his own
will too,--that is taking the name of God in vain, with a vengeance.
Cursing, on the other hand, is invoking the aid of a Spirit to a harm
you wish to see accomplished, but which is too great for your own
immediate power: and to-day I wish to point out to you what intensity
of faith in the existence and activity of a spiritual world is evinced
by the curse which is characteristic of the English tongue.
For, observe, habitual as it has become, there is still so much
life and sincerity in the expression, that we all feel our passion
partly appeased in its use; and the more serious the occasion, the
more practical and effective the cursing becomes. In Mr. Kinglake's
"History of the Crimean War," you will find the --th Regiment at Alma
is stated to have been materially assisted in maintaining position
quite vital to the battle by the steady imprecation delivered at it by
its colonel for half an hour on end. No quantity of benediction would
have answered the purpose; the colonel might have said, "Bless you,
my children," in the tenderest tones, as often as he pleased,--yet
not have helped his men to keep their ground.
I want you therefore, first, to consider how it happens that cursing
seems at present the most effectual means for encouraging human work;
and whether it may not be conceivable that the work itself is of
a kind which any form of effectual blessing would hinder instead
of help. Then, secondly, I want you to consider what faith in a
spiritual world is involved in the terms of the curse we usually
employ. It has two principal forms; one complete and unqualified,
"God damn your soul," implying that the soul is there, and that
we cannot be satisfied with less than its destruction: the other,
qualified, and on the bodily members only; "God damn your eyes and
limbs." It is this last form I wish especially to examine.
For how do you suppose that either eye, or ear, or limb, can be
damned? What is the spiritual mischief you invoke? Not merely the
blinding of the eye, nor palsy of the limb; but the condemnation or
judgment of them. And remember that though you are for the most part
unconscious of the spiritual meaning of what you say, the instinctive
satisfaction you have in saying it is as much a real movement of the
spirit within you, as the beating of your heart is a real movement
of the body, though you are unconscious of that also, till you put
your hand on it. Put your hand also, so to speak, upon the source
of the satisfaction with which you use this curse; and ascertain the
law of it.
Now this you may best do by considering what it is which will make
the eyes and the limbs blessed. For the precise contrary of that
must be their damnation. What do you think was the meaning of that
saying of Christ's, "Blessed are the eyes which see the things that
ye see"? For to be made evermore incapable of seeing such things,
must be the condemnation of the eyes. It is not merely the capacity
of seeing sunshine, which is their blessing; but of seeing certain
things under the sunshine; nay, perhaps, even without sunshine,
the eye itself becoming a Sun. Therefore, on the other hand, the
curse upon the eyes will not be mere blindness to the daylight,
but blindness to particular things under the daylight; so that,
when directed towards these, the eye itself becomes as the Night.
Again, with regard to the limbs, or general powers of the body. Do you
suppose that when it is promised that "the lame man shall leap as an
hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing"--(Steam-whistle interrupts me
from the Capo d' Istria, which is lying in front of my window with
her black nose pointed at the red nose of another steamer at the
next pier. There are nine large ones at this instant,--half-past six,
morning, 4th July,--lying between the Church of the Redeemer and the
Canal of the Arsenal; one of them an iron-clad, five smoking fiercely,
and the biggest,--English, and half a quarter of a mile long,--blowing
steam from all manner of pipes in her sides, and with such a roar
through her funnel--whistle number two from Capo d' Istria--that
I could not make any one hear me speak in this room without an
effort,)--do you suppose, I say, that such a form of benediction is
just the same as saying that the lame man shall leap as a lion, and
the tongue of the dumb mourn? Not so, but a special manner of action
of the members is meant in both cases: (whistle number three from
Capo d' Istria; I am writing on, steadily, so that you will be able
to form an accurate idea, from this page, of the intervals of time
in modern music. The roaring from the English boat goes on all the
while, for bass to the Capo d' Istria's treble, and a tenth steamer
comes in sight round the Armenian Monastery)--a particular kind of
activity is meant, I repeat, in both cases. The lame man is to leap,
(whistle fourth from Capo d' Istria, this time at high-pressure, going
through my head like a knife,) as an innocent and joyful creature
leaps, and the lips of the dumb to move melodiously: they are to be
blest, so; may not be unblest even in silence; but are the absolute
contrary of blest, in evil utterance. (Fifth whistle, a double one,
from Capo d' Istria, and it is seven o'clock, nearly; and here's my
coffee, and I must stop writing. Sixth whistle--the Capo d' Istria
is off, with her crew of morning bathers. Seventh,--from I don't know
which of the boats outside--and I count no more.)
5th July.
Yesterday, in these broken sentences, I tried to make you understand
that for all human creatures there are necessarily three separate
states: life positive, under blessing,--life negative, under
curse,--and death, neutral between these; and, henceforward, take
due note of the quite true assumption you make in your ordinary
malediction, that the state of condemnation may begin in this world,
and separately affect every living member of the body.
You assume the fact of these two opposite states, then; but you have
no idea whatever of the meaning of your words, nor of the nature of
the blessedness or condemnation you admit. I will try to make your
conception clearer.
In the year 1869, just before leaving Venice, I had been carefully
looking at a picture by Victor Carpaccio, representing the dream of
a young princess. Carpaccio has taken much pains to explain to us, as
far as he can, the kind of life she leads, by completely painting her
little bedroom in the light of dawn, so that you can see everything
in it. It is lighted by two doubly-arched windows, the arches being
painted crimson round their edges, and the capitals of the shafts that
bear them, gilded. They are filled at the top with small round panes
of glass; but beneath, are open to the blue morning sky, with a low
lattice across them: and in the one at the back of the room are set two
beautiful white Greek vases with a plant in each; one having rich dark
and pointed green leaves, the other crimson flowers, but not of any
species known to me, each at the end of a branch like a spray of heath.
These flower-pots stand on a shelf which runs all round the room,
and beneath the window, at about the height of the elbow, and serves
to put things on anywhere: beneath it, down to the floor, the walls
are covered with green cloth; but above, are bare and white. The
second window is nearly opposite the bed, and in front of it is the
princess's reading-table, some two feet and a half square, covered
by a red cloth with a white border and dainty fringe; and beside
it her seat, not at all like a reading chair in Oxford, but a very
small three-legged stool like a music-stool, covered with crimson
cloth. On the table are a book set up at a slope fittest for reading,
and an hour-glass. Under the shelf, near the table, so as to be easily
reached by the outstretched arm, is a press full of books. The door
of this has been left open, and the books, I am grieved to say, are
rather in disorder, having been pulled about before the princess went
to bed, and one left standing on its side.
Opposite this window, on the white wall, is a small shrine or picture,
(I can't see which, for it is in sharp retiring perspective,) with a
lamp before it, and a silver vessel hung from the lamp, looking like
one for holding incense.
The bed is a broad four-poster, the posts being beautifully wrought
golden or gilded rods, variously wreathed and branched, carrying a
canopy of warm red. The princess's shield is at the head of it, and
the feet are raised entirely above the floor of the room, on a dais
which projects at the lower end so as to form a seat, on which the
child has laid her crown. Her little blue slippers lie at the side
of the bed,--her white dog beside them. The coverlid is scarlet, the
white sheet folded half way back over it; the young girl lies straight,
bending neither at waist nor knee, the sheet rising and falling over
her in a narrow unbroken wave, like the shape of the coverlid of
the last sleep, when the turf scarcely rises. She is some seventeen
or eighteen years old, her head is turned towards us on the pillow,
the cheek resting on her hand, as if she were thinking, yet utterly
calm in sleep, and almost colourless. Her hair is tied with a narrow
riband, and divided into two wreaths, which encircle her head like a
double crown. The white nightgown hides the arm raised on the pillow,
down to the wrist.
At the door of the room an angel enters; (the little dog, though
lying awake, vigilant, takes no notice.) He is a very small angel,
his head just, rises a little above the shelf round the room, and
would only reach as high as the princess's chin, if she were standing
up. He has soft grey wings, lustreless; and his dress, of subdued
blue, has violet sleeves, open above the elbow, and showing white
sleeves below. He comes in without haste, his body, like a mortal
one, casting shadow from the light through the door behind, his face
perfectly quiet; a palm-branch in his right hand--a scroll in his left.
So dreams the princess, with blessed eyes, that need no earthly
dawn. It is very pretty of Carpaccio to make her dream out the angel's
dress so particularly, and notice the slashed sleeves; and to dream so
little an angel--very nearly a doll angel,--bringing her the branch
of palm, and message. But the lovely characteristic of all is the
evident delight of her continual life. Royal power over herself,
and happiness in her flowers, her books, her sleeping and waking,
her prayers, her dreams, her earth, her heaven.
After I had spent my morning over this picture, I had to go to
Verona by the afternoon train. In the carriage with me were two
American girls with their father and mother, people of the class
which has lately made so much money suddenly, and does not know what
to do with it: and these two girls, of about fifteen and eighteen,
had evidently been indulged in everything (since they had had the
means) which western civilization could imagine. And here they
were, specimens of the utmost which the money and invention of the
nineteenth century could produce in maidenhood,--children of its most
progressive race,--enjoying the full advantages of political liberty,
of enlightened philosophical education, of cheap pilfered literature,
and of luxury at any cost. Whatever money, machinery, or freedom of
thought could do for these two children, had been done. No superstition
had deceived, no restraint degraded them:--types, they could not but
be, of maidenly wisdom and felicity, as conceived by the forwardest
intellects of our time.
And they were travelling through a district which, if any in
the world, should touch the hearts and delight the eyes of young
girls. Between Venice and Verona! Portia's villa perhaps in sight upon
the Brenta,--Juliet's tomb to be visited in the evening,--blue against
the southern sky, the hills of Petrarch's home. Exquisite midsummer
sunshine, with low rays, glanced through the vine-leaves; all the
Alps were clear, from the lake of Garda to Cadore, and to farthest
Tyrol. What a princess's chamber, this, if these are princesses,
and what dreams might they not dream, therein!
But the two American girls were neither princesses, nor seers, nor
dreamers. By infinite self-indulgence, they had reduced themselves
simply to two pieces of white putty that could feel pain. The
flies and the dust stuck to them as to clay, and they perceived,
between Venice and Verona, nothing but the flies and the dust. They
pulled down the blinds the moment they entered the carriage, and
then sprawled, and writhed, and tossed among the cushions of it,
in vain contest, during the whole fifty miles, with every miserable
sensation of bodily affliction that could make time intolerable. They
were dressed in thin white frocks, coming vaguely open at the backs as
they stretched or wriggled; they had French novels, lemons, and lumps
of sugar, to beguile their state with; the novels hanging together
by the ends of string that had once stitched them, or adhering at
the corners in densely bruised dog's-ears, out of which the girls,
wetting their fingers, occasionally extricated a gluey leaf. From
time to time they cut a lemon open, ground a lump of sugar backwards
and forwards over it till every fibre was in a treacly pulp; then
sucked the pulp, and gnawed the white skin into leathery strings,
for the sake of its bitter. Only one sentence was exchanged, in the
fifty miles, on the subject of things outside the carriage (the Alps
being once visible from a station where they had drawn up the blinds).
"Don't those snow-caps make you cool?"
"No--I wish they did."
And so they went their way, with sealed eyes and tormented limbs,
their numbered miles of pain.
There are the two states for you, in clearest opposition; Blessed,
and Accursed. The happy industry, and eyes full of sacred imagination
of things that are not, (such sweet cosa, è la fede,) and the tortured
indolence, and infidel eyes, blind even to the things that are.
"How do I know the princess is industrious?"
Partly by the trim state of her room,--by the hour-glass on the
table,--by the evident use of all the books she has, (well bound, every
one of them, in stoutest leather or velvet, and with no dog's-ears,)
but more distinctly from another picture of her, not asleep. In that
one, a prince of England has sent to ask her in marriage: and her
father, little liking to part with her, sends for her to his room
to ask her what she would do. He sits, moody and sorrowful; she,
standing before him in a plain housewifely dress, talks quietly,
going on with her needlework all the time.
A work-woman, friends, she, no less than a princess; and princess most
in being so. In like manner, in a picture by a Florentine, whose mind
I would fain have you know somewhat, as well as Carpaccio's--Sandro
Botticelli--the girl who is to be the wife of Moses, when he first
sees her at the desert-well, has fruit in her left hand, but a distaff
in her right. [21]
"To do good work, whether you live or die," it is the entrance to all
Princedoms; and if not done, the day will come, and that infallibly,
when you must labour for evil instead of good.
It was some comfort to me, that second of May last, at Pisa, to watch
the workman's ashamed face, as he struck the old marble cross to
pieces. Stolidly and languidly he dealt the blows,--down-looking,--so
far as in anywise sensitive, ashamed,--and well he might be.
It was a wonderful thing to see done. This Pisan chapel, first
built in 1230, then called the Oracle, or Oratory,--"Oraculum, vel
Oratorium"--of the Blessed Mary of the New Bridge, afterwards called
the Sea-bridge, (Ponte-a-Mare,) was a shrine like that of ours on the
bridge of Wakefield; a boatman's praying-place: you may still see,
or might, ten years since, have seen, the use of such a thing at
the mouth of Boulogne Harbour, when the mackerel boats went out in
a fleet at early dawn. There used to be a little shrine at the end
of the longest pier; and as the Bonne Espérance, or Grâce-de-Dieu,
or Vierge Marie, or Notre Dame des Dunes, or Reine des Anges, rose
on the first surge of the open sea, their crews bared their heads,
and prayed for a few seconds. So also the Pisan oarsmen looked back
to their shrine, many-pinnacled, standing out from the quay above the
river, as they dropped down Arno under their sea bridge, bound for
the Isles of Greece. Later, in the fifteenth century, "there was laid
up in it a little branch of the Crown of Thorns of the Redeemer which
a merchant had brought home, enclosed in a little urn of Beyond-sea"
(ultramarine), and its name was changed to "St. Mary's of the Thorn."
In the year 1840 I first drew it, then as perfect as when it was
built. Six hundred and ten years had only given the marble of it a
tempered glow, or touched its sculpture here and there, with softer
shade. I daguerreotyped the eastern end of it some years later,
(photography being then unknown,) and copied the daguerreotype,
that people might not be plagued in looking, by the lustre. The
frontispiece to this letter is engraved from the drawing, and will
show you what the building was like.
But the last quarter of a century has brought changes, and made the
Italians wiser. British Protestant missionaries explained to them
that they had only got a piece of blackberry stem in their ultramarine
box. German philosophical missionaries explained to them that the Crown
of Thorns itself was only a graceful metaphor. French republican
missionaries explained to them that chapels were inconsistent
with liberty on the quay; and their own Engineering missionaries
of civilization explained to them that steam-power was independent
of the Madonna. And now in 1872, rowing by steam, digging by steam,
driving by steam, here, behold, are a troublesome pair of human arms
out of employ. So the Engineering missionaries fit them with hammer
and chisel, and set them to break up the Spina Chapel.
A costly kind of stone-breaking, this, for Italian parishes to
set paupers on! Are there not rocks enough of Apennine, think you,
they could break down instead? For truly, the God of their Fathers,
and of their land, would rather see them mar His own work, than
his children's.
Believe me, faithfully yours,