Chapter XIII: Letter LXXII: Venice, 9th November, 1876, 7 morning

I have set my writing-table close to the pillars of the great window of the Ca’ Ferro, which I drew, in 1841, carefully, with those of the next palace, Ca’ Contarini Fasan. Samuel Prout was so pleased with the sketch that he borrowed it, and made the upright drawing from it of the palace with the rich balconies, ‘which now represents his work very widely as a chromolithotint. [107]

Between the shafts of the pillars, the morning sky is seen pure and pale, relieving the grey dome of the church of the Salute; but beside that vault, and like it, vast thunderclouds heap themselves above the horizon, catching the light of dawn upon them where they rise, far westward, over the dark roof of the ruined Badia;—but all so massive, that, half an hour ago, in the dawn, I scarcely knew the Salute dome and towers from theirs; while the sea-gulls, rising and falling hither and thither in clusters above the green water beyond my balcony, tell me that the south wind is wild on Adria.

“Dux inquieti turbidus Adriæ.”—The Sea has her Lord, and the sea-birds are prescient of the storm; but my own England, ruler of the waves in her own proud thoughts, can she rule the tumult of her people, or, pilotless, even so much as discern the thunderclouds heaped over her Galilean lake of life?

Here is a little grey cockle-shell, lying beside me, which I gathered, the other evening, out of the dust of the Island of St. Helena; and a brightly-spotted snail-shell, from the thistly sands of Lido; and I want to set myself to draw these, and describe them, in peace.

‘Yes,’ all my friends say, ‘that is my business; why can’t I mind it, and be happy?’

Well, good friends, I would fain please you, and myself with you; and live here in my Venetian palace, luxurious; scrutinant of dome, cloud, and cockle-shell. I could even sell my books for not inconsiderable sums of money if I chose to bribe the reviewers, pay half of all I got to the booksellers, stick bills on the lamp-posts, and say nothing but what would please the Bishop of Peterborough.

I could say a great deal that would please him, and yet be very good and useful; I should like much again to be on terms with my old publisher, and hear him telling me nice stories over our walnuts, this Christmas, after dividing his year’s spoil with me in Christmas charity. And little enough mind have I for any work, in this seventy-seventh year that’s coming of our glorious century, wider than I could find in the compass of my cockle-shell.

But alas! my prudent friends, little enough of all that I have a mind to may be permitted me. For this green tide that eddies by my threshold is full of floating corpses, and I must leave my dinner to bury them, since I cannot save; and put my cockle-shell in cap, and take my staff in hand, to seek an unincumbered shore. This green sea-tide!—yes, and if you knew it, your black and sulphurous tides also—Yarrow, and Teviot, and Clyde, and the stream, for ever now drumly and dark as it rolls on its way, at the ford of Melrose.

Yes, and the fair lakes and running waters in your English park pleasure-grounds,—nay, also the great and wide sea, that gnaws your cliffs,—yes, and Death, and Hell also, more cruel than cliff or sea; and a more neutral episcopal person than even my Lord of Peterborough [108] stands, level-barred balance in hand,—waiting (how long?) till the Sea shall give up the dead which are in it, and Death, and Hell, give up the dead which are in them.

Have you ever thought of, or desired to know, the real meaning of that sign, seen with the human eyes of his soul by the disciple whom the Lord loved? Yes, of course you have! and what a grand and noble verse you always thought it! “And the Sea——” Softly, good friend,—I know you can say it off glibly and pompously enough, as you have heard it read a thousand times; but is it, then, merely a piece of pomp? mere drumming and trumpeting, to tell you—what might have been said in three words—that all the dead rose again, whether they had been bedridden, or drowned, or slain? If it means no more than that, is it not, to speak frankly, bombast, and even bad and half unintelligible bombast?—for what does ‘Death’ mean, as distinguished from the Sea,—the American lakes? or Hell as distinguished from Death,—a family vault instead of a grave?

But suppose it is not bombast, and does mean something that it would be well you should think of,—have you yet understood it,—much less, thought of it? Read the whole passage from the beginning: “I saw the Dead, small and great, stand before God. And the Books were opened;”—and so to the end.

‘Stand’ in renewed perfectness of body and soul—each redeemed from its own manner of Death.

For have not they each their own manner? As the seed by the drought, or the thorn,—so the soul by the soul’s hunger, and the soul’s pang;—athirst in the springless sand; choked in the return-wave of Edom; grasped by the chasm of the earth: some, yet calling “out of the depths;” but some—“Thou didst blow with Thy wind, and the sea covered them; they sank as lead in the mighty waters.” But now the natural grave, in which the gentle saints resigned their perfect body to the dust, and perfect spirit to Him who gave it;—and now the wide sea of the world, that drifted with its weeds so many breasts that heaved but with the heaving deep;—and now the Death that overtook the lingering step, and closed the lustful eyes;—and now the Hell, that hid with its shade, and scourged with its agony; the fierce and foul spirits that had forced its gates in flesh: [109]—all these the Loved Apostle saw compelled to restore their ruin; and all these, their prey, stand once again, renewed, as their Maker made them, before their Maker. “And the Sea gave up the Dead which were in it, and Death, and Hell, the dead which were in them.”

Not bombast, good reader, in any wise; nor a merely soothing melody of charming English, to be mouthed for a ‘second lesson.’

But is it worse than bombast, then? Is it, perchance, pure Lie?

Carpaccio, at all events, thought not; and this, as I have told you, is the first practical opinion of his I want you to be well informed of.

Since that last Fors was written, one of my friends found for me the most beautiful of all the symbols in the picture of the Dream;—one of those which leap to the eyes when they are understood, yet which, in the sweet enigma, I had deliberately twice painted, without understanding.

At the head of the princess’s bed is embroidered her shield; (of which elsewhere)—but on a dark blue-green space in the cornice above it is another very little and bright shield, it seemed,—but with no bearing. I painted it, thinking it was meant merely for a minute repetition of the escutcheon below, and that the painter had not taken the trouble to blazon the bearings again. (I might have known Carpaccio never would even omit without meaning.) And I never noticed that it was not in a line above the escutcheon, but exactly above the princess’s head. It gleams with bright silver edges out of the dark-blue ground—the point of the mortal Arrow!

At the time it was painted the sign would necessarily have been recognised in a moment; and it completes the meaning of the vision without any chance of mistake.

And it seems to me, guided by such arrow-point, the purpose of Fors that I should make clear the meaning of what I have myself said on this matter, throughout the six years in which I have been permitted to carry on the writing of these letters, and to preface their series for the seventh year, with the interpretation of this Myth of Venice.

I have told you that all Carpaccio’s sayings are of knowledge, not of opinion. And I mean by knowledge, communicable knowledge. Not merely personal, however certain—like Job’s ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ but discovered truth, which can be shown to all men who are willing to receive it. No great truth is allowed by nature to be demonstrable to any person who, foreseeing its consequences, desires to refuse it. He has put himself into the power of the Great Deceiver; and will in every effort be only further deceived, and place more fastened faith in his error.

This, then, is the truth which Carpaccio knows, and would teach:—

That the world is divided into two groups of men; the first, those whose God is their God, and whose glory is their glory, who mind heavenly things; and the second, men whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, [110] who mind earthly things. That is just as demonstrable a scientific fact as the separation of land from water. There may be any quantity of intermediate mind, in various conditions of bog;—some, wholesome Scotch peat,—some, Pontine marsh,—some, sulphurous slime, like what people call water in English manufacturing towns; but the elements of Croyance and Mescroyance are always chemically separable out of the putrescent mess: by the faith that is in it, what life or good it can still keep, or do, is possible; by the miscreance in it, what mischief it can do, or annihilation it can suffer, is appointed for its work and fate. All strong character curdles itself out of the scum into its own place and power, or impotence: and they that sow to the Flesh do of the Flesh reap corruption; and they that sow to the Spirit, do of the Spirit reap Life.

I pause, without writing ‘everlasting,’ as perhaps you expected. Neither Carpaccio nor I know anything about Duration of life, or what the word translated ‘everlasting’ means. Nay, the first sign of noble trust in God and man, is to be able to act without any such hope. All the heroic deeds, all the purely unselfish passions of our existence, depend on our being able to live, if need be, through the Shadow of Death: and the daily heroism of simply brave men consists in fronting and accepting Death as such, trusting that what their Maker decrees for them shall be well.

But what Carpaccio knows, and what I know also, are precisely the things which your wiseacre apothecaries, and their apprentices, and too often your wiseacre rectors and vicars, and their apprentices, tell you that you can’t know, because “eye hath not seen nor ear heard them,” the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God has revealed them to us,—to Carpaccio, and Angelico, and Dante, and Giotto, and Filippo Lippi, and Sandro Botticelli, and me, and to every child that has been taught to know its Father in heaven,—by the Spirit: because we have minded, or do mind, the things of the Spirit in some measure, and in such measure have entered into our rest.

“The things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.” Hereafter, and up there, above the clouds, you have been taught to think;—until you were informed by your land-surveyors that there was neither up nor down; but only an axis of x and an axis of y; and by aspiring aeronauts that there was nothing in the blue but damp and azote. And now you don’t believe these things are prepared anywhere? They are prepared just as much as ever, when and where they used to be: just now, and here, close at your hand. All things are prepared,—come ye to the marriage. Up and down on the old highways which your fathers trod, and under the hedges of virgin’s bower and wild rose which your fathers planted, there are the messengers crying to you to come. Nay, at your very doors, though one is just like the other in your model lodging houses,—there is One knocking, if you would open, with something better than tracts in His basket;—supper, and very material supper, if you will only condescend to eat of angel’s food first. There are meats for the belly, and the belly for meats; doth not your Father know that ye have need of these things? But if you make your belly your only love, and your meats your only masters, God shall destroy both it and them.

Truly it is hard for you to hear the low knocking in the hubbub of your Vanity Fair. You are living in the midst of the most perfectly miscreant crowd that ever blasphemed creation. Not with the old snap-finger blasphemy of the wantonly profane, but the deliberate blasphemy of Adam Smith: ‘Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour’s goods.’ Here’s one of my own boys getting up that lesson beside me for his next Oxford examination. For Adam Smith is accepted as the outcome of Practical Philosophy, at our universities; and their youth urged to come out high in competitive blasphemy. Not the old snap-finger sort, [111] I repeat, but that momentary sentiment, deliberately adopted for a national law. I must turn aside for a minute or two to explain this to you.

The eighth circle of Dante’s Hell (compare Fors of December, 1872, p. 13,) is the circle of Fraud, divided into ten gulphs; in the seventh of these gulphs are the Thieves, by Fraud,—brilliantly now represented by the men who covet their neighbours’ goods and take them in any way they think safe, by high finance, sham companies, cheap goods, or any other of our popular modern ways.

Now there is not in all the Inferno quite so studied a piece of descriptive work as Dante’s relation of the infection of one cursed soul of this crew by another. They change alternately into the forms of men and serpents, each biting the other into this change—

“Ivy ne’er clasped
A doddered oak, as round the other’s limbs
The hideous monster intertwined his own;
Then, as they both had been of burning wax,
Each melted into other.”

Read the story of the three transformations for yourself (Cantos xxiv., xxv.), and then note the main point of all, that the spirit of such theft is especially indicated by its intense and direct manner of blasphemy:—

“I did not mark,
Through all the gloomy circle of the abyss,
Spirit that swelled so proudly ’gainst its God,
Not him who headlong fell from Thebes.”

The soul is Vanni Fucci’s, who rifled the sacristy of St. James of Pistoja, and charged Vanni della Nona with the sacrilege, whereupon the latter suffered death. For in those days, death was still the reward of sacrilege by the Law of State; whereas, while I write this Fors, I receive notice of the conjunction of the sacred and profane civic powers of London to de-consecrate, and restore to the definitely pronounced ‘unholy’ spaces of this world, the church of All-Hallows, wherein Milton was christened.

A Bishop was there to read, as it were, the Lord’s Prayer backwards, or at least address it to the Devil instead of to God, to pray that over this portion of British Metropolitan territory His Kingdom might again come.

A notable sign of the times,—completed, in the mythical detail of it, by the defiance of the sacred name of the Church, and the desecration of good men’s graves, [112] lest, perchance, the St. Ursulas of other lands should ever come on pilgrimage, rejoicing, over the sea, hopeful to see such holy graves among the sights of London.

Infinitely ridiculous, such travelling as St. Ursula’s, you think,—to see dead bodies, forsooth, and ask, with every poor, bewildered, Campagna peasant, “Dov’ è San Paolo?” Not at all such the object of modern English and American tourists!—nay, sagacious Mr. Spurgeon came home from his foreign tour, and who more proud than he to have scorned, in a rational manner, all relics and old bones? I have some notes by me, ready for February, concerning the unrejoicing manner of travel adopted by the sagacious modern tourist, and his objects of contemplation, for due comparison with St. Ursula’s; but must to-day bring her lesson close home to your own thoughts.

Look back to the seventh page, and the twenty-fourth, of the Fors of January, for this year. The first tells you, what this last sign of Church desecration now confirms, that you are in the midst of men who, if there be truth in Christianity at all, must be punished for their open defiance of Heaven by the withdrawal of the Holy Spirit, and the triumph of the Evil One. And you are told in the last page that by the service of God only you can recover the presence of the Holy Ghost of Life and Health—the Comforter.

This—vaguely and imperfectly, during the last six years, proclaimed to you, as it was granted me—in this coming seventh year I trust to make more simply manifest; and to show you how every earthly good and possession will be given you, if you seek first the Kingdom of God and His Justice. If, in the assurance of Faith, you can ask and strive that such kingdom may be with you, though it is not meat and drink, but Justice, Peace, and Joy in the Holy Ghost,—if, in the first terms I put to you for oath, [113] you will do good work, whether you live or die, and so lie down at night, whether hungry or weary, at least in peace of heart and surety of honour;—then, you shall rejoice, in your native land, and on your nursing sea, in all fulness of temporal possession;—then, for you the earth shall bring forth her increase, and for you the floods clap their hands;—throughout your sacred pilgrimage, strangers here and sojourners with God, yet His word shall be with you,—“the land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is Mine,” and after your numbered days of happy loyalty, you shall go to rejoice in His Fatherland, and with His people.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I. Affairs of the Company.

There is no occasion to put our small account again in print till the end of the year: we are not more than ten pounds ahead, since last month.

I certainly would not have believed, six years ago, that I had so few friends who had any trust in me; or that the British public would have entirely declined to promote such an object as the purchase of land for national freehold.

Next year I shall urge the operatives whom any words of mine may reach, to begin some organization with a view to this object among themselves. They have already combined to build co-operative mills; they would find common land a more secure investment.

I am very anxious to support, with a view to the determination of a standard of material in dress, the wool manufacture among the old-fashioned cottagers of the Isle of Man; and I shall be especially grateful to any readers of Fors who will communicate with Mr. Egbert Rydings (Laxey, Isle of Man,) on this subject. In the island itself Mr. Rydings tells me, the stuffs are now little worn by the better classes, because they ‘wear too long,’—a fault which I hope there may be yet found English housewives who will forgive. At all events, I mean the square yard of Laxey homespun of a given weight, to be one of the standards of value in St George’s currency.

The cheque of £25, sent to Mr. Rydings for the encouragement of some of the older and feebler workers, is the only expenditure, beyond those for fittings slowly proceeded with in our museum at Sheffield, to which I shall have to call attention at the year’s end.

II. Affairs of the Master.

Though my readers, by this time, will scarcely be disposed to believe it, I really can keep accounts, if I set myself to do so: and even greatly enjoy keeping them, when I do them the first thing after my Exodus or Plato every morning; and keep them to the uttermost farthing. I have examples of such in past diaries; one, in particular, great in its exhibition of the prices of jargonel and Queen Louise pears at Abbeville. And my days always go best when they are thus begun, as far as pleasant feeling and general prosperity of work are concerned. But there is a great deal of work, and especially such as I am now set on, which does not admit of accounts in the morning; but imperatively requires the fastening down forthwith of what first comes into one’s mind after waking. Then the accounts get put off; tangle their thread—(so the Fates always instantly then ordain)—in some eightpenny matter, and without Œdipus to help on the right hand and Ariadne on the left, there’s no bringing them right again. With due invocation to both, I think I have got my own accounts, for the past year, stated clearly below.

Receipts. | Expenditure. | Balance.
-------------|---------------|--------------
£ s. d. | £ s. d. | £ s. d.
February 1344 17 9 | 817 0 0 | 527 17 9
March 67 10 0 | 370 2 3 | 225 5 6
April 1522 12 4 | 276 10 0 | 1471 7 10
May 484 18 3 | 444 16 3 | 1511 9 10
June 179 0 0 | 464 11 0 | 1225 18 10
July 0 0 0 | 460 0 0 | 765 18 10
August 180 11 8 | 328 19 6 | 617 11 0
September 0 0 0 | 427 5 0 | 190 6 0
October 1279 8 0 | 655 0 0 | 814 14 0
November 0 0 0 | 495 0 0 | 784 8 0
December 592 15 4 | 242 0 0 | 1135 3 4

In the first column are the receipts for each month; in the second, the expenditure; in the third, the balance, which is to be tested by adding the previous balance to the receipts in the first column, and deducting the expenditure from the sum.

The months named are those in which the number of Fors was published in which the reader will find the detailed statements: a grotesque double mistake, in March, first in the addition and then in the subtraction, concludes in a total error of threepence; the real balance being £225 5s. 6d. instead of £225 5s. 9d. I find no error in the following accounts beyond the inheritance of this excessive threepence: (in October, p. 334, the entry under September 1 is misprinted 10 for 15; but the sum is right,) until the confusion caused by my having given the banker’s balance in September, which includes several receipts and disbursements not in my own accounts, but to be printed in the find yearly estimate in Fors of next February. My own estimate, happily less than theirs, brings my balance for last month to £784 8s.; taking up which result, the present month’s accounts are as follows:—

RECEIPTS. £ s. d. £ s. d.
Oct. 15. Balance 784 8 0
Dividend on £6,500 Stock 292 10 0
Rents, Marylebone 90 15 4
Rents, Herne Hill 30 0 0
Oxford, Half-year’s Salary 179 10 0
————————— 1377 3 4

EXPENDITURE.
Oct. 15 to Nov. 15. Self at Venice 150 0 0
Oct. 24. Burgess 42 0 0
Nov. 1. Raffaelle 15 0 0
” 7. Downs 25 0 0
” 11. Crawley 10 0 0
—————— 242 0 0
-----------
Balance, Nov. 15 £1135 3 4

III. I have lost the reference to a number of the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ of three or four weeks back, containing an excellent article on the Bishop of Peterborough’s declaration, referred to in the text, that the disputes between masters and men respecting wages were a question of Political Economy, in which the clergy must remain ‘strictly neutral.’

Of the Bishop’s Christian spirit, in the adoption of his Master’s “Who made me a divider?” rather than of the earthly wisdom of John the Baptist, “Exact no more than that which is appointed you,” the exacting public will not doubt. I must find out, however, accurately what the Bishop did say; and then we will ask Little Bear’s opinion on the matter. For indeed, in the years to come, I think it will be well that nothing should be done without counsel of Ursula.

IV. The following is, I hope, the true translation of Job xxii. 24, 25. I greatly thank my correspondent for it.

“Cast the brass to the dust, and the gold of Ophir to the rocks of the brooks.

“So, will the Almighty be thy gold and thy shining silver. [114]

“Yes, then wilt thou rejoice in the Almighty and raise thy countenance to God.”

V. The following letter from a Companion may fitly close the correspondence for this year. I print it without suppression of any part, believing it may encourage many of my helpers, as it does myself:—

“My dear Master,—I have learnt a few facts about Humber keels. You know you were interested in my little keel scholars, because their vessels were so fine, and because they themselves were once simple bodies, almost guiltless of reading and writing. And it seems as if even the mud gives testimony to your words. So if you don’t mind the bother of one of my tiresome letters, I’ll tell you all I know about them.

“The Humber keels are, in nearly all cases, the property of the men who go in them. They are house and home to the keel family, who never live on shore like other sailors. It is very easy work navigating the rivers. There’s only the worry of loading and unloading,—and then their voyages are full of leisure.

“Keelmen are rural sailors, passing for days and days between cornfields and poppy banks, meadows and orchards, through low moist lands, where skies are grand at sunrise and sunset.

“Now all this evidently makes a happy joyous life, and the smart colours and decoration of the boats are signs of it. Shouldn’t you say so? Well, then, independence, home, leisure and nature are right conditions of life—and that’s a bit of St. George’s doctrine I’ve verified nearly all by myself; and there are things I know about keel folks besides, which quite warrant my conclusions. But to see these very lowly craft stranded low on the mud at low tide, or squeezed in among other ships—big and grimy things—in the docks, you would think they were too low in the scale of shipping to have any pride or pleasure in life; yet I really think they are little arks, dressed in rainbows. Remember, please, Humber keels are quite different things to barges of any kind. And now keels are off my mind—except that if I can ever get anybody to paint me a gorgeous one, I shall send it to you.

“My dear Master, I have thought so often of the things you said about yourself, in relation to St. George’s work; and I feel sure that you are disheartened, and too anxious about it—that you have some sort of feeling about not being sufficient for all of it. Forgive me, but it is so painful to think that the Master is anxious about things which do not need consideration. You said, I think, the good of you was, that you collected teaching and laws for us. But is that just right? Think of your first impulse and purpose. Was not that your commission? Be true to it. To me it seems that the good of you (as you say it) is that you have a heart to feel the sorrows of the world—that you have courage and power to speak against injustice and falsehood, and more than all, that you act out what you say. Everybody else seems asleep or dead—wrapped up in their own comfort or satisfaction,—and utterly deaf to any appeal. Do not think your work is less than it is, and let all unworthy anxieties go. The work is God’s, if ever any work was, and He will look after its success. Fitness or unfitness is no question, for you are chosen. Mistakes do not matter. Much work does not matter. It only really matters that the Master stays with us, true to first appointment; that his hand guides all first beginnings of things, sets the patterns for us,—and that we are loyal.

“Your affectionate servant.”

NOTES

[1] See first article in Notes.

[2] Inferno, III. 60. I fear that few modern readers of Dante understand the dreadful meaning of this hellish outer district, or suburb, full of the refuse or worthless scum of Humanity—such numbers that “non haverei creduto, che morte tanta n’ havesse disfatta,”—who are stung to bloody torture by insects, and whose blood and tears together—the best that human souls can give—are sucked up, on the hell-ground, by worms.

[3] Essay XI.

[4] I leave this passage as it was written: though as it passes through the press, it is ordered by Atropos that I should hear a piece of evidence on this matter no less clear as to the present ministry of such powers as that which led Peter out of prison, than all the former, or nearly all, former evidence examined by me was of the presence of the legion which ruled among the Tombs of Gennesaret.

[5] See second article in Notes.

[6] Quoted in last Fors, p. 341, lines 18–22, from ‘Contemporary Review.’ Observe that it is blasphemy, definitively and calmly uttered, first against Nature, and secondly against Christ.

[7] The most valuable notes of the kind correspondent who sent me this leaf, with many others, and a perfect series of nests, must be reserved till spring-time: my mind is not free for them, now.

[8] Compare Letter XVI. 11, and XVII. 7.

[9] “A Bishop by the altar stood,
A noble Lord of Douglas blood,
With mitre sheen, and rocquet white,
Yet showed his meek and thoughtful eye
But little pride of prelacy;
More pleased that, in a barbarous age,
He gave rude Scotland Virgil’s page,
Than that beneath his rule he held
The bishopric of fair Dunkeld.”

[10] Yes, dear lady; see, therefore, the next article.

[11] Yes, my dear, shares down; and—it is some poor comfort for you and me to know that. For as I correct this sheet for press, I hear from the proprietor of the chief slate quarry in the neighbourhood, that the poor idiots of shareholders have been beguiled into tunnelling four miles under Welsh hills—to carry slates! and even those from the chief quarry in question, they cannot carry, for the proprietors are under contract to send them by an existing line.

[12] Will any charitable Christian tell me who the owners are?—in the meantime, “confusion on their banners wait.”

[13] Exodus xviii. 21.

[14] The law of its course will be given in the ‘Laws of Fésole,’ Plate V.

[15] An under-estimate, at present prices for Turner drawings, and I have hitherto insured for full thirty thousand, but am now going to lower the insurance, for no money would replace the loss of them, and I less and less regard them as exchangeable property.

[16] I have not space in this Fors to give the letter certifying me of this.

[17] See my reason stated, Letter LIX., p. 322.

[18] See note at end of this letter.

[19] I have got no Turks yet in the Company: when any join it, I will give them Koran enough for what I ask of them.

[20] Every day taking more away than the one before it.

[21] Compare Letter XXI., p. 13.

[22] I have desired Mr. Ward to prepare small photographs of this design, in case any reader cares to have it,—but mind, it is not altogether done according to Mr. Stopford Brooke’s notion of the object of true art, “to please”—(see page 88 of the Manual of English Literature, just published by that omniscient divine—under the auspices of the all-and-sundry-scient Mr. T. R. Green, M.A.,—so, if you only want to be pleased, you had better not order it. But at any rate, order, if you wish to understand the next coming Fors, the Etruscan Leucothea, for comparison with your Lippi Madonna. Mr. Ward will have it ready with my signature about the time next Fors comes out;—or you can get it, unmounted, for a shilling, from Mr. Parker’s agent in Rome.

[23] The £40 here acknowledged was an additional subscription from No. 8 subscriber, whose total subscription is therefore £60, not £20, as in above subscriber’s account; in which also the initials of No. 38 should be S. G., and the sum £2 2s. These errors will be corrected in next Fors, in which also I will separate the interest from the subscriptions.

[24] My friends (see a really kind article in the Monetary Gazette,) much doubt, and very naturally, the wisdom of this exposition. I indeed expected to appear to some better advantage; but that the confession is not wholly pleasant, and appears imprudent, only makes it the better example. Fors would have it so.

[25] Psalm lxviii. 31; lxxxiii. 7 and 8; lxxxvii. 4; Isaiah xlv. 14. I am not sure of my interpretation of the 87th Psalm; but, as far as any significance exists in it to our present knowledge, it can only be of the power of the Nativity of Christ to save Rahab the harlot, Philistia the giant, Tyre the trader, and Ethiopia the slave.

[26] Letter XVII., p. 6.

[27] You may indeed dip softly into the ground and rise gradually out of it; but this will give you not a clear, but an infinitely graduated excision, exquisite in drawing, but not good for writing.

[28] I take the title of this relief from Mr. Parker’s catalogue, not being certain of the subject myself, and rather conceiving it to be Latona with Apollo.

[29] Travelling and personal expenses since January 1st, of which I have no space for the detail in this Fors; it will be given in its place. Klein has ten pounds a month, himself, besides his expenses in Oxford when I’ve no rooms for him.

[30] A youth, whom I am maintaining in art-study at Venice. He has £7 10s. monthly. This payment is to end of April.

[31] Water-colour drawing of a cottage at Coniston, likely to be soon destroyed by ‘improvements.’

[32] £10 pocket-money, £25 to St. George, money of his in my hands included in my banker’s January balance, acknowledged in St. George accounts, March 7th.

[33] £21 of this my own upholsterer’s and other bills at Oxford; the rest, Crawley will account for.

[34] Drawings made for me at Siena.

[35] Fifty drawings made for me by Signor Caldara of Venice, being part of a complete Venetian Herbal in process of execution. I count none of my money better spent than this.

[36] Annual gift to monastery of Assisi, for 1875; not sent last year because I meant to go there. Due always on the Corpus Domini.

[37] Exaggerated a little, I’m afraid.—J. R.

[38] The shells sent, for which I heartily thank my correspondent, are, I think, the same as mine, only not so white.

[39] Abram’s mountain home seems to have been much like Horace’s, as far as I can make out: but see accounts of modern travellers. Our translation “in the plain of Mamre” (Genesis xiii. 28; xiv. 13) is clearly absurd; the gist of the separation between Lot and Abram being Lot’s choice of the plain, as ‘the Paradise of God,’ and Abram’s taking the rock ground. The Vulgate says ‘in the ravine’ of Mamre; the Septuagint, ‘by the oak.’ I doubt not the Hebrew is meant to carry both senses, as of a rocky Vallombrosa; the Amorites at that time knew how to keep their rain, and guide their springs. Compare the petition of Caleb’s daughter when she is married, after being brought up on this very farm, Joshua xv. 17, 18; comparing also xiv. 14, 15, and of the hill country generally, xvi. 15, and Deut. xi. 10–12, 17.

[40] I need scarcely desire the reader to correct the misprint of ‘maternal’ for ‘paternal’ in line 14 of p. 90 in Fors of March. In last Fors, please put the i into ‘material’ in p. 112, line 16, and a comma before and after ‘there’ in p. 113, line 8.

[41] Vulgar modern Puritanism has shown its degeneracy in nothing more than in its incapability of understanding Scott’s exquisitely finished portraits of the Covenanter. In ‘Old Mortality’ alone, there are four which cannot be surpassed; the typical one, Elizabeth, faultlessly sublime and pure; the second, Ephraim Macbriar, giving the too common phase of the character, which is touched with ascetic insanity; the third, Mause, coloured and made sometimes ludicrous by Scottish conceit, but utterly strong and pure at heart; the last, Balfour, a study of supreme interest, showing the effect of the Puritan faith, sincerely held, on a naturally and incurably cruel and base spirit. His last battle-cry—“Down with the Amorites,” the chief Amorite being Lord Evandale, is intensely illustrative of all I have asked you to learn to-day. Add to these four studies, from this single novel, those in the ‘Heart of Midlothian,’ and Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice from ‘Rob Roy,’ and you have a series of theological analyses far beyond those of any other philosophical work that I know, of any period.

[42] For accounts in London, to save drawing small cheques. I have not room for detail this month, the general correspondence being lengthy.

[43] ‘Early History of Mankind,’ (a book of rare value and research, however,) p. 379.

[44] In the meantime, if any of my readers will look at the leading articles of the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ whose editor I thank with all my heart and soul, for the first honest commercial statements I ever saw in English journals, they will get sufficient light on such matters.

[45] Corr., Art. VI.

[46] See, on that subject, the third number of Deucalion.

[47] Article III. of Correspondence.

[48] I should like my lady readers in general to have, of back Fors numbers, at least, 30, 34, 36, 45, 46, and 48: those who have the complete book should scratch out the eleventh line in p. 18 of the last Index, and put the 10th line of it thus: “Ladies, and girls, advice to, 30, 2; 34, 29; 45, 212; 48, 271.”

[49] They may serve for the defence of the store, of course;—so may the broken bottles, stuck on the top of a wall. But the lock of your cupboard is not the contents of it.

[50] See Letter XI. (November ’71,) pages 3 to 7, the most pregnant five pages in the entire series of these letters; and compare that for January of this year, pp. 8–11, and for April, p. 113.

[51] Again, I have more myself—but that is because I have been ill-bred; and I shall be most thankful to take less, as soon as other people cease to be paid for doing nothing. People cry out upon me for asking ten shillings for a year’s Fors; but never object to Mr. Barber’s paying his clerk a guinea for opening his study door to me five times, charging the same to St. George’s account. (See Fors of April, pp. 134, 135, 136.)

[52] See Fors for January of this year, pp. 21, 22.

[53] This book I shall extend, if time be given me, from its first proposed form into a parallel one with the two others.

[54] Such limitation being secured by the severity of the required education in the public schools of art, and thought; and by the high standard of examination fixed, before granting licence of exhibition, in the public theatres, or picture galleries.

[55] Here is just an instance of what might at first seem to be a jest; but is a serious and straightforward corollary from the eternally true fact stated by St. Timothy: “They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition;” and by Horace:

“Quanto quisque sibi plura negaverit
Ab Dis plura feret.”

The passage might at first be thought inconsistent with what is said above of the ‘degradation’ which perpetual toil involves. But toil and poverty are two different things. Poverty ennobles, and secures; toil degrades, and endangers. We are all bound to fulfil our task; but happy only if we can also enter into our rest.

[56] It may always import such food as its climate cannot produce, in exchange for such food as it can; it may buy oranges with corn, or pepper with cheese. But not with articles that do not support life. Separate cities may honourably produce saleable art; Limoges its enamel, Sheffield its whittle; but a nation must not live on enamel or whittles.

[57] Foolish people are continually quibbling and stupifying themselves about the word ‘machine.’ Briefly, any instrument is a machine so far as its action is, in any particular, or moment, beyond the control of the human hand. A violin, a pencil, and a plough, are tools, not machines. A grinding organ, or a windmill, is a machine, not a tool: often the two are combined; thus a lathe is a machine, and the workman’s chisel, used at it, a tool.

[58] The ghastly squalor of the once lovely fields of Dulwich, trampled into mud, and strewn with rags and paper by the filthy London population, bred in cigar smoke, which is attracted by the Crystal Palace, would alone neutralize all possible gentlemanly education in the district.

[59] See an entirely admirable paper on school-sports, in ‘The World’ for February of this year.

[60] ‘Threading My Way’—an excellent one.

[61] The twenty-third verse of the same chapter is to be the shield-legend of the St. George’s Company.

[62] Meaning, to do his work instead of him. Compare Acts xx. 35. “I have showed you all things, how that, so labouring, ye ought to support the weak.”

[63] Dear Mr. Ruskin, 8th July, 1876.

I see that you intend to speak on the question of usury in next Fors. Would it not be well, since the Bishops of the Established Church have not a word to offer in defence of their conduct, to appeal to some of the other sects that profess to take the teaching of the Bible and of Christ for their guidance? The Wesleyans, for instance, teach that the Bible was given almost verbally by the Spirit of God; and John Wesley says his followers are “to die sooner than put anything in pawn, or borrow and lend on usury.” Perhaps if you were to challenge the President and Conference, and call on them either to state that they do not accept the teaching of Moses, David, and Christ on this matter, or to bring the sin clearly before the minds of the members of their body, you might force the question on the attention of the professedly religious persons in the country.

A Reader of Fors.

[64] Carriage expenses, of which the out-of-the-wayness of Brantwood incurs many, from April 6th to June 19th.

[65] Twenty pounds more than usual, the monks being in distress there.

[66] I shall take a fit of selfish account-giving, one of these days, but have neither time nor space this month.

[67] Please, some one, tell me if this something be true, or how far true.

[68] What can be done, ultimately, it is not yet in human imagination to conceive. What has been done, by one sensible man, for the land he had under control, may be read in the fourth article of our correspondence.

[69] Most London theatre-goers will recollect the Butterman’s pity for his son, in “Our Boys,” as he examines the remains of the breakfast in their lodgings.

[70] The law of symmetry, however, rests on deeper foundations than that of mere order. It is here, in Greek terms, too subtle to be translated except bit by bit, as we want them.

Τίς οὖν δὴ πρᾶξις φίλη καὶ ἀκόλουθος θεῷ; μία καὶ ἕνα λόγον ἔχουσα ἀρχαῖον, ὅτι τῷ μὲν ὀμοίῳ τὸ ὅμοιον ὄντι μετρίῳ φίλον ἂν εἴη, τὰ δ’ ἄμετρα οὔτ’ ἀλλήλοις οὔτε τοῖς ἐμμέτροις.—(Plato, Laws, Book IV.)

[71] Note by printer:—“We did this to avoid an unseemly division of balance-sheet, and of two evils thought this the least.”

[72] One of these is a perfect English Bible, folio, and in beautiful state, sent to Sheffield for the first volume of our Museum library. Of course I must make St. George a present of it.

[73] As I correct this sheet, Fors places another Carlisle paper in my hand; from which I gather that Lord Lonsdale’s conceptions of what is fit, and not, are probably now changed. But my correspondent is wrong in assuming that the public will have to pay the extra rent. Very probably they will if the farming improvements are fallacious; but if indeed produce can be raised at less expense, the increased rent may represent only the difference between past and present cost of production. In this sense, however, the public do pay Lord Lonsdale’s extra rent, that their market prices, but for his Lordship, would have been lowered. As matters stand, they may be thankful if they are not raised.

[74] I can’t be responsible for these Scotch names. I sent the slip of paper to my printers, and ‘on their eyes be it.’

[75] Italics mine (throughout the article, the rest of which is in Mr. Mackenzie’s own words). Have the vine-proprietors of Europe yet begun to look to the Earth—not the air, as the power that fails them? (See note d.)

[76] It will, I hope, not be thought an absurdity in the St. George’s Company to retain on their estates ‘pleasure-grounds’ for their tenants, instead of themselves. In this one respect, and in this only, their public work will differ from this admirable piece of ‘private enterprise.’

[77] Supposing the labour of all navvies, gold-diggers, and bad architects, throughout the world during the last fifty years, had been spent entirely in carting soil to where it was wanted for vegetables,—my dinnerless friends, you would have found the difference, by this time!

[78] This passage, in capitals, being wholly astounding to me, I venture to put a note of interrogation to it. I have long myself been questioning the farmers in Westmoreland about the quantity of rank bog grass they let grow. But their only idea of improvement is to burn the heather; this being a cheap operation, and dangerous only to their neighbours’ woods. Brantwood was within an ace of becoming Brantashes last summer.

[79] The name of the—certainly very efficient—teacher of these young people, and the general principles of their tuition, would have been a desirable addition, St. George thinks, to the information furnished by Mr. Mackenzie.

[80] I suppose myself, in the rest of this letter, to be addressing a “business man of the nineteenth century.”

[81] Thus, in the earlier numbers of Fors, I have observed more than once, to the present landholders of England, that they may keep their lands—if they can! Only let them understand that trial will soon be made, by the Laws of Nature, of such capacity in them.

[82] A masterless dog, I should have written, but wanted to keep my sentence short and down to my practical friend’s capacity. For if the dog have the good fortune to find a master, he has a possession thenceforth, better than bones; and which, indeed, he will, at any moment, leave, not his meat only, but his life for.

[83] It is a very subtle and lovely one, not to be discussed hurriedly.

[84] See ‘definition’ quoted as satisfactory in ‘Anthropological Magazine,’ “the belief in spiritual beings,” which would make the devil a religious person, inasmuch as he both believes—and fears.

[85] See the last results of modern enlightenment on this subject in Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins’s directions for the scientific representation of Dogs, illustrated by the charming drawings of that great artist;—especially compare the learned outlines of head and paw in Plate II., and the delineation of head without Psyche in Plate III., with the ignorant efforts of Velasquez in such extremities and features in our fourth photograph. Perhaps Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins will have the goodness, in his next edition, to show us how Velasquez ought to have expressed the Scapholinear, Cuneiform, Pisiform, Trapezium, Trapezoid, Magnum, and Unciform bones in those miserably drawn fore-paws.

[86] Being somewhat interested in Croydon, as readers of past Fors know, and in Museums also, I give large print to these proposals.

[87] I have no doubt of the mingled active sense of τίμιος in this sentence, necessary by the context; while also the phrase would be a mere flat truism, if the word were used only in its ordinary passive meaning.

[88] To see clearly that whatever our fates may have been, the heaviest calamity of them—and, in a sort, the only real calamity—is our own causing, is the true humility which indeed we profess with our lips, when our heart is far from it.

[89] Pleasures which the Word of God, or of the earthly Lawgiver speaking in His Name, does not allow, nor praise; for all right pleasures it praises, and forbids sadness as a grievous sin.

[90] This parenthesis is in Plato’s mind, visibly, though not in his words.

[91] Quarterly wages.

[92] Representing some dinners to friends; also exploring drives in the neighbourhood.

[93] Fast melting away in expensive inns, the only ones in which I can be quiet. If some pious young English boys and girls, instead of setting up for clergymen and clergywomen, would set up, on their marriage, for publicans, and keep clean parlours, lavendered sheets, and honest fare, all for honest price, for poor wanderers like myself, I doubt not their reward would be great in Heaven.

[94] The primary form in which the legend shows itself is a Nature myth, in which Ursula is the Bud of flowers, enclosed in its rough or hairy calyx, and her husband, Æther—the air of spring. She opens into lovely life with ‘eleven’ thousand other flowers—their fading is their sudden martyrdom. And—says your modern philosopher—‘That’s all’!

[95] Correspondence, Article VI.

[96] Compare the last page of Fors, October 1875.

[97] I. Servant. II. Master. III. Lord. IV. Duke.

[98] I want to write a long note on Byzantine empire,—Commanders of the Faithful,—Grand Turks,—and the “Eastern question.” But can’t: and perhaps the reader will be thankful.

[99] This Life of St. Ursula has been gathered from some of the stories concerning her which were current through Italy in the time of Carpaccio. The northern form of the legend, localized at Cologne, is neither so lovely nor so ancient.

[100] Molto incarnalmente.

[101] I could not see this symbol at the height at which the picture hung from the ground, when I described it in 1872. The folds of the drapery in the hand are all but invisible, even when the picture is seen close; and so neutral in their gray-green colour that they pass imperceptibly into violet, as the faint green of evening sky fades into its purple. But the folds are continued under the wrist in the alternate waves which the reader may see on the Etruscan tomb in the first room of the British Museum, with a sculpturesque severity which I could not then understand, and could only account for by supposing that Carpaccio had meant the Princess to “dream out the angel’s dress so particularly”! I mistook the fillet of victory also for a scroll; and could not make out the flowers in the window. They are pinks, the favourite ones in Italian windows to this day, and having a particular relation to St. Ursula in the way they rend their calyx; and I believe also in their peculiar relation to the grasses, (of which more in ‘Proserpina’). St. Ursula is not meant, herself, to recognize the angel. He enters under the door over which she has put her little statue of Venus; and through that door the room is filled with light, so that it will not seem to her strange that his own form, as he enters, should be in shade: and she cannot see his dark wings. On the tassel of her pillow, (Etrurian also,) is written “Infantia”; and above her head, the carving of the bed ends in a spiral flame, typical of the finally ascending Spirit. She lies on her bier, in the last picture but one, exactly as here on her bed; only the coverlid is there changed from scarlet to pale violet. See notes on the meaning of these colours in third ‘Deucalion.’

[102] By report from Bank; but the ‘repayments’ named in it should not have been added to the cash account, being on separate account with the Company. I will make all clear in December.

[103] For Signora Caldara (Venetian botany).

[104] Nominally loan, to poor relation, but I do not suppose he will ever be able to pay me. The following £200 I do not doubt receiving again.

[105] May St. George be informed of how many members the American Legislature is finally to be composed; and over whom it is to exercise the proud function of legislation, which is to be the reward of heroic and rightly-minded flunkeys?

[106] As a painter, no less than a philanthropist, I am curious to see the effect of scenery, in these ‘polite’ terms of description, “dotted over with establishments.”

[107] My original sketch is now in the Schools of Oxford.

[108] See terminal Article of Correspondence.

[109] Conf. ‘Inferno,’ XXIII. 123.

[110] Mr. Darwin’s last discoveries of the gestures of honour and courtesy among baboons are a singular completion of the types of this truth in the natural world.

[111] In old English illuminated Psalters, of which I hope soon to send a perfect example to Sheffield to companion our Bible, the vignette of the Fool saying in his heart, ‘There is no God,’ nearly always represents him in this action. Vanni Fucci makes the Italian sign of the Fig,—‘A fig for you!’

[112] My friend Mr. W. C. Sillar rose in the church, and protested, in the name of God, against the proceedings. He was taken into custody as disorderly,—the press charitably suggested, only drunk;—and was I believe discharged without fine or imprisonment, for we live in liberal days.

[113] Compare Fors of October, 1874, page 224 to end, observing especially the sentence out of 2nd Esdras, “before they were sealed, that have gathered Faith for a Treasure.”

[114] Silver of strength.