It is long since you have heard of me, and now I ask your
patience with me for a little. I have but just returned from
the funeral of my dear, dear friend ----, the first artist
friend I made in London--a loved and prized one. For years
past he had lived in the very humblest way, fighting his
battle of life against mean appreciation of his talents, the
wants of a rising family, and frequent attacks of illness,
crippling him for months at a time, the wolf at the door
meanwhile.
But about two years since his prospects brightened * * * and
he had but a few weeks since ventured on removal to a larger
house. His eldest boy of seventeen years, a very intelligent
youth, so strongly desired to be a civil engineer that Mr.
----, not being able to pay the large premium required for
his apprenticeship, had been made very glad by the consent
of Mr. Penn, of Millwall, to receive him without a premium
after the boy should have spent some time at King's College
in the study of mechanics. The rest is a sad story. About a
fortnight ago Mr. ---- was taken ill, and died last week,
the doctors say, of sheer physical exhaustion, not
thirty-nine years old, leaving eight young children, and his
poor widow expecting her confinement, and so weak and ill as
to be incapable of effort. This youth is the eldest, and the
other children range downwards to a babe of eighteen months.
There is not one who knew him, I believe, that will not give
cheerfully, to their ability, for his widow and children;
but such aid will go but a little way in this painful case;
and it would be a real boon to this poor widow if some of
her children could be got into an Orphan Asylum. * * *
If you are able to do anything I would send particulars of
the age and sex of the children.
I remain, dear Sir, ever obediently yours,
FRED. J. SHIELDS.
P.S.--I ought to say that poor ---- has been quite unable to
save, with his large family; and that they would be utterly
destitute now, but for the kindness of some with whom he was
professionally connected.
112. Now this case, of which you see the entire authenticity, is, out
of the many of which I hear continually, a _notably_ sad one only in
so far as the artist in question has died of distress while he was
catering for the public amusement. Hardly a week now passes without
some such misery coming to my knowledge; and the quantity of pain, and
anxiety of daily effort, through the best part of life, ending all at
last in utter grief, which the lower middle classes in England are now
suffering, is so great that I feel constantly as if I were living in
one great churchyard, with people all round me clinging feebly to the
edges of the open graves, and calling for help, as they fall back into
them, out of sight.
113. Now I want you to observe here, in a definite case, the working
of your beautiful modern political economy of "supply and demand."
Here is a man who could have "supplied" you with good and entertaining
art,--say for fifty good years,--if you had paid him enough for his
day's work to find him and his children peacefully in bread. But you
like having your prints as cheap as possible--you triumph in the
little that your laugh costs--you take all you can get from the man,
give the least you can give to him,--and you accordingly kill him at
thirty-nine; and thereafter have his children to take care of, or to
kill also, whichever you choose; but, now, observe, you must take care
of _them_ for nothing, or not at all; and what you might have had good
value for, if you had given it when it would have cheered the father's
heart, you now can have no return for at all, to yourselves; and what
you give to the orphans, if it does not degrade them, at least
afflicts, coming, not through their father's hand, its honest
earnings, but from strangers.
Observe, farther, whatever help the orphans may receive, will not be
from the public at all. It will not be from those who profited by
their father's labors; it will be chiefly from his fellow-laborers; or
from persons whose money would have been beneficially spent in other
directions, from whence it is drawn away to this need, which ought
never to have occurred,--while those who waste their money without
doing any service to the public will never contribute one farthing to
this distress.
114. Now it is this double fault in the help--that it comes too late,
and that the burden of it falls wholly on those who ought least to be
charged with it--which would be corrected by that institution of
overseers of which I spoke to you in the twelfth of these letters,
saying, you remember, that they were to have farther legal powers,
which I did not then specify, but which would belong to them chiefly
in the capacity of public almoners, or help-givers, aided by their
deacons, the reception of such help, in time of true need, being not
held disgraceful, but honorable; since the fact of its reception would
be so entirely public that no impostor or idle person could ever
obtain it surreptitiously.
115. (11th April.) I was interrupted yesterday, and I am glad of it,
for here happens just an instance of the way in which the unjust
distribution of the burden of charity is reflected on general
interests; I cannot help what taint of ungracefulness you or other
readers of these letters may feel that I incur, in speaking, in this
instance, of myself. If I could speak with the same accurate knowledge
of any one else, most gladly I would; but I also think it right that,
whether people accuse me of boasting or not, they should know that I
practise what I preach. I had not intended to say what I now shall,
but the coming of this letter last night just turns the balance of the
decision with me. I enclose it with the other; you see it is one from
my bookseller, Mr. Quaritch, offering me Fischer's work on the _Flora
of Java_, and Latour's on _Indian Orchidaceae_, bound together, for
twenty guineas. Now, I am writing a book on botany just now, for young
people, chiefly on wild flowers, and I want these two books very much;
but I simply cannot afford to buy them, because I sent my last spare
twenty guineas to Mr. Shields yesterday for this widow. And though you
may think it not the affair of the public that I have not this book on
Indian flowers, it is their affair finally, that what I write for them
should be founded on as broad knowledge as possible; whatever value my
own book may or may not have, it will just be in a given degree worth
_less_ to them, because of my want of this knowledge.
116. So again--for having begun to speak of myself I will do so yet
more frankly--I suppose that when people see my name down for a
hundred pounds to the Cruikshank Memorial, and for another hundred to
the Eyre Defense Fund, they think only that I have more money than I
know what to do with. Well, the giving of those subscriptions simply
decides the question whether or no I shall be able to afford a journey
to Switzerland this year, in the negative; and I wanted to go, not
only for health's sake, but to examine the junctions of the molasse
sandstones and nagelfluh with the Alpine limestone, in order to
complete some notes I meant to publish next spring on the geology of
the great northern Swiss valley; notes which must now lie by me at
least for another year; and I believe this delay (though I say it)
will be really something of a loss to the traveling public, for the
little essay was intended to explain to them, in a familiar way, the
real wonderfulness of their favorite mountain, the Righi; and to give
them some amusement in trying to find out where the many-colored
pebbles of it had come from. But it is more important that I should,
with some stoutness, assert my respect for the genius and earnest
patriotism of Cruikshank, and my much more than disrespect for the
Jamaica Committee, than that I should see the Alps this year, or get
my essay finished next spring; but I tell you the fact, because I want
you to feel how, in thus leaving their men of worth to be assisted or
defended only by those who deeply care for them, the public more or
less cripple, to their own ultimate disadvantage, just the people
who could serve them in other ways; while the speculators and
money-seekers, who are only making their profit out of the said
public, of course take no part in the help of anybody. And even if
the willing bearers could sustain the burden anywise adequately, none
of us would complain; but I am certain there is no man, whatever
his fortune, who is now engaged in any earnest offices of kindness
to these sufferers, especially of the middle class, among his
acquaintance, who will not bear me witness that for one we can
relieve, we must leave three to perish. I have left three, myself, in
the first three months of this year. One was the artist Paul Gray, for
whom an appeal was made to me for funds to assist him in going abroad
out of the bitter English winter. I had not the means by me, and he
died a week afterwards. Another case was that of a widow whose husband
had committed suicide, for whom application was made to me at the same
time; and the third was a personal friend, to whom I refused a sum
which he said would have saved him from bankruptcy. I believe six
times as much would not have saved him; however, I refused, and he is
ruined.
117. And observe, also, it is not the mere crippling of my means that
I regret. It is the crippling of my temper, and waste of my time. The
knowledge of all this distress, even when I can assist it,--much more
when I cannot,--and the various thoughts of what I can and cannot, or
ought and ought not, to do, are a far greater burden to me than the
mere loss of the money. It is peremptorily not my business--it is not
my gift, bodily or mentally, to look after other people's sorrow. I
have enough of my own; and even if I had not, the sight of pain is not
good for me. I don't want to be a bishop. In a most literal and
sincere sense, "_nolo episcopari_." I don't want to be an almoner, nor
a counselor, nor a Member of Parliament, nor a voter for Members of
Parliament. (What would Mr. Holyoake say to me if he knew that I have
never voted for anybody in my life, and never mean to do so!) I am
essentially a painter and a leaf dissector; and my powers of thought
are all purely mathematical, seizing ultimate principles only--never
accidents; a line is always, to me, length without breadth; it is not
a cable or a crowbar; and though I can almost infallibly reason out
the final law of anything, if within reach of my industry, I neither
care for, nor can trace, the minor exigencies of its daily appliance.
So, in every way, I like a quiet life; and I don't like seeing people
cry, or die; and should rejoice, more than I can tell you, in giving
up the full half of my fortune for the poor, provided I knew that the
public would make Lord Overstone also give the half of his, and other
people who were independent give the half of theirs; and then set men
who were really fit for such office to administer the fund, and answer
to us for nobody's perishing innocently; and so leave us all to do
what we chose with the rest, and with our days, in peace.
Thus far of the public's fault in the matter. Next, I have a word or
two to say of the sufferers' own fault--for much as I pity them, I
conceive that none of them _do_ perish altogether innocently. But this
must be for next letter.