‘What does all this mean?’ my correspondent asks, in wise anxiety.
National prosperity, my dear Madam, according to Mr. Goschen, the
‘Times,’ and ‘Morning Post’;—national prosperity carried to the point
of not knowing what to do with our money. Enlightenment, and Freedom,
and orthodox Religion, and Science of the superbest and trustworthiest
character, and generally the Reign of Law, answer the Duke of Argyll
and Professor Huxley. Ruin—inevitable and terrible, such as no nation
has yet suffered,—answer God and the Fates.
Yes—inevitable. England has to drink a cup which cannot pass from
her—at the hands of the Lord, the cup of His fury;—surely the dregs of
it, the wicked of the earth shall wring them and drink them out.
For let none of my readers think me mad enough or wild enough to hope
that any effort, or repentance, or change of conduct, could now save
the country from the consequences of her follies, or the Church from
the punishment of her crimes. This St. George’s Company of ours is mere
raft-making amidst irrevocable wreck—the best we can do, to be done
bravely and cheerfully, come of it what may.
Let me keep, therefore, to-day wholly to definite matters, and to
little ones. What the education we now give our children leads to, my
correspondent’s letter shows. What education they should have, instead,
I may suggest perhaps in some particulars.
What should be done, for instance, in the way of gift-giving, or
instruction-giving, for our little Agnes of the hill-side? Would the
St. George’s Company, if she were their tenant, only leave her
alone,—teach her nothing?
Not so; very much otherwise than so. This is some part of what should
be done for her, were she indeed under St. George’s rule.
Instead of the “something new,” which our learned Master of Arts edits
for her in carolling, she should learn, by heart, words which her
fathers had known, many and many a year ago. As, for instance, these
two little carols of grace before meat:—
What God gives, and what we take,
’Tis a gift for Christ His sake;
Be the meale of Beanes and Pease,
God be thanked for those and these.
Have we flesh, or have we fish,
All are Fragments from His dish:
He His Church save; and the King;
And our Peace here, like a Spring,
Make it ever flourishing.
Here, a little child, I stand
Heaving up my either hand;
Cold as Paddocks though they be,
Here I lift them up to Thee.
For a Benizon to fall,
On our meat, and on us all.
These verses, or such as these, Agnes should be able to say, and sing;
and if on any state occasion it were desired of her to say grace,
should be so mannered as to say obediently, without either vanity or
shame. Also, she should know other rhymes for her own contentment such
as she liked best, out of narrow store offered to, her, if she chose to
learn to read. Reading by no means being enforced upon her—still less,
writing; nothing enforced on her but household help to her mother;
instant obedience to her father’s or mother’s word; order and
cleanliness in her own departments and person; and gentleness to all
inoffensive creatures—paddocks as well as lambs and chickens.
Further, instead of eighteen distinct penny Children’s Prizes,
containing seventy-two elaborate woodcuts of ‘Ducklings Astray,’ and
the like, (which I should especially object to, in the case of Agnes,
as too personal, she herself being little more at present than a
duckling astray,) the St. George’s Company would invest for her, at
once, the ‘ridiculously small sum of eighteenpence,’ in one coloured
print—coloured by hand, for the especial decoration of her own chamber.
This colouring by hand is one of the occupations which young women of
the upper classes, in St. George’s Company, will undertake as a
business of pure duty; it was once a very wholesome means of livelihood
to poorer art students. The plates of Sibthorpe’s Flora Græca, for
instance, cost, I am informed, on their first publication, precisely
the sum in question,—eighteen-pence each,—for their colouring by
hand:—the enterprising publisher who issued the more recent editions,
reducing, in conformity with modern views on the subject of economy,
the colourist’s remuneration to thirty shillings per hundred. But in
the St. George’s Company, young ladies who have the gift of colouring
will be taught to colour engravings simply as well as they can do it,
without any reference whatever to pecuniary compensation; and such
practice I consider to be the very best possible elementary instruction
for themselves, in the art of watercolour painting.
And the print which should be provided and thus coloured for little
Agnes’s room should be no less than the best engraving I could get made
of Simon Memmi’s St. Agnes in Paradise; of which—(according to the
probable notions of many of my readers, absurd and idolatrous)—image,
little Agnes should know the legend as soon as she was able to
understand it; though, if the St. George’s Company, could manage it for
her, she should be protected from too early instruction in the meaning
of that legend, by such threats from her English playfellows as are
noticed in my correspondent’s letter.
Such should be some small part of her religious education. For
beginning of secular education, the St. George’s Company would provide
for her, above and before all things, a yard or two square of St.
George’s ground, which should be wholly her own; together with
instruments suited to her strength, for the culture, and seeds for the
sowing, thereof. On which plot of ground, or near it, in a convenient
place, there should be a bee-hive, out of which it should be considered
a crowning achievement of Agnes’s secular virtues if she could produce,
in its season, a piece of snowy and well-filled comb. And, (always if
she chose to learn to read), books should be given her containing such
information respecting bees, and other living creatures as it appeared
to the St. George’s Company desirable she should possess. But touching
the character of this desirable information, what I have to say being
somewhat lengthy, must be deferred to my March letter.
Castleton, Peak of Derbyshire,
27th January.
Since finishing this letter, I have driven leisurely through the
midland manufacturing districts, which I have not traversed, except by
rail, for the last ten years. The two most frightful things I have ever
yet seen in my life are the south-eastern suburb of Bradford, (six
miles long,) and the scene from Wakefield bridge, by the chapel; yet I
cannot but more and more reverence the fierce courage and industry, the
gloomy endurance, and the infinite mechanical ingenuity of the great
centres, as one reverences the fervid labours of a wasp’s nest, though
the end of all is only a noxious lump of clay.