have consented to be the Trustees of the fund; it being distinctly
understood that in that office they accept no responsibility for the
conduct of the scheme, and refrain from expressing any opinion of
its principles. They simply undertake the charge of the money and
land given to the St. George's fund; certify to the public that it
is spent, or treated, for the purposes of that fund, in the manner
stated in my accounts of it; and, in the event of my death, hold it
for such fulfilment of its purposes as they may then find possible.
But it is evidently necessary for the right working of the scheme that
the Trustees should not, except only in that office, be at present
concerned with or involved in it; and that no ambiguous responsibility
should fall on them. I know too much of the manner of law to hope
that I can get the arrangement put into proper form before the end
of the year; but, I hope, at latest, on the eve of Christmas Day
(the day I named first) to publish the December number of Fors with
the legal terms all clear: until then, whatever sums or land I may
receive will be simply paid to the Trustees, or secured in their name,
for the St. George's Fund; what I may attempt afterwards will be, in
any case, scarcely noticeable for some time; for I shall only work with
the interest of the fund; [34] and as I have strength and leisure:--I
have little enough of the one; and am like to have little of the
other, for years to come, if these drawing-schools become useful,
as I hope. But what I may do myself is of small consequence. Long
before it can come to any convincing result, I believe some of the
gentlemen of England will have taken up the matter, and seen that,
for their own sake, no less than the country's, they must now live
on their estates, not in shooting-time only, but all the year; and
be themselves farmers, or "shepherd lords," and make the field gain
on the street, not the street on the field; and bid the light break
into the smoke-clouds, and bear in their hands, up to those loathsome
city walls, the gifts of Giotto's Charity, corn and flowers.
It is time, too, I think. Did you notice the lovely instances of
chivalry, modesty, and musical taste recorded in those letters in
the 'Times,' giving description of the "civilizing" influence of our
progressive age on the rural district of Margate?
They are of some documentary value, and worth preserving, for several
reasons. Here they are:--
I.--A TRIP TO MARGATE.
To the Editor of the Times.
Sir,--On Monday last I had the misfortune of taking a trip
per steamer to Margate. The sea was rough, the ship crowded,
and therefore most of the Cockney excursionists prostrate
with sea-sickness. On landing on Margate pier I must confess I
thought that, instead of landing in an English seaport, I had
been transported by magic to a land inhabited by savages and
lunatics. The scene that ensued when the unhappy passengers had
to pass between the double line of a Margate mob on the pier must
be seen to be believed possible in a civilized country. Shouts,
yells, howls of delight greeted every pale-looking passenger, as
he or she got on the pier, accompanied by a running comment of
the lowest, foulest language imaginable. But the most insulted
victims were a young lady, who having had a fit of hysterics on
board, had to be assisted up the steps, and a venerable-looking
old gentleman with a long grey beard, who, by-the-by, was not sick
at all, but being crippled and very old, feebly tottered up the
slippery steps leaning on two sticks. "Here's a guy!" "Hallo! you
old thief, you won't get drowned, because you know that you are
to be hung," etc., and worse than that, were the greetings of
that poor old man. All this while a very much silver-bestriped
policeman stood calmly by, without interfering by word or deed;
and myself, having several ladies to take care of, could do nothing
except telling the ruffianly mob some hard words, with, of course,
no other effect than to draw all the abuse on myself. This is not
an exceptional exhibition of Margate ruffianism, but, as I have
been told, is of daily occurrence, only varying in intensity with
the roughness of the sea.
Public exposure is the only likely thing to put a stop to such
ruffianism; and now it is no longer a wonder to me why so many
people are ashamed of confessing that they have been to Margate.
I remain, Sir, yours obediently,
C. L. S.
London, August 16.
II.--MARGATE.
To the Editor of the Times.
Sir,--From personal experience obtained from an enforced
residence at Margate, I can confirm all that your correspondent
"C. L. S." states of the behaviour of the mob on the jetty; and
in addition I will venture to say that in no town in England,
or, so far as my experience goes, on the Continent, can such
utterly indecent exhibitions be daily witnessed as at Margate
during bathing hours. Nothing can be more revolting to persons
having the least feelings of modesty than the promiscuous mixing
of the bathers; nude men dancing, swimming, or floating with women
not quite nude, certainly, but with scant clothing. The machines
for males and females are not kept apart, and the latter do not
apparently care to keep within the awnings. The authorities post
notices as to "indecent bathing," but that appears to be all they
think they ought to do.
I am, Sir, yours obediently,
B.
To the Editor of the Times.
Sir,--The account of the scenes which occur at the landing of
passengers at the Margate jetty, given by your correspondent
to-day, is by no means overcharged. But that is nothing. The
rulers of the place seem bent on doing their utmost to keep
respectable people away, or, doubtless, long before this the
class of visitors would have greatly improved. The sea-fronts
of the town, which in the summer would be otherwise enjoyable,
are abandoned to the noisy rule of the lowest kinds of itinerant
mountebanks, organ-grinders, and niggers; and from early morn
till long after nightfall the place is one hopeless, hideous
din. There is yet another grievance. The whole of the drainage is
discharged upon the rocks to the east of the harbour, considerably
above low-water mark; and to the west, where much building is
contemplated, drains have already been laid into the sea, and,
when these new houses are built and inhabited, bathing at Margate,
now its greatest attraction, must cease for ever.
Yours obediently,
Pharos.
Margate, August 18.
I have printed these letters for several reasons. In the first place,
read after them this account of the town of Margate, given in the
'Encyclopædia Britannica,' in 1797: "Margate, a seaport town of Kent,
on the north side of the Isle of Thanet, near the North Foreland. It
is noted for shipping vast quantities of corn (most, if not all,
the product of that island) for London, and has a salt-water bath
at the Post-house, which has performed great cures in nervous and
paralytic cases."
Now this Isle of Thanet, please to observe, which is an elevated (200
to 400 feet) mass of chalk, separated from the rest of Kent by little
rivers and marshy lands, ought to be respected by you (as Englishmen),
because it was the first bit of ground ever possessed in this greater
island by your Saxon ancestors, when they came over, some six or
seven hundred of them only, in three ships, and contented themselves
for a while with no more territory than that white island. Also,
the North Foreland, you ought, I think, to know, is taken for the
terminal point of the two sides of Britain, east and south, in the
first geographical account of our dwelling-place, definitely given
by a learned person. But you ought, beyond all question, to know,
that the cures of the nervous and paralytic cases, attributed seventy
years ago to the "salt-water bath at the Post-house," were much more
probably to be laid to account of the freshest and changefullest
sea-air to be breathed in England, bending the rich corn over that
white dry ground, and giving to sight, above the northern and eastern
sweep of sea, the loveliest skies that can be seen, not in England
only, but perhaps in all the world; able, at least, to challenge the
fairest in Europe, to the far south of Italy.
So it was said, I doubt not rightly, by the man who of all others knew
best; the once in five hundred years given painter, whose chief work,
as separate from others, was the painting of skies. He knew the colours
of the clouds over the sea, from the Bay of Naples to the Hebrides;
and being once asked where, in Europe, were to be seen the loveliest
skies, answered instantly, "In the Isle of Thanet." Where, therefore,
and in this very town of Margate, he lived, when he chose to be quit
of London, and yet not to travel.
And I can myself give this much confirmatory evidence of his
saying;--that though I never stay in Thanet, the two loveliest skies I
have myself ever seen (and next to Turner, I suppose few men of fifty
have kept record of so many), were, one at Boulogne, and the other
at Abbeville; that is to say, in precisely the correspondent French
districts of corn-bearing chalk, on the other side of the Channel.
"And what are pretty skies to us?" perhaps you will ask me: "or what
have they to do with the behaviour of that crowd on Margate Pier?"
Well, my friends, the final result of the education I want you to
give your children will be, in a few words, this. They will know what
it is to see the sky. They will know what it is to breathe it. And
they will know, best of all, what it is to behave under it, as in
the presence of a Father who is in heaven.
Faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER X.
Denmark Hill,
7th September, 1871.
My Friends,
For the last two or three days, the papers have been full of articles
on a speech of Lord Derby's, which, it seems, has set the public mind
on considering the land question. My own mind having long ago been both
set, and entirely made up, on that question, I have read neither the
speech nor the articles on it; but my eye being caught this morning,
fortunately, by the words "Doomsday Book" in my 'Daily Telegraph,'
and presently, looking up the column, by "stalwart arms and heroic
souls of free resolute Englishmen," I glanced down the space between,
and found this, to me, remarkable passage:
"The upshot is, that, looking at the question from a purely mechanical
point of view, we should seek the beau ideal in a landowner cultivating
huge farms for himself, with abundant machinery and a few well-paid
labourers to manage the mechanism, or delegating the task to the
smallest possible number of tenants with capital. But when we bear in
mind the origin of landlordism, of our national needs, and the real
interests of the great body of English tenantry, we see how advisable
it is to retain intelligent yeomen as part of our means of cultivating
the soil."
This is all, then, is it, that your Liberal paper ventures to say
for you? It is advisable to retain a few intelligent yeomen in the
island. I don't mean to find fault with the 'Daily Telegraph': I
think it always means well on the whole, and deals fairly; which is
more than can be said for its highly toned and delicately perfumed
opponent, the 'Pall Mall Gazette.' But I think a "Liberal" paper
might have said more for the "stalwart arms and heroic souls" than
this. I am going myself to say a great deal more for them, though I
am not a Liberal--quite the polar contrary of that.
You, perhaps, have been provoked, in the course of these letters, by
not being able to make out what I was. It is time you should know, and
I will tell you plainly. I am, and my father was before me, a violent
Tory of the old school; (Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and
Homer's,) I name these two out of the numberless great Tory writers,
because they were my own two masters. I had Walter Scott's novels,
and the Iliad, (Pope's translation), for my only reading when I was a
child, on week-days: on Sundays their effect was tempered by 'Robinson
Crusoe' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress'; my mother having it deeply
in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman of me. Fortunately,
I had an aunt more evangelical than my mother; and my aunt gave
me cold mutton for Sunday's dinner, which--as I much preferred it
hot--greatly diminished the influence of the 'Pilgrim's Progress,'
and the end of the matter was, that I got all the noble imaginative
teaching of Defoe and Bunyan, and yet--am not an evangelical clergyman.
I had, however, still better teaching than theirs, and that
compulsorily, and every day of the week. (Have patience with me in this
egotism; it is necessary for many reasons that you should know what
influences have brought me into the temper in which I write to you.)
Walter Scott and Pope's Homer were reading of my own election, but my
mother forced me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the
Bible by heart; as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud,
hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once a year;
and to that discipline--patient, accurate, and resolute--I owe, not
only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable,
but much of my general power of taking pains, and the best part of
my taste in literature. From Walter Scott's novels I might easily,
as I grew older, have fallen to other people's novels; and Pope might,
perhaps, have led me to take Johnson's English, or Gibbon's, as types
of language; but, once knowing the 32nd of Deuteronomy, the 119th
Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the Sermon on the Mount, and most
of the Apocalypse, every syllable by heart, and having always a way
of thinking with myself what words meant, it was not possible for me,
even in the foolishest times of youth, to write entirely superficial
or formal English, and the affectation of trying to write like Hooker
and George Herbert was the most innocent I could have fallen into.
From my own masters, then, Scott and Homer, I learned the Toryism
which my best after-thought has only served to confirm.
That is to say a most sincere love of kings, and dislike of everybody
who attempted to disobey them. Only, both by Homer and Scott, I was
taught strange ideas about kings, which I find, for the present,
much obsolete; for, I perceived that both the author of the Iliad
and the author of Waverley made their kings, or king-loving persons,
do harder work than anybody else. Tydides or Idomeneus always killed
twenty Trojans to other people's one, and Redgauntlet speared more
salmon than any of the Solway fishermen, and--which was particularly a
subject of admiration to me,--I observed that they not only did more,
but in proportion to their doings, got less, than other people--nay,
that the best of them were even ready to govern for nothing, and
let their followers divide any quantity of spoil or profit. Of late
it has seemed to me that the idea of a king has become exactly the
contrary of this, and that it has been supposed the duty of superior
persons generally to do less, and to get more than anybody else;
so that it was, perhaps, quite as well that in those early days my
contemplation of existent kingship was a very distant one, and my
childish eyes wholly unacquainted with the splendour of courts.
The aunt who gave me cold mutton on Sundays was my father's sister:
she lived at Bridge-end, in the town of Perth, and had a garden full
of gooseberry-bushes, sloping down to the Tay, with a door opening
to the water, which ran past it clear-brown over the pebbles three
or four feet deep; an infinite thing for a child to look down into.
My father began business as a wine-merchant, with no capital, and a
considerable amount of debts bequeathed him by my grandfather. He
accepted the bequest, and paid them all before he began to lay by
anything for himself, for which his best friends called him a fool,
and I, without expressing any opinion as to his wisdom, which I knew in
such matters to be at least equal to mine, have written on the granite
slab over his grave that he was "an entirely honest merchant." As
days went on he was able to take a house in Hunter Street, Brunswick
Square, No. 54 (the windows of it, fortunately for me, commanded a view
of a marvellous iron post, out of which the water-carts were filled
through beautiful little trap-doors, by pipes like boa-constrictors;
and I was never weary of contemplating that mystery, and the delicious
dripping consequent); and as years went on, and I came to be four or
five years old, he could command a postchaise and pair for two months
in the summer, by help of which, with my mother and me, he went the
round of his country customers (who liked to see the principal of the
house his own traveller); so that, at a jog-trot pace, and through
the panoramic opening of the four windows of a postchaise, made more
panoramic still to me because my seat was a little bracket in front,
(for we used to hire the chaise regularly for the two months out of
Long Acre, and so could have it bracketed and pocketed as we liked),
I saw all the highroads, and most of the cross ones, of England and
Wales, and great part of lowland Scotland, as far as Perth, where every
other year we spent the whole summer; and I used to read the 'Abbot'
at Kinross, and the 'Monastery' in Glen Farg, which I confused with
"Glendearg," and thought that the White Lady had as certainly lived
by the streamlet in that glen of the Ochils, as the Queen of Scots
in the island of Loch Leven.
It happened also, which was the real cause of the bias of my after
life, that my father had a rare love of pictures. I use the word
"rare" advisedly, having never met with another instance of so
innate a faculty for the discernment of true art, up to the point
possible without actual practice. Accordingly, wherever there was
a gallery to be seen, we stopped at the nearest town for the night;
and in reverentest manner I thus saw nearly all the noblemen's houses
in England; not indeed myself at that age caring for the pictures,
but much for castles and ruins, feeling more and more, as I grew
older, the healthy delight of uncovetous admiration, and perceiving,
as soon as I could perceive any political truth at all, that it was
probably much happier to live in a small house, and have Warwick
Castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick Castle, and have
nothing to be astonished at; but that, at all events, it would not
make Brunswick Square in the least more pleasantly habitable, to pull
Warwick Castle down. And, at this day, though I have kind invitations
enough to visit America, I could not, even for a couple of months,
live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles.
Nevertheless, having formed my notion of kinghood chiefly from the
FitzJames of the 'Lady of the Lake,' and of noblesse from the Douglas
there, and the Douglas in 'Marmion,' a painful wonder soon arose in
my child-mind, why the castles should now be always empty. Tantallon
was there; but no Archibald of Angus:--Stirling, but no Knight of
Snowdoun. The galleries and gardens of England were beautiful to
see--but his Lordship and her Ladyship were always in town, said the
housekeepers and gardeners. Deep yearning took hold of me for a kind of
"Restoration," which I began slowly to feel that Charles the Second
had not altogether effected, though I always wore a gilded oak-apple
very reverently in my button-hole on the 29th of May. It seemed to
me that Charles the Second's Restoration had been, as compared with
the Restoration I wanted, much as that gilded oak-apple to a real
apple. And as I grew older, the desire for red pippins instead of
brown ones, and Living Kings instead of dead ones, appeared to me
rational as well as romantic; and gradually it has become the main
purpose of my life to grow pippins, and its chief hope, to see Kings.
Hope, this last, for others much more than for myself. I can always
behave as if I had a King, whether I have one or not; but it is
otherwise with some unfortunate persons. Nothing has ever impressed
me so much with the power of kingship, and the need of it, as the
declamation of the French Republicans against the Emperor before
his fall.
He did not, indeed, meet my old Tory notion of a King; and in my own
business of architecture he was doing, I saw, nothing but mischief;
pulling down lovely buildings, and putting up frightful ones carved all
over with L. N.'s: but the intense need of France for a governor of
some kind was made chiefly evident to me by the way the Republicans
confessed themselves paralyzed by him. Nothing could be done in
France, it seemed, because of the Emperor: they could not drive an
honest trade; they could not keep their houses in order; they could
not study the sun and moon; they could not eat a comfortable déjeûner
à la fourchette; they could not sail in the Gulf of Lyons, nor climb
on the Mont d'Or; they could not, in fine, (so they said,) so much as
walk straight, nor speak plain, because of the Emperor. On this side of
the water, moreover, the Republicans were all in the same tale. Their
opinions, it appeared, were not printed to their minds in the Paris
journals, and the world must come to an end therefore. So that,
in fact, here was all the Republican force of France and England,
confessing itself paralyzed, not so much by a real King, as by the
shadow of one. All the harm the extant and visible King did was,
to encourage the dressmakers and stone-masons in Paris,--to pay some
idle people very large salaries,--and to make some, perhaps agreeably
talkative, people, hold their tongues. That, I repeat, was all the harm
he did, or could do; he corrupted nothing but what was voluntarily
corruptible,--crushed nothing but what was essentially not solid:
and it remained open to these Republican gentlemen to do anything
they chose that was useful to France, or honourable to themselves,
between earth and heaven, except only--print violent abuse of this
shortish man, with a long nose, who stood, as they would have it,
between them and heaven. But there they stood, spell-bound; the
one thing suggesting itself to their frantic impotence as feasible,
being to get this one shortish man assassinated. Their children would
not grow, their corn would not ripen, and the stars would not roll,
till they had got this one short man blown into shorter pieces.
If the shadow of a King can thus hold (how many?) millions of men,
by their own confession, helpless for terror of it, what power must
there be in the substance of one?
But this mass of republicans--vociferous, terrified, and mischievous,
is the least part, as it is the vilest, of the great European populace
who are lost for want of true kings. It is not these who stand idle,
gibbering at a shadow, whom we have to mourn over;--they would have
been good for little, even governed;--but those who work and do
not gibber,--the quiet peasants in the fields of Europe, sad-browed,
honest-hearted, full of natural tenderness and courtesy, who have none
to help them, and none to teach; who have no kings, except those who
rob them while they live, no tutors, except those who teach them--how
to die.
I had an impatient remonstrance sent me the other day, by a country
clergyman's wife, against that saying in my former letter, "Dying
has been more expensive to you than living." Did I know, she asked,
what a country clergyman's life was, and that he was the poor man's
only friend?
Alas, I know it, and too well. What can be said of more deadly and
ghastly blame against the clergy of England, or any other country,
than that they are the poor man's only friends?
Have they, then, so betrayed their Master's charge and mind, in
their preaching to the rich;--so smoothed their words, and so sold
their authority,--that, after twelve hundred years entrusting of the
gospel to them, there is no man in England (this is their chief plea
for themselves forsooth) who will have mercy on the poor, but they;
and so they must leave the word of God, and serve tables?