Turks brought the scourge of the Moslem again on the Riviera. The
"Saracen towers" with which the coast is studded tell to this day the
tale of the raids of Barbarossa and Dragut. The blow fell heavily on San
Remo. The ruined quarter beneath its wall still witnesses to the heathen
fury. San Siro, which lay without the walls, was more than once
desecrated and reduced to ruin. A special officer was appointed by the
town to receive contributions for the ransom of citizens carried off by
the corsairs of Algiers or Tunis. These terrible razzias, which went on
to the very close of the last century, have left their mark on the
popular traditions of the coast. But the ruin which they began was
consummated by the purposeless bombardment of San Remo by an English
fleet during the war of the Austrian Succession, and by the perfidy with
which Genoa crushed at a single blow the freedom she had respected for
so many centuries. The square Genoese fort near the harbour commemorates
the extinction of the liberty of San Remo in 1729. The French revolution
found the city ruined and enslaved, and the gratitude of the citizens
for their deliverance by Buonaparte was shown by a sacrifice which it is
hard to forgive them. A row of magnificent ilexes, which stretched along
the ridge from the town to San Romolo, is said to have been felled for
the construction of vessels for the French navy.
Some of the criticism which has been lavished on San Remo is fair and
natural enough. To any one who has been accustomed to the exquisite
scenery around Cannes its background of olives seems tame and
monotonous. People who are fond of the bustle and gaiety of Nizza or
Mentone in their better days can hardly find much to amuse them in San
Remo. It is certainly quiet, and its quiet verges upon dulness. A more
serious drawback lies in the scarcity of promenades or level walks for
weaker invalids. For people with good legs, or who are at home on a
donkey, there are plenty of charming walks and rides up into the hills.
But it is not everybody who is strong enough to walk uphill or who cares
to mount a donkey. Visitors with sensitive noses may perhaps find reason
for growls at the mode of cultivation which is characteristic of the
olive groves. The town itself and the country around is, like the bulk
of the Riviera, entirely without architectural or archaeological
interest. There is a fine castle within a long drive at Dolceacqua, and
a picturesque church still untouched within a short one at Ceriana, but
this is all. Beneficial as the reforms of Carlo Borromeo may have been
to the religious life of the Cornice, they have been fatal to its
architecture. On the other hand, any one with an artistic eye and a
sketch-book may pass his time pleasantly enough at San Remo. The
botanist may revel day after day in new "finds" among its valleys and
hill-sides. The rural quiet of the place delivers one from the
fashionable bustle of livelier watering-places, from the throng of
gorgeous equipages that pour along the streets of Nice, or from picnics
with a host of flunkeys uncorking the champagne.
The sunshine, the colour, the beauty of the little town, secure its
future. The time must soon come when the whole coast of the Riviera will
be lined with winter resorts; but we can hardly hope that any will
surpass the happy blending of warmth and interest and repose which makes
the charm of San Remo.
THE POETRY OF WEALTH.
There is one marvellous tale which is hardly likely to be forgotten so
long as men can look down from Notre Dame de la Garde on the sunny
beauty of Marseilles. Even if the rest of Dumas' works sink into
oblivion, the sight of Chateau d'If as it rises glowing from the blue
waters of the Mediterranean will serve to recall the wonders of 'Monte
Christo.' But the true claim of the book to remembrance lies not in its
mere command over the wonderful but in the peculiar sense of wonder
which it excites. It was the first literary attempt to raise the mere
dead fact of money into the sphere of the imagination, and to reveal the
dormant poetry of wealth. There has as yet been only a single age in the
world's history when wealth has told with any force upon the imagination
of men. Unpoetic as the Roman mind essentially was, the sudden burst
upon it of the accumulated riches of the older world kindled in
senators and proconsuls a sense of romance which, wild and extravagant
as it seems, has in some of its qualities found no parallel since. The
feast of Lucullus, the gluttony of Heliogabalus, the sudden upgrowth of
vast amphitheatres, the waste of millions on the sport of a day, the
encounters of navies in the mimic warfare of the Coliseum, are the
freaks of gigantic children tossing about wildly the slowly-hoarded
treasures of past generations; but they are freaks which for the first
time revealed the strange possibilities which lay in the future of
wealth.
It is hard to say whether such a time will ever return. No doubt the
world is infinitely richer now than it was in the time of the Romans,
and no doubt too there are at least a dozen people in London alone whose
actual income far exceeds that of the wealthiest of proconsuls. But the
wealth of the modern capitalist is a wealth which has grown by slow
accumulations, a wealth which has risen almost insensibly into its
enormous mass, and the vastness of which its owner has never had brought
home to him with the same sort of shock as that which Lucullus must have
felt when he fronted the treasures of Mithridates, or Clive when he
threaded his way among the sacks of jewels in the royal vaults of
Moorshedabad. So far indeed is wealth from stimulating the imagination
nowadays that a banker is the very type of the unimaginative man, and
the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a financier an
object of suspicion to the money market. But it is conceivable in the
odd freaks of things that we may yet see the advent of the
Poet-Capitalist. It is almost impossible to say what new opportunities
the possession of fabulous resources might not add to the fancy of a
dreamer or to the speculations of a philanthropist. It is not till after
a little thought that we realize how materially the course of human
progress is obstructed by sheer want of money at critical moments, or
how easily the sum of human happiness might be increased by the sudden
descent of a golden shower on the right people at the right time.
There are dreams which men have been dreaming for generation after
generation which require nothing for their realization but the
appearance of such a capitalist as we have imagined. To take what may
seem perhaps an odd instance, just because it is an odd instance, let us
remember what a wonderful amount of hope and anticipation has been
thrown by a great religious party into the restoration of the Jews.
Rightly or wrongly, it is the one theme which sends a throb of
excitement through the life of quiet parsonages and kindles a new fire
even in the dreariest May meetings at Exeter Hall. But in point of
actual fact there is not the slightest necessity to await any great
spiritual revolution for the accomplishment of such a dream if its
accomplishment were really desirable. A league of Evangelical bankers
who fully believed in the prophecies they are so fond of quoting could
turn the wildest fancies of Dr. Cumming into sober earnest with very
little trouble indeed. Any emigration agent would undertake the
transport of Houndsditch bodily to Joppa; the bare limestone uplands of
Judaea could be covered again with terraces of olive and vine at
precisely the same cost of money and industry as is still required to
keep up the cultivation of the Riviera; and Mr. Fergusson would furnish
for a due consideration plans and estimates for a restoration of the
Temple on Zion. We are not suggesting such a scheme as an opportunity
for investing money to any great profit, but it is odd to live in a
world of wealthy people who believe firmly that its realization would
make this world into a little heaven below and yet never seem to feel
that they have the means of bringing it about in their cheque-books. Or
to take a hardly less odd instance, but one which has actually been
brought a little nearer to practical realization. Some time ago a body
of Welsh patriots determined to save the tongue and literature of the
Cymry from extinction by founding a new Welsh nation on the shores of
Patagonia. Nothing but Welsh was to be spoken, none but Welsh books were
to be read, and the laws of the colony were to be an amalgam of the
codes of Moses and of Howel the Good. The plan failed simply because its
originators were poor and unable to tide over the first difficulties of
the project. But conceive an ardent capitalist with a passion for
nationalities embracing such a cause, and at the cost of a few hundreds
of thousands creating perhaps a type of national life which might
directly or indirectly affect the future of the world. Such a man might
secure himself a niche in history at less cost and with less trouble
than he could obtain a large estate and a share in the commission of the
peace for a midland county.
But there is no need to restrict ourselves simply to oddities, although
oddities of this sort acquire a grandeur of their own at the touch of
wealth. The whole field of social experiment lies open to a great
capitalist. The one thing required, for instance, to render the squalor
and misery of our larger towns practically impossible would be the
actual sight of a large town without squalor or misery; and yet if
Liverpool were simply handed over to a great philanthropist with the
income of half-a-dozen Dukes of Westminster such a sight might easily be
seen. Schemes of this sort require nothing but what we may term the
poetic employment of capital for their realization. It is strange that
no financial hero makes his appearance to use his great money-club to
fell direr monsters than those which Hercules encountered, and by the
creation of a city at once great, beautiful, and healthy to realize the
conception of the Utopia and the dream of Sir Thomas More. Or take a
parallel instance from the country. Those who have watched the issues of
the co-operative system as applied to agriculture believe they see in it
the future solution of two of our greatest social difficulties--those,
we mean, which spring from the increasing hardships of the farmer's
position, and those which arise from the terrible serfage of the rural
labourer. But the experiments which have been as yet carried on are on
too small a scale either to produce any influence on the labour market
as a whole, or to make that impression on the public imagination which
could alone raise the matter into a "question of the day." What is
wanted is simply that two or three dukes should try the experiment of
peasant co-operation on a whole county, and try it with a command of
capital which would give the experiment fair play. Whether it succeeded
or not, such an attempt would have a poetic and heroic aspect of a
different order from the usual expenditure of a British peer.
Or we may turn to a wholly different field, the field of art. We are
always ready to cry out against "pot boilers" as we wander through the
galleries of the Academy, and to grumble at the butchers' bills and
bonnet bills which stand between great artists and the production of
great works. But the butchers' bills and bonnet bills of all the forty
Academicians might be paid by a great capitalist without any deep dip
into his money bags, and a whole future opened to English art by the
sheer poetry of wealth. There are hundreds of men with special faculties
for scientific inquiry who are at the present moment pinned down to the
daily drudgery of the lawyer's desk or the doctor's consulting-room by
the necessities of daily bread. A Rothschild who would take a score of
natural philosophers and enable them to apply their whole energies to
investigation would help forward science as really as Newton himself, if
less directly. But there are even direct ways in which wealth on a
gigantic scale might put out a poetic force which would affect the very
fortunes of the world. There are living people who are the masters of
twenty millions; and twenty millions would drive a tunnel under the
Straits of Dover. If increased intercourse means, as is constantly
contended, an increase of friendship and of mutual understanding among
nations, the man who devoted a vast wealth to linking two peoples
together would rise at once to the level of the great benefactors of
mankind. An opportunity for a yet more direct employment of the
influence of wealth will some day or other be found in the field of
international politics. Already those who come in contact with the
big-wigs of the financial world hear whispers of a future when the
destinies of peoples are to be decided in bank parlours, and questions
of peace and war settled, not by the diplomatist and statesman, but by
the capitalist. But as yet these are mere whispers, and no European
Gould has risen up to "finance" Downing Street into submission, or to
meet the boldest move of Prince Bismarck by a fall of the Stock
Exchange. Of all the schemes however which we have suggested, this is
probably the nearest to practical realization. If not we ourselves, our
children at any rate may see International Congresses made possible by a
few people quietly buttoning their breeches-pockets, and the march of
"armed nations" arrested by "a run for gold."
Taking however men as they are, it is far more wonderful that no one has
hit on the enormous field which wealth opens for the developement of
sheer downright mischief. The sense of mischief is a sense which goes
quietly to sleep as soon as childhood is over from mere want of
opportunity. The boy who wants to trip up his tutor can easily find a
string to tie across the garden walk; but when one has got beyond the
simpler joys of childhood strings are not so easy to find. To carry out
a practical joke of the Christopher Sly sort we require, as Shakespere
saw, the resources of a prince. But once grant possession of unlimited
wealth, and the possibilities of mischief rise to a grandeur such as
the world has never realized. The Erie Ring taught us a little of what
capital might do in this way, but in the Erie Ring capital was fettered
by considerations of profit and loss. Throw these considerations
overboard and treat a great question in the spirit of sheer mischief,
and the results may be simply amazing. Conceive, for instance, a
capitalist getting the railways round London into his power, and then in
sheer freak stopping the traffic for a single day. No doubt the day
would be a short one, but even twelve hours of such a practical joke
would bring about a "Black Monday" such as England has never seen. But
there would be no need of such an enormous operation to enable us to
realize the power of latent mischief which the owner of great wealth
really possesses. An adroit operator might secure every omnibus and
every cab in the metropolis and compel us to paddle about for a week in
the mud of November before the loss was replaced.
It is quite possible indeed that gigantic mischief of this sort may find
its sphere in practical politics. Already Continental Governments watch
with anxiety the power which employers possess of bringing about a
revolution by simply closing their doors and throwing thousands of
unemployed labourers on the street; but it is a power which in some
degree or other capital will always possess, and any one who remembers
the assistance which Reform derived from the Hyde Park rows will see at
once that mischief on the large scale might be made in this way an
important factor in political questions.
Ambition has yet a wider sphere of action than even mischief in this
poetic use of wealth. A London preacher recently drew pointed attention
to the merely selfish use of their riches by great English nobles, and
contrasted it with the days when Elizabeth's Lords of the Council
clubbed together to provide an English fleet against the Armada, or the
nobles of Venice placed their wealth on every great emergency at the
service of the State. But from any constitutional point of view there is
perhaps nothing on which we may more heartily congratulate ourselves
than on the blindness which hides from the great capitalists of England
the political power which such a national employment of their wealth
would give them--a blindness which is all the more wonderful in what is
at once the wealthiest and the most political aristocracy which the
world has ever seen. What fame the mere devotion of a quarter of a
million to public uses may give to a quiet merchant the recent example
of Mr. Peabody abundantly showed. But the case of the Baroness Burdett
Coutts is yet more strictly to the point. The mere fact that she has
been for years credited with a wide and unselfish benevolence has given
her a power over the imagination of vast masses of the London poor which
no one who is not really conversant with their daily life and modes of
thinking could for an instant imagine. Her bounty is enlarged in the
misty air of the slums of Wapping or Rotherhithe to colossal dimensions,
and the very quietness and unobtrusiveness of her work gives it an air
of mystery which tells like romance on the fancy of the poor.
It was characteristic of the power which such a use of wealth may give
that the mobs who smashed the Hyde Park railings stopped to cheer before
the house of Lady Burdett Coutts. Luckily none of our political nobles
has ever bethought himself of the means by which the great Roman leaders
rose habitually to influence or won over the labouring masses by "panem
et Circenses." But a nobler ambition might find its field in a large
employment of wealth for public ends of a higher sort. Something of the
old patrician pride might have spurred the five or six great Houses who
own half London to construct the Thames Embankment at their own cost,
and to hand it over free from the higglings of Mr. Gore to the people at
large. Even now we may hear of some earl whose rent-roll is growing with
fabulous rapidity as coming forward to relieve the Treasury by the offer
of a National Gallery of Art, or checkmating the jobbers of South
Kensington by the erection of a National Museum. It seems to be easy
enough for peer after peer to fling away a hundred thousand at Newmarket
or Tattersall's, and yet a hundred thousand would establish in the
crowded haunts of working London great "Conservatoires" where the finest
music might be brought to bear without cost on the coarseness and
vulgarity of the life of the poor. The higher drama may be perishing in
default of a State subvention, but it never seems to enter any one's
head that there are dozens of people among those who grumbled at the
artistic taste of Mr. Ayrton who could furnish such a subvention at the
present cost of their stable. As yet however we must be content, we
suppose, with such a use of wealth as 'Lothair' brings to the front--the
purely selfish use of it carried to the highest pitch which selfishness
has ever reached. Great parks and great houses, costly studs and costly
conservatories, existence relieved of every hitch and discomfort--these
are the outlets which wealth has as yet succeeded in finding. For nobler
outlets we must wait for the advent of the Poet-Capitalist.
LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS.
A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to the huge mass of
the Houses of Parliament, lies a broken, irregular pile of buildings, at
whose angle, looking out over the Thames, is one grey weatherbeaten
tower. The broken pile is the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth; the grey
weatherbeaten building is its Lollards' Tower. From this tower the
mansion itself stretches in a varied line, chapel and guard-room and
gallery and the stately buildings of the new house looking out on the
terrace and garden; while the Great Hall, in which the library has now
found a home, is the low picturesque building which reaches southward
along the river to the gate.
The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread
of our narrative as we proceed; but I would warn my readers at the
outset that I do not purpose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself,
or to attempt any architectural or picturesque description of the place.
What I attempt is simply to mark in incident after incident which has
occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom
it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the
literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm.
Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of
the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of
the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor house
of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the
Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot as
there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So
long as the political head of the English people ruled, like AElfred or
AEthelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English
people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the
Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the
Kings finally to Westminster that the Archbishops were permanently
drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave
a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history
which opened with the Conquest the Church was called to play a part
greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the Archbishop had been
simply the head of the ecclesiastical order--a representative of the
moral and spiritual forces on which government was based. The Conquest,
the cessation of the great Witenagemots in which the nation, however
imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a Tribune of
the People.
Foreigner though he might be, it was the Primate's part to speak for the
conquered race the words it could no longer utter. He was in fact the
permanent leader (to borrow a modern phrase) of a Constitutional
Opposition; and in addition to the older religious forces which he
wielded he wielded a popular and democratic force which held the new
King and the new baronage in check. It was he who received from the
sovereign whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule not by his
own will, but according to the customs, or as we should say now, the
traditional constitution of the realm. It was his to call on the people
to declare whether they chose him for their king, to receive the
thundered "Ay, ay," of the crowd, to place the priestly unction on
shoulder and breast, the royal crown on brow. To watch over the
observance of the covenant of that solemn day, to raise obedience and
order into religious duties, to uphold the custom and law of the realm
against personal tyranny, to guard amid the darkness and brutality of
the age those interests of religion, of morality, of intellectual life
which as yet lay peacefully together beneath the wing of the
Church,--this was the political office of the Primate in the new order
which the Conquest created, and it was this office which expressed
itself in the site of the house that fronted the King's house over
Thames.
From the days of Archbishop Anselm therefore to the days of Stephen
Langton, Lambeth only fronted Westminster as the Archbishop fronted the
King. Synod met over against Council; the clerical court of the one
ruler rivalled in splendour, in actual influence, the baronial court of
the other. For more than a century of our history the great powers which
together were to make up the England of the future lay marshalled over
against each other on either side the water.