CHAPTER VI.

MASTERSHIP.

136. As in all previous discussions of our subject, we must study the

relation of the commanding rich to the obeying poor in its simplest

elements, in order to reach its first principles.

The simplest state of it, then, is this:[78] a wise and provident person

works much, consumes little, and lays by a store; an improvident person

works little, consumes all his produce, and lays by no store. Accident

interrupts the daily work, or renders it less productive; the idle

person must then starve, or be supported by the provident one, who,

having him thus at his mercy, may either refuse to maintain him

altogether, or, which will evidently be more to his own interest, say to

him, "I will maintain you, indeed, but you shall now work hard, instead

of indolently, and instead of being allowed to lay by what you save, as

you might have done, had you remained independent, _I_ will take all the

surplus. You would not lay it up for yourself; it is wholly your own

fault that has thrown you into my power, and I will force you to work,

or starve; yet you shall have no profit of your work, only your daily

bread for it; [and competition shall determine how much of that[79]]."

This mode of treatment has now become so universal that it is supposed

to be the only natural--nay, the only possible one; and the market wages

are calmly defined by economists as "the sum which will maintain the

labourer."

137. The power of the provident person to do this is only checked by the

correlative power of some neighbour of similarly frugal habits, who says

to the labourer--"I will give you a little more than this other

provident person: come and work for me."

The power of the provident over the improvident depends thus, primarily,

on their relative numbers; secondarily, on the modes of agreement of the

adverse parties with each other. The accidental level of wages is a

variable function of the number of provident and idle persons in the

world, of the enmity between them as classes, and of the agreement

between those of the same class. _It depends, from beginning to end, on

moral conditions._

138. Supposing the rich to be entirely selfish, _it is always for their

interest that the poor should be as numerous as they can employ, and

restrain_. For, granting that the entire population is no larger than

the ground can easily maintain--that the classes are stringently

divided--and that there is sense or strength of hand enough with the

rich to secure obedience; then, if nine-tenths of a nation are poor, the

remaining tenth have the service of nine persons each;[80] but, if

eight-tenths are poor, only of four each; if seven-tenths are poor, of

two and a third each; if six-tenths are poor, of one and a half each;

and if five-tenths are poor, of only one each. But, practically, if the

rich strive always to obtain more power over the poor, instead of to

raise them--and if, on the other hand, the poor become continually more

vicious and numerous, through neglect and oppression,--though the

_range_ of the power of the rich increases, its _tenure_ becomes less

secure; until, at last the measure of iniquity being full, revolution,

civil war, or the subjection of the state to a healthier or stronger

one, closes the moral corruption, and industrial disease.[81]

139. It is rarely, however, that things come to this extremity. Kind

persons among the rich, and wise among the poor, modify the connexion of

the classes: the efforts made to raise and relieve on the one side, and

the success of honest toil on the other, bind and blend the orders of

society into the confused tissue of half-felt obligation,

sullenly-rendered obedience, and variously-directed, or mis-directed

toil, which form the warp of daily life. But this great law rules all

the wild design: that success (while society is guided by laws of

competition) _signifies always so much victory over your neighbour_ as

to obtain the direction of his work, and to take the profits of it.

_This is the real source of all great riches._ No man can become largely

rich by his personal toil.[82] The work of his own hands, wisely

directed, will indeed always maintain himself and his family, and make

fitting provision for his age. _But it is only by the discovery of some

method of taxing the labour of others that he can become opulent._ Every

increase of his capital enables him to extend this taxation more widely;

that is, to invest larger funds in the maintenance of labourers,--to

direct, accordingly, vaster and yet vaster masses of labour, and to

appropriate its profits.

140. There is much confusion of idea on the subject of this

appropriation. It is, of course, the interest of the employer to

disguise it from the persons employed; and, for his own comfort and

complacency, he often desires no less to disguise it from himself. And

it is matter of much doubt with me, how far the foul and foolish

arguments used habitually on this subject are indeed the honest

expression of foul and foolish convictions;--or rather (as I am

sometimes forced to conclude from the irritation with which they are

advanced) are resolutely dishonest, wilful, and malicious sophisms,

arranged so as to mask, to the last moment, the real laws of economy,

and future duties of men. By taking a simple example, and working it

thoroughly out, the subject may be rescued from all but such determined

misrepresentation.

141. Let us imagine a society of peasants, living on a rivershore,

exposed to destructive inundation at somewhat extended intervals; and

that each peasant possesses of this good, but imperilled, ground, more

than he needs to cultivate for immediate subsistence. We will assume

farther (and with too great probability of justice), that the greater

part of them indolently keep in tillage just as much land as supplies

them with daily food;--that they leave their children idle, and take no

precautions against the rise of the stream. But one of them, (we will

say but one, for the sake of greater clearness) cultivates carefully

_all_ the ground of his estate; makes his children work hard and

healthily; uses his spare time and theirs in building a rampart against

the river; and, at the end of some years, has in his storehouses large

reserves of food and clothing,--in his stables a well-tended breed of

cattle, and around his fields a wedge of wall against flood.

The torrent rises at last--sweeps away the harvests, and half the

cottages of the careless peasants, and leaves them destitute. They

naturally come for help to the provident one, whose fields are unwasted,

and whose granaries are full. He has the right to refuse it to them: no

one disputes this right.[83] But he will probably _not_ refuse it; it is

not his interest to do so, even were he entirely selfish and cruel. The

only question with him will be on what terms his aid is to be granted.

142. Clearly, not on terms of mere charity. To maintain his neighbours

in idleness would be not only his ruin, but theirs. He will require work

from them, in exchange for their maintenance; and, whether in kindness

or cruelty, all the work they can give. Not now the three or four hours

they were wont to spend on their own land, but the eight or ten hours

they ought to have spent.[84] But how will he apply this labour? The men

are now his slaves;--nothing less, and nothing more. On pain of

starvation, he can force them to work in the manner, and to the end, he

chooses. And it is by his wisdom in this choice that the worthiness of

his mastership is proved, or its unworthiness. Evidently, he must first

set them to bank out the water in some temporary way, and to get their

ground cleansed and resown; else, in any case, their continued

maintenance will be impossible. That done, and while he has still to

feed them, suppose he makes them raise a secure rampart for their own

ground against all future flood, and rebuild their houses in safer

places, with the best material they can find; being allowed time out of

their working hours to fetch such material from a distance. And for the

food and clothing advanced, he takes security in land that as much shall

be returned at a convenient period.

143. We may conceive this security to be redeemed, and the debt paid at

the end of a few years. The prudent peasant has sustained no loss; _but

is no richer than he was, and has had all his trouble for nothing_. But

he has enriched his neighbours materially; bettered their houses,

secured their land, and rendered them, in worldly matters, equal to

himself. In all rational and final sense, he has been throughout their

true Lord and King.

144. We will next trace his probable line of conduct, presuming his

object to be exclusively the increase of his own fortune. After roughly

recovering and cleansing the ground, he allows the ruined peasantry only

to build huts upon it, such as he thinks protective enough from the

weather to keep them in working health. The rest of their time he

occupies, first in pulling down, and rebuilding on a magnificent scale,

his own house, and in adding large dependencies to it. This done, in

exchange for his continued supply of corn, he buys as much of his

neighbours' land as he thinks he can superintend the management of; and

makes the former owners securely embank and protect the ceded portion.

By this arrangement, he leaves to a certain number of the peasantry only

as much ground as will just maintain them in their existing numbers; as

the population increases, he takes the extra hands, who cannot be

maintained on the narrowed estates, for his own servants; employs some

to cultivate the ground he has bought, giving them of its produce merely

enough for subsistence; with the surplus, which, under his energetic and

careful superintendence, will be large, he maintains a train of servants

for state, and a body of workmen, whom he educates in ornamental arts.

He now can splendidly decorate his house, lay out its grounds

magnificently, and richly supply his table, and that of his household

and retinue. And thus, without any abuse of right, we should find

established all the phenomena of poverty and riches, which (it is

supposed necessarily) accompany modern civilization. In one part of the

district, we should have unhealthy land, miserable dwellings, and

half-starved poor; in another, a well-ordered estate, well-fed servants,

and refined conditions of highly educated and luxurious life.

145. I have put the two cases in simplicity, and to some extremity. But

though in more complex and qualified operation, all the relations of

society are but the expansion of these two typical sequences of conduct

and result. I do not say, observe, that the first procedure is entirely

recommendable; or even entirely right; still less, that the second is

wholly wrong. Servants, and artists, and splendour of habitation and

retinue, have all their use, propriety, and office. But I am determined

that the reader shall understand clearly what they cost; and see that

the condition of having them is the subjection to us of a certain number

of imprudent or unfortunate persons (or, it may be, more fortunate than

their masters), over whose destinies we exercise a boundless control.

"Riches" mean eternally and essentially this; and God send at last a

time when those words of our best-reputed economist shall be true, and

we _shall_ indeed "all know what it is to be rich;"[85] that it is to

be slave-master over farthest earth, and over all ways and thoughts of

men. Every operative you employ is your true servant: distant or near,

subject to your immediate orders, or ministering to your

widely-communicated caprice,--for the pay he stipulates, or the price he

tempts,--all are alike under this great dominion of the gold. The

milliner who makes the dress is as much a servant (more so, in that she

uses more intelligence in the service) as the maid who puts it on; the

carpenter who smooths the door, as the footman who opens it; the

tradesmen who supply the table, as the labourers and sailors who supply

the tradesmen. Why speak of these lower services? Painters and singers

(whether of note or rhyme,) jesters and storytellers, moralists,

historians, priests,--so far as these, in any degree, paint, or sing, or

tell their tale, or charm their charm, or "perform" their rite, _for

pay_,--in so far, they are all slaves; abject utterly, if the service be

for pay only; abject less and less in proportion to the degrees of love

and of wisdom which enter into their duty, or _can_ enter into it,

according as their function is to do the bidding and the work of a manly

people;--or to amuse, tempt, and deceive, a childish one.

146. There is always, in such amusement and temptation, to a certain

extent, a government of the rich by the poor, as of the poor by the

rich; but the latter is the prevailing and necessary one, and it

consists, when it is honourable, in the collection of the profits of

labour from those who would have misused them, and the administration of

those profits for the service either of the same persons in future, or

of others; and when it is dishonourable, as is more frequently the case

in modern times, it consists in the collection of the profits of labour

from those who would have rightly used them, and their appropriation to

the service of the collector himself.

147. The examination of these various modes of collection and use of

riches will form the third branch of our future inquiries; but the key

to the whole subject lies in the clear understanding of the difference

between selfish and unselfish expenditure. It is not easy, by any

course of reasoning, to enforce this on the generally unwilling hearer;

yet the definition of unselfish expenditure is brief and simple. It is

expenditure which, if you are a capitalist, does not pay _you_, but pays

somebody else; and if you are a consumer, does not please _you_, but

pleases somebody else. Take one special instance, in further

illustration of the general type given above. I did not invent that

type, but spoke of a real river, and of real peasantry, the languid and

sickly race which inhabits, or haunts--for they are often more like

spectres than living men--the thorny desolation of the banks of the Arve

in Savoy. Some years ago, a society, formed at Geneva, offered to embank

the river for the ground which would have been recovered by the

operation; but the offer was refused by the (then Sardinian) government.

The capitalists saw that this expenditure would have "paid" if the

ground saved from the river was to be theirs. But if, when the offer

that had this aspect of profit was refused, they had nevertheless

persisted in the plan, and merely taking security for the return of

their outlay, lent the funds for the work, and thus saved a whole race

of human souls from perishing in a pestiferous fen (as, I presume, some

among them would, at personal risk, have dragged any one drowning

creature out of the current of the stream, and not expected payment

therefor), such expenditure would have precisely corresponded to the use

of his power made, in the first instance, by our supposed richer

peasant--it would have been the king's, of grace, instead of the

usurer's, for gain.

148. "Impossible, absurd, Utopian!" exclaim nine-tenths of the few

readers whom these words may find.

No, good reader, _this_ is not Utopian: but I will tell you what would

have seemed, if we had not seen it, Utopian on the side of evil instead

of good; that ever men should have come to value their money so much

more than their lives, that if you call upon them to become soldiers,

and take chance of a bullet through their heart, and of wife and

children being left desolate, for their pride's sake, they will do it

gaily, without thinking twice; but if you ask them, for their country's

sake, to spend a hundred pounds without security of getting back a

hundred-and-five,[86] they will laugh in your face.

149. Not but that also this game of life-giving and taking is, in the

end, somewhat more costly than other forms of play might be. Rifle

practice is, indeed, a not unhealthy pastime, and a feather on the top

of the head is a pleasing appendage; but while learning the stops and

fingering of the sweet instrument, does no one ever calculate the cost

of an overture? What melody does Tityrus meditate on his tenderly spiral

pipe? The leaden seed of it, broadcast, true conical "Dents de Lion"

seed--needing less allowance for the wind than is usual with that kind

of herb--what crop are you likely to have of it? Suppose, instead of

this volunteer marching and countermarching, you were to do a little

volunteer ploughing and counter-ploughing? It is more difficult to do it

straight: the dust of the earth, so disturbed, is more grateful than for

merely rhythmic footsteps. Golden cups, also, given for good ploughing,

would be more suitable in colour: (ruby glass, for the wine which

"giveth his colour" on the ground, might be fitter for the rifle prize

in ladies' hands). Or, conceive a little volunteer exercise with the

spade, other than such as is needed for moat and breastwork, or even

for the burial of the fruit of the leaden avena-seed, subject to the

shrill Lemures' criticism--

Wer hat das Haus so schlecht gebauet?

If you were to embank Lincolnshire more stoutly against the sea? or

strip the peat of Solway, or plant Plinlimmon moors with larch--then, in

due season, some amateur reaping and threshing?

"Nay, we reap and thresh by steam, in these advanced days."

I know it, my wise and economical friends. The stout arms God gave you

to win your bread by, you would fain shoot your neighbours, and God's

sweet singers with;[87] then you invoke the fiends to your farm-service;

and--

When young and old come forth to play

On a sulphurous holiday,

Tell how the darkling goblin sweat

(His feast of cinders duly set),

And, belching night, where breathed the morn,

His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn

That ten day-labourers could not end.

150. Going back to the matter in hand, we will press the example closer.

On a green knoll above that plain of the Arve, between Cluse and

Bonneville, there was, in the year 1860, a cottage, inhabited by a

well-doing family--man and wife, three children, and the grandmother. I

call it a cottage, but in truth, it was a large chimney on the ground,

wide at the bottom, so that the family might live round the fire;

lighted by one small broken window, and entered by an unclosing door.

The family, I say, was "well-doing;" at least it was hopeful and

cheerful; the wife healthy, the children, for Savoyards, pretty and

active, but the husband threatened with decline, from exposure under the

cliffs of the Mont Vergi by day, and to draughts between every plank of

his chimney in the frosty nights.

"Why could he not plaster the chinks?" asks the practical reader. For

the same reason that your child cannot wash its face and hands till you

have washed them many a day for it, and will not wash them when it can,

till you force it.

151. I passed this cottage often in my walks, had its window and door

mended; sometimes mended also a little the meal of sour bread and broth,

and generally got kind greeting and smile from the face of young or old;

which greeting this year, narrowed itself into the half-recognizing

stare of the elder child, and the old woman's tears; for the father and

mother were both dead,--one of sickness, the other of sorrow. It

happened that I passed not alone, but with a companion, a practised

English joiner, who, while these people were dying of cold, had been

employed from six in the morning to six in the evening, for two months,

in fitting, without nails, the panels of a single door in a large house

in London. Three days of his work taken, at the right time from

fastening the oak panels with useless precision, and applied to fasten

the larch timbers with decent strength, would have saved these

Savoyards' lives. _He_ would have been maintained equally; (I suppose

him equally paid for his work by the owner of the greater house, only

the work not consumed selfishly on his own walls;) and the two peasants,

and eventually, probably their children, saved.

152. There are, therefore,--let me finally enforce, and leave with the

reader, this broad conclusion,--three things to be considered in

employing any poor person. It is not enough to give him employment. You

must employ him first to produce useful things; secondly, of the several

(suppose equally useful) things he can equally well produce, you must

set him to make that which will cause him to lead the healthiest life;

lastly, of the things produced, it remains a question of wisdom and

conscience how much you are to take yourself, and how much to leave to

others. A large quantity, remember, unless you destroy it, _must_ always

be so left at one time or another; the only questions you have to decide

are, not _what_ you will give, but _when_, and _how_, and _to whom_, you

will give. The natural law of human life is, of course, that in youth a

man shall labour and lay by store for his old age, and when age comes,

shall use what he has laid by, gradually slackening his toil, and

allowing himself more frank use of his store; taking care always to

leave himself as much as will surely suffice for him beyond any possible

length of life. What he has gained, or by tranquil and unanxious toil

continues to gain, more than is enough for his own need, he ought so to

administer, while he yet lives, as to see the good of it again

beginning, in other hands; for thus he has himself the greatest sum of

pleasure from it, and faithfully uses his sagacity in its control.

Whereas most men, it appears, dislike the sight of their fortunes going

out into service again, and say to themselves,--"I can indeed nowise

prevent this money from falling at last into the hands of others, nor

hinder the good of it from becoming theirs, not mine; but at least let a

merciful death save me from being a witness of their satisfaction; and

may God so far be gracious to me as to let no good come of any of this

money of mine before my eyes."

153. Supposing this feeling unconquerable, the safest way of rationally

indulging it would be for the capitalist at once to spend all his

fortune on himself, which might actually, in many cases, be quite the

rightest as well as the pleasantest thing to do, if he had just tastes

and worthy passions. But, whether for himself only, or through the

hands, and for the sake, of others also, the law of wise life is, that

the maker of the money shall also be the spender of it, and spend it,

approximately, all, before he dies; so that his true ambition as an

economist should be, to die, not as rich, but as poor, as possible,[88]

calculating the ebb tide of possession in true and calm proportion to

the ebb tide of life. Which law, checking the wing of accumulative

desire in the mid-volley,[89] and leading to peace of possession and

fulness of fruition in old age, is also wholesome, in that by the

freedom of gift, together with present help and counsel, it at once

endears and dignifies age in the sight of youth, which then no longer

strips the bodies of the dead, but receives the grace of the living. Its

chief use would (or will be, for men are indeed capable of attaining to

this much use of their reason), that some temperance and measure will be

put to the acquisitiveness of commerce.[90] For as things stand, a man

holds it his duty to be temperate in his food, and of his body, but for

no duty to be temperate in his riches, and of his mind. He sees that he

ought not to waste his youth and his flesh for luxury; but he will waste

his age, and his soul, for money, and think he does no wrong, nor know

the _delirium tremens_ of the intellect for disease. But the law of life

is, that a man should fix the sum he desires to make annually, as the

food he desires to eat daily; and stay when he has reached the limit,

refusing increase of business, and leaving it to others, so obtaining

due freedom of time for better thoughts.[91] How the gluttony of

business is punished, a bill of health for the principals of the richest

city houses, issued annually, would show in a sufficiently impressive

manner.

154. I know, of course, that these statements will be received by the

modern merchant as an active border rider of the sixteenth century would

have heard of its being proper for men of the Marches to get their

living by the spade, instead of the spur. But my business is only to

state veracities and necessities; I neither look for the acceptance of

the one, nor hope for the nearness of the other. Near or distant, the

day _will_ assuredly come when the merchants of a state shall be its

true ministers of exchange, its porters, in the double sense of carriers

and gate-keepers, bringing all lands into frank and faithful

communication, and knowing for their master of guild, Hermes the herald,

instead of Mercury the gain-guarder.

155. And now, finally, for immediate rule to all who will accept it.

The distress of any population means that they need food, house-room,

clothes, and fuel. You can never, therefore, be wrong in employing any

labourer to produce food, house-room, clothes, or fuel; but you are

_always_ wrong if you employ him to produce nothing, (for then some

other labourer must be worked double time to feed him); and you are

generally wrong, at present, if you employ him (unless he can do nothing

else) to produce works of art or luxuries; because modern art is mostly

on a false basis, and modern luxury is criminally great.[92]

156. The way to produce more food is mainly to bring in fresh ground,

and increase facilities of carriage;--to break rock, exchange earth,

drain the moist, and water the dry, to mend roads, and build harbours of

refuge. Taxation thus spent will annihilate taxation, but spent in war,

it annihilates revenue.

157. The way to produce house-room is to apply your force first to the

humblest dwellings. When your brick-layers are out of employ, do not

build splendid new streets, but better the old ones; send your paviours

and slaters to the poorest villages, and see that your poor are

healthily lodged, before you try your hand on stately architecture. You

will find its stateliness rise better under the trowel afterwards; and

we do do not yet build so well that we need hasten to display our skill

to future ages. Had the labour which has decorated the Houses of

Parliament filled, instead, rents in walls and roofs throughout the

county of Middlesex; and our deputies met to talk within massive walls

that would have needed no stucco for five hundred years,--the decoration

might have been afterwards, and the talk now. And touching even our

highly conscientious church building, it may be well to remember that in

the best days of church plans, their masons called themselves "logeurs

du bon Dieu;" and that since, according to the most trusted reports, God

spends a good deal of His time in cottages as well as in churches, He

might perhaps like to be a little better lodged there also.

158. The way to get more clothes is--not, necessarily, to get more

cotton. There were words written twenty years ago[93] which would have

saved many of us some shivering, had they been minded in time. Shall we

read them again?

"The Continental people, it would seem, are importing our machinery,

beginning to spin cotton, and manufacture for themselves; to cut us out

of this market, and then out of that! Sad news, indeed; but

irremediable. By no means the saddest news--the saddest news, is that we

should find our national existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend

on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any

other people. A most narrow stand for a great nation to base itself on!

A stand which, with all the Corn-law abrogations conceivable, I do not

think will be capable of enduring.

"My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came honestly

down from it and said--'This is our minimum of cotton prices; we care

not, for the present, to make cotton any cheaper. Do you, if it seem so

blessed to you, make cotton cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton fur,

your heart with copperas fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the

general gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!' I admire a nation which

fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other nations to the end

of the world. Brothers, we will cease to undersell them; we will be

content to equal-sell them; to be happy selling equally with them! I do

not see the use of underselling them: cotton-cloth is already twopence a

yard, or lower; and yet bare backs were never more numerous among us.

Let inventive men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving

how cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent a little how cotton at

its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier divided among us.

"Let inventive men consider--whether the secret of this universe does

after all consist in making money. With a hell which means--'failing to

make money,' I do not think there is any heaven possible that would suit

one well. In brief, all this Mammon gospel of supply-and-demand,

competition _laissez faire_, and devil take the hindmost (foremost, is

it not, rather, Mr. Carlyle?), 'begins to be one of the shabbiest

gospels ever preached.'"

159. The way to produce more fuel[94] is first to make your coal mines

safer, by sinking more shafts; then set all your convicts to work in

them, and if, as is to be hoped, you succeed in diminishing the supply

of that sort of labourer, consider what means there may be, first, of

growing forest where its growth will improve climate; secondly, of

splintering the forests which now make continents of fruitful land

pathless and poisonous, into fagots for fire;--so gaining at once

dominion icewards and sunwards. Your steam power has been given (you

will find eventually) for work such as that: and not for excursion

trains, to give the labourer a moment's breath, at the peril of his

breath for ever, from amidst the cities which it has crushed into masses

of corruption. When you know how to build cities, and how to rule them,

you will be able to breathe in their streets, and the "excursion" will

be the afternoon's walk or game in the fields round them.

160. "But nothing of this work will pay?"

No; no more than it pays to dust your rooms, or wash your doorsteps. It

will pay; not at first in currency, but in that which is the end and the

source of currency,--in life; (and in currency richly afterwards). It

will pay in that which is more than life,--in light, whose true price

has not yet been reckoned in any currency, and yet into the image of

which, all wealth, one way or other, must be cast. For your riches must

either be as the lightning, which,

Begot but in a cloud,

Though shining bright, and speaking loud,

Whilst it begins, concludes its violent race;

And, where it gilds, it wounds the place;--

or else, as the lightning of the sacred sign, which shines from one part

of the heaven to the other. There is no other choice; you must either

take dust for deity, spectre for possession, fettered dream for life,

and for epitaph, this reversed verse of the great Hebrew hymn of economy

(Psalm cxii.):--"He hath gathered together, he hath stripped the poor,

his iniquity remaineth for ever:"--or else, having the sun of justice to

shine on you, and the sincere substance of good in your possession, and

the pure law and liberty of life within you, leave men to write this

better legend over your grave:--

"He hath dispersed abroad. He hath given to the poor. His righteousness

remaineth for ever."

FOOTNOTES:

[78] In the present general examination, I concede so much to ordinary

economists as to ignore all _innocent_ poverty. I adapt my reasoning,

for once, to the modern English practical mind, by assuming poverty to

be always criminal; the conceivable exceptions we will examine

afterwards.

[79] [I have no terms of English, and can find none in Greek nor Latin,

nor in any other strong language known to me, contemptuous enough to

attach to the bestial idiotism of the modern theory that wages are to be

measured by competition.]

[80] I say nothing yet of the quality of the servants, which,

nevertheless, is the gist of the business. Will you have Paul Veronese

to paint your ceiling, or the plumber from over the way? Both will work

for the same money; Paul, if anything, a little the cheaper of the two,

if you keep him in good humour; only you have to discern him first,

which will need eyes.

[81] [I have not altered a syllable in these three paragraphs, 137, 138,

139, on revision; but have much italicised: the principles stated being

as vital, as they are little known.]

[82] By his art he may; but only when its produce, or the sight or

hearing of it, becomes a subject of dispute, so as to enable the artist

to tax the labour of multitudes highly, in exchange for his own.

[83] [Observe this; the legal right to keep what you have worked for,

and use it as you please, is the corner-stone of all economy: compare

the end of Chap. II.]

[84] [I should now put the time of necessary labour rather under than

over the third of the day.]

[85] [See Preface to _Unto this Last_.]

[86] I have not hitherto touched on the subject of interest of money; it

is too complex, and must be reserved for its proper place in the body of

the work. The definition of interest (apart from compensation for risk)

is, "the exponent of the comfort of accomplished labour, separated from

its power;" the power being what is lent: and the French economists who

have maintained the entire illegality of interest are wrong; yet by no

means so curiously or wildly wrong as the English and French ones

opposed to them, whose opinions have been collected by Dr. Whewell at

page 41 of his _Lectures_; it never seeming to occur to the mind of the

compiler, any more than to the writers whom he quotes, that it is quite

possible, and even (according to Jewish proverb) prudent, for men to

hoard as ants and mice do, for use, not usury; and lay by something for

winter nights, in the expectation of rather sharing than lending the

scrapings. My Savoyard squirrels would pass a pleasant time of it under

the snow-laden pine branches, if they always declined to economize

because no one would pay them interest on nuts.

[I leave this note as it stood: but, as I have above stated, should now

side wholly with the French economists spoken of, in asserting the

absolute illegality of interest.]

[87] Compare Chaucer's feeling respecting birds (from Canace's falcon,

to the nightingale, singing, "Domine, labia--" to the Lord of Love),

with the usual modern British sentiments on this subject. Or even

Cowley's:--

"What prince's choir of music can excel

That which within this shade does dwell,

To which we nothing pay, or give,

They, like all other poets, live

Without reward, or thanks for their obliging pains!

'Tis well if they become not prey."

Yes; it Is better than well; particularly since the seed sown by the

wayside has been protected by the peculiar appropriation of part of the

church-rates in our country parishes. See the remonstrance from a

"Country parson," in _The Times_ of June 4th (or 5th; the letter is

dated June 3rd,) 1862:--"I have heard at a vestry meeting a good deal of

higgling over a few shillings' outlay in cleaning the church; but I have

never heard any dissatisfaction expressed on account of that part of the

rate which is invested in 50 or 100 dozens of birds' heads."

[If we could trace the innermost of all causes of modern war, I believe

it would be found, not in the avarice nor ambition of nations, but in

the mere idleness of the upper classes. They have nothing to do but to

teach the peasantry to kill each other.]

[88] [See the _Life of Fenelon_. "The labouring peasantry were at all

times the objects of his tenderest care; his palace at Cambray, with all

his books and writings, being consumed by fire, he bore the misfortune

with unruffled calmness, and said it was better his palace should be

burnt than the cottage of a poor peasant." (These thoroughly good men

always go too far, and lose their power over the mass.) He died

exemplifying the mean he had always observed between prodigality and

avarice, leaving neither debts nor money.]

[89] [Greek: kai penian hegoumenous einai me to ten ousian elatto poiein

alla to tei aplestian pleio]. "And thinking (wisely) that poverty

consists not in making one's possessions less, but one's avarice

more."--_Laws_, v. 8. Read the context, and compare. "He who spends for

all that is noble, and gains by nothing but what is just, will hardly be

notably wealthy, or distressfully poor."--_Laws_, v. 42.

[90] The fury of modern trade arises chiefly out of the possibility of

making sudden fortunes by largeness of transaction, and accident of

discovery or contrivance. I have no doubt that the final interest of

every nation is to check the action of these commercial lotteries; and

that all great accidental gains or losses should be national,--not

individual. But speculation absolute, unconnected with commercial

effort, is an unmitigated evil in a state, and the root of countless

evils beside.

[91] [I desire in the strongest terms to reinforce all that is contained

in this paragraph.]

[92] It is especially necessary that the reader should keep his mind

fixed on the methods of consumption and destruction, as the true sources

of national poverty. Men are apt to call every exchange "expenditure,"

but it is only consumption which is expenditure. A large number of the

purchases made by the richer classes are mere forms of interchange of

unused property, wholly without effect on national prosperity. It

matters nothing to the state whether, if a china pipkin be rated as

worth a hundred pounds, A has the pipkin and B the pounds, or A the

pounds and B the pipkin. But if the pipkin is pretty, and A or B breaks

it, there is national loss, not otherwise. So again, when the loss has

really taken place, no shifting of the shoulders that bear it will do

away with the reality of it. There is an intensely ludicrous notion in

the public mind respecting the abolishment of debt by denying it. When a

debt is denied, the lender loses instead of the borrower, that is all;

the loss is precisely, accurately, everlastingly the same. The Americans

borrow money to spend in blowing up their own houses. They deny their

debt, by one-third already [1863], gold being at fifty premium; and they

will probably deny it wholly. That merely means that the holders of the

notes are to be the losers instead of the issuers. The quantity of loss

is precisely equal, and irrevocable; it is the quantity of human

industry spent in effecting the explosion, plus the quantity of goods

exploded. Honour only decides _who_ shall pay the sum lost not whether

it is to be paid or not. Paid it must be, and to the uttermost farthing.

[93] [(_Past and Present._ Chap. IX. of Third Section.) To think that

for these twenty--now twenty-six--years, this one voice of Carlyle's has

been the only faithful and useful utterance in all England, and has

sounded through all these years in vain! See _Fors Clavigera_, Letter

X.]

[94] [We don't want to produce more fuel just now, but much less; and to

use what we get for cooking and warming ourselves, instead of for

running from place to place.]

APPENDICES.

I have brought together in these last pages a few notes, which were not

properly to be incorporated with the text, and which, at the bottom of

pages, checked the reader's attention to the main argument. They

contain, however, several statements to which I wish to be able to

refer, or have already referred, in other of my books, so that I think

right to preserve them.

APPENDIX I.--(p. 22.)

The greatest of all economists are those most opposed to the doctrine of

"laissez faire," namely, the fortifying virtues, which the wisest men of

all time have arranged under the general heads of Prudence, or

Discretion (the spirit which discerns and adopts rightly); Justice (the

spirit which rules and divides rightly); Fortitude (the spirit which

persists and endures rightly); and Temperance (the spirit which stops

and refuses rightly). These cardinal and sentinel virtues are not only

the means of protecting and prolonging life itself, but they are the

chief guards, or sources, of the material means of life, and the

governing powers and princes of economy. Thus, precisely according to

the number of just men in a nation, is their power of avoiding either

intestine or foreign war. All disputes may be peaceably settled, if a

sufficient number of persons have been trained to submit to the

principles of justice, while the necessity for war is in direct ratio to

the number of unjust persons who are incapable of determining a quarrel

but by violence. Whether the injustice take the form of the desire of

dominion, or of refusal to submit to it, or of lust of territory, or

lust of money, or of mere irregular passion and wanton will, the result

is economically the same;--loss of the quantity of power and life

consumed in repressing the injustice, added to the material and moral

destruction caused by the fact of war. The early civil wars of England,

and the existing[95] war in America, are curious examples--these under

monarchical, this under republican, institutions--of the results on

large masses of nations of the want of education in principles of

justice. But the mere dread or distrust resulting from the want of the

inner virtues of Faith and Charity prove often no less costly than war

itself. The fear which France and England have of each other costs each

nation about fifteen millions sterling annually, besides various

paralyses of commerce; that sum being spent in the manufacture of means

of destruction instead of means of production. There is no more reason

in the nature of things that France and England should be hostile to

each other than that England and Scotland should be, or Lancashire and

Yorkshire; and the reciprocal terrors of the opposite sides of the

English Channel are neither more necessary, more economical, nor more

virtuous, than the old riding and reiving on the opposite flanks of the

Cheviots, or than England's own weaving for herself of crowns of thorn,

from the stems of her Red and White roses.

APPENDIX II.--(p. 34.)

Few passages of the book which at least some part of the nations at

present most advanced in civilization accept as an expression of final

truth, have been more distorted than those bearing on Idolatry. For the

idolatry there denounced is neither sculpture, nor veneration of

sculpture. It is simply the substitution of an "Eidolon," phantasm, or

imagination of Good, for that which is real and enduring; from the

Highest Living Good, which gives life, to the lowest material good

which ministers to it. The Creator, and the things created, which He is

said to have "seen good" in creating, are in this their eternal goodness

appointed always to be "worshipped,"--_i. e._, to have goodness and

worth ascribed to them from the heart; and the sweep and range of

idolatry extend to the rejection of any or all of these, "calling evil

good, and good evil,--putting bitter for sweet, and sweet for

bitter."[96] For in that rejection and substitution we betray the first

of all Loyalties, to the fixed Law of life, and with resolute opposite

loyalty serve our own imagination of good, which is the law, not of the

House, but of the Grave, (otherwise called the law of "mark missing,"

which we translate "law of Sin"); these "two masters," between whose

services we have to choose, being otherwise distinguished as God and

Mammon, which Mammon, though we narrowly take it as the power of

money only, is in truth the great evil Spirit of false and

fond desire, or "Covetousness, which is Idolatry." So that

Iconoclasm--_image_-breaking--is easy; but an Idol cannot be broken--it

must be forsaken; and this is not so easy, either to do, or persuade to

doing. For men may readily be convinced of the weakness of an image; but

not of the emptiness of an imagination.

APPENDIX III.--(p. 36.)

I have not attempted to support, by the authority of other writers, any

of the statements made in these papers; indeed, if such authorities were

rightly collected, there would be no occasion for my writing at all.

Even in the scattered passages referring to this subject in three books

of Carlyle's--Sartor Resartus, Past and Present, and the Latter Day

Pamphlets,--all has been said that needs to be said, and far better than

I shall ever say it again. But the habit of the public mind at present

is to require everything to be uttered diffusely, loudly, and a hundred

times over, before it will listen; and it has revolted against these

papers of mine as if they contained things daring and new, when there

is not one assertion in them of which the truth has not been for ages

known to the wisest, and proclaimed by the most eloquent of men. It

would be [I had written _will_ be; but have now reached a time of life

for which there is but one mood--the conditional,] a far greater

pleasure to me hereafter, to collect their words than to add to mine;

Horace's clear rendering of the substance of the passages in the text

may be found room for at once,

Si quis emat citharas, emptas comportet in unum

Nec studio citharae, nec Musae deditus ulli;

Si scalpra et formas non sutor, nautica vela

Aversus mercaturis, delirus et amens

Undique dicatur merito. Qui discrepat istis

Qui nummos aurumque recondit, nescius uti

Compositis; metuensque velut contingere sacrum?

[Which may be roughly thus translated:--

"Were anybody to buy fiddles, and collect a number, being in

no wise given to fiddling, nor fond of music: or if, being

no cobbler, he collected awls and lasts, or, having no mind

for sea-adventure, bought sails, every one would call him a

madman, and deservedly. But what difference is there between

such a man and one who lays by coins and gold, and does not

know how to use, when he has got them?"]

With which it is perhaps desirable also to give Xenophon's statement, it

being clearer than any English one can be, owing to the power of the

general Greek term for wealth, "useable things."

[I have cut out the Greek because I can't be troubled to correct the

accents, and am always nervous about them; here it is in English, as

well as I can do it:--

"This being so, it follows that things are only property to the man who

knows how to use them; as flutes, for instance, are property to the man

who can pipe upon them respectably; but to one who knows not how to

pipe, they are no property, unless he can get rid of them

advantageously.... For if they are not sold, the flutes are no property

(being serviceable for nothing); but, sold, they become property. To

which Socrates made answer,--'and only then if he knows how to sell

them, for if he sell them to another man who cannot play on them, still

they are no property.'"]

APPENDIX IV.--(p. 39.)

The reader is to include here in the idea of "Government," any branch of

the Executive, or even any body of private persons, entrusted with the

practical management of public interests unconnected directly with their

own personal ones. In theoretical discussions of legislative

interference with political economy, it is usually, and of course

unnecessarily, assumed that Government must be always of that form and

force in which we have been accustomed to see it;--that its abuses can

never be less, nor its wisdom greater, nor its powers more numerous.

But, practically, the custom in most civilized countries is, for every

man to deprecate the interference of Government as long as things tell

for his personal advantage, and to call for it when they cease to do so.

The request of the Manchester Economists to be supplied with cotton by

Government (the system of supply and demand having, for the time, fallen

sorrowfully short of the expectations of scientific persons from it), is

an interesting case in point. It were to be wished that less wide and

bitter suffering, suffering, too, of the innocent, had been needed to

force the nation, or some part of it, to ask itself why a body of men,

already confessedly capable of managing matters both military and

divine, should not be permitted, or even requested, at need, to provide

in some wise for sustenance as well as for defence; and secure, if it

might be,--(and it might, I think, even the _rather_ be),--purity of

bodily, as well as of spiritual, aliment? Why, having made many roads

for the passage of armies, may they not make a few for the conveyance of

food; and after organizing, with applause, various schemes of

theological instruction for the Public, organize, moreover, some

methods of bodily nourishment for them? Or is the soul so much less

trustworthy in its instincts than the stomach, that legislation is

necessary for the one, but inapplicable to the other.

APPENDIX V.--(p. 70.)

I debated with myself whether to make the note on Homer longer by

examining the typical meaning of the shipwreck of Ulysses, and his

escape from Charybdis by help of her fig-tree; but as I should have had

to go on to the lovely myth of Leucothea's veil, and did not care to

spoil this by a hurried account of it, I left it for future examination;

and, three days after the paper was published, observed that the

reviewers, with their customary helpfulness, were endeavouring to throw

the whole subject back into confusion by dwelling on this single (as

they imagined) oversight. I omitted also a note on the sense of the word

[Greek: lygron], with respect to the pharmacy of Circe, and herb-fields

of Helen, (compare its use in Odyssey, xvii., 473, &c.), which would

farther have illustrated the nature of the Circean power. But, not to be

led too far into the subtleties of these myths, observe respecting them

all, that even in very simple parables, it is not always easy to attach

indisputable meaning to every part of them. I recollect some years ago,

throwing an assembly of learned persons who had met to delight

themselves with interpretations of the parable of the prodigal son,

(interpretations which had up to that moment gone very smoothly,) into

mute indignation, by inadvertently asking who the _un_prodigal son was,

and what was to be learned by _his_ example. The leading divine of the

company, Mr. Molyneux, at last explained to me that the unprodigal son

was a lay figure, put in for dramatic effect, to make the story

prettier, and that no note was to be taken of him. Without, however,

admitting that Homer put in the last escape of Ulysses merely to make

his story prettier, this is nevertheless true of all Greek myths, that

they have many opposite lights and shades; they are as changeful as

opal, and like opal, usually have one colour by reflected, and another

by transmitted light. But they are true jewels for all that, and full of

noble enchantment for those who can use them; for those who cannot, I am

content to repeat the words I wrote four years ago, in the appendix to

the _Two Paths_--

"The entire purpose of a great thinker may be difficult to fathom, and

we may be over and over again more or less mistaken in guessing at his

meaning; but the real, profound, nay, quite bottomless and unredeemable

mistake, is the fool's thought, that he had _no_ meaning."

APPENDIX VI.--(p. 84)

The derivation of words is like that of rivers: there is one real

source, usually small, unlikely, and difficult to find, far up among the

hills; then, as the word flows on and comes into service, it takes in

the force of other words from other sources, and becomes quite another

word--often much more than one word, after the junction--a word as it

were of many waters, sometimes both sweet and bitter. Thus the whole

force of our English "charity" depends on the guttural in "charis"

getting confused with the c of the Latin "carus;" thenceforward

throughout the middle ages, the two ideas ran on together, and both got

confused with St. Paul's [Greek: agape], which expresses a different

idea in all sorts of ways; our "charity" having not only brought in the

entirely foreign sense of alms-giving, but lost the essential sense of

contentment, and lost much more in getting too far away from the

"charis" of the final Gospel benedictions. For truly it is fine

Christianity we have come to, which, professing to expect the perpetual

grace or charity of its Founder, has not itself grace or charity enough

to hinder it from overreaching its friends in sixpenny bargains; and

which, supplicating evening and morning the forgiveness of its own

debts, goes forth at noon to take its fellow-servants by the throat,

saying,--not merely "Pay me that thou owest," but "Pay me that thou

owest me _not_."

It is true that we sometimes wear Ophelia's rue with a difference, and

call it "Herb o' grace o' Sundays," taking consolation out of the

offertory with--"Look, what he layeth out; it shall be paid him again."

Comfortable words indeed, and good to set against the old royalty of

Largesse--

Whose moste joie was, I wis,

When that she gave, and said, "Have this."

[I am glad to end, for this time, with these lovely words of Chaucer. We

have heard only too much lately of "Indiscriminate charity," with

implied reproval, not of the Indiscrimination merely, but of the Charity

also. We have partly succeeded in enforcing on the minds of the poor the

idea that it is disgraceful to receive; and are likely, without much

difficulty, to succeed in persuading not a few of the rich that it is

disgraceful to give. But the political economy of a great state makes

both giving and receiving graceful; and the political economy of true

religion interprets the saying that "it is more blessed to give than to

receive," not as the promise of reward in another life for mortified

selfishness in this, but as pledge of bestowal upon us of that sweet and

better nature, which does not mortify itself in giving.]

_Brantwood, Coniston,_

_5th October, 1871._

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[95] [Written in 1862. I little thought that when I next corrected my

type, the "existing" war best illustrative of the sentence would be

between Frenchmen in the Elysian Fields of Paris.]

[96] Compare the close of the Fourth Lecture in _Aratra Pentelici_.

PRE-RAPHAELITISM

To

FRANCIS HAWKSWORTH FAWKES, ESQ

OF FARNLEY

THESE PAGES

WHICH OWE THEIR PRESENT FORM TO ADVANTAGES GRANTED

BY HIS KINDNESS

ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

BY HIS OBLIGED FRIEND

JOHN RUSKIN

PREFACE.

Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of "Modern Painters,"

I ventured to give the following advice to the young artists of

England:--

"They should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her

laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to

penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and

scorning nothing." Advice which, whether bad or good, involved infinite

labor and humiliation in the following it; and was therefore, for the

most part, rejected.

It has, however, at last been carried out, to the very letter, by a

group of men who, for their reward, have been assailed with the most

scurrilous abuse which I ever recollect seeing issue from the public

press. I have, therefore, thought it due to them to contradict the

directly false statements which have been made respecting their works;

and to point out the kind of merit which, however deficient in some

respects, those works possess beyond the possibility of dispute.

Denmark Hill,

Aug. 1851.

PRE-RAPHAELITISM.

It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no man to live

in this world without working: but it seems to me no less evident that

He intends every man to be happy in his work. It is written, "in the

sweat of thy brow," but it was never written, "in the breaking of thine

heart," thou shalt eat bread; and I find that, as on the one hand,

infinite misery is caused by idle people, who both fail in doing what

was appointed for them to do, and set in motion various springs of

mischief in matters in which they should have had no concern, so on the

other hand, no small misery is caused by over-worked and unhappy people,

in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force

upon others, of work itself. Were it not so, I believe the fact of their

being unhappy is in itself a violation of divine law, and a sign of some

kind of folly or sin in their way of life. Now in order that people may

be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit

for it: They must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of

success in it--not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of

other people for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather

knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done,

whatever the world may say or think about it. So that in order that a

man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of

his work, but a good judge of his work.

The first thing then that he has to do, if unhappily his parents or

masters have not done it for him, is to find out what he is fit for. In

which inquiry a man may be very safely guided by his likings, if he be

not also guided by his pride. People usually reason in some such

fashion as this: "I don't seem quite fit for a head-manager in the firm

of ---- & Co., therefore, in all probability, I am fit to be Chancellor

of the Exchequer." Whereas, they ought rather to reason thus: "I don't

seem quite fit to be head-manager in the firm of ---- & Co., but I

daresay I might do something in a small green-grocery business; I used

to be a good judge of peas;" that is to say, always trying lower instead

of trying higher, until they find bottom: once well set on the ground, a

man may build up by degrees, safely, instead of disturbing every one in

his neighborhood by perpetual catastrophes. But this kind of humility is

rendered especially difficult in these days, by the contumely thrown on

men in humble employments. The very removal of the massy bars which once

separated one class of society from another, has rendered it tenfold

more shameful in foolish people's, i. e. in most people's eyes, to

remain in the lower grades of it, than ever it was before. When a man

born of an artisan was looked upon as an entirely different species of

animal from a man born of a noble, it made him no more uncomfortable or

ashamed to remain that different species of animal, than it makes a

horse ashamed to remain a horse, and not to become a giraffe. But now

that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself,

unreproached, with people once far above him, not only is the natural

discontentedness of humanity developed to an unheard-of extent, whatever

a man's position, but it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in

the state he was born in, and everybody thinks it his _duty_ to try to

be a "gentleman." Persons who have any influence in the management of

public institutions for charitable education know how common this

feeling has become. Hardly a day passes but they receive letters from

mothers who want all their six or eight sons to go to college, and make

the grand tour in the long vacation, and who think there is something

wrong in the foundations of society, because this is not possible. Out

of every ten letters of this kind, nine will allege, as the reason of

the writers' importunity, their desire to keep their families in such

and such a "station of life." There is no real desire for the safety,

the discipline, or the moral good of the children, only a panic horror

of the inexpressibly pitiable calamity of their living a ledge or two

lower on the molehill of the world--a calamity to be averted at any cost

whatever, of struggle, anxiety, and shortening of life itself. I do not

believe that any greater good could be achieved for the country, than

the change in public feeling on this head, which might be brought about

by a few benevolent men, undeniably in the class of "gentlemen," who

would, on principle, enter into some of our commonest trades, and make

them honorable; showing that it was possible for a man to retain his

dignity, and remain, in the best sense, a gentleman, though part of his

time was every day occupied in manual labor, or even in serving

customers over a counter. I do not in the least see why courtesy, and

gravity, and sympathy with the feelings of others, and courage, and

truth, and piety, and what else goes to make up a gentleman's character,

should not be found behind a counter as well as elsewhere, if they were

demanded, or even hoped for, there.

Let us suppose, then, that the man's way of life and manner of work have

been discreetly chosen; then the next thing to be required is, that he

do not over-work himself therein. I am not going to say anything here

about the various errors in our systems of society and commerce, which

appear (I am not sure if they ever do more than appear) to force us to

over-work ourselves merely that we may live; nor about the still more

fruitful cause of unhealthy toil--the incapability, in many men, of

being content with the little that is indeed necessary to their

happiness. I have only a word or two to say about one special cause of

over-work--the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things, and the

hope of accomplishing them by immense efforts: hope as vain as it is

pernicious; not only making men over-work themselves, but rendering all

the work they do unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and let

the reader be assured of this (it is a truth all-important to the best

interests of humanity). _No great intellectual thing was ever done by

great effort_; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and he

does it _without_ effort. Nothing is, at present, less understood by us

than this--nothing is more necessary to be understood. Let me try to say

it as clearly, and explain it as fully as I may.

I have said no great _intellectual_ thing: for I do not mean the

assertion to extend to things moral. On the contrary, it seems to me

that just because we are intended, as long as we live, to be in a state

of intense moral effort, we are _not_ intended to be in intense physical

or intellectual effort. Our full energies are to be given to the soul's

work--to the great fight with the Dragon--the taking the kingdom of

heaven by force. But the body's work and head's work are to be done

quietly, and comparatively without effort. Neither limbs nor brain are

ever to be strained to their utmost; that is not the way in which the

greatest quantity of work is to be got out of them: they are never to be

worked furiously, but with tranquillity and constancy. We are to follow

the plough from sunrise to sunset, but not to pull in race-boats at the

twilight: we shall get no fruit of that kind of work, only disease of

the heart.

How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this great truth and law

were but once sincerely, humbly understood,--that if a great thing can

be done at all, it can be done easily; that, when it is needed to be

done, there is perhaps only one man in the world who can do it; but _he_

can do it without any trouble--without more trouble, that is, than it

costs small people to do small things; nay, perhaps, with less. And yet

what truth lies more openly on the surface of all human phenomena? Is

not the evidence of Ease on the very front of all the greatest works in

existence? Do they not say plainly to us, not, "there has been a great

_effort_ here," but, "there has been a great _power_ here"? It is not

the weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have

to recognise in all mighty things; and that is just what we now _never_

recognise, but think that we are to do great things, by help of iron

bars and perspiration:--alas! we shall do nothing that way but lose some

pounds of our own weight.

Yet, let me not be misunderstood, nor this great truth be supposed

anywise resolvable into the favorite dogma of young men, that they need

not work if they have genius. The fact is, that a man of genius is

always far more ready to work than other people, and gets so much more

good from the work that he does, and is often so little conscious of the

inherent divinity in himself, that he is very apt to ascribe all his

capacity to his work, and to tell those who ask how he came to be what

he is: "If I _am_ anything, which I much doubt, I made myself so merely

by labor." This was Newton's way of talking, and I suppose it would be

the general tone of men whose genius had been devoted to the physical

sciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, but

in whatever field, it will always be distinguished by its perpetual,

steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating and

disciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incommunicable

facility in exercising them. Therefore, literally, it is no man's

business whether he has genius or not: work he must, whatever he is, but

quietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such work

will be always the things that God meant him to do, and will be his

best. No agonies nor heart-rendings will enable him to do any better. If

he be a great man, they will be great things; if a small man, small

things; but always, if thus peacefully done, good and right; always, if

restlessly and ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despicable.

Then the third thing needed was, I said, that a man should be a good

judge of his work; and this chiefly that he may not be dependent upon

popular opinion for the manner of doing it, but also that he may have

the just encouragement of the sense of progress, and an honest

consciousness of victory: how else can he become

"That awful independent on to-morrow,

Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile."

I am persuaded that the real nourishment and help of such a feeling as

this is nearly unknown to half the workmen of the present day. For

whatever appearance of self-complacency there may be in their outward

bearing, it is visible enough, by their feverish jealousy of each

other, how little confidence they have in the sterling value of their

several doings. Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up; and

there is too visible distress and hopelessness in men's aspects to admit

of the supposition that they have any stable support of faith in

themselves.

I have stated these principles generally, because there is no branch of

labor to which they do not apply: But there is one in which our

ignorance or forgetfulness of them has caused an incalculable amount of

suffering: and I would endeavor now to reconsider them with especial

reference to it,--the branch of the Arts.

In general, the men who are employed in the Arts have freely chosen

their profession, and suppose themselves to have special faculty for it;

yet, as a body, they are not happy men. For which this seems to me the

reason, that they are expected, and themselves expect, to make their

bread _by being clever_--not by steady or quiet work; and are,

therefore, for the most part, trying to be clever, and so living in an

utterly false state of mind and action.

This is the case, to the same extent, in no other profession or

employment. A lawyer may indeed suspect that, unless he has more wit

than those around him, he is not likely to advance in his profession;

but he will not be always thinking how he is to display his wit. He will

generally understand, early in his career, that wit must be left to take

care of itself, and that it is hard knowledge of law and vigorous

examination and collation of the facts of every case entrusted to him,

which his clients will mainly demand; this it is which he has to be paid

for; and this is healthy and measurable labor, payable by the hour. If

he happen to have keen natural perception and quick wit, these will come

into play in their due time and place, but he will not think of them as

his chief power; and if he have them not, he may still hope that

industry and conscientiousness may enable him to rise in his profession

without them. Again in the case of clergymen: that they are sorely

tempted to display their eloquence or wit, none who know their own

hearts will deny, but then they _know_ this to _be_ a temptation: they

never would suppose that cleverness was all that was to be expected from

them, or would sit down deliberately to write a clever sermon: even the

dullest or vainest of them would throw some veil over their vanity, and

pretend to some profitableness of purpose in what they did. They would

not openly ask of their hearers--Did you think my sermon ingenious, or

my language poetical? They would early understand that they were not

paid for being ingenious, nor called to be so, but to preach truth; that

if they happened to possess wit, eloquence, or originality, these would

appear and be of service in due time, but were not to be continually

sought after or exhibited: and if it should happen that they had them

not, they might still be serviceable pastors without them.

Not so with the unhappy artist. No one expects any honest or useful work

of him; but every one expects him to be ingenious. Originality,

dexterity, invention, imagination, every thing is asked of him except

what alone is to be had for asking--honesty and sound work, and the due

discharge of his function as a painter. What function? asks the reader

in some surprise. He may well ask; for I suppose few painters have any

idea what their function is, or even that they have any at all.

And yet surely it is not so difficult to discover. The faculties, which

when a man finds in himself, he resolves to be a painter, are, I

suppose, intenseness of observation and facility of imitation. The man

is created an observer and an imitator; and his function is to convey

knowledge to his fellow-men, of such things as cannot be taught

otherwise than ocularly. For a long time this function remained a

religious one: it was to impress upon the popular mind the reality of

the objects of faith, and the truth of the histories of Scripture, by

giving visible form to both. That function has now passed away, and none

has as yet taken its place. The painter has no profession, no purpose.

He is an idler on the earth, chasing the shadows of his own fancies.

But he was never meant to be this. The sudden and universal Naturalism,

or inclination to copy ordinary natural objects, which manifested

itself among the painters of Europe, at the moment when the invention of

printing superseded their legendary labors, was no false instinct. It

was misunderstood and misapplied, but it came at the right time, and has

maintained itself through all kinds of abuse; presenting in the recent

schools of landscape, perhaps only the first fruits of its power. That

instinct was urging every painter in Europe at the same moment to his

true duty--_the faithful representation of all objects of historical

interest, or of natural beauty existent at the period_; representations

such as might at once aid the advance of the sciences, and keep faithful

record of every monument of past ages which was likely to be swept away

in the approaching eras of revolutionary change.

The instinct came, as I said, exactly at the right moment; and let the

reader consider what amount and kind of general knowledge might by this

time have been possessed by the nations of Europe, had their painters

understood and obeyed it. Suppose that, after disciplining themselves so

as to be able to draw, with unerring precision, each the particular kind

of subject in which he most delighted, they had separated into two great

armies of historians and naturalists;--that the first had painted with

absolute faithfulness every edifice, every city, every battle-field,

every scene of the slightest historical interest, precisely and

completely rendering their aspect at the time; and that their

companions, according to their several powers, had painted with like

fidelity the plants and animals, the natural scenery, and the

atmospheric phenomena of every country on the earth--suppose that a

faithful and complete record were now in our museums of every building

destroyed by war, or time, or innovation, during these last 200

years--suppose that each recess of every mountain chain of Europe had

been penetrated, and its rocks drawn with such accuracy that the

geologist's diagram was no longer necessary--suppose that every tree of

the forest had been drawn in its noblest aspect, every beast of the

field in its savage life--that all these gatherings were already in our

national galleries, and that the painters of the present day were

laboring, happily and earnestly, to multiply them, and put such means of

knowledge more and more within reach of the common people--would not

that be a more honorable life for them, than gaining precarious bread by

"bright effects?" They think not, perhaps. They think it easy, and

therefore contemptible, to be truthful; they have been taught so all

their lives. But it is not so, whoever taught it them. It is most

difficult, and worthy of the greatest men's greatest effort, to render,

as it should be rendered, the simplest of the natural features of the

earth; but also be it remembered, no man is confined to the simplest;

each may look out work for himself where he chooses, and it will be

strange if he cannot find something hard enough for him. The excuse is,

however, one of the lips only; for every painter knows that when he

draws back from the attempt to render nature as she is, it is oftener in

cowardice than in disdain.

I must leave the reader to pursue this subject for himself; I have not

space to suggest to him the tenth part of the advantages which would

follow, both to the painter from such an understanding of his mission,

and to the whole people, in the results of his labor. Consider how the

man himself would be elevated: how content he would become, how earnest,

how full of all accurate and noble knowledge, how free from

envy--knowing creation to be infinite, feeling at once the value of what

he did, and yet the nothingness. Consider the advantage to the people;

the immeasurably larger interest given to art itself; the easy,

pleasurable, and perfect knowledge conveyed by it, in every subject; the

far greater number of men who might be healthily and profitably occupied

with it as a means of livelihood; the useful direction of myriads of

inferior talents, now left fading away in misery. Conceive all this, and

then look around at our exhibitions, and behold the "cattle pieces," and

"sea pieces," and "fruit pieces," and "family pieces;" the eternal brown

cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in

saucers, and foolish faces in simpers;--and try to feel what we are, and

what we might have been.

Take a single instance in one branch of archaeology. Let those who are

interested in the history of religion consider what a treasure we should

now have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables, and

drunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line for line, the religious

and domestic sculpture on the German, Flemish, and French cathedrals and

castles; and if every building destroyed in the French or in any other

subsequent revolution, had thus been drawn in all its parts with the

same precision with which Gerard Douw or Mieris paint bas-reliefs of

Cupids. Consider, even now, what incalculable treasure is still left in

ancient bas-reliefs, full of every kind of legendary interest, of subtle

expression, of priceless evidence as to the character, feelings habits,

histories, of past generations, in neglected and shattered churches and

domestic buildings, rapidly disappearing over the whole of

Europe--treasure which, once lost, the labor of all men living cannot

bring back again; and then look at the myriads of men, with skill

enough, if they had but the commonest schooling, to record all this

faithfully, who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked women

from academy models, or idealities of chivalry fitted out with Wardour

Street armor, or eternal scenes from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and the

Vicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londoners

wearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Do

but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible

imbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in the

southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fibre of the

heart in you that will break too.

But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, for

imagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty?

Yes; the highest, the noblest place--that which these only can attain

when they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever

imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without

forcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of training

which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could

receive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present training

consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and invention

high enough, and suppose that they _can_ be taught. Throughout every

sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rank

attributed to these powers,--the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be

attained, increased, or in any wise modified by teaching, only in

various ways capable of being concealed or quenched. Understand this

thoroughly; know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same

species of creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our

methods of teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinks

of bringing men up to be poets?--of producing poets by any kind of

general recipe or method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see in

youth that which we hope may, in its development, become a power of this

kind, should we instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of

him, and nothing else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labor?

Should we force him to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of his

boyish brain, and set before him, as the only objects of his study, the

laws of versification which criticism has supposed itself to discover in

the works of previous writers? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much be

likely to come of them so treated? unless, indeed, they were so great as

to break through all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and build

their own foundation in spite of us; whereas if, as in cases numbering

millions against units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this,

could any thing come of such training but utter inanity and spuriousness

of the whole man? But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain and

bridle the first flame of invention in early youth, heaping material on

it as one would on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we

desired to feed into greatness? Should we not educate the whole

intellect into general strength, and all the affections into warmth and

honesty, and look to heaven for the rest? This, I say, we should have

sense enough to do, in order to produce a poet in words: but, it being

required to produce a poet on canvas, what is our way of setting to

work? We begin, in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or

sixteen, that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her;

but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the

better; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do

himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original, manner: that is to say, he

is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet

this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules,

is to have a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a

principle shadow occupying one-third of the same; that no two people's

heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the

personages represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order,

which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in

proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin;

but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen

is to bestow upon God's work in general. This I say is the kind of

teaching which through various channels, Royal Academy lecturings, press

criticisms, public enthusiasm, and not least by solid weight of gold, we

give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters!

But we do worse than this. Within the last few years some sense

of the real tendency of such teaching has appeared in some of

our younger painters. It only _could_ appear in the younger ones,

our older men having become familiarised with the false system,

or else having passed through it and forgotten it, not well knowing

the degree of harm they had sustained. This sense appeared, among our

youths,--increased,--matured into resolute action. Necessarily, to exist

at all, it needed the support both of strong instincts and of

considerable self-confidence, otherwise it must at once have been borne

down by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Strong

instincts are apt to make men strange, and rude; self-confidence,

however well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance

of impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening

every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of

it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little

ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in

a youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedly

to be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of

his work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that he

should be regarded with disfavor by many, even the most temperate, of

the judges trained in the system he was breaking through, and with utter

contempt and reprobation by the envious and the dull. Consider, farther,

that the particular system to be overthrown was, in the present case,

one of which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the

expense of manliness and truth; and it will seem likely, _a priori_,

that the men intended successfully to resist the influence of such a

system should be endowed with little natural sense of beauty, and thus

rendered dead to the temptation it presented. Summing up these

conditions, there is surely little cause for surprise that pictures

painted, in a temper of resistance, by exceedingly young men, of

stubborn instincts and positive self-trust, and with little natural

perception of beauty, should not be calculated, at the first glance, to

win us from works enriched by plagiarism, polished by convention,

invested with all the attractiveness of artificial grace, and

recommended to our respect by established authority.

We should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in

proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to

the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or

affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit

of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and

their success in attaining them.

All this has actually been the case, but in a degree which it would have

been impossible to anticipate. That two youths, of the respective ages

of eighteen and twenty, should have conceived for themselves a totally

independent and sincere method of study, and enthusiastically persevered

in it against every kind of dissuasion and opposition, is strange

enough; that in the third or fourth year of their efforts they should

have produced works in many parts not inferior to the best of Albert

Durer, this is perhaps not less strange. But the loudness and

universality of the howl which the common critics of the press have

raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help or

encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate

their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do

neither the one nor the other,--these are strangest of all--unimaginable

unless they had been experienced.

And as if these were not enough, private malice is at work against them,

in its own small, slimy way. The very day after I had written my second

letter to the Times in the defence of the Pre-Raphaelites, I received an

anonymous letter respecting one of them, from some person apparently

hardly capable of spelling, and about as vile a specimen of petty

malignity as ever blotted paper. I think it well that the public should

know this, and so get some insight into the sources of the spirit which

is at work against these men--how first roused it is difficult to say,

for one would hardly have thought that mere eccentricity in young

artists could have excited an hostility so determined and so

cruel;--hostility which hesitated at no assertion, however impudent.

That of the "absence of perspective" was one of the most curious pieces

of the hue and cry which began with the Times, and died away in feeble

maundering in the Art Union; I contradicted it in the Times--I here

contradict it directly for the second time. There was not a single error

in perspective in three out of the four pictures in question. But if

otherwise, would it have been anything remarkable in them? I doubt, if

with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one

architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I

never met but with two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to

draw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions

and curvatures might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our

architects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talking

to one of the most distinguished among them, the author of several most

valuable works, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle in

perspective. And in this state of general science our writers for the

press take it upon them to tell us, that the forest trees in Mr. Hunt's

_Sylvia_, and the bunches of lilies in Mr. Collins's _Convent Thoughts_,

are out of perspective.[97]

It might not, I think, in such circumstances, have been ungraceful or

unwise in the Academicians themselves to have defended their young

pupils, at least by the contradiction of statements directly false

respecting them,[98] and the direction of the mind and sight of the

public to such real merit as they possess. If Sir Charles Eastlake,

Mulready, Edwin and Charles Landseer, Cope, and Dyce would each of them

simply state their own private opinion respecting their paintings, sign

it and publish it, I believe the act would be of more service to English

art than any thing the Academy has done since it was founded. But as I

cannot hope for this, I can only ask the public to give their pictures

careful examination, and look at them at once with the indulgence and

the respect which I have endeavored to show they deserve.

Yet let me not be misunderstood. I have adduced them only as examples of

the kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for that of

our modern schools, and of singular success in certain characters,

finish of detail, and brilliancy of color. What faculties, higher than

imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say; but I do

say that if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in due

time all the more forcibly because they have received training so

severe.

For it is always to be remembered that no one mind is like another,

either in its powers or perceptions; and while the main principles of

training must be the same for all, the result in each will be as various

as the kinds of truth which each will apprehend; therefore, also, the

modes of effort, even in men whose inner principles and final aims are

exactly the same. Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest,

equally industrious, equally impressed with a humble desire to render

some part of what they saw in nature faithfully; and, otherwise trained

in convictions such as I have above endeavored to induce. But one of

them is quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, and

excessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has a

memory which nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is

comparatively near-sighted.

Set them both free in the same field in a mountain valley. One sees

everything, small and large, with almost the same clearness; mountains

and grasshoppers alike; the leaves on the branches, the veins in the

pebbles, the bubbles in the stream: but he can remember nothing, and

invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to his mighty task; abandoning

at once all thoughts of seizing transient effects, or giving general

impressions of that which his eyes present to him in microscopical

dissection, he chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and

calculates with courage the number of weeks which must elapse before he

can do justice to the intensity of his perceptions, or the fulness of

matter in his subject.

Meantime, the other has been watching the change of the clouds, and the

march of the light along the mountain sides; he beholds the entire scene

in broad, soft masses of true gradation, and the very feebleness of his

sight is in some sort an advantage to him, in making him more sensible

of the aerial mystery of distance, and hiding from him the multitudes of

circumstances which it would have been impossible for him to represent.

But there is not one change in the casting of the jagged shadows along

the hollows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind for ever; not a

flake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud about their bases, but

he has watched it as it melts away, and could recall it to its lost

place in heaven by the slightest effort of his thoughts. Not only so,

but thousands and thousands of such images, of older scenes, remain

congregated in his mind, each mingling in new associations with those

now visibly passing before him, and these again confused with other

images of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by in

sudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbols

and blots, and undecipherable shorthand:--as for his sitting down to

"draw from Nature," there was not one of the things which he wished to

represent that stayed for so much as five seconds together: but none of

them escaped, for all that: they are sealed up in that strange

storehouse of his; he may take one of them out, perhaps, this day twenty

years, and paint it in his dark room, far away. Now, observe, you may

tell both of these men, when they are young, that they are to be honest,

that they have an important function, and that they are not to care what

Raphael did. This you may wholesomely impress on them both. But fancy

the exquisite absurdity of expecting either of them to possess any of

the qualities of the other.

I have supposed the feebleness of sight in the last, and of invention in

the first painter, that the contrast between them might be more

striking; but, with very slight modification, both the characters are

real. Grant to the first considerable inventive power, with exquisite

sense of color; and give to the second, in addition to all his other

faculties, the eye of an eagle; and the first is John Everett Millais,

the second Joseph Mallard William Turner.

They are among the few men who have defied all false teaching, and have,

therefore, in great measure, done justice to the gifts with which they

were entrusted. They stand at opposite poles, marking culminating points

of art in both directions; between them, or in various relations to

them, we may class five or six more living artists who, in like manner,

have done justice to their powers. I trust that I may be pardoned for

naming them, in order that the reader may know how the strong innate

genius in each has been invariably accompanied with the same humility,

earnestness, and industry in study.

It is hardly necessary to point out the earnestness or humility in the

works of William Hunt; but it may be so to suggest the high value they

possess as records of English rural life, and _still_ life. Who is there

who for a moment could contend with him in the unaffected, yet humorous

truth with which he has painted our peasant children? Who is there who

does not sympathize with him in the simple love with which he dwells on

the brightness and bloom of our summer fruit and flowers? And yet there

is something to be regretted concerning him: why should he be allowed

continually to paint the same bunches of hot-house grapes, and supply

to the Water Color Society a succession of pineapples with the

regularity of a Covent Garden fruiterer? He has of late discovered that

primrose banks are lovely; but there are other things grow wild besides

primroses: what undreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, if

he would lose himself for a summer in Highland foregrounds; if he would

paint the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they

nestle in the clefts of the rocks, and the mosses and bright lichens of

the rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and bring back a

piece of Jura pasture in spring; with the gentians in their earliest

blue, and the soldanelle beside the fading snow! And return again, and

paint a gray wall of Alpine crag, with budding roses crowning it like a

wreath of rubies. That is what he was meant to do in this world; not to

paint bouquets in china vases.

I have in various other places expressed my sincere respect for the

works of Samuel Prout: his shortness of sight has necessarily prevented

their possessing delicacy of finish or fulness of minor detail; but I

think that those of no other living artist furnish an example so

striking of innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular work at

the exact and only period when it was possible. At the instant when

peace had been established all over Europe, but when neither national

character nor national architecture had as yet been seriously changed by

promiscuous intercourse or modern "improvement;" when, however, nearly

every ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state of

comparative neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruinousness, and of

separation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiar

interest--half sorrowful, half sublime;--at that moment Prout was

trained among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall, until his

eye was accustomed to follow with delight the rents and breaks, and

irregularities which, to another man, would have been offensive; and

then, gifted with infinite readiness in composition, but also with

infinite affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray, he was

sent to preserve, in an almost innumerable series of drawings, _every

one made on the spot_, the aspect borne, at the beginning of the

nineteenth century, by cities which, in a few years more, rekindled

wars, or unexpected prosperities, were to ravage, or renovate, into

nothingness.

It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis; but there is this

fellowship between them, that both seem to have been intended to

appreciate the characters of foreign countries more than of their

own--nay, to have been born in England chiefly that the excitement of

strangeness might enhance to them the interest of the scenes they had to

represent. I believe John Lewis to have done more entire justice to all

his powers (and they are magnificent ones) than any other man amongst

us. His mission was evidently to portray the comparatively animal life

of the southern and eastern families of mankind. For this he was

prepared in a somewhat singular way--by being led to study, and endowed

with altogether peculiar apprehension of, the most sublime characters of

animals themselves. Rubens, Rembrandt, Snyders, Tintoret, and Titian,

have all, in various ways, drawn wild beasts magnificently; but they

have in some sort humanized or demonized them, making them either

ravenous fiends or educated beasts, that would draw cars, and had

respect for hermits. The sullen isolation of the brutal nature; the

dignity and quietness of the mighty limbs; the shaggy mountainous power,

mingled with grace, as of a flowing stream; the stealthy restraint of

strength and wrath in every soundless motion of the gigantic frame; all

this seems never to have been seen, much less drawn, until Lewis drew

and himself engraved a series of animal subjects, now many years ago.

Since then, he has devoted himself to the portraiture of those European

and Asiatic races, among whom the refinements of civilization exist

without its laws or its energies, and in whom the fierceness, indolence,

and subtlety of animal nature are associated with brilliant imagination

and strong affections. To this task he has brought not only intense

perception of the kind of character, but powers of artistical

composition like those of the great Venetians, displaying, at the same

time, a refinement of drawing almost miraculous, and appreciable only,

as the minutiae of nature itself are appreciable, by the help of the

microscope. The value, therefore, of his works, as records of the aspect

of the scenery and inhabitants of the south of Spain and of the East, in

the earlier part of the nineteenth century, is quite above all estimate.

I hardly know how to speak of Mulready: in delicacy and completion of

drawing, and splendor of color, he takes place beside John Lewis and the

pre-Raphaelites; but he has, throughout his career, displayed no

definiteness in choice of subject. He must be named among the painters

who have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doing

so; but having obtained a consummate method of execution, he has thrown

it away on subjects either altogether uninteresting, or above his

powers, or unfit for pictorial representation. "The Cherry Woman,"

exhibited in 1850, may be named as an example of the first kind; the

"Burchell and Sophia" of the second (the character of Sir William

Thornhill being utterly missed); the "Seven Ages" of the third; for this

subject cannot be painted. In the written passage, the thoughts are

progressive and connected; in the picture they must be co-existent, and

yet separate; nor can all the characters of the ages be rendered in

painting at all. One may represent the soldier at the cannon's mouth,

but one cannot paint the "bubble reputation" which he seeks. Mulready,

therefore, while he has always produced exquisite pieces of painting,

has failed in doing anything which can be of true or extensive use. He

has, indeed, understood how to discipline his genius, but never how to

direct it.

Edwin Landseer is the last painter but one whom I shall name: I need not

point out to any one acquainted with his earlier works, the labor, or

watchfulness of nature which they involve, nor need I do more than

allude to the peculiar faculties of his mind. It will at once be granted

that the highest merits of his pictures are throughout found in those

parts of them which are least like what had before been accomplished;

and that it was not by the study of Raphael that he attained his eminent

success, but by a healthy love of Scotch terriers.

None of these painters, however, it will be answered, afford examples

of the rise of the highest imaginative power out of close study of

matters of fact. Be it remembered, however, that the imaginative power,

in its magnificence, is not to be found every day. Lewis has it in no

mean degree; but we cannot hope to find it at its highest more than once

in an age. We _have_ had it once, and must be content.

Towards the close of the last century, among the various drawings

executed, according to the quiet manner of the time, in greyish blue,

with brown foregrounds, some began to be noticed as exhibiting rather

more than ordinary diligence and delicacy, signed W. Turner.[99] There

was nothing, however, in them at all indicative of genius, or even of

more than ordinary talent, unless in some of the subjects a large

perception of space, and excessive clearness and decision in the

arrangement of masses. Gradually and cautiously the blues became mingled

with delicate green, and then with gold; the browns in the foreground

became first more positive, and then were slightly mingled with other

local colors; while the touch, which had at first been heavy and broken,

like that of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew more and

more refined and expressive, until it lost itself in a method of

execution often too delicate for the eye to follow, rendering, with a

precision before unexampled, both the texture and the form of every

object. The style may be considered as perfectly formed about the year

1800, and it remained unchanged for twenty years.

During that period the painter had attempted, and with more or less

success had rendered, every order of landscape subject, but always on

the same principle, subduing the colors of nature into a harmony of

which the key-notes are greyish green and brown; pure blues and delicate

golden yellows being admitted in small quantity, as the lowest and

highest limits of shade and light: and bright local colors in extremely

small quantity in figures or other minor accessories.

Pictures executed on such a system are not, properly speaking, works in

_color_ at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which both the

shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which best

expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the lights

and the foreground are executed in that which best expresses their

warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as not, in

studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand: but the use of

two, three, or four colors, always in the same relations and places,

does not in the least constitute the work a study of color, any more

than the brown engravings of the Liber Studiorum; nor would the idea of

color be in general more present to the artist's mind, when he was at

work on one of these drawings, than when he was using pure brown in the

mezzotint engraving. But the idea of space, warmth, and freshness being

not successfully expressible in a single tint, and perfectly expressible

by the admission of three or four, he allows himself this advantage when

it is possible, without in the least embarrassing himself with the

actual color of the objects to be represented. A stone in the fore

ground might in nature have been cold grey, but it will be drawn

nevertheless of a rich brown, because it is in the foreground; a hill in

the distance might in nature be purple with heath, or golden with furze;

but it will be drawn nevertheless of a cool grey, because it is in the

distance.

This at least was the general theory,--carried out with great severity

in many, both of the drawings and pictures executed by him during the

period: in others more or less modified by the cautious introduction of

color, as the painter felt his liberty increasing; for the system was

evidently never considered as final, or as anything more than a means of

progress: the conventional, easily manageable color, was visibly

adopted, only that his mind might be at perfect liberty to address

itself to the acquirement of the first and most necessary knowledge in

all art--that of form. But as form, in landscape, implies vast bulk and

space, the use of the tints which enabled him best to express them, was

actually auxiliary to the mere drawing; and, therefore, not only

permissible, but even necessary, while more brilliant or varied tints

were never indulged in, except when they might be introduced without

the slightest danger of diverting his mind for an instant from his

principal object. And, therefore, it will be generally found in the

works of this period, that exactly in proportion to the importance and

general toil of the composition, is the severity of the tint; and that

the play of color begins to show itself first in slight and small

drawings, where he felt that he could easily secure all that he wanted

in form.

Thus the "Crossing the Brook," and such other elaborate and large

compositions, are actually painted in nothing but grey, brown, and blue,

with a point or two of severe local color in the figures; but in the

minor drawings, tender passages of complicated color occur not

unfrequently in easy places; and even before the year 1800 he begins to

introduce it with evident joyfulness and longing in his rude and simple

studies, just as a child, if it could be supposed to govern itself by a

fully developed intellect, would cautiously, but with infinite pleasure,

add now and then a tiny dish of fruit or other dangerous luxury to the

simple order of its daily fare. Thus, in the foregrounds of his most

severe drawings, we not unfrequently find him indulging in the luxury of

a peacock; and it is impossible to express the joyfulness with which he

seems to design its graceful form, and deepen with soft pencilling the

bloom of its blue, after he has worked through the stern detail of his

almost colorless drawing. A rainbow is another of his most frequently

permitted indulgences; and we find him very early allowing the edges of

his evening clouds to be touched with soft rose-color or gold; while,

whenever the hues of nature in anywise fall into his system, and can be

caught without a dangerous departure from it, he instantly throws his

whole soul into the faithful rendering of them. Thus the usual brown

tones of his foreground become warmed into sudden vigor, and are varied

and enhanced with indescribable delight, when he finds himself by the

shore of a moorland stream, where they truly express the stain of its

golden rocks, and the darkness of its clear, Cairngorm-like pools, and

the usual serenity of his aerial blue is enriched into the softness and

depth of the sapphire, when it can deepen the distant slumber of some

Highland lake, or temper the gloomy shadows of the evening upon its

hills.

The system of his color being thus simplified, he could address all the

strength of his mind to the accumulation of facts of form; his choice of

subject, and his methods of treatment, are therefore as various as his

color is simple; and it is not a little difficult to give the reader who

is unacquainted with his works, an idea either of their infinitude of

aims, on the one hand, or of the kind of feeling which prevades them

all, on the other. No subject was too low or too high for him; we find

him one day hard at work on a cock and hen, with their family of

chickens in a farm-yard; and bringing all the refinement of his

execution into play to express the texture of the plumage; next day, he

is drawing the Dragon of Colchis. One hour he is much interested in a

gust of wind blowing away an old woman's cap; the next he is painting

the fifth plague of Egypt. Every landscape painter before him had

acquired distinction by confining his efforts to one class of subject.

Hobbima painted oaks; Ruysdael, waterfalls and copses; Cuyp, river or

meadow scenes in quiet afternoons; Salvator and Poussin, such kind of

mountain scenery as people could conceive, who lived in towns in the

seventeenth century. But I am well persuaded that if all the works of

Turner, up to the year 1820, were divided into classes (as he has

himself divided them in the Liber Studiorum), no preponderance could be

assigned to one class over another. There is architecture, including a

large number of formal "gentlemen's seats," I suppose drawings

commissioned by the owners; then lowland pastoral scenery of every kind,

including nearly all farming operations,--ploughing, harrowing, hedging

and ditching, felling trees, sheep-washing, and I know not what else;

then all kinds of town life--court-yards of inns, starting of mail

coaches, interiors of shops, house-buildings, fairs, elections, &c.;

then all kinds of inner domestic life--interiors of rooms, studies of

costumes, of still life, and heraldry, including multitudes of

symbolical vignettes; then marine scenery of every kind, full of local

incident; every kind of boat and method of fishing for particular fish,

being specifically drawn, round the whole coast of England;--pilchard

fishing at St. Ives, whiting fishing at Margate, herring at Loch Fyne;

and all kinds of shipping, including studies of every separate part of

the vessels, and many marine battle-pieces, two in particular of

Trafalgar, both of high importance,--one of the Victory after the

battle, now in Greenwich Hospital; another of the Death of Nelson, in

his own gallery; then all kinds of mountain scenery, some idealised into

compositions, others of definite localities; together with classical

compositions, Romes and Carthages and such others, by the myriad, with

mythological, historical, or allegorical figures,--nymphs, monsters, and

spectres; heroes and divinities.[100]

What general feeling, it may be asked incredulously, can possibly

pervade all this? This, the greatest of all feelings--an utter

forgetfulness of self. Throughout the whole period with which we are at

present concerned, Turner appears as a man of sympathy absolutely

infinite--a sympathy so all-embracing, that I know nothing but that of

Shakespeare comparable with it. A soldier's wife resting by the roadside

is not beneath it; Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, watching the dead

bodies of her sons, not above it. Nothing can possibly be so mean as

that it will not interest his whole mind, and carry away his whole

heart; nothing so great or solemn but that he can raise himself into

harmony with it; and it is impossible to prophesy of him at any moment,

whether, the next, he will be in laughter or in tears.

This is the root of the man's greatness; and it follows as a matter of

course that this sympathy must give him a subtle power of expression,

even of the characters of mere material things, such as no other painter

ever possessed. The man who can best feel the difference between

rudeness and tenderness in humanity, perceives also more difference

between the branches of an oak and a willow than any one else would; and

therefore, necessarily the most striking character of the drawings

themselves is the speciality of whatever they represent--the thorough

stiffness of what is stiff, and grace of what is graceful, and vastness

of what is vast; but through and beyond all this, the condition of the

mind of the painter himself is easily enough discoverable by comparison

of a large number of the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful:

in itself quite passionless, though entering with ease into the external

passion which it contemplates. By the effort of its will it sympathises

with tumult or distress, even in their extremes, but there is no tumult,

no sorrow in itself, only a chastened and exquisitely peaceful

cheerfulness, deeply meditative; touched without loss of its own perfect

balance, by sadness on the one side, and stooping to playfulness upon

the other. I shall never cease to regret the destruction, by fire, now

several years ago, of a drawing which always seemed to me to be the

perfect image of the painter's mind at this period,--the drawing of

Brignal Church near Rokeby, of which a feeble idea may still be gathered

from the engraving (in the Yorkshire series). The spectator stands on

the "Brignal banks," looking down into the glen at twilight; the sky is

still full of soft rays, though the sun is gone; and the Greta glances

brightly in the valley, singing its evening-song; two white clouds,

following each other, move without wind through the hollows of the

ravine, and others lie couched on the far away moorlands; every leaf of

the woods is still in the delicate air; a boy's kite, incapable of

rising, has become entangled in their branches, he is climbing to

recover it; and just behind it in the picture, almost indicated by it,

the lowly church is seen in its secluded field between the rocks and the

stream; and around it the low churchyard wall, and the few white stones

which mark the resting places of those who can climb the rocks no more,

nor hear the river sing as it passes.

There are many other existing drawings which indicate the same character

of mind, though I think none so touching or so beautiful; yet they are

not, as I said above, more numerous than those which express his

sympathy with sublimer or more active scenes; but they are almost always

marked by a tenderness of execution, and have a look of being beloved in

every part of them, which shows them to be the truest expression of his

own feelings.

One other characteristic of his mind at this period remains to be

noticed--its reverence for talent in others. Not the reverence which

acts upon the practices of men as if they were the laws of nature, but

that which is ready to appreciate the power, and receive the assistance,

of every mind which has been previously employed in the same direction,

so far as its teaching seems to be consistent with the great text-book

of nature itself. Turner thus studied almost every preceding landscape

painter, chiefly Claude, Poussin, Vandevelde, Loutherbourg, and Wilson.

It was probably by the Sir George Beaumonts and other feeble

conventionalists of the period, that he was persuaded to devote his

attention to the works of these men; and his having done so will be

thought, a few scores of years hence, evidence of perhaps the greatest

modesty ever shown by a man of original power. Modesty at once admirable

and unfortunate, for the study of the works of Vandevelde and Claude was

productive of unmixed mischief to him; he spoiled many of his marine

pictures, as for instance Lord Ellesmere's, by imitation of the former;

and from the latter learned a false ideal, which confirmed by the

notions of Greek art prevalent in London in the beginning of this

century, has manifested itself in many vulgarities in his composition

pictures, vulgarities which may perhaps be best expressed by the general

term "Twickenham Classicism," as consisting principally in conceptions

of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of most

of our suburban villas. From Nicolo Poussin and Loutherbourg he seems to

have derived advantage; perhaps also from Wilson; and much in his

subsequent travels from far higher men, especially Tintoret and Paul

Veronese. I have myself heard him speaking with singular delight of the

putting in of the beech leaves in the upper right-hand corner of

Titian's Peter Martyr. I cannot in any of his works trace the slightest

influence of Salvator; and I am not surprised at it, for though Salvator

was a man of far higher powers than either Vandevelde or Claude, he was

a wilful and gross caricaturist. Turner would condescend to be helped by

feeble men, but could not be corrupted by false men. Besides, he had

never himself seen classical life, and Claude was represented to him as

competent authority for it. But he _had_ seen mountains and torrents,

and knew therefore that Salvator could not paint them.

One of the most characteristic drawings of this period fortunately bears

a date, 1818, and brings us within two years of another dated drawing,

no less characteristic of what I shall henceforward call Turner's Second

period. It is in the possession of Mr. Hawkesworth Fawkes of Farnley,

one of Turner's earliest and truest friends; and bears the inscription,

unusually conspicuous, heaving itself up and down over the eminences of

the foreground--"PASSAGE OF MONT CENIS. J. M. W. TURNER, January 15th,

1820."

The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or what

seems to have been a hospice at that time,--I do not remember such at

present,--a small square-built house, built as if partly for a fortress,

with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a kind of

drawbridge to the door. This building, about 400 or 500 yards off, is

seen in a dim, ashy grey against the light, which by help of a violent

blast of mountain wind has broken through the depth of clouds which

hangs upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing but

this roof of drifting cloud; but neither is there any weight of

darkness--the high air is too thin for it,--all savage, howling, and

luminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting out

here and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is a

desolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it in

long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof and

through its window in a frantic whirl; the near ground is all wan with

half-thawed, half-trampled snow; a diligence in front, whose horses,

unable to face the wind, have turned right round with fright, its

passengers struggling to escape, jammed in the window; a little farther

on is another carriage off the road, some figures pushing at its wheels,

and its driver at the horses' heads, pulling and lashing with all his

strength, his lifted arm stretched out against the light of the

distance, though too far off for the whip to be seen.

Now I am perfectly certain that any one thoroughly accustomed to the

earlier works of the painter, and shown this picture for the first time,

would be struck by two altogether new characters in it.

The first, a seeming enjoyment of the excitement of the scene, totally

different from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerly

have been regarded. Every incident of motion and of energy is seized

upon with indescribable delight, and every line of the composition

animated with a force and fury which are now no longer the mere

expression of a contemplated external truth, but have origin in some

inherent feeling in the painter's mind.

The second, that although the subject is one in itself almost incapable

of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the

impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it

might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low

minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of color have been

elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading,

instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warm

hues of the granite promontories, the dull stone color of the walls of

the buildings, clearly opposed, even in shade, to the grey of the snow

wreaths heaped against them, and the faint greens and ghastly blues of

the glacier ice, being all expressed with delicacies of transition

utterly unexampled in any previous drawings.

These, accordingly, are the chief characteristics of the works of

Turner's second period, as distinguished from the first,--a new energy

inherent in the mind of the painter, diminishing the repose and exalting

the force and fire of his conceptions, and the presence of Color, as at

least an essential, and often a principal, element of design.

Not that it is impossible, or even unusual, to find drawings of serene

subject, and perfectly quiet feeling, among the compositions of this

period; but the repose is in them, just as the energy and tumult were in

the earlier period, an external quality, which the painter images by an

effort of the will: it is no longer a character inherent in himself. The

"Ulleswater," in the England series, is one of those which are in most

perfect peace: in the "Cowes," the silence is only broken by the dash

of the boat's oars, and in the "Alnwick" by a stag drinking; but in at

least nine drawings out of ten, either sky, water, or figures are in

rapid motion, and the grandest drawings are almost always those which

have even violent action in one or other, or in all: e. g. high force of

Tees, Coventry, Llanthony, Salisbury, Llanberis, and such others.

The color is, however, a more absolute distinction; and we must return

to Mr. Fawkes's collection in order to see how the change in it was

effected. That such a change would take place at one time or other was

of course to be securely anticipated, the conventional system of the

first period being, as above stated, merely a means of Study. But the

immediate cause was the journey of the year 1820. As might be guessed

from the legend on the drawing above described, "Passage of Mont Cenis,

January 15th, 1820," that drawing represents what happened on the day in

question to the painter himself. He passed the Alps then in the winter

of 1820; and either in the previous or subsequent summer, but on the

same journey, he made a series of sketches on the Rhine, in body color,

now in Mr. Fawkes's collection. Every one of those sketches is the

almost instantaneous record of an _effect_ of color or atmosphere, taken

strictly from nature, the drawing and the details of every subject being

comparatively subordinate, and the color nearly as principal as the

light and shade had been before,--certainly the leading feature, though

the light and shade are always exquisitely harmonized with it. And

naturally, as the color becomes the leading object, those times of day

are chosen in which it is most lovely; and whereas before, at least five

out of six of Turner's drawings represented ordinary daylight, we now

find his attention directed constantly to the evening: and, for the

first time, we have those rosy lights upon the hills, those gorgeous

falls of sun through flaming heavens, those solemn twilights, with the

blue moon rising as the western sky grows dim, which have ever since

been the themes of his mightiest thoughts.

I have no doubt, that the _immediate_ reason of this change was the

impression made upon him by the colors of the continental skies. When

he first travelled on the Continent (1800), he was comparatively a young

student; not yet able to draw form as he wanted, he was forced to give

all his thoughts and strength to this primary object. But now he was

free to receive other impressions; the time was come for perfecting his

art, and the first sunset which he saw on the Rhine taught him that all

previous landscape art was vain and valueless, that in comparison with

natural color, the things that had been called paintings were mere ink

and charcoal, and that all precedent and all authority must be cast away

at once, and trodden under foot. He cast them away: the memories of

Vandevelde and Claude were at once weeded out of the great mind they had

encumbered; they and all the rubbish of the schools together with them;

the waves of the Rhine swept them away for ever; and a new dawn rose

over the rocks of the Siebengebirge.

There was another motive at work, which rendered the change still more

complete. His fellow artists were already conscious enough of his

superior power in drawing, and their best hope was, that he might not be

able to color. They had begun to express this hope loudly enough for it

to reach his ears. The engraver of one of his most important marine

pictures told me, not long ago, that one day about the period in

question, Turner came into his room to examine the progress of the

plate, not having seen his own picture for several months. It was one of

his dark early pictures, but in the foreground was a little piece of

luxury, a pearly fish wrought into hues like those of an opal. He stood

before the picture for some moments; then laughed, and pointed joyously

to the fish;--"They say that Turner can't color!" and turned away.

Under the force of these various impulses the change was total. _Every

subject thenceforth was primarily conceived in color_; and no engraving

ever gave the slightest idea of any drawing of this period.

The artists who had any perception of the truth were in despair; the

Beaumontites, classicalists, and "owl species" in general, in as much

indignation as their dulness was capable of. They had deliberately

closed their eyes to all nature, and had gone on inquiring, "Where do

you put your brown tree?" A vast revelation was made to them at once,

enough to have dazzled any one; but to _them_, light unendurable as

incomprehensible. They "did to the moon complain," in one vociferous,

unanimous, continuous "Tu whoo." Shrieking rose from all dark places at

the same instant, just the same kind of shrieking that is now raised

against the Pre-Raphaelites. Those glorious old Arabian Nights, how true

they are! Mocking and whispering, and abuse loud and low by turns, from

all the black stones beside the road, when one living soul is toiling up

the hill to get the golden water. Mocking and whispering, that he may

look back, and become a black stone like themselves.

Turner looked not back, but he went on in such a temper as a strong man

must be in, when he is forced to walk with his fingers in his ears. He

retired into himself; he could look no longer for help, or counsel, or

sympathy from any one; and the spirit of defiance in which he was forced

to labor led him sometimes into violences, from which the slightest

expression of sympathy would have saved him. The new energy that was

upon him, and the utter isolation into which he was driven, were both

alike dangerous, and many drawings of the time show the evil effects of

both; some of them being hasty, wild, or experimental, and others little

more than magnificent expressions of defiance of public opinion.

But all have this noble virtue--they are in everything his own: there

are no more reminiscences of dead masters, no more trials of skill in

the manner of Claude or Poussin; every faculty of his soul is fixed upon

nature only, as he saw her, or as he remembered her.

I have spoken above of his gigantic memory: it is especially necessary

to notice this, in order that we may understand the kind of grasp which

a man of real imagination takes of all things that are once brought

within his reach--grasp thenceforth not to be relaxed for ever.

On looking over any catalogues of his works, or of particular series of

them, we shall notice the recurrence of the same subject two, three, or

even many times. In any other artist this would be nothing remarkable.

Probably most modern landscape painters multiply a favorite subject

twenty, thirty, or sixty fold, putting the shadows and the clouds in

different places, and "inventing," as they are pleased to call it, a new

"effect" every time. But if we examine the successions of Turner's

subjects, we shall find them either the records of a succession of

impressions actually perceived by him at some favorite locality, or else

repetitions of one impression received in early youth, and again and

again realised as his increasing powers enabled him to do better justice

to it. In either case we shall find them records of _seen facts_;

_never_ compositions in his room to fill up a favorite outline.

For instance, every traveller, at least every traveller of thirty years'

standing, must love Calais, the place where he first felt himself in a

strange world. Turner evidently loved it excessively. I have never

catalogued his studies of Calais, but I remember, at this moment, five:

there is first the "Pas de Calais," a very large oil painting, which is

what he saw in broad daylight as he crossed over, when he got near the

French side. It is a careful study of French fishing boats running for

the shore before the wind, with the picturesque old city in the

distance. Then there is the "Calais Harbor" in the Liber Studiorum: that

is what he saw just as he was going into the harbor,--a heavy brig

warping out, and very likely to get in his way, or run against the pier,

and bad weather coming on. Then there is the "Calais Pier," a large

painting, engraved some years ago by Mr. Lupton:[101] that is what he

saw when he had landed, and ran back directly to the pier to see what

had become of the brig. The weather had got still worse, the fishwomen

were being blown about in a distressful manner on the pier head, and

some more fishing boats were running in with all speed. Then there is

the "Fortrouge," Calais: that is what he saw after he had been home to

Dessein's, and dined, and went out again in the evening to walk on the

sands, the tide being down. He had never seen such a waste of sands

before, and it made an impression on him. The shrimp girls were all

scattered over them too, and moved about in white spots on the wild

shore; and the storm had lulled a little, and there was a sunset--such a

sunset,--and the bars of Fortrouge seen against it, skeleton-wise.

He did not paint that directly; thought over it,--painted it a long

while afterwards.

Then there is the vignette in the illustrations to Scott. That is what

he saw as he was going home, meditatively; and the revolving lighthouse

came blazing out upon him suddenly, and disturbed him. He did not like

that so much; made a vignette of it, however, when he was asked to do a

bit of Calais, twenty or thirty years afterwards, having already done

all the rest.

Turner never told me all this, but any one may see it if he will compare

the pictures. They might, possibly, not be impressions of a single day,

but of two days or three; though in all human probability they were seen

just as I have stated them;[102] but they _are_ records of successive

impressions, as plainly written as ever traveller's diary. All of them

pure veracities. Therefore immortal.

I could multiply these series almost indefinitely from the rest of his

works. What is curious, some of them have a kind of private mark running

through all the subjects. Thus I know three drawings of Scarborough, and

all of them have a starfish in the foreground: I do not remember any

others of his marine subjects which have a starfish.

The other kind of repetition--the recurrence to one early impression--is

however still more remarkable. In the collection of F. H. Bale, Esq.,

there is a small drawing of Llanthony Abbey. It is in his boyish manner,

its date probably about 1795; evidently a sketch from nature, finished

at home. It had been a showery day; the hills were partially concealed

by the rain, and gleams of sunshine breaking out at intervals. A man was

fishing in the mountain stream. The young Turner sought a place of some

shelter under the bushes; made his sketch, took great pains when he got

home to imitate the rain, as he best could; added his child's luxury of

a rainbow; put in the very bush under which he had taken shelter, and

the fisherman, a somewhat ill-jointed and long-legged fisherman, in the

courtly short breeches which were the fashion of the time.