I have received, from the author, M. Émile de Lavelaye, his
pamphlet,—“Protestantism and Catholicism in their bearing upon the
Liberty and Prosperity of Nations, with an introductory Letter by Mr.
Gladstone.” I do not know why M. de Lavelaye sent me this pamphlet. I
thank him for the courtesy; but he has evidently read none of my books,
or must have been aware that he could not have written anything more
contrary to the positions which I am politically maintaining. On the
other hand, I have read none of his books, and I gather from passages
in his pamphlet that there may be much in them to which I should be
able to express entire adhesion.
But of the pamphlet in question, and its preface, he will, I trust,
pardon my speaking in the same frank terms which I should have used had
it accidentally come under my notice, instead of by the author’s gift.
The pamphlet is especially displeasing to me, because it speaks of
‘Liberty’ under the common assumption of its desirableness; whereas my
own teaching has been, and is, that Liberty, whether in the body, soul,
or political estate of men, is only another word for Death, and the
final issue of Death, putrefaction: the body, spirit, and political
estate being alike healthy only by their bonds and laws; and by Liberty
being instantly disengaged into mephitic vapour.
But the matter of this pamphlet, no less than the assumption it is
based on, is hateful to me; reviving, as it does, the miserable
question of the schism between Catholic and Protestant, which is
entirely ridiculous and immaterial; and taking no note whatever of the
true and eternal schism, cloven by the very sword of Michael, between
him that serveth God, and him that serveth Him not.
(The passage now and henceforward omitted in this place, contained an
attack on Mr. Gladstone written under a complete misconception of his
character. See, for explanation of it, the beginning of the third
letter in the second series of Fors. The blank space is left partly in
order not to confuse the Index references, partly in due memorial of
rash judgment.)
The fact being that I am, at this central time of my life’s work, at
pause because I cannot set down any form of religious creed so simple,
but that the requirement of its faithful signature by persons desiring
to become Companions of St. George, would exclude some of the noblest
champions of justice and charity now labouring for men; while, on the
other hand, I cannot set down the first principles of children’s noble
education without finding myself in collision with an almost resistless
infidel mob, which is incapable of conceiving—how much less of
obeying—the first laws of human decency, order, and honour. So that
indeed I am fain to ask, with my Leeds correspondent, in last Fors,
page 234, what is to be done for young folks to whom “music has little
attraction, except in the form of dance, and pictures are nothing”?
With her pardon, pictures are much to this class of young people. The
woodcuts of halfpenny novels representing scenes of fashionable
life,—those representing men murdering their wives, in the ‘Police
News,’—and, finally, those which are to be bought only in the
back-shop,—have enormous educational influence on the young British
public: which its clergymen, alike ignorant of human nature and human
art, think to counteract—by decorating their own churches,
forsooth,—and by coloured prints of the story of Joseph; while the
lower tribes of them—Moodys and Sankeys—think to turn modern musical
taste to account by fitting negro melodies to hymns.
And yet, my correspondent may be thankful that some remnant of delight
is still taken in dance-music. It is the last protest of the human
spirit, in the poor fallen creatures, against the reign of the absolute
Devil, Pandemonium with Mammon on the throne, instead of Lucifer,—the
Son of the Earth, Lord of Hell, instead of the Son of the Morning.
Let her stand in the midst of the main railroad station at Birmingham;
and think—what music, or dancing, or other entertainment fit for
prodigal sons, could be possible in that pious and little prodigal
locality. [55] Let her read the account of our modern pastoral music,
at page 15 of my fifth letter,—of modern Venetian “Barcarolle,” page 14
of Letter XIX. and 12 of Letter XX.,—and of our modern Campanile, and
Muezzin call to prayer, at page 262 of this Fors.
“Work is prayer”—thinks your Wakefield Mahometan;—his vociferous
minaret, in the name, and by the name, of the Devil, shall summon
English votaries to such worship for five miles round; that is to say,
over one hundred square miles of English land, the Pandemoniacal voice
of the Archangel-trumpet thus arouses men out of their sleep; and
Wakefield becomes Wakeful-field, over that blessed space of acre-age.
Yes; my correspondent may be thankful that still some feeble lust for
dancing on the green,—still some dim acknowledgment, by besotted and
stupefied brains, of the laws of tune and time known to their fathers
and mothers—remains possible to the poor wretches discharged by the
excursion trains for a gasp of breath, and a gleam of light, amidst
what is left to them, and us, of English earth and heaven. Waltzing,
drunk, in the country roads by our villages; yet innocently drunk, and
sleepy at sunset; not like their born masters and teachers, dancing,
wilfully, the cancan of hell, with harlots, at seven in the morning.
[56]
Music and dancing! They are quite the two primal instruments of
education. Make them licentious; let Mr. John Stuart Mill have the
dis-ordering of them, so that—(see page 18 of Letter XII.)—“no one
shall be guided, or governed, or directed in the way they should
go,”—and they sink to lower and lower depth—till the dance becomes
Death’s; and the music—a shriek of death by strychnine. But let Miriam
and David, and the Virgins of Israel, have the ordering of them, and
the music becomes at last the Eternal choir; and the Dance, the
Karol-dance of Christmas, evermore. [57]
Virgins of Israel, or of England, richly clad by your kings, and
“rejoicing in the dance,” how is it you do not divide this sacred,—if
sacred,—joy of yours with the poor? If it can ever be said of you, as
birds of God,
“Oh beauteous birds, methinks ye measure
Your movements to some heavenly tune,”
can you not show wherein the heavenliness of it consists,
to—suppose—your Sunday-school classes? At present, you keep the dancing
to yourselves, and graciously teach them the catechism. Suppose you
were to try, for a little while, learning the catechism yourselves; and
teaching them—to dance?
Howbeit, in St. George’s schools, this, the most ‘decorous,’ rightly
taught, of all exercises, shall not fail of its due discipline to any
class whatsoever:—reading, writing, and accounts may all be spared
where pupils show no turn to any of those scholarships, but music and
dancing, never. [58] Generally, however, it will be the best singers
and dancers who ask for teaching also in literature and art; for all,
there shall at least be the way open to these; and for none, danger or
corruption possible in these. For in their libraries there shall be
none but noble books, and in their sight none but noble art.
There is no real difficulty or occasion for dispute in choosing these.
Admit the principle of selection, and the practice is easy enough;
only, like all practical matters, the work must be done by one man,
sufficiently qualified for it; and not by a council. If he err, the
error may be represented by any one cognizant of it, and by council
corrected. But the main work must be done single-handed.
Thus, for the use of the St. George’s Company, I shall myself, if my
life is spared, write out a list of books which without any question
will be found serviceable in their libraries; [59]—a system of art
instruction which will be secure so far as it reaches; and a list of
purchaseable works of art, which it will be desirable to place in the
national schools and museums of the company. With this list of
purchaseable works, I shall name, as I have time, those in the museums
of Europe which ought to be studied, to the exclusion of those on which
time would be wasted.
I have no doubt that this work, though done at first for the St.
George’s Company, will be found generally useful, and especially that
the system of drawing arranged for them will in many respects supersede
that of Kensington. I had intended to write it separately for the use
of schools; but after repeated endeavours to arrange it in a popular
form, find that it will not so shape itself availably, but must consist
of such broad statements of principle as my now enlarged experience
enables me to make; with references to the parts of my other books in
which they are defended or illustrated: and of directions for practice
given as I can get illustrations of them prepared; leaving the
systematization of them to be made by the master of each drawing
school, according to the requirements of his scholars. (See page 19 of
Letter IX.)
For example of the impossibility of publishing on a system. It happens
to be now fine weather here in Lancashire;—I am able, therefore, to
draw out of doors; and am painting a piece of foreground vegetation,
which I don’t want to be used by students till after at least fifty
other exercises have been gone through. But I must do this one while
light and life serve; and not wait till I am sixty, to do work which my
eyes are not good enough for at fifty-five.
And if the readers of Fors think my letters too desultory, let them
consider what this chief work, specified in page 20 of Letter IX.,
involves. No one has the least notion of the quantity of manual labour
I have to go through, to discharge my duty as a teacher of Art. Look at
the frontispiece to Letter XX., which is photographed from one of my
architectural sketches; and if you can draw, copy a bit of it;—try
merely the bead moulding with its dentils, in the flat arch over the
three small ones, lowest on the left. Then examine those three small
ones themselves. You think I have drawn them distorted, carelessly, I
suppose. No. That distortion is essential to the Gothic of the Pisan
school; and I measured every one of the curves of those cusps on the
spot, to the tenth of an inch; and I ought to be engraving and
publishing those drawings, by rights; but, meantime, your Pisan
Republicans dash the chapel down, for a job in rebuilding it;—and the
French Emperor dashes every cathedral in France to pieces, to find his
masons work,—and gets for result, Reuter’s telegram, (page 21 of Letter
VI.); and I, with my eyes full of dust and driven smoke, am obliged to
leave my own work, and write Fors, more and more necessarily becoming
principal, as I find all my other work rendered vain.
Nevertheless, in the course of Fors itself, I shall try to give, as
aforesaid, art instruction enough for all need, if any one cares to
obey it. How little any one is likely to care, the closing paragraphs
of the letter from Wakefield show so clearly that I think it desirable
to print them here consecutively, as part of the text of Fors itself.
“Yet people tell me that those were very benighted Tory days I am
regretting. Wakefield was always held to be a Tory place, given up hand
and foot to the magnates who owned the great estate round. I know how
when a small thing in frilled slops, but with my bosom full of
patriotic pride in our town, I used to feel bitterly depressed at
hearing a rising Radical Leeds clothier, who came to see us, sometimes
denounce Wakefield as a ‘one-eyed hoil,’ his emphatic way of indicating
our want of sweep of vision. I remember he generally capped his
arguments by demanding, in sonorous tones, if any men worthy of the
name of Britons would put up with that ‘obsolete monopoly’ of the soke
mills.
“To tell truth, I am afraid that we felt a good deal of mean-spirited
admiration for the neighbouring squires and lords on the occasions when
they showed themselves and their handsome carriages in our streets: but
at least the Wentworths and Pilkingtons and Squire Waterton were
gentlemen and scholars; our new magnates have nothing to boast but
their money. It seems to me better that people should boast of the old
oaks of Walton, and the old pictures of —— Priory, than tell how many
thousands an iron lord made by the last rise in iron: and that is what
they talk of now. And if the iron kings have supplanted the landlords,
they are not any more free. The old farmers might vote blindly out of
blind respect for the old landlords; but is it not better than the
newly-enfranchised puddlers and strikers selling votes openly for the
price of a gallon of whisky? We have lost a good deal, although we are
long rid of the soke monopoly, which used to be a standing reproach to
us. I think that the town bought off the soke just after the Corn Law
agitation, when the great railways began to enclose the wide meadows
about the town with their ugly ramparts and arches, where the trains
keep up a continual scream.
“But the wool and corn magnates of the place held to their old
traditions long after that; and when Titus Salt asked for a footing in
the town that he might build there his great alpaca factories, he was
rejected. I had gone abroad then, but my heart was in the old place,
and I caught up eagerly all concerning it. Sometimes I heard doleful
accounts of its decadence—how the big houses were empty altogether, how
the inns were closed, the coaches stopped, the river traffic
diminished, and the great corn warehouses by the bridge falling to
ruin. There was no trace left of the gaieties that once gave the town
the name of ‘Merrie Wakefield.’ All the smart young men were leaving it
to push their way in Leeds or Manchester, and the girls left behind
were growing up into a population of old maids.
“So the doleful story went on for many a year. But insensibly the key
changed. Mills were springing up, and shops; and the houses had gone up
in rent. The sleepy streets were thronged with workers; in short, the
town seemed new-born altogether. And the ——s,—I knew the ——s,—nobody
would have thought it, such a simple kind of man as old —— seemed; yet
the tale ran that he could buy up all Wakefield, and young Bill was
going to live in —— Hall!! Young Bill in —— Hall! one of the most
sacred spots my memory cherished.
“I remembered him well,—an audacious boy, with a gift for wry faces,
and always up to some street prank. I remembered the well-worn jacket
and battered cap that his father’s thrift imposed on him. And he was to
be one of new rulers of the bright new time! and lord it in those
venerable oaken chambers sacred to Lady ——‘s ghost! It seemed
incredible; but twenty years had changed everything. Old ——, the
father—a man of the true old English grain, had, in my young days, a
foundry at the lower end of the town, and was said even then to be
worth a ‘mint of money.’ Worthy folks were he and his; but still people
of whom the loftier town’s-folk took no cognizance socially, for was
not the wife’s father old Robin the Pedlar? A good old soul he was, who
peddled to frugal farm wives the best thread and needles that could be
got,—and took no alms from his kinsfolk, and lived and died in
blameless humble honesty. And his grandson now rules in the hall where
old Robin, perchance, took a humble bit and sup at the back door. He
has a Scotch estate besides, and only failed of Parliament last year
because he bribed his way a little too openly. My enlightened friends
look upon his rise as one of the grandest signs of the grand new time;
but I cannot rejoice with them. When I see how he and his like are
doing their worst to foul the air and blacken the fields about the
town, I cannot help wishing the squires back in —— Hall.
“Men say, too, that he is a stronger Tory than the bluest of the old
squires. He has forgotten old Robin of the bobbins, and rules the
people from whom he sprang, with an iron hand, as such often do.
Naturally, his success has attracted others, and the town will soon be
surrounded with forges. On the once green Calder bank, where I used to
see garlands of brown pears ripening in the sweet sunshine, there is a
desert of dross and ashes, and twenty black throats vomiting fire and
fumes into the summer sky; and under the big sheds you see hundreds of
the liberated Britons of these improved days, toiling, half-naked, in
sweltering heat and din, from morning to evening. This, however, is
‘the activity and spread of the iron trade,’ which our local paper
tells us ‘are the most satisfactory pledge of the future progress and
prosperity of our town.’
“I wish that I could believe it; but it vexes me beyond comfort to see
the first landscape I knew and loved blighted by the smoke of the
forges, and to find one sweet association after another swept away.
“Even Sunday brings no respite to the eye. The forges are fired up
shortly after noonday, and many of the long chimneys follow suit. And
in the town the noise is so constant, you can scarcely hear the church
chimes unless you are close to the tower.
“Did you ever hear Wakefield chimes? We were very proud of them in the
old time. They had a round of pleasant sleepy tunes, that never failed
us through summer suns and winter frost; and came to be bound up
indelibly with the early memories of us children. How I loved to hear
them as I bounded, full of morning gladness, across the green Vicar’s
Croft to school; or at night when lying an unwilling prisoner in bed,
before the warm summer evening was ended. To my childish fancy there
was a strange wizardry bound up with that dark church steeple, frosted
and crumbling with age, which would break out overhead into mysterious
music when I was far afield, but expecting it.
“Years after, when poor and lonely in a great foreign city, I came, one
bitter winter’s day, upon an obscure cloister church standing by a
frozen river. It was a city without bells, and I had often longed for
the familiar sound. I was dreadfully homesick that day, and stood upon
the bridge, hapless, and listless; looking at the strange spire, the
strange houses and frozen-up boats, in a kind of dream. Suddenly the
cloister tower struck the hour,—four o’clock of a dark December day,
and presently it broke into a chime.
“It was a very simple ditty; but what a passion of longing it wakened
for England and the old chimes of that little English town! I felt as
if my heart could bear no more. I must go home; I must see the old
places again, cost what it might. But morning brought fresh counsels,
and many a year passed before I revisited the old place.
“At last I was there again, after many disappointments, and laid my
head to rest once more beneath the shadow of the old steeple.
“I woke with an expectant heart. It was a bright May day, such as I
remembered twenty years before. The big church bell tolled nine: then
came a pause, and my thirsty ears were strained to catch the first
sounds of the dear old chimes. ‘Ding’ went a treble bell high in the
air, the first note of ‘Tara’s Halls,’ and then!—a hideous sound I
cannot describe, a prolonged malignant yell, broke from the sky and
seemed to fill the earth. I stopped my ears and ran indoors, but the
sound followed to the innermost chambers. It gathered strength and
malignancy every moment, and seemed to blast all within its reach. It
lasted near two minutes, and ended with a kind of spasm and howl that
made every nerve shudder. I do not exaggerate. I cannot adequately
describe the hideous sound. When I had recovered my wits, I asked the
meaning of this horrible noise. My informant, a rising young townsman
of the new stamp, told me that it was the new steam-whistle at the
foundry, commonly called the ‘American Devil;’ that it was the most
powerful in the West Riding, and could be heard five miles off.
“It was only at half-power then, calling the workmen from breakfast;
but at six in the morning I could hear it in double force. I asked if
it was possible that people would quietly put up with such a hideous
disturbance. He owned that the old inhabitants did not like it; but
then, he said, they were a sleepy set, and wanted stirring up.
“Indeed, I actually found that the town was infected by four other
similar whistles, profaning dawn and eve with their heaven-defying
screech.
“The nuisance has been abolished since, I hear. They say it actually
killed one old lady by starting her up just at the only moment when it
was possible for her weary nerves to get sleep. She happened to have a
relation in the town council: a stir was made about it, and the
whistles were suppressed.
“But the peaceful, half town, half rural life of Wakefield is gone for
ever, I fear.
“Silk-mills and dye-works are encroaching on the corn-fields and
pastures; rows of jerry-built cottages are creeping up Pinder’s Fields,
where I used to pull orchises; greasy mill-girls elbow ladies in the
Westgate, and laugh and jeer at passing young men in a way that would
have horrified the old inhabitants. And everywhere there is an
indescribable smokiness and dirtiness more demoralizing than any tongue
can tell, or mind conceive.
“Well, it is the ‘march of the times.’ It will go on, I suppose, as in
other quiet pleasant English towns, until all the sweet Calder valley
is swallowed up in the smoke of Tophet. They will cut the snowdrop wood
down, and cover Heath Common with cheap villas, and make the old hall
into an ‘institution.’ You know how it will be. A river black with
filth and stagnant with foulness, a wilderness of toiling suburbs such
as you saw at Bradford; and where the cowslips and the corn grew, the
earth will be thick with ‘institutions.’ There will be a Blind
Institution, and an Eye and Ear Institution, an Orthopædic Institution,
and a Magdalen Institution, and Mechanics’ Institutions; and we shall
hear a great deal of the liberality and beneficence of the cotton and
iron kings of the place. But will all this compensate one little child
for robbing it of its God-given birthright of earth and sky?
“I cannot believe it.
“Poor little martyrs! There will be no ‘swallow twittering from the
straw-built shed’ for them,—only the American Devil calling father to
his hot, hard day’s labour. What can they make of it all? What kind of
outlook will they have in coming years from the bridge of my early
recollections? What I saw on the Medlock yesterday—such a hideous
sight!—yet my husband remembers catching fish there. The gases would
kill a fish like a lightning-stroke, now.
“And the poor children! It makes me so sad, having some of my own, to
think of those who will be born there, with hearts as hungry for nature
and truth as mine was; who will never see God’s heaven, save through
grimy panes and smoke; who will have no sweet cowslip-fields to walk
in,—only the defiled pavement; who will grow hard and sour before
childhood is over, with the riddle of their joyless lives.
“How I have drifted on.
“Your allusion to Wakefield Bridge in the Fors of February (?) unloosed
a flood of long-buried recollections.
“This is what you draw on yourself by opening your heart to others.
Pray forgive the trespass on your time.
“Yours gratefully,
“E. L.”