called him, was the son of a rich negro merchant at Monte Video, who,
though married and father of a family, yet, for the love of the Italian
captain, came over to fight by his side, which they say he never
quitted. I have seen each separately, but not together. There is a Mrs.
Garibaldi; she went out with him to the Abruzzi. I hope the French
won’t cut them to pieces, but vice versâ.
July 7.
Last night I had the pleasure of abandoning a café on the entrance of
the French. The Italians expect you to do so. It was quite composedly
done; no bravado or hurry.
Mazzini, on the 30th, after the capture of the bastion, proposed to
the Assembly that it, with the army, should quit Rome, carry off the
artillery, and occupy some stronghold. But the Assembly at first would
not; and after, when it would, could not. The course actually taken
was repugnant to Mazzini’s views, who was anxious to save Rome from
destruction, but at the same time to hold out somewhere and somehow to
the last.
The Chigi chapel, in Sta. Maria del Popolo, is a remarkable case.
Raphael’s Jonah is untouched, but the statue next it has been chipped
in two places by a ball. Nothing else is hurt.
_To the same._
Rome: July 13, 1849.
We are all in admiration here of M. de Corcelles’ statement, that
during the twenty-six days that elapsed of the siege, not one bomb
had been thrown into the city. I dare say a large proportion of what
were thrown were grenades, but that there were bombs, in the strictest
sense, is undoubted. A military friend whom I can trust has seen
_one_, and I think I myself have. Moreover, the grenades were large.
And I presume M. de Corcelles will prefer saying plainly that he was
misinformed, to the alternative of professing not to have meant to deny
grenades. On the night of the 22nd, 150 missives of the bomb or the
grenade species are said to have been thrown into the town; 130 were
counted by an acquaintance of mine, a Roman; at the rate they were
being plied while I was looking on myself, I cannot doubt some figure
like this must be correct.
On the night of the 29th, a French officer told an English gentleman
the detachment in the Borghese grounds was ordered to fire 120 shots
into the Piazza di Spagna quarter, as a feint; they had no particular
aim, but seeing a light in a high window, they took it for their mark,
and--_hinc illæ lachrymæ_--hence those balls and bombs, or, I beg
pardon, grenades perhaps, which frightened us out of our propriety into
the primo piano.
Mazzini, through the negotiation of Mr. Cass, the American Chargé
d’affaires, received a passport in his own name from the French, and
went off viâ Civita Vecchia, with a bearer of despatches from the
same Mr. Cass, I think, on Tuesday last, the 10th. He would go into
Switzerland. This is quite positive.
On Monday I was at Albano. The French, seventy horse, came in that
afternoon at four. The Spaniards meantime had just the previous night
occupied Genzano, three miles off. One hears that the French have
turned them out of it.
Two newspapers appear in Rome besides the official gazette, called the
‘Giornale di Roma’; one of these, the ‘Costituzionale,’ belongs to the
_prete_ interest; the other, ‘La Speranza dell’ Epoca,’ to Mamiani and
coterie. They are under a military censure, but liberally exercised; a
new appointment was freely commented on _in malam partem_ yesterday by
this latter print.
The Principessa di Belgiojoso is still here, looking after her feriti
at the Monte Cavallo, who, as I think by Mr. Cass’s intercession, are
allowed to remain there; at first, orders were given that they should
be removed within a week. Garibaldi is said to have effected a junction
at Terni with Forbes, an Englishman holding rank here of colonel, I
think, and commanding a small detachment.
Add to the list of fortunate escapes, that a ball struck the façade
of the Palazzo Sciarra on the terzo piano. On the secondo in front is
the gallery, whose ample windows give light to the famous Modestia e
Vanità of Leonardo da Vinci, the Violin Player of Raphael, Titian’s
Bella Donna, and others, most of which, however, have been put into the
passage for safety.
Freeborn, the Consul, has got _one_ bomb in his bank. Do _you_ know
the difference between the two things, bomb and grenade? bomb has two
handles, and grenade is a hollow ball with a hole in it; that is all I
know. Grenades, they say, burst in the air; otherwise they are as big
as bombs, and by no means innocent things.
July 14.
Giving the French and the ‘Times’ credit for some degree of
truth-telling, the simple truth would appear to be, that we have been
grenaded, not bombarded. It is possible that the cannon and _mortars_
were pointed merely to the breach, and that the bombs and balls that
came in were merely bad shots. But the _obus_ (singular or plural)
must certainly have been pointed against the very heart of the city,
the Pantheon and Capitol; and a discharge of 150 or more grenades
in a single night is, if not a bombardment, still---- My authority
about Mazzini’s movements is[13] Miss Fuller, an American, who was in
immediate communication with Mazzini and Mr. Cass, and who was a party
to the negotiation. She is now gone to Rieti.
_To the same._
Geneva: August 7.
I shall go and see Mont Blanc, among other duties (for I am finishing
my education before coming to town), and move homeward by the Rhine.
I saw the French enter Rome, and then went to Naples, which I greatly
enjoyed. Thence direct by Genoa and Turin to this place, and from here
by Interlaken home. I am full of admiration of Mazzini. But, on the
whole, ‘Farewell, politics, utterly! What can I do?’ Study is much more
to the purpose.
This is a dull sky-and-water atmosphere, after the blue sweaters of the
south; and the English locust of course prevails in it.
_To T. Arnold, Esq._
University Hall, London: October 29, 1849.
Well, here I am, and with Palgrave, who is breakfasting with me in my
hall, where we all--_i.e._ myself and my eleven undergraduates (that
should be thirty, and I hope will be some day)--breakfast and dine
daily. Here, I take it, I shall remain for some little time; though
even as you talk of coming over here, so I, believing that I shall be
kicked out for mine heresies’ sake, and doubtful of success in literary
doings, have sometimes looked at my feet and considered the antipodes,
reflecting however much on the natural conservatising character of
our years after thirty. As I say, I have no confidence in my tenure.
For intolerance, O Tom, is not confined to the cloisters of Oxford,
or the pews of the Establishment, but comes up, like the tender herb,
_partout_, and is indeed in a manner indigenous in the heart of the
family man of the middle classes.
Do we not work best by digging deepest? by avoiding polemics, and
searching to display the real thing? If only one could do the
latter!--Emerson is an example, and also Carlyle, and in his kind M.A.
Yet [Greek: ἕκαστος ἔχει τὸ ἑαυτου χάρισμα] and οὐ πάντες χωροῦσι
τοῦτον τὸν λὸγον. Let B----s delight to bark and bite, if indeed God
has made them so.
Interrupted by my one pupil--for you observe that undergraduates all
attend the University College professors, and I only keep a hall, as an
M. A. of old times did in the days of professors at Oxford--and out of
the eleven only have one pupil--I now resume to say farewell.
_To J. C. Shairp, Esq._
University Hall: October 31, 1849.
You and Walrond may read this,[14] but don’t show it to others; nor,
therefore, name it, as if you do, they’ll importune. You are nice
discreet creatures, I know.
I wish you would come and see me on your way to Oxford. London,
generally speaking, is lonely--for evil at any rate and partly for
good. A loneliness relieved by evening parties is not delightful, but I
get on well enough in general, looking forward always to the Long. If I
do not get a pupil for the Continent, I shall come up to Scotland.
You do not perhaps enjoy at Rugby a fine yellow fog this morning. We
do.
_To F. T. Palgrave, Esq._
[On receiving a present of Goethe’s works.]
University Hall, London: November 18, 1849.
Thanks many, specially perhaps for the note. I had a great mind
to say to you, ‘As soon as you give me the Goethe, we will cut.’
Let us suppose that done, and look forward _tout-de-suite_ to a
recommencement--‘Cut and come again’ being the true motto for all
proper intercourse. I think the best way of looking at a present is as
a thing to be much more valuable some time hereafter than just now;
it is more properly a future than a present. Cast thy Goethe upon
the waters; give with thy left hand, and let not thy right hand of
fellowship ask what thy left doeth.
And so on, whereof enough.
_To ----_
It is a good deal forgotten that we came into this world to do, not
kindness to others, but our own duty, to live soberly, righteously,
and godly, not benevolently, philanthropically, and tenderheartedly.
To earn his own bread honestly--in the strictest sense of the word
_honestly_--to do plain straightforward work or business well and
thoroughly, not with mere eye-service for the market, is really quite a
sufficient task for the ordinary mortal.
_To T. Arnold, Esq._
University Hall, London: January 3, 1850.
Here I am, just about to recommence the crambe repetita of pædagogy
after a brief fortnight’s holiday. Of what use is pædagogy? Some, I
suppose; and as much probably as any other occupation one is in the
way of getting harnessed to. Cast, therefore, thy syntax on the waters.
But in the meantime [Greek: εἴσελθε εὶς τὸ ταμιεῖόν σου, καὶ κλείοας
την θύραν σου, κ.τ.λ.]
There is a great blessing, I sometimes think, in being set down amongst
uncongenial people, for me at least who am over-provocable. Consider
the coal upon the fireplace, how it came to blaze thus: was it not
concealed and compressed for long world-ages, never expecting to
see the light again, far less that in its own self there was light,
heat, and joyfulness, having no sort of imagination that it should be
transmuted into, or shall we say, wooed, wedded and incorporated with
the subtle atmosphere itself? Consider, I say, the long preparation
of this strange marriage of coal and oxygen air, and say, if you can,
moreover, when was there most real worthiness of existence, in the
grimy or the blazy period, in the imprisonment or deliverance of the
gases, the incarnation or apotheosis, the suppression or expression,
&c. &c. &c.?
Sunday, January 27.
As in old times at breakfast in Oriel, so here for an afternoon walk
and dinner I am waiting for M. and, I believe, E. They tell me you like
the ‘Bothie’; it was a pleasant anticipation to me that you would,
while it was yet in swaddling-clothes. They have reprinted me at
Cambridge, Massachusetts!
_To a Friend._
[In answer to some criticisms on ‘Amours de Voyage.’]
Good heavens! don’t be afraid. You are a very gentle beast, and of
a good conscience, and roar me like any sucking-dove. _Parturiunt
montes_--you are not half trenchant enough. Yet your criticism is not
exactly what I wanted. What I want assurance of is in the way of
execution rather than conception. If I were only half as sure of the
bearableness of the former as I am of the propriety of the latter, I
would publish at once. Gott und Teufel! my friend, you don’t suppose
all that comes from myself! I assure you it is extremely _not_ so.
You’re a funny creature, my dear old fellow: if one don’t sing you a
ballant, or read you a philosophic sermonette, if one don’t talk about
the gowans or faith, you’re not pleased. However, I believe that the
execution of this is so poor, that it makes the conception a fair
subject of disgust. You cannot possibly be too severe and truculent
about the execution, and I agree quite as to the correctness (which
is the only question) of what you say; except that I am not sure that
scenes and scenery would exactly improve the matter.
But do you not, in the conception, find any final strength of mind in
the unfortunate fool of a hero? I have no intention of sticking up for
him, but certainly I did not mean him to go off into mere prostration
and defeat. Does the last part seem utterly sceptical to your sweet
faithful soul?
Your censure of the conception almost provoked me into publishing,
because it showed how washy the world is in its confidences. There is a
Roland for your Oliver, my boy. But I probably shan’t publish, for fear
of a row with my committee.
_To the same._
June 19, 1850.
It continues to strike me how ignorant you, and I, and other young
men of our set are. Actual life is unknown to an Oxford student, even
though he is not a mere Puseyite, and goes on jolly reading parties.
Enter the arena of your brethren, and go not to your grave without
knowing what common merchants and solicitors, much more sailors
and coalheavers, are acquainted with. Ignorance is a poor kind of
innocence. The world is wiser than the wise, and as innocent as the
innocent; and it has long been found out what is the best way of taking
things. ‘The earth,’ said the great traveller, ‘is much the same
wherever we go’; and the changes of position which women and students
tremble and shilly-shally before, leave things much as they found them.
_Cœlum non animum mutant._ The winter comes and destroys all, but in
the spring the old grasses come up all the greener.
Let us not sit in a corner and mope, and think ourselves clever, for
our comfort, while the room is full of dancing and cheerfulness. The
sum of the whole matter is this. Whatsoever your hand findeth to do, do
it without fiddle-faddling; for there is no experience, nor pleasure,
nor pain, nor instruction, nor anything else in the grave whither thou
goest. When you get to the end of this life, you won’t find another
ready-made, in which you can do without effort what you were meant to
do with effort here.
_To R. W. Emerson, Esq._
University Hall, Gordon Square: July 22, 1850.
Why I have let six months pass away without acknowledging the copy of
your ‘Representative Men,’ which I received and read so thankfully, I
do not know; unless it be that I was not willing to put an end at once
to the relation of debtor which resulted. To have a distinct claim
on one for a letter constitutes a sort of connection, even with the
Atlantic between us.
I am here at the end of my first session in London, not much the worse,
nor much the wiser. I am not sorry myself to be where I am: in very
many ways, it is a greater seclusion than the academic shades you took
pleasure in looking at, at Oxford.
_To T. Arnold, Esq._
University Hall: July 23, 1850.
I am rejoiced to find you busy and _in mediis rebus_ so soon. Your
population of course won’t be very beautiful and attractive, but all
the truer to fact in general for having plenty of alloy, and that
is a comfort to a certain extent; earthly paradises being mostly
milk-and-watery, and not long to last. Van Diemen’s Land with its
convict basis has got at any fate something of the _tantum radice
ad Tartara_, to begin with, and _quantum vertice_ may come. In new
colonies, I suppose, no amount of bishops and archdeacons can resist
the general indifferentist tendencies of the commercial English
middle-class, to whom the world is committed for the present.
I find, meantime, even the small amount of business which I have to do
in this place beneficial to me, even the bank-books and cash-accounts.
_To J. C. Shairp, Esq._
University Hall: March 9, 1851.
_Ex nihilo nihil._ He who does not come at all, does not come with
goose quills, and _à fortiori_ not with swan quills. Thus the logicians.
You must, therefore, correct your exercises with your own goose
feathers. But, tell me. Have you got such big boys this half-year that
the ordinary-sized instrument will not apply to their Latin prose? Why
don’t you come up here and buy them for yourself?
We are still, I believe, travelling about the sun, round and round,
and round and round, in the old foolish fashion. It is certainly a
very funny way for the _anima mundi_ to amuse itself. But chacun à son
goût. In the midst of life we are in death, for suppose the _anima
mundi_ were to take a fancy to do something else, to go backwards and
forwards, or even round the other way!
Cudwith, I am told, has an admirable disquisition on ‘A Plastic
Nature,’ in a parliamentary sense, I suppose; for otherwise, would
it not be pantheism? But indeed that is a mistake, for I hold it to
be perfectly constitutional language, entirely in the spirit of our
institutions in (Church and State, that is to say) Natural and Revealed
Religion. Consider these things; watch and pray, that is the right way,
for self and friends, among whom, believe me,
A. H. C.
_To T. Arnold, Esq._
University Hall, Gordon Square: March 16, 1851.
I sent you five or six copies of the poem you were so friendly as
to like so well. By the time they reached you, you would probably
have been properly disenchanted, with a view to which contingency I
fortified them by two Idylls of a truer pastoral poet or poetess. These
you may accept, for the lack of better, as my wedding-present. The
following you may accept or not, as you please:--
On grass, on gravel, in the sun,
And now beneath the shade,
They went in pleasant Kensington.
Let it remind you of the ancient Kensington Gardens, Fresh from the
oven, it is, I assure you, _tibi primo confisum_. I am still resident
in Gordon Square, and very little certain whether I shall or not
continue so. The work does, however, well enough.
May 16, 1851.
This has lingered, I believe, chiefly because I desired to add some
self-introducing phrase to your wife, the precise form of which was
difficult; so pray give what you think becoming an ancient ally of her
husband’s--best wishes--_submission_? For to a certain extent, even at
this distance, old friends have to make their graceful withdrawal. It
seems to me, at any rate on this side the water, that a wife is a sort
of natural enemy to a man’s friends.
I, like you, have jumped over a ditch for the fun of the experiment,
and would not be disinclined to be once again in a highway with my
brethren and companions. But _Spartam nactus es, hanc orna_. And you,
I should think, though amongst the poor sinful blackguards of yearly
multiplying convicts and convictidæ, may make some pretty thing out of
your Sparta.
Nothing is very good anywhere, I am afraid. I could have gone cracked
last year with one thing or another, I think, but the wheel comes round.
_To ----_
January 1852.
I certainly am free to tell you that while I do fully think that
the Christian religion is the best, or perhaps the only really good
religion that has appeared, on the other hand, as to how it appeared,
I see all possible doubt. Whether Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote
the gospels, is profoundly dubious. St. Paul wrote his epistles, I
should think, pretty certainly, but he had _seen_ next to nothing.
The religion of those epistles is very different from that of the
gospels, or of St. James’s epistle. The whole origin of Christianity
is lost in obscurity; if the facts are to be believed, it is simply on
trust, because the religion of which they profess to be the origin is
a good one. But its goodness is not proved by them; we find it out for
ourselves by the help of good people, good books, &c. &c. Such is my
present feeling, and the feeling of many. But I don’t urge it on any
one, or mention it, except when I am specially asked, and seldom then.
You remember you complained of my silence.
I mean to wait, but at present that’s what I think. A great many
intelligent and moral people think Christianity a bad religion. I
don’t, but I am not sure, as at present preached, it is quite the
truth. Meantime, ‘the kingdom of heaven cometh not of observation,’ but
‘is in ourselves.’
_To ----_
London: January 1852.
The single life, according to the doctrine of compensation, has some
superiorities, as, for example, that of being more _painful_, which,
in a state of things that offers but little opportunity for elevated
_action_, may be considered a temptation to the aspiring temper. To
live in domestic comfort, toiling in some business not in itself of any
great use, merely for the sake of bread for the household, does look at
times a little ignoble, or at any rate unchivalrous. The Sydney project
had some little relish of chivalry in it. What I looked forward to
originally, in case of not going to Sydney, was unmarried poverty and
literary work.
_To ----_
London: January 1852.
People who have got at all accustomed to write as authors are so
incapable of writing, or even speaking, except ‘in character,’ and
will run through a whole list of dramatis personæ as occasion occurs,
without giving you a chance of seeing what they really are off the
stage; if they try to be sincere, it often makes bad worse. There!
that is one of the mischiefs and miseries of authorship which deters
me. Ten years hence, perhaps! which would not be at all too late;
but if never, no matter. I have myself been rather spoilt by somewhat
_over_-quicksighted men, and thus have got into a perverse habit of
hiding. Have you looked at my sometime pamphlet?[15] I should not write
it now, you must know, I am wiser; but it meant something at the time.
Pictorial-ness, yes; _that_, when it becomes a wonderful vision of all
things, is the ‘Spirit of the Universe.’ The pictorial attitude is not
a good one for one’s continuous life, but for a season it transports
one out of reality.
February 21, 1852.
I may perhaps be idle now; but when I was a boy, between fourteen and
twenty-two throughout, I may say, you don’t know how much regular
drudgery I went through. Holidays after holidays, when I was at
school, after a week or so of recreation, which very rarely came in
an enjoyable form to me, the whole remaining five or six weeks I used
to give to regular work at fixed hours. That wasn’t so very easy for
a schoolboy, spending holidays, not at home, but with uncles, aunts,
and cousins. All this, and whatever work, less rigorous through pretty
regular, that has followed since during the last ten years, has been,
so far as external results go, perhaps a mere blank and waste; nothing
very tangible has come of it; but still it is some justification to
me for being less strict with myself now. Certainly, as a boy, I had
less of boyish enjoyment of any kind whatever, either at home or at
school, than nine-tenths of boys, at any rate of boys who go to school,
college, and the like; certainly, even as a man I think I have earned
myself some title to live for some little interval, I do not say in
enjoyment, but without immediate devotion to particular objects; on
matters as it were of business.
A bad style is as bad as bad manners, and manners you admit do mean
something. Things really ill-written it does one a little harm to read.
Would you forgive bad music because it was well meant? discord because
concordantly intended?
Sunday Morning, London: March 1852.
Shall I begin by recommending patience about all questions, moral,
mystical, &c.? It is not perhaps simply one’s business in life to
‘envisager’ the most remarkable problems of humanity and the universe
simply for the sole benefit of having so done; still we may be well
assured that only time can work out any sort of answer to them for us.
‘_Solvitur ambulando._’ Meantime, in defence of silence, I have always
an impression that what is taken to talk with is lost to act with; you
cannot speak your wisdom and have it.
It is rain, rain, rain, and universal umbrellas travelling churchward.
I meant to get another walk to Chelsea to see Mrs. Carlyle: but the
waters are covering the face of the New Road, and the omnibuses,
doubtless, would be full.
All things become clear to me by work more than by anything else.
Any kind of drudgery will help one out of the most uncommon either
sentimental or speculative perplexity; the attitude of work is the only
one in which one can see things properly. One may be afraid sometimes
of destroying the beauty of one’s dreams by doing anything, losing
sight of what perhaps one will not be able to recover; it need not be
so.
As to mysticism, to go along with it even counter to fact and to reason
may sometimes be tempting, though to do so would take me right away
off the terra firma of practicable duty and business into the limbo of
unrevealed things, the forbidden terra incognita of vague hopes and
hypothetical aspirations. But when I lose my legs, I lose my head; I am
seized with spiritual vertigo and meagrims unutterable.