of country or town. Three--and one dead makes four--of my dear friends
(and I have not many dear friends) are country clergymen; and I know
the ways of every sort of them; my architectural tastes necessarily
bringing me into near relations with the sort who like pointed arches
and painted glass; and my old religious breeding having given me
an unconquerable habit of taking up with any travelling tinker of
evangelical principles I may come across; and even of reading, not
without awe, the prophetic warnings of any persons belonging to that
peculiarly well-informed "persuasion," such, for instance, as those
of Mr. Zion Ward "concerning the fall of Lucifer, in a letter to a
friend, Mr. William Dick, of Glasgow, price twopence," in which I
read (as aforesaid, with unfeigned feelings of concern,) that "the
slain of the Lord shall be MAN-Y; that is, man, in whom death is,
with all the works of carnality, shall be burnt up!"
But I was not thinking either of English clergy, or of any other group
of clergy, specially, when I wrote that sentence; but of the entire
Clerkly or Learned Company, from the first priest of Egypt to the
last ordained Belgravian curate, and of all the talk they have talked,
and all the quarrelling they have caused, and all the gold they have
had given them, to this day, when still "they are the poor man's
only friends"--and by no means all of them that, heartily! though I
see the Bishop of Manchester has, of late, been superintending--I
beg his pardon, Bishops don't superintend--looking on, or over, I
should have said--the recreations of his flock at the seaside; and
"the thought struck him" that railroads were an advantage to them
in taking them for their holiday out of Manchester. The thought may,
perhaps, strike him, next, that a working man ought to be able to find
"holy days" in his home, as well as out of it. [35]
A year or two ago, a man who had at the time, and has still, important
official authority over much of the business of the country, was
speaking anxiously to me of the misery increasing in the suburbs
and back streets of London, and debating, with the good help of the
Oxford Regius Professor of Medicine--who was second in council--what
sanitary or moral remedy could be found. The debate languished,
however, because of the strong conviction in the minds of all three
of us that the misery was inevitable in the suburbs of so vast a
city. At last, either the minister or physician, I forget which,
expressed the conviction. "Well," I answered, "then you must not
have large cities." "That," answered the minister, "is an unpractical
saying--you know we must have them, under existing circumstances."
I made no reply, feeling that it was vain to assure any man actively
concerned in modern parliamentary business, that no measures were
"practical" except those which touched the source of the evil
opposed. All systems of government--all efforts of benevolence, are
vain to repress the natural consequences of radical error. But any
man of influence who had the sense and courage to refuse himself and
his family one London season--to stay on his estate, and employ the
shopkeepers in his own village, instead of those in Bond Street--would
be "practically" dealing with, and conquering, this evil, so far as
in him lay; and contributing with his whole might to the thorough
and final conquest of it.
Not but that I know how to meet it directly also, if any London
landlords choose so to attack it. You are beginning to hear something
of what Miss Hill has done in Marylebone, and of the change brought
about by her energy and good sense in the centre of one of the worst
districts of London. It is difficult enough, I admit, to find a woman
of average sense and tenderness enough to be able for such work;
but there are, indeed, other such in the world, only three-fourths
of them now get lost in pious lecturing, or altar-cloth sewing; and
the wisest remaining fourth stay at home as quiet house-wives, not
seeing their way to wider action; nevertheless, any London landlord
who will content himself with moderate and fixed rent, (I get five per
cent. from Miss Hill, which is surely enough!), assuring his tenants of
secure possession if that is paid, so that they need not fear having
their rent raised, if they improve their houses; and who will secure
also a quiet bit of ground for their children to play in, instead of
the street,--has established all the necessary conditions of success;
and I doubt not that Miss Hill herself could find co-workers able to
extend the system of management she has originated, and shown to be
so effective.
But the best that can be done in this way will be useless ultimately,
unless the deep source of the misery be cut off. While Miss Hill,
with intense effort and noble power, has partially moralized a couple
of acres in Marylebone, at least fifty square miles of lovely country
have been Demoralized outside London, by the increasing itch of the
upper classes to live where they can get some gossip in their idleness,
and show each other their dresses.
That life of theirs must come to an end soon, both here and in Paris,
but to what end, it is, I trust, in their own power still to decide. If
they resolve to maintain to the last the present system of spending the
rent taken from the rural districts in the dissipation of the capitals,
they will not always find they can secure a quiet time, as the other
day in Dublin, by withdrawing the police, nor that park-railings
are the only thing which (police being duly withdrawn) will go
down. Those favourite castle battlements of mine, their internal
"police" withdrawn, will go down also; and I should be sorry to see
it;--the lords and ladies, houseless at least in shooting season,
perhaps sorrier, though they did find the grey turrets dismal in
winter time. If they would yet have them for autumn, they must have
them for winter. Consider, fair lords and ladies, by the time you
marry, and choose your dwelling-places, there are for you but forty
or fifty winters more in whose dark days you may see the snow fall
and wreathe. There will be no snow in Heaven, I presume--still less
elsewhere, (if lords and ladies ever miss of Heaven).
And that some may, is perhaps conceivable, for there are more than a
few things to be managed on an English estate, and to be "faithful"
in those few cannot be interpreted as merely abstracting the rent of
them. Nay, even the Telegraph's beau ideal of the landowner, from a
mechanical point of view, may come short, somewhat. "Cultivating huge
farms for himself with abundant machinery;--" Is that Lord Derby's
ideal also, may it be asked? The Scott-reading of my youth haunts me,
and I seem still listening to the (perhaps a little too long) speeches
of the Black Countess who appears terrifically through the sliding
panel in 'Peveril of the Peak,' about "her sainted Derby." Would
Saint Derby's ideal, or his Black Countess's, of due ordinance for
their castle and estate of Man, have been a minimum of Man therein,
and an abundance of machinery? In fact, only the Trinacrian Legs of
Man, transposed into many spokes of wheels--no use for "stalwart arms"
any more--and less than none for inconveniently "heroic" souls?
"Cultivating huge farms for himself!" I don't even see, after the
sincerest efforts to put myself into a mechanical point of view, how
it is to be done. For himself? Is he to eat the cornricks then? Surely
such a beau ideal is more Utopian than any of mine? Indeed, whether
it be praise- or blame-worthy, it is not so easy to cultivate
anything wholly for oneself, nor to consume, oneself, the products of
cultivation. I have, indeed, before now, hinted to you that perhaps
the "consumer" was not so necessary a person economically, as has been
supposed; nevertheless, it is not in his own mere eating and drinking,
or even his picture-collecting, that a false lord injures the poor. It
is in his bidding and forbidding--or worse still, in ceasing to do
either. I have given you another of Giotto's pictures, this month,
his imagination of Injustice, which he has seen done in his time,
as we in ours; and I am sorry to observe that his Injustice lives
in a battlemented castle and in a mountain country, it appears;
the gates of it between rocks, and in the midst of a wood; but in
Giotto's time, woods were too many, and towns too few. Also, Injustice
has indeed very ugly talons to his fingers, like Envy; and an ugly
quadruple hook to his lance, and other ominous resemblances to the
"hooked bird," the falcon, which both knights and ladies too much
delighted in. Nevertheless Giotto's main idea about him is, clearly,
that he "sits in the gate" pacifically, with a cloak thrown over his
chain-armour (you can just see the links of it appear at his throat),
and a plain citizen's cap for a helmet, and his sword sheathed,
while all robbery and violence have way in the wild places round
him,--he heedless.
Which is, indeed, the depth of Injustice: not the harm you do, but that
you permit to be done,--hooking perhaps here and there something to you
with your clawed weapon meanwhile. The baronial type exists still, I
fear, in such manner, here and there, in spite of improving centuries.
My friends, we have been thinking, perhaps, to-day, more than we ought
of our masters' faults,--scarcely enough of our own. If you would
have the upper classes do their duty, see that you also do yours. See
that you can obey good laws, and good lords, or law-wards, if you once
get them--that you believe in goodness enough to know what a good law
is. A good law is one that holds, whether you recognize and pronounce
it or not; a bad law is one that cannot hold, however much you ordain
and pronounce it. That is the mighty truth which Carlyle has been
telling you for a quarter of a century--once for all he told it you,
and the landowners, and all whom it concerns, in the third book of
'Past and Present' (1845, buy Chapman and Hall's second edition if
you can, it is good print, and read it till you know it by heart),
and from that day to this, whatever there is in England of dullest
and insolentest may be always known by the natural instinct it has to
howl against Carlyle. Of late, matters coming more and more to crisis,
the liberty men seeing their way, as they think, more and more broad
and bright before them, and still this too legible and steady old
sign-post saying, That it is not the way, lovely as it looks, the
outcry against it becomes deafening. Now, I tell you once for all,
Carlyle is the only living writer who has spoken the absolute and
perpetual truth about yourselves and your business; and exactly in
proportion to the inherent weakness of brain in your lying guides,
will be their animosity against Carlyle. Your lying guides, observe,
I say--not meaning that they lie wilfully--but that their nature is to
do nothing else. For in the modern Liberal there is a new and wonderful
form of misguidance. Of old, it was bad enough that the blind should
lead the blind; still, with dog and stick, or even timid walking with
recognized need of dog and stick, if not to be had, such leadership
might come to good end enough; but now a worse disorder has come upon
you, that the squinting should lead the squinting. Now the nature of
bat, or mole, or owl, may be undesirable, at least in the day-time,
but worse may be imagined. The modern Liberal politico-economist of
the Stuart Mill school is essentially of the type of a flat-fish--one
eyeless side of him always in the mud, and one eye, on the side that
has eyes, down in the corner of his mouth,--not a desirable guide for
man or beast. There was an article--I believe it got in by mistake,
but the Editor, of course, won't say so--in the 'Contemporary Review,'
two months back, on Mr. Morley's Essays, by a Mr. Buchanan, with an
incidental page on Carlyle in it, unmatchable (to the length of my poor
knowledge) for obliquitous platitude in the mud-walks of literature.
Read your Carlyle, then, with all your heart, and with the best of
brain you can give; and you will learn from him first, the eternity
of good law, and the need of obedience to it: then, concerning
your own immediate business, you will learn farther this, that the
beginning of all good law, and nearly the end of it, is in these
two ordinances,--That every man shall do good work for his bread:
and secondly, that every man shall have good bread for his work. But
the first of these is the only one you have to think of. If you
are resolved that the work shall be good, the bread will be sure;
if not,--believe me, there is neither steam plough nor steam mill,
go they never so glibly, that will win it from the earth long, either
for you, or the Ideal Landed Proprietor.
Faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XI.
Denmark Hill.
15th October, 1871.
My Friends,
A day seldom passes, now that people begin to notice these Letters
a little, without my receiving a remonstrance on the absurdity of
writing "so much above the level" of those whom I address.
I have said, however, that eventually you shall understand, if you
care to understand, every word in these pages. Through all this year
I have only been putting questions; some of them such as have puzzled
the wisest, and which may, for a long time yet, prove too hard for
you and me: but, next year, I will go over all the ground again,
answering the questions, where I know of any answers; or making them
plain for your examination, when I know of none.
But, in the meantime, be it admitted, for argument's sake, that this
way of writing, which is easy to me, and which most educated persons
can easily understand, is very much above your level. I want to know
why it is assumed so quietly that your brains must always be at a
low level? Is it essential to the doing of the work by which England
exists, that its workmen should not be able to understand scholar's
English, (remember, I only assume mine to be so for argument's sake),
but only newspaper's English? I chanced, indeed, to take up a number
of 'Belgravia' the other day, which contained a violent attack on an
old enemy of mine--'Blackwood's Magazine'; and I enjoyed the attack
mightily, until 'Belgravia' declared, by way of coup-de-grace to
'Blackwood,' that something which 'Blackwood' had spoken of as settled
in one way had been irrevocably settled the other way,--"settled,"
said triumphant 'Belgravia,' "in seventy-two newspapers."
Seventy-two newspapers, then, it seems--or, with a margin,
eighty-two,--perhaps, to be perfectly safe, we had better say
ninety-two--are enough to settle anything in this England of ours,
for the present. But, irrevocably, I doubt. If, perchance, you workmen
should reach the level of understanding scholar's English instead of
newspaper's English, things might a little unsettle themselves again;
and, in the end, might even get into positions uncontemplated by
the ninety-two newspapers,--contemplated only by the laws of Heaven,
and settled by them, some time since, as positions which, if things
ever got out of, they would need to get into again.
And, for my own part, I cannot at all understand why well-educated
people should still so habitually speak of you as beneath their level,
and needing to be written down to, with condescending simplicity,
as flat-foreheaded creatures of another race, unredeemable by any
Darwinism.
I was waiting last Saturday afternoon on the platform of the railway
station at Furness Abbey; (the station itself is tastefully placed so
that you can see it, and nothing else but it, through the east window
of the Abbot's Chapel, over the ruined altar;) and a party of the
workmen employed on another line, wanted for the swiftly progressive
neighbourhood of Dalton, were taking Sabbatical refreshment at the
tavern recently established at the south side of the said Abbot's
Chapel. Presently, the train whistling for them, they came out in
a highly refreshed state, and made for it as fast as they could by
the tunnel under the line, taking very long steps to keep their
balance in the direction of motion, and securing themselves,
laterally, by hustling the wall, or any chance passengers. They
were dressed universally in brown rags, which, perhaps, they felt to
be the comfortablest kind of dress; they had, most of them, pipes,
which I really believe to be more enjoyable than cigars; they got
themselves adjusted in their carriages by the aid of snatches of
vocal music, and looked at us,--(I had charge of a lady and her two
young daughters),--with supreme indifference, as indeed at creatures
of another race; pitiable, perhaps,--certainly disagreeable and
objectionable--but, on the whole, despicable, and not to be minded. We,
on our part, had the insolence to pity them for being dressed in rags,
and for being packed so close in the third-class carriages: the two
young girls bore being run against patiently; and when a thin boy
of fourteen or fifteen, the most drunk of the company, was sent back
staggering to the tavern for a forgotten pickaxe, we would, any of us,
I am sure, have gone and fetched it for him, if he had asked us. For
we were all in a very virtuous and charitable temper: we had had an
excellent dinner at the new inn, and had earned that portion of our
daily bread by admiring the Abbey all the morning. So we pitied the
poor workmen doubly--first, for being so wicked as to get drunk at
four in the afternoon; and, secondly, for being employed in work
so disgraceful as throwing up clods of earth into an embankment,
instead of spending the day, like us, in admiring the Abbey: and I,
who am always making myself a nuisance to people with my political
economy, inquired timidly of my friend whether she thought it all
quite right. And she said, certainly not; but what could be done? It
was of no use trying to make such men admire the Abbey, or to keep
them from getting drunk. They wouldn't do the one, and they would do
the other--they were quite an unmanageable sort of people, and had
been so for generations.
Which, indeed, I knew to be partly the truth, but it only made the
thing seem to me more wrong than it did before, since here were not
only the actual two or three dozen of unmanageable persons, with
much taste for beer, and none for architecture; but these implied the
existence of many unmanageable persons before and after them,--nay,
a long ancestral and filial unmanageableness. They were a Fallen Race,
every way incapable, as I acutely felt, of appreciating the beauty of
'Modern Painters,' or fathoming the significance of 'Fors Clavigera.'
But what they had done to deserve their fall, or what I had done to
deserve the privilege of being the author of those valuable books,
remained obscure to me; and indeed, whatever the deservings may have
been on either side, in this and other cases of the kind, it is always
a marvel to me that the arrangement and its consequences are accepted
so patiently. For observe what, in brief terms, the arrangement
is. Virtually, the entire business of the world turns on the clear
necessity of getting on table, hot or cold, if possible, meat--but,
at least, vegetables,--at some hour of the day, for all of us: for you
labourers, we will say at noon; for us æsthetical persons, we will say
at eight in the evening; for we like to have done our eight hours'
work of admiring abbeys before we dine. But, at some time of day,
the mutton and turnips, or, since mutton itself is only a transformed
state of turnips, we may say, as sufficiently typical of everything,
turnips only, must absolutely be got for us both. And nearly every
problem of State policy and economy, as at present understood, and
practised, consists in some device for persuading you labourers to
go and dig up dinner for us reflective and æsthetical persons, who
like to sit still, and think, or admire. So that when we get to the
bottom of the matter, we find the inhabitants of this earth broadly
divided into two great masses;--the peasant paymasters--spade in hand,
original and imperial producers of turnips; and, waiting on them all
round, a crowd of polite persons, modestly expectant of turnips, for
some--too often theoretical--service. There is, first, the clerical
person, whom the peasant pays in turnips for giving him moral advice;
then the legal person, whom the peasant pays in turnips for telling
him, in black letter, that his house is his own; there is, thirdly,
the courtly person, whom the peasant pays in turnips for presenting a
celestial appearance to him; there is, fourthly, the literary person,
whom the peasant pays in turnips for talking daintily to him; and there
is, lastly, the military person, whom the peasant pays in turnips
for standing, with a cocked hat on, in the middle of the field, and
exercising a moral influence upon the neighbours. Nor is the peasant
to be pitied if these arrangements are all faithfully carried out. If
he really gets moral advice from his moral adviser; if his house is,
indeed, maintained to be his own, by his legal adviser; if courtly
persons, indeed, present a celestial appearance to him; and literary
persons, indeed, talk beautiful words: if, finally, his scarecrow
do, indeed, stand quiet, as with a stick through the middle of it,
producing, if not always a wholesome terror, at least, a picturesque
effect, and colour-contrast of scarlet with green,--they are all of
them worth their daily turnips. But if, perchance, it happen that he
get immoral advice from his moralist, or if his lawyer advise him that
his house is not his own; and his bard, story-teller, or other literary
charmer, begin to charm him unwisely, not with beautiful words, but
with obscene and ugly words--and he be readier with his response in
vegetable produce for these than for any other sort; finally, if his
quiet scarecrow become disquiet, and seem likely to bring upon him
a whole flight of scarecrows out of his neighbours' fields,--the
combined fleets of Russia, Prussia, etc., as my friend and your
trustee, Mr. Cowper-Temple, has it, (see above, Letter II., p. 21,)
it is time to look into such arrangements under their several heads.
Well looked after, however, all these arrangements have their
advantages, and a certain basis of reason and propriety. But there
are two other arrangements which have no basis on either, and which
are very widely adopted, nevertheless, among mankind, to their
great misery.
I must expand a little the type of my primitive peasant before
defining these. You observe, I have not named among the polite persons
giving theoretical service in exchange for vegetable diet, the large,
and lately become exceedingly polite, class, of artists. For a true
artist is only a beautiful development of tailor or carpenter. As
the peasant provides the dinner, so the artist provides the clothes
and house: in the tailoring and tapestry producing function,
the best of artists ought to be the peasant's wife herself, when
properly emulative of Queens Penelope, Bertha, and Maude; and in the
house-producing-and-painting function, though concluding itself in
such painted chambers as those of the Vatican, the artist is still
typically and essentially a carpenter or mason; first carving wood
and stone, then painting the same for preservation;--if ornamentally,
all the better. And, accordingly, you see these letters of mine are
addressed to the "workmen and labourers" of England,--that is to say,
to the providers of houses and dinners, for themselves, and for all
men, in this country, as in all others.
Considering these two sorts of Providers, then, as one great class,
surrounded by the suppliant persons for whom, together with themselves,
they have to make provision, it is evident that they both have need
originally of two things--land, and tools. Clay to be subdued; and
plough, or potter's wheel, wherewith to subdue it.
Now, as aforesaid, so long as the polite surrounding personages are
content to offer their salutary advice, their legal information, etc.,
to the peasant, for what these articles are verily worth in vegetable
produce, all is perfectly fair; but if any of the polite persons
contrive to get hold of the peasant's land, or of his tools, and put
him into the "position of William," and make him pay annual interest,
first for the wood that he planes, and then for the plane he planes it
with!--my friends, polite or otherwise, these two arrangements cannot
be considered as settled yet, even by the ninety-two newspapers,
with all Belgravia to back them.
Not by the newspapers, nor by Belgravia, nor even by the Cambridge
Catechism, or the Cambridge Professor of Political Economy.
Look to the beginning of the second chapter in the last edition of
Professor Fawcett's Manual of Political Economy, (Macmillan, 1869,
p. 105). The chapter purports to treat of the "Classes among whom
wealth is distributed." And thus it begins:--