learn what I have to tell you in these pamphlets; and you will find,
if you choose to find, it is true; and may prove, if you choose
to prove, that it is useful: and I am not in the least minded to
compete for your audience with the 'opinions' in your damp journals,
morning and evening, the black of them coming off on your fingers,
and--beyond all washing--into your brains. It is no affair of mine
whether you attend to me or not; but yours wholly; my hand is weary of
pen-holding--my heart is sick of thinking; for my own part, I would not
write you these pamphlets though you would give me a barrel of beer,
instead of two pints, for them:--I write them wholly for your sake;
I choose that you shall have them decently printed on cream-coloured
paper, and with a margin underneath, which you can write on, if you
like. That is also for your sake: it is a proper form of book for
any man to have who can keep his books clean; and if he cannot, he
has no business with books at all. It costs me ten pounds to print
a thousand copies, and five more to give you a picture; and a penny
off my sevenpence to send you the book;--a thousand sixpences are
twenty-five pounds; when you have bought a thousand Fors of me, I
shall therefore have five pounds for my trouble--and my single shopman,
Mr. Allen, five pounds for his; we won't work for less, either of us;
not that we would not, were it good for you; but it would be by no
means good. And I mean to sell all my large books, henceforward, in
the same way; well printed, well bound, and at a fixed price; and the
trade may charge a proper and acknowledged profit for their trouble
in retailing the book. Then the public will know what they are about,
and so will tradesmen; I, the first producer, answer, to the best of
my power, for the quality of the book;--paper, binding, eloquence,
and all: the retail dealer charges what he ought to charge, openly; and
if the public do not choose to give it, they can't get the book. That
is what I call legitimate business. Then as for this misunderstanding
of me--remember that it is really not easy to understand anything,
which you have not heard before, if it relates to a complex subject;
also, it is quite easy to misunderstand things that you are hearing
every day--which seem to you of the intelligiblest sort. But I can
only write of things in my own way and as they come into my head;
and of the things I care for, whether you care for them or not,
as yet. I will answer for it, you must care for some of them, in time.
To take an instance close to my hand: you would of course think it
little conducive to your interests that I should give you any account
of the wild hyacinths which are opening in flakes of blue fire,
this day, within a couple of miles of me, in the glades of Bagley
wood through which the Empress Maud fled in the snow, (and which,
by the way, I slink through, myself, in some discomfort, lest the
gamekeeper of the college of the gracious Apostle St. John should
catch sight of me; not that he would ultimately decline to make a
distinction between a poacher and a professor, but that I dislike
the trouble of giving an account of myself). Or, if even you would
bear with a scientific sentence or two about them, explaining to
you that they were only green leaves turned blue, and that it was
of no consequence whether they were either; and that, as flowers,
they were scientifically to be considered as not in existence,--you
will, I fear, throw my letter, even though it has cost you sevenpence,
aside at once, when I remark to you that these wood hyacinths of Bagley
have something to do with the battle of Marathon, and if you knew it,
are of more vital interest to you than even the Match Tax.
Nevertheless, as I shall feel it my duty, some day, to speak to you
of Theseus and his vegetable soup, so, to-day, I think it necessary
to tell you that the wood-hyacinth is the best English representative
of the tribe of flowers which the Greeks called "Asphodel," and which
they thought the heroes who had fallen in the battle of Marathon, or
in any other battle, fought in just quarrel, were to be rewarded, and
enough rewarded, by living in fields-full of; fields called, by them,
Elysian, or the Fields of Coming, as you and I talk of the good time
'Coming,' though with perhaps different views as to the nature of
the to be expected goodness.
Now what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said the other day to
the Civil Engineers (see Saturday Review, April 29th,) is entirely
true; namely, that in any of our colliery or cartridge-manufactory
explosions, we send as many men (or women) into Elysium as were likely
to get there after the battle of Marathon; [15] and that is, indeed,
like the rest of our economic arrangements, very fine, and pleasant
to think upon; neither may it be doubted, on modern principles of
religion and equality, that every collier and cartridge-filler is as
fit for Elysium as any heathen could be; and that in all these respects
the battle of Marathon is no more deserving of English notice. But
what I want you to reflect upon, as of moment to you, is whether
you really care for the hyacinthine Elysium you are going to? and
if you do, why you should not live a little while in Elysium here,
instead of waiting so patiently, and working so hardly, to be blown
or flattened into it? The hyacinths will grow well enough on the top
of the ground, if you will leave off digging away the bottom of it;
and another plant of the asphodel species, which the Greeks thought
of more importance even than hyacinths--onions; though, indeed, one
dead hero is represented by Lucian as finding something to complain of
even in Elysium, because he got nothing but onions there to eat. But
it is simply, I assure you, because the French did not understand that
hyacinths and onions were the principal things to fill their existing
Elysian Fields, or Champs Elysées, with, but chose to have carriages,
and roundabouts, instead, that a tax on matches in those fields would
be, nowadays, so much more productive than one on Asphodel; and I
see that only a day or two since even a poor Punch's show could not
play out its play in Elysian peace, but had its corner knocked off
by a shell from Mont Valérien, and the dog Toby "seriously alarmed."
One more instance of the things you don't care for, that are vital
to you, may be better told now than hereafter.
In my plan for our practical work, in last number, you remember I
said, we must try and make some pottery, and have some music, and
that we would have no steam engines. On this I received a singular
letter from a resident at Birmingham, advising me that the colours
for my pottery must be ground by steam, and my musical instruments
constructed by it. To this, as my correspondent was an educated person,
and knew Latin, I ventured to answer that porcelain had been painted
before the time of James Watt; that even music was not entirely a
recent invention; that my poor company, I feared, would deserve no
better colours than Apelles and Titian made shift with, or even the
Chinese; and that I could not find any notice of musical instruments
in the time of David, for instance, having been made by steam.
To this my correspondent again replied that he supposed David's
"twangling upon the harp" would have been unsatisfactory to modern
taste; in which sentiment I concurred with him, (thinking of the
Cumberland procession, without dancing, after its sacred, cylindrical
Ark). We shall have to be content, however, for our part, with a
little "twangling" on such roughly-made harps, or even shells, as
the Jews and Greeks got their melody out of, though it must indeed
be little conceivable in a modern manufacturing town that a nation
could ever have existed which imaginarily dined on onions in Heaven,
and made harps of the near relations of turtles on Earth. But to keep
to our crockery, you know I told you that for some time we should not
be able to put any pictures of Gods on it; and you might think that
would be of small consequence: but it is of moment that we should at
least try--for indeed that old French potter, Palissy, was nearly the
last of potters in France, or England either, who could have done
so, if anybody had wanted Gods. But nobody in his time did;--they
only wanted Goddesses, of a demi-divine-monde pattern; Palissy, not
well able to produce such, took to moulding innocent frogs and vipers
instead, in his dishes; but at Sèvres and other places for shaping of
courtly clay, the charmingest things were done, as you probably saw at
the great peace-promoting Exhibition of 1851; and not only the first
rough potter's fields, tileries, as they called them, or Tuileries,
but the little den where Palissy long after worked under the Louvre,
were effaced and forgotten in the glory of the House of France;
until the House of France forgot also that to it, no less than
the House of Israel, the words were spoken, not by a painted God,
"As the clay is in the hands of the potter, so are ye in mine;" and
thus the stained and vitrified show of it lasted, as you have seen,
until the Tuileries again became the Potter's field, to bury, not
strangers in, but their own souls, no more ashamed of Traitorhood,
but invoking Traitorhood, as if it covered, instead of constituting,
uttermost shame;--until, of the kingdom and its glory there is not
a shard left, to take fire out of the hearth.
Left--to men's eyes, I should have written. To their thoughts, is left
yet much; for true kingdoms and true glories cannot pass away. What
France has had of such, remain to her. What any of us can find of
such, will remain to us. Will you look back, for an instant, again
to the end of my last Letter, p. 23, and consider the state of life
described there:--"No liberty, but instant obedience to known law and
appointed persons; no equality, but recognition of every betterness
and reprobation of every worseness; and none idle but the dead."
I beg you to observe that last condition especially. You will debate
for many a day to come the causes that have brought this misery
upon France, and there are many; but one is chief--chief cause,
now and always, of evil everywhere; and I see it at this moment, in
its deadliest form, out of the window of my quiet English inn. It
is the 21st of May, and a bright morning, and the sun shines, for
once, warmly on the wall opposite, a low one, of ornamental pattern,
imitative in brick of wood-work (as if it had been of wood-work, it
would, doubtless, have been painted to look like brick). Against this
low decorative edifice leans a ruddy-faced English boy of seventeen
or eighteen, in a white blouse and brown corduroy trousers, and a
domical felt hat; with the sun, as much as can get under the rim, on
his face, and his hands in his pockets; listlessly watching two dogs
at play. He is a good boy, evidently, and does not care to turn the
play into a fight; [16] still it is not interesting enough to him,
as play, to relieve the extreme distress of his idleness, and he
occasionally takes his hands out of his pockets, and claps them at
the dogs, to startle them.
The ornamental wall he leans against surrounds the county
police-office, and the residence at the end of it, appropriately called
"Gaol Lodge." This county gaol, police-office, and a large gasometer,
have been built by the good people of Abingdon to adorn the principal
entrance to their town from the south. It was once quite one of the
loveliest, as well as historically interesting, scenes in England. A
few cottages and their gardens, sloping down to the river-side,
are still left, and an arch or two of the great monastery; but the
principal object from the road is now the gaol, and from the river
the gasometer. It is curious that since the English have believed
(as you will find the editor of the Liverpool Daily Post, quoting
to you from Macaulay, in his leader of the 9th of this month), "the
only cure for Liberty is more liberty," (which is true enough, for
when you have got all you can, you will be past physic,) they always
make their gaols conspicuous and ornamental. Now I have no objection,
myself, detesting, as I do, every approach to liberty, to a distinct
manifestation of gaol, in proper quarters; nay, in the highest, and in
the close neighbourhood of palaces; perhaps, even, with a convenient
passage, and Ponte de' Sospiri, from one to the other, or, at least,
a pleasant access by water-gate and down the river; but I do not see
why in these days of 'incurable' liberty, the prospect in approaching
a quiet English county town should be a gaol, and nothing else.
That being so, however, the country boy, in his white blouse,
leans placidly against the prison wall this bright Sunday morning,
little thinking what a luminous sign-post he is making of himself,
and living gnomon of sun-dial, of which the shadow points sharply to
the subtlest cause of the fall of France, and of England, as is too
likely, after her.
Your hands in your own pockets, in the morning. That is the beginning
of the last day; your hands in other people's pockets at noon; that
is the height of the last day; and the gaol, ornamented or otherwise
(assuredly the great gaol of the grave), for the night. That is
the history of nations under judgment. Don't think I say this to any
single class; least of all specially to you; the rich are continually,
nowadays, reproaching you with your wish to be idle. It is very wrong
of you; but, do they want to work all day, themselves? All mouths
are very properly open now against the Paris Communists because they
fight that they may get wages for marching about with flags. What do
the upper classes fight for, then? What have they fought for since
the world became upper and lower, but that they also might have wages
for walking about with flags, and that mischievously? It is very wrong
of the Communists to steal church-plate and candlesticks. Very wrong
indeed; and much good may they get of their pawnbrokers' tickets. Have
you any notion (I mean that you shall have some soon) how much the
fathers and fathers' fathers of these men, for a thousand years back,
have paid their priests, to keep them in plate and candlesticks? You
need not think I am a republican, or that I like to see priests
ill-treated, and their candlesticks carried off. I have many friends
among priests, and should have had more had I not long been trying to
make them see that they have long trusted too much in candlesticks,
not quite enough in candles; not at all enough in the sun, and least of
all enough in the sun's Maker. Scientific people indeed of late opine
the sun to have been produced by collision, and to be a splendidly
permanent railroad accident, or explosive Elysium: also I noticed,
only yesterday, that gravitation itself is announced to the members
of the Royal Institution as the result of vibratory motion. Some day,
perhaps, the members of the Royal Institution will proceed to inquire
after the cause of--vibratory motion. Be that as it may, the Beginning,
or Prince of Vibration, as modern science has it,--Prince of Peace,
as old science had it,--continues through all scientific analysis,
His own arrangements about the sun, as also about other lights, lately
hidden or burning low. And these are primarily, that He has appointed
a great power to rise and set in heaven, which gives life, and warmth,
and motion, to the bodies of men, and beasts, creeping things, and
flowers; and which also causes light and colour in the eyes of things
that have eyes. And He has set above the souls of men, on earth, a
great law or Sun of Justice or Righteousness, which brings also life
and health in the daily strength and spreading of it, being spoken of
in the priest's language, (which they never explained to anybody, and
now wonder that nobody understands,) as having "healing in its wings:"
and the obedience to this law, as it gives strength to the heart, so
it gives light to the eyes of souls that have got any eyes, so that
they begin to see each other as lovely, and to love each other. That
is the final law respecting the sun, and all manner of minor lights
and candles, down to rushlights; and I once got it fairly explained,
two years ago, to an intelligent and obliging wax-and-tallow chandler
at Abbeville, in whose shop I used to sit sketching in rainy days;
and watching the cartloads of ornamental candles which he used to
supply for the church at the far east end of the town, (I forget
what saint it belongs to, but it is opposite the late Emperor's large
new cavalry barracks,) where the young ladies of the better class in
Abbeville had just got up a beautiful evening service, with a pyramid
of candles which it took at least half an hour to light, and as long
to put out again, and which, when lighted up to the top of the church,
were only to be looked at themselves, and sung to, and not to light
anybody or anything. I got the tallow-chandler to calculate vaguely the
probable cost of the candles lighted in this manner, every day, in all
the churches of France; and then I asked him how many cottagers' wives
he knew round Abbeville itself who could afford, without pinching,
either dip or mould in the evening to make their children's clothes
by, and whether, if the pink and green beeswax of the district were
divided every afternoon among them, it might not be quite as honourable
to God, and as good for the candle trade? Which he admitted readily
enough; but what I should have tried to convince the young ladies
themselves of, at the evening service, would probably not have been
admitted so readily;--that they themselves were nothing more than
an extremely graceful kind of wax-tapers which had got into their
heads that they were only to be looked at, for the honour of God,
and not to light anybody.
Which is indeed too much the notion of even the masculine aristocracy
of Europe at this day. One can imagine them, indeed, modest in
the matter of their own luminousness, and more timid of the tax
on agricultural horses and carts, than of that on lucifers; but it
would be well if they were content, here in England, however dimly
phosphorescent themselves, to bask in the sunshine of May at the end
of Westminster Bridge, (as my boy on Abingdon Bridge,) with their
backs against the large edifice they have built there,--an edifice, by
the way, to my own poor judgment, less contributing to the adornment
of London, than the new police-office to that of Abingdon. But the
English squire, after his fashion, sends himself to that highly
decorated gaol all spring-time; and cannot be content with his hands
in his own pockets, nor even in yours and mine; but claps and laughs,
semi-idiot that he is, at dog-fights on the floor of the House, which,
if he knew it, are indeed dog-fights of the Stars in their courses,
Sirius against Procyon; and of the havock and loosed dogs of war,
makes, as the Times correspondent says they make, at Versailles,
of the siege of Paris, "the Entertainment of the Hour."
You think that, perhaps, an unjust saying of him, as he will,
assuredly, himself. He would fain put an end to this wild work,
if he could, he thinks.
My friends, I tell you solemnly, the sin of it all, down to this last
night's doing, or undoing, (for it is Monday now, I waited before
finishing my letter, to see if the Sainte Chapelle would follow the
Vendôme Column;) the sin of it, I tell you, is not that poor rabble's,
spade and pickaxe in hand among the dead; nor yet the blasphemer's,
making noise like a dog by the defiled altars of our Lady of Victories;
and round the barricades, and the ruins, of the Street of Peace.
This cruelty has been done by the kindest of us, and the most
honourable; by the delicate women, by the nobly-nurtured men, who
through their happy and, as they thought, holy lives, have sought,
and still seek, only "the entertainment of the hour." And this robbery
has been taught to the hands,--this blasphemy to the lips,--of the
lost poor, by the False Prophets who have taken the name of Christ
in vain, and leagued themselves with his chief enemy, "Covetousness,
which is idolatry."
Covetousness, lady of Competition and of deadly Care; idol above the
altars of Ignoble Victory; builder of streets, in cities of Ignoble
Peace. I have given you the picture of her--your goddess and only
Hope--as Giotto saw her; dominant in prosperous Italy as in prosperous
England, and having her hands clawed then, as now, so that she can only
clutch, not work; also you shall read next month with me what one of
Giotto's friends says of her--a rude versifier, one of the twangling
harpers; as Giotto was a poor painter for low price, and with colours
ground by hand; but such cheap work must serve our turn for this time;
also, here, is portrayed for you [17] one of the ministering angels
of the goddess; for she herself, having ears set wide to the wind,
is careful to have wind-instruments provided by her servants for
other people's ears.
[Illustration]
This servant of hers was drawn by the court portrait-painter, Holbein;
and was a councillor at poor-law boards, in his day; counselling
then, as some of us have, since, "Bread of Affliction and Water of
Affliction" for the vagrant as such,--which is, indeed, good advice,
if you are quite sure the vagrant has, or may have, a home; not
otherwise. But we will talk further of this next month, taking into
council one of Holbein's prosaic friends, as well as that singing
friend of Giotto's--an English lawyer and country gentleman, living
on his farm, at Chelsea (somewhere near Cheyne Row, I believe)--and
not unfrequently visited there by the King of England, who would ask
himself unexpectedly to dinner at the little Thames-side farm, though
the floor of it was only strewn with green rushes. It was burnt at
last, rushes, ricks, and all; some said because bread of affliction
and water of affliction had been served to heretics there, its master
being a stout Catholic; and, singularly enough, also a Communist; so
that because of the fire, and other matters, the King at last ceased
to dine at Chelsea. We will have some talk, however, with the farmer,
ourselves, some day soon; meantime and always, believe me,
Faithfully yours,
JOHN RUSKIN.
POSTSCRIPT.
25th May (early morning).--Reuter's final telegram, in the Echo of
last night, being "The Louvre and the Tuileries are in flames, the
Federals having set fire to them with petroleum," it is interesting
to observe how, in fulfilment of the Mechanical Glories of our age,
its ingenious Gomorrah manufactures, and supplies to demand, her own
brimstone; achieving also a quite scientific, instead of miraculous,
descent of it from Heaven; and ascent of it, where required, without
any need of cleaving or quaking of earth, except in a superficially
'vibratory' manner.
Nor can it be less encouraging to you to see how, with a sufficiently
curative quantity of Liberty, you may defend yourselves against all
danger of over-production, especially in art; but, in case you should
ever wish to re-'produce' any of the combustibles (as oil, or canvas)
used in these Parisian Economies, you will do well to inquire of the
author of the "Essay on Liberty" whether he considers oil of linseed,
or petroleum, as best fulfilling his definition, "utilities fixed
and embodied in material objects."
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER VII.
Denmark Hill,
1st July, 1871.
My Friends,
It seldom chances, my work lying chiefly among stones, clouds, and
flowers, that I am brought into any freedom of intercourse with my
fellow-creatures; but since the fighting in Paris I have dined out
several times, and spoken to the persons who sat next me, and to others
when I went upstairs; and done the best I could to find out what people
thought about the fighting, or thought they ought to think about it,
or thought they ought to say. I had, of course, no hope of finding
any one thinking what they ought to do. But I have not yet, a little
to my surprise, met with any one who either appeared to be sadder,
or professed himself wiser, for anything that has happened.
It is true that I am neither sadder nor wiser, because of it,
myself. But then I was so sad before, that nothing could make
me sadder; and getting wiser has always been to me a very slow
process,--(sometimes even quite stopping for whole days together),--so
that if two or three new ideas fall in my way at once, it only puzzles
me; and the fighting in Paris has given me more than two or three.