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THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND.
LECTURES GIVEN IN OXFORD.
BY
JOHN RUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D.,
HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF
CORPUS-CHRISTI COLLEGE.
DURING HIS
_SECOND TENURE OF THE SLADE PROFESSORSHIP._
NEW YORK: JOHN WILEY AND SONS. 1888.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
LECTURE I.
THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING. _Bertha to Osburga_ 5
LECTURE II.
THE PLEASURES OF FAITH. _Alfred to the Confessor_ 31
LECTURE III.
THE PLEASURES OF DEED. _Alfred to Cœur de Lion_ 61
LECTURE IV.
THE PLEASURES OF FANCY. _Cœur de Lion to Elizabeth_ 91
* * * * *
LECTURE I.
THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING.
_BERTHA TO OSBURGA._
In the short review of the present state of English Art, given you
last year, I left necessarily many points untouched, and others
unexplained. The seventh lecture, which I did not think it necessary
to read aloud, furnished you with some of the corrective statements
of which, whether spoken or not, it was extremely desirable that you
should estimate the balancing weight. These I propose in the present
course farther to illustrate, and to arrive with you at, I hope,
a just--you would not wish it to be a flattering--estimate of the
conditions of our English artistic life, past and present, in order
that with due allowance for them we may determine, with some security,
what those of us who have faculty ought to do, and those who have
sensibility, to admire.
2. In thus rightly doing and feeling, you will find summed a wider
duty, and granted a greater power, than the moral philosophy at this
moment current with you has ever conceived; and a prospect opened to
you besides, of such a Future for England as you may both hopefully
and proudly labour for with your hands, and those of you who are
spared to the ordinary term of human life, even see with your eyes,
when all this tumult of vain avarice and idle pleasure, into which
you have been plunged at birth, shall have passed into its appointed
perdition.
3. I wish that you would read for introduction to the lectures I have
this year arranged for you, that on the Future of England, which I
gave to the cadets at Woolwich in the first year of my Professorship
here, 1869; and which is now placed as the main conclusion of the
"Crown of Wild Olive": and with it, very attentively, the close of
my inaugural lecture given here; for the matter, no less than the
tenor of which, I was reproved by all my friends, as irrelevant and
ill-judged;--which, nevertheless, is of all the pieces of teaching I
have ever given from this chair, the most pregnant and essential to
whatever studies, whether of Art or Science, you may pursue, in this
place or elsewhere, during your lives.
The opening words of that passage I will take leave to read to you
again,--for they must still be the ground of whatever help I can give
you, worth your acceptance.
"There is a destiny now possible to us--the highest ever set before a
nation to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race:
a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in
temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey.
We have been taught a religion of pure mercy, which we must either now
finally betray, or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in
an inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years
of noble history, which it should be our daily thirst to increase with
splendid avarice; so that Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honour,
should be the most offending souls alive. Within the last few years
we have had the laws of natural science opened to us with a rapidity
which has been blinding by its brightness; and means of transit and
communication given to us, which have made but one kingdom of the
habitable globe.
"One kingdom;--but who is to be its king? Is there to be no king in
it, think you, and every man to do that which is right in his own
eyes? Or only kings of terror, and the obscene empires of Mammon and
Belial? Or will you, youths of England, make your country again a
royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle; for all the world a source
of light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the
Arts;--faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent
and ephemeral visions--faithful servant of time-tried principles,
under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and
amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped
in her strange valour, of goodwill towards men?"
The fifteen years that have passed since I spoke these words must, I
think, have convinced some of my immediate hearers that the need for
such an appeal was more pressing than they then imagined;--while they
have also more and more convinced me myself that the ground I took
for it was secure, and that the youths and girls now entering on the
duties of active life are able to accept and fulfil the hope I then
held out to them.
In which assurance I ask them to-day to begin the examination with
me, very earnestly, of the question laid before you in that seventh
of my last year's lectures, whether London, as it is now, be indeed
the natural, and therefore the heaven-appointed outgrowth of the
inhabitation, these 1800 years, of the valley of the Thames by a
progressively instructed and disciplined people; or if not, in what
measure and manner the aspect and spirit of the great city may be
possibly altered by your acts and thoughts.
In my introduction to the Economist of Xenophon I said that every
fairly educated European boy or girl ought to learn the history of
five cities,--Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, and London; that of
London including, or at least compelling in parallel study, knowledge
also of the history of Paris.
A few words are enough to explain the reasons for this choice. The
history of Athens, rightly told, includes all that need be known of
Greek religion and arts; that of Rome, the victory of Christianity
over Paganism; those of Venice and Florence sum the essential facts
respecting the Christian arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Music;
and that of London, in her sisterhood with Paris, the development of
Christian Chivalry and Philosophy, with their exponent art of Gothic
architecture.
Without the presumption of forming a distinct design, I yet hoped at
the time when this division of study was suggested, with the help of
my pupils, to give the outlines of their several histories during
my work in Oxford. Variously disappointed and arrested, alike by
difficulties of investigation and failure of strength, I may yet hope
to lay down for you, beginning with your own metropolis, some of the
lines of thought in following out which such a task might be most
effectively accomplished.
You observe that I speak of architecture as the chief exponent of
the feelings both of the French and English races. Together with
it, however, most important evidence of character is given by the
illumination of manuscripts, and by some forms of jewellery and
metallurgy: and my purpose in this course of lectures is to illustrate
by all these arts the phases of national character which it is
impossible that historians should estimate, or even observe, with
accuracy, unless they are cognizant of excellence in the aforesaid
modes of structural and ornamental craftsmanship.
In one respect, as indicated by the title chosen for this course, I
have varied the treatment of their subject from that adopted in all
my former books. Hitherto, I have always endeavoured to illustrate the
personal temper and skill of the artist; holding the wishes or taste
of his spectators at small account, and saying of Turner you ought to
like him, and of Salvator, you ought not, etc., etc., without in the
least considering what the genius or instinct of the spectator might
otherwise demand, or approve. But in the now attempted sketch of
Christian history, I have approached every question from the people's
side, and examined the nature, not of the special faculties by which
the work was produced, but of the general instinct by which it was
asked for, and enjoyed. Therefore I thought the proper heading for
these papers should represent them as descriptive of the _Pleasures_
of England, rather than of its _Arts_.
And of these pleasures, necessarily, the leading one was that of
Learning, in the sense of receiving instruction;--a pleasure totally
separate from that of finding out things for yourself,--and an
extremely sweet and sacred pleasure, when you know how to seek it, and
receive.
On which I am the more disposed, and even compelled, here to insist,
because your modern ideas of Development imply that you must all
turn out what you are to be, and find out what you are to know, for
yourselves, by the inevitable operation of your anterior affinities
and inner consciences:--whereas the old idea of education was that the
baby material of you, however accidentally or inevitably born, was
at least to be by external force, and ancestral knowledge, bred; and
treated by its Fathers and Tutors as a plastic vase, to be shaped or
mannered as _they_ chose, not as _it_ chose, and filled, when its form
was well finished and baked, with sweetness of sound doctrine, as with
Hybla honey, or Arabian spikenard.
Without debating how far these two modes of acquiring
knowledge--finding out, and being told--may severally be good, and
in perfect instruction combined, I have to point out to you that,
broadly, Athens, Rome, and Florence are self-taught, and internally
developed; while all the Gothic races, without any exception, but
especially those of London and Paris, are afterwards taught by these;
and had, therefore, when they chose to accept it, the delight of being
instructed, without trouble or doubt, as fast as they could read or
imitate; and brought forward to the point where their own northern
instincts might wholesomely superimpose or graft some national ideas
upon these sound instructions. Read over what I said on this subject
in the third of my lectures last year (page 79), and simplify that
already brief statement further, by fastening in your mind Carlyle's
general symbol of the best attainments of northern religious
sculpture,--"three whalecubs combined by boiling," and reflecting that
the mental history of all northern European art is the modification
of that graceful type, under the orders of the Athena of Homer and
Phidias.
And this being quite indisputably the broad fact of the matter, I
greatly marvel that your historians never, so far as I have read,
think of proposing to you the question--what you might have made
of yourselves _without_ the help of Homer and Phidias: what sort of
beings the Saxon and the Celt, the Frank and the Dane, might have been
by this time, untouched by the spear of Pallas, unruled by the rod of
Agricola, and sincerely the native growth, pure of root, and ungrafted
in fruit of the clay of Isis, rock of Dovrefeldt, and sands of Elbe?
Think of it, and think chiefly what form the ideas, and images,
of your natural religion might probably have taken, if no Roman
missionary had ever passed the Alps in charity, and no English king in
pilgrimage.
I have been of late indebted more than I can express to the friend who
has honoured me by the dedication of his recently published lectures
on 'Older England;' and whose eager enthusiasm and far collected
learning have enabled me for the first time to assign their just
meaning and value to the ritual and imagery of Saxon devotion. But
while every page of Mr. Hodgett's book, and, I may gratefully say
also, every sentence of his teaching, has increased and justified the
respect in which I have always been by my own feeling disposed to
hold the mythologies founded on the love and knowledge of the natural
world, I have also been led by them to conceive, far more forcibly
than hitherto, the power which the story of Christianity possessed,
first heard through the wreaths of that cloudy superstition, in the
substitution, for its vaporescent allegory, of a positive and literal
account of a real Creation, and an instantly present, omnipresent, and
compassionate God.
Observe, there is no question whatever in examining this influence,
how far Christianity itself is true, or the transcendental doctrines
of it intelligible. Those who brought you the story of it believed it
with all their souls to be true,--and the effect of it on the hearts
of your ancestors was that of an unquestionable, infinitely lucid
message straight from God, doing away with all difficulties, grief,
and fears for those who willingly received it, nor by any, except
wilfully and obstinately vile persons, to be, by any possibility,
denied or refused.
And it was precisely, observe, the vivacity and joy with which the
main fact of Christ's life was accepted which gave the force and wrath
to the controversies instantly arising about its nature.
Those controversies vexed and shook, but never undermined, the faith
they strove to purify, and the miraculous presence, errorless precept,
and loving promises of their Lord were alike undoubted, alike rejoiced
in, by every nation that heard the word of Apostles. The Pelagian's
assertion that immortality could be won by man's will, and the
Arian's that Christ possessed no more than man's nature, never for
an instant--or in any country--hindered the advance of the moral law
and intellectual hope of Christianity. Far the contrary; the British
heresy concerning Free Will, though it brought bishop after bishop
into England to extinguish it, remained an extremely healthy and
active element in the British mind down to the days of John Bunyan
and the guide Great Heart, and the calmly Christian justice and simple
human virtue of Theodoric were the very roots and first burgeons
of the regeneration of Italy.[1] But of the degrees in which it was
possible for any barbarous nation to receive during the first five
centuries, either the spiritual power of Christianity itself, or
the instruction in classic art and science which accompanied it, you
cannot rightly judge, without taking the pains, and they will not, I
think, be irksome, of noticing carefully, and fixing permanently in
your minds, the separating characteristics of the greater races, both
in those who learned and those who taught.
[Footnote 1: Gibbon, in his 37th chapter, makes Ulphilas also an
Arian, but might have forborne, with grace, his own definition of
orthodoxy:--and you are to observe generally that at this time the
teachers who admitted the inferiority of Christ to the Father as
touching his Manhood, were often counted among Arians, but quite
falsely. Christ's own words, "My Father is greater than I," end that
controversy at once. Arianism consists not in asserting the subjection
of the Son to the Father, but in denying the subjected Divinity.]
Of the Huns and Vandals we need not speak. They are merely forms of
Punishment and Destruction. Put them out of your minds altogether, and
remember only the names of the immortal nations, which abide on their
native rocks, and plough their unconquered plains, at this hour.
Briefly, in the north,--Briton, Norman, Frank, Saxon, Ostrogoth,
Lombard; briefly, in the south,--Tuscan, Roman, Greek, Syrian,
Egyptian, Arabian.
Now of these races, the British (I avoid the word Celtic, because you
would expect me to say Keltic; and I don't mean to, lest you should
be wanting me next to call the patroness of music St. Kekilia), the
British, including Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Scot, and Pict, are,
I believe, of all the northern races, the one which has deepest love
of external nature;--and the richest inherent gift of pure music and
song, as such; separated from the intellectual gift which raises song
into poetry. They are naturally also religious, and for some centuries
after their own conversion are one of the chief evangelizing powers
in Christendom. But they are neither apprehensive nor receptive;--they
cannot understand the classic races, and learn scarcely anything from
them; perhaps better so, if the classic races had been more careful to
understand _them_.
Next, the Norman is scarcely more apprehensive than the Celt, but he
is more constructive, and uses to good advantage what he learns from
the Frank. His main characteristic is an energy, which never exhausts
itself in vain anger, desire, or sorrow, but abides and rules, like a
living rock:--where he wanders, he flows like lava, and congeals like
granite.
Next, I take in this first sketch the Saxon and Frank together, both
pre-eminently apprehensive, both docile exceedingly, imaginative in
the highest, but in life active more than pensive, eager in desire,
swift of invention, keenly sensitive to animal beauty, but with
difficulty rational, and rarely, for the future, wise. Under the
conclusive name of Ostrogoth, you may class whatever tribes are native
to Central Germany, and develope themselves, as time goes on, into
that power of the German Cæsars which still asserts itself as an
empire against the licence and insolence of modern republicanism,--of
which races, though this general name, no description can be given in
rapid terms.
And lastly, the Lombards, who, at the time we have to deal with, were
sternly indocile, gloomily imaginative,--of almost Norman energy,
and differing from all the other western nations chiefly in this
notable particular, that while the Celt is capable of bright wit and
happy play, and the Norman, Saxon, and Frank all alike delight in
caricature, the Lombards, like the Arabians, never jest.
These, briefly, are the six barbaric nations who are to be taught: and
of whose native arts and faculties, before they receive any tutorship
from the south, I find no well-sifted account in any history:--but
thus much of them, collecting your own thoughts and knowledge, you
may easily discern--they were all, with the exception of the Scots,
practical workers and builders in wood; and those of them who had
coasts, first rate sea-boat builders, with fine mathematical
instincts and practice in that kind far developed, necessarily good
sail-weaving, and sound fur-stitching, with stout iron-work of nail
and rivet; rich copper and some silver work in decoration--the Celts
developing peculiar gifts in linear design, but wholly incapable
of drawing animals or figures;--the Saxons and Franks having enough
capacity in that kind, but no thought of attempting it; the Normans
and Lombards still farther remote from any such skill. More and more,
it seems to me wonderful that under your British block-temple, grimly
extant on its pastoral plain, or beside the first crosses engraved on
the rock at Whithorn--you English and Scots do not oftener consider
what you might or could have come to, left to yourselves.
Next, let us form the list of your tutor nations, in whom, it
generally pleases you to look at nothing but the corruptions. If we
could get into the habit of thinking more of our own corruptions and
more of _their_ virtues, we should have a better chance of learning
the true laws alike of art and destiny. But, the safest way of all, is
to assure ourselves that true knowledge of any thing or any creature
is only of the good of it; that its nature and life are in that, and
that what is diseased,--that is to say, unnatural and mortal,--you
must cut away from it in contemplation, as you would in surgery.
Of the six tutor nations, two, the Tuscan and Arab, have no effect on
early Christian England. But the Roman, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian
act together from the earliest times; you are to study the influence
of Rome upon England in Agricola, Constantius, St. Benedict, and
St. Gregory; of Greece upon England in the artists of Byzantium and
Ravenna; of Syria and Egypt upon England in St. Jerome, St. Augustine,
St. Chrysostom, and St. Athanase.
St. Jerome, in central Bethlehem; St. Augustine, Carthaginian by
birth, in truth a converted Tyrian, Athanase, Egyptian, symmetric
and fixed as an Egyptian aisle; Chrysostom, golden mouth of all;
these are, indeed, every one teachers of all the western world, but
St. Augustine especially of lay, as distinguished from monastic,
Christianity to the Franks, and finally to us. His rule, expanded into
the treatise of the City of God, is taken for guide of life and policy
by Charlemagne, and becomes certainly the fountain of Evangelical
Christianity, distinctively so called, (and broadly the lay
Christianity of Europe, since, in the purest form of it, that is
to say, the most merciful, charitable, variously applicable, kindly
wise.) The greatest type of it, as far as I know, St. Martin of Tours,
whose character is sketched, I think in the main rightly, in the Bible
of Amiens; and you may bind together your thoughts of its course
by remembering that Alcuin, born at York, dies in the Abbey of
St. Martin, at Tours; that as St. Augustine was in his writings
Charlemagne's Evangelist in faith, Alcuin was, in living presence,
his master in rhetoric, logic, and astronomy, with the other physical
sciences.
A hundred years later than St. Augustine, comes the rule of St.
Benedict--the Monastic rule, virtually, of European Christianity, ever
since--and theologically the Law of Works, as distinguished from the
Law of Faith. St. Augustine and all the disciples of St. Augustine
tell Christians what they should feel and think: St. Benedict and all
the disciples of St. Benedict tell Christians what they should say and
do.
In the briefest, but also the perfectest distinction, the disciples
of St. Augustine are those who open the door to Christ--"If any man
hear my voice"; but the Benedictines those to whom Christ opens the
door--"To him that knocketh it shall be opened."
Now, note broadly the course and action of this rule, as it combines
with the older one. St. Augustine's, accepted heartily by Clovis,
and, with various degrees of understanding, by the kings and queens
of the Merovingian dynasty, makes seemingly little difference in
their conduct, so that their profession of it remains a scandal to
Christianity to this day; and yet it lives, in the true hearts among
them, down from St. Clotilde to her great grand-daughter Bertha, who
in becoming Queen of Kent, builds under its chalk downs her own little
chapel to St. Martin, and is the first effectively and permanently
useful missionary to the Saxons, the beginner of English
Erudition,--the first laid corner stone of beautiful English
character.
I think henceforward you will find the memorandum of dates which I
have here set down for my own guidance more simply useful than those
confused by record of unimportant persons and inconsequent events,
which form the indices of common history.
From the year of the Saxon invasion 449, there are exactly 400 years
to the birth of Alfred, 849. You have no difficulty in remembering
those cardinal years. Then, you have Four great men and great events
to remember, at the close of the fifth century. Clovis, and the
founding of Frank Kingdom; Theodoric and the founding of the Gothic
Kingdom; Justinian and the founding of Civil law; St. Benedict and the
founding of Religious law.
Of, Justinian, and his work, I am not able myself to form any
opinion--and it is, I think, unnecessary for students of history to
form any, until they are able to estimate clearly the benefits, and
mischief, of the civil law of Europe in its present state. But to
Clovis, Theodoric, and St. Benedict, without any question, we owe more
than any English historian has yet ascribed,--and they are easily held
in mind together, for Clovis ascended the Frank throne in the year of
St. Benedict's birth, 481. Theodoric fought the battle of Verona, and
founded the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy twelve years later, in 493,
and thereupon married the sister of Clovis. That marriage is always
passed in a casual sentence, as if a merely political one, and while
page after page is spent in following the alternations of furious
crime and fatal chance, in the contests between Fredegonde and
Brunehaut, no historian ever considers whether the great Ostrogoth who
wore in the battle of Verona the dress which his mother had woven for
him, was likely to have chosen a wife without love!--or how far the
perfectness, justice, and temperate wisdom of every ordinance of his
reign was owing to the sympathy and counsel of his Frankish queen.
You have to recollect, then, thus far, only three cardinal dates:--
449. Saxon invasion.
481. Clovis reigns and St. Benedict is born.
493. Theodoric conquers at Verona.
Then, roughly, a hundred years later, in 590, Ethelbert, the fifth
from Hengist, and Bertha, the third from Clotilde, are king and queen
of Kent. I cannot find the date of their marriage, but the date, 590,
which you must recollect for cardinal, is that of Gregory's accession
to the pontificate, and I believe Bertha was then in middle life,
having persevered in her religion firmly, but inoffensively, and
made herself beloved by her husband and people. She, in England,
Theodolinda in Lombardy, and St. Gregory in Rome:--in their hands,
virtually lay the destiny of Europe.
Then the period from Bertha to Osburga, 590 to 849--say 250 years--is
passed by the Saxon people in the daily more reverent learning of the
Christian faith, and daily more peaceful and skilful practice of the
humane arts and duties which it invented and inculcated.
The statement given by Sir Edward Creasy of the result of these 250
years of lesson is, with one correction, the most simple and just that
I can find.
"A few years before the close of the sixth century, the country was
little more than a wide battle-field, where gallant but rude warriors
fought with each other, or against the neighbouring Welsh or Scots;
unheeding and unheeded by the rest of Europe, or, if they attracted
casual attention, regarded with dread and disgust as the fiercest of
barbarians and the most untameable of pagans. In the eighth century,
England was looked up to with admiration and gratitude, as superior to
all the other countries of Western Europe in piety and learning, and
as the land whence the most zealous and successful saints and teachers
came forth to convert and enlighten the still barbarous regions of the
continent."
This statement is broadly true; yet the correction it needs is a very
important one. England,--under her first Alfred of Northumberland,
and under Ina of Wessex, is indeed during these centuries the most
learned, thoughtful, and progressive of European states. But she is
not a missionary power. The missionaries are always to her, not from
her:--for the very reason that she is learning so eagerly, she does
not take to preaching. Ina founds his Saxon school at Rome not to
teach Rome, nor convert the Pope, but to drink at the source of
knowledge, and to receive laws from direct and unquestioned authority.
The missionary power was wholly Scotch and Irish, and that power was
wholly one of zeal and faith, not of learning. I will ask you, in the
course of my next lecture, to regard it attentively; to-day, I must
rapidly draw to the conclusions I would leave with you.
It is more and more wonderful to me as I think of it, that no effect
whatever was produced on the Saxon, nor on any other healthy race
of the North, either by the luxury of Rome, or by her art, whether
constructive or imitative. The Saxon builds no aqueducts--designs
no roads, rounds no theatres in imitation of her,--envies none of
her vile pleasures,--admires, so far as I can judge, none of her
far-carried realistic art. I suppose that it needs intelligence of
a more advanced kind to see the qualities of complete sculpture: and
that we may think of the Northern intellect as still like that of a
child, who cares to picture its own thoughts in its own way, but does
not care for the thoughts of older people, or attempt to copy what it
feels too difficult. This much at least is certain, that for one cause
or another, everything that now at Paris or London our painters most
care for and try to realize, of ancient Rome, was utterly innocuous
and unattractive to the Saxon: while his mind was frankly open to
the direct teaching of Greece and to the methods of bright decoration
employed in the Byzantine Empire: for these alone seemed to his
fancy suggestive of the glories of the brighter world promised by
Christianity. Jewellery, vessels of gold and silver, beautifully
written books, and music, are the gifts of St. Gregory alike to the
Saxon and Lombard; all these beautiful things being used, not for the
pleasure of the present life, but as the symbols of another; while
the drawings in Saxon manuscripts, in which, better than in any other
remains of their life, we can read the people's character, are rapid
endeavours to express for themselves, and convey to others, some
likeness of the realities of sacred event in which they had been
instructed. They differ from every archaic school of former design
in this evident correspondence with an imagined reality. All previous
archaic art whatsoever is symbolic and decorative--not realistic. The
contest of Herakles with the Hydra on a Greek vase is a mere sign that
such a contest took place, not a picture of it, and in drawing that
sign the potter is always thinking of the effect of the engraved
lines on the curves of his pot, and taking care to keep out of the
way of the handle;--but a Saxon monk would scratch his idea of the
Fall of the angels or the Temptation of Christ over a whole page of
his manuscript in variously explanatory scenes, evidently full of
inexpressible vision, and eager to explain and illustrate all that he
felt or believed.
Of the progress and arrest of these gifts, I shall have to speak in my
next address; but I must regretfully conclude to-day with some brief
warning against the complacency which might lead you to regard them
as either at that time entirely original in the Saxon race, or at the
present day as signally characteristic of it. That form of complacency
is exhibited in its most amiable but, therefore, most deceptive guise,
in the passage with which the late Dean of Westminster concluded his
lecture at Canterbury in April, 1854, on the subject of the landing of
Augustine. I will not spoil the emphasis of the passage by comment as
I read, but must take leave afterwards to intimate some grounds for
abatement in the fervour of its self-gratulatory ecstasy.
"Let any one sit on the hill of the little church of St. Martin, and
look on the view which is there spread before his eyes. Immediately
below are the towers of the great abbey of St. Augustine, where
Christian learning and civilization first struck root in the
Anglo-Saxon race; and within which now, after a lapse of many
centuries, a new institution has arisen, intended to carry far and
wide, to countries of which Gregory and Augustine never heard, the
blessings which they gave to us. Carry your view on--and there
rises high above all the magnificent pile of our cathedral, equal
in splendour and state to any, the noblest temple or church that
Augustine could have seen in ancient Rome, rising on the very ground
which derives its consecration from him. And still more than the
grandeur of the outward buildings that rose from the little church
of Augustine and the little palace of Ethelbert have been the
institutions of all kinds of which these were the earliest cradle.
From Canterbury, the first English Christian city,--from Kent, the
first English Christian kingdom--has by degrees arisen the whole
constitution of Church and State in England which now binds together
the whole British Empire. And from the Christianity here established
in England has flowed, by direct consequence, first the Christianity
of Germany; then, after a long interval, of North America; and lastly,
we may trust, in time, of all India and all Australasia. The view from
St. Martin's Church is indeed one of the most inspiriting that can be
found in the world; there is none to which I would more willingly take
any one who doubted whether a small beginning could lead to a great
and lasting good;--none which carries us more vividly back into the
past, or more hopefully forward into the future."
To this Gregorian canticle in praise of the British constitution,
I grieve, but am compelled, to take these following historical
objections. The first missionary to Germany was Ulphilas, and what she
owes to these islands she owes to Iona, not to Thanet. Our missionary
offices to America as to Africa, consist I believe principally in
the stealing of land, and the extermination of its proprietors by
intoxication. Our rule in India has introduced there, Paisley instead
of Cashmere shawls: in Australasia our Christian aid supplies, I
suppose, the pious farmer with convict labour. And although, when
the Dean wrote the above passage, St. Augustine's and the cathedral
were--I take it on trust from his description--the principal
objects in the prospect from St. Martin's Hill, I believe even the
cheerfullest of my audience would not now think the scene one of
the most inspiriting in the world. For recent progress has entirely
accommodated the architecture of the scene to the convenience of the
missionary workers above enumerated; to the peculiar necessities
of the civilization they have achieved. For the sake of which the
cathedral, the monastery, the temple, and the tomb, of Bertha,
contract themselves in distant or despised subservience under the
colossal walls of the county gaol.
LECTURE II.
THE PLEASURES OF FAITH.
_ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR._
I was forced in my last lecture to pass by altogether, and to-day
can only with momentary definition notice, the part taken by Scottish
missionaries in the Christianizing of England and Burgundy. I would
pray you therefore, in order to fill the gap which I think it better
to leave distinctly, than close confusedly, to read the histories of
St. Patrick, St. Columba, and St. Columban, as they are given you by
Montalembert in his 'Moines d'Occident.' You will find in his pages
all the essential facts that are known, encircled with a nimbus of
enthusiastic sympathy which I hope you will like better to see them
through, than distorted by blackening fog of contemptuous rationalism.
But although I ask you thus to make yourselves aware of the greatness
of my omission, I must also certify you that it does not break the
unity of our own immediate subject. The influence of Celtic passion
and art both on Northumbria and the Continent, beneficent in all
respects while it lasted, expired without any permanent share in the
work or emotion of the Saxon and Frank. The book of Kells, and the
bell of St. Patrick, represent sufficiently the peculiar character
of Celtic design; and long since, in the first lecture of the 'Two
Paths,' I explained both the modes of skill, and points of weakness,
which rendered such design unprogressive. Perfect in its peculiar
manner, and exulting in the faultless practice of a narrow skill, it
remained century after century incapable alike of inner growth, or
foreign instruction; inimitable, yet incorrigible; marvellous, yet
despicable, to its death. Despicable, I mean, only in the limitation
of its capacity, not in its quality or nature. If you make a
Christian of a lamb or a squirrel--what can you expect of the lamb
but jumping--what of the squirrel, but pretty spirals, traced with
his tail? He won't steal your nuts any more, and he'll say his prayers
like this--[2]; but you cannot make a Beatrice's griffin, and emblem
of all the Catholic Church, out of him.
[Footnote 2: Making a sign.]
You will have observed, also, that the plan of these lectures does
not include any reference to the Roman Period in England; of which
you will find all I think necessary to say, in the part called _Valle
Crucis_ of 'Our Fathers have told us.' But I must here warn you, with
reference to it, of one gravely false prejudice of Montalembert. He is
entirely blind to the conditions of Roman virtue, which existed in the
midst of the corruptions of the Empire, forming the characters of such
Emperors as Pertinax, Carus, Probus, the second Claudius, Aurelian,
and our own Constantius; and he denies, with abusive violence, the
power for good, of Roman Law, over the Gauls and Britons.
Respecting Roman national character, I will simply beg you to
remember, that both St. Benedict and St. Gregory are Roman patricians,
before they are either monk or pope; respecting its influence on
Britain, I think you may rest content with Shakespeare's estimate of
it. Both Lear and Cymbeline belong to this time, so difficult to our
apprehension, when the Briton accepted both Roman laws and Roman gods.
There is indeed the born Kentish gentleman's protest against them in
Kent's--
"Now, by Apollo, king,
Thou swear'st thy gods in vain";
but both Cordelia and Imogen are just as thoroughly Roman ladies, as
Virgilia or Calphurnia.
Of British Christianity and the Arthurian Legends, I shall have a word
or two to say in my lecture on "Fancy," in connection with the similar
romance which surrounds Theodoric and Charlemagne: only the worst of
it is, that while both Dietrich and Karl are themselves more wonderful
than the legends of them, Arthur fades into intangible vision:--this
much, however, remains to this day, of Arthurian blood in us, that
the richest fighting element in the British army and navy is British
native,--that is to say, Highlander, Irish, Welsh, and Cornish.
Content, therefore, (means being now given you for filling gaps,)
with the estimates given you in the preceding lecture of the sources
of instruction possessed by the Saxon capital, I pursue to-day our
question originally proposed, what London might have been by this
time, if the nature of the flowers, trees, and children, born at the
Thames-side, had been rightly understood and cultivated.
Many of my hearers can imagine far better than I, the look that London
must have had in Alfred's and Canute's days.[3] I have not, indeed,
the least idea myself what its buildings were like, but certainly
the groups of its shipping must have been superb; small, but
entirely seaworthy vessels, manned by the best seamen in the then
world. Of course, now, at Chatham and Portsmouth we have our
ironclads,--extremely beautiful and beautifully manageable things, no
doubt--to set against this Saxon and Danish shipping; but the Saxon
war-ships lay here at London shore--bright with banner and shield
and dragon prow,--instead of these you may be happier, but are not
handsomer, in having, now, the coal-barge, the penny steamer, and the
wherry full of shop boys and girls. I dwell however for a moment only
on the naval aspect of the tidal waters in the days of Alfred, because
I can refer you for all detail on this part of our subject to the
wonderful opening chapter of Dean Stanley's History of Westminster
Abbey, where you will find the origin of the name of London given as
"The City of Ships." He does not, however, tell you, that there were
built, then and there, the biggest war-ships in the world. I have
often said to friends who praised my own books that I would rather
have written that chapter than any one of them; yet if I _had_ been
able to write the historical part of it, the conclusions drawn would
have been extremely different. The Dean indeed describes with a
poet's joy the River of wells, which rose from those "once consecrated
springs which now lie choked in Holywell and Clerkenwell, and the
rivulet of Ulebrig which crossed the Strand under the Ivy bridge";
but it is only in the spirit of a modern citizen of Belgravia that he
exults in the fact that "the great arteries of our crowded streets,
the vast sewers which cleanse our habitations, are fed by the
life-blood of those old and living streams; that underneath our tread
the Tyburn, and the Holborn, and the Fleet, and the Wall Brook, are
still pursuing their ceaseless course, still ministering to the good
of man, though in a far different fashion than when Druids drank
of their sacred springs, and Saxons were baptized in their rushing
waters, ages ago."
[Footnote 3: Here Alfred's Silver Penny was shown and commented on,
thus:--Of what London was like in the days of faith, I can show you
one piece of artistic evidence. It is Alfred's silver penny struck in
London mint. The character of a coinage is quite conclusive evidence
in national history, and there is no great empire in progress, but
tells its story in beautiful coins. Here in Alfred's penny, a round
coin with L.O.N.D.I.N.I.A. struck on it, you have just the same
beauty of design, the same enigmatical arrangement of letters, as in
the early inscription, which it is "the pride of my life" to have
discovered at Venice. This inscription ("the first words that Venice
ever speaks aloud") is, it will be remembered, on the Church of St.
Giacomo di Rialto, and runs, being interpreted--"Around this temple,
let the merchant's law be just, his weights true, and his covenants
faithful."]
Whatever sympathy you may feel with these eloquent expressions of that
entire complacency in the present, past, and future, which peculiarly
animates Dean Stanley's writings, I must, in this case, pray you
to observe that the transmutation of holy wells into sewers has,
at least, destroyed the charm and utility of the Thames as a salmon
stream, and I must ask you to read with attention the succeeding
portions of the chapter which record the legends of the river
fisheries in their relation to the first Abbey of Westminster;
dedicated by its builders to St. Peter, not merely in his office of
cornerstone of the Church, nor even figuratively as a fisher of men,
but directly as a fisher of fish:--and which maintained themselves,
you will see, in actual ceremony down to 1382, when a fisherman still
annually took his place beside the Prior, after having brought in a
salmon for St. Peter, which was carried in state down the middle of
the refectory.
But as I refer to this page for the exact word, my eye is caught by
one of the sentences of Londonian[4] thought which constantly pervert
the well-meant books of pious England. "We see also," says the Dean,
"the union of innocent fiction with worldly craft, which marks so
many of the legends both of Pagan and Christian times." I might simply
reply to this insinuation that times which have no legends differ
from the legendary ones merely by uniting guilty, instead of innocent,
fiction, with worldly craft; but I must farther advise you that the
legends of these passionate times are in no wise, and in no sense,
fiction at all; but the true record of impressions made on the minds
of persons in a state of eager spiritual excitement, brought into
bright focus by acting steadily and frankly under its impulses. I
could tell you a great deal more about such things than you would
believe, and therefore, a great deal more than it would do you the
least good to hear;--but this much any who care to use their common
sense modestly, cannot but admit, that unless they choose to try the
rough life of the Christian ages, they cannot understand its practical
consequences. You have all been taught by Lord Macaulay and his school
that because you have Carpets instead of rushes for your feet; and
Feather-beds instead of fern for your backs; and Kickshaws instead
of beef for your eating; and Drains instead of Holy Wells for your
drinking;--that, therefore, you are the Cream of Creation, and
every one of you a seven-headed Solomon. Stay in those pleasant
circumstances and convictions if you please; but don't accuse your
roughly bred and fed fathers of telling lies about the aspect the
earth and sky bore to _them_,--till you have trodden the earth as
they, barefoot, and seen the heavens as they, face to face. If you
care to see and to know for yourselves, you may do it with little
pains; you need not do any great thing, you needn't keep one eye open
and the other shut for ten years over a microscope, nor fight your way
through icebergs and darkness to knowledge of the _celestial_ pole.
Simply, do as much as king after king of the Saxons did,--put rough
shoes on your feet and a rough cloak on your shoulders, and walk to
Rome and back. Sleep by the roadside, when it is fine,--in the first
outhouse you can find, when it is wet; and live on bread and water,
with an onion or two, all the way; and if the experiences which you
will have to relate on your return do not, as may well be, deserve the
name of spiritual; at all events you will not be disposed to let other
people regard them either as Poetry or Fiction.
[Footnote 4: Not _Londinian_.]
With this warning, presently to be at greater length insisted on,
I trace for you, in Dean Stanley's words, which cannot be bettered
except in the collection of their more earnest passages from among
his interludes of graceful but dangerous qualification,--I trace, with
only such omission, the story he has told us of the foundation of that
Abbey, which, he tells you, was the Mother of London, and has ever
been the shrine and the throne of English faith and truth.
"The gradual formation of a monastic body, indicated in the charters
of Offa and Edgar, marks the spread of the Benedictine order
throughout England, under the influence of Dunstan. The 'terror' of
the spot, which had still been its chief characteristic in the charter
of the wild Offa, had, in the days of the more peaceful Edgar, given
way to a dubious 'renown.' Twelve monks is the number traditionally
said to have been established by Dunstan. A few acres further up the
river formed their chief property, and their monastic character was
sufficiently recognized to have given to the old locality of the
'terrible place' the name of the 'Western Monastery,' or 'Minster of
the West.'"
The Benedictines then--twelve Benedictine monks--thus begin the
building of existent Christian London. You know I told you the
Benedictines are the Doing people, as the disciples of St. Augustine
the Sentimental people. The Benedictines find no terror in their
own thoughts--face the terror of places--change it into beauty of
places,--make this terrible place, a Motherly Place--Mother of London.
This first Westminster, however, the Dean goes on to say, "seems to
have been overrun by the Danes," and it would have had no further
history but for the combination of circumstances which directed hither
the notice of Edward the Confessor.
I haven't time to read you all the combination of circumstances. The
last clinching circumstance was this--
"There was in the neighbourhood of Worcester, 'far from men in the
wilderness, on the slope of a wood, in a cave deep down in the grey
rock,' a holy hermit 'of great age, living on fruits and roots.' One
night when, after reading in the Scriptures 'how hard are the pains of
hell, and how the enduring life of Heaven is sweet and to be desired,'
he could neither sleep nor repose, St. Peter appeared to him,
'bright and beautiful, like to a clerk,' and warned him to tell the
King that he was released from his vow; that on that very day his
messengers would return from Rome;" (that is the combination of
circumstances--bringing Pope's order to build a church to release
the King from his vow of pilgrimage); "that 'at Thorney, two leagues
from the city,' was the spot marked out where, in an ancient church,
'situated low,' he was to establish a perfect Benedictine monastery,
which should be 'the gate of heaven, the ladder of prayer, whence
those who serve St. Peter there, shall by him be admitted into
Paradise.' The hermit writes the account of the vision on parchment,
seals it with wax, and brings it to the King, who compares it with the
answer of the messengers, just arrived from Rome, and determines on
carrying out the design as the Apostle had ordered.
"The ancient church, 'situated low,' indicated in this vision the
one whose attached monastery had been destroyed by the Danes, but its
little church remained, and was already dear to the Confessor, not
only from the lovely tradition of its dedication by the spirit of St.
Peter;" (you must read that for yourselves;) "but also because of two
miracles happening there to the King himself.