Chapter XIII: Letter VII: The Elysium of ancient days. The definitions of true,

and spurious, Communism. Explanation of the design of true
Communism, in Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia.” This letter, though
treating of matters necessary to the whole work, yet introduces
them prematurely, being written, incidentally, upon the ruin of
Paris.

Assisi, 18th May, 1874.

So ended, as Fors would have it, my abstraction, which I see Fors had her reason for stopping me in; else the abstraction would have needed farther abstracting. As it is, the reader may find in it the real gist of the remaining letters, and discern what a stiff business we have in hand,—rent, capital, and interest, all to be attacked at once! and a method of education shown to be possible in virtue, as cheaply as in vice!

I should have got my business, stiff though it may be, farther forward by this time, but for that same revolution in Paris, and burning of the Tuileries, which greatly confused my plan by showing me how much baser the human material I had to deal with, was, than I thought in beginning.

That a Christian army (or, at least, one which Saracens would have ranked with that they attacked, under the general name of Franks,) should fiercely devastate and rob an entire kingdom laid at their mercy by the worst distress;—that the first use made by this distressed country of the defeat of its armies would be to overthrow its government; and that, when its metropolis had all but perished in conflagration during the contest between its army and mob, no warning should be taken by other civilized societies, but all go trotting on again, next week, in their own several roads to ruin, persistently, as they had trotted before,—bells jingling, and whips cracking,—these things greatly appalled me, finding I had only slime to build with instead of mortar; and shook my plan partly out of shape.

The frightfullest thing of all, to my mind, was the German temper, in its naïve selfishness; on which point, having been brought round again to it in my last letter, I have now somewhat more to say.

In the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ of 7th March, this year, under the head of ‘This Evening’s News,’ appeared an article of which I here reprint the opening portion.

The well-known Hungarian author, Maurus Jokai, is at present a
visitor in the German capital. As a man of note he easily obtained
access to Prince Bismarck’s study, where an interesting
conversation took place, which M. Jokai reports pretty fully to the
Hungarian journal the Hon:—

“The Prince was, as usual, easy in his manner, and communicative,
and put a stop at the very outset to the Hungarian’s attempt at
ceremony. M. Jokai humorously remarked upon the prevalence of
‘iron’ in the surroundings of the ‘iron’ Prince. Among other
things, there is an iron couch, and an iron safe, in which the
Chancellor appears to keep his cigars. Prince Bismarck was struck
by the youthful appearance of his guest, who is ten years his
junior, but whose writings he remembers to have seen reviewed long
ago, in the Augsburg Gazette (at that time still, the Chancellor
said, a clever paper) when he bore a lieutenant’s commission. In
the ensuing conversation, Prince Bismarck pointed out the paramount
necessity to Europe of a consolidated State in the position of
Austro-Hungary. It was mainly on that account that he concluded
peace with so great despatch in 1866. Small independent States in
the East would be a misfortune to Europe. Austria and Hungary must
realize their mutual interdependence, and the necessity of being
one. However, the dualist system of government must be preserved,
because the task of developing the State, which on this side of the
Leitha falls to the Germans, beyond that river naturally falls to
the Magyars. The notion that Germany has an inclination to annex
more land, Prince Bismarck designated as a myth. God preserve the
Germans from such a wish! Whatever more territory they might
acquire would probably be undermined by Papal influence, and they
have enough of that already. Should the Germans of Austria want to
be annexed by Germany, the Chancellor would feel inclined to
declare war against them for that wish alone. A German Minister who
should conceive the desire to annex part of Austria would deserve
to be hanged—a punishment the Prince indicated by gesture. He does
not wish to annex even a square foot of fresh territory, not as
much as two pencils he kept on playing with during the conversation
would cover. Those pencils, however, M. Jokai remarks, were big
enough to serve as walking-sticks, and on the map they would have
reached quite from Berlin to Trieste. Prince Bismarck went on to
justify his annexation of Alsace-Loraine by geographical necessity.
Otherwise he would rather not have grafted the French twig upon the
German tree.

The French are enemies never to be appeased. Take away from them the cook, the tailor, and the hairdresser, and what remains of them is a copper-coloured Indian.”

Now it does not matter whether Prince Bismarck ever said this, or not. That the saying should be attributed to him in a leading journal, without indication of doubt or surprise, is enough to show what the German temper is publicly recognized to be. And observe what a sentence it is—thus attributed to him. The French are only copper-coloured Indians, finely dressed. This said of the nation which gave us Charlemagne, St. Louis, St. Bernard, and Joan of Arc; which founded the central type of chivalry in the myth of Roland; which showed the utmost height of valour yet recorded in history, in the literal life of Guiscard; and which built Chartres Cathedral!

But the French are not what they were! No; nor the English, for that matter; probably we have fallen the farther of the two: meantime the French still retain, at the root, the qualities they always had; and of one of these, a highly curious and commendable one, I wish you to take some note to-day.

Among the minor nursery tales with which my mother allowed me to relieve the study of the great nursery tale of Genesis, my favourite was Miss Edgeworth’s “Frank.” The authoress chose this for the boy’s name, because she meant him to be a type of Frankness, or openness of heart:—truth of heart, that is to say, liking to lay itself open. You are in the habit, I believe, some of you, still, of speaking occasionally of English Frankness;—not recognizing, through the hard clink of the letter K, that you are only talking, all the while, of English Frenchness. Still less when you count your cargoes of gold from San Francisco, do you pause to reflect what San means, or what Francis means, without the Co;—or how it came to pass that the power of this mountain town of Assisi, where not only no gold can be dug, but where St. Francis forbade his Company to dig it anywhere else—came to give names to Devil’s towns far across the Atlantic—(and by the way you may note how clumsy the Devil is at christening; for if by chance he gets a fresh York all to himself, he never has any cleverer notion than to call it ‘New York’; and in fact, having no mother-wit from his dam, is obliged very often to put up with the old names which were given by Christians,—Nombre di Dios, Trinidad, Vera Cruz, and the like, even when he has all his own way with everything else in the places, but their names).

But to return. You have lately had a fine notion, have you not, of English Liberty as opposed to French Slavery?

Well, whatever your English liberties may be, the French knew what the word meant, before you. For France, if you will consider of it, means nothing else than the Country of Franks;—the country of a race so intensely Free that they for evermore gave name to Freedom. The Greeks sometimes got their own way, as a mob; but nobody, meaning to talk of liberty, calls it ‘Greekness.’ The Romans knew better what Libertas meant, and their word for it has become common enough, in that straitened form, on your English tongue; but nobody calls it ‘Romanness.’ But at last comes a nation called the Franks; and they are so inherently free and noble in their natures, that their name becomes the word for the virtue; and when you now want to talk of freedom of heart, you say Frankness, and for the last political privilege which you have it so much in your English minds to get, you haven’t so much as an English word, but must call it by the French one, ‘Franchise.’ [43]

“Freedom of heart,” you observe, I say. Not the English freedom of Insolence, according to Mr. B., (see above, Letter 29,) but pure French openness of heart, Fanchette’s and her husband’s frankness, the source of joy, and courtesy, and civility, and passing softness of human meeting of kindly glance with glance. Of which Franchise, in her own spirit Person, here is the picture for you, from the French Romance of the Rose,—a picture which English Chaucer was thankful to copy.

“And after all those others came Franchise,
Who was not brown, nor grey,
But she was white as snow.
And she had not the nose of an Orleanois.
Aussi had she the nose long and straight.
Eyes green, and laughing—vaulted eyebrows;
She had her hair blonde and long,
And she was simple as a dove.
The body she had sweet, and brightly bred;
And she dared not do, nor say
To any one, anything she ought not.
And if she knew of any man
Who was in sorrow for love of her,
So soon she had great pity for him,
For she had the heart so pitiful,
And so sweet and so lovely,
That no one suffered pain about her,
But she would help him all she could.
And she wore a surquanye
Which was of no coarse cloth;
There’s none so rich as far as Arras.
And it was so gathered up, and so joined together,
That there was not a single point of it
Which was not set in its exact place, rightly.
Much well was dressed Franchise,
For no robe is so pretty
As the surquanye for a demoiselle.
A girl is more gentle and more darling
In surquanye than in coat,
And the white surquanye
Signifies that sweet and frank
Is she who puts it on her.”

May I ask you now to take to heart those two lines of this French description of Frenchness:

“And she dared not do, nor say
To any one, anything she ought not.”

That is not your modern notion of Frenchness, or franchise, or libertas, or liberty—for all these are synonyms for the same virtue. And yet the strange thing is that the lowest types of the modern French grisette are the precise corruption of this beautiful Franchise: and still retain, at their worst, some of the grand old qualities; the absolute sources of corruption being the neglect of their childhood by the upper classes, the abandonment to their own resources, and the development therefore of “Liberty and Independence,” in your beautiful English, not French, sense.

“Livrée à elle-meme depuis l’âge de treize ans, habituée à ne compter que sur elle seule, elle avait de la vie un expérience dont j’étais confondue. De ce Paris où elle était née, elle savait tout, elle connaissait tout.

Je n’avais pas idée d’une si complete absence de sens moral, d’une si inconsciente dépravation, d’une impudeur si effrontément naïve.

La règle de sa conduite, c’était sa fantaisie, son instinct, le caprice du moment.

Elle aimait les longues stations dans les cafés, les mélodrames entremêlés de chopes et d’oranges pendant les entr’actes, les parties de canot à Asnières, et surtout, et avant tout, le bal.

Elle était comme chez elle à l’Élysée—Montmartre et au Château-Rouge; elle y connaissait tout le monde, le chef d’orchestre la saluait, ce dont elle était extraordinairement fière, et quantité de gens la tutoyaient.

Je l’accompagnais partout, dans les commencements, et bien que je n’étais pas précisément naïve, ni gênée par les scrupules de mon éducation, je fus tellement consternée de l’incroyable désordre de sa vie, que je ne pus m’empêcher de lui en faire quelques représentations.

Elle se fâcha tout rouge.

Tu fais ce qui te plaît, me dit-elle, laisse-moi faire ce qui me convient.

C’est un justice que je lui dois: jamais elle n’essaya sur moi son influence, jamais elle ne m’engagea à suivre son exemple. Ivre de liberté elle respectait la liberté des autres.”

Such is the form which Franchise has taken under republican instruction. But of the true Franchise of Charlemagne and Roland, there were, you must note also, two distinct forms. In the last stanzas of the Chant de Roland, Normandy and France have two distinct epithets,—“Normandie, la franche; France, la solue” (soluta). “Frank Normandy; Loose France. Solute;”—we, adding the dis, use the words loose and dissolute only in evil sense. But ‘France la solue’ has an entirely lovely meaning. The frankness of Normandy is the soldier’s virtue; but the unbinding, so to speak, of France, is the peasant’s.

“And having seen that lovely maid,
Why should I fear to say
That she is ruddy, fleet, and strong,
And down the rocks can leap along
Like rivulets in May?”

It is curious that the most beautiful descriptive line in all Horace,

“montibus altis
Levis crepante lympha desilit pede,”

comes in the midst of the dream of the blessed islands which are to be won by following the founders of—what city, think you? The city that first sang the “Marseillaise.”

“Juppiter illa piae secrevit litora genti.”

Recollect that line, my French readers, if I chance to find any, this month, nor less the description of those ‘arva beata’ as if of your own South France; and then consider also those prophetic lines, true of Paris as of Rome,—

“Nec fera coerulea domuit Germania pube.
Impia, perdemus devoti sanguinis aetas.”

Consider them, I say, and deeply, thinking over the full force of those words, “devoti sanguinis,” and of the ways in which the pure blood of Normandie la franche, and France la solue, has corrupted itself, and become accursed. Had I but time to go into the history of that word ‘devoveo,’ what a piece of philology it would lead us into! But, for another kind of opposition to the sweet Franchise of old time, take this sentence of description of another French maiden, by the same author from whom I have just quoted the sketch of the grisette:

“C’était une vieille fille d’une cinquantaine d’années, sèche et jaune, avec un grand nez d’oiseau de proie, très noble, encore plus dévote, joueuse comme la dame de pique en personne, et médisante à faire battre des montagnes.”

You see what accurate opposition that gives you of another kind, to Franchise. You even have the ‘nez d’Orleanois’ specified, which the song of the Rose is so careful to tell you Franchise had not.

Here is another illustrative sentence:

“La colère, à la fin, une de ces terribles colères blanches de dévote, chassait des flots de bile au cerveau de Mademoiselle de la Rochecardeau, et blêmissait ses lèvres.”

These three sentences I have taken from two novels of Emile Gaboriau, “L’argent des autres,” and “La Degringolade.” They are average specimens of modern French light literature, with its characteristic qualities and defects, and are both of them in many respects worth careful study; but chiefly in the representation they give, partly with conscious blame, and partly in unconscious corruption, of the Devoti sanguinis aetas; with which, if you would compare old France accurately, read first Froude’s sketch of the life of Bishop Hugo of Lincoln, and think over the scene between him and Cœur de Lion.

You have there, as in life before you, two typical Frenchmen of the twelfth century—a true king, and a true priest, representing the powers which the France of that day contrived to get set over her, and did, on the whole, implicitly and with her heart obey.

They are not altogether—by taking the dancing-master and the hairdresser away from them—reduced to copper-coloured Indians.

If, next, you will take the pains—and it will need some pains, for the book is long and occasionally tiresome—to read the Degringolade, you will find it nevertheless worth your while; for it gives you a modern Frenchman’s account of the powers which France in the nineteenth century contrived to get set over her; and obeyed—not with her heart, but restively, like an ill-bred dog or mule, which have no honour in their obedience, but bear the chain and bit all the same.

But there is a farther and much more important reason for my wish that you should read this novel. It gives you types of existent Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of a very different class. They are, indeed, only heroes and heroines in a quite second-rate piece of literary work. But these stereotypes, nevertheless, have living originals. There is to be found in France, as truly the Commandant Delorge, as the Comte de Combelaine. And as truly Mademoiselle de Maillefert as the Duchesse de Maumussy. How is it, then, that the Count and Duchess command everything in France, and that the Commandant and Demoiselle command nothing?—that the best they can do is to get leave to live—unknown, and unthought-of? The question, believe me, is for England also; and a very pressing one.

Of the frantic hatred of all religion developed in the French republican mind, the sentences I have quoted are interesting examples. I have not time to speak of them in this letter, but they struck me sharply as I corrected the press to-day; for I had been standing most part of the morning by St. Paul’s grave, thinking over his work in the world. A bewildered peasant, from some green dingle of Campagna, who had seen me kneel when the Host passed, and took me therefore to be a human creature and a friend, asked me ‘where St. Paul was’?

‘There, underneath,’ I answered.

‘There?’ he repeated, doubtfully,—as dissatisfied.

‘Yes,’ I answered; ‘his body at least;—his head is at the Lateran.’

‘Il suo corpo,’ again he repeated, still as in discontent. Then, after a pause, ‘E la sua statua?’

Such a wicked thing to ask for that! wasn’t it, my Evangelical friends? You would so much rather have had him ask for Hudson’s!

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I have had by me, some time, three eager little fragments from one of Mr. Sillar’s letters:—too eager, always, in thinking this one sin of receiving interest on money means every other. I know many excellent people, happily, whose natures have not been spoiled by it: the more as it has been done absolutely without knowledge of being wrong. I did not find out the wrong of it myself, till Mr. Sillar showed me the way to judge of it.

The passage which I have italicized, from Mr. Lecky, is a very precious statement of his sagacious creed. The chief jest of it is his having imagined himself to be of Aristotle’s ‘species’!

“To get profit without responsibility has been a fond scheme as impossible of honest attainment as the philosopher’s stone or perpetual motion. Visionaries have imagined such things to exist, but it has been reserved for this mammon-worshipping generation to find it in that arrangement by which a man, without labour, can secure a permanent income with perfect security, and without diminution of the capital.

“A view of it is evidently taken by Lord Bacon when he says that usury bringeth the treasure of a realm into few hands; for the usurer trading on a certainty, and other men on uncertainties, at the end of the game all the money will be in the box.

“We have had now an opportunity of practically testing this theory; not more than seventeen years have elapsed since all restraint was removed from the growth of what Lord Coke calls this ‘pestilent weed’ and we see Bacon’s words verified, the rich becoming richer, and the poor poorer, is the cry throughout the whole civilized world. Rollin in his Ancient History, speaking of the Roman Empire, tells us that it has been the ruin of every state where it was tolerated. It is in a fair way to ruin this of ours, and ruin it it will, unless England’s sons calmly and candidly investigate the question for themselves, and resolutely act upon the conclusions to which the investigation must lead them.

“There is such a thing as unlimited liability; of the justice of such laws I do not now speak, but the law exists, and as it was made by moneyed men in the interest of moneyed men they cannot refuse to be judged by it. The admission, therefore, of the fact that interest is a share of the profit, would throw upon the money-lender the burden of unlimited liability; this he certainly refuses to admit, consequently he has no alternative but to confess that interest has nothing whatever to do with profit, but that it is a certain inherent property of money, viz., that of producing money, and that interest is as legitimately the offspring of money as a Calf is that of a Cow. That this is really the stand now taken, may be shown from the literature and practice of the present day. Mr. Lecky, one of the latest champions of interest, boldly admits it. In his history of the rise and influence of rationalism in Europe, p. 284, after quoting Aristotle’s saying, that all money is sterile by nature, he says, ‘This is an absurdity of Aristotle’s, and the number of centuries during which it was incessantly asserted without being (so far as we know) once questioned, is a curious illustration of the longevity of a sophism when expressed in a terse form, and sheltered by a great name. It is enough to make one ashamed of his species to think that Bentham was the first to bring into notice the simple consideration that if the borrower employs the borrowed money in buying bulls and cows, and if these produce calves to ten times the value of the interest, the money borrowed can scarcely be said to be sterile.’

“And now to remedy all this. Were there no remedy, to parade it in our view, would be cruel; but there is one, so simple, that like those of divine making, it may be despised for its simplicity. It consists in the recognition of the supreme wisdom which forbade the taking of usury. We should not reimpose the usury laws, which were in themselves a blunder and a snare, nor would we advocate the forcible repression of the vice any more than we do that of other vices, such as gambling or prostitution, but we would put them on precisely the same footing, and enact thus—

Whereas, usury is a sin detestable and abominable, the law will
refuse to recognize any contract in which it is an element.

The first effect of this would be, that all those who had lent, taking security into their hands, would have no power of oppression beyond keeping the pledge,—the balance of their debts being on a similar footing to those of the men who had lent without security.

“To these their chance of repayment would depend on their previous conduct. If they had lent their money to honourable men, they would surely be repaid; if to rogues, they surely would not; and serve them right. Those, and those only, who have lent without interest would have the power of an action at law to recover; and as such men must have possessed philanthropy, they could safely be trusted with that power.

“Regarding the future employment of money, a usurer who intended to continue his unholy trade, would lend only to such men as would repay without legal pressure, and from such men trade would not have to fear competition. But to disreputable characters the money-market would be hermetically sealed; and then as commerce, freed from the competition of these scoundrels, began again to be remunerative, we should find it more to our advantage to take an interest in commerce than usury from it, and so gradually would equity supersede iniquity, and peace and prosperity be found where now abound corruption, riot, and rebellion, with all the host of evils inseparable from a condition of plethoric wealth on one hand, and on the other hopeless and despairing poverty.”

II. I intended in this note to have given some references to the first use of the word Franc, as an adjective. But the best dictionary-makers seem to have been foiled by it. “I recollect,” (an Oxford friend writes to me,) “Clovis called his axe ‘Francisca’ when he threw it to determine by its fall where he should build a church,” and in Littré’s dictionary a root is suggested, in the Anglo-Saxon Franca, ‘javelin.’ But I think these are all collateral, not original uses. I am not sure even when the word came to be used for the current silver coin of France: that, at least, must be ascertainable. It is curious that in no fit of Liberty and Equality, the anti-Imperialists have thought of calling their golden coins ‘Citizens’ instead of ‘Napoleons’; nor even their sous, Sansculottes.

III. Some of my correspondents ask me what has become of my promised additional Fors on the glaciers. Well, it got crevassed, and split itself into three; and then relegated itself into a somewhat compact essay on glaciers; and then got jammed up altogether, because I found that the extremely scientific Professor Tyndall had never distinguished the quality of viscosity from plasticity, (or the consistence of honey from that of butter,) still less the gradations of character in the approach of metals, glass, or stone, to their freezing-points; and that I wasn’t as clear as could be wished on some of these matters myself; and, in fact, that I had better deal with the subject seriously in my Oxford lectures than in Fors, which I hope to do this next autumn, after looking again at the riband structure of the Brenva. Meantime, here—out of I don’t know what paper, (I wish my correspondents would always cross the slips they cut out with the paper’s name and date,)—is a lively account of the present state of affairs, with a compliment to Professor Tyndall on his style of debate, which I beg humbly to endorse.

“An awful battle, we regret to say, is now raging between some of the most distinguished men of Science, Literature, and Art, for all those three fair sisters have hurtled into the Homeric fray. The combatants on one side are Professors G. Forbes, Tait, and Ruskin, with Mr. Alfred Wills, and on the other—alone, but fearless and undismayed—the great name of Tyndall. The causa teterrima belli is in itself a cold and unlikely one—namely, the glaciers of Switzerland; but fiercer the fight could not be, we grieve to state, if the question of eternal punishment, with all its fiery accessory scenery, were under discussion. We have no rash intention of venturing into that terrible battleground where Professor Ruskin is laying about him with his ‘Fors Clavigera,’ and where Professor Tait, like another Titan, hurls wildly into the affrighted air such epithets as ‘contemptible,’ ‘miserable,’ ‘disgusting,’ ‘pernicious,’ ‘pestilent.’ These adjectives, for anything that ignorant journalists can know, may mean, in Scotch scientific parlance, everything that is fair, chivalrous, becoming, and measured in argument. But, merely from the British instinct of fair play, which does not like to see four against one, and without venturing a single word about the glaciers, we cannot help remarking how much more consistent with the dignity of science appears Professor Tyndall’s answer in the last number of the Contemporary Review. If it be true that the man who keeps his temper is generally in the right, we shall decidedly back Mr. Tyndall and the late lamented Agassiz in the present dreadful conflict. Speaking, for instance, of those same furious adjectives which we have culled from the literary parterre of Professor Tait, Dr. Tyndall sweetly says, ‘The spirit which prompts them may, after all, be but a local distortion of that noble force of heart which answered the Cameron’s Gathering at Waterloo; carried the Black Watch to Coomassie; and which has furnished Scotland with the materials of an immortal history. Still, rudeness is not independence, bluster is not strength, nor is coarseness courage. We have won the human understanding from the barbarism of the past; but we have won along with it the dignity, courtesy, and truth of civilized life. And the man who on the platform or in the press does violence to this ethical side of human nature discharges but an imperfect duty to the public, whatever the qualities of his understanding may be.’ This, we humbly think, is how men of science ought to talk when they quarrel—if they quarrel at all.”

I hope much to profit by this lesson. I have not my “School for Scandal” by me—but I know where to find it the minute I get home; and I’ll do my best. “The man who,” etc., etc.;—yes, I think I can manage it.

FORS CLAVIGERA.