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STRAY STUDIES
FROM
ENGLAND AND ITALY.
BY
JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
LONDON:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1876.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
PREFACE.
I have to thank the Editors of _Macmillan's Magazine_ and the _Saturday
Review_ for allowing me to reprint most of the papers in this series. In
many cases however I have greatly changed their original form. A few
pages will be found to repeat what I have already said in my 'Short
History.'
CONTENTS
PAGE
A BROTHER OF THE POOR 1
SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE:--
I. CANNES AND ST. HONORAT 31
II. CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE 44
III. TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA 59
IV. THE WINTER RETREAT 71
V. SAN REMO 79
THE POETRY OF WEALTH 93
LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS 107
CHILDREN BY THE SEA 167
THE FLORENCE OF DANTE 181
BUTTERCUPS 198
ABBOT AND TOWN 211
HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS 241
AENEAS: A VERGILIAN STUDY 257
TWO VENETIAN STUDIES:--
I. VENICE AND ROME 289
II. VENICE AND TINTORETTO 300
THE DISTRICT VISITOR 313
THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD 329
THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS 359
CAPRI 383
CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS 395
THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS 414
A BROTHER OF THE POOR.
There are few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such
as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in
the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly
a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the
grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables
of Knoll, the chime of a village clock falls faintly on the ear, but
there is no voice or footfall of living thing to break the silence as I
turn over leaf after leaf of the little book I have brought with me from
the bustle of town to this still retreat, a book that is the record of a
broken life, of a life "broken off," as he who lived it says of another,
"with a ragged edge."
It is a book that carries one far from the woodland stillness around
into the din and turmoil of cities and men, into the misery and
degradation of "the East-end,"--that "London without London," as some
one called it the other day. Few regions are more unknown than the Tower
Hamlets. Not even Mrs. Riddell has ventured as yet to cross the border
which parts the City from their weltering mass of busy life, their
million of hard workers packed together in endless rows of monotonous
streets, broken only by shipyard or factory or huge breweries, streets
that stretch away eastward from Aldgate to the Essex marshes. And yet,
setting aside the poetry of life which is everywhere, there is poetry
enough in East London; poetry in the great river which washes it on the
south, in the fretted tangle of cordage and mast that peeps over the
roofs of Shadwell or in the great hulls moored along the wharves of
Wapping; poetry in the "Forest" that fringes it to the east, in the few
glades that remain of Epping and Hainault,--glades ringing with the
shouts of school-children out for their holiday and half mad with
delight at the sight of a flower or a butterfly; poetry of the present
in the work and toil of these acres of dull bricks and mortar where
everybody, man woman and child, is a worker, this England without a
"leisure class"; poetry in the thud of the steam-engine and the white
trail of steam from the tall sugar refinery, in the blear eyes of the
Spitalfields weaver, or the hungering faces of the group of labourers
clustered from morning till night round the gates of the docks and
watching for the wind that brings the ships up the river: poetry in its
past, in strange old-fashioned squares, in quaint gabled houses, in grey
village churches, that have been caught and overlapped and lost, as it
were, in the great human advance that has carried London forward from
Whitechapel, its limit in the age of the Georges, to Stratford, its
bound in that of Victoria.
Stepney is a belated village of this sort; its grey old church of St.
Dunstan, buried as it is now in the very heart of East London, stood
hardly a century ago among the fields. All round it lie tracts of human
life without a past; but memories cluster thickly round "Old Stepney,"
as the people call it with a certain fond reverence, memories of men
like Erasmus and Colet and the group of scholars in whom the Reformation
began. It was to the country house of the Dean of St. Paul's, hard by
the old church of St. Dunstan, that Erasmus betook him when tired of the
smoke and din of town. "I come to drink your fresh air, my Colet," he
writes, "to drink yet deeper of your rural peace." The fields and hedges
through which Erasmus loved to ride remained fields and hedges within
living memory; only forty years ago a Londoner took his Sunday outing
along the field path which led past the London Hospital to what was
still the suburban village church of Stepney. But the fields through
which the path led have their own church now, with its parish of dull
straight streets of monotonous houses already marked with premature
decay, and here and there alleys haunted by poverty and disease and
crime.
There is nothing marked about either church or district; their character
and that of their people are of the commonest East-end type. If I ask my
readers to follow me to this parish of St. Philip, it is simply because
these dull streets and alleys were chosen by a brave and earnest man as
the scene of his work among the poor. It was here that Edward Denison
settled in the autumn of 1867, in the second year of the great "East
London Distress." In the October of 1869 he left England on a fatal
voyage from which he was never to return. The collection of his letters
which has been recently printed by Sir Baldwyn Leighton has drawn so
much attention to the work which lay within the narrow bounds of those
two years that I may perhaps be pardoned for recalling my own memories
of one whom it is hard to forget.
A few words are enough to tell the tale of his earlier days. Born in
1840, the son of a bishop, and nephew of the late Speaker of the House
of Commons, Edward Denison passed from Eton to Christchurch, and was
forced after quitting the University to spend some time in foreign
travel by the delicacy of his health. His letters give an interesting
picture of his mind during this pause in an active life, a pause which
must have been especially distasteful to one whose whole bent lay from
the first in the direction of practical energy. "I believe," he says in
his later days, "that abstract political speculation is my _metier_;"
but few minds were in reality less inclined to abstract speculation.
From the very first one sees in him what one may venture to call the
best kind of "Whig" mind, that peculiar temper of fairness and
moderation which declines to push conclusions to extremes, and recoils
instinctively when opinion is extended beyond its proper bound. His
comment on Newman's 'Apologia' paints his real intellectual temper with
remarkable precision. "I left off reading Newman's 'Apologia' before I
got to the end, tired of the ceaseless changes of the writer's mind, and
vexed with his morbid scruples--perhaps, too, having got a little out of
harmony myself with the feelings of the author, whereas I began by being
in harmony with them. I don't quite know whether to esteem it a blessing
or a curse; but whenever an opinion to which I am a recent convert, or
which I do not hold with the entire force of my intellect, is forced too
strongly upon me, or driven home to its logical conclusion, or
over-praised, or extended beyond its proper limits, I recoil
instinctively and begin to gravitate towards the other extreme, sure to
be in turn repelled by it also."
I dwell on this temper of his mind because it is this practical and
moderate character of the man which gives such weight to the very
sweeping conclusions on social subjects to which he was driven in his
later days. A judgment which condemns the whole system of Poor Laws, for
instance, falls with very different weight from a mere speculative
theorist and from a practical observer whose mind is constitutionally
averse from extreme conclusions. Throughout however we see this
intellectual moderation jostling with a moral fervour which feels
restlessly about for a fitting sphere of action. "Real life," he writes
from Madeira, "is not dinner-parties and small talk, nor even croquet
and dancing." There is a touch of exaggeration in phrases like these
which need not blind us to the depth and reality of the feeling which
they imperfectly express, a feeling which prompted the question which
embodies the spirit of all these earlier letters,--the question, "What
is my work?"
The answer to this question was found both within and without the
questioner. Those who were young in the weary days of Palmerstonian rule
will remember the disgust at purely political life which was produced by
the bureaucratic inaction of the time, and we can hardly wonder that,
like many of the finer minds among his contemporaries, Edward Denison
turned from the political field which was naturally open to him to the
field of social effort. His tendency in this direction was aided, no
doubt, partly by the intensity of this religious feeling and of his
consciousness of the duty he owed to the poor, and partly by that closer
sympathy with the physical suffering around us which is one of the most
encouraging characteristics of the day. Even in the midst of his
outburst of delight at a hard frost ("I like," he says, "the bright
sunshine that generally accompanies it, the silver landscape, and the
ringing distinctness of sounds in the frozen air"), we see him haunted
by a sense of the way in which his pleasure contrasts with the winter
misery of the poor. "I would rather give up all the pleasures of the
frost than indulge them, poisoned as they are by the misery of so many
of our brothers. What a monstrous thing it is that in the richest
country in the world large masses of the population should be condemned
annually to starvation and death!" It is easy to utter protests like
these in the spirit of a mere sentimentalist; it is less easy to carry
them out into practical effort, as Edward Denison resolved to do. After
an unsatisfactory attempt to act as Almoner for the Society for the
Relief of Distress, he resolved to fix himself personally in the
East-end of London, and study the great problem of pauperism face to
face.
His resolve sprang from no fit of transient enthusiasm, but from a sober
conviction of the need of such a step. "There are hardly any residents
in the East rich enough to give much money, or with enough leisure to
give much time," he says. "This is the evil. Even the best disposed in
the West don't like coming so far off, and, indeed, few have the time to
spare, and when they do there is great waste of time and energy on the
journey. My plan is the only really practicable one, and as I have both
means, time, and inclination, I should be a thief and a murderer if I
withheld what I so evidently owe." In the autumn of 1867 he carried out
his resolve, and took lodgings in the heart of the parish which I
sketched in the opening of this paper. If any romantic dreams had mixed
with his resolution they at once faded away before the dull, commonplace
reality. "I saw nothing very striking at Stepney," is his first comment
on the sphere he had chosen. But he was soon satisfied with his choice.
He took up in a quiet, practical way the work he found closest at hand.
"All is yet in embryo, but it will grow. Just now I only teach in a
night school, and do what in me lies in looking after the sick, keeping
an eye upon nuisances and the like, seeing that the local authorities
keep up to their work. I go to-morrow before the Board at the workhouse
to compel the removal to the infirmary of a man who ought to have been
there already. I shall drive the sanitary inspector to put the Act
against overcrowding in force." Homely work of this sort grows on him;
we see him in these letters getting boys out to sea, keeping school with
little urchins,--"demons of misrule" who tried his temper,--gathering
round him a class of working men, organizing an evening club for boys.
All this, too, quietly and unostentatiously and with as little resort as
possible to "cheap charity," as he used to call it, to the "doles of
bread and meat which only do the work of poor-rates."
So quiet and simple indeed was his work that though it went on in the
parish of which I then had the charge it was some little time before I
came to know personally the doer of it. It is amusing even now to
recollect my first interview with Edward Denison. A vicar's Monday
morning is never the pleasantest of awakenings, but the Monday morning
of an East-end vicar brings worries that far eclipse the mere headache
and dyspepsia of his rural brother. It is the "parish morning." All the
complicated machinery of a great ecclesiastical, charitable, and
educational organization has got to be wound up afresh, and set going
again for another week. The superintendent of the Women's Mission is
waiting with a bundle of accounts, complicated as only ladies' accounts
can be. The churchwarden has come with a face full of gloom to consult
on the falling off in the offertory. The Scripture-reader has brought
his "visiting book" to be inspected, and a special report on the
character of a doubtful family in the parish. The organist drops in to
report something wrong in the pedals. There is a letter to be written to
the inspector of nuisances, directing his attention to certain
odoriferous drains in Pig-and-Whistle Alley. The nurse brings her
sick-list and her little bill for the sick-kitchen. The schoolmaster
wants a fresh pupil-teacher, and discusses nervously the prospects of
his scholars in the coming inspection. There is the interest on the
penny bank to be calculated, a squabble in the choir to be adjusted, a
district visitor to be replaced, reports to be drawn up for the Bishop's
Fund and a great charitable society, the curate's sick-list to be
inspected, and a preacher to be found for the next church festival.
It was in the midst of a host of worries such as these that a card was
laid on my table with a name which I recognized as that of a young
layman from the West-end, who had for two or three months past been
working in the mission district attached to the parish. Now, whatever
shame is implied in the confession, I had a certain horror of "laymen
from the West-end." Lay co-operation is an excellent thing in itself,
and one of my best assistants was a letter-sorter in the post-office
close by; but the "layman from the West-end," with a bishop's letter of
recommendation in his pocket and a head full of theories about "heathen
masses," was an unmitigated nuisance. I had a pretty large experience of
these gentlemen, and my one wish in life was to have no more. Some had a
firm belief in their own eloquence, and were zealous for a big room and
a big congregation. I got them the big room, but I was obliged to leave
the big congregation to their own exertions, and in a month or two their
voices faded away. Then there was the charitable layman, who pounced
down on the parish from time to time and threw about meat and blankets
till half of the poor were demoralized. Or there was the statistical
layman, who went about with a note-book and did spiritual and economical
sums in the way of dividing the number of "people in the free seats" by
the number of bread tickets annually distributed. There was the layman
with a passion for homoeopathy, the ritualistic layman, the layman with
a mania for preaching down trades' unions, the layman with an
educational mania. All however agreed in one point, much as they
differed in others, and the one point was that of a perfect belief in
their individual nostrums and perfect contempt for all that was already
doing in the neighbourhood.
It was with no peculiar pleasure therefore that I rose to receive this
fresh "layman from the West"; but a single glance was enough to show me
that my visitor was a man of very different stamp from his predecessors.
There was something in the tall, manly figure, the bright smile, the
frank winning address of Edward Denison that inspired confidence in a
moment. "I come to learn, and not to teach," he laughed, as I hinted at
"theories" and their danger; and our talk soon fell on a certain "John's
Place," where he thought there was a great deal to be learned. In five
minutes more we stood in the spot which interested him, an alley running
between two mean streets, and narrowing at one end till we crept out of
it as if through the neck of a bottle. It was by no means the choicest
part of the parish: the drainage was imperfect, the houses miserable;
but wretched as it was it was a favourite haunt of the poor, and it
swarmed with inhabitants of very various degrees of respectability.
Costermongers abounded, strings of barrows were drawn up on the
pavement, and the refuse of their stock lay rotting in the gutter.
Drunken sailors and Lascars from the docks rolled along shouting to its
houses of ill-fame. There was little crime, though one of the "ladies"
of the alley was a well-known receiver of stolen goods, but there was a
good deal of drunkenness and vice. Now and then a wife came plumping on
to the pavement from a window overhead; sometimes a couple of viragoes
fought out their quarrel "on the stones"; boys idled about in the
sunshine in training to be pickpockets; miserable girls flaunted in
dirty ribbons at nightfall at half-a-dozen doors.
But with all this the place was popular with even respectable working
people in consequence of the small size and cheapness of the houses--for
there is nothing the poor like so much as a house to themselves; and the
bulk of its population consisted of casual labourers, who gathered every
morning round the great gates of the docks, waiting to be "called in" as
the ships came up to unload. The place was naturally unhealthy,
constantly haunted by fever, and had furnished some hundred cases in the
last visitation of cholera. The work done among them in the "cholera
time" had never been forgotten by the people, and, ill-famed as the
place was, I visited it at all times of the day and night with perfect
security. The apostle however of John's Place was my friend the
letter-sorter. He had fixed on it as his special domain, and with a
little aid from others had opened a Sunday-school and simple Sunday
services in the heart of it. A branch of the Women's Mission was
established in the same spot, and soon women were "putting by" their
pence and sewing quietly round the lady superintendent as she read to
them the stories of the Gospels.
It was this John's Place which Edward Denison chose as the centre of his
operations. There was very little in his manner to show his sense of
the sacrifice he was making, though the sacrifice was in reality a great
one. No one enjoyed more keenly the pleasures of life and society: he
was a good oarsman, he delighted in outdoor exercise, and skating was to
him "a pleasure only rivalled in my affection by a ride across country
on a good horse." But month after month these pleasures were quietly put
aside for his work in the East-end. "I have come to this," he says,
laughingly, "that a walk along Piccadilly is a most exhilarating and
delightful treat. I don't enjoy it above once in ten days, but therefore
with double zest." What told on him most was the physical depression
induced by the very look of these vast, monotonous masses of sheer
poverty. "My wits are getting blunted," he says, "by the monotony and
_ugliness_ of this place. I can almost imagine, difficult as it is, the
awful effect upon a human mind of never seeing anything but the meanest
and vilest of men and men's works, and of complete exclusion from the
sight of God and His works,--a position in which the villager never is."
But there was worse than physical degradation. "This summer there is not
so very much actual suffering for want of food, nor from sickness. What
is so bad is the habitual condition of this mass of humanity--its
uniform mean level, the absence of anything more civilizing than a
grinding organ to raise the ideas beyond the daily bread and beer, the
utter want of education, the complete indifference to religion, with the
fruits of all this--improvidence, dirt, and their secondaries, crime and
disease."
Terrible however as these evils were, he believed they could be met; and
the quiet good sense of his character was shown in the way in which he
met them. His own residence in the East-end was the most effective of
protests against that severance of class from class in which so many of
its evils take their rise. When speaking of the overcrowding and the
official ill-treatment of the poor, he says truly: "These are the sort
of evils which, where there are no resident gentry, grow to a height
almost incredible, and on which the remedial influence of the mere
presence of a gentleman known to be on the alert is inestimable." But
nothing, as I often had occasion to remark, could be more judicious than
his interference on behalf of the poor, or more unlike the fussy
impertinence of the philanthropists who think themselves born "to
expose" Boards of Guardians. His aim throughout was to co-operate with
the Guardians in giving, not less, but greater effect to the Poor Laws,
and in resisting the sensational writing and reckless abuse which aim at
undoing their work. "The gigantic subscription lists which are regarded
as signs of our benevolence," he says truly, "are monuments of our
indifference."
The one hope for the poor, he believed, lay not in charity, but in
themselves. "Build school-houses, pay teachers, give prizes, frame
workmen's clubs, help them to help themselves, lend them your brains;
but give them no money, except what you sink in such undertakings as
above." This is not the place to describe or discuss the more detailed
suggestions with which he faced the great question of poverty and
pauperism in the East-end; they are briefly summarized in a remarkable
letter which he addressed in 1869 to an East-end newspaper:--"First we
must so discipline and regulate our charities as to cut off the
resources of the habitual mendicant. Secondly, all who by begging
proclaim themselves destitute, must be taken at their word. They must be
taken up and kept at penal work--not for one morning, as now, but for a
month or two; a proportion of their earnings being handed over to them
on dismissal, as capital on which to begin a life of honest industry.
Thirdly, we must promote the circulation of labour, and obviate morbid
congestions of the great industrial centres. Fourthly, we must improve
the condition of the agricultural poor." Stern as such suggestions may
seem, there are few who have really thought as well as worked for the
poor without feeling that sternness of this sort is, in the highest
sense, mercy. Ten years in the East of London had brought me to the same
conclusions; and my Utopia, like Edward Denison's, lay wholly in a
future to be worked out by the growing intelligence and thrift of the
labouring classes themselves.
But stern as were his theories, there is hardly a home within his
district that has not some memory left of the love and tenderness of his
personal charity. I hardly like to tell how often I have seen the face
of the sick and dying brighten as he drew near, or how the little
children, as they flocked out of school, would run to him, shouting his
name for very glee. For the Sunday-school was soon transformed by his
efforts into a day-school for children, whose parents were really
unable to pay school-fees; and a large schoolroom, erected near John's
Place, was filled with dirty little scholars. Here too he gathered round
him a class of working men, to whom he lectured on the Bible every
Wednesday evening; and here he delivered addresses to the dock-labourers
whom he had induced to attend, of a nature somewhat startling to those
who talk of "preaching down to the intelligence of the poor." I give the
sketch of one of these sermons (on "Not forsaking the assembling of
yourselves together") in his own words:--"I presented Christianity as a
society; investigated the origin of societies, the family, the tribe,
the nation, with the attendant expanded ideas of rights and duties; the
common weal, the bond of union; rising from the family dinner-table to
the sacrificial rites of the national gods; drew parallels with trades'
unions and benefit clubs, and told them flatly they would not be
Christians till they were communicants." No doubt this will seem to most
sensible people extravagant enough, even without the quotations from
"Wordsworth, Tennyson, and even Pope" with which his addresses were
enlivened; but I must confess that my own experience among the poor
agrees pretty much with Edward Denison's, and that I believe "high
thinking" put into plain English to be more likely to tell on a
dock-yard labourer than all the "simple Gospel sermons" in the world.
His real power however for good among the poor lay not so much in what
he did as in what he was. It is in no spirit of class self-sufficiency
that he dwells again and again throughout these letters on the
advantages to such a neighbourhood of the presence of a "gentleman" in
the midst of it. He lost little, in the end he gained much, by the
resolute stand he made against the indiscriminate almsgiving which has
done so much to create and encourage pauperism in the East of London.
The poor soon came to understand the man who was as liberal with his
sympathy as he was chary of meat and coal tickets, who only aimed at
being their friend, at listening to their troubles, and aiding them with
counsel, as if he were one of themselves, at putting them in the way of
honest work, at teaching their children, at protecting them with a
perfect courage and chivalry against oppression and wrong. He
instinctively appealed in fact to their higher nature, and such an
appeal seldom remains unanswered. In the roughest costermonger there is
a vein of real nobleness, often even of poetry, in which lies the whole
chance of his rising to a better life. I remember, as an instance of the
way in which such a vein can be touched, the visit of a lady, well known
for her work in the poorer districts of London, to a low alley in this
very parish. She entered the little mission-room with a huge basket,
filled not with groceries or petticoats, but with roses. There was
hardly one pale face among the women bending over their sewing that did
not flush with delight as she distributed her gifts. Soon, as the news
spread down the alley, rougher faces peered in at window and door, and
great "navvies" and dock-labourers put out their hard fists for a
rosebud with the shyness and delight of schoolboys. "She was a _real_
lady," was the unanimous verdict of the alley; like Edward Denison she
had somehow discovered that man does not live by bread alone, and that
the communion of rich and poor is not to be found in appeals to the
material but to the spiritual side of man.
"What do you look on as the greatest boon that has been conferred on the
poorer classes in later years?" said a friend to me one day, after
expatiating on the rival claims of schools, missions, shoe-black
brigades, and a host of other philanthropic efforts for their
assistance. I am afraid I sank in his estimation when I answered,
"Sixpenny photographs." But any one who knows what the worth of family
affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of
little portraits stuck over a labourer's fireplace, still gathering
together into one the "home" that life is always parting--the boy that
has "gone to Canada," the girl "out at service," the little one with the
golden hair that sleeps under the daisies, the old grandfather in the
country--will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies,
social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family
affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all
the philanthropists in the world.
It is easy indeed to resolve on "helping" the poor; but it is far less
easy to see clearly how we can help them, what is real aid, and what is
mere degradation. I know few books where any one who is soberly facing
questions like these can find more help than in the "Letters" of Edward
Denison. Broken and scattered as his hints necessarily appear, the main
lines along which his thought moves are plain enough. He would
discriminate between temporary, and chronic distress, between the
poverty caused by a sudden revolution of trade and permanent destitution
such as that of Bethnal Green. The first requires exceptional treatment;
the second a rigid and universal administration of the Poor Laws. "Bring
back the Poor Law," he repeats again and again, "to the spirit of its
institution; organize a sufficiently elastic labour test, without which
no outdoor relief to be given; make the few alterations which altered
times demand, and impose every possible discouragement on private
benevolence." The true cure for pauperism lies in the growth of thrift
among the poor. "I am not drawing the least upon my imagination when I
say that a young man of twenty could in five years, even as a
dock-labourer, which is much the lowest employment and least well paid
there is, save about L20. This is not exactly Utopia; it is within the
reach of nearly every man, if quite at the bottom of the tree; but if it
were of anything like common occurrence the destitution and disease of
this life would be within manageable limits."
I know that words like these are in striking contrast with the usual
public opinion on the subject, as well as with the mere screeching over
poverty in which sentimentalists are in the habit of indulging. But it
is fair to say that they entirely coincide with my own experience. The
sight which struck me most in Stepney was one which met my eyes when I
plunged by sheer accident into the back-yard of a jobbing carpenter, and
came suddenly upon a neat greenhouse with fine flowers inside it. The
man had built it with his own hands and his own savings; and the sight
of it had so told on his next-door neighbour--a cobbler, if I remember
rightly--as to induce him to leave off drinking, and build a rival
greenhouse with savings of his own. Both had become zealous florists,
and thrifty, respectable men; but the thing which surprised both of them
most was that they had been able to save at all.
It is in the letters themselves however rather than in these desultory
comments of mine that the story of these two years of earnest combat
with the great problem of our day must be studied. Short as the time
was, it was broken by visits to France, to Scotland, to Guernsey, and by
his election as Member of Parliament for the borough of Newark. But
even these visits and his new parliamentary position were meant to be
parts of an effort for the regeneration of our poorer classes. His
careful examination of the thrift of the peasantry of the Channel
Islands, his researches into the actual working of the "Assistance
Publique" in Paris, the one remarkable speech he delivered in Parliament
on the subject of vagrancy, were all contributions to this great end. In
the midst of these labours a sudden attack of his old disease forced him
to leave England on a long sea-voyage, and within a fortnight of his
landing in Australia he died at Melbourne. His portrait hangs in the
school which he built, and rough faces as they gaze at it still soften
even into tears as they think of Edward Denison.
SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
I.
CANNES AND ST. HONORAT.
In a colloquial sort of way we talk glibly enough of leaving England,
but England is by no means an easy country to leave. If it bids us
farewell from the cliffs of Dover, it greets us again on the quay of
Calais. It would be a curious morning's amusement to take a map of
Europe, and mark with a dot of red the settlements of our lesser English
colonies. A thousand Englands would crop up along the shores of the
Channel or in quiet nooks of Normandy, around mouldering Breton castles
or along the banks of the Loire, under the shadow of the Maritime Alps
or the Pyrenees, beneath the white walls of Tunis or the Pyramids of the
Nile. During the summer indeed England is everywhere--fishing in the
fiords of Norway, sketching on the Kremlin, shooting brigands in
Albania, yachting among the Cyclades, lion-hunting in the Atlas,
crowding every steamer on the Rhine, annexing Switzerland, lounging
through Italian galleries, idling in the gondolas of Venice. But even
winter is far from driving England home again; what it really does is to
concentrate it in a hundred little Britains along the sunny shores of
the South. Each winter resort brings home to us the power of the British
doctor. It is he who rears pleasant towns at the foot of the Pyrenees,
and lines the sunny coasts of the Riviera with villas that gleam white
among the olive groves. It is his finger that stirs the camels of
Algeria, the donkeys of Palestine, the Nile boats of Egypt. At the first
frosts of November the doctor marshals his wild geese for their winter
flitting, and the long train streams off, grumbling but obedient, to the
little Britains of the South.
Of these little Britains none is more lovely than Cannes. The place is a
pure creation of the health-seekers whose gay villas are thrown
fancifully about among its sombre fir-woods, though the "Old Town," as
it is called nowadays, remains clinging to its original height, street
above street leading up to a big bare church of the Renascence period,
to fragments of mediaeval walls and a great tower which crowns the summit
of the hill. At the feet of this height lie the two isles of Lerins, set
in the blue waters of the bay; on the east the eye ranges over the
porphyry hills of Napoul to the huge masses of the Estrelles; landwards
a tumbled country with bright villas dotted over it rises gently to the
Alps. As a strictly winter resort Cannes is far too exposed for the more
delicate class of invalids; as a spring resort it is without a rival.
Nowhere is the air so bright and elastic, the light so wonderfully
brilliant and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous fragments,
sparkles at our feet. Colour takes a depth as well as a refinement
strange even to the Riviera; nowhere is the sea so darkly purple,
nowhere are the tones of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent,
nowhere are the sunsets so sublime. The scenery around harmonizes in its
gaiety, its vivacity, its charm with this brightness of air and light.
There is little of grandeur about it, little to compare in magnificence
with the huge background of the cliffs behind Mentone or the mountain
wall which rises so steeply from its lemon groves. But everywhere there
is what Mentone lacks--variety, largeness, picturesqueness of contrast
and surprise. Above us is the same unchanging blue as there, but here it
overarches gardens fresh with verdure and bright with flowers, and
houses gleaming white among the dark fir-clumps; hidden little ravines
break the endless tossings of the ground; in the distance white roads
rush straight to grey towns hanging strangely against the hill-sides; a
thin snow-line glitters along the ridge of the Maritime Alps; dark
purple shadows veil the recesses of the Estrelles.
Nor is it only this air of cheerfulness and vivacity which makes Cannes
so pleasant a spring resort for invalids; it possesses in addition an
advantage of situation which its more sheltered rivals necessarily want.
The high mountain walls that give their complete security from cold
winds to Mentone or San Remo are simply prison walls to visitors who are
too weak to face a steep ascent on foot or even on donkey-back, for
drives are out of the question except along one or two monotonous roads.
But the country round Cannes is full of easy walks and drives, and it is
as varied and beautiful as it is accessible. You step out of your hotel
into the midst of wild scenery, rough hills of broken granite screened
with firs, or paths winding through a wilderness of white heath.
Everywhere in spring the ground is carpeted with a profusion of
wild-flowers, cistus and brown orchis, narcissus and the scarlet
anemone; sometimes the forest scenery sweeps away, and leaves us among
olive-grounds and orange-gardens arranged in formal, picturesque rows.
And from every little height there are the same distant views of far-off
mountains, or the old town flooded with yellow light, or islands lying
gem-like in the dark blue sea, or the fiery hue of sunset over the
Estrelles.
Nor are these land-trips the only charm of Cannes. No one has seen the
coast of Provence in its beauty who has not seen it from the sea. A sail
to the isles of Lerins reveals for the first time the full glory of
Cannes even to those who have enjoyed most keenly the large
picturesqueness of its landscapes, the delicate colouring of its distant
hills, the splendour of its sunsets. As one drifts away from the shore
the circle of the Maritime Alps rises like the framework of some perfect
picture, the broken outline of the mountains to the left contrasting
with the cloud-capt heights above Turbia, snow-peaks peeping over the
further slopes between them, delicate lights and shadows falling among
the broken country of the foreground, Cannes itself stretching its
bright line of white along the shore. In the midst of the bay, the
centre as it were of this exquisite landscape, lie the two isles of
Lerins. With the larger, that of St. Marguerite, romance has more to do
than history, and the story of the "Man in the Iron Mask," who was so
long a prisoner in its fortress, is fast losing the mystery which made
it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St.
Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the
starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its
Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism
of Egypt first penetrated into the West.
The devotees whom the fame of Antony and of the Coenobites of the Nile
had drawn in crowds to the East returned at the close of the fourth
century to found similar retreats in the isles which line the coasts of
the Mediterranean. The sea took the place of the desert, but the type of
monastic life which the solitaries had found in Egypt was faithfully
preserved. The Abbot of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of
religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary cells, and
linked together by the common ties of obedience and prayer. By a curious
concurrence of events the coenobitic life of Lerins, so utterly unlike
the later monasticism of the Benedictines, was long preserved in a
remote corner of Christendom. Patrick, the most famous of its scholars,
transmitted its type of monasticism to the Celtic Church which he
founded in Ireland, and the vast numbers, the asceticism, the loose
organization of such abbeys as those of Bangor or Armagh preserved to
the twelfth century the essential characteristics of Lerins. Nor is this
all its historical importance. What Iona is to the ecclesiastical
history of Northern England, what Fulda and Monte Cassino are to the
ecclesiastical history of Germany and Southern Italy, that this Abbey of
St. Honorat became to the Church of Southern Gaul. For nearly two
centuries, and those centuries of momentous change, when the wreck of
the Roman Empire threatened civilization and Christianity with ruin like
its own, the civilization and Christianity of the great district between
the Loire, the Alps, and the Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of
Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the
barbaric invaders who poured down on the Rhone and the Garonne, it
exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona till the
Synod of Whitby exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious
sees of Southern Gaul were filled by prelates who had been reared at
Lerins; to Arles, for instance, it gave in succession Hilary, Caesarius,
and Virgilius. The voice of the Church was found in that of its doctors;
the famous rule of faith, "quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus,"
is the rule of Vincent of Lerins; its monk Salvian painted the agony of
the dying Empire in his book on the government of God; the long fight of
semi-Pelagianism against the sterner doctrines of Augustin was chiefly
waged within its bounds.
Little remains to illustrate this earlier and more famous period of the
monastic history of Lerins which extends to the massacre of its monks by
Saracen pirates at the opening of the eighth century. The very look of
the island has been changed by the revolutions of the last hundred
years. It is still a mere spit of sand, edged along the coast with
sombre pines; but the whole of the interior has been stripped of its
woods by the agricultural improvements which are being carried on by the
Franciscans who at present possess it, and all trace of solitude and
retirement has disappeared. A well in the centre of the island and a
palm-tree beside the church are linked to the traditional history of the
founders of the abbey. Worked into the later buildings we find marbles
and sculptures which may have been brought from the mainland, as at
Torcello, by fugitives who had escaped the barbaric storm. A bas-relief
of Christ and the Apostles, which is now inserted over the west gate of
the church, and a column of red marble which stands beside it, belong
probably to the earliest days of the settlement at Lerins. In the little
chapels scattered over the island fragments of early sarcophagi,
inscriptions, and sculpture have been industriously collected and
preserved. But the chapels themselves are far more interesting than
their contents. Of the seven which originally lined the shore, two or
three only now remain uninjured; in these the building itself is either
square or octagonal, pierced with a single rough Romanesque window, and
of diminutive size. The walls and vaulting are alike of rough
stonework. The chapels served till the Revolution as seven stations
which were visited by the pilgrims to the island, but we can hardly
doubt that in these, as in the Seven Chapels at Glendalough, we see
relics of the earlier coenobitic establishment.
The cloister of the abbey is certainly of a date later than the massacre
of the monks, which took place according to tradition in the little
square of wild greensward which lies within it; but the roughness of its
masonry, the plain barrel roof, and the rude manner in which the low,
gloomy vaulting is carried round its angles, are of the same character
as in the usual tenth-century buildings of Southern Gaul. With the
exception of the masonry of its side walls there is nothing in the
existing remains of the abbey church itself earlier than its
reconstruction at the close of the eleventh century. The building has
been so utterly wrecked that little architectural detail is left; but
the broad nave, with its narrow side aisles, the absence, as in the
Aquitanian churches, of triforium and clerestory, and the shortness of
the choir space, give their own individual mark to St. Honorat. Of the
monastic buildings directly connected with the church only a few rooms
remain, and these are destitute of any features of interest. They are
at present used as an orphanage by the Franciscans whom the Bishop of
Frejus, by whom the island was purchased some fifteen years ago, has
settled there as an agricultural colony, and whose reverence for the
relics around them is as notable as their courtesy to the strangers who
visit them. If it is true that the island narrowly escaped being turned
into a tea-garden and resort for picnics by some English speculators, we
can only feel a certain glow of gratitude to the Bishop of Frejus. The
brown train of the eleven brothers as we saw them pacing slowly beneath
the great caroub-tree close to the abbey, or the row of boys blinking in
the sunshine as they repeat their lesson to the lay-brother who acts as
schoolmaster, jar less roughly on the associations of Lerins than the
giggle of happy lovers or the pop of British champagne.
There is little interest in the later story of St. Honorat, from the
days of the Saracen massacre to its escape from conversion into a
tea-garden. The appearance of the Moslem pirates at once robbed it of
its old security, and the cessation of their attacks was followed by new
dangers from the Genoese and Catalans who infested the coast in the
fourteenth century. The isle was alternately occupied by French and
Spaniards in the war between Francis and Charles V.; it passed under the
rule of Commendatory abbots, and in 1789, when it was finally
secularized, the four thousand monks of its earlier history had shrunk
to four. Perhaps the most curious of all the buildings of Lerins is that
which took its rise in the insecurity of its mediaeval existence. The
Castle of Lerins, which lies on the shore to the south of the church, is
at once a castle and an abbey. Like many of the great monasteries of the
East, its first object was to give security to its inmates against the
marauders who surrounded them. Externally its appearance is purely
military; the great tower rises from its trench cut deep in the rock, a
portcullis protects the gate, the walls are pierced with loopholes and
crowned with battlements. But within, the arrangements, so far as it is
possible to trace them in the present ruined state of the building, seem
to have been purely monastic. The interior of the tower is occupied by a
double-arched cloister, with arcades of exquisite first-pointed work,
through which one looks down into the little court below. The visitor
passes from this into the ruins of the abbot's chapel, to which the
relics were transferred for security from the church of St. Honorat,
and which was surrounded by the cells, the refectory, and the domestic
buildings of the monks. The erection of the castle is dated in the
twelfth century, and from this time we may consider the older abbey
buildings around the church to have been deserted and left to ruin; but
we can hardly grumble at a transfer which has given us so curious a
combination of military and monastic architecture in the castle itself.
Something of the feudal spirit which such a residence would be likely to
produce appears in the abbot's relations with the little town of Cannes,
which formed a part of his extensive lordship on the mainland. Its
fishers were harassed by heavy tolls on their fishery, and the rights of
first purchase in the market and forced labour were rigorously exacted
by the monastic officers. It is curious to compare, as one's boat floats
back across the waters of the bay, the fortunes of these serfs and of
their lords.
SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
II.
CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE.