Chapter IV: Epilogue: 201 (1)

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CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE LETTERS CONTAINED IN BOTH VOLUMES 204

INDEX 213

NOTE TO THE SECOND VOLUME.

_The letters relating to Mr. Ruskin's candidature for the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University were published when this volume was almost out of the printer's hands. They have however been included, by Mr. Ruskin's wish, and will be found at the end of this volume, where a letter to the late Mr. W. H. Harrison, which has just been brought to my notice, and two very recent letters on Dramatic Reform, have, at the cost of some delay, been also added._--[ED.]

_November_ 15, 1880.

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE LETTERS CONTAINED IN THE SECOND VOLUME.

NOTE.--_In the second and third columns the bracketed words and
figures are more or less certainly conjectured; whilst those
unbracketed give the actual_ _dating of the letters._

LETTERS ON POLITICS AND WAR.

THE ITALIAN QUESTION. 1859.
(Three letters: June 6, June 15, and August 1.)

THE FOREIGN POLICY OF ENGLAND. 1863.

THE POSITION OF DENMARK. 1864.

THE JAMAICA INSURRECTION. 1865.

THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR. 1870.
(Two letters: October 6 and 7.)

MODERN WARFARE. 1876.

ARROWS OF THE CHACE.

LETTERS ON POLITICS AND WAR.

[From "The Scotsman," July 20, 1859.]

_THE ITALIAN QUESTION._[1]

BERLIN, _June_ 6, 1859.

I have been thinking of sending a few lines about what I have seen of Austrians and Italians; but every time I took my pen and turned from my own work about clouds and leafage to think for a few minutes concerning political clouds and thickets, I sank into a state of amazement which reduced me to helpless silence. I will try and send you an incoherent line to-day; for the smallest endeavor at coherence will bring me into that atmosphere of astonishment again, in which I find no expression.

You northern Protestant people are always overrating the value of Protestantism as such. Your poetical clergymen make sentimental tours in the Vaudois country, as if there were no worthy people in the Alps but the Vaudois. Did the enlightened Edinburgh evangelicals never take any interest in the freedom of the Swiss, nor hear of such people as Winkelried or Tell? Not but that there is some chance of Tell disappearing one of these days under acutest historical investigation.

Still, he, or somebody else, verily got Switzerland rid of much evil, and made it capable of much good; and if you examine the influence of the battles of Morgarten and Sempach on European history, you will find they were good and true pieces of God's work.[2] Do people suppose they were done by Protestants? Switzerland owes all that she is--all that she is ever likely to be--to her stout and stern Roman Catholics, faithful to their faith to this day--they, and the Tyrolese, about the truest Roman Catholics in Christendom and certainly among its worthiest people, though they laid your Zuingli and a good deal of ranting Protestantism which Zuingli in vain tried to make either rational or charitable, dead together on the green meadows of Cappel, and though the Tyrolese marksmen at this moment are following up their rifle practice to good purpose, and with good will, with your Vaudois hearts for targets.

The amazement atmosphere keeps floating with its edges about me, though I write on as fast as I can in hopes of keeping out of it. You Scotch, and we English!! to keep up the miserable hypocrisy of calling ourselves Protestants! And here have been two of the most powerful protests (sealed with quite as much blood as is usually needed for such documents) that ever were made against the Papacy--one in 1848,[3] and one now--twenty thousand men or thereabouts lying, at this time being, in the form of torn flesh and shattered bones, among the rice marshes of the Novarrese, and not one jot of our precious Protestant blood gone to the signature. Not so much as one noble flush of it, that I can see, on our clay cheeks, besmirched, as they are, with sweat and smoke; but all for gold, and out of chimneys. Of sweat for bread that perishes not, or of the old Sinai smoke for honor of God's law, and revelation thereof--no drop nor shadow. Not so much as a coroner's inquest on those dead bodies in the rice fields--dead men who must have been murdered by somebody. If a drunken man falls in a ditch, you will have your Dogberry and Verges talk over him by way of doing justice; but your twenty thousand--not drunken, but honest, respectable, well-meaning, and serviceable men--are made rice manure of, and you think it is all right. We Protestants indeed! The Italians are Protestants, and in a measure the French--nay, even the Austrians (at all events those conical-hatted mountaineers), according to their understanding of the matter. What we are, Moloch or Mammon, or the Protestant devil make up of both, perhaps knows.

Do not think I dislike the Austrians. I have great respect and affection for them, and I have seen more of them in familiar intercourse than most Englishmen. One of my best friends in Venice in the winter of 1849-50 was the Artillery officer who had directed the fire on the side of Mestre in 1848. I have never known a nobler person. Brave, kind, and gay--as gentle as a lamb, as playful as a kitten--knightly in courtesy and in all tones of thought--ready at any instant to lay down his life for his country or his Emperor. He was by no means a rare instance either of gentleness or of virtue among the men whom the Liberal portion of our English press represent as only tyrants and barbarians. Radetzky himself was one of the kindest of men--his habitual expression was one of overflowing _bonhommie_, or of fatherly regard for the welfare of all around him. All who knew him loved him. In little things his kindness was almost ludicrous. I saw him at Verona run out of his own supper-room and return with a plate of soup in his hand, the waiters (his youngest aides-de-camp) not serving his lady guests fast enough to please him; yet they were nimble enough, as I knew in a race with two of them among the fire-flies by the Mincio, only the evening before. For a long time I regarded the Austrians as the only protection of Italy from utter dissolution (such as that which, I see to-day, it is reported that the Tuscan army has fallen into, left for five weeks to itself), and I should have looked upon them as such still, if the Sardinian Government had not shown itself fit to take their place. And the moment that any Italian Government was able to take their place, the Austrians necessarily became an obstacle to Italian progress, for all their virtues are incomprehensible to the Italians, and useless to them. Unselfish individually, the Austrians are nationally entirely selfish, and in this consists, so far as it is truly alleged against them, their barbarism. These men of whom I have been speaking would have given, any of them, life and fortune unhesitatingly, at their Emperor's bidding, but their magnanimity was precisely that of the Highlander or the Indian, incognizant of any principle of action but that of devotion to his chief or nation. All abstract grounds of conscience, all universal and human hopes, were inconceivable by them. Such men are at present capable of no feeling towards Italy but scorn; their power was like a bituminous cerecloth wrapping her corpse--it saved her from the rottenness of revolution; but it must be unwound, if the time has come for her resurrection.

I do not know if that time has come, or can come. Italy's true oppression is all her own. Spain is oppressed by the Spaniard, not by the Austrian. Greece needs but to be saved from the Greeks. No French Emperor, however mighty his arm or sound his faith, can give Italy freedom.

"A gift of that which is not to be given
By all the associate powers of earth and heaven."

But the time is come at least to bid her be free, if she has the power of freedom. It is not England, certainly, who should forbid her. I believe that is what it will come to, however--not so much because we are afraid of Napoleon, as because we are jealous of him. But of him and us I have something more to say than there is time for to-night. These good, stupid, affectionate, faithful Germans, too (grand fellows under arms; I never imagined so magnificent a soldiery as 15,000 of them which I made a shift to see, through sand clouds, march past the Prince Frederick William[4] on Saturday morning last). But to hear them fretting and foaming at the French getting into Milan!--they having absolutely no other idea on all this complicated business than that French are fighting Germans! Wrong or right, why or wherefore, matters not a jot to them. French are fighting Germans--somehow, somewhere, for some reason--and beer and Vaterland are in peril, and the English in fault, as we are assuredly, but not on that side, for I believe it to be quite true which a French friend, high in position, says in a letter this morning--"If the English had not sympathized with the Austrians there would have been no war." By way of keeping up the character of incoherence to which I have vowed myself, I may tell you that before that French letter came, I received another from a very sagacious Scotch friend (belonging, as I suppose most Scotch people do, to the class of persons who call themselves "religious"), containing this marvellous enunciation of moral principle, to be acted upon in difficult circumstances, "Mind your own business." It is a serviceable principle enough for men of the world, but a surprising one in the mouth of a person who professes to be a Bible obeyer. For, as far as I remember the tone of that obsolete book, "our own" is precisely the last business which it ever tells us to mind. It tells us often to mind God's business, often to mind other people's business; our own, in any eager or earnest way, not at all. "What thy hand findeth to do." Yes; but in God's fields, not ours. One can imagine the wiser fishermen of the Galilean lake objecting to Peter and Andrew that they were not minding their business, much more the commercial friends of Levi speaking with gentle pity of him about the receipt of Custom. "A bad man of business always--see what has come of it--quite mad at last."

And my astonishing friend went on to say that this was to be our principle of action "where the path was not quite clear"--as if any path ever _was_ clear till you got to the end of it, or saw it a long way off; as if all human possibility of path was not among clouds and brambles--often cold, always thorny--misty with roses occasionally, or dim with dew, often also with shadow of Death--misty, more particularly in England just now, with shadow of that commercially and otherwise valuable smoke before spoken of.

However, if the path is not to be seen, it may be felt, or at least tumbled off, without any particular difficulty. This latter course of proceeding is our probablest, of course.--But I can't write any more to-night. I am, etc.,

J. RUSKIN.

_Note_ to p. 6.--The lines quoted are from Wordsworth's "Poems
dedicated to National Independence and Liberty," Part II.,
Sonnet i. The second line should read, "By all the blended
powers of earth and heaven."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This and the two following letters deal, it will be seen, with "the Italian question" in 1859, when the peace of Europe was disturbed by the combined action of France and Sardinia against Austria in the cause of Italian independence. Of these three letters the first was written two days after the defeat of the Austrians at Magenta, followed by the entrance into Milan of the French, and the second a few days before the similar victory of the French and Sardinian armies at Solferino.

[2] Few readers need be reminded of the position of Tell in the list of Swiss patriots (_pace_ the "acutest historical investigation," which puts him in the list of mythical personages) in the early part of the fourteenth century; of Arnold von Winkelried who met the heroic death, by which he secured his country's freedom, at Sempach in 1386; or of Ulrich Zuingli, the Swiss Protestant leader of his time, who fell at Cappel, in the war of the Reformed against the Romish cantons, in 1531. At the battle of Morgarten, in 1315, twenty thousand Austrians were defeated by no more than thirteen hundred Swiss, with such valor that the name of the victors' canton was thereupon extended to the whole country, thenceforth called Switzerland.

It may be further noted that Arnold of Sempach is, with Leonidas, Curtius, and Sir Richard Grenville, named amongst the types of "the divinest of sacrifices, that of the patriot for his country," in Mr. Ruskin's Preface, "Bibliotheca Pastorum," Vol. i. p. xxxiii.

[3] The year of the Lombard insurrection, when Radetzky, the Austrian field-marshal, defeated the insurgents at Custozza near Verona. Radetzky died in 1858.

[4] The Prince Frederick William, now Emperor of Germany (having succeeded his brother Frederick William IV. in January, 1861), was at the date of this letter Regent of Prussia, and Commander-in-chief of the Prussian forces.

[From the "Scotsman," July 23, 1859.]

_THE ITALIAN QUESTION._

BERLIN, _June_ 15.

You would have had this second letter sooner, had I not lost myself, after despatching the first, in farther consideration of the theory of Non-Intervention, or minding one's own business. What, in logical terms, _is_ the theory? If one sees a costermonger wringing his donkey's tail, is it proper to "intervene"? and if one sees an Emperor or a System wringing a nation's neck, is it improper to intervene? Or is the Intervention allowable only in the case of hides, not of souls? for even so, I think you might find among modern Italians many quite as deserving of intervention as the donkey. Or is interference allowable when one person does one wrong to another person, but not when two persons do two wrongs to two, or three to three, or a multitude to a multitude; and is there any algebraic work on these square and cube roots of morality wherein I may find how many coadjutors or commissions any given crooked requires to make it straight? Or is it a geographical question; and may one advisably interfere at Berwick but not at Haddington? Or is there any graduated scale of intervention, practicable according to the longitude? I see my way less clearly, because the illustrations of the theory of Non-intervention are as obscure as its statement. The French are at present happy and prosperous; content with their ruler and themselves; their trade increasing, and their science and art advancing; their feelings towards other nations becoming every day more just. Under which circumstances we English non-interventionalists consider it our duty to use every means in our power of making the ruler suspected by the nation, and the nation unmanageable by the ruler. We call both all manner of names; exhaust every term of impertinence and every method of disturbance; and do our best, in indirect and underhand ways, to bring about revolution, assassination, or any other close of the existing system likely to be satisfactory to Royals[5] in general. This is your non-intervention when a nation is prosperous.

On the other hand, the Italian nation is unhappy and unprosperous; its trade annihilated, its arts and sciences retrograde, its nerve and moral sense prostrated together; it is capable only of calling to you for help, and you will not help it. The man you have been calling names, with his unruly colonels, undertakes to help it, and Christian England, with secret hope that, in order to satisfy her spite against the unruly colonels, the French army may be beaten, and the Papacy fully established over the whole of Italy--Christian England, I say, with this spiteful jealousy for one of her motives, and a dim, stupid, short-sighted, sluggish horror of interruption of business for the other, takes, declaratively and ostensibly, this highly Christian position. "Let who will prosper or perish, die or live--let what will be declared or believed--let whatsoever iniquity be done, whatsoever tyranny be triumphant, how many soever of faithful or fiery soldiery be laid in new embankments of dead bodies along those old embankments of Mincio and Brenta; yet will we English drive our looms, cast up our accounts, and bet on the Derby, in peace and gladness; our business is only therewith; for us there is no book of fate, only ledgers and betting-books; for us there is no call to meddle in far-away business. See ye to it. We wash our hands of it in that sea-foam of ours; surely the English Channel is better than Abana and Pharpar, or than the silver basin which Pilate made use of, and our soap is of the best almond-cake."

I hear the Derby was great this year.[6] I wonder, sometimes, whether anybody has ever calculated, in England, how much taxation the nation pays annually for the maintenance of that great national institution. Observe--what I say of the spirit in which the English bear themselves at present, is founded on what I myself have seen and heard, not on what I read in journals. I read them little at home--here I hardly see them. I have no doubt that in the Liberal papers one might find much mouthing about liberty, as in the Conservative much about order, it being neither liberty nor order which is wanted, but Justice. You may have Freedom of all Abomination, and Order of all Iniquity--if you look for Forms instead of Facts. Look for the facts first--the doing of justice howsoever and by whatsoever forms or informalities. And the forms will come--shapely enough, and sightly enough, afterwards. Yet, perhaps, not till long afterwards. Earnest as I am for the freedom of Italy, no one can hope less from it, for many a year to come. Even those Vaudois, whom you Presbyterians admire so much, have made as yet no great show of fruit out of their religious freedom. I went up from Turin to Torre di Lucerna to look at them last year. I have seldom slept in a dirtier inn, seldom seen peasants' cottages so ill built, and never yet in my life saw anywhere paths so full of nettles. The faces of the people are interesting, and their voices sweet, except in howlings on Sunday evening, which they performed to a very disquieting extent in the street till about half-past ten, waking me afterwards between twelve and one with another "catch," and a dance through the village of the liveliest character. Protestantism is apt sometimes to take a gayer character abroad than with us. Geneva has an especially disreputable look on Sunday evenings, and at Hanover I see the shops are as wide open on Sunday as Saturday; here, however, in Berlin, they shut up as close as you do at Edinburgh. I think the thing that annoyed me most at La Tour, however, was the intense sectarianism of the Protestant dogs. I can make friends generally, fast enough, with any canine or feline creature; but I could make nothing of those evangelical brutes, and there was as much snarling and yelping that afternoon before I got past the farmhouses to the open hill-side, as in any of your Free Church discussions. It contrasted very painfully with the behavior of such Roman Catholic dogs as I happen to know--St. Bernard's and others--who make it their business to entertain strangers. But the hill-side was worth reaching--for though that Lucerna valley is one of the least interesting I ever saw in the Alps, there is a craggy ridge on the north of it which commands a notable view. In about an hour and a half's walking you may get up to the top of a green, saddle-shaped hill, which separates the Lucerna valley from that of Angrogna; if then, turning to the left (westward), you take the steepest way you can find up the hill, another couple of hours will bring you to a cone of stones which the shepherds have built on the ridge, and there you may see all the historical sites of the valley of Angrogna as in a map--and as much of Monte Viso and Piedmont as clouds will let you. I wish I could draw you a map of Piedmont as I saw it that afternoon. The air was half full of white cumulus clouds, lying nearly level about fifteen hundred feet under the ridge; and through every gap of them a piece of Piedmont with a city or two. Turin, twenty-eight miles away as the bird flies, shows through one cloud-opening like a handful of golden sand in a pool of blue sea.

I've no time to write any more to-day, for I've been to Charlottenburg, out of love for Queen Louise.[7] I can't see a good painting of her anywhere, and they show her tomb by blue light, like the nun scene in _Robert le Diable_. A German woman's face, if beautiful at all, is exquisitely beautiful; but it depends mainly on the thoughtfulness of the eyes, and the bright hair. It rarely depends much upon the nose, which has perhaps a tendency to be--if anything--a little too broadish and flattish--perhaps one might even say in some cases, knobbish. (The Hartz mountains, I see, looking at them from Brunswick, have similar tendencies, less excusably and more decidedly.) So when the eyes are closed--and for the soft hair one has only furrowed marble--and the nose to its natural disadvantages adds that of being seen under blue light, the general effect is disappointing.

Frederick the Great's celebrated statue is at the least ten yards too high[8] from the ground to be of any use; one sees nothing but the edges of the cloak he never wore, the soles of his boots, and, in a redundant manner, his horse's tail. Under which vertically is his Apotheosis. In which process he sits upon the back of an eagle, and waves a palm, with appearance of satisfaction to himself, and it is to be hoped no danger of any damage to three stars in the neighborhood.

Kiss's Amazon makes a good grotesque for the side of the Museum steps; it was seen to disadvantage in London. The interior of the gallery is very beautiful in many ways; and Holbein's portrait of George Gyzen is worth coming all the way from England to see only ten minutes. I never saw so noble a piece of work of its kind in my life.

Believe me, etc.,
J. RUSKIN.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] A misprint for "Rogues." See next letter, p. 13.

[6] "Magnificent weather and excellent sport made the great people's meeting pass off with great _éclat_." ("Annual Register" for 1859, p. 73.) The race was won by Sir J. Hawley's Musjid.

[7] The mother of the present Emperor, whose treatment by Napoleon I., and whose own admirable qualities, have won for her the tender and affectionate memory of her people. She died in 1810. Her tomb at Charlottenburg is the work of the German sculptor, Christian Rauch.

[8] The full height of this statue (also the work of Rauch) is, inclusive of the pedestal, somewhat over forty-two feet from the ground. One of the bas-relief tablets which flank the pedestal represents the Apotheosis of the monarch. The visitor to Berlin may recall August Kiss's bronze group, representing the combat of an Amazon with a tiger, on the right side of the Old Museum steps; and Holbein's portrait of George Gyzen, a merchant of London, is No. 586 in the picture galleries of the Museum. It is described by Mr. Ruskin in his article on "Sir Joshua and Holbein" in the _Cornhill Magazine_ of March, 1860, and also in Wornum's "Life and Works of Holbein," p. 260 (London, 1867).

[From "The Scotsman," August 6, 1859.]

_THE ITALIAN QUESTION._

SCHAFFHAUSEN, _August_ 1, 1859.

_Letter to the Editor_ (_of "The Scotsman"_).

SIR: I have just received the number of the _Scotsman_ containing my second letter from Berlin, in which there is rather an awkward misprint of "royals" for "rogues," which must have puzzled some of your readers, no less than the general tone of the letter, written as it was for publication at another time, and as one of a series begun in another journal. I am obliged by the admission of the letter into your columns; and I should have been glad to continue in those columns the series I intended, had not the refusal of this letter by the _Witness_[9] shown me the liability to misapprehension under which I should be writing. I had thought that, seeing for these twenty years I have been more or less conversant with Italy and the Italians, a few familiar letters written to a personal friend, at such times as I could win from my own work, might not have been uninteresting to Scottish readers, even though my opinions might occasionally differ sharply from theirs, or be expressed in such rough way as strong opinions must be, when one has no time to polish them into more pleasing presentability. The refusal of the letter by the _Witness_ showed me that this was not so; and as I have no leisure to take up the subject methodically, I must leave what I have written in its present imperfect form. It is indeed not mainly a question of time, which I would spend gladly, though to handle the subject of the present state of Italy with any completeness would involve a total abandonment of other work for some weeks. But I feel too deeply in this matter to allow myself to think of it continuously. To me, the state of the modern political mind, which hangs the slaughter of twenty thousand men, and the destinies of twenty myriads of human souls, on the trick that transforms a Ministry, or the chances of an enlarged or diminished interest in trade, is something so horrible that I find no utterance wherewith to characterize it--nor any courage wherewith to face the continued thought of it, unless I had clear expectation of doing good by the effort--expectation which the mere existence of the fact forbids. I leave therefore the words I have written to such work as they may; hoping, indeed, nothing from any words; thankful, if a few people here and there understand and sympathize in the feelings with which they were written; and thankful, if none so sympathize, that I am able at least to claim some share in the sadness, though not in the triumph, of the words of Farinata--

"Fu' io sol colà, dove sofferto
Fu per ciascun di torre via Fiorenza,
Colui che la difese a viso aperto."[10]

I am, etc., J. RUSKIN.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] After a careful and repeated search in the columns of the _Witness_, I am still unable to certainly explain these allusions. It seems, however, that the two preceding letters had been sent to the _Witness_, which printed the first and refused to print the second. The _Scotsman_ printed both under the titles of "Mr. Ruskin on the Italian Question," and "Mr. Ruskin on Foreign Politics," whilst it distinguished this third letter by the additional heading of "Letter to the Editor." It may be conjectured, therefore, that the first two letters were reprinted by the _Scotsman_ from another paper, and that, in receiving the number of the _Scotsman_ containing the second, Mr. Ruskin did not know that it had reprinted the first also. As to the "series begun in another journal," it is, I think, clear that it had not been long continued, as the letter dated "June 15," sent to and refused by it, is spoken of as "the second letter," so that that dated "June 6" must have been the first, as this was unquestionably the last of the series.

[10]

"But singly there I stood, when, by consent
Of all, Florence had to the ground been razed,
The one who openly forbade the deed."

CARY'S DANTE--"L'Inferno," x. II. 90-93.

Farinata degli Uberti was a noble Florentine, and the leader of the Ghibelline faction, when they obtained a signal victory over the Guelfi at Montaperto, near the river Arbia. Machiavelli calls him "a man of exalted soul, and great military talents" (Hist. of Florence, Bk. ii). Subsequently, when it was proposed that, in order to maintain the ascendency of the Ghibelline faction in Tuscany, Florence should be destroyed, Farinata alone of all the Council opposed the measure, declaring that he had endured every hardship with no other view than that of being able to pass his days in his own country. (See Cary's notes to Canto x.)

[From "The Liverpool Albion," November 2, 1863.]

_THE FOREIGN POLICY OF ENGLAND._[11]

ZURICH, _Oct. 25th_, 1863.

SIR: I beg to acknowledge your favor of the 20th of October. My health does not now admit of my taking part frequently in public business; yet I should have held it a duty to accept the invitation of the directors of the Liverpool Institute, but that, for the time being, my temper is at fault, as well as my health; and I am wholly unable to go on with any of my proper work, owing to the horror and shame with which I regard the political position taken, or rather sunk into, by England in her foreign relations--especially in the affairs of Italy and Poland.[12] What these matters have to do with Art may not at first be clear, but I can perhaps make it so by a short similitude. Suppose I had been engaged by an English gentleman to give lectures on Art to his son. Matters at first go smoothly, and I am diligent in my definitions of line and color, until, one Sunday morning at breakfast time, a ticket-of-leave man takes a fancy to murder a girl in the road leading round the lawn, before the house-windows. My patron, hearing the screams, puts down his paper, adjusts his spectacles, slowly apprehends what is going on, and rings the bells for his smallest footman. "John, take my card and compliments to that gentleman outside the hedge, and tell him that his proceedings are abnormal, and, I may add, to me personally--offensive. Had that road passed through my property, I should have felt it my duty to interfere." John takes the card, and returns with it; the ticket-of-leave man finishes his work at his leisure; but, the screams ceasing as he fills the girl's mouth with clay, the English gentleman returns to his muffins, and congratulates himself on having "kept out of that mess." Presently afterwards he sends for me to know if I shall be ready to lecture on Monday. I am somewhat nervous, and answer--I fear rudely--"Sir, your son is a good lad; I hope he will grow to be a man--but, for the present, I cannot teach him anything. I should like, indeed, to teach _you_ something, but have no words for the lesson." Which indeed I have not. If I say any words on such matters, people ask me, "Would I have the country go to war? do I know how dreadful a thing war is?" Yes, truly, I know it. I like war as ill as most people--so ill, that I would not spend twenty millions a year in making machines for it, neither my holidays and pocket money in playing at it; yet I would have the country go to war, with haste, in a good quarrel; and, which is perhaps eccentric in me, rather in another's quarrel than in her own. We say of ourselves complacently that we will not go to war for an idea; but the phrase interpreted means only, that we will go to war for a bale of goods, but not for justice nor for mercy; and I would ask you to favor me so far as to read this letter to the students at your meeting, and say to them that I heartily wish them well; but for the present I am too sad to be of any service to them; that our wars in China and Japan[13] are not likely to furnish good subjects for historical pictures; that "ideas" happen, unfortunately, to be, in Art, the principal things; and that a country which will not fight for its ideas is not likely to have anything worth painting.

I have the honor to be, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.

The Secretary of the Liverpool Institute.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] This letter was written in answer to a request that Mr. Ruskin would come and preside at the distribution of prizes among the students in the Science and Art Department of the Liverpool Institute, on Saturday, Oct. 31, 1863. It was subsequently read on the occasion of distribution, in accordance with the wish expressed towards the end of the letter.

[12] See the preceding and the following letter. This one was, it will be seen, written in the year of the last great struggle of Poland against Russia.

[13] A The expedition of the English and French against China was begun in the August of 1860; the war in Japan in the summer of 1863.

[From "The Morning Post," July 7, 1864.]

_THE POSITION OF DENMARK._

_To the Editor of_ "_The Morning Post_."

SIR: Will you allow me, in fewest words, to say how deeply I concur in all that is said in that noble letter of Lord Townshend's published in your columns this morning--except only in its last sentence, "It is time to protest."[14] Alas! if protests were of any use, men with hearts and lips would have protested enough by this time. But they are of none, and can be of none. What true words are worth any man's utterance, while it is possible for such debates as last Monday's to be, and two English gentlemen can stand up before the English Commons to quote Virgil at each other, and round sentences, and show their fineness of wrist in their pretty little venomous carte and tierce of personality, while, even as they speak, the everlasting silence is wrapping the brave massacred Danes?[15] I do not know, never shall know, how this is possible. If a cannon shot carried off their usher's head, nay, carried off but his rod's head, at their room door, they would not round their sentences, I fancy, in asking where the shot came from; but because these infinite masses of advancing slaughter are a few hundred miles distant from them, they can speak their stage speeches out in content. Mr. Gladstone must go to places, it seems, before he can feel! Let him go to Alsen, as he went to Naples,[16] and quote Virgil to the Prussian army. The English mind, judging by your leaders, seems divided between the German-cannon nuisance and the Savoyard street-organ nuisance; but was there ever hurdy-gurdy like this dissonance of eternal talk?[17] The Savoyard at least grinds his handle one way, but these classical discords on the double pipe, like Mr. Kinglake's two tunes--past and present[18]--on Savoy and Denmark, need stricter police interference, it seems to me! The cession of Savoy was the peaceful present of a few crags, goats, and goatherds by one king to another; it was also fair pay for fair work, and, in the profoundest sense, no business of ours. Whereupon Mr. Kinglake mewed like a moonstruck cat going to be made a mummy of for Bubastis. But we saw the noble Circassian nation murdered, and never uttered word for them. We saw the noble Polish nation sent to pine in ice, and never struck blow for them. Now the nation of our future Queen calls to us for help in its last agony, and we round sentences and turn our backs. Sir, I have no words for these things, because I have no hope. It is not these squeaking puppets who play before us whom we have to accuse; it is not by cutting the strings of them that we can redeem our deadly error.

We English, as a nation, know not, and care not to know, a single broad or basic principle of human justice. We have only our instincts to guide us. We will hit anybody again who hits us. We will take care of our own families and our own pockets; and we are characterized in our present phase of enlightenment mainly by rage in speculation, lavish expenditure on suspicion or panic, generosity whereon generosity is useless, anxiety for the souls of savages, regardlessness of those of civilized nations, enthusiasm for liberation of blacks, apathy to enslavement of whites, proper horror of regicide, polite respect for populicide, sympathy with those whom we can no longer serve, and reverence for the dead, whom we have ourselves delivered to death.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.

DENMARK HILL, _July_ 6.

FOOTNOTES:

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Arrows of the Chace, vol. 2/2Chapter IV: Epilogue: 201 (1)

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