iiniii' Hill CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY _„ Cornell University Library PR 5255. A 1 1897 Crown of wild olives; Munera Pulveris: Pr 3 1924 013 541 770 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013541770 Illustrated Cabintt edition Crown of OTild Olives ^ )VIunera pulveris ^ pre-RapbacUtism ,«? Hratra pentelici by ^obn Rushin )VIerrtll and Baker Publiebevs ^ /? New Xovk ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ A / ) g^7 /)'%%/73^ CONTENTS. Work, THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. LECTURE I. LECTURE II. Traffic, Wax, . LECTURE IIL MUNERA PULVERIS. Preface,^ CHAP. I. Definitions, II. Store-Keeping, III. Coin-Keeping, IV. Commerce, V. Government, VI. Mastership, . Appendices, PAGE 17 44 66 97 III "5 1st 170 181 204 222 PRE-RAPHAELITISM. PAGS PREEACE, ........ 235 Pre-Raphaelitism, ..... 237 ARATRA PENTELICI. Preface, ...... . 283 LECTURE I. Of the Division of Arts, .... 287 II. Idolatry, •....,, 304 III. Imagination, ...... 322 IV. Likeness, ....... 350 V. Structure, . . . . . . 372 VI. The School of Athens, ..... 395 The Future of England, .... 415 Notes on Political Economy of Prussia, . , . 435 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. ARATRA PENTELICI. PLATES FACING PAGE I. Porch of San Zenone. Verona, . , . 300 II. The Arethusa of Syracuse, . . . 302 III. The Warning to the Kings, . . . 302 V. Tomb of the Doges Jacopo and Lorenzo Tiepoi.o, 333 VI. Archaic Athena of Athens and Corinth, . 334 VII. Archaic, Central and Declining Art of Greece, 355 VIII. The Apollo of Syracuse and the Self-made Man, 366 IX. Apollo Chrysocomes of Clazomence, 368 X. Marble Masonry in the Duoma of Verona, 381 XI. The First Elements of Sculpture, . . 382 XII. Branch of Phillyrea. Dark Purple, . . 390 XIII. Greek Flat Relief and Sculpture by Edged Incision, . . . . . -392 XIV. Apollo and the Python. Heracles and the Nemean Lion, ..... 400 XV. Hera of Argos. Zeus of Syracuse, . . 401 XVr. Df.mrtf.r op Messene. Hera of Crossus, . . 402 PLATES FACING PAGE XVII. Athena of Thurium. Sereie Ligeia of Terina, 402 XVIII. Artemis of Syracuse. Hera of Lacinian Cape, 404 XIX. Zeus of Messene. Ajax of Opus, . . . 405 XX. Greek and Barbarian Sculpture, . . 407 XXI. The Beginnings of Chivalry, . . . 409 FIGURE PAGE Specimen of Plate, ..... 293 323 Woodcut, ...... Figure on Greek Type of Vases, . . . 326 Early Drawing of the Myth, .... 330 Cut, "Give It to Me," ..... 33J Engraving on Coin, ..... 335 Drawing of Fish. By Turner, . . , . 36a Iron Bar, 37g Diagram of Leaf, 3gi THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE THREE LECTURES ON WORK, TRAFFIC AND WAR PREFACE, Twenty teaes ago, there was no lovelier piece of lowland scenery in South England, nor any more pathetic in the world, by its expression of sweet human character and life, than that immediately bordering on the sources of the Wandle, and in- cluding the lower moors of Addington, and the vUlagea of Beddington and Carshalton, with all their pools and streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever sang with constant Ups of the hand which ' giveth rain from heaven ; ' no pastures ever lightened in spring time with more passionate blossoming ; no sweeter homes ever hallowed the heart of the passer-by with their pride of peaceful gladness— iain-hidden — yet full- confessed. The place remains, or, untU a few months ago, remained, nearly unchanged in its larger features ; but, with deliberate mind I say, that I have never seen anything so ghastly in its inner tragic meaning, — not in Pisan Maremma — not by Campagna tomb, — not by the sand-isles of the TorceUan shore, — as the slow stealing of aspects of reckless, indolent, animal neglect, over the delicate sweetness of that English scene : nor is any blasphemy or impiety — any frantic saying or godless thought — more appalling to me, using the best power of judgment I have to discern its sense and scope, than the insolent defilings of those springs by the human herds that drink of them. Just where the welling of stainless water, trembling and pure, like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself a radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp of feathery weeds, all waving, which it traverses with its deep threads of clearness, like the chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here and there with white grenouillette ; just in the veiy msh and murmur of the first spreadiag currents, the humau 6 PBEPACB. wretches of the place cast their street and house foulness ; heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid clothes ; they having neither energy to cai-t it away, nor decency enough to dig it into-the ground, thus shed into the stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and melt, far away, in all places where God meant those waters to bring joy and health. And, in a httle pool, behind some houses farther in the village, where another spring rises, the shattered stones of the well, and of the little fretted channel which was long ago built and traced for it by gentler hands, lie scattered, each from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and scoria ; and bricklayers' refuse, on one side, which the clean water nevertheless "chastises to purity ; but it cannot conquer the dead earth beyond ; and there, circled and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant edge of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the accumulation of indolent years. Half-a-dozen men, with one day's work, could cleanse those pools, and trim the flowers about their banks, and make every breath of summer air above them rich with cool balm ; and every glittering wave medicinal, as if it ran, troubled of angels, from the porch of Bethesda. But that day's work is never given, nor wiU be ; nor will any joy be possible to heart of man, for evermore, about those wells of EngHsh waters. When I last left them, I walked up slowly through the back streets of Croydon, from the old church to the hospital ; and, just on the left, before coming up to the crossing of the High Street, there was a new public-house built. And the front of it was built in so wise manner, that a recess of two feet was left below its front windows, between them and the street- pavement — a recess too narrow for any possible use (for even if it bad been occujjied by a seat, as in old time it might have been, everybody walking along the street would have fallen over the legs of the reposing wayfarers). But, by way of making this two feet depth of freehold land more expressive of the dignity of an estabhshment for the sale of spirituoua liquors, it was fenced from the pavement by an imposing iron railing, having four or five spearheads to the yard of it, and sis feet high ; containing as much iron and iron-work, indeed. as could well be put into the space ; and by this stately ar rangement, the little piece of dead ground within, between waU and street, became a protective receptacle of refuse ; cigar ends, and oyster shells, and the like, such as an open-handed English street-populace habitually scatters from its presence, find was thus left, unsweepable by any ordinary methods. Now the iron bars which, uselessly (or in great degree worse than uselessly), enclosed this bit of ground, and made it pesti- lent, represented a quantity of work which would have cleansed the Cwshalton pools three times over ; — of work, partly cramped and deadly, in the mine ; partly fierce * and exhaus- tive, at the furnace ; partly foohsh and sedentaiy, of iU-taught students making bad designs : work from the beginning to the last fruits of it, and in all the branches of it, venomous, deathful, and miserable. Now, how did it come to pass that this work was done instead of the other ; that the strength and life of the Enghsh operative were spent in defiling ground, instead of redeeming it ; and in producing an entirely (in that place) valueless piece of metal, which can neither be eaten nor breathed, instead of medicinal fresh air, and pure water? There is but one reason for it, and at present a conclusive one, — that the capitalist can charge per-centage on the work • ' A fearful occurrence took place a few days since, near Wolverhamp- ton. Thomas Snape, aged nineteen, was on duty as the " keeper" of a blast furnace at Deepfield, assisted by John Gardner, aged eighteen, and Joseph -Swift, aged thirty-seven. The furnace contained four tons of m,Qlten ironPand an equal amount of cinders, and ought to have been run out at 7.30 p.m. But Snape and his mates, engaged in talking and drinking, neglected their duty, and, in the meantime, the iron rose in the furnace until it reached a pipe wherein water was contained. Jiist as the men had stripped, and were proceeding to tap the furnace, the water in the pipe, converted into steam, burst down its front and let loose on them the molten metal, which instantaneously consumed Gard- ner ; Snape, terribly burnt, and mad with pain, leaped into the canal and then ran home and fell dead on the threshold, Swift survived to Teach the hospital, where he died too. In further illustration of this matter, I beg the reader to look at the article on the ' Decay of the English Race,' in the ' Pall-MaU Gazette ' of April 17, of this year ; and at the articles on the ' Report of the Thames Commission,' in any journals of the same date. S p&mpaob. in the one case, and cannot in the other. If, having certain funds for supporting laboui- at my disposal, I pay men merely to keep my ground in order, my money is, in that function, . ^spent once for all ; but if I pay them to dig iron out of my ground, and work it, and sell it, I can charge rent for the ground, and per-centage both on the manufacture and the sale, and make my capital profitable in these three bye-ways. The greater part of the profitable investment of capital, in the present day, is in operations of this kind, in which th e pu blic is persuaded to buy something of no use to it, on production, , or sale, of which, the capitalist may charge per-centage ; the said public remaining all the while under the persuasion that the per-centages thus obtained are real national gains, where- as, they are merely filchings out of partially light pockets, to swell heavy ones. Thus, the Croydon publican buys the iron railing, to make himself more conspicuous to drunkards. The public-house- keeper on the other side of the way presently buys another railing, to out-rail him with. Both are, as to their relative at- tractiveness to customers of taste, just where they were before ; but they have lost the price of the railings ; which they must either themselves finally lose, or make their aforesaid customers of taste pay, by raising the price of their beer, or adulterating it. Either the publicans, or their customers, are thus poorer by precisely what the capitaUst has gained ; and the value of the work itself, meantime, has been lost to the nation ; the iron bars in that form and place being wholly useless. It is this mode of taxation of the poor by the rich which is referred to in the text (page 31), in comparing the modem acquisitive power of capital with that of the lance and sword ; the only difference being that the levy of black mail in old times was by force, and is now by cozening. The old rider and reiver frankly quartered himself on the publican for the night ; the modem one merely makes his lance into an iron spike, and persuades his host to buy it. One comes as an open robber, the other as a cheating pedlar ; but the result, to the injured person's pocket, is absolutely the same. Of course many Use- ful industries mingle with, and disguise the useless ones ; and PREFAOE. 9 in the tslbits &{ energy aroused by the struggle, there is a certain direct good. It is far better to spend four thousand pounds in making a good gun, and then to blow it to pieces, than to pass life in idleness. Only do not let it be called ■ political economy.' There is also a confused notion in the minds of many persons, that the gathering of the property of the poor into the hands of the rich does no idtimate harm ; since, in whosesoever hands it may be, it must be spent at last, and thus, they think, return to the poor again. This fallacy has been again and again exposed ; but grant the plea true, and the same apology may, of course, be made for black mail, or any other form of robbery. It might be (though practically it never is) as advantageous for the nation that the robber should have the spending of the money he extorts, as that the person robbed should have spent it. But this is no excuse for the theft. If I were to put a turnpike on the road where it passes my own gate, and endeavour to exact a shilling from every passenger, the pubUc would soon do away with my gate, without listening to any plea on my part that ' it was as ad- vantageous to them, in the end, that I should spend their shillings, as that they themselves should.' But if, instead of out-facing them with a turnpike, I can only persuade them to come in and buy stones, or old iron, or any other useless thing, out of my ground, I may rob them to the same extent, and be, moreover, thanked as a public benefactor, and pro- moter of commercial prosperity. And this main question for the poor of England — for the poor of all countries — is wholly omitted in every common treatise on the subject of wealth. Even by the labourers themselves, the operation of capital is regarded only in its effect on their immediate interests ; never in the far more terrific power of its appointment of the kind and the object of labour. It matters little, ultimately, how much a labourer is paid for making anything ; but it matters fearfully what the thing is, which he is compelled to make. If his labour is so ordered as to produce food, and fresh air, and fresh water, no matter that his wages are low ; — the food and fresh air and water will be at last there ; and he will at last get them. But if he is paid to destroy food and fresh air, of 10 PRBFAOE. to produce iron bars instead of them, — the food and air •will finally not be there, and he will not get them, tG liis great and final inconvenience. So that, conclusively, in political as in household economy, the great question is, not so much what money you have in your pocket, as what you wiU buy with it, and do with it. I have _ been long accustomed, as all men engaged in work of investigation must be, to hear my statements laughed at for years, before they are examined or believed ; and I am generally content to wait ihe public's time. But it has not been without displeased surprise that I have found myself totally unable, as yet, by anj repetition, or illustration, to force this plain thought into my readers' heads, — that the wealth of nations, as of men, consists in substance, not in ciphers ; and that the real good of all work, and of all com- merce, depends on the final worth of the thing you make, or get by it. This is a practical enough statement, one would think : but the English public has been so possessed by its modern school of economists with the notion that Business is always good, whether it be busy in mischief or in benefit ; and that buying and selling are always salutary, whatever the intrinsic worth of what you buy or sell, — that it seems impossible to gain so much as a patient hearing for any in- quiry respecting the substantial result of our eager modern labours. I have never felt more checked by the sense of this impossibility than in arranging the heads of the following three lectures, which, though delivered at considerable inter- vals of time, and in difi'erent places, were not prepared with- out reference to each other. Their connection would, how- ever, have been made far more distinct, if I had not been prevented, by what I feel to be another great difficulty in addressing English audiences, from enforcing, with any de- cision, the common, and to me the most important, part of their subjects. I chiefly desired (as I have just said) to question my hearers — operatives, merchants, and soldiers, as to the ultimate meaning of the business they had in hand ; and to know from them what they expected or intended their manufacture to come to, their selling to come to, and their PREFACE. 11 tilling to come to. That appeared the first point needing determination before I could speak to them with any real utility or effect. 'You craftsmen — salesmen — swordsmen, — d6"but teU me clearly what you want, then, if I can say any- thing to help you, I will ; and if not, I will account to you as I best may for my inability.' But in order to put this ques- tion into any terms, one had first of aU to face the difficulty just spoken of — to me for the present insuperable, — the diffi- culty of knowing whether to address one's audience as beHev- ing, or not beheving, in any other world than this. For if you address any average modern EngUsh company as beheving in an Eternal life, and endeavour to draw any conclusions, from this assumed belief, as to their present business, they will forthwith teU you that what you say is very beautiful, but it is not practical If, on the contrary, you frankly address them as unbelievers in Eternal hie, and try to draw any con- sequences from that unbelief, — they immediately hold you 1 for an accursed person, and shake off the dust from their feet at you. And the more I thought over what I had got to say, the less I found I could say it, without some reference to this intangible or intractable part of the subject. It made all the difference, in asserting any principle of war, whether one assumed that a discharge of artillery would merely knead down a certain quantity of red clay into a level line, as in a bricjB field ; or whether, out of every separately Christian- named portion of the ruinous heappthere went out, into the imoke and dead-fallen air of battle, some astonished condi- tion of soul, unwillingly released. It made all the difference, in speaking of the possible range of commerce, whether one assumed that all bargains related only to visible property — or whether property, for the present invisible, but nevertheless real, was elsewhere purchasable on other jterms. It made aU the difference, in addressing a body of men subject to consid- erable hardship, and having to find some way out of it — whether one could confidentially say to them, ' My friends, — you have only to die, and all will be right ; ' or whether one l^d any secret misgiving that such advice was more blessed to him that gave, than to him that took it. And therefore 12 PRBFAGE. the deliberate reader will find, throughout these lectures, a hesitation in driving points home, and a pausing short of con- clusions which he will feel I would fain have come to ; hesita- tion which arises whoUy from this uncertainty of my hearers' temper. For I do not now speak, nor have I ever spoken, since the time of my first forward youth, in any proselyting temper, as Jesiring^to- persuade any one of -what, in such .raatters, I thought myself ; but, whomsoever I venture-±o_ad- dress, I take for the time his creed as I find it ; and endeav- our to push it into such vital fruit as it seems capable of. Thus, it is a creed with a great part of the existing English people, that they are in possession of a book which tells them, straight from the Ups of God aU they ought to do, and need to know. I have read that book, with as much care as most of them, for some forty years ; and am thankful that, on those who trust it, I can press its pleadings. My endeavour has been uniformly to make them trust it more deeply than they do ; trust it, not in their own favourite verses only, but in the sum of all ; trust it not as a fetish or talisman, which they are to be saved by daily repetitions of ; but as a Captain's order, to be heard and obeyed at their peril. I was always encouraged by supposing my hearers to hold such behef. 'To these, if to any, I once had hope of addressing, with accept- ance, words which insisted on the guilt of pride, and the futility of avarice ; from these, if from any, I once expected ratification of a political economy, which asserted that the life was more than the meat, and the body than raiment ; and these, it once seemed to me, I might ask without accusation or fanaticism, not merely in doctrine of the lips, but in the bestowal of their heart's treasure, to separate themselves from the crowd of whom it is wiitten, ' After all these things do the Gentiles seek.' It cannot, however, be assumed, with any semblance of reason, that a general audience is now whoUy, or even in majority, composed of these religious persons. A large por- tion must always consist of men who admit no such creed ; or who, at least, are inaccessible to appeals founded on it. And as, with the so-called Christian, I desired to plead for honest PREFACE. 13 declaration and fulfilment of his belief in life,— with the so- called Infidel, I desired to plead for an honest declaration and fulfilment of his belief in death. The dilemma is inevitable. Men must either hereafter hve, or hereafter die ,■ fate may be bravely met, and conduct v^isely ordered, on either expecta- tion; but never in jiesitation between ungrasped hope, and unconfronted fear. We usually believe in immortality, so far as to avoid preparation for death ; and in mortality, so far as to avoid preparation for anything after death. Whereas, a wise man will at least hold himself prepared for one or other of two events, of which one or other is inevitable ; and will have all things in order, for his sleep, or in readiness, for his awakening. Nor have we any right to call it an ignoble judgment, if he determine to put them in order, as for sleep. A brave belief in life is indeed an enviable state of mind, but, as far as I can discern, an unusual one. I know few Christians so convinced of the splendour of the rooms in their Father's house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions, than they would have been if the Queen had sent for them to live at Court : nor has the Church's most ardent ' desire to depart, and be vyith Christ,' ever cured it of the singnilar habit of putting on mourning for every person summoned to such departure. On the contrary, a brave belief in death has been assuredly held by many not ignoble persons, and it is a sign of the last depravity in the Church itself, when it assumes that such a beUef is inconsistent with either purity of charac- ter, or energj' of hand. The shortness of life is not, to any rational person, a conclusive reason for wasting the space of it which may be granted him ; nor does the anticipation of death to-morrow suggest, to any one but a drunkard, the ex- pediency of drunkenness to-day. To teach that there is no device in the grave, may indeed make the deviceless person more contented in his dulness ; but it will make the deviser only more earnest in devising, nor is human conduct likely, in every case, to be purer under the conviction that all its evil jnay in a moment be pardoned, and all its wrong-doing in h moment redeemed ; and that the sigh of repentance, which !4 PREFACE. purges the guilt of the past, will waft the soul into a felicity which forgets its pain, — than it may be under the sterner, and to many not unwise minds, more probable, apprehension, that ' what a man soweth that shall he also reap ' — or others reap, — when he, the living seed of pestilence, walketh no more in darkness, but lies down therein. But to men whose feebleness of sight, or bitterness of soul, or the offence given by the conduct of those who claim highei hope, may have rendered this painful creed the only possible one, there is an appeal to be made, more secure in its ground than any which can be addressed to happier persons. I would fain, if I might offencelessly, have spoken to them asifjione others heard ; and have said thus : Hear me, you dying men, who will soon be deaf for ever. For these others, at your right hand and your left, who look forward to a state of in- finite existence, in which aU their errors will be overruled, and aU their faults forgiven ; for these, who, stained and blackened in the battle smoke of mortality, have but to dip themselves for an instant in the font of death, and to rise re- newed of plumage, as a dove that is covered with silver, and her feathers hke gold ; for these, indeed, it may be permis- sible to waste their numbered moments, through faith in a future of innumerable hours ; to these, in their weakness, it may be conceded that they should tamper with sin which can only bring forth fruit of righteousness, and profit by the in- iquity which, one day, will be remembered no more. In them, it may be no sign of hardness of heart to neglect the poor, over whom they know their Master is watching ; and to leave those to perish temporarily, who cannot perish eternally. But, for you, there is no such hope, and therefore no such excuse. This fate, which you ordain for the wretched, you believe to be all their inheritance ; you may crush them, be- fore the moth, and they will never rise to rebuke you ; — their breath, which fails for lack of food, once expiring, will never be recalled to whisper against you a word of accusing ; — they and you, as you think, shall lie down together in the dust, and the worms cover you ; — and for them there shall be no consolation, and on you no vengeance, — only the qvfestion PREFAOB. 15 murmured above your grave : ' Who shall repay him what he hath done ? ' Is it therefore easier for you in your heart to inflict the sorrow for which there is no remedy ? Will you take, wantonly, this little all of his life from your poor broth- er, and make his brief hours long to him with pain ? Will you be readier to the injustice which can never be redressed ; and niggardly of mercy which you can bestow but once, and which, refusing, you refuse for ever ? I think better of you, even of the most selfish, than that you would do this, well understood. And for yourselves, it seems to me, the question becomes not less grave, in these curt hmits. If your hfe were but a fever fit, — the madness of a night, whose follies were aU to be forgotten in the dawn, it might matter little how you fretted away the sickly hours, — what toys you snatched at, or let fall, — what visions you followed wistfully with the de- ceived eyes of sleepless phrenzy. Is the earth only an hos- pital ? Play, if you care to play, on the floor of the hospital dens. Knit. its straw into what crowns please you; gather the dust of it for treasure, and die rich in that, clutching at ^ the black motes in the air with your dying hands ; — and yet, it may be well with you. But if this life be no dream, and the world no hospital ; if all the peace and power and joy you can ever win, must be won now ; and all fruit of victory gathered here, or never ; — wiU you still, throughout the puny totality of your life, weary yourselves in the fire for vanity ? If there is no rest which remaineth for you, is there none you might presently take ? was this grass of the earth made green for your shroud only, not for your bed ? and can you never lie down upon it, but only under it ? The heathen, to whose creed you have returned, thought not so. They knew that life brought its contest, but they expected from it also the crown of all contest : No proud one ! no jewelled circlet flam- / ing through Heaven above the height of the unmerited throne ; only some few leaves of wild olive, cool to the tired brow, > through a few years of peace. It should have been of gold, they thought ; but Jupiter was poor ; this was the best the god could give them. Seeking a greater than this, they had known it a mockery. Not in war, not in wealth, not in tyr- 16 PBEFAGB. annj, waa there any happiness to be found for them — only in kindly peace, fruitful and free. The wreath was to be of wild oHve, mark you : — the tree that grows carelessly, tufting the rocks with no vivid bloom, no verdure of branch ; only with soft snow of blossom, and scarcely fulfilled fruit, mixed with grey leaf and thornset stem ; no fastening of diadem for you but with such sharp embroidery ! But this, such as it is, you may win while yet you Uve ; type of grey honour and sweet rest.* Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and the ministry to their pain ; — these, and the blue sky above you, and the sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath ; and mysteries and presences, innumer- able, of hving things, — these may yet be here your riches ; im.tormenting and divine : serviceable for the life that now ia nor, it may be, without promise of that which is to come. r ' ' '" THE CROWN OF WILD OLIYE. LECTUEE I. WORK. {Velwered before the Working Men's Institute, at OamberweU.) My Friends, — I have not come among you to-night to en- deavour to give you an e ntertainin g lecture ; but to tell you a few- plain .Jacts, and ask you some plain, but necessary questions. I have seen and known too much of the struggle for Mfe among our labouring population, to feel at ease, even under any circumstances, in inviting them to dwell on the trivialities of my own studies ; but, much more, as I meet to- night, for the first time, the members of a working Institute established in the district in which I have passed the greater part of my life, I am desirous that we should at once under- stand each other, on graver matters. I would fain tell you, with what feelings, and with what hope, I regard this Insti- tution, as one of many such, now happily established through- out England, as well as in other countries ; — Institutions which are preparing the way for a great change in all the circumstances of industrial life ; but of which the success must wholly depend upon our clearly understanding the cir- cumstances and necessary limits of this change. No teacher can truly promote the cause^oTeducation, until he knows the conditions of the life for which that education is to prepare his pupiL And the fact that he is called upon to address you nominally, as a 'Working Class,' must compel him, if hn is in any wise earnest or thoughtful, to inquire in ^e outset % 18 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. on what you yourselves suppose this class distinction has been founded in the past, and must be founded in the future. The manner of the amusement, and the matter of the teach- ing, which any of us can offer you, must depend wholly on our;first understanding from you, whether you think the dis- tinction heretofore drawn between working men and others, is truly or falsely founded. Do you accept it as it stands ? do you wish it to be modified ? or do you think the object of education is to efface it, and make us forget it for ever ? Let me make myself more distinctly understood. We call this — ^you and I — a ' Working Men's ' Institute, and our col- lege in London, a ' Working Men's ' CoUege. Now, how do you consider that these several institutes differ, or ought to differ, from ' idle men's ' institutes and ' idle men's ' colleges ? Or by what other word than ' idle " shall I distinguish those whom the happiest and wisest of working men do not object to call the 'Upper Classes?' Are there reaUy upper classes, — are there lower ? How much should they always be ele- vated, how much always depressed? And, gentlemen and ladies — I pray those of you who are here to forgive me the offence there may be in what I am going to say. ItjajioU- who wish to say it. Bitter voices say it ; voices of battle and of famine through aU the world, which must be heard some day, whoever keeps silence. Neither is it to you specially that I say it. I am sure that most now present know their duties of kindness, and fulfil them, better perhaps than I do mine. But I speak to you as representing your whole class, which errs, I know, chiefly by thoughtlessness, but not there- fore the less terribly. Wilful error is limited by the will, but what Hmit is there to that of which we are unconscious ? Bear with me, therefore, while I turn to these workmen, and ask them, also as representing a great multitude, what they think the ' upper classes ' are, and ought to be, in rela- tion to them. Answer, you workmen who are here, as you would among yourselves, frankly ; and tell me how you would have me call those classes. Am I to call them — would yon think me right in calling them — the idle classes ? I think you would feel somewhat uneasy, and as jf I were not treating WORK. 19 my subject honestly, or speaking from my heart, if I went on under the supposition that all rich people were idle. Tou would be both unjust and unwise if you allowed me to say that ; — not less unjust than the rich people who say that all the poor are idle, and wOl never work if they can help it, or more than they can help. For indeed the fact is, that there are idle poor and idle- rich ; and there are busy poor and busy rich. Many a beggar is as lazy as if he had ten thousand a year ; and many a man of large fortune is busier than his errand-boy, and never would think of stopping in the street to play marbles. So that, in a large view, the distinction between workers and idlers, as between knaves and honest men, runs through the very heart and innermost economies of men of all ranks and in all positions. There is a working class — strong and happy — among both rich and poor ; there is an idle class — weak, wicked, and miserable — among both rich and poor. And the worst of the misunderstandings arising between the two orders come of the unlucky fact that the wise of one class habitually contemplate the foolish of the other. If the busy rich people watched and rebuked the idle rich people, aU would be right ; and if the busy poor people watched and rebuked the idle poor people, all would be right. But each class has a tendency to look for the faults of the other. A hard-working man of property is particularly offended by an idle beggar ; and an orderly, but poor, workman is naturally intolerant of the licen- tious luxury of the rich. And what is severe judgment in the minds of the just men of either class, becomes fierce enmity in the unjust — but among the unjust only. None but the dis- solute among the poor look upon the rich as their natural enemies, or desire to pillage their houses and divide their property. None but the dissolute among the rich speak in opprobrious terms of the vices and foUies of the poor. There is, then, no class distinction between idle and indua- trious people ; and I am going to-night to speak only of the indu8*d-ious. The idle people we will put out of our thoughts at once — they are mere nuisances — what ought to be done with them, we'll talk of at another tima But there are class dis. 20 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. tinctions, among the industrious themselves ; tremendoMS di» tinctions, which rise and fall to every degree in the infinite thermometer of human pain and of human power — distinc- tions of high and low, of lost and won, to the whole reach of man's soul and body. These separations we will study, and the laws of them, among energetic men only, who, whether they work or whether they play, put their strength into the work, and their strength into the game ; being in the full sense of the word ' industri- ous,' one way or another — with a purpose, or without. And these distinctions are mainly four : I. Between those who work, and those who play. n. Between those who produce the means of life, and those who consume them. in. Between those who work with the head, and those who work with the hand. IV. Between those who work wisely, and who work fool- ishly. For easier memory, let us say we are going to oppose, in our examination. — L Work to play ; n. Production to consumption ; m. Head to Hand ; and, IV. Sense to nonsense. I. First, then, of the distinction between the classes who work and the classes who play. Of course we must agree upon a definition of these terms, — work and play, — before going farther. Now, roughly, not with vain subtlety of defi- nition, but for plain use of the words, 'play ' is an exertion of body or mind, made to please ourselves, and with no jdatet mined end ; and work is a thing done because it ought to be done, and with a determined end. Tou play, as you call it, at cricket, for instance. That is as hard work as anything else ; but it amuses you, and it has no result but the amuse- ment. If it were done as an ordered form of exercise, for health's sake, it would become work directly. So, in like manner, whatever we do to please ourselves, and only for the sake of the pleasure, not for an ultimate object, is 'play,' the WOBS. 21 •pleasing thing,' not the useful thing. Play may be useful in ft secondary sense (nothing is indeed more useful or necessary) ; but the use of it depends on its being spontaneous. Let us, then, enquire together what sort of games the play- i ing class in England spend their lives in playing at. The first of all English games is making money. That is an aU-absorbing game ; and we knock each other down often- er in playing at that than at foot-ball, or any other roughest ' sport ; and it is absolutely without purpose ; no one who en- gages heartily in that game ever knows why. Ask a great money-maker what he wants to do with his money — he never knows. He doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he may get it. ' What will you make of what you have got? ' you ask. 'Well, I'll get more,' he says. Just as, at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. And there's no use in the money, but to have more of it than other people is the game. So all that great foul city of London there, — rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, — a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore, — you fancy it is a city of work ? Not a street of it ! It is a great city of play ; very nasty play, and very hard play, but still play. It is only Lord's cricket ground without the turf, — a huge biUiard table vdthout the cloth, and with pockets as deep as the bottomless pit ; but mainly a billiard table, after all. Well, the first great Enghsh game is this playing at coun- ters. It differs from the rest in that it appears always to be (:- producing money, while every other game is expensive. But it does not always produce money. There's a gi-eat difference between ' winning ' money and ' making ' it ; a great difference between getting it out of another man's pocket into ours, or filling both. Collecting money is by no means the same thing as making it ; the tax-gatherer's house is not the Mint ; and much of the apparent gain (so called), in commerce, is only a form of taxation on carriage or exchange. Our next great English game, however, hunting and shoot- ing, is costly altogether ; and how much we are fined for it aimually in land, horses, gamekeepers, and game laws, and all 22 THE CROWN OF* WILD OLIVE. else that accompanies that beautiful and special English game, I will not endeavour to count now : but note only that, except for exercise, this is not merely a useless game, but a deadly one, to all connected with it. For through horse-racing, you get every form of what the higher classes everywhere call ' Play,' in distinction from all other plays ; that is — gambling; by no means a beneficial or recreative game : and, through game-preserving, you get also some curious laying out of ground ; that beautiful arrangement of dweUing-house for man and beast, by which we have grouse and black-cock — so many brace to the acre, and men and women — so many brace to the garret. I often wonder what the angelic builders and surveyors — the angehc builders who build the ' many man- sions ' up above there ; and the angehc surveyors, who meas- ured that four-square city with their measuring reeds — I won- der what they think, or are supposed to think, of the laying out of ground by this nation, which has set itself, as it seems, literally to accomplish, word for word, or rather fact for word, ,in the persons of those poor whom its Master left to represent him, what that Master said of himself — that foxes and birds had homes, but He none. Then, next to the gentlemen's game of hunting, we must put the ladies' game of dressing. It is not the cheapest of games. I saw a brooch at a jeweller's in Bond Street a fort- night ago, not an inch wide, and witiiout any singular jewel in it, yet worth 3,000i. And I wish I could tell you what this 'play' costs, altogether, in England, France, and Russia an- nually. But it is a pretty game, and on certain terms, 1 likp it ; nay, I don't see it played quite as much as I would fail have it. You ladies like to lead the fashion : — by all means lead it — lead it thoroughly, lead it far enough. Dress your- selves nicely, and dress everybody else nicely. Lead ihe fash- ions for the poor first ; make them look well, and you yourselves will look, in ways of which you have now no conception, all the better. The fashions you have set for some time among your peasantry are not pretty ones ; their doublets are too UTegularly slashed, and the wind blows too frankly through them. Then there are other games, wild enough, as I could show you if I had time. There's playing at literature, and playing at art — very dil. ferent, both, from working at hterature, or working at art, but I've no time to speak of these. I pass to the greatest of all — the play of plays, the great gentlemen's game, which ladies like them best to play at, — the game of War. It is en- trahcingly pleasant to the imagination ; the facts of it, not always so pleasant. We dress for it, however, more finely than for any other sport ; and go out to it, not merely in scar- let, as to hunt, but in scarlet and gold, and all manner of fine colours : of course we could fight better in grey, and without feathers ; but all nations have agreed that it is good to be well dressed at this play. Then the bats and balls are very costly ; our English and French bats, with the balls and wickets, even those which we don't make any use of, costing, I suppose, now about fifteen millions of money annually to each nation ; all of which, you know is paid for by hard la- bourer's work in the furrow and furnace. A costly game I — not to speak of its consequences ; I wiU say at present nothing of these. The mere immediate cost of all these plays is wkat I want you to consider ; they aU cost deadly work somewhere, as many of us know too well. The jewel-cutter, whose sight fails over the diamonds ; the weaver, whose arm fails over the web ; the iron-forger, whose breath fails before the furnace — they know what work is — they, who have all the work, and none of the play, except a kind they have named for themselves down in the black north country, where ' play ' means being laid up by sickness. It is a pretty example foi philologists, of varying dialect, this change in the sense oi the word 'play,' as used in the black country of Birmingham, and the red and black country of Baden Baden. Yes7gentle- men, and gentlewomen, of England, who think ' one moment unamused a misery, not made for feeble man,' this is what youjiave brought the word 'play' to mean, in the heart of merry England ! You may have your fluting and piping ; but there are sad children sitting in the market-place, whfc indeed cannot say to you, ' We have piped unto you, and y« 24 mw cnoWN off WtLD OLtVM. have not danced :' but eternally shall say to you, 'We havfi mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.' This, then, is the first distinction between the "upper and lower' classes. And this is one which is by no means neces- sary ; which indeed must, in process of good time, be by all honest men's consent aboUshed. Men will be taught that an existence of play, sustained by the blood of other creatures, is a good existence for gnats and sucking fish ; but not for men : that neither days, nor lives, can be made holy by doing nothing in them : that the best prayer at the beginning of a day is that we may not lose its moments ; and the best grace before meat, the consciousness that we have justly earned our dinner. And when we have this much of plain Christianity preached to us again, and enough respect for what we regard as inspiration, as not to think that ' Son, go work to-dayin my " vineyfird,' means ' Fool, go play to-day i&Tuy vineyard,' we shall all be workers, in one way or another ; and this much at least of the distinction between ' upper ' and ' lower ' forgotten. n. I pass then to our second distinction ; between the rich and poor, between Dives and Lazarus, — distinction which exists more sternly, I suppose, in this day, than ever ^n the world, Pagan or Christian, till now. I wiU put it sharply before you, to begin with, merely by reading two paragraphs which I cut from two papers that lay on my breakfast table on the same morning, the 25th of November, 1864. The piece about the rich Russian at Pai-is is common- place enough, and stupid besides (for fifteen francs, — 12s. 6d., — is nothing for a rich man to give for a couple of peaches, out of season). Still, the two paragraphs printed on the same day are worth putting side by side. ' Such a man is now here. He is a Russian, and, witli your permission, we will call him Count Teufelskine. In dress he is sublime ; art is considered in that toilet, the har- mony of colour respected, the chiar' oscuro evident in well- selected contrast. In manners he is di^ified — nay, perhaps apathetic: nothing disturbs the placid serenity of that calm exterior. One day our friend breakfasted chez Bignon. When the bill came he read, " Two peaches, ISf.' He paid V/oRK. 25 " Peacltes scai?ce, I presume ? " was Ws sole remark. " No. sir," replied the waiter, " but Teufelskines are." ' Telegraph, November 25, 1864. ' Yesterday morning, at eigbt o'clock, a woman, passing a dung heap in the stone yard near the recently-erected alms- ' houses in Shadwell Gap, High Street, Shadwell, called the at- tention of a Thames police-constable to a man in a sitting position on the dung heap, and said she was afraid he was dead. Her fears proved to be true. The wretched creature appeared to have been dead several hours. He had perished of cold and wet, and the rain had been beating down on him all night. The deceased was a bone-picker. He was in the lowest stage of poverty, poorly clad, and half-starved. The police had frequently driven him away from the stone yard, between sunset and sunrise, and told him to go home. He selected a most desolate spot for his wretched death. A penny and some bones were found in his pockets. The de- ceased was between fifty and sixty years of age. Inspector Roberts, of the K division, has given directions for inquiries to be made at the lodging-houses respecting the deceased, to ascertain his identity if possible.' — Morning Post, November 25, 1864. ¥ou have the separation thus in brief compass ; and I want you to take notice of the ' a penny and some bones were found in his pockets,' and to compare it with this third statement, from the Telegraph of January 16th of this year : — 'Again, the dietary scale for adult and juvenile paupers was drawn up by the most conspicuous political economists in England. It is low in quantity, but it is sufficient to support nature ; yet within ten years of the passing of the Poor Law Act, we heard of the paupers in the Andover Union gnawing the scraps of putrid flesh and sucking the marrow from the bones of horses which they were employed to crush.' Tou see my reason for thinking that our Lazarus of Chris- tianity has some advantage over the Jewish one. Jewish Lazarus expected, or at least prayed, to be fed with crumbs from the rich man's table ; but our Lazarus is fed with crumbs from the dog's table. 26 THB GROWN OP WILD OLtVEl. Now this distinction between rich and poor rests on two bases. Within its proper limits, on a basis which is lawful and everlastingly necessary ; beyond them, on a basis unlaw- ful, and everlastingly corrupting the frame-work of society. The lawful basis of wealth is, that a man who works should be paid the fair value of his work ; and that if he does not choose to spend it to-day, he should have free leave to keep it, and spend it to-morrow. Thus, an industrious man work- ing daily, and laying by daily, attains at last the possession of an accumulated sum of wealth, to which he has absolute right. The idle person who vnll not work, and the wasteful person who lays nothing by, at the end of the same time will be doubly poor — poor in possession, and dissolute in moral habit ; and he will then naturally covet the money which the other has saved. And if he is then allowed to attack the other, and rob him of his well-earned wealth, there is no more any motive for saving, or any reward for good conduct ; and all society is thereupon dissolved, or exists only in systems of rapine. Therefore the first necessity of social life is the clear- ness of national conscience in enforcing the law — that he should keep who has justly earned. That law, I say, is the proper basis of distinction between rich and poor. But there is also a false basis of distinction ; namely, the power held over those who earn wealth by those who levy or exact it. There wiU be always a number of men who would fain set themselves to the accumulation of wealth as the sole object of their hves. Necessarily, that class of men is an uneducated class, inferior in intellect, and more or less cowardly. It is physically impossible for a well-educated, intellectual, or brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts ; as physically impossible as it is for him to make his dinner the principal object of them. All healthy people like their dinners, but their dinner is not the main object of their lives. So all healthily minded people Hke making money — ought to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of winning it; but the main object of their life is not money ; it is some- thing better than money. A good soldier, for instance, mainly wishes to do his fightiag weU. He is glad of his pay — very WORK. 27 properly so, and justly grumbles when you keep him ten yeaxs without it— stUl, his main notion of life is to win battles, not to be paid for winning them. So of clergymen. They like pew-rents, and baptismal fees, of course ; but yet, if they are brave and well educated, the pew-rent is not the sole ob- ject of their lives, and the baptismal fee is not the sole pur- pose of the baptism ; the clergyman's object is essentially to baptize and preach, not to be paid for preaching. So of doc- tors. They like fees no doubt, — ought to like them ; yet if they are brave and well educated, the entire object of their lives is not fees. They, on the whole, desire to cure the sick ; and, — if they are good doctors, and the choice were fairly put to them, — would rather cure their patient, and lose their fee, than kill him, and get it. And so with aU other brave and rightly trained men ; their work is first, their fee second — very important always, but stUl second. But in every nation, as I said, there are a vast class who are iU-educated, cowardly, and more or less stupid. And with these people, just as cer- tainly the fee is first, and the work second, as with brave people the work is first and the fee second. And this is no small distinction. It i£_the whole- distinction in a man ; dis- tinction between life and death in him, between heaven and heU /or him. You cannot servetwo masters ; — you must serve one or other. If your work is first with you, and your fee second, work is your master, and the lord of work, who is God. But if your fee is first with you, and your work second, fee is your master, and the lord of fee, who is the Desil ; and not only the Devil, but the lowest of devils — the ' least erected fiend that fell.' So there you have it in brief terms ; Work first — you are God's servants ; Fee first — you ~~ are the Fiend's. And it makes a difference, now and ever, beUeve me, whether you serve Him who has on His vesture ' and thigh written, 'King of Kings,' and whose service is per- fect freedom ; or him on whose vesture and thigh the name is written, ' Slave of Slaves,' and whose service is perfect slavery. However, in every nation there are, and must always be, a certain number of these Fiend's servants, who have it princi- pally for the object of their lives to make money. They are 28 TEE OBOWN OF WILD OLIVE. always, as I said, more or less stupid, and cannot conceive of anything else so nice as money. Stupidity is always the basis of the Judas bargain. We do great injustice to Iscariot, in thinking him wicked above all common wickedness. He was only a common money-lover, and, Uke aU money-lovers, didn't understand Christ ; — couldn't make out the worth of Him, or meaning of Him. He didn't want Him to be kUled. He was horror-struck when he found that Christ would be killed ; threw his money away instantly, and hanged himself. How many of our present money-seekers, think you, would have the grace to hang themselves, whoever was killed ? But Judas was a common, selfish, muddle-headed, pilfering fel- low ; his hand always in the bag of the poor, not caring for them. He didn't understand Christ ; — yet believed in Him, much more than most of us do ; had seen Him do miracles, thought He was quite strong enough to shift for Himself, and he, Judas, might as well make his own little bye-perquisites out of the affair. Christ would come out of it well enough, and he have his thirty pieces. Now, that is the money-seek- er's idea, all over the world. He doesn't hate Christ, but can't understand Him — doesn't care for him — sees no good in that benevolent business ; makes bis own little job-outof it at all events, come what will. And thus, out of every mass of men, you have a certain number of bag-men — your 'fee- first ' men, whose main object is to make money. And they do make it — make it in all sorts of unfair ways, chiefly by the weight and force of money itself, or what is called the power of capital ; that is to say, the power which money, once ob- tained, has over the labour of the poor, so that the capitalist can take aU its produce to himself, except the labourer's food. That is the modern Judas's way of ' carrying the bag,' and ' bearing what is put therein.' Nay, but (it is asked) how is that an unfair advantage ? Has not the man who has worked for the money a right to use it as he best can ? No ; in this respect, money is now exactly what mountain promontories over pubUc roads were in old times. The barons fought for them fairly :— the strong' est and cuuniugest got them ; then fortified them, and xxxaA^ WOBE. 29 sveryone tyIso passed below pay toll. Well, capital now is exactly what crags were then. Men fight fairly (we will, at least, grant so much, though it is more than we ought) for their money ; but, once having got it, the fortified millionaire can make everybody who passes below pay toll to his million, and build another tower of his money castle. And I can tell you, the poor vagrants by the roadside suffer now quite as much from the bag-baron, as ever they did from the crag- baron. Bags-and crags have just. the same result on rags. I have not time, however, to-night to show you irr how many ways the power of capital is unjust ; but this one great prin- ciple I have to assert — you will find it quite indisputably true — that whenever money is the principal object of life with either man or nation, it is both got ill, and spent iU ; and does harm both in the getting and spending ; but when it is not the principal object, it and all other things will be well got, and well spent. And here is the test, with every man, of whether money is the principal object with him, or not. If in mid-life he coidd pause and say, "Now I have enough to live upon, I'll live upon it ; and having well earned it, I wiU also well spend it, and go out of the world poor, as I came into it," then money is not principal with him ; but if, having enough to live upon in the manner befitting_hiax_haracter and rank, he stiU wants to make more, and to die rich, then money is the principal object with him, and it becomes a curse to himself, and generally to those who spend it after him. For you know it mMS^Jbe-^psjit some day ; the only question is whether theltnan who makes it shall spend it, or some one else. And generally it is better for the maker to spend it, for he will know best its value and use. This is the true law of Ufe. And if a man does not choose thus to spend his money, he must either hoard it or lend it, and the worst thing he can generally do is to lend it ; for borrowers are nearlX-^ways ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done, and aU unjust war protracted. For observe what the real fact is, respecting loans to for- eign military governments, and how strange it is. If your ^ttle boy came to you to ask for money to spend in squiba 30 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVB. and crackers, you would think twice before you gave it him ; and you would have some idea that it was wasted, when you saw it fly off in fireworks, even though he did no mischief with it. But the Eussian children, and Austrian children, come to you, borrowing money, not to spend in innocent squibs, but in cartridges and bayonets to attack you in India with, and to keep down all noble life in Italy with, and to murder Polish women and children with ; and that you will give at once, because they pay you interest for it. Now, in order to pay you that interest, they must tax every working peasant in their dominions ; and on that work you live. You therefore at once rob the Austrian peasant, assassinate or banish the Polish peasant, and you live on the produce of the theft, and the bribe for the assassination ! That is the broad fact — that is the practical meaning of your foreign loans, and of most large interest of money ; and then you quarrel with Bishop Colenso, forsooth, as if he denied the Bible, and you beUeved it ! though, wretches as you are, every deUberate act of your lives is a new defiance of its primary orders ; and as if, for most of the rich men of England at this moment, it were not indeed to be desired, as the best thing at least for them, that the Bible should not be true, since against them these words are written in it : ' The rust of your gold and silver shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh, as it were fire.' m. I pass now to our third condition of separation, be- tween the men who work vrith the hand, and those who work with the head. And here we have at last an inevitable distinction. There must be work done by the arms, or none of us could live. There must be work done by the brains, or the life we get would not be worth having. And the same men cannot do both. There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it ; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it; and it is physically impossible that one class should do, or divide, the work of the other. And it is of no use to try to conceal this soiTowf ul fact by fine words, and to talk to ^e workman about the boQovvrableuesg of manual labout / ■/ / / WORK. 31 and the dignify of humanity. That is a grand old proverli of Sancho Panza's, ' Fine words butter no parsnips ; ' and I cap tell you that, all over England just now, you workmen are buying a great deal too much butter at that dairy. Eough work, honourable or not, takes the life out of us ; and the man who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an express train against the north wind all night, or hold- ing a collier's helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or whirling white hot iron at a furnace mouth, that man is not the same at the end of his day, or night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything comfortable about him, reading books, or classing butterflies, or paiating pictures. If it is any com- fort to you to be told that the rough work is the more hon- ourable of the two, I should be sorry to take that much of consolation from you ; and in some sense I need not. The rough work is at all events real, honest, and, generally, though not always, useful ; while the fine work is, a great deal of it, f ooUsh and false as well as fine, and therefore dishonourable ; but when both kinds are equally well and worthily done, the head's is the noble work, and the hand's the ignoble ; and of all hand work whatsoever, necessary for the maintenance of life, those old words, ' In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread,' indicate that the inherent nature of it is one of calam- ity ; and that the ground, ciu'sed for our sake, casts also some shadow of degradation into our contest with its thorn and its thistle ; so that aU nations have held their days hon- ourable, or 'holy,' and constituted them 'holydays' or 'holi- days,' by making them days of rest ; and the promise, which, among all our distant hopes, seems to cast the chief bright- ness over death, is that blessing of the dead who die in the Lord, that ' they rest from their labours, and their works do foUow them.' And thus the perpetual question and contest must arise, who is to do this rough work ? and how is the worker of it to be comforted, redeemed, and rewarded ? and what kind of play should he have, and what rest, in this world, sometimes, as well as in the next ? Well, my good working friends, these questions will take a little time to answer yet. They 32 TEE GROWN OP WILD OLIVE. must be answered : all good men are occupied with them, and all honest thinkers. There's grand head work doing about them ; but much must be discovered, and much at- tempted in vain, before anything decisive can be told you. Only note these few particulars, which are already sure. As to the distribution of the hard work. None of us, or very few of us, do either hard or soft work because we think we ought ; but because we have chanced to fall into the way of it, and cannot help ourselves. Now, nobody does anything ' well that they cannot help doing : work is only" done well when it is done with a wiU ; and no man has a thoroughly sound will unless he knows he is doing what he should, and is in hisj)lace. And, depend upon it, all work must be done atlast, not in a disorderly, 'scrambling, doggish way, but in an ordered, soldierly, human way — a lawful way. Men are en- listed for the labour that kills — the labour of war : they are counted, trained, fed, dressed, and praised for that. Let them be enlisted also for the labour that feeds : let them be counted, trained, fed, dressed, praised for that. Teach the plough ex- ercise as carefully as you do the sword exercise, and let the officers of troops of life be held as much gentlemen as the officers of troops of death ; and all is done : but neither this, nor any other right thing, can be accompUshed — you can't even see your way to it — unless, first of all, both servant and master are resolved that, come what will of it, they will do each other justice. People are perpetually squabbhng about what wiU be best to do, or easiest to do, or adviseablest to do, or profitablest to do ; but they never, so far as I hear them talk, ever ask what it is just to do. And it is the law of heaven that you shall not be able to judge what is wise or easy, unless you are first resolved to judge what is just, and to do it. That is the one thing constantly reiterated by our Master — the order of all others that is given oftenest — ' Do justice and judgment.' That's your Bible order ; that's the 'Service of God,' not praying nor psalm-singing. You are told, indeed, to sing psalms when you are merry, and to pray when you need anything ; and, by the pei-version of the Evil Spirit, we get to t]?!!*ik that praying and psalm-singing are "yfORK. 33 ' '' servicOv' If a child finds itself in want of anything, it runs in and asks its father for it — does it call that, doing its father a service ? If it begs for a toy or a piece of cake — does it call that serving its father ? That, with God, is prayer, and He likes to hear it : He likes you to ask Him for cake when you want it ; but He doesn't call that ' serving Him.' Beg- ging is not serving : God Ukes mere beggars as little as you do — He Kkes honest servants, not beggars. So when a child loves its father very much, and is very happy, it may sing little songs about him ; but it doesn't call that serving its father ; neither is singing songs about God, serving God. It is enjoying ourselves, if it's anything ; most probably it is nothing ; but if it's anything, it is serving ourselves, not God. And yet we are impudent enough to call our beggings and chauntings ' Divine Service : ' we say ' Divine service will be " performed " ' (that's our word — the form of it gone through) ' at eleven o'clock' Alas ! — unless we perform Divine service in every willing act of our life, we never perform it at all. The one Divine work — the one ordered sacrifice — is to do justice ; and it is the last we are ever inclined to do. Any- thing rather than that ! As much charity as you choose, but no justice. ' Nay,' you will say, ' charity is greater than jus- tice.' Yes, it is greater ; it is the summit of justice — it is the temple of which justice is the foundation. But you can't have the top without the bottom ; you cannot build upon charity. You must build upon justice, for this main reason, that you have not, at first, charity to build vnth. It is the last reward of good work. Do justice to your brother (you can do that, whether you love him or not), and you will come to love him. But do injustice to him, because you don't love him ; and you will come to hate him. It is all very fine to think you can build upon charity to begin with ; but you will find aU you hate _gotJo_begiiLwith, begins at home, and is essentially love of yourself. You well-to-do people, for instance, who are here to-night, will go to ' Divine service ' next Sunday, aU nice and tidy, and your little children will have their tight little Sunday boots on, and lovely little Sunday feathers in their hats ; and you'll think, complacently and piously, how 3 34 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. ,, lovely they look ! So they do : and you love them, heartily, Q and you Hke sticking feathers in their hats. That's aU right: that is charity ; but it is charity beginning at home. Then you will come to the poor Uttle crossing-sweeper, got up also, — it, in its Sunday dress, — the dirtiest rags it has, — that it may beg the better : we shall give it a penny, and think how good we are. That's charity going abroad. But what does Justice say, walking and watching near us ? Christian Jus- tice has been strangely mute, and seemingly blind ; and, if not blind, decrepit, this many a day : she-keeps her accounts ^till, however — quite steadily — doing them aTloights, care- ' fuUy, vsitti_her bandage off, and through acutest spectacles (the only modern scientific invention she cares about). You must put your ear down ever so close to her lips to hear her speak ; and then you will start at what she first whispers, for it wiU certainly be, ' Why shouldn't that httle crossing-sweeper \^ have a feather on its head, as well as your ovm child ? ' Then you may ask Justice, in an amazed manner, ' How she can possibly be so foolish as to think children could sweep cross- ings with feathers on their heads ? ' Then you stoop again, and Justice says — stiU in her duU, stupid way — 'Then, why don't you, every other Sunday, leave your child to sweep the crossing, and take the little sweeper to church in a hat and feather ? ' Mercy on us (you think), what will she say next ? And you answer, of course, that 'you don't, because every body ought to remain content in the position in which Prov- idence has placed them.' Ah, my friends, that's the gist of the whole question. Bid Providence put them in that posi- tion, or did you ? Tou knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell him to remain content in the ' position in which Providence has placed him.' That's modem Christianity. You say — ' We did not knock him into the ditch.' How do you know what you have done, or are doing? That's just what we have aU got to know, and what we shall never know, untn the question with us every morning, is, not how to do the gainful thing, but how to do the just thing ; nor untR we are at least so far on the way to being Christian, as to have understood that m^^ro of the poor half-way Mahometan, WORK 35 'One hour in the execution of justice is worth seventy years of prayer.' Supposing, then, we have it determined with appropriate justice, who is to do the hand work, the next questions must be how the hand-workers are to be paid, and how they are to be refreshed, and what play they are to have. Now, the possible quantity of play depends on the possible quantity of pay ; and the quantity of pay is not a matter for considera- tion to hand-workers only, but to all workers. Generally, good, useful work, whether of the hand or head, is either ill- paid, or not paid at all. I don't say it should be so, but it always is so. People, as a rule, only pay for being amused or being cheated, not for being served. Five thousand a year to your talker, and a shilling a day to your fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head work in art, Uterature, or science, is ever paid for. How much do you think Homer got for his Iliad ? or Dante for his Paradise ? only bitter bread and salt, and going up and down other peo- \ pie's stairs. In science, the man who discovered the tele- scope, and first saw heaven, was paid with a dungeon ; the man who invented the microscope, and first saw earth, died of starvation, driven from his home : it is indeed very clear that God means all thoroughly good work and talk to be done for nothing. Baruch, the scribe, did not get a^penngt a hne for writing Jeremiah's second roll for him, I fancy ; and St. Stephen did not get bishop's pay for that long sermon of his to the Pharisees ; nothing but stones. For indeed that is the wfflddifaiJiec^ proper payment. So surely as any of the world's ehildrenj work for the world's good, honestly, with head and heart ; and come to it, saying, ' Give us a Httle bread, just to keep the life in us,' the world-father answers them, ' No, my children, not bread ; a stone, if you hke, or as many as you need, to keep you quiet.' But the hand-workers are not so iU off as aU this comes to. The worst that can hap- pen ix> you ia to break stones ; not be broken by them. And for you there will come a time for better payment ; some day, assuredly, more pence will, be paid to Peter the Fisherman, and fewer to Peter the Pope ; we shall pay people not quite \\ 36 THE CROWN Off WILD OLIVM. so much for talking in Parliament and doing nothing, as for holding their tongues out of it and doing something ; we shall pay our ploughman a little more and our lawyer a little less, and so on : but, at least, we may even now take care that whatever work is done shall be fully paid for ; and the man who does it paid for it, not somebody else ; and that it shaU be done in an orderly, soldierly, weU-guided, wholesome way, under good captains and lieutenants of labour ; and that it shall have its appointed times of rest, and enough of them ; and that in those times the play shall be wholesome play, not in theatrical^gardens, with tin flowers and gas sunshine, and girlsdancing because of their misery ; but in true gardens, with real flowers, and real sunshine, and children dancing be- cause of their gladness ; so that truly the streets shall be fuU (the 'streets,' mind you, not the gutters) of children, playing in the midst thereof. We may take care that working-men shaU have at least as good books to read as anybody else, when they've time to read them ; and as comfortable firesides to sit at as anybody else, when they've time to sit at them. This, I think, can be managed for you, my working friends, in the good time. IV. I must go on, however, to our last head, concerning ourselves all, as workers. What is wise work, and what is foolish work ? What the difference between sense and non- sense, in daily occupation ? Well, wise work is, briefly, work imth God. Foolish work is work against God. And work done with God, which He will help, may be briefly described as ' Putting in Order '— that is, enforcing God's law of order, spiritual and material, over men and things. " The first thing you have to do, essen- tially ; the real ' good work ' is, with respect to men, to en- force justice, and vsdth respect to things, to enforce tidine&s, and fruitful ness. And against these two great human deeds, justice and order, there are perpetually two great demons contending, — the devil of inic|uity, or inequity, and the devU of disorder, or of death; for_death_ is ijnly consummation of disorder. You have to fight these two fiends daily. So far as you don't fight against the fiend of iniquity, you work lot WORK. 37 him. You 'work iniquity,' and the judgment upon you, foi all your ' Lord, Lord's,' will be ' Depart from me, ye that work iniquity.' And so far as you do not resist the fiend of disor- der, you work disorder, and you yourseK do the work of Death, which is sin, and has for its wages. Death himself. Observe then, all wise work is mainly threefold in charac- ter. It is honest, useful, and cheerful. I. It is HONEST. I hardly know anything more strange than that you recognise honesty in play, and you do not in work. In your lightest games, you have always some one to see what you call ' fair-play.' In boxing, you must hit fair ; in racing, start fair. Your English watchword is fair-play, your Enghsh hatred, foul-play. Did it ever strike you that you wanted another watchword also, fair-work, and another hatred also, foul- work ? Your prize-fighter has some honour in him yet ; and so have the men in the ring round him : they wiU judge him to lose the match, by foul hitting. But your prize-merchant gains his match by foul selling, and no one cries out against that. You drive a gambler out of the gam- bling-room who loads dice, but you leave a tradesman in flour- ishing business, who loads scales ! For observe, all dishonest dealing is loading scales. What does it matter whether I get short weight, adulterate substance, or dishonest fabric ? The 'lault in the fabric is incomparably the worst of the two. Give me short measure of food, and I only lose by you ; but give me adulterate food, and I die by you. Here, then, is your chief duty, you workmen and tradesmen — to be true to yourselves, and to us who would help you. We can do nothing for you, nor you for yourselves, without honesty. Get that, you get all ; without that, your suffrages, your reforms, your free-trade measures, your institutions of science, are all in vain. It is useless to put your heads together, if you can't put your hearts together. Shoulder to shoulder, right hand to right hand, among yourselves, and no wrong hand to any- body else, and you'll win the world yet. n. Then, secondly, wise work is useful. No man minde, or ought to mind, its being hard, if only it comes to some- thing ; but when it is hard, and comes to nothing ; when all S8 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVB. our beeslbusiness turns to spiders' ; and for honey-comb we have only resultant cobweb, blown away by the next breeze — that is the cruel thing for the worker. Yet do we ever ask ourselves, personally, or even nationally, whether our work is coming to anything or not ? We don't care to keep what has been nobly done ; still less do we care to do nobly what others would keep ; and, least of all, to make the work itself usieful instead of deadly to the doer, so as to use his life in- deed, but not to waste it. Of all wastes, the greatest waste that you can commit is the waste of labour. If you went down in the morning into your dairy, and you found that your youngest child had got down before you ; and that he and the cat were at play together, and that he had poured out -- all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up, you would scold the child, and be so;rry_the rpilk was wasted. But if, instead of wooden bowls with mUk in them, there are golden bowls with human life in them, and instead of the cat to play with — the devil to play with ; and you yourself the player ; and instead of leaving that_goldeii bowl to be broken by God — at the^iountaiu, you break it in the dust yourself, and pour the human blood out on the ground for the fiend to Hck up — • that is no waste ! What ! you perhaps think, ' to waste the la- bour of men is not to kill them.' Is it not ? I should like t'l know how you could kill them more utterly — kill them with second deaths, seventh deaths, hundredfold deaths ? It is the shghtest way of kiUiug to stop a man's breath. Nay, the hun- ger, and the cold, and the Uttle whisiUng bullets — our love-mes- sengers between nation and nation — have brought pleasant messages from us to many a man before now ; orders of sweet release, and leave at last to go where he will be most welcome and most happy. At the worst you do but shorten his life, you do not corrupt his life. But if you put him to base la- bour, if you bind_,_liis thoughts, if you blind his eyes, if you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if you stunt his body, and blast his soul, and at last leave hiin not so much as to reap the poor fruit of his degradation, but gather that for yourself, and dismiss him to the grave, when you have dona with him, having, so far as in you lay, made the walls of that wouk. 39 gttcvd everlasting (though, indeed, I fancy the goodly bricks of some of our family vaults wiU hold closer in the resurrec* tion day than the sod over the labourer's head), this you think is no waste, and no sin ! in. Then, lastly, -wise work is oheerfttl, as j, child's work is. And now I want you to take one thought home with you, and let it stay with you. Everybody in this room has been taught to pray daily, ' Thy kingdom come.' Now, if we hear a man swear in the streets, we think it very wrong, and say he 'takes God's name in vain.' But there's a twenty times worse way of taking His name in vain, than that. It is to ask Ood for what we don't want. He doesn't like that sort of prayer. If you don't want a thing, don't ask for it : such asking is the worst mockery of your King you can mock Him with ; the soldiers striking Him on the head with the reed was nothing to that. If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it ; you must work for it. And, to work for it, you must know what it is : we have all prayed for it many a day without thinking. Observe, it is a kingdom that is to come to us ; we are not to go to it. Also, it is not to be a kingdom of the dead, but of the living. Also, it is not to come aU at once, but quietly ; nobody_JinQws how. 'The kingdom of God cometh not with observation.' Also, it is not to come outside of us, but in the hearts of us : ' the kingdom of God is within you.' And, being within us, it is not a thing to be seen, but to be felt ; and though it brings all substance of good with it, it does not consist in that : ' the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost : ' joy, that is to say, in the holy, healthful, and helpful Spirit. Now, if we want to work for this kingdom, and to bring it, and enter into it, there's just one condition to be first accepted. You must enter it as children, or not at all ; ' Whosoever wUl not receive it as a little child shall not enter therein.' And again, 'Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' Of such, observe. Not of children themselves, but of such 40 TEE UBOWN OF WILD OLIYB. as children. I 'believe most mothers who read that text thiuli that aU heaven is to be full of babies. But that's not so. There will be children there, but the hoary head is the crown. ' Length of days, and long Ufe and peace,' that is the blessing, not to die in babyhood. Children die but for their parents' sins ; God means them to live, but He can't let them always ; then they have their earlier place in heaven : and the little chUd of David, vainly prayed for ; — the little child of Jero- boam, killed by its mother's step on its own threshold, — they will be there. But weary old David, and weary old Barzillai, having learned children's lessons at last, will be there too : and the one question for us all, young or old, is, have we learned our child's lesson ? it is the character of children we want, and must gain at our peril ; let us see, briefly, in what it consists. The first character of right childhood is that it is Modest. A well-bred child does not think it can teach its parents, or that it knows everything. It may think its father and mother know everything, — perhaps that all grown-up people know everything ; very certainly it is sure that it does not. And it is always asking questions, and wanting to know more. Well, that is the first character of a good and wise man at his work To know that he knows very little ; — to perceive that there are many above him wiser than he ; and to be always asking questions, wanting to learn, not to teach. No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs weU who wants to govern ; it is an old saying (Plato's, but I know not if his, first), and as wise as old. Then, the second character of right childhood is to be Faith* ful. Perceiving that its father knows best what is good for it, and having found always, when it has tried its own way against his, that he was right and it was wrong, a noble child trusts him at last whoUy, gives him its hand, and wiU walk blindfold with him, if he bids it. And that is the true character of all good men also, as obedient workers, or soldiers under cap- tains. They must trust their captains ; — they are bound foj their lives to choose none but those whom they can trust. Then, they are not always to be thinking that what seems wonK. 41 strange to them, or wrong in what they are desired to do, is strange or wrong. They know their captain : where he leads they must follow, what he bids, they must do ; and without this trust and faith, without this captainship and soldiership, no great deed, no great salvation, is possible to man. Among all the nations it is only when this faith is attained by them that they become great : the Jew, the Greek, and the Mahome- tan, agree at least in testifying to this. It was a deed of this absolute trust which made Abraham the father of the faithful ; it was the declaration of the power of God as captnin over all men, and the acceptance of a leader appointed by Him as commander of the faithful, which laid the foundation of what- ever national power yet exists in the East ; and the deed of the Greeks, which has become the type of unselfish and noble soldiership to all lands, and to all times, was commemorated, on the tomb of those who gave their lives to do it, in the most pathetic, so far as I know, or can feel, of all human utterances : ' Oh, stranger, go and teU our people that we are lying here, having obeyed their words.' Then the third character of right childhood is to be Loving and Generous. Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back. It loves everything near it, when Jt is a right kindjaf child — would hurt nothing, would give the best it has away, always, if you need it — does not lay plans for getting everything in the house for itself, and delights in helping people ; you cannot please it so much as by giving it a chance of being useful, in ever so little a way. And because of all these characters, lastly, it is Cheerful. Putting its trust in its father, it is careful for nothing — be- ing full of love to every creature, it is happy always, whether ia its play or in its duty. Well, that's the great worker's character also. Taking no thought for the morrow ; taking thought only for the duty of the day ; trusting somebody else to take care of to-morrow ; knowing indeed what labour is, but not what sorrow is ; and always ready for play — beautiful play, — for lovely human play is like the play of the Sun. There's a worker for you. He, steady to his time, is set as a strong man to run his course, but also, he rejoiceth as a, 4^ TEE cnOWN OP WILD OLIVE. strong man to run his course. See how he plays in the morning, with the mists below, and the clouds above, with a ray here and a flash there, and a shower of jewels everywhere ; that's the Sun's play ; and great human play is like his — aU various — aU fuU of light and life, and tender, as the dew of the morning. So then, you have the child's character in these four things — Humility, Faith, Charity, and Cheerfulness. That's what you have got to be converted to. ' Except ye be converted and become as little children ' — You hear much of conversion now-a-days ; but people always seem to think they have got to be made wretched by conversion, — to be converted to long faces. No, friends, you have got to be converted to short ones ; you have to repent into childhood, to repent into de- light, and deHghtsomeness. You can't go into a conventicle but you'U hear plenty of talk of backsliding. Backsliding, indeed ! I can teU. you, on the ways most of us go, the faster we shde back the better. SUde back into the cradle, if going on is into the grave — back, I teU you ; back — out of your long faces, and into your long clothes. It is among children only, and as children only, that you will find medicine for your healing and true wisdom for your teaching. There is poison in the counsels of the men of this world ; the words they speak are all bitterness, ' the poison of asps is under their lips,' but, ' the sucking child shall play by the hole of the asp.' There is death in the looks of men. ' Their eyes are privily set against the poor ; ' they are as the uncharmable serpent, the cockatrice, which slew by seeing. But~M;he weaned child shall lay his hand on the cockatrice den.' There is death in the steps of men : ' their feet are swift to shed blood ; they have compassed us in our steps like the lion that is greedy of his prey, and the young Uon lurking in secret places,' but, in that kingdom, the wolf shall lie dpwn with the lamb, and the fathng with the lion, and 'a little child shall lead them.' There is death in the thoughts of men : the world is one wide riddle to them, darker and darker as it draws to a close ; but the secret of it is known to the child, and the Lord of heaven and earth is most to be thanked in WOBK. 43 that ' He has hidden these things from the wise and prudeni^ and has revealed them unto babes.' Yes, and there is death — infinitude of death in the principalities and powers of men. As far as the east is from the west, so far our sins are^ — not set from us, but multiplied around us : the Sun himself, think you he now ' rejoices ' to run his course, when he plunges westward to the horizon, so widely red, not with clouds, but blood? And it will be red more widely yei "Whatever drought of the early and latter rain may be, there wiU be none of that red rain. You fortify yourselves, you arm yourselves against it in vain ; the enemy and avengei will be upon you also, unless you learn that it is not out of the mouths of the knitted gun, or the smoothed rifle, but 'out of the mouths of babes and sucklings ' that the strength is or- dained, which shall ' BtUl the enemy and avenger.' LECTURE n. TRAFFIC. {Ddwered in (he Town BaU, Bradford.) My good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down here among your hills that I might talk to you about this Exchange you are going to buUd : but earnestly and seriously a,sking^you to pardon me, I am going to do nothing of Jhe _kind. I cannot talk, or at least can say very little, about this same Exchange. I must talk of quite other things, though not wiHihgly ; — I could not deserve your pardon, if when you invited me to speak on one subject, I wilfully spoke on another. But I cannot speak, to purpose, of anything about which I_do- not care ; and most simply and sorrowfully I have to tell you, in the outset, that I do not care about this Exchange of yours. If, however, when you sent me your invitation, I had an- swered, ' I won't come, I don't care about the Exchange of Bradford,' you would have been justly offended with me, not knowing the reasons of so blunt a carelessness. So I have come down, hoping that j'ou will patiently let me tell you why, on this, and many other such occasions, I now remain silent, when formerly I should have caught at the opportunity of speaking to a gracious audience. In a word, then, I do not care about this Exchange, — be- cause you don't ; and because you know perfectly well I can- not make you. Look at the essential circumstances of the case, which you, as business men, know perfectly well, though perhaps you think I forget them. You are going to spend 30,000Z., which to you, collectively, is nothing ; the buying a new coat is, as to the cost of it, a much more important Blatter of consideration to me than building a new Exchanga TRAFFIC. 45 is to you. But you think you may as well have the^ right thing for your money. Tou know there are a great many odd sfyles of architecture about ; you don't want to do any- thing ridiculous ; you hear of me, among others, as a respect- able architectural man-milliner : and you send for me, that I may tell you the leading fashion ; and what is, in our shops, for the moment, the newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles. Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occa- sion. All good architecture is the expression of national hfe and character ; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a httle of the deep significance of this word ' taste ; ' for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener contro- verted than that_ good_ taste is essentially a moral quality. ' No,' say many of my antagonists, ' taste is one thing, moral- ity is another. Tell us what is pretty ; we shall be glad to know that ; but preach no sermons to us.' Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — it is the ONiiY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, ' What do you like ? ' TeU me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, what their ' taste ' is, and if they answer candidly, you know them, body and soul. ' Tou, my friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what do you like ? ' 'A pipe and a quartern of gin.' I know you. 'You, good woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, what do you Uke ? ' 'A swept hearth and a clean tea-table, and my husband opposite me, and a baby at my breast.' Good, I know you also. ' You, little girl with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you like ? ' ' My canary, and a run among the wood hyacinths.' 'You, little boy with the dirty hands and the low forehead, what do you like ? ' 'A shy at the sparrows, and a game at pitch-f arlhing.' Good ; we know them aU now. What more need we ask ? ' Nay,' perhaps you answer : ' we need rather to ask what th^se people and children do, than wh^t they like. If they do 40 TEE CBOWN OF WILD OLIVE. right, it is no matter that they like what is wrong ; and b they do wrong, it is no matter that they like what is right. Doing is^ the great thing; and it does not matter that the man Ukes drinking, so that he does not drink ; nor that the little girl Ukes to be kind to her canary, if she wiU not learn her lessons ; nor that the little boy Ukes throwing stones at the sparrows, if he goes to the Sunday school.' Indeed, for a short time, and in a provisional sense, this is true. For if, resolutely, people do what is right, in time they come to Hke doing it. But they only are in a right moral state when they Aaue come to like doing it ; and as long as they don't Hke it, they are stiU in a vicious state. The man is not in health of , body who is always thirsting for the bottle in the cupboard, though he bravely bears his thirst ; but the man who heartily enjoys water in the morning and wine in the evening, each in its proper quantity and time. And the entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but en^oy the right things — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love know- ledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice. But you may answer or think, ' Is the liking for outside ornaments, — for pictures, or statues, or furniture, or archi- tecture, — a moral quality?' Yes, most surely, if a rightly set liking. Taste for any pictures or statues is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. Only here again we have to define the word 'good.' I don't mean by 'good,' clever — or learned — or difficult in the doing. Take a picture by -^Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice : it is an entirely clever picture ; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to it ; but it is also an entirely baBe_andjevil picture. It is an expression of deKght in the prolonged con- templation of a vUe thing, and delight in that is an ' unman- nered,' or ' immoral ' quaUty. It is ' bad taste ' in the pro- foundest sense — it is the taste of the devils. On the other hand, a picture of Titian's, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses dehght in the per- petual poatemplatioB pf a jjood and perfect thing. That is TRAFFIC. 47 an entirely moral quality — it is the taste of the angels. Amil all delight in art, and all love of it, resolve themselves into simple love of that which deserves love. That deserving ia the quality which we call ' loveliness ' — (we ought to have an opposite word, hatehness, to be said of the things which de- serve to be hated) ; and it is not au indifferent nor optional thing whether we love this or that ; but it is just the vital function of all our being. What we like determines what we are, and is the sign of what we are ; and to teach taste is in- evitably to form character. As Ijvas thinking over.-this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the title of a book standing open in a bookseller's window. It was — ' On the necessity of the diffusion of taste among all classes.' 'Ah,' I thought to myself, 'my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste, where wiU your classes be ? The man who likes what you like, belongs to the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You may put him to other work if you choose ; but, by the condition you have brought him into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. Tou get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and " Pop goes the Weasel " for music. You think you can make him like Dante and Beethoven ? I wish you joy of your lessons ; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him : — he won't Uke to go back to his costermongering.' And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any vice, or weakness, without expressing it,Jegi- bly, and_j(W-eva?r€ither in bad art, or by want of art ; and that there is no national virtue, small or great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the art which circumstances en- able the people possessing that virtue to produce. Take, for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and patient courage. You have at present in England only~ one art of any' consequence — that is, ironrHprking. You know thor- oughly well how to cast and~irammer iron. Now, do you think in those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the Infemoa 4:8 TEE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. you havo created ; do you think, on those iron plates, youi courage and endurance are not written for ever — not merelj with an iron pen, but on iron parchment? And take also your great English vice — European vice — vice of all the world — vice of all other worlds that roll or shine in heaven, bearing with them yet the atmosphere of hell — the vice of jealousy, which brings competition into your commerce, treachery into your councils, and dishonour into your wars — that vice which has rendered for you, and for your next neighbouring nation, the daily occupations of existence no longer possible, but with the maU upon your breasts and the sword loose in its sheath ; so that, at last, you have realised for aU the multi- tudes of the two great peoples who lead the so-called civUiaa- tion of the earth, — you have realised for them aU, I say, in person and in poHcy, what was once true only of the rough Border riders of your Cheviot hUls — ' They carved at the meal With gloves of steel, And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd ; — do you think that this national shame and dastardliness of heart are not written as legibly on every rivet of your iron armour as the strength of the right hands that forged it? Friends, I know not whether this thing be the more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is quite unspeakably both. Sup- pose, instead of being now sent for by you, I had been sent for by some private gentleman, Hving in a suburban house, with his garden separated only by a fruit-waU from his next door neighbour's ; and he had called me to consult with him on the furnishing of his drawing-room. I begin looking about me, and find the walls rather bare ; I think such and such a paper might be desirable — perhaps a little fresco here and there on the ceiUng — a damask curtain or so at the win- dows. 'Ah,' says my employer, 'damask curtains, indeed! That's all very fine, but you know I can't afford that kind of thing just now ! ' ' Yet the world credits you with a splendid income ! ' 'Ah, yes,' says my friend, ' but do you know, at TRAFFIC. 49 present, I am obliged to spend it nearly all in steel-traps?' ' Steel-traps ! for whom ? ' ' Why, for that fellow on the other side the wall, you know : we're very good friends, capi- tal friends ; but we are obliged to keep our traps set on both sides of the waU ; we could not possibly keep on friendly terms without them, and our spring guns. The worst of it is, we are both clever fallows enough ; and there's never a day passes that we don't find out a new trap, or a new gun-bar- rel, or something ; we spend about fifteen millions a year each in our traps, take it all together ; and I don't see how we're to do with less.' A highly comic state of life for two privatei gentlemen ! but for two nations, it seems to me, not wholly 1 comic ? Bedlam would be comic, perhaps, if there were only "sne madman in it ; and your Christmas pantomime is comic, Vyhen there is only one clovm in it ; but when the whole vorld turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart's 1)lood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic, > think. Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly al- low for that. You don't know what to do with yourselves for au_sfingatiQn : fox-hunting and cricketing^-^will not carry you through the whole of this unendurably long mortal life : you liked pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better made : but then the worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, was not play to the sparrows ; and what is play to you now, is not play to the small birds of State neither ; and for the black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking shots at them, it I mistake not. I must get back to the matter in hand, however. Believe me, vdthout farther instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation's vice, or virtue, was written in its art : the soldiership of early Greece ; the sensuality of late Italy ; the visionary religion of Tuscany ; the splendid human energy and beauty of Venice. I have no time to do this to-night (I have done it elsewhere before now) ; but I proceed to apply the principle to ourselves in a more searching manner. I notice that among all the new buildings %at cover youi 4 50 THE CnoWN OF WILD OLIVE. once wild hills, churclies and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large proportion, mth your mills and mansions and I notice also that the churches and schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions and mills are never Gothic. WiU you allow me to ask precisely the meaning of this ? For, remember, it is peculiarly a modem phenomenon. When Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as churches ; and when the Italian style superseded the Gothic, churches were Italian as well as houses. If there is a Gothic spire to the cathedral of Antwerp, there is a Gothic belfry to the Hotel de ViUe at Brussels ; if Inigo Jones builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an Italian St. Paul's. But now you live under one school of architecture, and wor- ship under another. What do you mean by doing this ? Am I to understand that you are thinking of changing your archi- tecture back to Gothic ; and that you treat your churches ex- perimentally, because it does not matter what mistakes you 'make in a church ? Or am I to understand that you con- sider Gothic a pre-eminently sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you think, like the fine frankincense, should be mixed for the tabernacle only, and reserved for your reh- gious services? For if this be the feeling, though it may seem at first as if it were graceful and reverent, you will find that, at the_root of the matter, it signifies neither more nor less than that you have separated your religion from your life. For consider what a wide significance this fact has ; and re- member that it is not you only, but all the people of England, who are behaving thus just now. You have all got into the habit of calling the church ' the house of God.' I have seen, over the doors of many churches, the legend actually carved, ' This is the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' Now, note where that legend comes from, and of what place it was first spoken. A boy leaves his father's house to go on a long journey on foot to visit his uncle ; he has to cross a wild hill-desert ; just as ii one of your own boys had to cross the wolds of Westmore- land, to visit an uncle at Carlisle. The second or third day TRAFFIO. 51 your boy finds himself somewhere between Hawes and Brough, in the midst of the moors, at sunset. It is stony ground, and boggy ; he cannot go one foot farther that night. Do-vsTi he lies, to sleep, on Wharnside, where best he may, gathering a few of the stones together to put under his head ; — so wild the place is, he cannot get anything but stones. And there, lying under the broad night, he has a dream ; and he sees a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven, and the angels of God are ascending and descend- ing upon it. And when he wakes out of his sleep, he says, ' How dreadful is this place ; surely, this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' This PLACE, observe ; not this church ; not this city ; not this stone, even, which he puts up for a memorial — the piece of flint on which his head has lain. But this place ; this windy slope of Wharnside ; this moorland hollow, torrent-bitten, snow- blighted ; this any place where God lets down the ladder. And how are you to know where that vsdU be ? or how are you to determine where it may be, but by being ready for it always ? Do you know where the hghtning is to fall next ? You do know that, partly ; you can guide the hghtning ; but you cannot guide the going forth of the Spirit, which is that lightning when it shines from the east to the west. But the perpetual and insolent warping of that strong verse to serve a merely ecclesiastical purpose, is only one of the thousand instances in which we sink back into gross Judaism. We call our churches 'temples.' Now, you know, or ought to know, they are not temples. They have never had, never can have, anything whatever to do with temples. They are ' synagogues ' — • gathering places ' — where you gather your, selves together as an assembly ; and by not calling them so, you again miss the force of another mighty text — 'Thou, when thou prayest, shalt not be as the hypocrites are ; for they love to pray standing in the churches ' [we should trans- late it], ' that they may be seen of men. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father,' — which is, not in chancel nor in aisle, but 'in secret.' 52 THE CROWN UP WILD OLIVE. Now, you feel, as I say this to you — I know you feel — as if I were trying to take away the honour of your churches. Not so ; I am trying to prove to you the honour of your houses and your hills ; I am trying to show you — not that the Church is not sacred — but that the whole Earth is. I would have you feel, what careless, what constant, what in- fectious sin there is in aU modes of thought, whereby," in calling your churches only ' holy,' you call your hearths and homes profane ; and have separated yourselves from the heathen by casting all your household gods to the ground, instead of recognising, in the place of their many and feeble Lares, the presence of your One and Mighty Lord and Lar. ' But what has all this to do with our Exchange ? ' you ask me, impatiently. My dear friends, it has just everything to do with it ; on thes&inner aiid_great^uestions_depend all the outer and little ones ; and if you have asked me down here to speak to you, because you had before been interested in anything I have written, you must know that all I have yet said about architecture was to show this. The book I called ' The Seven Lamps ' was to show that certain right states of temper and moral feeling were the magic powers by which all good architecture, without exception, had been produced. ' The Stones of Venice,' had, from beginning to end, no other aim than to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a state of pure national faith, and of domestic virtue ; and that its Renais- sance architecture had arisen out of, and in all its features in- dicated, a state of concealed national infidelity, and of domes- tic corruption. And now, you ask me what style is best to build in ; and how can I answer, knowing the meaning of the two styles, but by another question — do you mean to build as Christians or as Infidels ? And still more — do you mean to build as honest Christians or as honest Infidels ? as thor- oughly and confessedly, either one or the other ? You don't like to be asked such rude questions. I cannot help it ; they are of much more importance than this Exchange business • and if they can be at once answered, the Exchange business settles itself in a moment. Bat, before I press them farther, TRAFFIC. 53 I must ask leave to explain one point clearly. In aU my past work, my endeavour has been to show that good architecture is essentially religious — the production of a faithful and vir- tuous, not of an infidel and corrupted people. But in the course of doing this, I have had also to show that good archi- tecture is not ecclesiastical. People are so apt to look upon religion as the business of the clergy, not their own, that the moment they hear of anything depending on ' religion,' they think it must also have depended on the priesthood ; and I have had to take what place was to be occupied between these two errors, and fight both, often with seeming contra- diction. Good architecture is the work of good and beUev- ing men ; therefore, you say,_ at-least_some people say, ' Good architecture must essentially have been the work of the cler- gy, not of the laity.' No — a thousand times no ; good archi- tecture has always been the work of the commonalty, not of the clergy. What, you say, those glorious cathedrals — the pride of Europe — did their builders not form Gothic archi- tecture ? No ; they corrupted Gothic architecture. Gothic was formed in the baron's castle, and the burgher's street. It was formed by the thoughts, and hands, and powers of free citizens and soldier kings. By the monk it was used as an instrument for the aid of his superstition ; when that su- perstition became a -beautiful madness, and the best hearts of Europe vainly dreamed and pined in the cloister, and vainly raged and perished in the crusade — through that fury of per- verted faith and wasted war, the Gothic rose also to its love- liest, most fantastic, and, finally, most foolish dreams ; and, in those dreams, was lost. I hope, now, that there is no risk of your misunderstanding me when I come to the gist of what I want to say to-night — when I repeat, that every great national architecture has been the result and exponent of a great national religion. You can't have bits of it here, bits there — you must have it every- where, or nowhere It is not the monopoly of a clerical com« pany — it is not the exponent of a theological dogma — it is not the hierogiypliic writing of an initiated priesthood ; it is the Qianly language of a people inspired by resolute and oonuaon 64 TSE CROWN OP WTLD OLIVE!. purpose, and rendering resolute and common fideKty to thp legible laws of an undoubted God. Now, there have as yet been three distinct schools of Eu- ropean architecture. I say, European, because Asiatic and African architectures belong so entirely to other races and oKmates, that there is no question of them here ; only, in pass- ing, I wiU simply assure you that whatever is good or great in Egypt, and Syria, and India, is just good or great for the same reasons as the buildings on our side of the Bosphorus. We Europeans, then, have had three great religions : the Greek, which was the worship of the God of Wisdom and Power ; the Mediseval, which was the Worship of the Ghsd of Judgment and Consolation ; the Eenaissance, which was the worship of the God of Pride and Beauty ; these three we have had — they are past, — and now, at last, we English have got a fourth religion, and a God of our own, about which I want to ask you. But I must explain these three old ones first. I repeat, first, the Greeks essentially worshipped the God of Wisdom ; so that whatever contended against their reU- gion, — to the Jews a stumbUng block, — was, to the Greeks — Foolishness. The first Greek idea of Deity was that expressed in the word, of which we keep the remnant in our words 'Z>ii-urnar and ' Z>i-vuie ' — the god of Day, Jupiter the revealer. Athena is his daughter, but especially daughter of the Intellect, springing armed from the head. We are only with the help of recent investigation beginning to penetrate the depth of meaning couched under the Athenaic symbols : but I may note rapidly, that her SBgis, the mantle with the serpent fringes, in which she often, in the best statues, is represented as folding up her left hand for better guard, and the Gorgon on her shield, are both representative mainly of the chilling horror and sadness (turning ^marLto, stone, as it were,) of tha outmost and superficial spheres of knowledge — that knowl- edge which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, the heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the child. For out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissensioi^ TRAFFIC. 65 clanger, and disdain ; but from perfect knowledge, given by the full-revealed Athena, strength and peace, in sign of which she is crowned with the olive spray, and bears the resistless spear. This, then, was the Greek conception of purest Deity, and every habit of life, and every form of his art developed them- selves from the seeking this bright, serene, resistless vdsdom ; and setting himself, as a man, to do things evermore rightly and strongly ; * not with any ardent affection or ultimate hope ; but with a resolute and continent energy of will, as knowing that for failure there was no consolation, and for sin there was no remission. And the Greek architecture rose anen-ing, bright, clearly defined, and self-contained. Next followed in Europe the great Christian faith, which was essentially the religion of Comfort. Its great doctrine is the remission of sins; for which cause it happens, too often, in certain phases of Christianity, that sin and sickness themselves are partly glorified, as if, the more you had to be healed of, the more divine was the healing. The practical result of this doctrine, in art, is a continual contemplation of sin and disease, and of imaginary states of purification from them ; thus we have an architecture conceived in a mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspiration, partly severe, partly luxuriant, which will bend itself to every one of our needs, and every one of our fancies, and be strong or weak with us, as we are strong or weak ourselves. It is, of all architecture, the basest, when base people build it — of all, the noblest, when built by the noble. And now note that both these reHgions — Greek and Medi- * It is an error to suppose that the Greek worship, or seeking, wag chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of Rightness and Strength, founded on Forethought : the principal character of Greek art is not Beauty, but Design : and the Dorian Apollo-worship and Athenian Virgin-worship are both expressions of adoration of divine Wisdom and Purity. Next to these great deities rank, in power over the national mind, Dionysus and Ceres, the givers of human strength and life : then, for heroic ex- ample, Hercules. There is no Venus-worship among tiie Greek in the great times : and the Muses are essentially teachers of Truth, and of it» Uarmonies. 66 THE CROWN OP WILD OLIVE. SBval— 'perislied by falsehood in their own main purposft The Greek religion of Wisdom perished in a false philosophy — ' Oppositions of science, falsely so called.' The Mediseval religion of Consolation perished in false comfort ; in remis- sion of sias given lyingly. It was_ ihe__selling_ of ^Ahaoluiion that ended the Mediseval faith ; and I can teU you more, it is the selling of absolution which, to the end of time, will mark false Christianity. Pure Christianity gives her remission of sias only by ending them ; but false Christianity gets her remission of sins by compounding for them. And there are many ways of compounding for them. We English have beautiful little quiet ways of buying absolution, whether in low Church or high, far more cunning than any of Tetzel's trading. Then, thirdly, there followed the religion of Pleasui-e, in which aU Europe gave itseK to luxury, ending ia death. First, hals masques in every saloon, and then guillotines ia every square. And all these three worships issue in vast temple buUdiag. Your Greek worshipped Wisdom, and bmlt you the Parthenon — the Virgin's temple. The Medise- val worshipped Consolation, and built you Virgia temples also — but to our Lady of Salvation. Then the KevivaJist worshipped beauty, of a sort, and built you Versailles, and the Vatican. Now, lastly, wiU you tell me what we worship, and what we buUd ? You know we are speaking always of the real, active, con- tinual, national worship ; that by which men act while they live ; not that which they talk of when they die. Now, we have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we pay tithes of property, and sevenths of time ; but we have also a practical and earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our property and six-sevenths of our time. And we dispute a great deal about the nominal religion ; but :sve^_aEe_aU^ unani- mous about this practical one, of which I think you will admit that the ruling goddess may be best generally described as the 'Goddess of Getting-on,' or 'Britannia of the Market.' The Athenians had an 'Athena Agoraia,' or Minerva of the Market ; but she was a subordinate type of their goddess^ TRAFFIC. 57 while our Britannia Agoraia ia the principal type of ours. And all your great architectural works, are, of course, built to her. It is long since you built a great cathedral ; and how you would laugh at me, if I proposed building a cathedral on the top of one of these hiUs of yours, taking it for an Acrop- oUs ! But your raiboad mounds, prolonged masses of Acrop- olis ; your railroad stations, vaster than the Parthenon, and innumerable ; your chimneys, how much more mighty and costly than cathedral spires ! your harbour-piers ; your ware- houses ; your exchanges ! — aU these are built to your great Goddess of ' Getting-on ; ' and she has formed, and wUl con- tinue to form, your architecture, as long as you worship her ; and it is quite vain to ask me to tell you how to buUd to her ; you know far better than I. There might indeed, on some theories, be a conceivably good architecture for Exchanges — that is to say if there were any heroism in the fact or deed of exchange, which might be typically carved on the outside of your building. For, you know, aU beautiful architecture must be adorned with sculp- ture or painting ; and for sculpture or painting, you must have a subject. And hitherto it has been a received opinion among the nations of the world that the only right subjects for either, were heroisms of some sort. Even on his pots and his flagons, the Greek put a Hercules slaying Uons, or an ApoUo slaying serpents, or Bacchus slaying melancholy giants, and earth-bom despondencies. On his temples, the Greek put contests of great warriors in founding states, or of gods with evil spirits. On his houses and temples alike, the Christian put carvings of angels conquering devils ; or of hero-martyrs exchanging this world for another ; subject in- appropriate, I think, to our manner of exchange here. And the Master of Christians not only left his followers without any orders as to the sculpture of affairs of exchange on the outside of buildings, but gave some strong evidence of his dislike of affairs of exchange within them. And yet there might surely be a heroism in such affairs ; and all commerce become a kind of selling of doves, not impious. The wonder has always been great to me, that heroism has never been •"58 THE CROWN OF WICD OLIVJB. supposed to be in anywise consistent with the practice ol supplying people with food, or clothes ; but rather with that of quartering oneself upon them for food, and stripping them of their clothes. Spoiling of armour is an heroic deed in aU ages ; but the seUing of clothes, old, or new, has never taken any colour of magnanimity. Yet one does not see why feed- ing the hungry and clothing the naked should ever become base businesses, even when engaged in on a large scale. If one could contrive to attach the notion of conquest to them .anyhow? so that, supposing there were anywhere an obstinate race, who refused to be comforted, one might take some pride in giving them compulsory comfort ; and as it were, ' occupying a country ' with one's gifts, instead of one's armies ? If one could only consider it as much a victory to get a barren field sown, as to get an eared field stripped ; and contend who should build villages, instead of who -should •carry' them. Are not all forms of heroism, conceivable in doing these serviceable deeds ? You doubt who is strongest ? It might be ascertained by push of spade, as well as push of sword. Who is wisest ? There are witty things to be thought of in planning other business than campaigns. Who is bravest? There are always the elements to fight with, stronger than men ; and nearly as merciless. The only ab- solutely and unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be — that he is paid httle for it — and regfularly : while you traffickers, and exchangers, and others occupied in presumably benevolent business, like to be paid much, for it — and by chance. I never can make out howTT is that a knight-eraant does not expect to be paid for his trouble, but a pedlar-errant always does ; — that people are willing to take hard knocks for nothing, but never to sell ribands cheap ; — that they are ready to go on fervent crusades to recover the tomb of a buried God, never on any travels to fulfil the orders of a living God ; — that they will go anywhere barefoot to preach their faith, but must be well bribed to practise it, and are perfectly ready to give the Gospel gratis, but never the loaves and fishes. If you chose to take the matter up on any such soldierly principle, to do your commerce, and youi TBAFFIO. 59 feeding of nations, for fixed salaries ; and to be as particulai" about giving people the best food, and the best cloth, as sol- diers are about giving them the best gunpowder, I could carve something for you on your exchange worth looking at. But I can only at present suggest decorating its frieze vrith pendant purses ; and making its pillars broad at the base for the sticking of bills. And in the innermost chambers of it there might be a statue of Britannia of the Market, who may have, perhaps advisably, a partridge for her crest, typical at once of her courage in fighting for noble ideas ; and of her interest in game ; and round its neck the inscription in golden letters, ' Perdix fovit quae non peperit' * Then, for her spear, she might have a weaver's beam ; and on her shield, instead of her Cross, the Milanese boar, semi-fleeced, with tiie town of Gennesaret proper, in the field and the legend ' In the best market,' and her corslet, of leather, folded over her heart in the shape of a purse, with thirty slits in it for a piece of money to go in at, on each day of the month. And I doubt not but that people would come to see your ex- change, and its goddess, with applause. Nevertheless, I want to point out to you certain strange characters in this goddess of yours. She differs from the great Greek and Mediaeval deities essentially in two things — first, as to the continuance of her presumed power ; secondly, as to the extent of it. 1st, as to the Continuance. The Greek Goddess of Wisdom gave continual increase of wisdom, as the Christian Spirit of Comfort (or Comforter) continual increase of comfort. There was no question, with these, of any limit or cessation of function. But with your Agora Goddess, that is just the most important question. Getting on — but where to? Gathering together — but how much? Do you mean to gather always — never to spend? If so, I wish you joy of your goddess, for I am just as well * Jerem. xvii. 11 Cbest in Septuagint and Vulgate). ' As the partridge, jEogtering what^he broJiglit-^ot forth, so he that getteth riches, not hy right shall leave theni in the midst of his days, and at his end shall l>« a fool.' QO THE OBOWN OF WILD OLIV& off as you, without the trouble of worshippi2ig her at afl. But if you do not spend, somebody else wiU — somebody else must. And it is because of this (among many other sucJi errors) that I haye fearlessly declared your so-called science of Political Economy to be no science ; because, namely, it has omitted the study of exactly the most important branch of the business — the study of spending. For spend you must, and as much as you make, ultimately. You gather^ corn : — will you bury England under a heap of grain ; or will you, ■when you have gathered, finally eat ? You gather gold : — wiU you make your house-roofs of it, or pave your streets with it ? That is stiU one way of spending it. But if you keep it, that you may get more, I'U give you more ; I'll give you all the gold you want — all you can imagine — if you can teU me what you'll do with it. You shall have thousands of gold pieces ; — thousands of thousands — millions — mountains, of gold : where wiU you keep them ? Will you put an Olympus of silver upon a golden Pelion — make Ossa Hke a wart ? Do you think the rain and dew would then come down to you, in ' the streams from such mountains, more blessedly than they wiU down the mountains which God has made for you, of moss and whinstone ? But it is not gold that you want to gather ! What is it ? greenbacks ? No ; not those neither. What is it then — is it ciphers after a capital I ? i Cannot you practise writing ciphers, and write as many as you want? Write ciphers for an hour every morning, in a big book, and \^ say every evening, I am worth all those noughts more than I was yesterday. Won't that do ? Well, what in the name of Plutus is it you want ? Not gold, not greenbacks, not ciphers after a capital I ? You will have to answer, after all, ' No ; we want, somehow or other, money's worth.' Well, what is that ? Let your Goddess of Getting-on discover it, and let her learn to stay therein. n. But there is yet another question to be asked respecting this Goddess of Getting-on. The first was of the continuance of her power ; the second is of its extent. PaUas and the Madonna were supposed to be all the world's Pallas, and all the world's Jkladonna. They could teach aH TRAFFIC. 61 men, and they could comfort all men. But, look strictly into the nature of the power of your Goddess of Getting-on ; and you will find she is the Goddess — not of everybody's getting on — but only of somebody's getting on. This is a vital, or rather deathful, distinction. Examine it in your own ideal of the state of national life which this Goddess is to evoke and maintain. I asked you what it was, when I was last here ; * — you have never told me. Now, shaU I try to teU you ? Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a pleasant undtdating world, with iron and coal everywhere underneath it. On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings ; and stables, and coach-houses ; a moderately sized park ; a large garden and hot houses ; and pleasant carriage drives through the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the Goddess ; the EngHsh gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his beautiful family ; always able to have the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the sons, and a shooting in the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of the bank, is to be the miU ; not less than a quarter of a nule long, with a steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney three hundred feet high. In this miU are to be in constant employment from eight hundred to a thousand (workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church ' on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful lan- guage. Is not that, broadly, and in the main features, the kind of thing you propose to yourselves ? It is very pretty indeed seen froiQ^ above ; not at aU so pretty, seen from below. For, observe, while to one family this deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting on, to a thousand families she is the Goddess of not Getting on. ' Nay,' you say, ' they have all their chance.' Yes, so has every one in a lo±tery,_but there must always be the same number of blanks. ' Ah ! but in a lottery it is not skill and intelligence which take the lead, but blind chance, ' What then ! do you think the old practice, that ' they shoulu * Two Patlis, p. 98. 62 ThE UUOWN OF WILD OLTVM. take who have the power, and they should keep who can,' is less iniquitous, when the power has become power of brains instead of fist ? and that, though we may not take advantage of a child's or a woman's weakness, we may of a man's fool- ishness? 'Nay, but finally, work must be done, and some one must be at the top, some one at the bottom.' Granted, my friends. Work must always be, and eaptaias_i>f work must always be ; and if you in the least remember the tone of any of my writings, you must know that.JtheyL are thought unfitjot^ihis -age, because they are always insisting on need of government, and speaking with scorn of liberty. But I beg you to observe that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins (if it fight for treasure or land) ; neither, because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's work. Eeal kings, on the contrary, are known invariably by their doing quite the reverse of this, — by their taking the least possible quantity of the nation's work for themselves. There is no test of real kinghood so infallible as that. Does the crowned creature live simply, bravely, unostentatiously? probably he is a King. Does he cover his body with jewels, and his table with delicates ? in all probability he is not a King. It is possible he may be, as Solomon was ; but that is when the nation shares his splendour with him. Solomon made gold, not only to be in his own palace as stones, but to be in Jerusalem as stones. But even so, for the mest part, these splendid kiaghoods expire ia ruin, and only the true kinghoods live, which are of royal labourers governing loyal labourers ; who, both leading rough lives, estabHsh the true dynasties. Conclusively you will find that because you are king of a nation, it does not follow that you are to gather for yourself all the wealth of that nation ; neither, because you ure king of a small part of the nation, and lord over the means of its maintenance — over field, or mill, or mine, are you to take all the produce of that piece of the foundation of n* tional existence for yoiuself. TRAFFIC. 63 You will tell me I need not preach against these things, for I cannot mend them. No, good friends, I cannot ; but you can, and you wiU ; or something else can and will. Do you think these phenomena are to stay always in their present power or aspect ? All history shows, on the contrary, that to be the exact thing they never can do. Change ■nixist come ; but it is ours to determine whether change of growth, or change of death. ShaU the Parthenon be in ruins on its rock, and Bolton priory in its meadow, but these miUs of yours be the consummation of the buildings of the earth, and their wheels be as the wheels of eternity ? Think you that ' men may come, and men may go,' but — mills — go on forever? Not so ; out of these, better or worse shall come ; and it is for you to choose which. I know that none of this wrong is done with deliberate pur- pose. I know, on the contrary, that you wish your workmen weU ; that you do much for them, and that you desire to do more for them, if you saw your way to it safely. I know that many of you have done, and are every day doing, whatever you feel to be in your power ; and that even all this vrrong and misery are brought about by a warped sense of duty, each of you striving to do his best, vdthoutnoiiciiig that this best is essentially and centrally the best for himself, not for others. And all this has come of the spreading of that thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of the modern economist, that ' To do the best for yourself, is finally to do the best for others.' Friends, our great Master said not so ; and most absolutely we shall find this world is not made so. Indeed, to do the best for others, is finally to do the best for ourselves ; but it will not do to have our eyes fixed on that issue. The Pagans had got beyond that. Hear what a Pagan says of this matter ; hear what were, perhaps, the last written words of Plato, — if not the last actually written (for this we cannot know), yet assuredly in fact and power his parting words — in which, en- deavouring to give full crowning and harmonious close to all his thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the imagined sentence of the Great Spirit, his strength and his heart fail him, and tho words cease, broken off for ever. It is the close 64 THE CROWN OF WILD OLITTB. of the dialogue called ' Critias,' in which he describes, partly from real tradition, partly in ideal dream, the early state of Athens ; and the genesis, and order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis ; in which genesis he conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man, which in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the Sons of God intermarried with the daughters of men, for he supposes the earhest race to have been indeed the children of God ; and to have corrupted themselves, until ' their spot was not the spot of his children.' And this, he says, was the end ; that indeed ' through many generations, so long" as the God's nature in them yet was full, they were submissive to the sacred laws, and carried themselves lovingly to aU that had kindred viith them in divineness ; for their uttermost spirit was faithful and true, and in every wise great ; so that, in aU meekness of wisdom, they dealt with each other, and took all the chances of life ; and despising all things except virtue, they cared little what happened day by day, and bore lightly the burden of gold and of possessions ; for they saw that, if only their common love and virtue increased, all these things would be increased together with them ; but to set their esteem and ardent pur- suit upon material possession would be to lose that first, and their virtue and affection together with it. And by such reasoning, and what of the divine nature remained in them, they gained aU this greatness of which we have already told ; but when the God's part of them faded and became extinct, being mixed again and again, and effaced by the prevalent mortality ; and the human nature at last exceeded, they then became unable to endure the courses of fortune ; and fell into shapelessness of life, and baseness in the sight of him who could see, having lost everything that was fairest of their hon« our ; while to the blind hearts which could not discern the true life, tending to happiness, it seemed that they were then chiefly noble and happy, being filled with all iniquity of inor- dinate possession and power. Whereupon, the God of God's, whose Kinghood is in laws, beholding a once just nation thus cast into misery, and desiring to lay such punishment upon them as might make them repent into restraining, gathered TRAFFIC. 6S together all the gods into his dwelling-place, which from heaven's centre overlooks whatever has part in creation ; and having assembled them, he said ' The rest is silence. So ended are the last words of the chief wisdom of the heathen, spoken of this idol of riches ; this idol of yours ; this golden image high by measureless cubits, set up where your green fields of England are fur- nace-burnt into the likeness of the plain of Dura : this idol, forbidden to us, first of all idols, by our own Master and faith ; forbidden to us also by every human lip that has ever, in any age or people, been accounted of as able to speak ac- cording to the purposes of God. Continue to make that for- bidden deity your principal one, and soon no more art, no more science, no more pleasure will be possible. Catastro- phe vyill come ; or worse than catastrophe, slow mouldering and withering into Hades. But if you can fix some concep- tion of a true human state of life to be striven for — life for all men as for yourselves — if you can determine some honest and simple order of existence ; following those trodden ways of wisdom, which are pleasantness, and seeking her quiet and withdrawn paths, which are peace ; — then, and so sanctifying wealth into ' commonwealth,' all your art, your hterature, your daily labours, your domestic affection, and citizen's duty, will join and increase into one magnificent harmony. Tou will know then how to build, well enough ; you vriU build with stone well, but with flesh better ; temples not made with hands, but riveted of hearts ; and that kind of marble, crimson-veined, is indeed eternal, n LECTURE IIL WAB. \ [Pdioered at the Boyal Military Acadtmy,' Woohmh.) i Young soldiers, I do not doubt but that many of you came unwillingly to-night, and many in merely contemptuous curiosity, to hear what a writer on painting could possibly say, or would venture to say, respecting your great art of war. You may well think within yourselves, that a painter might, pernaps without immodesty, lecture younger painters upon painting, but not young lawyers upon law, nor young physi- cians upon medicine — least of all, it may seem to you, young warriors upon war. And, indeed, when I was asked to address you, I declined at first, and declined long ; for I felt that you would not be interested in my special business, and would cer- tainly think there was small need for me to come to teach you yours. Nay, I knew that there ought to be no such need, for the great veteran soldiers of England are now men every way so thoughtful, so noble, and so good, that no other teaching than their knightly example, and their few words of grave and tried counsel should be either necessary for you, or even, without assurance of due modesty in the offerer, endured by you. But being asked, not once nor twice, I have not ventured persistently to refuse ; and I will try, in very few words, to lay before you some reason why you should accept my excuse, and hear me patiently. You may imagine that your work is wholly foreign to, and separate from mine. So far from that, all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war ; no great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of sol- diers. There is no art among a shepherd people, if it remains WAJR 67 at peace. There is no art among an agricultural people, if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely consistent with fine art ; but cannot produce it. Manufacture not only is unable to produce it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it exist. There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle. Now, though I hope you love fighting for its own sake, yon must, I imagine, be surprised at my assertion that there ia any such good fruit of fighting. You supposed, probably, that your ofiice was to defend the works of peace, but cer- tainly not to found them : nay, the common course of war, you may have thought, was only to destroy them. And truly, I who tell you this of the use of war, should have been the last of men to tell you so, had I trusted my own experience only. Hear why : I have given a considerable part of my life to the investigation of Venetian painting and the result of that enquiry was my fixing upon one man as the greatest of all Venetians, and therefore, as I believed, of all painters what- soever. I formed this faith, (whether right or wrong matters at present nothing,) in the supremacy of the painter Tintoret, under a roof covered with his pictures ; and of those pictures, three of the noblest were then in the form of shreds of ragged canvas, mixed up with the laths of the roof, rent through by three Austrian shells. Now it is not every leoturer who could tell you that he had seen three of his favourite pictures torn to rags by bombshells. And after such a sight, it is not every lecturer who would tell you that, nevertheless, war was the foundation of all great art. Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any careful compari- son of the states of great historic races at different periods. Merely to show you what I mean, I vsdll sketch for you, very briefly, the broad steps of the advance of the best art of the world. The first dawn of it is in Egypt ; and the power of it is founded on the perpetual contemplation of death, and of future judgment, by the mind of a nation of which the ruling caste were priests, and the second, soldiers. The greatest works produced by them are sculptures of their kings going out to battle, or receiving the homage of conquered arraiea (58 TEE CROWN Of WILD OLIVB,. And you must remember also, as one of the great keys to the splendour of the Egyptian nation, that the priests were not occupied in theology only. Their theology was the basis of practical government and law, so that they were not so much priests as religious judges, the office of Samuel, among the Jews, being as nearly as possible correspondent to theirs. All the rudiments of art then, and much more than the rudiments of all science, are laid first by this great warrior- nation, which held in contempt all mechanical trades, and in absolute hatred the peaceful life of shepherds. From Egypt art passes directly into Greece, where all poetry, and all painting, are nothing else than the description, praise, or dramatic representation of war, or of the exercises which prepare for it, in their connection with offices of religion. All Greek institutions had first respect to war ; and their con- ception of it, as one necessary office of aU human and divine life, is expressed simply by the images of their guiding gods. ApoUo is the god of all wisdom of the intellect ; he bears the arrow and the bow, before he bears the lyre. Again, Athena is the goddess of all wisdom in conduct. It is by the helmet and the shield, oftener than by the shuttle, that she is distin- guished from other deities. There were, however, two great difierences in principle be- tween the Greek and the Egyptian theories of policy. In Greece there was no soldier caste ; every citizen was neces- sarily a soldier. And, again, while the Greeks rightly de- spised mechanical a? ts as much as the Egyptians, they did not make the fatal mistake of despising agricultural and pas- toral Ufe ; but perfectly honoured both. These two conditions of truer thought raise them quite into the highest rank of wise manhood that has yet been reached ; for aU our great arts, and nearly all our great thoughts, have been borrowed or de- rived from them. Take away from us what they have given ; and I hardly can imagine how low the modern European would stand. Now, you are to remember, in passing to the next phase of history, that though you must have war to produce art — you must also have much more than war ; namely, an art-instinct War 69 or genius in the people ; and that, though all the talent foi painting in the world won't make painters of you, unless you have a gift for fighting as well, you may have the gift for fighting, and none for painting. Now, in the next great dj- nasty of soldiers, the art-instinct is wholly wanting. I have /not yet investigated the Roman character enough to teU you the causes of this ; but I believe, paradoxical as it may seem to you, that, however truly the Eoman might say of himself that he was born of Mars, and suckled by the wolf, he was nevertheless, at heart, more of a farmer than a soldier. The exercises of war were with him practical, not poetical ; his poetry was in -domestic hfe only, and the object of battle, 'pacis imponere morem.' And the arts are extinguished in his hands, and do not rise again, until, with Gothic chivalry, there comes back into the mind of Europe a passionate de- Ught in war itself, for the sake of war. And then, with the romantic knighthood which can imagine no other noble em- ployment, — under the fighting kings of France, England, and Spain ; and under the fighting dukeships and citizenships of Italy, art is born again, and rises to her height in the great valleys of Lombardy and Tuscany, through which there flows not a single stream, from all their Alps or Apennines, that did not once run dark red from battle : and it reaches its culmi- nating glory in the city which gave to history the most in- tense type of soldiership yet seen among men ; — the city whose armies were led in their assault by their king, led through it to victory by their king, and so led, though that king of theirs was blind, and in the extremity of his age. And from this time forward, as peace is established or ex- tended in Europe, the arts decline. They reach an un- paralleled pitch of costliness, but lose their life, enlist them- selves at last on the side of luxury and various corruption, and, among wholly tranquil nations, wither utterly away ; remaining only in partial practice among races who, like the French and us, have still the minds, though we cannot all - live the Uves, of soldiers. 'It may be so,' I can suppose that a philanthropist might exclaim. 'Perish then the arts, if they can flourish only at 70 TMB CROWN Of WILD OLIVE. such a cost. What worth is there in toys of canvas and stone if compared to the joy and peace of artless domestic life?' And the answer is— truly, in themselves, none. But as expres- sions of the highest state of the human spirit, their worth is in- finite. As results they may be worthless, but, as signs, thex are above price. For it is an assured truth that, whenever the faculties of men are at their fulness, they must express themselves by art ; and to say that a state is without such ex- pression, is to say that it is sunk from its proper level of jnajily nature. So that, when I tell you that war is the foun- dation of all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men. It was very strange to me to discover this ; and very dread- ful — but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. The com- mon notion that peace and the virtues of civil life flourished together, I found, to be wholly untenable. Peace and the vices of civil Ufe only flourish together. We talk of peace and learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and civil- isation ; but I found that those were not the words which the Muse of History coupled together : that on her lips, the words Were — peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and corruption, peace and death. I found, in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of word, and strength of thought, in war ; that they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace ; latight by war, and deceived by peace ; trained by war, and betrayed by peace ; — in a word, that they were born in war, and expired in peace. Yet now note carefully, in the second place, it is not all war of which this can be said — nor all dragon's teeth, which, sown, will start up into men. It is not the ravage erf a bar- barian wolf-flock, as under Genseiic or Suwarrow ; nor the habitual restlessness and rapine of mountaineers, as on the old borders of Scotland ; nor the occasional struggle of a strong peaceful nation for its life, as in the wars of the Swiss with Austria ; rior the contest of merely ambitious nations for extent of power, as in the wars of France under Napoleon, or the just terminated war in America. None of these forms of war build anything but tombs. But the creative or foun. dational war is that in which the natural restlessness and love of contest among men are disciplined, by consent, into modes of beautiful — though it may be fatal — play : in which the nat- ural ambition and love of power of men are disciplined into the aggressive conquest of surrounding evil : and in which the natural instincts of self-defence are sanctified by the nobleness of the institutions, and purity of the households, which they are appointed to defend. To such war as this all men are bom ; in such war as this any man may happily die ; and forth from such war as this have arisen throughout the extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and virtues of humanity. I shall therefore divide the war of which I would speak to you into three heads. War for exercise or play ; war for do- minion ; and, war for defence. L And first, of war for exercise or play. I speak of it pri- marily in this hght, because, through all past history, manly war has been more an exercise than anything else, among the classes who cause, and proclaim it. It is not a game to the con- script, or the pressed sailor ; but neither of these are the causers of it. To the governor who determines that war shall be, and to the youths who voluntarily adopt it as their pro- fession, it has always been a grand pastime ; and chiefly pur- sued because they had nothing else to do. And this is true without any exception. No king whose mind was fully occu- pied with the development of the inner resources of his king- dom, or with any other sufficing subject of thought, ever en- tered into war but on compulsion. No youth who was earnestly busy with any peaceful subject of study, or set on any serviceable course of action, ever voluntarily became a soldier. Occupy him early, and wisely, in agriculture or business, in science or in hterature, and he wiU never think of war otherwise th»n as a calamity. But leave him idle ; and, the more brave and active and capable he is by nature, the more he wiU thirst for some appointed field for action ; and find, in the passion and peril of battle, the only satisfying ful- filment of his unoccupied being. And from the earliest in- cipient civilisation until now, the population of the earth divides itself, when you look at it widely, into two races ; one 7^ TEE CROWN OP WILD OLIYR - of workers, and the other of players — one tilling the ground, manufacturing, building, and otherwise providing for tha necessities of hfe ; — the other part proudly idle, and continu- ally therefore needing recreation, in which they use the pro- ductive and laborious orders partly as their cattle, and partly as their puppets or pieces in the game of death. Now, remember, whatever virtue or goodliness there may be in this game of war, rightly played, there is none when you tjius jjlay it with a multitude of small human pawns. If you, the gentlemen of this or any other kingdom, choose * to make your pastime of contest, do so, and welcome ; but set not up these unhappy peasant-pieces upon the green fielded board. If the wager is to be of death, lay it on your own heads, not theirs. A goodly struggle in the Olympic dust, though"it be the dust of the grave, the gods will look upon, and be with you in ; but they wiU not be with you, if you sit on the sides of the amphitheatre, whose steps are the mountains of earth, whose arena its valleys, to urge your peasant millions into gladiatorial war. You also, you tender and delicate women, for whom,_ and by, whose command, all true battle has been, and must ever be ; you would perhaps shrink now, though you need not, from the thought of sitting as queens above set lists where the jousting game might be mortal. How much more, then, ought you to shrink from the thought of sitting above a theatre pit in which even a few condemned slaves were slaying each other only for your delight ! And do you not shrink from the fact of sitting above a theatre pit, where, — not condemned slaves, — but the best and bravest of the poor sons of your people, slay each other,— not man to man,— as the coupled gladiators ; but race to race, in duel of generations? You would tell me, perhaps, that you do not sit to see this ; and it is indeed true, that the women of Europe— those who have no heart- interests of their own at peril in the contest — draw the ciir- tains of their boxes, and mufBe the openings; so that from the pit of the cu-cus of slaughter there may reach them only at intervals a half-heard cry and a murmur as of the wind's eighing, when myriads of souls expire. They shut out the WAR 73 death-cries ; and are happy, and talk wittily among them- selves. That is the utter literal fact of what our ladies do in their pleasant Uves. Nay, you might answer, spealcing for them — 'We do not let these wars come to pass for our play, nor by our careless- ness ; we cannot help them. How can any final quarrel of nations be settled otherwise than by war?' I cannot now deL'.y, to tell j-ou how political quarrels might be otherwise settled. But grant that they cannot. Grant that no law of reason can be understood by nations ; no law of justice sub- mitted to by them : and that, while questions of a few acres, and of petty cash, can be determined by truth and equity, the questions which are to issue in the perishing or saving of kingdoms can be determined only by the truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle. Grant this, and even then, judge if it will ahvays be necessary for you to put your quarrel into the hearts of your j)oor, and sign your treaties with peasants' blood. You would be ashamed to do this in your own private position and power. Why should you not be ashamed also to do it in public place and power ? If j'ou quarrel with your neighbour, and the quarrel be indeterminable by law, and mortal, you and he do not send your footmen to Battersea fields to fight it out ; nor do you set fire to his tenants' cot- tages, nor spoil their goods. Tou fight out your quarrel yourselves, and at your own danger, if at aU. And you do not think it materially affects the arbitrement that one of you has a larger household than the other ; so that, if the servants or tenants were brought into the field with their masters, the issue of the contest could not be doubtful? You either refuse the private duel, or you practise it under laws of honour, not of physical force ; that so it may be, in a manner, justly concluded. Now the just or unjust conclusion of the private feud is of little moment, whUe the just or unjust con- clusion of the public feud is of eternal moment : and yet, in this public quarrel, you take your servants' sons from thei» arms to fight for it, and your servants' food from their lips to support it ; and the black seals on the parchment of youi treaties of peace are the deserted hearth and the fruitless field, H TSB CttOWlf OP WILD OLtVB. There is a ghastly ludicrousness in this, as there is mostly iii these wide and universal crimes. Hear the statement of the very fact of it in the most literal words of the greatest of our English thinkers : — ' What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport and upshot of war ? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, hy certain ' ' natural enemies " of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them ; she has, not without difliculty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoir- dupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are se- lected ; all dressed in red ; and shipped away, at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain ; and fed there till wanted. ' And now to that same spot in the south of Spain are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending ; till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition ; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. ' Straightway the word " Fire ! " is given, and they blow the souls out of one another, and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcases, which it must bury, and anon shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel ? Busy as the devil is, not the small- est ! They lived far enough apart ; were the entirest strangers ; nay, in so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then ? Simpleton ! their governors had fallen out ; and instead of shooting one another. had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot.' (Sartor Re- sartus.) Positively, then, gentlemen, the game of battle must not, and shall not, ultimately be played this way. But should it be played any way ? Should it, if not by your servants, be, practised by yourselves? I think, yes. Both history and human instinct seem alike to say, yes. All healthy men like fighting, and like the sense of danger ; all brave women like to-hear of their fighting, and of their facing danger. This is a fixed instinct in the fine race of them ; and I cannot help WAR. 73 fancying that fair fight is the best play for them ; and that a tournament was a better game than a steeple-chase. The time may perhaps come in France as well as here, for univer- sal hurdle-races and cricketing : but I do not think universal ' crickets ' will bring out the best qualities of the nobles of either country. I use, in such question, the test which I have adopted, of the connection of war with other arts ; and I re- flect how, as a sculptor, I should feel, if I were asked to de- sign a monument for a dead knight, in Westminster abbey, with a carving of a bat at one end, and a baU at the other. It may be the remains in me only of savage Gothic prejudice ; but I had rather carve it with a shield at one end, and a sword at the other. And this, observe, with no reference whatever to any story of duty done, or cause defended. As- sume the knight merely to have ridden out occasionally to fight his neighbour for exercise ; assume him even a soldier of fortune, and to have gained his bread, and filled his purse, at the sword's point. Still, I feel as if it were, somehow, grander and worthier in hiwi to have made his bread by sword play than any other play ; • had rather he had made it by thrusting than by batting ; — much more, than by betting. Much rather that he should ride war horses, than back race horses ; and — I say it sternly and deliberately — much rather would I have him slay his neighbour, than cheat him. W^ ' But remember, so far as this may be true, the game of war is only that in which the full personal povjer of the human creature is brought out in managemei/t of its weapons. And this for three reasons : — First, the great justification of this game is that it truly, when well played, determines who is the best man ; — who is the highest bred, the most self-denying, the most fearless, the coolest of nerve, the swiftest of eye and hand. You can- not test these quaUties wholly, unless there is a clear possi- bility of the struggle's ending in death. It is only in the fronting of that condition that the full trial of the man, soul and body, comes out. You may go to your game of wickets, or of hurdles, or of cards, and any knavery that is in you may stay unchallenged all the while. But if the play may bs 76 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. ended at any moment by a lance-thrust, a man will probablj make up liis accounts a little before he enters it. Whatever is rotten and evil in him will weaken his hand more in hold- ing a sword hilt, than in balancing a billiard cue ; and on the whole, the habit of living lightly hearted, in daily presence of death, always has had, and must have, a tendency both to the making and testing of honest men. But for the final testing, observe, you must make the issue of battle strictly dependent on fineness of frame, and firmness of hand. You must not make it the question, which of the combatants has the longest gun, or which has got behind the biggest tree, or which has the wind in his face, or which has gunpowder made by the best chemist, or iron smelted with the best coal, or the angriest mob at his back. Decide your battle, whether of nations, or individuals, on fho&e terms ; — and you have only multiplied confusion, and added slaugliter to iniquity. But decide your battle by pure trial which has the strongest arm, and steadiest heart, — and you have gone far to decide a great many matters besides, and to decide them rightly. And the other reasons for this mode of decision of cause, are the diminution both of the material destructiveness, or cost, and of the physical distress of war. For you must not think that in speaking to you in this (as you may imagine), fantastic praise of battle, I have overlooked the conditions weighing against me. I pray all of you, who have not read, tojread with the most earnest attention, Mr. Helps's two essays on War and Government, in the first volume of the last series of ' Friends in Council.' Everything that can be urged against war is there simply, exhaustively, and most graphically stated, And all, there urged, is true. But the two great counts of evil alleged against war by that most thoughtful writer, hold only against modem war. If you have to take away masses of men from all industrial employment, — to feed them by the labour of others, — to move them and provide them with de- structive machines, varied daily in national rivalship of invent, ive cost ; if you have to ravage the country which you attack, — to destroy for a score of future years, its roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbours ; — and if, finally, having brought masses WAB. 71 of men, counted by hundreds of thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged shot, and leave the frag- ments of living creatures countlessly beyond all help of sur- gery, to starve and parch, through days of torture, down into clots of clay — what book of accounts shaU record the cost of your work ; — What book of judgment sentence the guilt of it? That, I say, is modem war, — scientific war, — chemical and mechanic war, worse even than the savage's poisoned arrow. And yet you will tell me, perhaps, that any other war than this is impossible now. It may be so ; the progress of science cannot, perhaps, be otherwise registered than by new facilities of destruction ; and the brotherly love of our enlarging Chris- tianity be only proved by multiplication of murder. Yet hear, for a moment, what war was, in Pagan and ignorant days ; — what war might yet be, if we could extinguish our science in darkness, and join the heathen's practice to the Christian's theory. I read you this from a book which probably most of you know well, and all ought to know — Muller's 'Dorians ;' — but I have put the points I wish you to remember in closer connection than in his text. 'The chief characteristic of the warriors of Sparta was great composure and subdued strength ; the violence {Xvo-o-a) of Aristodemus and Isadas being considered as deserving rather of blame than praise ; and these qualities in general distin- guished the Greeks from the northern Barbarians, whose bold- ness always consisted in noise and tumult. For the same rea- son the Spartans sacrijiced to the Muses before an action ; these goddesses being expected to produce regularity and order in battle ; as they sacrificed on the same occasion in Crete to the god of love, as the confirmer of mutual esteem and shame. Every man put on a crown, when the band of flute-players gave the signal for attack ; all the shields of the hne gUttered with their high polish, and mingled their splendoiu' vsdth the dark red of the purple mantles, which were meant both to adorn the combatant, and to conceal the blood of the wounded ; to fall well and decorously being an incentive the more to the most heroic valour. The conduct of the Spartans in battle denotes a high and noble disposition, which rejected all the 78 THE CBOWN OF WILD 0LI7S. extremes of brutal rage. The pursuit of the enemy ceased when the victory was completed ; and after the signal for retreat had been given, all hostilities ceased. The spoiling of arms, at least during the battle, was also interdicted ; and the con- secration of the spoils of slain enemies to the gods, as, in gen- eral, aU rejoicings for victory, were considered as iU-omened.' Such was the war of the greatest soldiers who prayed to heathen gods. "What Christian war is, preached by Christian ministers, let any one teU you, who saw the sacred crowning, and heard the sacred flute-playing, and was inspired and sanctified by the divinely-measured and musical language, of any North American regiment preparing for its charge. And what is the relative cost of life in pagan and Christian wars, let this one fact tell you : — the Spaiians won the decisive bat- tle of Corinth with the loss of eight men ; the victors at in- decisive Gettysburg confess to the loss of 30,000. n. I pass now to our second order of war, the commonest among men, that undertaken ia desire of dominion. And let me ask you to think for a few moments what the real mean- ing of this desire of dominion is — first in the minds of kings — then in that of nations. Now, mind you this first, — that I speak either about kings, or masses of men, with a fixed conviction that human nature is a noble and beautiful thing ; not a foul nor a base thing. All the sin of men I esteem aa their disease, notjtheir nature ; as a folly which may be prevented, not a necessity which must be accepted. And my wonder, even when things are at their worst, is always at the height which this human nature can attain. Thinking it high, I find it always a higher thing than I thought it ; while those who think it low, find it, and will find it, always lower than they thought it : the fact being, that it is infinite, and capable of infinite height and infinite fall ; but the nature of it — and here is the faith which I would have you hold with me — the nature of it is in the nobleness, not in the catastrophe. Take the faith in its utmost terms. "When the captain of the ' London ' shook hands with his mate, saying ' God speed you I I will go down with my passengers,' that I believe to ba WAR. 79 •Luman nature.' He does not do it from any religious motive ^from any hope of reward, or any fear of punishment ; he does it because he is a man. But when a mother, living among the fair fields of merry England, gives her two-year-old child to be suffocated under a mattress in her inner room, while the said mother waits and talks outside ; that I believe to be not human nature. You have the two extremes there, shortly. And you, men, and mothers, who are here face to face with me to-night, I call upon you to say which of these is human, and which inhuman — which ' natui-al ' and which ' unnat- ural?' Choose your creed at once, I beseech you : — choose it with unshaken choice — choose it forever. Will you take, for foundation of act and hope, the faith that this man was such as God made him, or that this woman was such as God made her ? Which of them has failed from their nature — from their present, possible, actual nature ; —not their nature of long ago, but their nature of now ? Which has betrayed it — falsi- fied it ? Did the guardian who died in his trust, die inhu- manly, and as a fool ; and did the murderess of her child fulfil the law of her being? Choose, I say ; infinitude of choices hajig upon this. You have had false prophets among you — for centuries you have had them — solemnly warned against them though you were ; false prophets, who have told you that aU men are nothing but fiendu or wolves, half beast, half devil. Believe that and indeed you may sink to that. But refuse that, and have faith that God 'made you upright,' though you have sought out many inventions ; so, you will strive daily to become more what your Maker meant and means you to bo, and daily gives you also the power to be — and you wUl cling more and more to the nobleness and virtuo that is in you, saying, ' My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go.' I have put this to you as a choice, as if you might hold either of these creeds you liked best. But there is in reality no choice for you ; the facts being quite easily ascertainable. You have no business to think about this matter, or to choose in it The broad fact is, that a human creature of the highest race, aod niost perfect as a human thing, is invwiably both 80 TEE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. kind and true ; and that as you lower the race, you get cruelty and falseness, as you get deformity : and this so steadily and assuredly, that the two greaf words which, in their first use, meant only perfection of race, have come, by consequence of the invariable connection of virtue with the fine human nature, both to signify benevolence of disposition. The word gener- ous, and the word gentle, both, in their origin, meant only 'of pure race,' but because charity and tenderness are insep- arable from this purity of blood, the words which once stood only for pride, now stand as synonyms for virtue. Now, this being the true power of our inherent humanity, and seeing that all the aim of education should be to develop this ; — and seeing also what magnificent self sacrifice the higher classes of men are capable of, for any cause that they understand or feel, — it is wholly inconceivable to me how well- educated pi'inces, who ought to be of all gentlemen the gen- tlest, and of all nobles the most generous, and whose title of royalty means only their function of doing every man 'right' — how these, I say, throughout history, should so rarely pro- nounce themselves on the side of the poor and of justice, but continually maintain themselves and their own interests by oppression of the poor, and by wresting of justice ; and how tliis should be accepted as so natural, that the word loyalty, which means faithfulness to law, is used as if it were only the duty of a people to be loyal to their king, and not the duty of a king to be infinitely more loyal to his people. How comes it to pass that a captain will die with his passengers, and lean over the gunwale to give the parting boat its course ; but that a king will not usually die with, much less /or, his passengers, — thinks it rather incumbent on his passengers, in any num- ber, to die for him ? Think, I beseech you, of the wonder of this. The sea captain, not captain by divine right, but only by company's appointment ; — not a man of royal descent, but only a plebeian who can steer ; — not with the eyes of the world upon him, but with feeble chance, depending on one poor boat, of his name being ever heard above the wash of the fatal waves ; — not with the cause of a nation resting on his act, but lielpless to save so much as a child from among the lost croTycJ WAR. 81 with whom no resolves to be lost, — yet goes down quietly to his grave, rather than break his faith to these few emigrants. But your captain by divine right, — your captain with the hues of a hundred shields of kings upon his breast, — your captain whose every deed, brave or base, will be illuminated or branded for ever before unescapable eyes of men, — youi- cap- t;iin whose every thought and act are beneficent, or fatal, from sunrising to setting, blessing as the sunshine, or shadowing as the night, — this captain, as you find him in history, for the most part thinks only how he may tax his passengers, and sit at most ease in his state cabin ! For observe, if there had been indeed in the hearts of the rulers of great multitudes of men any such conception of work for the good of those under their command, as there is in the good and thoughtful masters of any small company of men, not only wars for the sake of mere increase of power could never take place, but our idea of power itself would be entirely altered. Do you suppose that to think and act even for a mUhou of men, to hear their complaints, watch their weaknesses, restrain their vices, make laws for them, lead them, day by day, to purer hfe, is not enough for one man's work ? If any of us were absolute lord only of a district of a hundred miles square, and were resolved on doing our ut- most for it ; making it feed as large a number of people as possible ; making every clod productive, and every rock de- fensive, and every human being happy ; should we not have enough on our hands think you ? But if the ruler has any other aim than this ; if, careless of the result of his interfer- ence, he desire only the authority to interfere ; and, regard- loss of what is ill-done or well-done, cares only that it shall be done at his bidding , — if he would rather do two hundred miles' space of mischief, than one hundred miles' space of good, of course he will try to add to his territory ; and to add Ulimitably. But does he add to his power ? Do you call it power in a child, if he is allowed to play with the wheels and bands of some vast engine, pleased with their murmur and whirl, till his unwise touch, wandering where it ought not. scatters beam and wheel into ruin ? Yet what machine is sa 82 THE CROWN OP WILD OLIVE. vast, so incognisable, as the working of the mind of a nation , ■what child's touch so wanton, as the word of a selfish king ? And yet, how long have we allowed the historian to speak of the extent of the calamity a man causes, as a just ground for his pride ; and to extol him as the greatest prince, who is only the centre of the widest error. Follow out this thought by yourselves ; and you wiU find that all power, properly so called, is wise and benevolent. There may be capacity in a drifting fire-ship to destroy a fleet ; there may be venom enough in a dead body to infect a nation : — but which of you, the most ambitious, would desire a drifting kinghood, robed in consuming fire, or a poison-dipped sceptre whose touch was mortal ? There is no true potency, remember, but that of help ; nor true ambition, but ambition to save. And then, observe farther, this true power, the power of saving, depends neither on multitude of men, nor on extent of territory. We are continually assuming that nations be- come strong according to their numbers. They indeed be- come so, if those numbers can be made of one mind ; but how are you sure you can stay them in one mind, and keep them from having north and south minds ? Grant them unanimous, how know you they will be unanimous in right ? If they are unanimous in wrong, the more they are, essentially the weaker they are. Or, suppose that they can neither be of one mind, nor of two minds, but can only be of no mind ? Suppose they are a more helpless mob ; tottering into precipi- tant catastrophe, hke a waggon load of stones when the wheel comes off. Dangerous enough for their neighbours, certainly, but not ' powerful.' Neither does strength depend on extent of territory, any more than upon number of population. Take up your mapa when you go home this evening, — put the cluster of British Isles beside the mass of South America ; and then consider whether any race of men need care how much ground they stand upon. The strength is in the men, and in their unity and virtue, not in their standing room : a little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools ; and only thai nation gains true territory, which gains itself. WAS. 83 And now for the brief practical outcome of all this, Ee« member, no government is ultimately strong, but ia propor- tion to its kindness and justice ; and that a nation does not strengthen, by merely multiplying and diffusing itself. We have not strengthened as yet, by multiplying into America. Nay, even when it has not to encounter the separating condi tions of emigration, a nation need not boast itself of multiply- ing on its own ground, if it multiplies only as flies or locusts do, Mnth the god of flies for its god. It multiplies its strength only by increasing as one great family, in perfect fellowship and brotherhood. And lastly, it does not strengthen itself by seizing dominion over races whom it cannot benefit. Aus- tria is not strengthened, but weakened, by her grasp of Lom- bardy ; and whatever apparent increase of majesty and of wealth may have accrued to us from the possession of India, whether these prove to us ultimately power or weakness, de- pends wholly on the degree in which our influence on the native race shall be benevolent and exalting. But, as it is at their own peril that any race extends their dominion in mere desire of power, so it is at their own still greater peril that they refuse to undertake aggressive war, according to their force, whenever they are assured that their authority would be helpful and protective. Nor need you listen to any sophis- tical objection of the impossibiUty of knowing when a people's help is needed, or when not. Make your national conscience clean, and your national eyes wUl soon be clear. No man who is truly ready to take part in a noble quarrel wiU ever stand long in doubt by whom, or in what cause, his aid is needed. I hold it my duty to make no political statement of any special bearing in this presence ; but 1 teU you broadly and boldly, that, within these last ten years, we EngUsh have, as a knightly nation, lost„pur spurs : we have fought where we should not have fought, for gain ; and we have been pas- sive where we should not have been passive, for fear. I teU you that the principle of non-intervention, as now preached among us, is as selfish and cruel as the worst frenzy of con- quest, and differs from it only by being not only malignant, but dastardly. 84 -raB OBOWN OF WILD OLIVE. I know, liowever, that my opinions on this subject differ toa ■widely from those ordinarily held, to be any-fa^ttier intruded •upon you ; and therefore I pass lastly to examine the condi- tions of the third kind of noble war ; — war waged simply for defence of the country in which we were bom, and for the maintenance and execution of her laws, by whomsoever threat- ened or defied. It is to this duty that I suppose most men entering the army consider themselves in reality to be bound, and I want you now to reflect what the laws of mere defence are ; and what the soldier's duty, as now understood, or sup- posed to be understood. You have solemnly devoted your- selves to be English soldiers, for the guardianship of England. I want you to feel what this vow of yours indeed means, or is gradually coming to mean. You take it upon you, first, while 3'ou ai'e sentimental schoolboys ; you go into your military convent, or barracks, just as a girl goes into her convent while she is a sentimental schoolgirl ; neither of you then know what you are about, though both the good soldiers and good nuns make the best of it afterwards. You don't understand perhaps why I call you ' sentimental ' schoolboys, when you go into the army ? Because, on the whole, it is love of adven- ture, of excitement, of fine dress and of the pride of fame, all which are sentimental motives, which chiefly make a boy like going into the Guards better than into a counting-house. You fancy, perhaps, that there is a severe sense of duty mixed with these peacocky motives ? And in the best of you, there is ; but do not think that it is principal If you cared to do your duty to your country in a prosaic and unsentimental way, depend upon it, there is now truer duty to be done in raising harvests than in burning them ; more in building houses, than in sheUing them — more in winning money by your own work, wherewith to help men, than in taxing other people's work, for money wherewith to slay men ; more duty finally, in honest and unselfish living than in honest and un- selfish dying, though that seems to your boys' eyes the brav- est. So far then, as for your own honour, and the honour of your families, you choose brave death in a red coat before brave life in a black one, you are sentimental ; and now see WAR 85 wiiat ttis J)assiohate tow of yours oomeS to. For a little while you ride, and you hunt tigers or savages, you shoot, and are shot ; you are happy, and proud, always, and honolired and wept if you die ; and you are satisfied with your life, and with the end of it ; believing, on the whole, that good rather than harm of it comes to others, and much pleasure to you. But as the sense of duty enters into your forming minds, the vow takes another aspect. Tou find that you have put your- selves into the hand of your country as a weapon. Tou have vowed to strike, when she bids you, and to stay scabbarded when she bids you ; all that you need answer for is, that you fail not in her grasp. And there is goodness in this, and greatness, if you can trust the hand and heart of the Brito- mart who has braced you to her side, and are assured that when she leaves you sheathed in darkness, there is no need for your flash to the sun. But remember, good and noble as -'this state may be, it is a state of slavery. There are different kinds of slaves and different masters. Some slaves are scourged to their work by whips, others are scourged to it by restlessness or ambition. It does not matter what the whip is ; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls : the fact, so far, of slavery, is in being driven to your work vnthout thought, at another's bid- ding. Again, some slaves are bought with money, and others with praise. It matters not what the purchase-money is. The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and be bought for it. Again, it matters not what kind of work you are set on ; some slaves are set to forced diggings, others to forced marches ; some dig furrows, others field-works, and others graves. Some press the juice of reeds, and some the juice of vines, and some the blood of men. The fact of the captivity is the same whatever work we are set upon, though the fruits of the toil may be different. But, remember, in thus vowing ourselves to be the slaves of any master, it ought to be some subject of forethought with us, what work he is likely to put us upon. You may think that the whole duty of a soldier is to be passive, that it is the country you have left behind who is to command, and you ha\'B only to obey. But 66 TEE CROWN OF WILD OLtVB. are you sure that you have left all your country behind, 01 that the part of it you have bo left is indeed the best part of it? Suppose — and, remember, it is quite conceivable — that you yourselves are indeed the best part of England ; that you, who have become the slaves, ought to have been the masters ; and that those vyho ai-e the masters, ought to have been the slaves ! If it is a noble and whole-hearted England, whose bidding you iure bound to do, it is well ; but if you are your- selves the best of her heart, and the England you have left be but a half-hearted England, how say you of your obedience ? Tou were too proud to become shopkeepers : are you satisfied then to become the servants of shopkeepers ? You were too proud to become merchants or farmers yourselves : will you have merchants or farmers then for your field marshals ? You had no gifts of special grace for Exeter Hall : will you have some gifted person thereat for your commiinder-in-chief, to judge of your work, and reward it? You imagine yourselves to be the army of England : how if you should find yourselves, lit last, only the poHce of her manufacturing towns, and the beadles of her little Bethels ? It is not so yet, nor will be so, I trust, for ever ; but what I want you to see, and to be assured of, is, that the ideal of soldiership is not mere passive obedience and bravery ; that, so far from this, no country is in a healthy state which has , separated, even in a small degree, her civil from her military power. All states of the world, however great, fall at once when they use mercenary armies ; and although it is a less in- stant form of error (because involving no national taint of cowardice), it is yet an error no less ultimately fatal — it is the error especially of modern times, of which we cannot yet know all the calamitous consequences — to take away the best blood and strength of the nation, all the sovd-substance of it that is brave, and careless of reward, and scornful of pain, and faithful in trust ; and to cast that into steel," and make a mere sword of it ; taking away its voice and will ; but to keep the worst part of the nation — -whatever is cowardly, avaricious, sensual, and faithless— and to give to this the voice, to this the authority, to this the chief privilege, where there is leoat capacity, of ttouglit. The fulfilment of your vow for the de- fence of England -wiU by no means consist in carrying out such a system. You are not true soldiers, if you only mean to stand at a shop door, to protect shop-boys who are cheating itmide. A soldier's vow to his country is that he will die for the guardianship of her domestic virtue, of her righteous laws, and of her anyway challenged or endangered honour. A state without virtue, without laws, and without honour, he is bound not to defend ; nay, bound to redress by his own right hand that which he sees to bo base in her. So sternly is this the law of Nature and life, that a nation once utterly corrupt can only be redeemed by a military despotism — never by talking, nor by its free effort. And the health of any state consists simply in this : that in it, those who are wisest shall also be strongest ; its rulers should be also its soldiers ; or, rather, by force of intellect more than of sword, its soldiers its rulers. Whatever the hold which the aristocracy of Eng- land has on the heart of England, in that they are still always in front of her battles, tliis hold will not be enough, unless they are also in front of her thoughts. And truly her thoughts need good captain's leading now, if ever ! Do you know what, by this beautiful division of labour (her brave men fighting, and her cowards thinking), she has come at last to think? Here is a bit of paper in my hand,* a good one too, and an honest one ; quite representative of the best common pubHc thought of England at this moment ; and it is holding forth * I do not care to refer to the journal quoted, because the article was unworthy of its general tone, though in order to enable the audience to verify the quoted sentence, I left the number containing it on the table, when I delivered this lecture. But a saying of Baron Liebig's, quoted at the head of a leader on the same subject in the ' Daily Telegraph ' of Jan- uary 11, 1866, summarily digests and presents the maximum folly of modern thought in this respect. ' Civilization,' says the Baron, 'is the economy of power, and English power is coal.' Not altogether so, my chemical friend. Civilization is the making of civil persons, which is a kind of distillation of which alembics are incapable, and does not at all Imply the turning of a small company of gentlemen into a large company of ironmongers. And English power (what little of it may be left), is by no means coal, but, indeed, of that which, ' when the whole world turn^ to coal, then chiefly lives.' '" 88 tEE OnoWir t>ff VflLt) OLIVt!. in one of its leaders upon our ' social welfare,' — upon om • vivid life ' — upon the ' political supremacy of Great Britain.' And -what do you think all these are owing to ? To what our Enghsh sires have done for us, and taught us, age after age ? No : not to that. To our honesty of heart, or coolness of head, or steadiness of will? No: not to these. To our thinkers, or our statesmen, or our poets, or our captains, or our martyrs, or the patient labour of our poor ? No : not to these ; or at least not to these in any chief measure. Nay, says the journal, ' more than any agency, it is the cheapness and abundance of our coal which have made us what we are.' If it be so, then ' ashes to ashes ' be our epitaph ! and the sooner the better. I tell 3'ou, gentlemen of England, if ever you would have your country breathe the pure Jbjreath of heaven again, and receive again a soul into her body, instead of rotting into a carcase, -blown up in the belly with carbonic acid (and great that way), you must think, and feel, for your England, as well as fight for her : you must- teach her that all the true greatness she ever had, or eve.r can have, she won while her fields were green and heE_faces ruddy; — that greatness is still possible for Eng- lishmen, even though the ground be not hollow under their feet, nor the sky black over their heads ; — and that, when the day comes for their country to lay her honours in the dust, her crest will not rise from it more loftUy because it is dust of soal. Gentlemen, I tell you, solemnly, that the day is coming when the soldiers of England must be her tutors and the cap- tains of her army, captains also of her mind. And now, remember, j'ou soldier youths, who are thus in all ways the hope of your country ; or must be, if she have any hope : remember that your fitness for aU future trust de- pends upon what you are now. No good soldier in his old age was ever careless or indolent in his youth. Many a giddy and thoughtless boy has become a good bishop, or a good lawyer, or a good merchant ; but no such an one ever be- came a good general. I challenge you, in all history, to find a record of a good soldier who was not grave and earnest in his youth. And, in general, I have no patience with people who talk about ' the thoughtlessness of youth ' indulgently. WaH. 89 I had infinitely i-ather hear of thoughtless old ag^, tod the in- dulgence due to that. When a man has done his work, and nothing can any way be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, and jest with his fate, if he will ; but what excuse can you find for wilfulness of thought, at the very time when every crisis of future fortune hangs on your de- cisions ? A youth thoughtless ! when all the happiness of his home for ever depends on the chances, or the passions, of an hour ! A youth thoughtless ! when the career of all his days depends on the opportunity of a moment ! A youth thought- less ! when his every act is a foundation-stone of future con- duct, and every imagination a fountain of life or death ! Be thoughtless in any after years, rather than now — though, in- deed, there is only one place where a man may be nobly thoughtless, — his deathbed. No thinking should ever be left to be done there. Having, then, resolved that you will not waste recklessly, but earnestly use, these early days of yours, remember that all the duties of her children to England may be summed in two words — industry, and honour. I say first, industry, for it is in this that soldier youth are especially tempted to fail. Tet surely, there is no reason because your life may possibly or probably be shorter than other men's, that you should therefore waste more recklessly the portion of it that is granted you ; neither do the duties of your profession, which require you to keep your bodies strong, in any wise involve the keeping of your minds weak. So far from that, the ex- perience, the hardship, and the activity of a soldier's life ren- der his powers of thought more accurate than those of other men ; and while, for others, aU knowledge ia often little more than a means of amusement, there is no form of science which a soldier may not at some time or other find bearing on business of life and death. A young mathematician may be excused for langour in studying curves to be described only with a pencil ; but not in tracing those which are to be described with a rocket. Your knowledge of a wholesome herb may involve the feeding of an army ; and acquaintance with an obscure point of geography, the success of a cam 90 TBM O&OWM OV WILD OLIVE. paign. Never waste an instant's time, therefore ; the sin d idleness is a thousand-fold greater in you than in other youths ; for the fates of those who will one day be under your command hang upon your knowledge ; lost moments now win be lost lives then, and every instant which you care- lessly take for play, you buy with blood. But there is one way of wasting time, of all the vilest, because it wastes, not time only, but the interest and energy of your minds. Of all the ungentlemanly habits into which you can fall, the vilest is betting, or interesting yourselves in the issues of betting. It unites nearly every condition of foUy and vice ; you concen- trate your interest upon a matter of chance, instead of upon a subject of true knowledge ; and you back opinions which you have no grounds for forming, merely because they are your own. All the insolence of egotism is in this ; and so far as the love of excitement is complicated with the hope of win- ning money, you turn yourselves into the basest sort of trades- men — those who hve by speculation. Were there no other ground for industry, this would be a sufficient one ; that it protected you from the temptation to so scandalous a vice. Work faithfully, and you will put yourselves in possession of a glorious and enlarging happiness : not such as can be won by the speed of a horse, or marred by the obUquity of a ball. First, then, by industry you must fulfil your vow to your country ; but aU industry and earnestness will be useless un- less they are consecrated by your resolution to be in all things men of honour ; not honour in the common sense only, but in the highest. Eest on the force of the two main words in the great verse, integer vitse, scelerisqiie purus. Tou have vowed your life to England ; give it her wholly — a bright, stainless, perfect life— a knightly hfe. Because you have to fight with machines instead of lances, there may be a necessity for more ghastly danger, but there is none for less worthiness of char- acter, than in olden time. You may be true knights yet, though perhaps not equites; you may have to call yourselves 'cannonry' instead of ' chivalry,' but that is no reason why you should not call yourselves true men. So the first thing you have to see to in becoming soldiers is that you make your« WAR. 91 selves ■wholly true. Courage is a mere mattei of course among any ordinarily well-born youths ; but neither truth nor gentle- ness is matter of course. You must bind them like shields about your necks ; you must write them on the tables of your hearts. Though it be not exacted of you, yet exact it of your- selves, this vow of stainless truth. Your hearts are, if you leave them unstirred, as tombs in which a god lies buried. Vow yourselves crusaders to redeem that sacred sepulchre. And remember, before all things — for no other memory will be so protective of you — that the highest law of this knightly trutfk is that under which it is vowed to women. Whomso- ever else you deceive, whomsoever you injure, whomsoever you leave unaided, you must not deceive, nor injure, nor leave unaided according to your power, any woman of whatever rank. Believe me, every virtue of the higher phases of manly character begins ia this ; — in truth and modesty before the face of all maidens ; in truth and pity, or truth and reverence, to aU womanhood. And now let me turn for a moment to you, — wives and maidens, who are the souls of soldiers ; to you, — mothers, who have devoted your children to the great hierarchy of war. Let me ask you to consider what part you have to take for the aid of those who love you ; for if you fail in your part they cannot fulfil theirs ; such absolute helpmates you are that BO man can stand without that help, nor labour in his own strength. I know your hearts, and that the truth of them never fails when an hour of trial comes which you recognise for such. But you know Hot when the hour of trial first finds you, nor when it verUy finds you. You imagine that you are only called upon to wait and to suffer ; to surrender and to mourn. You know that you must not weaken the hearts of your hus- bands and lovers, even by the one fear of which those hearts are capable, — the fear of parting from you, or of causing you grief. Through weary years of separation, through fearful expectancies of unknown fate ; through the tenfold bitterness of the sorrow which might so easily have been joy, and the tenfold yearning for glorious life struck down in its prime— 92 TEE GROWN Of WILD OLIYB. through aU these agonies you fail not, and never Trill fail But your trial is not in these. To be heroic in danger is little ; — you are Englishwomen. To be heroic in change and sway of fortune is httle ; — for do you not love ? To be patient through the great chasm and pause of loss is little ; — for do you not still love in heaven ? But to be heroic in happiness ; to bear yourselves gravely and righteously in the dazzling of the sun- shine of morning ; not to forget the God in whom you trust, when He gives you most ; not to fail those who trust you, when they seem to need you least ; this is the difficult forti- tude. It is not in the pining of absence, not in the peril of battle, not in the wasting of sickness, that your prayer should be most passionate, or your guardianship most tender. Pray, mothers and maidens, for your young soldiers in the bloom of their pride ; pray for them, while the only dangers round them are in their own wayward wills ; watch you, and pray, when they have to face, not death, but temptation. But it is this fortitude also for which there is the crowning reward. Beheve me, the whole course and character of your lovers' hves is in your hands ; what you would have them be, they shall be, if you not only desire to have them so, but deserve to have them so ; for they are but mirrors in which you will see your- selves imaged. If you are frivolous, they vrill be so also ; if you have no understanding of the scope of their duty, they also wiU forget it ; they will hsten, — they can listen, — to no other interpretation of it than that uttered from your Hps. Bid them be brave ; — they will be brave for you ; bid them be cowards ; and how noble soever they be ; — they will quail for you. Bid them be wise, and they wiU be wise for you ; mock ,it their counsel, they will be fools for you : such and so ab- solute is your rule over them. You fancy, perhaps, as you have been told so often, that a wife's rule should only be over her husband's house, not over his mind. Ah, no ! the true rule is just the reverse of that ; a true wife, in her husband's house, is his servant ; it is in his heart that she is queen. Whatever of the best he can conceive, it is her part to be ; whatever of highest he can hope, it is hers to promise ; aU ttiat is dark in him ^e must pur^e into purity ; all tljat is fail- WAB. 93 ing in him she must strengthen into truth : from her, through all the world's clamour, he must win his praise ; in her, through all the world's warfare, he must find his peace. And, now, but one word more. You may wonder, perhaps, that I have spoken all this night in praise of war. Yet, truly, if it might be, I, for one, would fain join in the cadence of hammer-strokes that should beat swords into plough- shares : and that this cannot be, is not the fault of us men. It is your fault. Wholly yours. Only by your command, or by your permission, can any contest take place among us. And the real, final, reason for all the poverty, misery, and rage of battle, throughout Europe, is simply that you v/omen, however good, however religious, however self-sacrificing for those whom you love, are too selfish and too thoughtless to take pains for any creature out of your own immediate circles. You, fan&y that you are sorry for the pain of others. Now I just teU you this, that if the usual course of war, instead of unroofing peasants' houses, and ravaging peasants' fields, merely broke the china upon your own drawing-room tables, no war in civilised countries would last a week. I tell you more, that at whatever moment you chose to put a period to war, you could do it with less trouble than you take any day to go out to dinner. You know, or at least you might know if you would think, that eveiy battle you hear of has made many widows and orphans. We ..liaxe,^ none of us, heart enough truly to mourn with these. But at least we might jDut on the outer symbols of mourning with them. Let but every Chris- tian lady who has conscience toward God, vow that she wiU mourn, at least outwardly, for His killed creatures. Your praying is useless, and your churchgoing mere mockery of God, if you have not plain obedience in you enough for this. Let every lady in the upper classes of civilised Europe simpljf TOW that, while any cruel war proceeds, she will wear black ; — a mute's black, — with no jewel, no ornament, no excuse for, or evasion into, prettiness. — -I tell you again, no war would last a week. And lastly. You women of England are all now shrieking yith one Yoice^ -^fon and your clergymen together, — becau?? Si THE CBOWN OF WILD OLIVE. you hear of your Bibles being attacked. If you choose to obey your Bibles, you will never care who attacks them. It is just because you never fulfil a single downright precept of the Book, that you are so careful for its credit : and just be- cause you don't care to obey its whole words, that you are so particular about the letters of them. The Bible teUs you to dress plainly, — and you are mad for finery ; the Bible tells you to have pity on the poor, — and you crush them under your carriage-wheels ; the Bible tells you to do judgment and jus- tice, — and you do not know, nor care to know, so much as what the Bible word 'justice means.' Do but learn so much of God's truth as that comes to ; know what He means when He teUs you to be just : and teach your sons, that their bravery is but a fool's boast, and their deeds but a firebrand's tossing, unless thaj are indeed Just men, and Perfect in the Fear of God ;— and you will soon have no more war, unless it be indeed such as is willed by Him, of whom, though Prince of Peace, it is also written, ' In Righteousness He doth judge, and make war.' lUNERA PULVERIS SIX ESSAYS ON THE ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY PEEFAOE. The following pages contain, I believe, the first accurata analysis of the laws of Political Economy which has been published in England. Many treatises, within their scope, correct, have appeared in contradiction of the views popu- larly received ; but no exhaustive examination of the subject was possible to any person unacquainted with the value of the products of the highest industries, commonly called the " Fine Arts ; " and no one acquainted with the nature of those industries has, so far as I know, attempted, or even ap- proached, the task. So that, to the date (1863) when these Essays were pub- lished, not only the chief conditions of the production of wealth had remained unstated, but the nature of wealth itself had never been defined. "Every one has a notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth," wrote Mr. Mill, in the outset of his treatise ; and contentedly proceeded, as if a chemist should proceed to investigate the laws of chemistry vnthout endeavouring to ascertain the nat- vie of fire or water, because every one had a notion of them, " sufficiently correct for common purposes." But even that apparently indisputable statement was un- true. There is not one person in ten thousand who has a notion sufficiently correct, even for the commonest purposes, of " what is meant " by wealth ; stUl less of what wealth ever- lastingly is, whether we mean it or not ; which it is the busi- ness of every student of economy to ascertain. We, indeed, know (either by experience or in imagination) what it is to be able to provide ourselves with luxurious food, and handsome elothes ; and if Mi-. Mill had thought that wealth conaiat^ed 98 PREFACE. only in these, or in the means of obtaining these, it would have been easy for him to have so defined it vyith perfect scientific accuracy. But he knew better : he knew that some kinds of wealth consisted ia the possession, or power of ob- taining, other things than these ; but, having, in the studies of his life, no clue to the principles of essential value, he was compelled to take pubHc opinion as the ground of his science ; and the public, of course, willingly accepted the notion of a science founded on their opinions. I had, on the contrary, a singular advantage, not only in the greater extent of the field of investigation opened to me by my daily pursuits, but in the severity of some lessons I accidentally received in the course of them. When, in the winter of 1851, I was collecting materials for my work on Venetian architecture, three of the pictures of Tintoret on the roof of the School of St. Eoch were hanging down in ragged fragments, mixed with lath and plaster, round the apertures made by the fall of three Austrian heavy shot. The city of Venice was not, it appeared, rich enough to repair the damage that winter ; and buckets were set on the floor of the upper room of the school to catch the rain, which not only fell directly through the shot holes, but found its way, owing to the generally pervious state of the roof, through many of the canvases of Tintoret's in other parts of the ceiling. It was a lesson to me, as I have just said, no less direct than severe ; for I knew already at that time (though I have not ventured to assert, until recently at Oxford,) that the pict- ures of Tintoret in Venice were accurately the most precious articles of wealth in Europe, being the best existing produc- tions of human industry. Now at the time that three of them were thus fluttering in moist rags from the roof they had adorned, the shops of the Eue Rivoli at Paris were, in obe- dience to a steadily-increasing public Demand, beginning to show a steadily-increasing Supply of elaborately-finished and coloured lithographs, representing the modern dances of de- Hght, among which the caacau has sioce tiiJsejj a, distinguished pla to be studied under the head of money. 13. Intrinsic value is the absolute power of anything to support life. A sheaf of wheat of given quality and weight has in it a measurable power of sustaining the substance of the body ; a cubic foot of pure air, a fixed power of sustain- ing its warmth ; and a cluster of flowers of given beauty a fixed power of enlivening or animating the senses and heart. [* Observe these definitions,— they are of much importance, — and co« nect with them the sentences in italics on this and the next page,] MUl^ERA PULVEBIS. lit It does not in the least affect the intrinsic value of the wheat, the air, or the flowers, that men refuse or despise them. Used or not, their own power is in them, and that particular power is in nothing else. 14. But in order that this value of theirs may become ef- fectual, a certain state is necessary in the recipient of it. The digesting, breathing, and perceiving functions must be perfect in the human creature before the food, air, or flowers can be- come of their full value to it. The production of effectual val- ue, therefore, always involves two needs : first, the production of a thing essentially useful ; then the production of the capacity to use it. Where the intrinsic value and acceptant capacity come together there is Effectual value, or wealth ; where there is either no intrinsic value, or no acceptant capacity, there is no effectual value ; that is to say, no wealth. A horse is no wealth to us if we cannot ride, nor a picture if we can- not see, nor can any noble thing he wealth, except to a noble per- son. As the aptness of the user increases, the effectual value of the thing used increases ; and in its entirety can co-exist only with perfect skill of use, and fitness of nature. 15. Valuable material things may be conveniently referred to five heads : (i.) Land, with its associated air, water, and organisms. (H.) Houses, furniture, and instruments. (iii.) Stored or prepared food, medicine, and articles of bod- ily luxury, including clothing. (iv.) Books. (v.) Works of art. The conditions of value in these things are briefly as fol- lows : — 16. (i.) Land. Its value is twofold ; first, as producing food and mechanical power ; secondly, as an object of sight and thought, producing intellectual power. Its value, as a means of producing food and mechanical power, varies with its form (as mountain or plain), with its substance (in soil or mineral contents), and vnth its cUmata AU these conditions of intrinsic value must be knovm and com- plied with by the men who have to deal with it, in order to 118 MUNBRA PVLVBBIS. give effectual value ; but at any given time and place, the in- trinsic value is fixed : such and such a piece of land, with ita associated lakes and seas, rightly treated in surface and sub- stance, can produce precisely so much food and power, and no more. The second element of value in land being its beauty^ united with such conditions of space and form as are neces- sary for exercise, and for fuUness of animal life, land of the highest value in these respects will be that lying in temperate climates, and boldly varied in form ; removed from unhealthy or dangerous influences (as of miasm or volcano) ; and capa- ble of sustaining a rich fauna and flora. Such land, care- fully tended by the hand of man, so far as to remove from it unsightlinesses and evidences of decay, guarded from vio- lence, and inhabited, under man's affectionate protection, by every kind of living creature that can occupy it in peace, is the most precious " property " that human beings can pos- sess. 17. (ii.) Buildings, fimiiture, and instruments. The value of buildings consists, first, in permanent strength, with convenience of form, of size, and of position ; so as to render employment peaceful, social intercourse easy, tempera- ture and air healthy. The advisable or possible magnitude of cities and mode of their distribution in squares, streets, courts, &c. ; the relative valae of sites of land, and the modes of structure which are healthiest and most permanent, have to be studied under this head. The value of buildings consists secondly in historical asso- ciation, and architectural beauty, of which we have to examine the influence on manners and Hfe. The value of instruments consists, first, in their power of shortening labour, or otherwise accomplishing what human strength unaided could not. The kinds of work which are severally best accomphshed by hand or by machine ; — the ef- fect of machinery in gathering and multiplying population, and its influence on the minds and bodies of such population ; together with the conceivable uses of machinery on a colossal Bcale in accomplishing mighty and useful works, hitherto un- MUNERA PULVERI8. 119 thought of, such as the deepening of large river channels ;— changing the surface of mountainous districts ; — irrigating tracts of desert in the torrid zone ; — breaking up, and thus rendering capable of quicker fusion, edges of ice in the north- em and southern Arctic seas, &c., so rendering parts of the eaxth habitable which hitherto have been lifeless, are to be studied under this head. The value of instruments is, secondarily, in their aid to ab- stract sciences. The degree in vyhich the multiplication of such instruments should be encouraged, so as to make them, if large, easy of access to numbers (as costly telescopes), or so cheap as that they might, in a serviceable form, become a common part of the furniture of households, is to be consid- ered under this head.* 18. (iii.) Food, medicine, and articles of luxury. Under this head we shall have to examine the possible methods of obtaining pure food in such security and equality of supply as to avoid both waste and famine : then the economy of medicine and just range of sanitary law : finally the economy of luxury, partly an aesthetic and partly an ethical question. 19. (iv.) Books. The value of these consists. First, in their power of preserving and communicating the knowledge of facts. Secondly, in their power of exciting vital or noble emotion and intellectual action. They have also their corresponding negative powers of disguising and effacing the memory of facts, and killing the noble emotions, or exciting base ones. Under these two heads we have to consider the economical and educational value, positive and negative, of Hterature ; — the means of producing and educating good authors, and the means and advisability of rendering good books generally ac» cessible, and directing the reader's choice to them. [* I cannot now recast these sentences, pedantic in their generaliza- tion, and intended more for index tlian statement, but I must guard the reader from thinking that I ever wish for cheapness by bad quality. A poor boy need not always learn mathematics ; but, if you set him tu do so, have the farther kindness to give him good compasses, not cheap ones, whose points bend like lead.] 120 MUNERA PULVERI8. 20. (v.) Works of art. The value of these is of the sam« nature as that of books ; but the laws of their production and possible modes of distribution are very different, and require separate examination. 21. n. — Money. Under this head, we shall have to ex- amine the laws of currency and exchange ; of which I will note here the first principles. Money has been inaccurately spoken of as merely a means of exchange. But it is far more than this. It is a document- ary expression of legal claim. It is not wealth, but a docu- mentary claim to wealth, being the sign of the relative quan- tities of it, or of the labour producing it, to which, at a given time, persons, or societies, are entitled. If aU the money in the world, notes and gold, were de- stroyed in an instant, it would leave the world neither richer nor poorer than it was. But it would leave the individual inhabitants of it in different relations. Money is, therefore, correspondent in its nature to the title-deed of an estate. Though the deed be burned, the estate stiU exists, but the right to it has become dispu- table. 22. The real worth of money remains unchanged, as long as the proportion of the quantity of existing money to the quantity of existing wealth or available labour remains un- changed. If the wealth increases, but not the money, the worth of the money increases ; if the money increases, but not the wealth, the worth of the money diminishes. 23. Money, therefore, cannot be arbitrarily multiplied, any more than title-deeds can. So long as the existing wealth or available labour is not fully represented by the currency, the currency may be increased without diminution of the assigned worth of its pieces. But when the existing wealth, or avail- able labour is once fully represented, every piece of money thrown into circulation diminishes the worth of every other existing piece, in the proportion it bears to the number of them, pro^ided the new piece be received with equal credit ; MUNBRA PULVEBIS. 121 if not, the depreciation of wortli takes place, according to the degree of its credit. 24. "When, however, new money, composed of some sub- stance of supposed intrinsic value (as of gold), is brought into the market, or when new notes are issued which are sup- posed to be deserving of credit, the desire to obtain the money will, under certain circumstances, stimulate industry : an ad- ditional quantity of wealth is immediately produced, and if this be in proportion to the new claims advanced, the value of the existing currency is undepreciated. If the stimulus given be so great as to produce more goods than are pro- portioned to the additional coinage, the worth of the exist- ing currency will be raised. Arbitrary control and issues of currency affect the produc- tion of wealth, by acting on the hopes and fears of men, and are, under certain circumstances, wise. But the issue of ad- ditional currency to meet the exigencies of immediate ex- pense, is merely one of the disguised forms of borrowing or taxing. It is, however, in the present low state of economical knowledge, often possible for governments to venture on an issue of currency, when they could not venture on an addi- tional loan or tax, because the real operation of such issue is not understood by the people, and the pressure of it is irreg- ularly distributed, and with an unperceived gradation. 25. The use of substances of intrinsic value as the materials of a currency, is a barbarism ; — a remnant of the conditions of barter, which alone render commerce possible among savage nations. It is, however, still necessary, partly as a mechanical check on arbitrary issues ; partly as a means of exchanges with foreign nations. In proportion to the extension of civi- lization, and increase of trustworthiness in Governments, it will cease. So long as it exists, the phenomena of the cost and price of the articles used for currency are mingled with those proper to currency itself, in an almost inextricable manner : and the market worth of bullion is affected by multitudinous accidental circumstances, which have been traced, with more or less success, by writers on commercial operations : but with these variations the true political economist has no more 122 MUNERA PULVEBIS. to do than an engineer, fortifying a harbour of refuge against Atlantic tide, has to concern himself with the cries or quarrels of children who dig pools with their fingers for ite streams among the sand. 26. HL — Riches. According to the various industry, ca- pacity, good fortune, and desires of men, they obtain greater or smaller share of, and claim upon, the wealth of the world. The inequahties between these shares, always in some de- gree just and necessary, may be either restrained by law or circumstance within certain limits ; or may increase indefi- nitely. Where no moral or legal restraint is put upon the exercise of the wiU and intellect of the stronger, shrewder, or more covetous men, these differences become ultimately enormous. But as soon as they become so distinct in their extremes as that, on one side, there shall be manifest redundance of pos- session, and on the other manifest pressure of need, — the terms " riches " and " poverty " are used to express the op- posite states ; being contrary only as the terms " warmth " and " cold " are contraries, of which neither implies an actual degree, but only a relation to other degrees, of temperature. 27. Respecting riches, the economist has to inquire, first, into the advisable modes of their collection ; secondly, into the advisable modes of their administration. Respecting the collection of national riches, he has to in- quire, first, whether he is justified ia calling the nation rich, if the quantity of wealth it possesses relatively to the wealth of other nations, be large ; irrespectively of the manner of its distribution. Or does the mode of distribution in any wise affect the nature of the riches ? Thus, if the king alone be rich — suppose Crcesus or Mausolus — are the Lydians or Carians therefore a rich nation? Or if a few slave-masters are rich, and the nation is otherwise composed of slaves, is it to be called a rich nation ? For if not, and the ideas of a cer- taia mode of distribution or operation in the riches, and of a certain degree of freedom in the people, enter into our idea of riches as attributed to a people, we shall have to define tha degree of fluency, or circulative character which is essential tff MUNEBA PULVEBia. 123 the nature of common wealth ; and the degree of indepen« dance of action required ia its possessors. Questions which look as if they would take time in answering.* 28. And farther. Since the inequahty, which is the condi- tion of riches, may be estabUshed in two opposite modes — namely, by increase of possession on the one side, and by de- crease of it on the other — we have to inquire, with respect to any given state of riches, precisely in what manner the cor- relative poverty was produced : that is to say, whether by being surpassed only, or being depressed also ; and if by be- ing depressed, what are the advantages, or the contrary, con- ceivable in the depression. For instance, it being one of the commonest advantages of being rich to entertain a number of servants, we have to inquire, on the one side, what economical process produced the riches of the master ; and on the other, what economical process produced the poverty of the persons who serve him ; and what advantages each, on his own side, derives from the result. 29. These being the main questions touching the collection of riches, the next, or last, part of the inquiry is into their administration. Their possession involves three great economical powers which require separate examination : namely, the powers of selection, direction, and provision. The power of Selection relates to things of which the sup- ply is Hmited (as the supply of best things is always). When it becomes matter of question to whom such things are to be- long, the richest person has necessarily the first choice, unless some arbitrary mode of distribution be otherwise determined upon. The business of the economist is to show how this choice may be a wise one. The power of Dieection arises out of the necessary relation of rich men to poor, which ultimately, in one way or another, [* I regret the ironical manner in which this passage, one of great im- portance in the matter of it, was written. The gist of it is, that the first ef all inquiries respecting the wealth of any nation is not, how much it has ; but whether it is in a form that can be used, and in the possession of persons who can use it.] 124 MUNEBA PULVBEIS. involves the direction of, or authority over, the labour of the poor ; and this nearly as nluch over their mental as their bodily labour. The business of the economist is to show how this direction may be a Just one. The power of Provision is dependent upon the redundance of wealth, which may of course by active persons be made available in preparation for future work or future profit ; in wliich function riches have generally received the name of capital ; that is to say, of head-, or source-material. The business of the economist is to show how this provision may be a Distant one. 30. The examination of these three functions of riches will embrace every final problem of political economy ; — and, above, or before aU, this curious and vital problem, — whether, since the wholesome action of riches in these three functions will depend (it appears), on the Wisdom, Justice, and Far- sightedness of the holders ; and it is by no means to be as- sumed that persons primarily rich, must therefore be just and wise, — it may not be ultimately possible so, or somewhat so, to arrange matters, as that persons primarily just and wise, should therefore be rich ? Such being the general plan of the inquiry before us, I shall not limit myseK to any consecutive following of it, having hardly any good hope of being able to complete so laborious a work as it must prove to me ; but from time to time, as I have leisure, shall endeavour to carry forward this part or that, as may be immediately possible ; indicating always with ac- curacy the place which the particular essay wiU or should take in the completed system. CHAPTER II STORE-KEEPING. 31. The first chapter having consisted of little more than def- inition of terms, I purpose, in this, to expand and iUustrata the given definitions. The view which has here been taken of the nature of wealth, namely, that it consists in an intrinsic value developed by a vital power, is directly opposed to two nearly universal con- ceptions of wealth. In the assertion that value is primarily intrinsic, it opposes the idea that anything which is an object of desire to numbers, and is limited in quantity, so as to have sated worth in exchange, may be called, or virtually become, wealth. And in the assertion that value is, secondarily, de- pendent upon power in the possessor, it opposes the idea that the worth of things depends on the demand for them, instead of on the use of them. Before going farther, we will make these two positions clearer. 32. I. First. All wealth is intrinsic, and is not constituted by the judgment of men. This is easily seen in the case of things affecting the body ; we know, that no force of fantasy wUl make stones noxu'ishing, or poison innocent ; but it is less apparent in things affecting the mind. We are easUy — per- haps williTigly — misled by the appearance of beneficial results obtained by industries addressed wholly to the gratification of fanciful desire ; and apt to suppose that whatever is widely coveted, dearly bought, and pleasurable in possession, must be included in our definition of wealth. It is the more diffi- cult to quit ourselves of this error because many things which are true wealth in moderate use, become false wealth in im- moderate ; and many things are mixed of good and evil, — as mostly, books, and works of art, — out of which one person will get the good, and another the evU ; so that it seems as if 126 MUNEBA PVLVBB18. there were no fixed good or evil in the things themselves, bul only in the view taken, and use made of them. But that is not so. The evil and good are fixed ; in es- sence, and in proportion. And in things in which evil de- pends upon excess, the point of excess, though indefinable, is fixed ; and the power of the thing is on the hither side for good, and on the farther side for evil. And in all cases this power is inherent, not dependent on opinion or choice. Our thoughts of things neither make, nor mar their eternal force ; nor — which is the most serious point for future consideration — can they prevent the effect of it (within certain limits) upon ourselves. 33. Therefore, the object of any special analysis of wealth will be not so much to enumerate what is serviceable, as to distinguish what is destructive ; and to show that it is inevi- tably destructive ; that to receive pleasure from an evU thing is not to escape from, or alter the evU of it, but to be altered by it ; that is, to suffer from it to the utmost, having our own nature, in that degree, made evil also. And it may be shown farther, that, through whatever length of time or subtleties of connexion the harm is accomplished, (being also less or more according to the fineness and worth of the humanity on which it is wrought), stiU, nothing but harm erer comas of a bad thing. 34 So that, in sum, the term wealth is never to be attached to the accidental object of a morbid desire, but only to the con- slant object of a legitimate one.* By the fury of ignorance, and fitfulness of caprice, large interests may be continually attached to things unserviceable or hurtful ; if their nature could be altered by our passions, the science of Political Econ- omy would remain, what it has been hitherto among us, the weighing of clouds, and the portioning out of shadows. But of ignorance there is no science ; and of caprice no law. Their disturbing forces interfere with the operations of faithful [* Kemember carefully this statement, that Wealtli consists only in the things which the nature of humanity has rendered in all ages, and must render in all ages to come, (that is what I meant by " constant"), the objects of legitimate desire. And see Appendix IL] MUNEBA PULVEBI8. 127 Economy, but have nothing in common with them : she, the calm arbiter of national destiny, regards only essential power for good in aU that she accumulates, and alike disdains the wanderings * of imagination, and the thirsts of disease. 35. n. Secondly. The assertion that wealth is not only in« trinsic, but dependent, in order to become effectual, on a given degree of vital power in its possessor, is opposed to another popular view of wealth ; — namely, that though it may always be eonstituted by caprice, it is, when so constituted, a substantial thing, of which given quantities may be counted as existing here, or there, and exchangeable at rated prices. In this view there are three errors. The first and chief is the overlooking the fact that all exchangeableness of commod- ity, or effective demand for it, depends on the sum of capacity for its use existing, here or elsewhere. The book we cannot read, or picture we take no delight in, may indeed be called part of our wealth, in so far as we have power of exchanging either for something we like better. But our power of effect- ing such exchange, and yet more, of effecting it to advantage, depends absolutely on the number of accessible persons who can understand the boc k, or enjoy the painting, and who wiU dispute the possession of them. Thus the actual worth of either, even to us, depends no more on their essential good- ness than on the capacity existing somewhere for the perception of it ; and it is vain in any completed system of production to think of obtaining one without the other. So that, though the true political economist knows that co-existence of capac- ity for use with temporary possession cannot be always se- cured, the final fact, on which he bases aU action and admin- istration, is that, in the whole nation, or group of nations, he has to deal with, for every atom of intrinsic value produced he must with exactest chemistry produce its twin atom of ac- ceptant digestion, or understanding capacity ; or, in the de- gree of his failure, he has no wealth. Nature's challenge to us is, in earnest, as the Assyrians mock ; "I will give thee two thousand horses, if thou be able on thy part to set riders [* The WaTiderings, observe, not the Kight goiags, of Imagmation. She is verj fso' from despising thege. J 128 MUNEBA PULVEBIB. upon them." Bavieca's paces are brave, if the Cid backs him ; but woe to us, if we take the dust of capacity, wearing the armour of it, for capacity itself, for so all procession, how- ever goodly in the show of it, is to the tomb. 36. The second error in this popular view of wealth is, that in giving the name of wealth to things which we cannot use, we in reality confuse wealth vnth money. The land we have no skUl to cultivate, the book which is sealed to us, or dress which is superfluous, may indeed be exchangeable, but as such are nothing more than a cumbrous form of bank-note, of doubtful or slow convertibility. As long as we retain pos- session of them, we merely keep our bank-notes in the shape of gravel or clay, of book-leaves, or of embroidered tissue. Circumstances may, perhaps, render such forms the safest, or a certain complacency may attach to the exhibition of them ; into both these advantages we shall inquire after- wards ; I wish the reader only to observe here, that exchange- able property which we cannot use is, to us personally, merely one of the forms of money, not of wealtL 37. The third error in the popular view is the confusion of Guardianship with Possession ; the real state of men of prop- erty being, too commonly, that of curators, not possessors, of wealth. A man's power over his property is at the widest range of it, fivefold ; it is power of Use, for himself. Administration, t© others, Ostentation, Destruction, or Bequest : and possession is in use only, which for each man is sternly limited ; so that such things, and so much of them as he can use, are, indeed, weU for him, or Wealth ; and more of them, or ^ny other things, are ill for him, or lUth.* Plunged to the lips in Orinoco, he shall drink to his thirst measure ; more, at his peril : with a thousand oxen on his lands, he shall eat to his hunger measure ; more, at his peril. He cannot live in two houses at once ; a few bales of silk or wool will suffice for the fabric of all the clothes he can ever wear, and a few books wiU probably hold all the furniture good for his brain. Be- yond these, in the best of us but narrow, capacities, we have * See Appendix IIL MVNEBA PULYEBI8. 129 but the power of administering, or maZ-administering, wealth : (that is to say, distributing, lending, or increasing it) ; — of ex- hibiting it (as in magnificence of retinue or furniture), — of destroying, or, finally, of bequeathing it. And with multi- tudes of rich men, administration degenerates into curator- ship ; they merely hold their property in charge, as Trustees, for the benefit of some person or persons to whom it is to be delivered upon their death ; and the position, explained in clear terms, would hardly seem a covetable one. What would be the probable feelings of a youth, on his entrance into Ufe, to whom the career hoped for him was proposed in terms such as these : " You must work unremittingly, and with your utmost intelligence, during all your available years, you will thus accumulate wealth to a large amount ; but you must touch none of it, beyond what is needful for your sup- port. Whatever sums you gain, beyond those required for your decent and moderate maintenance, and whatever beauti- ful things you may obtain possession of, shall be properly taken care of by servants, for whose maintenance you will be charged, and whom you will have the trouble of superintend- ing, and on your death-bed you shall have the power of de- termining to whom the accumulated property shall belong, or to what purposes be apphed." 38. The labour of Ufe, under such conditions, would prob- ably be neither zealous nor cheerful ; yet the only difference between this position and that of the ordinary capitalist is the power which the latter supposes himself to possess, and which is attributed to him by others, of spending his money at any moment. This pleasure, taken in the imagination of power to part with that with which we have no intention of parting, is one of the most curious, though commonest forms of the Eidolon, or Phantasm of Wealth. But the political economist has nothing to do with this idealism, and looks only to the practi- cal issue of it — namely, that the holder of wealth, in such temper, may be regarded simply as a mechanical means of coUeetion ; or as a money-chest with a sUt in it, not only re- ceptant but suctional, set in the pubUc thoroughfare ; — chest of which only Death has the key, and evil Chance the distri- 130 MUNEBA PULVEBIS. bution of the contents. In his function of Lender (which, however, is one of administration, not use, as far as he is him» self concerned), the capitaHst takes, indeed, a more interest- ing aspect ; but even in that function, his relations with the state are apt to degenerate into a mechanism for the conven- ient contraction of debt ; — a function the more mischievous, because a nation Luvariably appeases its conscience with re- spect to an unjustifiable expense, by meeting it with borrowed funds, expresses its repentance of a foolish piece of business, by letting its tradesmen wait for their money, and always leaves its descendants to pay for the work which will be of the least advantage to them.* 39. Quit of these three sources of misconception, the reader will have Uttle farther difficulty in apprehending the real nature of Effectual value. He may, however, at first not without surprise, perceive the consequences involved in his acceptance of the definition. For if the actual existence of wealth be dependent on the power of its possessor, it follows that the sum of wealth held by the nation, instead of being constant, or calculable, varies hourly, nay, momentarily, with the number and character of its holders 1 and that in chang- ing hands, it changes in quantity. And farther, since the worth of the currency is proportioned to the sum of material wealth which it represents, if the sum of the wealth changes, the worth of the currency changes. And thus both the sum of the property, and power of the currency, of the state, vary- momentarily as the character and number of the holders. And not only so, but different rates and kinds of variation are caused by the character cf the holders of different kinds of wealth. The transitions of value caused by the character of the holders of land differ in mode from those caused by character in holders of works of art ; and these again from those caused by character in holders of machinery or other working capital But we cannot examine these special phe- [* I would beg the reader's very close attention to these 87th and 38th paragraphs. It would be well if a dogged conviction could be en- forced on nations, as on individuals, that, with few exceptions, whrt tbey c»»»ot at present pay for, they should ngt at present have.] MtTNBRA PULVERIS. 131 iQOmena of any kind of wealth until we have a clear idea of the way in which true cuiTency expresses them ; and of the resulting modes in which the cost and price of any article ara related to its value. To obtain this we must approach the subject in its first elements. 40. Let us suppose a national store of wealth, composed of material things either useful, or believed to be so, taken charge of by the Government,* and that every workman, having pro- duced any article involving labour in its prod action, and for which he has no immediate use, brings it to add to this store, receiving from the Government, in exchange, an order either for the return of the thing itself, or of its equivalent in other things, such as he may choose out of the store, at any time when he needs them. The question of equivalence itself (how much wine a man is to receive ia return for so much com, or how much coal in return for so much iron) is a quite separate one, which we will examine presently. For the time, let it be assumed that this equivalence has been determined, and that the Government order, in exchange for a fixed weight of any article (called, suppose a), is either for the return of that weight of the article itself, or of another fixed weight of the article b, or another of the article c, and so on. Now, supposing that the labourer speedily and continu- ally presents these general orders, or, ia common language, "spends the money," he has neither changed the circum- stances of the nation, nor his own, except in so far as he may have produced useful and consumed useless articles, or vice versd. But if he does not use, or uses in part only, the orders he receives, and lays aside some portion of them ; and thus every day bringing his contribution to the national store, laya by some per-centage of the orders received in exchange for it, he increases the national wealth daily by aa much as he does not use of the received order, and to the same amount accu- mulates a monetary claim on the Government. It is, of course, always in his power, as it is his legal right, to bring forward this accumulation of claim, and at once to consume, destroy, or distribute, the sum of his wealth. Supposing he nevei *See Appendix IV. 132 MUNMBA PVLVJBmS. does so, but dies, leaving his claim to others, he has enriched the State during his life by the quantity of wealth over which that claim extends, or has, in other words, rendered so much additional hfe possible in the State, of which additional life he bequeaths the immediate possibihty to those whom he in- vests with his claim. Supposing him to cancel the claim, he would distribute this possibihty of life among the nation at large. 41. We hitherto consider the Government itself as simply a conservative power, taking charge of the wealth entrusted to it. But a Government may be more or less than a conservative power. It may be either an improving, or destructive one. If it be an improving power, using aU the wealth entrusted to it to the best advantage, the nation is enriched in root and branch at once, and the Government is enabled, for every order presented, to return a quantity of wealth greater than the order was written for, according to the fructification ob- tained in the interim. This ability may be either concealed, in which case the currency does not completely represent the wealth of the country, or it may be manifested by the contin- ual payment of the excess of value on each order, in which case there is (irrespectively, observe, of collateral results after- wards to be examiued) a perpetual rise in the worth of the currency, that is to say, a fall in the price of aU articles repre- sented by it. 42. But if the Government be destructive, or a consuming power, it becomes unable to return the value received on the presentation of the order. This inability may either be concealed by meeting demands to the fuU, until it issue in bankruptcy, or in some form of national debt ; — or it may be concealed during oscillatory. ■ movements between destructiveness and productiveness, which result on the whole in stability ; — or it may be manifested by the consistent return of less than value received on each pre- sented order, in which case there is a consistent fall in the worth of the currency, or rise in the price of the things- repr» oented by it. MUNERA PULVEBIS. IS^i 43. Now, if for this conception of a central Government, »re substitute that of a body of persons occupied in industrial pursuits, of whom each adds in his private capacity to the common store, we at once obtain an approximation to the actual condition of a civilized mercantile community, from which approximation we might easily proceed into still com- pleter analysis. I purpose, however, to arrive at every result by the gradual expansion of the simpler conception ; but I wish the reader to observe, in the meantime, that both the social conditions thus supposed (and I wiU by anticipation say also, aU possible social conditions), agree in two great points ; namely, in the primal importance of the supposed national store or stock, and in its destructibility or improveabiUty by the holders of it. 44. L Observe that in both conditions, that of central Government-holding, and diffused private-holding, the quan- tity of stock is of the same national moment. In the one case, indeed, its amount may be known by examination of the persons to vrhom it is confided ; in the other it cannot be known but by exposing the private aifairs of every individual. But, known or unknown, its significance is the same under each condition. The riches of the nation consist in the abundance, and their wealth depends on the nature, of this store. 45. n. In the second place, both conditions, (and all other possible ones) agree in the destructibility or improveability of the store by its holders. Whether in private hands, or under Government charge, the national store may be daily consumed, or daily enlarged, by its possessors; and while the currency remains apparently unaltered, the property it represents may diminish or increase. 46. The first question, then, which we have to put under our simple conception of central Government, namely, "What store has it ? " is one of equal importance, whatever may be the constitution of the State ; while the second question- namely, " Who are the holders of the store ? " involves the discussion of the constitution of the State itself. The first inquiry resolves itself into three heads : 131 MtlNEBA PULVMRia. 1. What is the nature of the store ? 2. What is its quantity in relation to the population ? 3. What is its quantity in relation to the currency ? The second inquiry into two : 1. Who are the Holders of the store, and in what propor. tions ? 2. Who are the Claima,nts of the store, (that is to say, the holders of the cujrency,) and in what proportions ? We wiU examine the range of the first three questions in the present paper ; of the two following, in the sequel. 47. I. Question First. What is the nature of the store ? Has the nation hitherto worked for and gathered the right thing or the wrong ? On that issue rest the possibilities of its life. For example, let us imagine a society, of no great extent, occupied in procuring and laying up store of com, wine, wool, silk, and other such preservable materials of food and clothing ; and that it has a currency representing them. Imagine farther, that on days of festivity, the society, discov- ering itself to derive satisfaction from pyrotechnics, gradually turns its attention more and more to the manufacture of gun- powder ; so that an increasing number of labourers, giving what time they can spare to this branch of industry, bring in- creasing quantities of combustibles into the store, and use the general orders received in exchange to obtain such wine, wool, or corn, as they may have need of. The currency re- mains the same, and represents precisely the same amount of material in the store, and of labour spent in producing it. But the corn and wine gradually vanish, and in their place, as gradu- ally, appear sulphur and saltpetre, till at last the labourers who have consumed corn and supplied nitre, presenting on a festal morning some of their currency to obtain materials for the feast, discover that no amount of currency vrill command anything Festive, except Fire. The supply of rockets is un- Umited, but that of food, limited, in a quite final manner ; and the whole currency in the hands of the society repre- sents an infinite power of detonation, but none of existence. 48. This statement, caricatured as it may seem, is only ex- MUNERA PULVEniS. 135 aggerated in dssuming the persisteDce of the folly to extrem- ity, unchecked, as in reality it would be, by the gradual rise in price of food. But it falls short of the actual facts of human life in expression of the depth and intensity of the folly itself. Tor a great part (the reader would not believe how great untL he saw the statistics in detail) of the most earnest and ingenious industry of the world is spent in pro- ducing munitions of war ; gathering, that is to say the mate- rials, not of festive, but of consuming fire ; filling its stores with all power of the instruments of pain, and all aflluenee of the ministries of death. It was no true Trionfo della Morte * which men have seen and feared (sometimes scarcely feared) so long ; wherein he brought them rest from their labours. We see, and share, another and higher form of his triumph now. Task-master, instead of Releaser, he rules the dust of the arena no less than of the tomb ; and, content once in the grave whither man went, to make his works to cease and his devices to vanish, — ^now, in the busy city and on the service- able sea, makes his work to increase, and his devices to mul- tiply. 49. To this doubled loss, or negative power of labour, spent in producing means of destruction, we have to add, in our estimate of the consequences of human foUy, whatever more insidious waste of toil there is in production of unnec- essary luxury. Such and such an occupation (it is said) sup- ports so many labourers, because so many obtain wages ia following it ; but it is never considered that unless there be a supporting power in the product of the occupation, the wages given to one man are merely withdrawn from another. We cannot say of any trade that it maintains such and such a number of persons, unless we know how and where the money, now spent in the purchase of its produce, would have been spent, if that produce had not been manufactured. The purchasing funds truly support a number of people in making [* I little thought, what Trionfo deUa Morte would be, for this very cause, and in literal fulfilment of the closing words of the 47th para- graph, over the fields and houses of Europe, and over its fairest city-» within seven years from the day I wrote it.] 13(5 MUNEBA PtTLVERia. This ; but (probably) leave unsupported an equal number wba are making, or could have made That. The manufacturers of small watches thrive at Geneva ; — it is well ; — but where would the money spent on small watches have gone, had there been no small watches to buy ? 50. If the so frequently uttered aphorism of mercantile economy — " labour is limited by capital," were true, this ques- tion would be a definite one. But it is untrue ; and that widely. Out of a given quantity of funds for wages, more or less labour is to be had, according to the quantity of will with which we can inspire the workman ; and the true limit of labour is only in the limit of this moral stimulus of the will, and of the bodily power. In an ultimate, but entirely unprac- tical sense, labour is limited by capital, as it is by matter — that is to say, where there is no material, there can be no work, — but in the practical sense, labour is limited only by the great original capital of head, heart, and hand. Even in the most artificial relations of commerce, labour is to capital as fire to fuel : out of so much fuel, you can have only so much fire ; but out of so much fuel, you shall have so much fire, — not in proportion to the mass of combustiWe, but to the force of wind that fans and water that quenches ; and the appliance of both. And labour is furthered, as conflagration is, not so much by added fuel, as by admitted air.* 51. For which reasons, I had to insert, in § 49, the qualify- ing " probably ; " for it can never be said positively that the purchase-money, or wages fund of any trade is withdrawn from some other trade. The object itself may be the stimulus of the production of the money which buys it ; that is to say, the work by which the purchaser obtained the means of buying it, would not have been done by him unless he had wanted that particular thing. And the production of any article not intrinsically (nor in the process of manufacture) injurious, is [* The meaning of which is, that you may spend a great deal of money, and get very little work for it, and that little bad ; but having good " air " or "spirit," to put life into it, with very little money, you may get a great deal of work, and all good ; which, observe, is an arith metical, not at all a poetical or visionary circumstance. J MUNEBA PULVERIS. 137 ■useful, if the desire of it causes productive labour in other directions. 52. In the national store, therefore, the presence of things intrinsically valueless does not imply an entu'ely correlative absence of things valuable. We cannot be certain that all the labour spent on vanity has been diverted from reality, and that for every bad thing produced, a precious thing has been lost. In great measure, the vain things represent the results of roused indolence ; they have been carved, as toys, in extra time ; and, if they had not been made, nothing else would have been made. Even to munitions of war this principle ap- plies ; they partly represent the work of men who, if they had not made spears, would never have made pruning hooks, and who are incapable of any activities but those of contest. 53. Thus then, finally, the nature of the store has to be con- sidered under two main lights ; the one, that of its immediate and actual utility ; the other, that of the past national char- acter which it signifies by its production, and future character which it must devolop by its use. And the issue of this in- vestigation will be to show us that Economy does not depend merely on principles of " demand and supply," but primarily on what is demanded, and what is supplied ; which I wOl beg of you to observe, and take to heart. 54. n. Question Second. — What is the quantity of the store, in relation to the population ? It follows from what has been already stated that the accu- rate form in which this question has to be put is — " What quantity of each article composing the store exists in propor- tion to the real need for it by the population ? " But we shall for the time assume, in order to keep all our terms at the sim- plest, that the store is whoUy composed of useful articles, and accurately proportioned to the several needs for them. Now it cannot be assumed, because the store is large in proportion to the number of the people, that the people must be in comfort ; nor because it is small, that they must be in distress. An active and economical race always producei 138 MUNERA PVLVERI8. more than it requires, and lives (if it is permitted to do so) in competence on the produce of its daily labour. The quantity of its store, great or small, is therefore in many respects in- different to it, and cannot be inferred from its aspect. Sim^ ilarly an inactive and wasteful population, which cannot live by its daUy labour, but is dependent, partly or wholly, on consumption of its store, may be (by various difficulties, here- after to be examined, in realizing or getting at such store) re- tained in a state of abject distress, though its possessions may be immense. But the results always involved in the magni- tude of store are, the commercial power of the nation, its security, and its mental character. Its commercial power, in that according to the quantity of its store, may be the extent of its dealings ; its security, in that according to the quantity of its store are its means of sudden exertion or sustained en- durance ; and its character, in that certain conditions of civiU- zation cannot be attained without permanent and contiaually accumulating store, of great intrinsic value, and of peculiar nature.* 55. Now, seeing that these three advantages arise from largeness of store in proportion to population, the question arises immediately, " Given the store — is the nation enriched by diminution of its numbers ? Are a successful national spec- ulation, and a pestilence, economically the same thing ? This is in part a sophistical question ; such as it would be to ask whether a man was richer when struck by disease which must limit his life within a predicable period, than he was when ill health. He is enabled to enlarge his current ex- penses, and has for all purposes a larger sum at his imme- diate disposal (for, given the fortune, the shorter the Hfe, the larger the annuity) ; yet no man considers himseK richer be- cause he is condemned by his physician. 56. The logical reply is that, since Wealth is by definition only the means of life, a nation cannot be enriched by its own mortality. Or in shorter words, the Ufe is more than the meat ; and existence itself, more wealth than the means of ex- istence. Whence, of two nations who have equal store, the [* More especially, works of great art.] MUNERA PULVEB18. 139 more numerous is to be considered the richer, provided the type of the inhabitant be as high (for, though the relative bulk of their store be less, its relative efficiency, or the amount of effectual wealth, must be greater). But if the type of the population be deteriorated by increase of its numbers, we have evidence of poverty in its worst influence ; and then, to determine whether the nation in its total may still be justifi- ably esteemed rich, we must set or weigh, the number of the poor agaiQst that of the rich. To effect which piece of scale-work, it is of course necessary to determine, first, who are poor and who are rich ; nor this only, but also how poor and how rich they are. Which vriU prove a curious thermometrical investigation ; for we shall have to do for gold and for silver, what we have done for quicksilver ; — determine, namely, their freezing-point, their zero, their temperate and fever-heat points ; finally, their vaporescent point, at which riches, sometimes explosively, as lately in America, " make to themselves wings : " — and corre- spondently, the number of degrees below zero at which pov- erty, ceasing to brace with any wholesome cold, burns to the bone.f 57. For the performance of these operations, in the strict- est sense scientific, we vsdll first look to the existing so-caUed " science " of PoHtical Economy ; we will ask it to define for us the comparatively and superlatively rich, and the compara- tively and superlatively poor ; and on its owsx terms — if any terms it can pronounce — examine, in our prosperous Eng- land, how many rich and how many poor people there are ; and whether the quantity and intensity of the poverty is in- deed so overbalanced by the quantity and intensity of wealth, [* The meaning of tnat, in plain English, is, that we must find out how far poverty and riches are good or bad for people, and what is the difEerenoe between being miserably poor — so as, perhaps, to be driven to crime, or to pass life in suffering — and being blessedly poor, in the sense meant in the Sermon on the Mount. For I suppose the people who believe that sarmoti, do not think (if they ever honestly ask them- selves what they do think), either that Luke vi. 24. Is a merely poetical exclamation, or that the Beatitude of Poverty has yet been attained io St. Martin's Lane »nd other back streets of London.] 140 MUNEBA PULVEBIS. that we may permit ourselves a luxurious blindness to it, and call ourselves, complacently, a rich country. And if we find no clear definition in the existing science, we will endeavour for ourselves to fix the true degrees of the scale, and to apply them.* 58. Question Third. What is the quantity of the store in relation to the Currency ? We have seen that the real worth of the currency, so far as dependent on its relation to the magnitude of the store, may vary, within certain limits, without affecting its worth in exchange. The diminution or increase of the represented wealth may be unperceived, and the currency may be taken either for more or less than it is truly worth. Usually it is taken for much more ; and its power in exchange, or credit- power, is thus increased up to a given strain upon its relation to existing wealth. This credit-power is of chief importance in the thoughts, because most sharply present to the expe- rience, of a mercantile community : but the conditions of its stability f and aU other relations of the currency to the mate- [* Large plans I — Eight years are gone, and nothing done yet. But I keep my purpose of making one day this balance, or want of balance, visible, in those so seldom used scales of Justice. ] f These are nearly all briefly represented by the image used for the force of money by Dante, of mast and sail : — Quali dal vento le gonflate vele Caggiono avvolte, poi ch^ I'alber fiacoa Tal cadde a terra la flera crudele. The image may be followed out, like all of Dante's, into as close de- tail as the reader chooses. Thus the stress of the sail must be propor- tioned to the strength of the mast, and it is only in unforeseen danger that a skilful seaman ever carries all the canvas his spars will bear , states of mercantile languor are like the flap of the sail in a calm ; of mercantile precaution, like taking in reefs ; and mercantile ruin is in- stant on the breaking of the mast. [I mean by credit-power, the general impression on the national mind that a sovereign, or any other coin, is worth so much bread and cheese — so much wine— so much horse and carriage — or so much fine art: it may be really worth, when tried, less or more than is thought ; th« thought of it is the credit-power.] MUNEBA PULVEBia. 141 rial stoie are entirely simple in principle, if not in action. Far other than simple are the relations of the currency to the available labour which it also represents. For this relation is involved not only with that of the magnitude of the store to the number, but with that of the magnitude of the store to the mind, of the population. Its proportion to their number, and the resulting worth of currency, are calculable ; but ita proportion to their will for labour is not. The worth of the piece of money which claims a given quantity of the store is, in exchange, less or greater according to the facility of ob- taining the same quantity of the same thing without having recourse to the store. In other words it depends on the im mediate Cost and Price of the thing. We must now, there- fore, complete the definition of these terms. 59. All cost and price are counted in Labour. We must know first, therefore, what is to be counted as Labour. I have already defined labour to be the Contest of the life of man with an opposite. Literally, it is the quantity of •' Lapse," loss, or failure of human life, caused by any efibrt. It is usually confused vrith effort itself, or the appHcation of power (opera) ; but there is much effort which is merely a mode of recreation, or of pleasure. The most beautiful ac- tions of the human body, and the highest results of the himian intelligence, are conditions, or achievements, of quite unlaborious, — nay, of recreative, — effort. But labour is the suffering in effort. It is the negative quantity, or quantity of de-feat, which has to be counted against every Feat, and of de-fect which has to be counted against every Fact, or Deed of men. In brief, it is " that quantity of our toil which we die in." We might, therefore, d priori, conjecture (as we shall ulti- mately find), that it cannot be bought, nor sold. Everything else is bought and sold for Labour, but labour itseK cannot be bought nor sold for anything, being priceless.* The idea * The object of Political Economy is not to buy, nor to sell labour, but to spare it. Every attempt to buy or sell it is, in the outcome, in- effectual ; 30 far as successful, it is not sale, but Betrayal ; and the pur- thaBP-mouey is a part of that thirty pieces which bought, flrgt the great 142 MXJNEBA PULVEBI8. that it is a commodity to be bought or sold, is the alpha and omega of Politico-Economic fallacy. 60. This being the nature of labour, the " Cost " of any- thing is the quantity of labour necessary to obtain it ; — the quantity for which, or at which, it " stands " (constat). It is literally the " Constancy " of the thing ; — you shall win it — move it — come at it, for no less than this. Cost is measiired and measurable (using the accurate Latin terms) only in " labour," not in " opera." * It does not matter how much woi-k a thing needs to produce it ; it matters only how much distress. Generally the more the power it requires, the less the distress ; so that the noblest works of man cost less than the meanest. True labour, or spending of Ufe, is either of the body, in fatigue or pain ; of the temper or heart (as in perseverance of search for things, — patience in waiting for them, — -fortitude or degradation in suffering for them, and the like), or of the intellect. All these kinds of labour are supposed to be in- cluded in the general term, and the quantity of labour is then expressed by the time it lasts. So that a unit of labour is " an hour's work " or a day's work, as we may determine, f 61. Cost, like value, is both intrinsic and effectual. Intrin- sic cost is that of getting the thing in the right way ; effect- est of labours, and afterwards tlie burial-field of the Stranger ; for this purchase-money, being in its very smallness or vileness the exactly measured opposite of the " vilis annona amicorum," makes all men strangers to each other. * Cicero's distinction, " sordid! qusBstus, quorum operse, non quorum artes emuntur," admirable in principle, is Inaccurate in expression, be- cause Cicero did not practloally know how much operative dexterity is necessary in all the higher arts ; but the cost of this dexterity is incal- eulable. Be it great or small, the "cost" of the mere perfectness of touch in a hammer-stroke of Donatello's, or a pencil-touch of Correg- gio's, is inestimable by any ordinary arithmetic. [Old notes, these, more embarrassing I now perceive, than elncid* tory ; but right, and worth retaining.] f Only observe, as some labour is more destructive of life than other labour, the hour or day of the more destructive toil is supposed to in- clude proportionate rest. ThougU meii do ppt, pr casnot, usunlly taka •ucb f est, except in death. MUNEBA PULVEBI8. 143 ual cost is that of getting the thing in the way we set about it. But intrinsic cost cannot be made a subject of analytical investigation, being only partially discoverable, and that by long experience. Effectual cost is all that the political Econ- omist can deal with ; that is to say, the cost of the thing un- der existing circumstances, and by known processes. Cost, being dependent much on application of method, varies with the quantity of the thing wanted, and with the number of persons who work for it. It is easy to get a Httle of some things, but difiBcult to get much ; it is impossible to get some things with few hands, but easy to get them with many. 62. The cost and value of things, however difficult to de- termine accurately, are thus both dependent on ascertainable physical circumstances.* * There is, therefore, ohserve, no such thing as cheapness (in the common use of that term), without some error or injustice. A thing is said to he cheap, not because it is common, but because it is supposed to be sold under its worth. Everything has its proper and true worth at any given time, in relation to everything else ; and at that worth should be bought and sold. If sold under it, it is cheap to the buyer by exactly so much as the seller loses, and no more. Putrid meat, at twopence a pound, is not " cheaper " than wholesome meat at seven- pence a pound ; it is probably much dearer ; but if, by watching your opportunity, you can get the wholesome meat for sixpence a pound, it is cheaper to you by a penny, which you have gained, and the seller has lost. The present rage for cheapness is either, therefore, simply and literally a rage for badness of all commodities, or it is an attempt to find persons whose necessities will force them to let you have more than you should for your money. It is quite easy to produce such persons, and in large numbers ; for the more distress there is in a nation, the more cheapness of this sort you can obtain, and your boasted cheapness is thus merely a measure of the extent of your national distress. There is, indeed, a condition of apparent cheapness, which we have some right to be triumphant in ; namely, the real reduction in cost of articles by right application of labour. But in this case the article is only cheap with reference to its former price ; the so-called cheapness Is only our expression for the sensation of contrast between its former and existing prices. So ioon as the new methods of producing the arti- cle are established, it ceases to be esteemed either cheap or dear, at the new price, as at the old one, and is felt to be cheap only when accident enables it to be piu-chased, beneath this new value. And it is no ad. 144 MUNBBA PULVBRI8. But their price is dependent on the human will. Such and such a thing is demonstrably good for so muck And it may demonstrably be had for so much. But it remains questionable, and in all manner of ways questionable, whether I choose to give so much.* This choice is always a relative one. It is a choice to give a price for this, rather than for that ; — a resolution to have the thing, if getting it does not involve the loss of a better thing. Price depends, therefore, not only on the cost of the commodity itself, but on its relation to the cost of every other attainable thing. vantage to produce the article more easily, except as it enables you to multiply your population. Cheapness of this kind is merely the dis- covery that more men can be maintained on the same ground ; and the question how many you will maintain in proportion to your additional means, remains exactly in the same terms that it did before. A form of immediate cheapness resxilts, however, in many cases, without distress, from the labour of a population where food is redun- dant, or where the labour by which the food is produced leaves much idle time on their hands, which may be applied to the production of "cheap " articles. All such phenomena indicate to the political economist places where the labour is unbalanced. In the first case, the just balance is to be effected by taking labourers from the spot where pressure exists, and sending them to that where food is redundant. In the second, the cheapness is a local accident, advantageous to the local purchaser, disad- vantageous to the local producer. It is one of the first duties of com- merce to extend the market, and thus give the local producer his full advantage. Cheapness caused by natural accidents of harvest, weather, &c. , is always counterbalanced, in due time, by natural scarcity, similarly caused. It is the part of wise government, and healthy commerce, so to provide in times and places of plenty for times and places of dearth, as that there shall never be waste, nor famine. Cheapness caused by gluts of the market is merely a disease of clumsy and wanton commerce. * Price has been already defined (p. 9) to be the quantity of labour which the possessor of a thing is willing to take for it. It is best to consider the price to be that fixed by the possessor, because the posses- sor has absolute power of refusing sale, while the purchaser has no ab- solute power of compelling it ; but the effectual or market price is that at which their estimates coincide. MUNBRA PULVERia. 145 Farther. The power of choice is also a relative one. It depends not merely on our own estimate of the thing, but on everybody else's estimate ; therefore on the nimiber and force of the will of the concurrent buyers, and on the existing quan- tity of the thing in proportion to that number and force. Hence the price of anything depends on four variables. (1.) Its cost. (2.) Its attainable quantity at that cost. (3.) The number and power of the persons who want it. (4 ) The estimate they have formed of its desirableness. Its value only affects its price so far as it is contemplated in this estimate ; perhaps, therefore, not at all. 63. Now, in order to show the manner in which price is expressed in terms of a currency, we must assume these four quantities to be known, and the " estimate of desirableness,'' commonly called the Demand, to be certain. We will take the number of persons at the lowest. Let A and B be two labourers who " demand," that is to say, have resolved to la- bour for, two articles, a and 6. Their demand for these arti- cles (if the reader hkes better, he may say their need) is to be conceived as absolute, their existence depending on the get- ting these two things. Suppose, for instance, that they are bread and fuel, in a cold country, and let a represent the least quantity of bread, and b the least quantity of fuel, which will support a man's Hfe for a day. Let a be producible by an hour's labour, but b only by two hours' labour. Then the cost of a is one hour, and of h two (cost, by our definition, being expressible in terms of time). If, therefore, each man worked botii for his corn and fuel, each would have to work three hours a day. But they divide the labour for its greater ease.* Then if A works three hours, he produces 3a, which is one a more than both the men want. And if B works three hours, he produces only 1^ b, or half of h less than both want But if A work three hours and B six, A has * Tliis " greater ease " ought to be allowed for by a diminution in the times of the divided work ; but as the proportion of times would re- main the same, I do not introduce this unnecessary complexity into the calculation- 146 MVNEBA PULVEBI8. 3 a, and B has 3 6, a maintenance in the right proportion fo* both for a day and half ; so that each might take half a day's rest But as B has worked double time, the whole of this day's rest belongs in equity to him. Therefore the just ex- change should be, A giving two a for one 6, has one a and one 6 ; — maintenance for a day. B giving one 6 for two a, has two a and two 6 ; maintenance for two days. But B cannot rest on the second day, or A would be left without the article which B produces. Nor is there any means of making the exchange just, unless a third labourer ia called in. Then one workman. A, produces a, and two, B and C, produce b : — A, working three hours, has three a ; — B, three hours, 1^ b ; — C, three hours, 1^ b. B and C each give half of b for a, and all have their equal daily maintenance for equal daily work. To carry the example a single step farther, let three arti- cles, a, b, and c be needed. Let a need one hour's work, b two, and c four ; then the day's work must be seven hours, and one man in a day's work can make 7 a, or 3J b, or If c. Therefore one A works for a, producing 7a; two B's work for b, producing 7 6; four C's work for c, producing 7 c. A has six o to spare, and gives two a for one 6, and four a for one c. Each B has 2^ b to spare, and gives ^ b for one a, and two b for one c. Each C has f of c to spare, and gives ^ c for one b, and J of c for one o. And all have their day's maintenance. Generally, therefore, it follows that if the demand is con- stant,* the relative prices of things are as their costs, or as the quantities of labour involved in production. 64 Then, in order to express their prices in terms of a currency, we have only to put the currency into the form of orders for a certain quantity of any given article (with us it is in the form of orders for gold), and all quantities of other articles are priced by the relation they bear to the articli which the currency claims. * Compare IPnto thia Last, p. 115, et leq. HUN'SkA PULVERiS. 147 But the worth of the currency itself is not in the slightest degree founded more on the worth of the article which it either claims or consists in (as gold) than on the worth of every other article for which the gold is exchangeable. It is just as accurate to say, " so many pounds are worth an acre of land," as " an acre of land is worth so many pounds." The worth of gold, of land, of houses, and of food, and of all other things, depends at any moment on the existing quanti- ties and relative demands for all and each ; and a change in the worth of, or demand for, any one, involves an instantane- ously correspondent change in the worth of, and demand for. all the rest ; — a change as inevitable and as accurately bal- anced (though often in its process as untraceable) as the change in volume of the outflowing river from some vast lake, caused by change ia the volume of the inflowing streams, though no eye can trace, nor instrument detect, mo- tion, either on its surface, or in the depth. 65. Thus, then, the real working power or worth of the cur- rency is founded on the entire sum of the relative estimates formed by the population of its possessions ; a change in this estimate in any direction (and therefore every change in the national character), instantly alters the value of money, in its second great function of commanding labour. But we must always carefully and sternly distinguish between this worth of currency, dependent on the conceived or appreciated value of what it represents, and the worth of it, dependent on the existence of what it represents. A currency is true, or false, in proportion to the security with which it gives claim to the possession of land, house, horse, or picture ; but a cur- rency is strong or weak,* worth much, or worth little, in pro- portion to the degree of estimate in which the nation holds the house, horse, or picture which is claimed. Thus the power of the English currency has been, tUl of late, largely based on the national estimate of horses and of wine : so that a man [* That is to say, the love of money is founded first on the intense- ness of desire for given things ; a youth will rob the till, now-a-day^ for pantomime tickets and cigars ; the "strength " of the currency lin- ing irresistible to him, in oonsequenee of his desire for those luxuries.l 148 MUNERA PTTLVERIS. might always give any price to furnish choicely his stable, oi his cellar ; and receive public approval therefor : but if he gave the same sum to furnish his library, he was called mad or a bibUo-maniac. And although he might lose his fortune by his horses, and his health or life by his cellar, and rarely lost either by his books, he was yet never called a Hippo- maniac nor an Oino-maniac ; but only Bibho-maniac, because the current worth of money was understood to be legiti- mately founded on cattle and wine, but not on literature. The prices lately given at sales for pictures and MSS. indicate some tendency to change in the national character in this re- spect, so that the worth of the currency may even come in time to rest, in an acknowledged manner, somewhat on the state and keeping of the Bedford missal, as well as on the health of Caractacus or Blink Bonny ; and old pictures be considered property, no less than old port. They might have been so before now, but that it is more difficult to choose the one than the other. 66. Now, observe, aU these sources of variation in the power of the currency exist, whoUy irrespective of the influences of vice, indolence, and improvidence. We have hitherto sup- posed, throughout the analysis, every professing labourer to labour honestly, heartily, and in harmony with his fellows. We have now to bring farther into the calculation the effects of relative industry, honour, and forethought ; and thus to follow out the bearings of our second inquiry : Who are the holders of the Store and Currency, and in what proportions ? This, however, we must reserve for our next paper- noticing here only that, however distinct the several branches of the subject are, radically, they are so interwoven in their issues that we cannot rightly treat any one, till we have taken cognizance of all. Thus the need of the currency in propor tion to number of population is materially influenced by the probable number of the holders in proportion to the non- holders ; and this again, by the number of holders of goods, or wealth, in proportion to the non-holders of goods. For as, by definition, the currency is a claim to goods which are not possessed, its quantity indicates the number of claimants in MUNBItA PVLVERIS. 149 proportion to the number of holders ; and the force and com- plexity of claim. For if the claims be not complex, currency as a means of exchange may be very small in quantity. A sells some corn to B, receiving a promise from B to pay in cattle, which A then hands over to C, to get some wine. C in due time claims the cattle from B ; and B takes back his promise. These exchanges have, or might have been, all effected with a single coin or promise ; and the proportion of the currency to the store would in such circumstances indi- cate only the circulating vitality of it — that is to say, the quantity and convenient divisibility of that part of the store which the habiis of the nation keep in circulation. If a cattle breeder is content to live with his household chiefly on meat and milk, and does not want rich furniture, or jewels, or books — if a wine and com grower maintains himself and his men chiefly on grapes and bread ; — if the wives and daughters of families weave and spin the clothing of the household, and the nation, as a whole, remains content with the produce of its own soil and the work of its own hands, it has little occa- sion for circulating media. It pledges and promises little and seldom ; exchanges only so far as exchange is necessary for life. The store belongs to the people in whose hands it is found, and money is little needed either as an expression of right, or practical means of division and exchange. 67. But ia proportion as the habits of the nation become complex and fantastic (and they may be both, without there- fore being civilized), its circulating medium must increase in proportion to its store. If every one wants a little of every- thiag, — if food must be of many kinds, and dress of many fashions, — if mulitudes live by work which, ministering to fancy, has its pay measured by fancy, so that large prices will be given by one person for what is valueless to another, — if there are great inequalities of knowledge, causing great in- equalities of estimate, — and, finally, and worst of all, if the currency itself, from its largeness, and the power which the possession of it impHes, becomes the sole object of desire with large numbers of the nation, so that the holding of it ia disputed among them as the main object of life : — in each 150 MXJNERA PULVBRIS. and all of these cases, the ciirrency necessarily enlarges ia proportion to the store ; and as a means of exchange and di- vision, as a bond of right, and as an object of passion, has a more and more important and malignant power over the na- tion's dealings, character, and life. Against which power, when, as a bond of Eight, it becomes too conspicuous and too burdensome, the popidar voice is apt to be raised in a violent and irrational manner, leading to revolution instead of remedy. Whereas all possibility of Economy depends on the clear assertion and maintenance of this bond of right, however burdensome. The first neces- sity of all economical government is to secure the unques- tioned and unquestionable working of the great law of Prop- erty — that a man who works for a thing shall be allowed to get it, keep it, and consume it, in peace ; and that he who does not eat his cake to-day, shall be seen, without grudging, to have his cake to-morrow. This, I say, is the first point to be secured by social law ; vrithout this, no poUtical advance, nay, no political existence, is in any sort possible. Whatever evil, luxury, iniquity, may seem to result from it, this is neverthe- less the first of all Equities ; and to the enforcement of this, by law and by police-truncheon, the nation must always pri- marily set its mind — that the cupboard door may have a firm- lock to it, and no man's dinner be carried off by the mob, oi> its way home from the baker's. Which, thus fearlessly assert- ing, we shall endeavour in next paper to consider how far it may be practicable for the mob itself, also, in due breadth of dish, to have dinners to carry home. MUNEBA PULYJEIBIB. 151 CHAPTEE m. COIN-KEEPINa. 68. It will be seen by reference to the last chapter that oui present task is to examine the relation of holders of store to holders of currency ; and of both to those who hold neither. In order to do this, we must determine on which side we are to place substances such as gold, commonly known as bases of currency. By aid of previous definitions the reader wiU now be able to understand closer statements than have yet been possible. 69. The currency of any country consists of every document acknowledging debt, which is transferable in the country.* This transferableness depends upon its intelligibility and credit. Its intelligibility depends chiefly on the difficulty of forging anything like it ; — its credit much on national char- acter, but ultimately always on the existence of substantial means of meeting its demand.\ As the degrees of transferableness are variable, (some docu- ments passing only in certain places, and others passing, if at all, for less than their inscribed value), both the mass, and, so to speak, fluidity, of the currency, are variable. True or per- fect currency flows freely, Uke a pure stream ; it becomes sluggish or stagnant in proportion to the quantity of less [* Remember this definition : it is of great importance as opposed to the imperfect ones usually given. When first these essays were pub- lished, I remember one of their reviewers asking contemptuously, "Is half-a-crown a document ? " it never having before occurred to him that a document might be stamped as well as written, and stamped on silver as well as on parchment. ] [f I do not mean the demand of the holder of a five-pound note for five pounds, but the demand <)f the holder of a pound for a pound's worth of something good.] 152 MVNBRA PULVERI8. transferable matter which mixes with it, adding to its bulk, but diminishing its purity. [Articles of commercial value, on which bills are drawn, increase the currency indefinitely ; and substances of intrinsic value if stamped or signed without restriction so as to become acknowledgments of debt, increase it indefinitely also.] Every bit of gold found in Austraha, so long as it remains uncoined, is an article offered for sale hke any other ; but as soon as it is coined into pounds, it dimin- ishes the value of every pound we have now in our pockets. 70. Legally authorized or national currency, in its perfect condition, is a form of public acknowledgment of debt, so reg- ulated and divided that any person presenting a commodity of tried worth in the public market, shall, if he please, receive in exchange for it a document giving him claim to the return of its equivalent, (1) in any place, (2) at any time, and (3) in any kind. When currency is quite healthy and vital, the persons en- trusted with its management are always able to give on de- maud either, A. The assigning document for the assigned quantity of goods. Or, B. The assigned quantity of goods for the assigning docu- ment. If they cannot give document for goods, the national ex- change is at fault. If they cannot give goods for document, the national credit is at fault. The nature and power of the document are therefore to be examined under the three relations it bears to Place, Time, and Kind. 71. (1.) It gives claim to the return of equivalent wealth in any Place. Its use in this function is to save carriage, so that parting with a bushel of corn in London, we may receive an order for a bushel of com at the Antipodes, or elsewhere. To be perfect in this use, the substance of currency must bo to the maximum portable, credible, and inteUigible. Its non- acceptance or discredit results always from some form of ignorance or dishonour ; so far as such interruptions rise out MUNERA PULVBRIS. 153 of differences in denomination, there is no ground for their continuance among civilized nations. It may be convenient in one country to use chiefly copper for coinage, in another silver, and in another gold, — reckoning accordingly in cen- times, francs, or zecchins : but that a franc should be dif- ferent in weight and value from a shilling, and a zwanziger vary from both, is wanton loss of commercial power. 72. (2.) It gives claim to the return of equivalent wealth at any Time. In this second use, currency is the exponent of accumulation : it renders the laying-up of store at the com- mand of individuals unHmitedly possible ; — whereas, but for its intervention, all gathering would be confined within cer- tain limits by the bulk of property, or by its decay, or the difficulty of its guardianship. " I will pull down my bams and build greater," cannot be a daily saying ; and aU material investment is enlargement of care. The national currency transfers the guardianship of the store to many ; and preserves to the original producer the right of re-entering on its posses- sion at any future period. 73. (3.) It gives claim (practical, though not legal) to the return of equivalent wealth in any Kind. It is a transferable right, not merely to this or that, but to anything ; and its power LQ this function is proportioned to the range of choice. If you give a child an apple or a toy, you give him a deter- minate pleasure, but if you give him a penny, an indeterminate one, proportioned to the range of selection offered by the shops in the village. The power of the world's currency is similarly in proportion to the openness of the world's fair, and, commonly, enhanced by the brilliancy of external aspect, rather than solidity of its wares. 74. We have said that the currency consists of orders for equivalent goods. If equivalent, their quality must be guar- anteed. The kinds of goods chosen for specific claim must, therefore, be capable of test, while, also, that a store may be kept in hand to meet the call of the currency, smaUness of bulk, with great relative value, is desirable ; and indestructi' biUty, over at least a certain period, essential. Such indestructibility, and facility of being tested, are 154 MUNEBA PULVERIS. united in gold ; its intrinsic value is great, and its imaginary value greater; bo that, partly through indolence, partly through necessity and want of organiaation, most nations have agreed to take gold for the only basis of their curren- cies ; — with this grave disadvantage, that its portability en- abUng the metal to become an active part of the medium of exchrjige, the stream of the currency itself becomes opaque ■with gold — half currency and halt commodity, in unison of functions which partly neutralize, partly enhance each other's force. 75. They partly neutralize, since in so far as the gold is commodity, it is bad currency, because liable to sale ; and in so far as it is currency, it is bad commodity, because its ex- change value interferes with its practical use. Especially its employment in the higher branches of the arts becomes un- safe on account of its liability to be melted down for exchange. Again. They partly enhance, since in so far as the gold has acknowledged intrinsic value, it is good currency, be- cause everywhere acceptable ; and in so far as it has legal exchangeable value, its worth as a commodity is increased. We want no gold in the foi-m of dust or crystal ; but we seek for it coined, because ia that form it will pay baker and butcher. And this worth in exchange not only absorbs a large quantity in that use,* but greatly increases the effect * [Bead and think over, the following note very carefully.] The waste of labour in obtaining the gold, though it cannot be estimated by help of any existing data, may be understood in its bearing on entire economy by supposing it limited to transactions between two persons. If two farmers in Australia have been ex- changing corn and cattle with each other for years, keeping their accounts of reciprocal debt in any simple way, the sum of the posses- sions of either would not be diminished, though the part of it which was lent or borrowed were only reckoned by marks on a stone, or notches on a tree ; and the one counted himself accordingly, so many scratches, or so many notches, better than the other. But it would soon be seriously diminished if, discovering gold in their fields, each resolved only to accept golden counters for a reckoning ; and accord- ingly, whenever he wanted a sack of corn or a cow, was obliged to go and wash sand for a week before he could get the means of giving » receipt for them. JIUNEEA PULVEBI8. 155 on the imagiaation of the quantity used in the arts. Thus, in brief, the force of the functions is increased, but their precision blunted, by their unison. 76. These inconveniences, however, attach to gold as a basis of currency on account of its portability and precious- ness. But a far greater inconvenience attaches to it as the only legal basis of currency. Imagine gold to be only attain- able in masses weighiug several pounds each, and its value, Hke that of malachite or marble, proportioned to its large- ness of bvdk ;— it could not then get itself confused with the currency in daily use, but it might still remain as its basis ; and this second inconvenience would still affect it, namely, that its significance as an expression of debt varies, as that of evei7 other article would, with the popular estimate of its desirableness, and vdth the quantity offered in the market. My power of obtaining other goods for gold depends always on the strength of public passion for gold, and on the limita- tion of its quantity, so that when either of two things happen — that the world esteems gold less, or finds it more easily — my right of claim is in that degree effaced ; and it has been even gravely maintained that a discovery of a mountain of gold would cancel the National Debt ; in other words, that men may be paid for what costs much in what costs nothing. Now, it is true that there is little chance of sudden convul- sion in this respect ; the world will not so rapidly increase in wisdom as to despise gold on a sudden ; and perhaps may [for a little time] desire it more eagerly the more easily it is obtained ; nevertheless, the right of debt ought not to rest on a basis of imagination ; nor should the frame of a national currency vibrate with every miser's panic, and every merchant's imprudence. 77. There are two methods of avoiding this insecurity, which would have been fallen upon long ago, if, instead of calculating the conditions of the supply of gold, men had only considered how the world might Uve and manage its affairs without gold at alL* One is, to base the currency on * It is difficult to estimate the curious futility of discussions such as that which lately occupied a section of the British Association, on the ^50 MUNERA PULVEBIS. substances of truer intrinsic value ; the other, to base it on several substances instead of one. If I can only claim gold, the discovery of a golden mountain starves me ; but if I can claim bread, the discovery of a continent of corn-fields need not trouble me. If, however, I wish to exchange my bread for other things, a good harvest wiU for the time limit my power in this respect ; but if I can claim either bread, iron, or silk at pleasure, the standard of value has three feet instead of one, and will be proportionately firm. Thus, ultimately, the steadiness of currency depends upon the breadth of its base ; but the difficulty of organization increasing with this breadth, the discovery of the condition at once safest and most convenient * can only be by long analysis, which must for the present be deferred. Gold or silver j- may always be retained in limited use, as a luxury of coinage and question- less standard, of one weight and alloy among all nations, vary- ing only iu the die. The purity of coinage, when metallic, is closely indicative of the honesty of the system of revenue, and even of the general dignity of the State. J absorption of gold, while no one can prodnoe even the simplest of the data necessary for the inquiry. To take the first occurring one, — What means have we of ascertaining the weight of gold employed this year in the toilettes of the women of Europe (not to speak of Asia) ; and, sup- posing it known, what means of conjecturing the weight by which, next year, their fancies, and the changes of style among their jewellers, will diminish or increase it ? * See, in Pope's epistle to Lord Bathurst, his sketch of the difficul- ties and uses of a currency literally " pecuniary " — (consisting of herds of cattle). " His Grace will game — to White's a bull be led," &o. \ Perhaps both ; perhaps silver only. It may be found expedient ultimately to leave gold free for use in the arts. As a means of reck- oning, the standard might be, and in some cases has already been, entirely ideal. — Bee Mill's Political Mconomy, book iii. chap. vii. at beginning. J The purity of the drachma and zecohin were not without signifi- cance of the state of intellect, art, and policy, both in Athens and Yea ice ; — a fact first impressed upon me ten years ago, when, in taking daguerreotypes at Venice, I found no purchaseable gold pure enough t« gild them with, except that of the old Venetian zecphin- MUNEBA PULVEBIS. 157 78. Whatever the article or articles may be which the national •urrency promises to pay, a premium on that article indicates bankruptcy of the government in that proportion, the division of its assets being restrained only by the remaining confidence of the holders of notes ia the return of prosperity to the firm. Currencies of forced acceptance, or of unlimited issue, are merely various modes of disg^sing taxation, and delaying its pressure, untU it is too late to iofcerfere with the cause of pressure. To/ do away with the possibility of such disguise would have been among the first results of a true economical science, had any such existed ; but there have been too many motives for the concealment, so long as it could by any arti- fices be maintained, to permit hitherto even the founding of such a science. 79. And indeed, it is only through evil conduct, wilfully persisted in, that there is any embarrassment, either in the theory or working of currency. No exchequer is ever em- barrassed, nor is any financial question difficult of solution, when people keep their practice honest, and their heads cool. But when governments lose all office of pUotage, protection, or scrutiny ; and live only in magnificence of authorized lar- ceny, and polished mendicity ; or when the people, choosiag Speculation (the s usually redundant in the spelling) instead of Toil, visit no dishonesty with chastisement, that each may with impunity take his dishonest turn ; — there are no tricks of financial terminology that will save them ; all signature and mintage do but magnify the ruin they retard ; and even the riches that remain, stagnant or current, change only from the slime of Avernus to the sand of Phlegethon — giacfcsand at the embouchure ; — land fluently recommended by recent auctioneers as "eligible for building leases." 80. Finally, then, the power of true currency is fourfold. (1.) Credit power. Its worth in exchange, dependent on public opinion of the stability and honesty of the issuer. (2.) Eeal worth. Supposing the gold, or whatever else the currency expressly promises, to be required from the issuer, for all his notes ; and that the call cannot be met in f uU. Then the actual worth of the document would be, and its act« 153 MUJNEBA PULYBRIS. ual worth at any moment is, therefore to be defined as, whai the division of the assets of the issuer would produce for it. (3.) The exchange power of its base. Granting that we can get five pounds in gold for our note, it remains a ques- tion how much of other things we can get for five pounds in gold. The more of other things exist, and the less gold, the greater this power. (4.) The power over labour, exercised by the given quantity of the base, or of the things to be got for it. The question in this case is, how much work, and (question of questions !) whose work, is to be had for the food which five pounds will buy. This depends on the number of the population, on their gifts, and on their dispositions, with which, down to their slightest humours, and up to their strongest impulses, the power of the currency varies. 81. Such being the main conditions of national currency, we proceed to examine those of the total currency, under the broad definition, " transferable acknowledgment of debt ; " * * Under which term, observe, we include all documents of debt, which, being honest, might be transferable, though they practically are not transferred ; while we exclude all documents which are in reality worthless, though in fact transferred temporarily, as bad money is. The document of honest debt, not transferred, is merely to paper cur- rency as gold withdrawn from circulation is to that of bullion. Much confusion has crept into the reasoning on this subject from the idea that the withdrawal from circulation is a definable state, whereas it is a graduated state, and indefinable. The sovereign in my pocket is with- drawn from circulation as long as I choose to keep it there. It is no otherwise withdrawn if I bury it, nor even if I choose to make it, and others, into a golden cup, and drink out of them ; since a rise in the price of the wine, or of other things, may at any time cause me to melt the cup and throw it back into currency ; and the bullion operates on the prices of the things in the market as directly, though not as forcibly, while it is in the form of a cup as it does in the form of a sovereign. No calculation can be founded on my humour in either case. If I like to handle rouleaus, and therefore keep a quantity of gold, to play with, in the form of jointed basaltic columns, it is all one in its effect on the market as if I kept it in the form of twisted filigree, or, steadily " ami- cus lamnae," beat the narrow gold pieces into broad ones, and dined ofE them. The probability is greater that I break the rouleau than that 1 melt the plate ; but the increased probability is not calculable. Thus, MUNERA PULVEBI8. 159 among the many forms of which there are in eliect only two, distinctly opposed ; namely, the acknowledgments of debts which will be paid, and of debts which wiU not. Documents, whether in whole or part, of bad debt, being to those of good debt as bad money to bullion, we put for the present these forms of imposture aside (as in analysing a metal we should wash it clear of dross), and then range, in thefr exact quantities, the true currency of the country on one side, and the store or property of the country on the other. We place gold, and all such substances, on the side of documents, as far as they operate by signature ; — on the side of store as far as they operate by value. Then the currency represents the quantity of debt in the country, and the store the quantity of its possession. The ownership of all the property is divided between the holders of currency and holders of store, and whatever the claiming value of the currency is at any moment, that value is to be deducted from the riches of the store- holders. 82. Farther, as true currency represents by definition debts which will be paid, it represents either the debtor's wealth, or his ability and willingness ; that is to say, either wealth ex- isting in his hands transferred to him by the creditor, or wealth which, as he is at some time surely to return it, he is either increasing, or, if diminishing, has the will and strength to reproduce. A sound currency therefore, as by its increase it represents enlarging debt, represents also enlarging means ; but in this curious way, that a certain quantity of it marks the deficiency of the wealth of the country from what it would have been if that currency had not existed.* In this respect documents are only withdrawn from the currency when cancelled, and bullion when it is so effeotnally lost as that the prohahility of finding it is no greater than of finding new gold in the mine. * For example, suppose an active peasant, having got his ground into good order and built himself a comfortable house, finding time still on his hands, sees on* of his neighbours little able to work, and ill-lodged, and offers to build him also a house, and to put his land in order, on condition of receiving for a given period rent for the building and tithe of the fruits. The ofEer is accepted, and a document given promissory 0f rest and titbe, Tbi^ note is inooey, It c»u only be gopd money il 160 MUNEBA PULVBBI8. it is like the detritus of a mountain ; assume that it lies at a fixed angle, and the more the detritus, the larger must be the mountain ; but it would have been larger stiU, had there been none. 83. Farther, though, as above stated, every man possessing money has usually also some property beyond what is neces- sary for his immediate wants, and men possessing property usually also hold currency beyond what is necessary for their immediate exchanges, it mainly determines the class to which they belong, whether in their eyes the money is an adjunct of the property, or the property of the money. In the first case the holder's pleasure is in his possessions, and in his money subordinately, as the means of bettering or adding to them. In the second, his pleasure is in his money, and in his posses- sions only as representing it. (In the first case the money is as an atmosphere surrounding the wealth, rising from it and raining back upon it ; but in the second, it is as a deluge, with the wealth floating, and for the most part perishing in it.*) The shortest distinction between the men is that the one wishes always to buy, and the other to sell. 84. Such being the great relations of the classes, their sev- eral characters are of the highest importance to the nation ; for on the character of the store-holders chiefly depend the preservation, display, and serviceableness of its wealth ; on that of the currency-holders, its distribution ; on that of both, its reproduction. We shall, therefore, ultimately find it to be of incomparably greater importance to the nation in whose hands the thing is the man who has incurred the debt so far recovers his strength as to be able to take advantage of the help he has received, and meet the de- mand of the note ; if he lets his house fall to ruin, and his field to waste, his promissory note will soon be valueless : but the existence of the note at all is a consequence of his not having worked so stoutly as the other. Let him gain as much as to be able to pay back the entire debt ; the note is cancelled, and we have two rich store-holders and no currency. [* You need not trouble yourself to make out the sentence in paren- thesis, unless you like, but do not think it is mere metaphor. It states ► fact which I could not have stated so shortly, 6m< by metaphor.] MUNERA PULVERIS. 161 put, than how much of it is got ; and that the character of the holders may be conjectured by the quaUty of the store ; for such and such a man always asks for such and such a thing ; nor only asks for it, but if it can be bettered, betters it : so that possession and possessor reciprocally act on each other, through the entire sum of national possession. The base na- tion, asking for base things, sinks daily to deeper vileness of nature and weakness in use ; while the noble nation, asking for noble things, rises daily into diviner eminence in both ; the tendency to degradation being surely marked by " dTafio ; " that is to say, (expanding the Greek thought), by carelessness as to the hands in which things are put, consequent dispute for the acquisition of them, disorderhness in the accumulation of them, inaccuracy in the estimate of them, and bluntness in conception as to the entire nature of possession. 85. The currrency-holders always increase in number and influence in proportion to the bluntness of natiu-eand clumsi- ness of the store-holders ; for the less use people can make of things, the more they want of them, and the sooner weary of them, and want to change them for something else ; and aU frequency of change increases the quantity and power of cur- rency. The large currency-holder himself is essentially a per- son who never has been able to make up his miad as to what he will have, and proceeds, therefore, in vague collection and aggregation, with more and more infuriate passion, urged by complacency in progress, vacancy in idea, and pride of con- quest. While, however, there is this obscurity in the nature of possession of currency, there is a charm in the seclusion of it, which is to some people very enticing. In the enjoyment of real property, others must partly share. The groom has some enjoyment of the stud, and the gardener of the garden ; but the money is, or seems, shut up ; it is wholly enviable. No one else can have part in any complacencies arising from it. The power of arithmetical comparison is also a great thing to uhitaaginative people. They know always they are so much better than they were, in money ; so much better than ot)«ers, 162 MUNERA PULVEBI8. in money ; but wit cannot be so compared, nor character. My neighbour cannot be convinced that I am wiser than he is, but he can, that I am worth so much more ; and the uni- versality of the conviction is no less flattering than its clear- ness. Only a few can understand, — none measure — and few will willingly adore, superiorities in other things ; but every- body can understand money, everybody can count it, and most wiU worship it. 86. Now, these various temptations to accumulation would be politically harmless if what was vainly accumulated had any fair chance of being wisely spent. For as accumulation can- not go on for ever, but must some day end in its reverse — if this reverse were indeed a beneficial distribution and use, as irrigation from reservoir, the fever of gathering, though peril- ous to the gatherer, might be serviceable to the community. But it constantly happens (so constantly, that it may be stated as a political law having few exceptions), that what is unreas- onably gathered is also unreasonably spent by the persons into whose hands it finally falls. Very frequently it is spent in war, or else in a stupefying luxury, twice hurtful, both in be- ing indulged by the rich and witnessed by the poor. So that the mal tener and mal dare are as correlative as complementary colours ; and the circulation of wealth, which ought to be soft, steady, strong, far-sweeping, and fuH of warmth, Hke the Gulf stream, being narrowed into an eddy, and concentrated on a point, changes into the alternate suction and surrender of Charybdis. Which is indeed, I doubt not, the true mean- ing of that marvellous fable, " infinite," as Bacon said of it, "in matter of meditation." * 87. It is a strange habit of wise humanity to speak in enig- mas only, so that the highest truths and usefullest laws mnist be hunted for through whole picture-galleries of dreams, which to the vulgar seem dreams only. Thus Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Goethe, have hidden all that is chiefly serviceable in their [* What foUowa, to the end of the chapter, was a note ou!y, in thfl first printing ; but for after service, it is of more value than »ny othej part of tb« hook, so I have put it into the main t«xt.J MUNERA PULVERIS. 163 work, and in all the various literature they absorbed and re- embodied, under types which have rendered it quite useless to the multitude. What is worse, the two primal declarers oi moral discovery, Homer and Plato, are partly at issue ; for Plato's logical power quenched his imagination, and he bet came incapable of understanding the purely imaginative ele- ment either in poetry or painting : he therefore somewhat overrates the pure discipline of passionate art in song and music, and misses that of meditative art. There is, however, a deeper reason for his distrust of Homer. His love of justice, and reverently religious nature, made him dread, as death, every form of fallacy ; but chiefly, fallacy respecting the world to come (his own myths being only symbolic exponents of a rational hope). We shall perhaps now every day dis- cover more clearly how right Plato was in this, and feel our- selves more and more wonderstruck that men such as Homer and Dante (and, in an inferior sphere, Milton), not to speak of the great sculptors and painters of every age, have permit- ted themselves, though full of aJl nobleness and wisdom, to coin idle imaginations of the mysteries of .eternity, and guide the faiths of the famUies of the earth by the courses of their own vague and visionary arts : while the indisputable truths of human life and duty, respecting which they all have but one voice, he hidden behind these veils of phantasy, unsought, and often unsuspected. I will gather carefuUy, out of Dante and Homer, what, in this kind, bears on our subject, in its due place ; the first broad intention of their symbols may be sketched at once. 88. The rewards of a worthy use of riches, subordinate to other ends, are shown by Dante in the fifth and sixth orbs of Paradise ; for the punishment of their unworthy use, three places are assigned ; one for the avaricious and prodigal whose souls are lost, [Hell, canto 7) ; one for the avaricious and prodigal whose souls are capable of purification, {Purga- tory, canto 19) ; and one for the usurers, of whom none can be redeemed [Hell, canto 17). The first group, the largest in all hell("gente piu che altrove troppa," compare Virgil's " quae maxima turba "), meet in contrary currents, as the 164 MUNERA PULVEBia. waves of Charybdis, casting weights at each other from oppo site sides. This weariness of contention is the chief element of their torture ; so marked by the beautiful lines beginning "Or puoi, fighuol," &c. : (but the usurers, who made their money inactively, sit on the sand, equally without rest, how- ever. " Di qua, di la, soccorrien, &c.) For it is not avarice, but contention for riches, leading to this double misuse of them, which, in Dante's light, is the unredeemable sin. The place of its punishment is guarded by Plutus, "the great enemy,'' and " la fi^ra crudele," a spirit quite different from the Greek Plutus, who, though old and bHnd, is not cruel, and is curable, so as to become far-sighted, (oi tv^Xos dXX" 6^ pK4iru)v. — Plato's epithets in first book of the Laws.) Still more does this Dantesque type differ from the resplendent Plutus of Goethe in the second part of Faust, who is the per- sonified power of wealth for good or evil — not the passion for wealth ; and again from the Plutus of Spenser, who is the passion of mere aggregation. Dante's Plutus is specially and definitely the Spirit of Contention and Competition, or Evil Commerce ; because, as I showed before, this kind of com- merce " makes aU men strangers ; " his speech is therefore unintelligible, and no single soul of all those ruined by him has recognizable features. On the other hand, the redeemable sins of avarice and prodigality are, in Dante's sight, those which are without de- liberate or calculated operation. The lust, or lavishness, of riches can be purged, so long as there has been no servile consistency of dispute and competition for them. The sin is spoken of as that of degradation by -the love of earth ; it is purified by deeper humiliation — the souls crawl on their bel- hes; their chant is, "my soul cleaveth unto the dust." But the spirits thus condemned are all recognizable, and even the worst examples of the thirst for gold, which they are com- pelled to tell the histories of during the night, are of men swept by the passion of avarice into violent crime, but not sold to its steady work. 89. The precept given to each of these spirits for its de- liverance is — Turn thine eyes to the lucre (lure) which th« MUNERA PULVERIS. 165 Eternal King rolls with the mighty wheels. Otherwise, the wheels of the " Greater Fortune,'' of which the constellation is ascending when Dante's dream begins. Compare George Herbert — " Lift up thy head ; Take stars for money ; stars, not to be told By any art, yet to be purchased." And Plato's notable sentence in the third book of the Polity . — " TeU them they have divine gold and sUver in their souls for ever ; that they need no money stamped of men — neither may they otherwise than impiously mingle the gathering of the diviae with the mortal treasure, for through that which the law of the multitude has coined, endless crimes have been done and suffered ; hut in their' s is neither pollution nor sorrow." 90. At the entrance of this place of punishment an evil spirit is seen by Dante, quite other than the " Gran Nemico." The great enemy is obeyed knowingly and wiUingly ; but this epirit — feminine — and called a Siren — is the " Deceitfulness of riches," aTranj TrXcnJrcru of the Gospels, winning obedience by guUe. This is the Idol of riches, made doubly phantasmal by Dante's seeing her in a dream. She is lovely to look upon, and enchants by her sweet singing, but her womb is loath- some. Now, Dante does not caU her one of the Sirens care- lessly, any more than he speaks of Charybdis carelessly ; and though he had got at the meaning of the Homeric fable only through Virgil's obscure tradition of it, the clue he has given us is quite enough. Bacon's interpretation, "the Sirens, or lileasures," which has become universal since his time, is opposed alike to Plato's meaning and Homer's. The Sirens are not pleasures, but Desires : in the Odyssey they are the phantoms of vain desire ; but in Plato's Vision of Destiny, phan- toms of divine desire ; singing each a different note on the circles of the distaff of Necessity, but forming one harmony, to which the three great Fates put words. Dante, however, adopted the Homeric conception of them, which was that they were demons of the Imagination, not carnal ; (desire of the eyes ; not lust of the flesh) ; therefore said to be daughters of the Muses. Yet not of the Muses, heavenly or historical 166 MUNBBA PULVBRIB. but of the Muse of pleasure ; and they are at first winged, because even vain hope excites and helps when first formed ; but afterwards, contending for the possession of the imagi- nation with the Muses themselves, they are deprived of their wings. 91. And thus we are to distinguish the Siren power from the power of Circe, who is no daughter of the Muses, but of the strong elements. Sun and Sea ; her power is that of frank, and full vital pleasure, which, if governed and watched, nourishes men ; but, unwatched, and having no " moly," bit- terness or delay, mixed with it, turns men into beasts, but does not slay them, — leaves them, on the contrary, power of revival. She is herself indeed an Enchantress ; — pure Animal life ; transforming — or degrading — but always wonderful (she puts the stores on board the ship invisibly, and is gone again, like a ghost) ; even the vrild beasts rejoice and are softened around her cave ; the transforming poisons she gives to men are mixed with no rich feast, but with piu-e and right nour- ishment, — Pramnian wine, cheese, and flour ; that is, wine, milk, and corn, the three great sustainers of life — it is their own fault if these make swine of them ; (see Appendix V.) and swine are chosen merely as the type of consumption ; as Plato's vSiv TToXis, in the second book of the Polity, and per- haps chosen by Homer with a deeper knowledge of the like- ness in variety of nourishment, and internal form of body. " Et quel est, s'il vous plait, cet audacieux animal qui se permet d'etre bilti au dedans comme une joUe petite fille ?" " Hclas ! chere enfant, j'ai honte de le nommer, et il ne faudra pas m'en vouloir. C'est . . . c'est le cochon. Ce n'est pas prcciscment flatteur pour vous ; mais nous en sommes tous 1:1, et si cela vous contrarie par trop, il faut aller vous plaindre au bon Dieu qui a voulu que les choses fussent arrang^es ainsi : seulement le cochon, qui ne pense qu'a man- ger, a I'estomac bien plus vaste que nous et c'est toujours une consolation." — {Histoire d'une Bouchee de Pain, Lettre ix.) 92. But the deadly Sirens are in all things opposed to the Cu-cean power. They promise pleasure, but never give it. They nourish in no wise ; but slay by slow death. And MtlSEHA PULVEttlS. l67 whereas they corrupt the heart and the head, instead of merely betraying the senses, there is no recovery from their power ; they do not tear nor scratch, like ScyUa, but the men who have Ustened to them are poisoned, and waste away. Note that the Sirens' field is covered, not merely with the bones, but with the skins, of those who have been consumed there. They address themselves, in the part of the song which Homer gives, not to the passions of Ulyases, but to his vanity, and the only man who ever came within hearing of them, and escaped untempted, was Orpheus, who silenced the vain imaginations by singing the praises of the gods. 93. It is, then, one of these Sirens whom Dante takes as the phantasm or deceitfulness of riches ; but note further, that she says it was her song that deceived Ulysses. Look back to Dante's account of Ulysses' death, and we find it was not the love of money, but pride of knowledge, that betrayed him ; whence we get the clue to Dante's complete meaning : that the souls whose love of wealth is pardonable have been first deceived into pursuit of it by a dream of its higher uses, or by ambition. His Siren is therefore the PhUotime of Spenser, daughter of Mammon — ' ' Whetn all that folk with such contention Do flock about, my deare, my daughter is — Honour and dignitie from her alone Derived are." By comparing Spenser's entire account of this Philotim^ with Dante's of the Wealth-Siren, we shall get at the full meaning of both poets ; but that of Homer Ues hidden much more deeply. For his Sirens are indefinite ; and they are de- sires of any evil thing ; power of wealth is not specially indi- cated by him, untU, escaping the harmonious danger of im- agination, Ulysses has to choose between two practical ways of life, indicated by the two rocks of Scylla and Charybdis. The monsters that haunt them are quite distinct from the rocks themselves, which, having many other subordinate sig- nifications, are in the main Labour and Idleness, or getting and spending ; each with its attendant monster, or betraying 168 MUNERA PULVERia. demon. The rock of gaining has its summit in the clo*ds, i» visible, and not to be climbed ; that of spending is low, but marked by the cursed fig-tree, which has leaves, but no fruit. We know the type elsewhere ; and there is a curious lateral allusion to it by Dante when Jacopo di Sant' Andrea, who had ruined himself by profusion and committed suicide, scatters the leaves of the bush of Lotto degli Agli, endeavouring to hide himself among them. We shall hereafter examine the type completely ; here I will only give an approximate ren- dering of Homer's words, which have been obscured more by translation than even by tradition. 94. "They are overhanging rocks. The great waves of blue water break round them ; and the blessed Gods call them the Wanderers. " By one of them no winged thing can pass — not even the wild doves that bring ambrosia to their father Jove — but the smooth rock seizes its sacrifice of them." (Not even ambrosia to be had vnthout Labour. The word is pecuhar — as a part of anything is offered for sacrifice ; especially used of heave- offering.) " It reaches the wide heaven with its top, and a dark blue cloud rests on it, and never passes ; neither does the clear sky hold it, in summer nor in harvest. Nor can any man climb it — not if he had twenty feet and hands, for it is smooth as though it were hewn. " And in the midst of it is a cave which is turned the way of hell. And therein dwells Scylla, whining for prey : her cry, indeed, is no louder than that of a newly-born whelp : but she herself is an awful thing — nor can any creature see her face and be glad ; no, though it were a god that rose against her. For she has twelve feet, all fore-feet, and six necks, and terrible heads on them ; and each has three rows of teeth, full of black death. " But the opposite rock is lower than this, though but a bow-shot distant ; and upon it there is a great fig-tree, full of leaves ; and under it the terrible Charybdis sudks down the black water. Thrice in the day she sucks it down, and thrice casts it up again : be not thou there when she sucks down, foi Neptune himself could not save thee." MUNEUA PULVER18. 169 [Thus far went my rambling note, in Fraser's Magazine. The Editor sent me a comphment on it — of which I was very proud ; what the PubUsher thought of it, I am not informed ; only I know that eventually he stopped the papers. I think a great deal of it myself, now, and have put it all in large print accordingly, and should like to write more ; but will, on the contrary, self-denyingly, and ia gratitude to any reader who has got through so much, end my chapter.] 170 MUNERA PULVURla. CHAPTER IV. COMMERCE. 95. As the currency conveys right of choice out of many things in exchange for one, so Commerce is the agency by which the the power of choice is obtained ; so that countries producing only timber can obtain for their timber silk and gold ; or, naturally producing only jewels and frankincense, can obtain for them cattle and corn. In this function, com- merce is of more importance to a country in proportion to the limitations of its products, and the restlessness of its fancy ; — generally of greater importance towards Northern latitudes. 96. Commerce is necessary, however, not only to exchange local products, but local skill. Labour requiring the agency of fire can only be given abundantly in cold countries ; labour requiring suppleness of body and sensitiveness of touch, only in warm ones ; labour involving accurate vivacity of thought only in temperate ones ; while peculiar imaginative actions are produced by extremes of heat and cold, and of light and darkness. The production of great art is hmited to climates warm enough to admit of repose in the open air, and cool enough to render such repose delightful. Minor variations in modes of skill distinguish every locality. The labour which at any place is easiest, is in that place cheapest ; and it becomes often desirable that products raised in one country should be wrought in another. Hence have arisen discussions on " Inter- national values " which wiU be one day remembered as highly curious exercises of the human mind. For it will be discov- ered, in due course of tide and time, that international value is regulated just as inter-provincial or inter-parishional value is. Coals and hops are exchanged between Northumberland and MUNEBA PULVEBIS. 171 Kent on absolutely the same principlea as iron and -wine be- tween Lancashire and Spain. The greater breadth of an arm of the sea increases the cost, but does not modify the princi- ple of exchange ; and a bargain written in two languages will have no other economical results than a bargain written in one. The distances of nations are measured, not by seas, but by ignorances ; and their divisions determined, not by dialects, but by enmities.* 97. Of course, a system of international values may always be constructed if we assume a relation of moral law to physi- cal geography ; as, for instance, that it is right to cheat or rob across a river, though not across a road ; or across a sea, though not across a river, &c. ; — again, a system of such values may be constructed by assuming similar relations of taxation to physical geography ; as, for instance, that an article should be taxed in crossing a river, but not in crossing a road ; or in being carried fifty mUes, but not in being carried five, &c. ; such positions are indeed not easily maintained when once put in logical form ; but one law of international value is main- tainable in any form : namely, that the farther your neighbour lives from you, and the less he understands you, the more you are bound to be true in your dealings with him ; because your power over him is greater in proportion to his ignorance, and his remedy more difficult in proportion to his distance, f 98. I have just said the breadth of sea increases the cost of exchange. Now note that exchange, or commerce, in itself, is always costly ; the sum of the value of the goods being dimin- ished by the cost of their conveyance, and by the maintenance of the persons employed in it ; so that it is only when there is advantage to both producers (in getting the one thing for the [* I have repeated the substance of this and the next paragraph so often since, that I am ashamed and weary. The thing is too true, and too simple, it seems, for anybody ever to believe. Meantime, the theo- ries of " international values," as explained by Modern Political Econ- omy, have brought about last year's pillage of France by Germany, and the affectionate relations now existing in consequence bgtween the in- habitants of the right and left banks of the Rhine.] [f I wish some one would examine and publish accurately the latS dealings of tJie Governors of the Cape with the Caffirs.J 172 MUNEBA PULVERIS. other) greater than the loss in conveyance, that the exchange is expedient. And it can only be justly conducted when the porters kept by the producers (commonly called merchants) expect mere pay, and not profit.* For in just commerce there are but three parties — the two persons or societies exchang- ing, and the agent or agents of exchange ; the value of the things to be exchanged is known by both the exchangers, and each receives equal value, neither gaining nor losing (for what- ever one gains the other loses). The intermediate agent is paid a known per-centage by both, partly for labour in con- veyance, partly for care, knowledge, and risk ; every attempt at concealment of the amount of the pay indicates either ef- fort on the part of the agent to obtain unjust profit, or effort on the part of the exchangers to refuse him just pay. But for the most part it is the first, namely, the effort on the part of the merchant to obtain larger profit (so-caUed) by buying cheap and selling dear. Some part, indeed, of this larger gain is deserved, and might be openly demanded, because it is the reward of the merchant's knowledge, and foresight of probable necessity ; but the greater part of such gain is un- just ; and unjust in this most fatal way, that it depends, first, on keeping the exchangers ignorant of the exchange value of the articles ; and, secondly, on taking advantage of the buyer's need and the seller's poverty. It is, therefore, one of the es- sential, and quite the most fatal, forms of usury ; for usury means merely taking an exorbitant f sum for the use of any- thing ; and it is no matter whether the exorbitance is on loan or exchange, on rent or on price — the essence of the usury being that it is obtained by advantage of opportunity or ne- cessity, and not as due reward for labour. All the great [* By "pay," I mean wages for labour or skill; by "profit," gain dependent on the state of the market.] [f Since I wrote this, I have worked out the question of Interest of money, which always, until lately, had embarrassed and defeated me ; and I find that the payment of interest of any amount whatever is real "usury," and entirely unjustifiable. I was shown this chiefly by the pamphlets issued by Mr. W. C. Sillar, though I greatly regret the Impa^ tienoe which causes Mr. Sillar to regard usury as the radical orime in po- litical economy. There are others worse, that act with it.] MUITEBA PULVEBI8. 173 thinkers, therefore, have held it to be unnatural and impious, in so far as it feeds on the distress of others, or their folly.* Nevertheless, attempts to repress it by law must for ever be ineffective ; though Plato, Bacon, and the First Napoleon — all three of them men who knew somewhat more of humanity than the " British merchant " usually does — tried their hands at it, and have left some (probably) good moderative forms of law, which we wiU examine in their place. But the only final check upon it must be radical purifying of the national char- acter, for being, as Bacon calls it, " concessum propter duri- tiem cordis," it is to be done away with by touching the heart only ; not, however, without medicinal law — as in the case of the other permission, "propter duritiem." But in this more than in anything (though much in all, and though in this he would not himself allow of their application, for his own laws against usury are sharp enough), Plato's words in the fourth book of the Polity are true, that neither drugs, nor charms, nor burnings, wUl touch a deep-lying poHtical sore, any more than a deep bodily one ; but only right and utter change of constitution: and that "they do but lose their labour who think that by any tricks of law they can get the better of these mischiefs of commerce, and see not that they hew at a Hydra." 99. And indeed this Hydra seems so unslayable, and sin sticks so fast between the jokiings of the stones of buying and selling, that " to trade " in things, or literally " cross- give " them, has warped itself, by the instinct of nations, into their worst word for fraud ; for, because in trade there cannot but be trust, and it seems also that there cannot but also be injury in answer to it, what is merely fraud between enemies becomes treachery among friends : and " trader," " traditor,'' and " traitor " are but the same word. For which simplicity of language there is more reason than at first appears : for as in true commerce there is no "profit," so in true com- merce there is no "sale." The idea of sale is that of an * Hence Dante's companionship of Cahors, Inf., canto xi., supported Toy the view taken of the matter throughout the middle ages, in common with the Greeks. 174 MUNERA PVL VESTS. interchange between enemies respectively endeavouring to get the better one of another ; but commerce is an exchange be- tween friends ; and there is no desire but that it should be just, any more than there would be between members of the same family.* The moment there is a bargain over the pot- tage, the family relation is dissolved : — typically, " the days of mourning for my father are at hand." Whereupon follows the resolve, " then will I slay my brother." 100. This inhumanity of mercenary commerce is the more notable because it is a fulfilment of the kw that the corrup- tion of the best is the worst. For as, taking the body nat- ural for symbol of the body politic, the governing and form- ing powers may be hkened to the brain, and the labouring to the limbs, the mercantile, presiding over circulation and communication of things in changed utilities, is symbolized by the heart ; and, it that hardens, all is lost. And this is the ultimate lesson which the leader of English intellect meant for us, (a lesson, indeed, not all his own, but part of the old wisdom of humanity), in the tale of the Merchant of Venice ; in which the true and incorrupt merchant, — kind and free be- yond every other Shakspearian cotiception of men, — is opposed to the corrupted merchant, or usurer ; the lesson being deep- ened by the expression of the strange hatred which the cor- rupted merchant bears to the pure one, mixed vdth intense scorn, — " This is the fool that lent out money gratis ; look to him, jailer," (as to lunatic no less than cri min al) the enmity, ob- serve, having its symbohsm UteraUy carried out by being aimed straight at the heart, and finally foiled by a literal ap- peal to the great moral law that flesh and blood cannot be weighed, enforced by " Portia "f ("Portion"), the type of di- [* I do not wonder when I re-read this, that people talk about my " sentiment." But there is no sentiment whatever in the matter. It is a hard wd bare commercial fact, that if two people deal together vrJit don't try to cheat each other, they will in a given tinje, make more money out of each other than if they do. See § 104.] \ Shakspeare would certainly never have chosen this name had he fceea forced lo retaia the Romau spelling. lake FstiiU, "lost l*dy,' MVNEBA PULVER18. 175 »ine Fortune, found, not in gold, nor in silver, but in lead, that is to say, in endurance and patience, not in splendour ; and finally taught by her lips also, declaring, instead of the law and quality of " merces," the greater law and quality of mercy, which is not strained, but drops as the rain, blessing him that gives and him that takes. And observe that this "mercy" is not the mean "Misericordia," but the mighty " Gratia," answered by Gratitude, (observe Shylock's leaning on the, to him detestable, word, gratis, and compare the re- lations of Grace to Equity given in the second chapter of the second book of the Memorahilia ;) that is to say, it is the gra- cious or loving, instead of the strained, or competing manner, of doing things, answered, not only with " merces " or pay, but with " merci " or thanks. And this is indeed the mean- ing of the great benediction "Grace, mercy, and peace," for there can be no peace without grace, (not even by help of rifled cannon), nor even without tripHcity of graciousness, for the Greeks, who began but with one Grace, had to open their scheme into three before they had done. 101. With the usual tendency of long repeated thoughtj to take the surface for the deep, we have conceived these goddesses as if they only gave loveliness to gesture ; whereas or Cordelia, "heart-lady," Portia is "fortune" lady. The two great relative groups of words, Fortuua, fero, and fors — Portio, porto, and pars (with the lateral branch, op-portune, im-portune, opportunity, &c. ), are of deep and intricate significance ; their various senses of bringing, abstracting, and sustaining being all centralized by the wheel (which bears and moves at once), or still better, the ball (spera) of Fortune, — " Volve sua spera, e beata si gode : " the motive power of this wheel distinguishing its goddess from the fixed majesty of Necessitas with her iron nails ; or aviyK-ri, with her pillar of fire and iridescent orbits, fixed at the centre. Portus and porta, and gate in its connexion with gain, form another interesting branch group ; and Mors, the concentration of delaying, is always to be remembered with Fors, the concentration of bringing and bearing, passing on into Fortis and Fortitude. [This not« is literally a mere memorandum for the future work which I am now completing In Fori Olavigera ; it was printed partly in vanity, but also with real desire to get people to share the interest I found In the careful study of the leading words in noble languages. Compare the next note.J 176 MUNEBA PULVaBIS. their true function is to give graciousness to deed, the othei loveliness arising naturally out of that. In which function Chai-is becomes Charitas ; * and has a name and praise even greater than that of Faith or Truth, for these may be main- tained sullenly and proudly ; but Charis is in her countenance always gladdening (Aglaia), and in her service instant and humble ; and the true wife of Vulcan, or Labour. And it is not until her sincerity of function is lost, and her mere beauty contemplated instead of her patience, that she is bom again of the foam flake, and becomes Aphrodite ; and it is then only that she becomes capable of joining herself to war and to the enmities of men, instead of to laboiu: and their services. Therefore the fable of Mars and Venus is chosen by Homer, picturing himself as Demodocus, to sing at the games in the court of Alcinous. Phseacia is the Homeric island of Atlantis ; an image of noble and wise government, concealed, (how shghtly !) merely by the change of a short vowel for a long * As Charis becomes Charitas, the word "Cher," or "Dear," passes from Shylock's sense of it (to buy cheap and sell dear) into Antonio's sense of it : emphasized with the final i in tender " Cheri," and hushed to English calmness in our noble ' ' Cherish. " The reader must not think that any care can be misspent in tracing the connexion and power of the words which we have to \ise in the sequel. (See Appendix VI.) Much education sums itself in making men economize their words, and under- stand them. Nor is it possible to estimate the harm which has been done, in matters of higher speculation and conduct, by loose verbiage, though we may guess at it by observing the dislike which people show to having anything about their religion said to them in simple words, be- cause then they understand it. Thus congregations meet weekly to in- voke the influence of a Spirit of Life and Truth ; yet if any part of that character were intelligibly expressed to them by the formulas of the service, they would be offended. Suppose, for instance, in the closing benediction, the clergyman were to give vital significance to the vague word "Holy," and were to say, "the fellowship of the Helpful and Honest Ghost be with you, and remain with you always," what would be the horror of many, first at the irreverence of so intelligible an ex- pression ; and secondly, at the discomfortable occurrence of the sus- picion that while throughout the commercial dealings of the week they had denied the propriety of Help, and possibility of Honesty, the Per. son whose company they had been now asking to be blessed with could have no fellowship with cruel people or knaves. MUNERA PVLVERia. 171 one in the name of its queen ; yet misunderstood by all late* writers, (even by Horace, in his "pinguis, Phteaxque"). That fable expresses the perpetual error of men in thinking that grace and dignity can only be reached by the soldier, and never by the artisan ; so that commerce and the useful arts have had the honour and beauty taken away, and only the Fraud and Paia left to them, with the lucre. Which is, in- deed, one great reason of the continual blundering about the oflSces of government with respect to commerce. The higher classes are ashamed to employ themselves iti it ; and though ready enough to fight for (or occasionally against) the people, — to preach to them, — or judge them, wiUnot break bread for them ; the refined upper servant who has willingly looked after the burnishing of the armoury and ordering of the hbrary, not liking to set foot in the larder. 102. Farther still. As Charis becomes Charitas on the one side, she becomes — better still — Chara, Joy, on the other ; or rather this is her very mother's milk and the beauty of her childhood ; for God brings no enduring Love, nor any other good, out of pain ; nor out of contention ; but out of joy and harmony. And in this sense, human and divine, music and gladness, and the measures of both, come into her name ; and Cher becomes f uU-vowelled Cheer, and Cheerful ; and Chara opens into Choir and Choral.* 103. And lastly. As Grace passes into Freedom of action, Charis becomes Eleutheria, or Liberahty ; a form of Hberty quite curiously and intensely different from the thing usually * " TO juic div ^AAa ^wa ovK ^xeii' cCtfrBriffiv rav iv Tats Ktvfiffffft rtl^eup ouSi OTo|(£c, oTs S^ fivB/ihs ivofia Ka\ aofiovla- riiuv Se 06 s ftirofiev roiis 0eoi)s (Apollo, the Muses, and Bacchus — the grave Bacchus, that is — ruling the choir of age ; or Bacchus restraining ; ' sseva tene, cum Bere- cyntio cornu, tympana,' &c.) (TuYX"? ^ "'"''* SeSovTOP 6vofia." " Other animals have no perception of order nor of disorder in motion ; but for us, Apollo and Bacchus and the Muses are appointed to mingle in our dances ; and these are they who have given o the sense of delight in rhythm and harmony. And the name of choir, choral dance, (we may believe,) came from chara (delighi)."— iuMs, book ii. 178 MUNERA PULVEBia. understood by " Liberty " in modem language : indeed, much more like what some people would call slavery : for a Greek always understood, primarily, by liberty, deliverance from the law of his own passions (or from what the Christian writers call bondage of corruption), and this a complete liberty : not being merely safe from the Siren, but also unbound from the mast, and not having to resist the passion, but making it fawn upon, and follow him — (this may be again partly the meaning of the fawning beasts about the Circeau cave ; so, again, George Herbert — Correct thy passion's spite, Then may the beasts draw thee to happy light)- And it is only in such generosity that any man becomes capable of so governing others as to take true part in any system of national economy. Nor is there any other eternal distinction between the upper and lower classes than this form of Uberty, Eleutheria, or benignity, in the one, and its opposite of slavery, Douleia, or malignity, in the other ; the separation of these two orders of men, and the firm govern- ment of the lower by the higher, being the first conditions of possible wealth and economy in any state, — the Gods giving it no greater gift than the power to discern its true freemen, and "mahgnum spernere vulgus." 104. While I have traced the finer and higher laws of this matter for those whom they concern, I have also to note the material law — vulgarly expressed in the proverb, " Hon- esty is the best policy." That proverb is indeed wholly inap- plicable to matters of private interest. It is not true that honesty, as far as material gain is concerned, profits individ- uals. A clever and cruel knave will in a mixed society al- ways be richer than an honest person can be. But Honesty is the best "policy," if policy mean practice of State. For fraud gains nothing in a State. It only enables the knaves in it to live at the expense of honest people ; while there is for every act of fraud, however small, a loss of wealth to the MUNBBA PTTLVERIS. 179 community. Whatever the fraudulent person gains, soma other person loses, as fraud produces nothing ; and there is, besides, the loss of the time and thought spent in accomplish- ing the fraud, and of the strength otherwise obtainable by mutual help (not to speak of the fevers of anxiety and jealousy in the blood, which are a heavy physical loss, as I will show in due time). Practically, when the nation is deeply corrupt, cheat answers to cheat ; every one is in turn imposed upon, and there is to the body politic the dead loss of the ingenuity, together vdth the incalculable mischief of the injury to each defrauded person, producing collateral effect unexpectedly. My neighbour sells me bad meat : I seU him in return flawed iron. We neither of us get one atom of pecuniary advantage on the whole transaction, but we both suffer unexpected in- convenience ; my men get scurvy, and his cattle-truck runs off the raUs. 105. The examination of this form of Charis must, there- fore, lead us into the discussion of the principles of govern- ment in general, and especially of that of the poor by the rich, discovering how the Graciousness joined with the Great- ness, or Love with Majestas, is the true Dei Gratia, or Divine Eight, of every form and manner of King ; i. e., specifically, of the thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, and powera of the earth : — of the thrones, stable, or " ruling," literally right-doing powers ("rex eris, recte si facies " ) : — of the dom- inations — lordly, edifying, dominant and harmonious powers ; chiefly domestic, over the " built thing," domus, or house ; and inherently twofold, Dominus and Domina; Lord and Lady : — of the Princedoms, pre-eminent, incipient, creative, and demonstrative powers ; thus poetic and mercantile, in the " princeps carmen deduxisse " and the merchant-prince : — of the Virtues or Courages ; militant, guiding, or Ducal powers : — and finally of the Strengths, or Forces pure ; magistral powers, of the More over the less, and the forceful and free over the weak and servile elements of life. Subject enough for the next paper, involving " economical " principles of some importance, of which, for theme, here is a sentence, which I do not care to translate, for it would sound iSO MUNEBA PULVEBIB. harsh in English,* though, truly, it is one of the tenderest ever uttered by man ; which may be meditated over, or rather through, in the meanv?hile, by any one who will take the pains : — itrrh, oiira Kol aSe\iphs, irav tij avT$ /iii iirurTd/ievos 4yX^V XfiV"^"') Cvi^^" iari ; [* My way now, Is to say ttings plainly, if I can, whether they sovmd harsh or not ; — this is the translation — " Is it possible, then, that as a horse is only a mischief to any one who attempts to use him without knowing how, so also our brother, if we attempt to use him without knowing how, may be a mischief to us f "] MUNEBA PULrEBIS. l8l CHAPTER V. GOVEENMENT. 106. It remains for us, as I stated in the close of the last chapter, to examine first the principles of government in general, and then those of the government of the Poor by the Eich. The government of a state consists in its customs, lawB, and councils, and their enforcementa I. Customs. As one person primarily differs from another by finenesB of nature, and, secondarily, by fineness of training, so also, a polite nation differs from a savage one, first, by the refine- ment of its nature, and secondly by the delicacy of its cus- toms. In the completeness of custom, which is the nation's self- government, there are three stages — first, fineness in method of doing or of being ; — called the manner or moral of acts ; secondly, firmness in holding such method after adoption, so that it shall become a habit in the character : 'i. e., a constant " having " or " behaving ; " and, lastly, ethical power in per- formance and endurance, which is the skill following on habit, and the ease reached by frequency of right doing. The sensibility of the nation is indicated by the fineness of its customs ; its courage, continence, and self-respect by its persistence in them. * By sensibihty I mean its natural perception of beauty, fitness, and rightness ; or of what is lovely, decent, and just : faculties dependent much on race, and the primal signs of fine breeding in man ; but cultivable also by education, and necessarily perishing without it. True education has, indeed, no other function than the development of these 182 MUNERA PULVERI8. faculties, and of the relative will. It has been the great erroi of modern intelligence to mistake science for education. You do not educate a man by telling him what he knew not, but by making him what he was not. And making him what he wiU remain for ever : for no wash of weeds will bring back the faded purple. And ia that dyeing there are two processes — first, the cleansing and wringing-out, which is the baptism with water ; and then the infusing of the blue and scarlet colours, gentleness and justice, which is the baptism with fire. 107.* The customs and manners of a sensitive and highly- trained race are always Vital : that is to say, they are orderly manifestations of intense life, like the habitual action of the fingers of a musician. The customs and manners of a vile and rude race, on the contrary, are conditions of decay : they are not, properly speaking, habits, but incrustations ; not re- straints, or forms, of life ; but gangrenes, noisome, and the beginnings of death. And generally, so far as custom attaches itself to indolence instead of action, and to prejudice instead of perception, it takes this deadly character, so that thus Custom hangs upon us with a weight Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life. But that weight, if it become impetus, (living instead of dead weight) "is just what gives value to custom, when it works vyith life, instead of against it. 108. The high ethical training of a nation implies perfect Grace, Pitifuhiess, and Peace; it is irreconcilably inconsistent with filthy or mechanical employments, — with the desire of money, — and with mental states of anxiety, jealousy, or in- difference to pain. The present insensibility of the upper classes of Europe to the surrounding aspects of suffering, uncleanness, and crime, binds them not only into one responsi- bility with the sin, but into one dishonour with the foulness, [* Think over this paragraph carefully; it should have been much expanded to be quite intelligible ; but it contains all that I want It to contain.] MDNBRA PULVSBIS. 183 whicli rot at their thresholds. The crimes daily recorded in the poUce-courts of London and Paris (and much more those which are wnrecorded) are a disgrace to the whole body poli- tic ; * they are, as in the body natural, stains of disease on a face of delicate skin, making the dehcacy itself frightful. Similarly, the filth and poverty permitted or ignored in the midst of us are as dishonourable to the whole social body, as in the body natural it is to wash the face, but leave the hands and feet f oid. Christ's way is the only true one : begin at the feet ; the face will take care of itself. 109. Tet, since necessarily, in the frame of a nation, noth- ing but the head can be of gold, and the feet, for the work they have to do, must be part of iron, part of clay ; — foul or mechanical work is always reduced by a noble race to the minimum in quantity ; and, even then, performed and en- dured, not without sense of degradation, as a fine temper is wounded by the sight of the lower offices of the body. The highest conditions of human society reached hitherto have cast such work to slaves ; but supposing slavery of a pohti- cally defined kind to be done away with, mechanical and foul employment must, in all highly organized states, take the as- pect either of punishment or probation. All criminals should at once be set to the most dangerous and painful forms of it, especially to work in mines and at furnaces, f so as to reheve * "The ordinary brute, who flourishes in the very centre of ornate life, tells us of unknown depths on the verge of which we totter, being bound to thank our stars every day we live that there is not a general outbreak, and a revolt from the yoke of civilization." — Tim^s leader, Dec. 35, 1862. Admitting that our stars are to be thanked for our safety, whom are we to thank for the danger ? f Our politicians, even the best of them, regard only the distress caused by ihe failure of mechanical labour. The degradation caused by its excess is a far more serious subject of thought, and of future fear. I shall examine this part of our subject at length hereafter. There can hardly be any doubt, at present, cast on the truth of the above passages, as all the great thinkers are unanimous on the matter. Plato's words are terrific in their scorn and pity whenever he touches on the mechan- ical arts. He calls the men employed in them not even human, but partially and diminutively human, "ai'dfit^TrtiTxai," and opposes such work to noble occupations, not merely as prison is opposed to freedom 184 MUNERA PULVEBI8. the innocent population as far as possible : of merely rougli (not mechanical) manual labour, especially agricultural, a large portion should he done by the upper classes ; — bodily health, and sufficient contrast and repose for the mental functions, being un- attainable without it ; what necessarily inferior labour remains to be done, as especially in manufactures, should, and always will, when the relations of society are reverent and harmoni- ous, fall to the lot of those who, for the time, are fit for noth- ing better. For as, whatever the perfectness of the educa- tional system, there must remain infinite differences between the natures and capacities of men ; and these differing natures are generally rangeable under the two qualities of lordly, (or tending towards rule, construction, and harmony), and servUe (or tending towards misrule, destruction, and discord) ; and, but as a convict's dishonoured prison is to the temple (escape from them being like that of a criminal to the sanctuary) ; and the destruction caused by them being of soul no less than body. — Rep. vi. 9. Corapare Laws, V. 11. Xenophon dwells on the evil of occupations at the fur- nace and especially their ' ' atrxo^i", want of leisure. " — Econ. t 4. (Modern England, with all its pride of education, has lost that first sense of the word "school ;" and till it recover that, it will find no other rightly.) His word for the harm to the soul is to " break " it, as we say of the heart. — Econ. i. 6. And herein, also, is the root of the scorn, otherwise apparently most strange and cruel, with which Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare always speak of the populace ; for it is entirely true that, in great states, the lower orders are low by nature as well as by task, being precisely that part of the commonwealth which has been thrust down for its coarseness or unworthiness (by coarseness I mean especially insensibility and irreverence — the "profane" of Horace); and when this ceases to be so, and the corruption and profanity are in the higher instead of the lower orders, there arises, first, helpless confu- sion , then, if the lower classes deserve power, ensues swift revolution, and they get it ; but if neither the populace nor their rulers deserve it, there follows mere darkness and dissolution, till, out of the putrid ele- ments, some new capacity of order rises, like grass on a grave ; if not, there is no more hope, nor shadow of turning, for that nation. Atropoa has her way with it. So that the law of national health is like that of a great lake or sea, in perfect but slow circulation, letting the dregs fall continually to the lowest place, and the clear water rise ; yet so as that there shall be no neglect of the lower orders, but perfect supervision and sympathy, go that if one member suffer, all members shall suifer with it. MUNBRA PULVEBI8. 185 siBce the lordly part is only in a state of profitableness while ruling, and the servile only in a state of redeemableness while serving, the whole health of the state depends on the mani- fest separation of these two elements of its mind ; for, if the servile part be not separated and rendered visible in service, it mixes with, and corrupts, the entire body of the state ; and if the lordly part be not distinguished, and set to rule, it is crushed and lost, being turned to no account, so that the rarest qualities of the nation are all given to it in vain.* n. Laws. 110. These are the definitions and bonds of custom, or of what the nation desires should become custom. Law is either archie, f (of direction), meristic, (of division), or critic, (of judgment). Archie law is that of appointment and precept : it defines what is and is not to be dcme. Meristic law is that of balance and distribution : it defines what is and is not to be possessed. Critic law is that of discernment and award : it defines what is and is not to be suffered. 111. A. Abchic Law. If we choose to unite the laws of precept and distribution under the head of " statutes," all law ' " o\lyris, Ko! SaAois yiyyo/icvris." (Little, and that little born in vain.) The bitter sentence never was so true as at this day. [f This following note is a mere cluster of memoranda, but I keep it t)i reference. ] Thetic, or Thesmio, would perhaps be a better term than archie ; but liable to be confused with some which we shall want relating to Theoria. The administrators of the three great divisions of law are severally Archons Merists, and Dioasts. The Archons are the true princes, or beginners of things ; or leaders (as of an orchestra). The Merists are properly the Domini, or Lords of houses and nations. The Dicasts, properly, the judges, and that with Olympian justice, which reaches to heaven and hell. The violation of archie law is aiiapria (error), itovr\pia (failure), or TtK-nnfiiXem (discord). The violation of mer- istic law is 4vo/ii'a (iniquity). The violation of critic law is aSiKia (injury) Iniquity is the central generic term ; for all law is, fatal ; it is the divi- sion to men of their fate ; as the fold of their pasture, it is v6iios ; as the assigning of their portion, jiolpa. ISO MUNERA PtTLTERIS. is simply either of statute or judgment ; that is, first the es- tablishment of ordinance, and, secondly, the assignment of the reward, or penalty, due to its observance or violation. To some extent these two forms of law must be associated, and, with every ordinance, the penalty of disobedience to it be also determined. But since the degrees and guilt of diso- bedience vary, the determination of due reward and punish- ment must be modified by discernment of special fact, which is peculiarly the office of the judge, as distinguished from that of the lawgiver and law-sustainer, or king ; not but that the two offices are always theoretically, and in early stages, or limited numbers, of society, are often practically, united in the same person or persons. 112. Also, it is necessary to keep clearly in view the dis- tinction between these two kinds of law, because the possible range of law is wider in proportion to their separation. There are many points of conduct respecting which the nation may wisely express its vrilll by a written precept or resolve, yet not enforce it by penalty : * and the expedient degree of penalty is always quite a separate consideration from the expedience of the statute ; for the statute may often be better enforced by mercy than severity, and is also easier in the bearing, and less likely to be abrogated. Farther, laws of precept have reference especially to youth, and concern themselves vrith training ; but laws of judgment to manhood, and concern themselves with remedy and reward. There is a highly curi- ous feeling in the EngUsh mind against educational law : we think no man's liberty should be interfered with till he has done irrevocable wrong ; whereas it is then just too late for the only gracious and kingly interference, which is to hinder him from doing it. Make your educational laws strict, and [* This is the only sentence which, in revising these essays, I am now inclined to question ; but the point is one of extreme difficulty. There might be a law, for instance, of curfew, that candles should be put out, unless for necessary service, at such and such an hour, the idea of " necessary service " being quite indefinable, and no penalty possible ; yet there would be a distinct consciousness of illegal conduct in young ladies' minds who danced by candlelight till dawn.] MUNBBA PULVEBIS. 187 your criminal ones may be gentle ; but, leave youth its liberty and you wiU have to dig dungeons for age. And it is good for a man that he " wear the yoke in his youth : " for the reins may then be of silken thread ; and with sweet chime of silver bells at the bridle ; but, for the captivity of age, you must forge the iron fetter, and cast the passing beU. 113. Since no law can be, in a final or true sense, estab- lished, but by right, (all unjust laws involving the ultimate necessity of their own abrogation), the law-giving can only become a law-sustaining power in so far as it is Royal, or "right doing;" — in so far, that is, as it rules, not mis- rules, and orders, not dis-orders, the things submitted to it. Throned on this rock of justice, the kingly power becomes established and establishing ; " Oelo's," or divine, and, there- fore, it is literally true that no iniler can err, so long as he is a ruler, or ap^cuv oiSets afiapTavei Tore orav a.p)(ti>v y ; perverted by careless thought, which has cost the world somewhat, into — " the king can do no wrong." 114. B. Mebistic Law,* or that of the tenure of property, first determines what every individual possesses by right, and secures it to him ; and what he possesses by wrong, and de- prives him of it. But it has a far higher provisory function : it determines what every man should possess, and puts it within his reach on due conditions ; and what he should not possess, and puts this out of his reach, conclusively. 115. Every article of human wealth has certain conditions attached to its merited possession ; when these are unob- served, possession becomes rapine. And the object of meris- tic law is not only to secure to every man .his rightful share (the share, that is, which he has worked for, produced, or re- ceived by gift from a rightful owner), but to enforce the due conditions of possession, as far as law may conveniently reach ; for instance, that land shall not be wantonly allowed to run to waste, that streams shall not be poisoned by the persona through whose properties they pass, nor air be rendered un- [* Read this and the next paragraph with attention ; they contain clear statements, which I cannot mend, oil things most necessary.] 188 MUNEBA PVLVERI8. wholesome beyond given limits. Laws of this kind exist al ready in rudimentary degree, but need large development : the just laws respecting the possession of works of art have not hitherto been so much as conceived, and the daily loss of national wealth, and of its use, in this respect, is quite incal- culable. And these laws need revision quite as much respect- ing property in national as in private hands. For instance : the pubhc are under a vague impression that, because they have paid for the contents of the British Museum, every one has an equal right to see and to handle them. But the pub- lic have similarly paid for the contents of Woolwich arsenal > yet do not expect free access to it, or handling of its contents. The British Museum is neither a free circulating library, nor a free school : it is a place for the safe preservation, and ex- hibition on due occasion, of unique books, unique objects of natural history, and unique works of art ; its books can no more be used by everybody than its coins can be handled, or its statues cast. There ought to be free libraries in every quarter of London, vdth large and complete reading-rooms attached ; so also free educational museums should be open in every quarter of London, all day long, until late at night, well lighted, well catalogued, and rich in contents both of art and natural history. But neither the British Museum nor National Gallery is a school ; they are treasuries ; and both should be severely restricted in access and in use. Unless some order of this kind is made, and that soon, for the MSS. department of the Museum, (its superintendents have sorrow- fully told me this, and repeatedly), the best MSS. in the col- lection will be destroyed, irretrievably, by the careless and continual handling to which they are now subjected. Finally, in certain conditions of a nation's progress, laws limiting accumulation of any kind of property may be found expedient. 116. C. Ckitio Law determines questions of injury, and assigns due rewards and punishments to conduct. Two curious economical questions arise laterally with re- spect to this branch of law, namely, the cost of crime, and MUNERA PTfLVEBia. 189 the cost of judgment. The cost of crime is endured by na- tions ignorantly, that expense being nowhere stated in their budgets ; the cost of judgment, patiently, (provided only it can be had pure for the money), because the science, or perhaps we ought rather to say the art, of law, is felt to found a noble profession and discipline ; so that civihzed nations are usually glad that a number of persons should be supported by exer- cise in oratory and analysis. But it has not yet been calcu- lated what the practical value might have been, in other di- rections, of the intelligence now occupied in deciding, through courses of years, what might have been decided as justly, had the date of judgment been fixed, in as many hours. Imagine cme half of the funds which any great nation devotes to dis- pute by law, appUed to the determination of physical ques- tions in medicine, agriculture, and theoretic science ; and calculate the probable results within the next ten years ! I say nothing yet of the more deadly, more lamentable loss, involved in the use of purchased, instead of personal, justice . — " £TraKT(0 Trap' aXKwv — aTTOpta oiKeiOiv." 117. In order to true analysis of critic law, we must under- stand the real meaning of the word " injury." We commonly understand by it, any kind of harm done by one man to another ; but we do not define the idea of harm : sometimes we limit it to the harm which the sufferer is con- scious of ; whereas much the worst injuries are those he is wnconscious of ; and, at other times, we Umit the idea to vio- lence, or restraint ; whereas much the worse forms of injury are to be accomplished by indolence, and the withdrawal of restraint. 118. " Injury " is then simply the refusal, or violation of, any man's right or claim upon his feUows : which claim, much talked of in modern times, under the term "right," is mainly resolvable into two branches : a man's claim not to be hin- dered from doing what he should ; and his claim to be hin- dered from doing what he should not ; these two forms of hindrance being intensified by reward, help, and fortune, or Pors, on one side, and by punishment, impediment, and even final arrest, or Mors, on the other. 190 MUNEBA PULVEBI8. 119. Now, in order to a man's obtaining these two rights it is clearly needful that the worth of him should be approxi- mately known ; aa well as the want of worth, which has, un- happily, been usually the principal subject of study for critic law, careful hitherto only to mark degrees of de-merit, instead of merit ; — assigning, indeed, to the Deficiencies (not always alas ! even to these) just estimate, fine, or penalty ; but tc the .^fificiencies, on the other side, which are by much the more interesting, as well as the only profitable part of its subject, assigning neither estimate nor aid. 120. Now, it is in this higher and perfect function of critic law, enabling instead of cZisabHng, that it becomes truly Kingly, instead of Draconic: (what Providence gave the great, wrathful legislator his name ?) : that is, it becomes the law of man and of Ufa, instead of the law of the worm and of death — both of these laws being set in changeless poise one against another, and the enforcement of both being the eternal function of the lawgiver, and true claim of every living soul : such claim being indeed strong to be mercifully hindered, and even, if need be, abolished, when longer existence means only deeper destruction, but stronger still to be mercifully helped, and recreated, when longer existence and new crea- tion mean nobler life. So that reward and punishment will be found to resolve themselves mainly* into help and hin- drance ; and these again will issue naturally from true recog- nition of deserving, and the just reverence and just wrath which foUow instinctively on such recognition. 121. I say, "follow," but, in reality, they are part of the recognition. Reverence is as instinctive as anger ; — both of them instant on true vision : it is sight and understanding that we have to teach, and these are reverence. Make a man perceive worth, and ia its reflection he sees his own relative unworth, and worships thereupon iaevitably, not with stiff courtesy, but rejoicingly, passionately, and, best of all, rest- fully : for the inner capacity of awe and love is infinite in [* Mainly ; not altogether. Conclusive reward of high virtue ia loving and crowning, not helping ; and conclusive punishment of deep Yice is hating and crushing, not merely hindering.] MVNBBA PXJLVEBI8. 191 man •, and only in finding these, can we find peace. And the oommon insolences and petulances of the people, and their talk of equaUty, are not uTeverence in them in the least, but mere blindness, stupefaction, and fog in the brains,* the first sign of any cleansing away of which is, that they gain some power of discerning, and some patience in submitting to, their true counsellors and governors. In the mode of such discernment consists the real " constitution '' of the state, more than in the titles or offices of the discerned person ; for it is no matter, save in degree of mischief, to what office a man is appointed, if he cannot fulfil it. 122. Hr. Government by Council. This is the determination, by living authority, of the na- tional conduct to be observed under existing circumstances ; and the modification or enlargement, abrogation or enforce- ment, of the code of national law according to present needs or purposes. This government is necessarily always by coun- cil, for though the authority of it may be vested in one per- son, that person cannot form any opinion on a matter of pub- lic interest but by (voluntarily or involuntarily) submitting himself to the influence of others. This goverment is always twofold — visible and invisible. The visible government is that which nominally carries on the national business ; determines its foreign relations, raises taxes, levies soldiers, orders war or peace, and otherwise be- comes the arbiter of the national fortune. The invisible government is that exercised by all energetic and intelligent men, each in his sphere, regulating the inner will and secret ways of the people, essentially forming its character, and pre- paring its fate. Visible governments are the toys of some nations, the dis- eases of others, the harness of some, the burdens of more, • Compare Chaucer's " villany " (clowniahnesB). Full foul and chorlislie seemed gh<, And eke villanous for to be, And little coulde of nortura To worsliip any creature. 193 MUNEBA PULVEBIB. the necessity of all. Sometimes their career is quite distinct from that of the people, and to write it, as the national his- tory, is as if one should number the accidents which befall a man's weapons and wardrobe, and call the list his biography. Nevertheless, a truly noble and wise nation necessarily has a noble and wise visible government, for its wisdom issues in that conclusively. 123. Visible governments are, in their agencies, capable of three pure forms, and of no more than three. They are either monarchies, where the authority is vested in one person ; oligarchies, when it is vested in a minority ; or democracies, when vested in a majority. But these three forms are not only, in practice, variously limited and combined, but capable of infinite difference in character and use, receiving specific names according to their variations ; which names, being nowise agreed upon, nor con- sistently used, either in thought or writing, no man can at ■ present tell, in speaking of any kind of government, whether he is understood ; nor, in hearing, whether he understanda Thus we usually call a just government by one person a mon- archy, and an unjust or cruel one, a tyranny : this might be reasonable if it had reference to the divinity of true govern- ment ; but to limit the term "oligarchy" to government by a few rich people, and to call government by a few wise or noble people "aristocracy," is evidently absurd, unless it were proved that rich people never could be wise, or noble people rich ; and farther absurd, because there are other distinctions in character, as well as riches or wisdom (greater purity of race, or strength of purpose, for instance), which may give the power of government to the few. So that if we had to give names to every group or kind of minority, we should have verbiage enough. But there is only one right name— "oligarchy." 124. So also the terms " republic " and " democracy " * are [* I leave this paragraph, in every syllable, as it was written, during the rage of the American war ; it was meant to refer, however, chiefly to the Northerns ; what modifications its hot and partial terms require I (fill give in another place : let it gtand ners as it stood,] MUNEBA PULVERIS. IBS confused, especially in modem use ; and both of them are liable to every sort of misconception. A republic means, properly, a poUty in which the state, with its all, is at every man's service, and every man, with his all, at the state's ser- vice — (people are apt to lose sight of the last condition), but its government may nevertheless be oligarchic (consular, or decemviral, for instance), or monarchic (dictatorial). But a democracy means a state in which the government rests directly with the majority of the citizens. And both these conditions have been judged only by such accidents and aspects of them as each of us has had experience of ; and sometimes both have been confused with anarchy, as it is the fashion at present to talk of the " failure of republican insti- tutions in America,'' when there has never yet been in America any such thing as an institution, but only defiance of institu- tion ; neither any such thing as a res-publica, but only a mul- titudinous res-privata ; every man for himself. It is not re- publicanism which fails now in America ; it is your model science of political economy, brought to its perfect practice. There you may see competition, and the " law of demand and supply '' (especially in paper), in beautiful and unhindered operation.* Lust of wealth, and trust in it ; vulgar faith in magnitude and multitude, instead of nobleness ; besides that faith natural to backwoodsmen — "lucum ligna,"f — perpetual self-contemplation, issuing in passionate vanity ; total igno- rance of the finer and higher arts, and of all that they teach and bestow ; and the discontent of energetic minds unoccu- pied, frantic with hope of uncomprehended change, and prog- ress they know not whither ; J — these are the things that * Supply and demand ! Alas ! for what noble work was there ever any audible "demand" in that poor sense (Past and Present) ? Nay, the demand is not loud, even for ignoble work. Bee " Average Earnings of Betty Taylor," in Times of 4th February of this year [1863] : " Worked from Monday morning at 8 A.M. to Friday night at 5.30 p.m. for 1». 5i(?.* — Laisaez favre. [This kind of slavery finds no Abolltionista that I hear of.] [f " That the sacred grove is nothing but logs."] % Ames, by report of Waldo Emerson, says " that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will gpHjetiroes str Jkts on a rock, and 194 MUNEBA PUL7ERI8. have " failed " in America ; and yet not altogether failed — it is not collapse, but coUision ; the greatest railroad accident on record, with fire caught from the furnace, and Catiline's quenching " non aqui, sed ruind." * But I see not, in any of our talk of them, justice enough done to their erratic strength of purpose, nor any estimate taken of the strength of endur- ance of domestic sorrow, in what their women and children suppose a righteous cause. And out of that endurance and suffering, its own fruit will be bom with time ; \not abolition of slavery, however. See § 130.] and Carlyle's prophecy of them (June, 1850), as it has now come true in the first clause, will, in the last : — " America, too, wiU find that caucuses, divisionaUsts, stump- oratory, and speeches to Buncombe will not carry men to the immortal gods ; that the Washington Congress, and constitu- tional battle of Kilkenny cats is there, as here, naught for such objects ; quite incompetent for such ; and, in fine, that said sublime constitutional arrangement will require to be (with terrible throes, and travail such as few expect yet) re- modelled, abridged, extended, suppressed, torn asunder, put together again — not without heroic labour and effort, quite other than that of the stump-orator and the revival preacher, one day." 125.f Understand, then, once for all, that no form of gov- ernment, provided it be a government at all, is, as such, to be either condemned or praised, or contested for in anyvnse, but go to the bottom ; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but tlien your feet are always in the water." Yes, that is comfortable ; and though your raft cannot sink (being too worthless for that), it may go to pieces, I suppose, when the four winds (your only pilots) steer competitively from its four corners, and carry it, iis o-kaipivhs Bapc'r)s ii)aip i,KivSas, and then more than your feet will be in the water. [* "Not with water, but with ruin." The worst ruin being that which the Americans chiefly boast of. They sent all their best and houestest youths, Harvard University men and the like, to that accursed war ; got them nearly all shot ; wrote pretty biographies (to the ages of 17, 18, 19) and epitaphs for them ; and so, having washed all the salt out of the nation in blood, left themselves to putrefactien, and th« morality of New Zork.] [f This paragraph contains th« gist of all that prewde.] MUNERA PULVBRIS. 195 t)y fools. But all forms of government are good just so fai as they attain this one vital necessity of policy — that the wise and kind, few or many, shall govern the unwise and unkind ; and they are evil so far as they miss of this, or reverse it. Not does the form, in any case, signify one whit, but iia firmness^ and adaptation to the need ; for if there be many foolish per- sons in a state, and few wise, then it is good that the few govern ; and if there be many wise, and few foolish, then it is good that the many govern ; and if many be wise, yet one wiser, then it is good that one should govern ; and so on. Thus, we may have "the ant's republic, and the realm of bees," both good in their kind ; one for groping, and the other for building ; and nobler still, for flying ; — the Ducal monarchy * of those Intelligent of seasons, that set forth The aery caravan, high over seas. 126. Nor need we want examples, among the inferior creat- ures, of dissoluteness, as well as resoluteness, in government. I once saw democracy finely illustrated by the beetles of North Switzerland, who by universal suffrage, and elytric ac- clamation, one May twilight, carried it, that they would fly over the Lake of Zug ; and flew short, to the great disfigure- ment of the Lake of Zug, — KavOapav Xifirjv — over some leagues square, and to the close of the cockchafer democracy for that year. Then, for tyranny, the old fable of the frogs and the stork finely touches one form of it ; but truth wiU image it more closely than fable, for tyranny is not complete when it is only over the idle, but when it is over the laborious and the blind. This description of pelicans and climbing perch, which I find quoted in one of our popular natural histories, out of Sir Emerson Tennant's Ceylon, comes as near as may be to the true image of the thing : — [* Whenever you are puzzled by any apparently mistaken use of words in these essays, take your dictionary, remembering I had to fix terms, as well as principles. A Duke is a " dux " or " leader ; " the flying wedge of cranes is under a "ducal monarch" — a very different personage from a queen-bee. The Venetians, with a beautiful instinct, gave ths name to their King of the Sea. ] 196 MVNERA PULVERI8. " Heavy rains came on, and as we stood on the higb ground, we observed a pelican on the margin of the shallow pool gorging himself; our people went towards him, and raised a cry of ' Fish, fish ! ' We hurried down, and found numbers of fish struggling upward through the grass, in the rills formed by the trickling of the rain. There was scarcely water to cover them, but nevertheless they made rapid prog- ress up the bank, on which our followers collected about two baskets of them. They were forcing their way up the knoll, and had they not been interrupted, first by the pelican, and afterwards by ourselves, they would in a few minutes have gained the highest point, and descended on the other side into a pool which formed another portion of the tank. In going this distance, however, they must have used muscu- lar exertion enough to have taken them half a mile on level ground ; for at these places all the cattle and wild animals of the neighbourhood had latterly come to drink, so that the surface was everywhere indented with footmarks, in addition to the cracks in the surrounding baked mud, into which the fish tumbled in their progress. In those holes, which were deep, and the sides perpendicular, they remained to die, and were carried off by kites and crows." * 127. But whether governments be bad or good, one gen- eral disadvantage seems to attach to them in modem times — that they are all costly, f This, however, is not essentially the fault of the governments. If nations choose to play at war, they will always find their governments wiUing to lead the game, and soon coming under that term of Aristophanes, " (cairrjXot a.(nt&, and cliangeful. lago and lachimo have evident!/ 202 MUNEBA PULVEBI8. respectively the spirits of faithful and imaginative labour, opposed to rebellious, hurtful and slavish labour. Prospero ("for hope "), a true governor, is opposed to Sycorax, the mother of slavery, her name " Swine-raven," indicating at once brutality and deathfulness ; hence the lice — " As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed, with raten^a feather,'" — &o. For aU these dreams of Shakespeare, as those of true and strong men must be, are " tfiavTacr/JLaTa 6eia, Koi crKiai Toil' ov- Tojv " — divine phantasms, and shadows of things that are. We hardly tell our children, wiDingly, a fable with no purport in it ; yet we think God sends his best messengers only to sing fairy tales to us, fond and empty. The Tempest is just like a grotesque in a rich missal, " clasped where paynims pray." Ariel is the spirit of generous and free-hearted service, in early stages of human society oppressed by ignorance and wild tyr- anny : venting groans as fast as mill-wheels strike ; in ship- wreck of states, dreadful ; so that " all but mariners plunge ia the brine, and quit the vessel, then all afire with me," yet hav- ing in itself the wiU and sweetness of truest peace, whence that is especially called "Ariel's" song, "Come unto these yellow sands, and there, take hands," " courtesied when you have, and kissed, the wild waves whist : " (mind, it is " cor- tesia," not " curtsey,") and read " quiet " for " whist," if you want the full sense. Then you may indeed foot it featly, and fcweet spirits bear the burden for you — with watch in the night, and call in early morning. The vis viva in elemental transformation follows- — " Full fathom five thy father Ues, of his bones are coral made." Then, giving rest after labour, it "fetches dew from the still vext Bermoothes, and, with a charm joined to their suffered labour, leaves men asleep." Snatching away the feast of the cruel, it seems to them as a harpy ; followed by the utterly vile, who cannot see it in any shape, but to whom it is the picture of nobody, it still gives shrill harmony to their false and mocking catch, " Thought is the same root— prohably the Spanish lago, Jacob, "the supplanter," Leonatus, and other such names, are interpreted, or played with, in the plays themselves. For the interpretation of Sycorax, and reference to her raven's feather, I am indebted to Mr. John R. Wise. MUNERA PULVBBm. 203 free ; " but leads tliem into briers and foul places, and at last hoUas the hounds upon them. Minister of fate against the great criminal, it joins itself with the "incensed seas and shores " — the sword that layeth at it cannot hold, anri may " with bemocked-at stabs as soon kill the stUl-closing waters, as diminish one dowle that is in its plume." As the guide and aid of true love, it is always called by Prospero " fine " (the French " fine," not the English), or " dehcate " — another long note would be needed to explain aU the meaning in this word. Lastly, its work done, and war, it resolves itself into the ele- ments. The intense significance of the last song, " Where the bee sucks," I will examine in its due place. The types of slavery in Caliban are more palpable, and need not be dwelt on now : though I wiU notice them also, sever- ally, in their proper places ; — the heart of his slavery is in his worship : " That's a brave god, and bears celestial — ^liquor." But, in illustration of the sense in which the Latin " benig- nus " and " maUgnus " are to be coupled with Eleutheria and Douleia, note that Caliban's torment is always the physical re- flection of his own nature — " cramps " and " side stiches that shall pen thy breath up ; thou shalt be pinched, as thick as honeycombs : " the whole nature of slavery being one cramp and cretinous contraction. Fancy this of Ariel ! You may fetter him, but you set no mark on him ; you may put him to hard work and far journey, but you cannot give him a cramp. 135. I should dwell, even in these prefatory papers, at more length on this subject of slavery, had not all I would say been said already, in vain, (not, as I hope, ultimately in vain), by Carlyle, in the first of the Latter-day Pamphlets, which I com- mend to the reader's gravest reading ; together with that as much neglected, and still more immediately needed, on model prisons, and with the great chapter on " Permanence " (fifth of the last section of " Past and Present "), which sums what is knovm, and foreshadows, or rather forelights, all that is to be learned of National Discipline. I have only here farther to examine the nature of one world-wide and everlasting form of slavery, wholesome in use, as deadly in abuse ; — the service oJ ttie rich by the poor. 204 MUNEBA PULVEB1& CHAPTEE VL MASTERSHIP. 136. As in all previous discussions of our subject, we must study the relation of the commanding rich to the obeying poor in its simplest elements, in order to reach its first prin- ciples. The simplest state of it, then, is this : * a wise and provi- dent person works much, consumes httle, and lays by a store ; an improvident person works little, consumes all his produce, and lays by no store. Accident interrupts the daily work, or renders it less productive ; the idle person must then starve, or be supported by the provident one, who, having him thus at his mercy, may either refuse to maintain him altogether, or, which will evidently be more to his own interest, say to him, " I will maintain you, indeed, but you shall now work bard, instead of indolently, and instead of being allowed to lay by what you save, as you might have done, had you re- mained independent, I wUl take all the surplus. You would not lay it up for yourself ; it is wholly your own faiilt that has thrown you into my power, and I will force you to work, or starve ; yet you shall have no profit of your work, only your daUy bread for it ; [and competition shall determine how much of thatf]." This mode of treatment has now be- * In the present general examination, I concede so much to ordinarj' economists as to ignore all innocent poverty. I adapt my reasoning, for once, to the modern English practical mind, by assuming poverty to be always criminal; the conceivable exceptions we will examine after- wards. rf I have no terms of English, and can find none in Greek nor Latin, nor in any other strong language known to me, contemptuous enough to attach to the bestial idiotism of the modern theory that wages are to be measured by competition.] MUNEBA PULVEBI8. 205 come BO universal that it is supposed to be the only natural — nay, the only possible one ; and the market wages are calmly defined by economist! as " th« sum which will maintain the labourer." 137. The power of the proTident person to do this is only checked by the correlative power of some neighbour of simi- larly frugal habits, who says to the labourer — " I wUl give you a little more than this other provident person : come and work for me." The power of the provident over the improvident depends thus, primarily, on their relative numbers ; secondarily, on the modes of agreement of the adverse parties with each other. The accidental level of wages is a variable function of the num- ber of provident and idle persons in the world, of the enmity 1 )etween them as classes, and of the agreement between those of the same class. It depends, from beginning to end, on moral conditions. 138. Supposing the rich to be entirely selfish, it is always for their interest that the poor should he as numerous as they can employ, and restrain. For, granting that the entire population is no larger than the ground can easily maintain — that the classes are stringently divided — and that there is sense or strength of hand enough with the rich to secure obedience ; then, Lf nine-tenths of a nation are poor, the remaining tenth have the service of nine persons each ; * but, if eight-tenths are poor, only of four each ; if seven-tenths are poor, of two and a third each ; if six-tenths are poor, of one and a half each ; and if five-tenths are poor, of only one each. But, prac- tically, if the rich strive always to obtain more power over the poor, instead of to raise them — and if, on the other hand, the poor become continually more vicious and numerous, through neglect and oppression, — though the range of the power of * I say nothing yet of the quality of the servants, which, neverthe- less, is the gist of the business. Will you have Paul Veronese to paint your ceiling, or the plumber from over the way ? Both will work for the same money ; Paul, if anything, a little the cheaper of the two, if you keep him in gopd bumour ; only you have to (liscerii hjm flrst, whi?lj mil need eyei, 206 MUNERA rVLVEBIS. the rich increases, its tenure becomes less Secure ; until, at last, the measure of iniquity being full, revolution, civU war, or the subjection of the state to a healthier or stronger one, closes the moral corruption, and industrial disease.* 139. It is rarely, however, that things come to this extrem- ity. Kind persons among the rich, and wise among the poor, modify the connexion of the classes : the efforts made to raise and relieve on the one side, and the success of honest toil on the other, bind and blend the orders of society into the con- fused tissue of half-felt obligation, suUenly-rendered obedi- ence, and variously-directed, or mis-directed toil, which form the warp of daily hfe. But this great law rules all the wild design : that success (while society is guided by laws of com- petition) signifies always so much victory over your neighbour as to obtain the direction of his work, and to take the profits of it. This is the real source of all great riches. No man can become largely rich by his personal toil.f The work of his own hands, wisely directed, will indeed always maintain him- self and his family, and make fitting provision for his age. But it is only by the discovery of some method of taxing the la- hour of others that he can become opulent. Every increase Of his capital enables him to extend this taxation more widely ; that is, to invest larger funds in the maintenance of labourers, — to direct, accordingly, vaster and yet vaster masses of la- bour, and to appropriate its profits. 140. There is much confusion of idea on the subject of this aj^ropriation. It is, of course, the interest of the employer to disguise it from the persons employed ; and, for his own comfort and complacency, he often desires no less to disguise it from himself. And it is matter of much doubt with me, how far the foul and foolish arguments used habitually on this subject are indeed the honest expression of foUl and fool- [* I have not altered a syllable in these three paragraphs, 137, 138, 139, on revision ; Ijut have much italicised ; the principles stated being as vital, as they are little known.] f By his art he may ; but only when its produce, or the sight or hear- ing of it, becomes a subject of dispute, so as to enable the artist to ta4 the labour p£ multitudes highly, in exchange for his own. MUNEBA PULYEBIS. 207 ish convicticms ; — or rather (as I am sometimes forced to con- clude from the irritation with which they are advanced) are resolutely dishonest, wilful, and malicious sophisms, arranged so as to mask, to the last moment, the real laws of economy, and future duties of men. By taking a simple example, and working it thoroughly out, the subject may be rescued from aU but such determined misrepresentation. 141. Let us imagine a society of peasants, living on a river- shore, exposed to destructive inundation at somewhat extended intervals ; and that each peasant possesses of this good, but imperilled, ground, more than he needs to cultivate for im- mediate subsistence. We wiU assume farther (and with too great probability of justice), that the greater part of them in- dolently keep in tillage just as much land as supplies them with daily food ; — that they leave their children idle, and take no precautions against the rise of the stream. But one of them, (we will say but one, for the sake of greater clearness) culti-vates carefully all the ground of his estate ; makes his children work hard and healthily ; uses his spare time and theirs in building a rampart against the river ; and, at the end of somd years, has in his storehouses large reserves of food and clothing, — in his stables a well-tended breed of cattle, and aroimd his fields a wedge of wall against flood. The torrent rises at last — sweeps away the harvests, and half the cottages of the careless peasants, and leaves them destitute. They naturally come for help to the provident one, whose fields are unwasted, and whose granaries are full. He has the right to refuse it to them : no one disputes this right.* But he will probably not refuse it ; it is not his interest to do BO, even were he entirely selfish and cruel. The only ques- tion with him wUl be on what terms his aid is to be granted. 142. Clearly, not on terms of mere charity. To maintain bis neighbours in idleness would be not only his ruin, but theirs. He will require work from them, in exchange for their maintenance ; and, whether in kindness or cruelty, all [* Observe this ; the legal right to keep what you have worked for, and use it as you please, is the corner-stone of all economy : compar« the end of Chap. 11.] 208 MUNBBA PULVEBI8. the work tliey can give. Not now the three or four hours they were wont to spend on their own land, but the eight or ten hours they ought to have spent.* But how will he apply this labour ? The men are now his slaves ; — nothing less, and nothing more. On pain of starvation, he can force them to work in the manner, and to the end, he chooses. And it is by his wisdom in this choice that the worthiness of his mas- tership is proved, or its unworthiness. Evidently, he must first set them to bank out the water in some temporary way, and to get their ground cleansed and resown ; else, ia any case, their continued maintenance will be impossible. That done, and while he has stiU to feed them, suppose he makes them raise a secure rampart for their own ground against aU future flood, and rebuild their houses in safer places, with the best material they can find ; being allowed time out of their working hours to fetch such material from a distance. And for the food and clothing advanced, he takes security in land that as much shall be returned at a convenient period. 143. We may conceive this security to be redeemed, and the debt paid at the end of a few years. The prudent peas- ant has sustained no loss ; hut is no richer than he was, and has had all his trouble for nothing. But he has enriched his neighbours materially ; bettered their houses, secured their land, and rendered them, in worldly matters, equal to him- self. In all rational and final sense, he has been throughout their true Lord and King. 144. We will next trace his probable line of conduct, pre- suming his object to be exclusively the increase of his own fortune. After roughly recovering and cleansing the ground, he allows the ruined peasantry only to bmld huts upon it, such as he thinks protective enough from the weather to keep them in working health. The rest of their time he oc- cupies, first in pulling down, and rebuilding on a magnificent scale, his own house, and in adding large dependencies to it. This done, ia exchange for his continued supply of com, he [• I should now put the time of neceMiry labour rather under than over the third of the day.") MUNERA PULVERI8. 209 buys as much of Hs neighbours' land as he thinks he can Biiperintend the management of; and makes the former owners securely embank and protect the ceded portion. By this arrangement, he leaves to a certain number of the peas- antry only as much ground as will just maiataiu them in their existing numbers ; as the population increases, he takes the extra hands, who cannot be maintained on the narrowed es- tates, for his own servants ; employs some to cultivate the ground he has bought, giving them of its produce merely enough for subsistence ; with the surplus, which, under his energetic and careful superintendence, will be large, he main- tains a train of servants for state, and a body of workmen, whom he educates in ornamental arts. He now can splen- didly decorate his house, lay out its grounds magnificently, and richly supply his table, and that of his household and ret- inue. And thus, without any abuse of right, we should find established all the phenomena of poverty and riches, which (it is supposed necessarily) accompany modern civilization. In one part of the district, we should have xmhealthy land, mis- erable dwellings, and half-starved poor ; in another, a well- ordered estate, well-fed servants, and refined conditions of highly educated and luxurious life. 145. I have put the two cases in simpHcity, and to some extremity. But though in more complex and qualified opera- tion, ail the relations of society are but the expansion of these two typical sequences of conduct and result. I do not say, observe, that the first procedure is entirely recommendable ; or even entirely right ; still less, that the second is whoUy wrong. Servants, and artists, and splendour of habitation and retinue, have all their use, propriety, and office. But I am determined that the reader shall understand clearly what they cost ; and see that the condition of having them is the subjection to us of a certain number of imprudent or unfort- unate persons (or, it may be, more fortunate than their mas- ters), over whose destinies we exercise a boundless control. " Biches " mean eternally and essentially this ; and God send at last a time when those words of our best-reputed economist shall be true, and we shall iiideed " aU know what 210 MUNERA PULVERI8. it is to be rich ; " * that it ia to be slave-master over farthest earth, and over all ways and thoughts of men. Every opera- tive you employ is your true sei^ant : distant or near, sub- ject to your immediate orders, or ministering to your -widely- communicated caprice, — for the pay he stipulates, or the price he tempts, — aU are alike under this great dominion of the gold. The miUiner who makes the dress is as much a ser- vant (more so, in that she uses more intelligence in the ser- vice) as the maid who puts it on ; the carpenter who smooths the door, as the footman who opens it ; the tradesmen who supply the table, as the labourers and sailors who supply the tradesmen. Why speak of these lower services? Painters and singers (whether of note or rhyme,) jesters and story- tellers, moralists, historians, priests, — so far as these, in any degree, paint, or sing, or tell their tale, or charm their charm, or " perform '' their rite, for pay, — in so far, they are all slaves ; abject utterly, if the service be for pay only ; abject less and less in proportion to the degrees of love and of wis- dom which enter into their duty, or can enter into it, accord- iag as their function is to do the bidding and the work of a manly people ; — or to amuse, tempt, and deceive, a childish one. 146. There is always, ia such amusement and temptation, to a certain extent, a government of the rich by the poor, as of the poor by the rich ; but the latter is the prevailing and necessary one, and it consists, when it is honourable, in the collection of the profits of labour from those who would have misused them, and the administration of those profits for the service either of the same persons in future, or of others ; and when it is dishonourable, as is more frequently the case in modern times, it consists in the collection of the profits of labour from those who would have rightly used them, and their appropriation to the service of the collector himself. 147. The examination of these various modes of collection and use of riches will form the third branch of our future in- quiries ; but the key to the whole subject lies in the clear un- dierstanding of the difference between sehSsh and unselfish [* See Preface to Unio tJti) iMsi.] MUNERA PVLVSRIS. 211 expenditure. It is not easy, by any course of reasoning, ta enforce this on the generally unwilling hearer ; yet the defini- tion of unselfish expenditure is brief and simple. It is ex- penditure ■which, if you are a capitalist, does not pay you, but pays somebody else ; and if you are a consumer, does not please you, but pleases somebody else. Take one special in- stance, in further illustration of the general type given above. I did not invent that type, but spoke of a real river, and of real peasantry, the languid and sickly race which inhabits, or haunts — for they are often more like spectres than Hving men — the thorny desolation of the banks of the Arve ia Savoy. Some years ago, a society, formed at Geneva, offered to em- bank the river for the ground which would have been re- covered by the operation ; but the offer was refused by the (then Sardinian) government. The capitalists saw that this ex- penditure would have " paid " if the ground saved from the river was to be theirs. But if, when the offer that had this aspect of profit was refused, they had nevertheless persisted in the plan, and merely taking security for the return of their outlay, lent the funds for the work, and thus saved a whole race of human souls from perishing in a pestiferous fen (as, I presume, some among them would, at personal risk, have dragged any one drowning creature out of the current of the stream, and not expected' payment therefor), such expendi- ture would have precisely corresponded to the use of his power made, in the first instance, by our supposed richer peasant — it would have been the king's, of grace, instead of the usurer's, for gain. 148. " Impossible, absurd, Utopian ! " exclaim nine-tentha of the few readers whom these words may find. No, good reader, this is not JJtopian : but I will tell you what would have seemed, if we had not seen it, Utopian on the side of evil instead of good ; that ever men should have come to value their money so much more than their lives, that if you call upon them to become soldiers, and take chance of a bullet through their heart, and of wife and children being left desolate, for their pride's sake, they will do it gaily, without thinking twice ; but if you ask them, for their country's sake, 212 MUNBRA PULVEBIIS. to spend a hnndred pounds without security of getting back a hundred-and-five,* they -will laugh in your face. 14:9. Not but that also this game of life-giving and taking is, in the end, somewhat more costly than other forms of play might be. Eifle practice is, indeed, a not unhealthy pastime, find a feather on the top of the head is a pleasing appendage ; but whUe learning the stops and fingering of the sweet instru- ment, does no one ever calculate the cost of an overture ? What melody does Tityrus meditate on his tenderly spiral pipe ? The leaden seed of it, broad-cast, true conical " Dents de Lion " seed — needing less allowance for the wind than is usual with that kind of herb — what crop are you likely to have of it ? Suppose, instead of this volunteer marching and countermarchiQg, you were to do a little volunteer ploughing and counter-ploughing ? It is more difficult to do it straight : the dust of the earth, so disturbed, is more grateful than for merely rhythmic footsteps. Golden cups, also, given for good ploughing, would be more suitable in colour : (ruby glass, for the wine which " giveth his colour " on the ground, might be fitter for the rifle prize in ladies' hands). Or, conceive a little volunteer exercise with the spade, other than such as is needed * I have not hitherto touched on the subject of interest of money ; it is too complex, and must be reserved for its- proper place in the body of the work. The definition of interest (apart from compensation for risk) is, ' ' the exponent of the comfort of accomplished labour, separated from its power ; " the power being what is lent : and the French economists who have maintained the entire illegality of interest are wrong ; yet by no means so curiously or wildly wrong as the English and l<'rench ones opposed to them, whose opinions have been collected by Dr. WliewoU at page 41 of his Lectures ; it never seeming to occur to the mind of the compiler, any more than to the writers whom he quotes, that it is quite possible, and even (according to Jewish proverbj prudent, for men to hoard as ants and mice do, for use, not usury ; and lay by something for winter nights, in the expectation of rather sharing than lending the scrapings. My Savoyard squirrels would pass a pleasant time of it un- der the snow-laden pine-branches, if they always declined to economize because no one would pay them interest on nuts. [I leave this note as it stood : but, as I have above stated, should now side wholly with the French economists spoken of, in asserting the ab- solute illegality of interest] MUNERA PUZVEBta. 213 for moat and breastwork, or even for the burial of the fruit ol the leaden avena-seed, subject to the shriU Lemures' criti- cism — Wer Uat das Haus so sohleoht gebauet ? If you were to embank Lincolnshire more stoutly against the sea ? or strip the peat of Solway, or plant Plinlimmon moors with larch — then, in due season, some amateur reaping and threshing ? "Nay, we reap and thresh by steam, in these advanced days." I know it, my wise and economical friends. The stout arms God gave you to win your bread by, you would fain shoot your neighbours, and God's sweet singers with ; * then you invoke the fiends to your farm-service ; and — When young and old come forth to play On a sulphurous holiday, Tell how the darkling goblin sweat (His feast of cinders duly set), And, belching night, where breathed the mom. His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn That ten day-labourers could not end. 150. Going back to the matter in hand, we will press the example closer. On a green knoU above that plain of the * Compare Chaucer's feeling respecting birds (from Canace's falcon, to the nightingale, singing, "Domine, labia — "to the Lord of Love), with the usual modern British sentiments on this subject. Or eve» Cowley's ; — " What prince's choir of music can excel That which within this shade does dwell. To which we nothing pay, or give, They, like all. other poets, live ■% Without reward, or thanks for their obliging pains I -^ 'Tia w»ll if they bscoms not prey." Yes ; it lll&etter than well ; particularly since the seed sown by the way. side has been protected by the peculiar appropriation of part of the church- rates in our country parishes. See the remonstrance from a " Country Parson," in Tlie Times of June 4th (or 5th ; the letter is dated Juno 214 MUNERA PULVBRTS. Arve, between Cluse and Bonneville, there was, in the yeai 1860, a cottage, inhabited by a well-doing family — man and wife, three children, and the grandmother. I call it a cot- tage, but in truth, it was a large chimney on the ground, wide at the bottom, so that the family might Uve round the fire ; lighted by one small broken window, and entered by an un- closing door. The family, I say, was " well-doing ; " at least it was hopeful and cheerful ; the wife healthy, the children, for Savoyards, pretty and active, but the husband threatened with decline, from exposure under the cliffs of the Mont Vergi by day, and to draughts between every plank of his chimney in the frosty nights. " Why could he not plaster the chinks ? " asks the prac- tical reader. For the same reason that your child cannot wash its face and hands till you have washed them many a day for it, and will not wash them when it can, tiU you force it 151. I passed this cottage often in my walks, had its win- dow and door mended ; sometimes mended also a little the meal of sour bread and broth, and generally got kind greeting and smile from the face of young or old ; which greeting, this year, narrowed itself into the haU-recognizing stare of the elder child, and the old woman's tears ; for the father and mother were both dead, — one of sickness, the other of sorrow. It happened that I passed not alone, but with a companion, a practised English joiner, who, while these peo- ple were dying of cold, had been employed from six in the morning to six in the evening, for two months, in fitting, without naUs, the panels of a single door in a large house in London. Three days of his work taken, at the right time, from fastening the oak panels with useless precision, and ap- 3rd,) 1862 : — " I have heard at a vestry meeting a good deal of higgling over a few shillings' outlay in cleaning the church ; but I have never heard any dissatisfaction expressed on account of that part of the rate which is invested in 50 or 100 domng of birds' heads. " [If we could trace tha innermost of all eausta of modern war, ITje- lieve it would be found, not in th« avarice nor ambition of nations, but in the mere idleness of the upper classes. They have nothing to do but to teach the peasantry to kill each other.] MUNEHA PXTLVSRI8. 215 plied to fasten the larch timhers with decent strength, would have saved these Savoyards' lives. He would have been main- tained equally ; (I suppose him equally paid for his work by the owner of the greater house, only the work not consumed self- ishly on his own walls ;) and the two peasants, and eventually, probably their children, saved. 152. There are, therefore, — let me finally enforce, and leave with the reader, this broad conclusion, — three things to be considered in employing any poor person. It is not enough to give him employment. You must employ him first to produce useful things ; secondly, of the several (sup- pose equally useful) things he can equally well produce, you must set him to make that which will cause him to lead the healthiest life ; lastly, of the things produced, it remains a question of wisdom and conscience how much you are to take yourself, and how much to leave to others. A large quantity, remember, unless you destroy it, must always be so left at one time or another ; the only questions you have to decide are, not what you will give, but when, and how, and to whom, you wUl give. The natural law of human life is, of course, that in youth a man shall labour and lay by store for his old age, and when age comes, shall use what he has laid by, gradually slackening his toil, and allowing himself more frank use of his store ; taking care always to leave himseK as much as will surely suffice for him beyond any possible length of life. What he has gained, or by tranquU and unanxious toil continues to gain, more than is enough for his own need, he ought so to administer, while he yet lives, as to see the good of it again beginning, in other hands ; for thus he has him- self the greatest sum of pleasiu-e from it, and faithfully uses his sagacity in its control Whereas most men, it appears, dislike the sight of their fortunes going out into service again, and say to themselves, — "I can indeed nowise prevent this money from falling at last into the hands of others, nor hinder the good of it from becoming theirs, not mine ; but at least let a merciful death save me from being a witness of their satisfaction ; and may God so far be gracious to me as to let no good come of any of this money of mine before my eyes." 216 MUNEBA PULVERIS. 153. Supposing this feeling unconquerable, the safest wajt of rationally indulging it would be for the capitalist at onca to spend aU his fortune on himself, which might actually, in many cases, be quite the rightest as well as the pleasantest thing to do, it he had just tastes and worthy passions. But, whether for himself only, or through the hands, and for the sake, of others also, the law of wise Ufe is, that the maker of the money shall also be the spender of it, and spend it, ap- proximately, all, before he dies ; so that his true ambition as an economist should be, to die, not as rich, but as poor, as possible,* calculating the ebb tide of possession in true and calm proportion to the ebb tide of life. Which law, checking the wing of accumidative desire in the mid-volley, f and lead- ing to peace of possession and fulness of fruition in old age, is also wholesome, in that by the freedom of gift, together with present help and counsel, it at once endears and dignifies age in the sight of youth, which then no longer strips the bodies of the dead, but receives the grace of the living. Its chief use would (or will be, for men are indeed capable of attaining to this much use of their reason), that some temper- ance and measure will be put to the acquisitiveness of com- merce.]; For as things stand, a man holds it his duty to be [* See the Life of Fenelon. " The labouring peasantry were at all times the objects of his tenderest care ; his palace at Cambray, with all his books and writings, being consumed by iire, he bore the misfortune with unruffled calmness, and said it was better his palace should be burnt than the cottage of a poor peasant." (These thoroughly good men always go too far, and lose their power over the mass.) He died ex- emplifying the mean he had always observed between prodigality and avarice, leaving neither debts nor money. ] f KoL irivlav i]yov^i.evovs eTj-oi fi-)| rh riju ouiriav ixdrra irotfiy aXKh. rh TTif airXriaTlttv irXefoi. ' ' And thinking (wisely) that poverty consists not in making one's possessions less, but one's avarice more." — Laws, v. 8. Read the context, and compare " He who spends for all that is noble, and gains by nothing but what is just, will hardly be notably wealthy, or distressfully poor." — Lmns, v. 42. X The fury of modern trade arises chiefly out of the possibility o£ making sudden fortunes by largeness of transaction, and accident of discovery or contrivance. I have no doubt that the final interest ot •very nation is to check the action of these commercial lotteries ; and MUNEBA PULVERI8. temperate in his food, and of his body, but for no duty to be temperate in his riches, and of his mind. He sees that he ought not to waste his youth and his flesh for luxury ; but he ■will waste his age, and his soul, for money, and think he does no wrong, nor know the delirium tremens of the intellect for disease. But the law of life is, that a man should fix the sum he desires to make annually, as the food he desires to eat daily ; and stay when he has reached the limit, refusing in- crease ot business, and leaving it to others, so obtaining due freedom of time for better thoughts.* How the gluttony of business is punished, a bill of health for the principals of the richest city houses, issued annually, would show in a suffi- ciently impressive manner. 154. I know, of course, that these statements will be re- ceived by the modem merchant as an active border rider of the sixteenth century would have heard of its being proper Tor men of the Marches to get their Uving by the spade, in- stead of the spur. But my business is only to state veracities and necessities ; I neither look for the acceptance of the one, nor hope for the nearness of the other. Near or distant, the day will assuredly come when the merchants of a state shall be its true ministers of exchange, its porters, in the double sense of carriers and gate-keepers, bringing all lands into frank and faithful communication, and knovsdng for their master of guild, Hermes the herald, instead of Mercury the gain-guarder. 155. And now, fiinally, for immediate rule to all who will ac- cept it. The distress of any population means that they need food, house-room, clothes, and fuel. You can never, therefore, be wrong in employing any labourer to produce food, house- room, clothes, or fuel ; but you are always wrong if you em- ploy him to produce nothing, (for then some other labourer that all great accidental gains or losses should be national, — not individ- nal. But speculation absolute, unconnected with commercial effort, is an unmitigated evil in a state, and the root of countless evils beside. [* T desire in the strongest terms to reinforce all that is contained in this paragraph.] 218 MUNERA PULVBRI8. must be worked double time to feed him) ; and you are gen- erally wrong, at present, if you employ him (unless he can da nothing else) to produce works of art or luxuries ; because modem art is mostly on a false basis, and modern luxury ia criminally great.* 156. The way to produce more food is mainly to bring in fresh ground, and increase facilities of carriage ; — to break rock, exchange earth, drain the moist, and water the dry, to mend roads, and build harbours of refuge. Taxation thus spent wUl annihilate taxation, but spent in war, it annihilates revenue. 157. The way to produce house-room is to apply your force first to the humblest dwellings. When your brick-layers are out of employ, do not build splendid new streets, but better the old ones ; send your paviours and slaters to the poorest villages, and see that your poor are healthily lodged, before you try your hand on stately architecture. You will find its stateUness rise better under the trowel afterwards ; and we do * It is especially necessary that the reader should keep his mind fixed on the methods of consumption and destruction, as the true sources of national poverty. Men are apt to call every exchange "expenditure," but it is only consumption which is expenditure. A large number of the purchases made by the richer classes are mere forms of interchange of unused property, wholly without effect on national prosperity. It matters nothing to the state whether, if a china pipkin be rated as worth a hundred pounds, A has the pipkin and B the pounds, or A the pounds and B the pipkin. But if the pipkin is pretty, and A or B breaks it, there is national loss, not otherwise. So again, when the loss has really taken place, no shifting of the shoulders that bear it will do away with the reality of it. There is an intensely ludicrous notion in the public mind respecting the abolishment of debt by denying it. When a debt is denied, the lender loses instead of the borrower, that is all ; the loss is precisely, accurately, everlastingly the same. The Americans borrow money to spend in blowing up their own houses. They deny their debt, by one-third already [1863], gold being at fifty premium ; and they will probably deny it wholly. That merely means that the holders of the notes are to be the losers instead of the issuers. The quantity of loss is precisely equal, and irrevocable ; it is the quantity of human industry spent in effecting the explosion, plus the quantity of goods exploded. Honour only decides vlio shall pay the sum lost not whether it is to be paid or not. Paid it must be, and to the uttermost farthing. MUNEBA PULVBBIS. 219 do not yet build so well that we need hasten to display our skill to future ages. Had the labour which has decorated the Houses of Parliament filled, instead, rents in. walls and roofs throughout the county of Middlesex ; and our deputies met to talk within massive walls that would have needed no stucco for five hundred years, — the decoration might have been after- wards, and the talk now. And touching even our highly con- scientious church building, it may be weU. to remember that in the best days of church plans, their masons called them- selves " logeurs du bon Dieu ; " and that siace, according to the most trusted reports, God spends a good deal of His time in cottages as well as in churches, He might perhaps Hke to be a Httle better lodged there also. 158. The way to get more clothes is — ^not, necessarily, to get more cotton. There were words written twenty years ago * which would have saved many of us some shivering, had they been minded in time. Shall we read them again ? " The Continental people, it would seem, are importing our machinery, beginning to spin cotton, and manufacture for themselves ; to cut us out of this market, and then out of that ! Sad news, indeed ; but irremediable. By no means the saddest news — the saddest news, is that we should find our national existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on seUing manufactured cotton at a farthing an eU cheaper than any other people. A most narrow stand for a great na- tion to base itself on ! A stand which, with all the Corn-law abrogations conceivable, I do not think wiU be capable of en- during. " My friends, suppose we quitted that stand ; suppose we came honestly down from it and said — ' This is our minimum of cotton prices ; we care not, for the present, to make cotton any cheaper. Do you, if it seem so blessed to you, make cot- ton cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton fur, your heart [• (Past and Pr«t»nt, Chap. IX. of Third Section.) To think that for theso twenty — now twenty-«ix — years, this one voice of Carlyle's has been the only faithful and useful utterance in all England, and has sounded through all these years in vain I See Fora Glavigera, Letter X] MUNEBA. PULVEBIB. ■with copperas fumes, with rage and mutiny ; become ye the general gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp ! ' I admire a nation which fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other nations to the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to undersell them ; we wiU be content to equal-sell them ; to be happy selling equally with them ! I do not see the use of un- derselling them : cotton-cloth is already twopence a yard, or lower ; and yet bare backs were never more numerous among us. Let inventive men cease to spend their existence inces- santly contriving how cotton can be made cheaper ; and try to invent a little how cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier divided among us. " Let inventive men consider — whether the secret of this universe does after all consist in making money. With a hell which means — ' failing to make money,' I do not think there is any heaven possible that would suit one well. In brief, all this Mammon gospel of supply-and-demand, competition, laissez /aire, and devil take the hindmost (foremost, is it not, rather, Mr. Carlyle?), 'begins to be one of the shabbiest gospels ever preached.' " 159. The way to produce more fuel * is first to make your coal mines safer, by sinking more shafts ; then set aU your convicts to work in them, and if, as is to be hoped, you suc- ceed in diminishing the supply of that sort of labourer, con- sider what means there may be, first, of growing forest where its growth will improve climate ; secondly, of splintering the forests which now make continents of fruitful land pathless and poisonous, into fagots for fire ; — so gaining at once dominion icewards and sunwards. Tour steam power has been given (you will find eventually) for work such as that : and not for excursion trains, to give the labourer a moment's breath, at the peril of his breath for ever, from amidst the cities which it has crushed into masses of corruption. When you know how to build cities, and how to rule them, you will be able to [• W» don't want to produce more fuel just now, but much less ; and to use what we get for cooking and warming ouraelves, instead of for running from place to place.] MUNERA PULVEBI8. 221 breathe in their streets, and the " excursion " will be the af- ternoon's walk or game in the fields round them. 160. "But nothing of this work will pay ? " No ; no more than it pays to dust your rooms, or wash j-Qur doorsteps. It will pay ; not at first in currency, but iu that which is the end and the source of currency, — in life ; (and in currency richly afterwards). It will pay ia that which is more than life, — in Ught, whose true price has not yet been reckoned in any currency, and yet into the image ol which, all wealth, one way or other, must be cast. For your riches must either be as the lightning, which, , Begot but in a cloud, Though shining bright, and speaking loud, Whilst it begins, concludes its violent race ; And, where it gilds, it wounds the place ; — or else, as the lightning of the sacred sign, which shines from one part of the heaven to the other. There is no other choice ; you must either take dust for deity, spectre for possession, fettered dream for Ufe, and for epitaph, this reversed verse of the great Hebrew hymn of economy (Psaka cxii.) : — " He hath gathered together, he hath stripped the poor, his iniquity remaineth for ever : " — or else, having the sun of justice to shine on you, and the sincere substance of good in your possession, and the pure law and liberty of Ufe within you, leave men to write this better legend over your grave : — " He hath dispersed abroad. He hath given to the poor. His righteousness remaineth for ever." APPEin)IOES. I HAYB brought together in these last pages a few notes, which were not properly to be incorporated with the text, and which, at the bottom of pages, checked the reader's attention to the main argument. They contaia, however, several statements to which I wish to be able to refer, or have already referred, in other of my books, so that I think right to preserve them, j APPENDIX L— (p. 22.) The greatest of all economists are those most opposed to the doctrine of " laissez faire," namely, the fortifying virtues, which the wisest men of aU time have arranged under the general heads of Prudence, or Discretion (the spirit which discerns and adopts rightly) ; Justice (the spirit which rules and divides lightly) ; Fortitude (the spirit which persists and endures rightly) ; and Temperance (the spirit which stops and refuses rightly). These cardinal and sentinel virtues are not only the means of protecting and prolonging life itself, but they are the chief guards, or sources, of the material means of Hfe, and the govemiag powers and princes of economy. Thus, precisely according to the number of just men ia a nation, is their power of avoiding either intestine or foreign war. All disputes may be peaceably settled, if a suf- ficient number of persons have been trained to submit to the principles of justice, whUe the necessity for war is in direct ratio to the number of unjust persons who are incapable of determining a quarrel but by violence. Whether the injus- tice take the form of the desire of dominion, or of refusal td submit to it, or of lust of territory, or lust of money, or oi MUNEBA PULVERI8. 223 mere irregular passion and wanton will, the result is eoonomi- cally the earn© ; — loss of the quantity of power and life con- sumed in repressing the injustice, added to the material and moral destruction caused by the fact of war. The early civil wars of England, and the existing * war in America, are curi- ous examples — these under monarchical, this under republi- can, institutions — of the results on large masses of nations of the want of education in principles of justice. But the mere dread or distrust resulting from the want of the inner virtues of Faith and Charity prove often no less costly than war itself. The fear which France and England have of each other costs each nation about fifteen millions sterling annually, besides various paralyses of commerce ; that sum being spent in the manufacture of means of destruction instead of means of pro- duction. There is no more reason in the nature of things that France and England should be hostile to each other than that England and Scotland should be, or Lancashire and Yorkshire ; and the reciprocal terrors of the opposite sides of the T^ltlinh Channel are neither more necessary, more eco- nomical, nor more virtuous, than the old riding and reiving on the opposite flanks of the Cheviots, or than England's own weaving for herseK of crowns of thorn, from the stems of her Eed and White roses. APPENDIX n.— (p. 34.) Few passages of the book which at least some part of the na- tions at present most advanced in civilization accept as an ex- pression of final truth, have been more distorted than those bearing on Idolatry. For the idolatry there denounced is neither sculpture, nor veneration of sculpture. It is simply the substitution of an "Eidolon," phantasm, or imagination of Good, for that which is real and enduring ; from the Highest Living Good, which gives life, to the lowest material good [* Written in 1862. I little thought that when I next corrected my type, the "existing" war best illustrative of the senteJ^ce. ly^ould b» Ijetween Frenchmen ja the Elysisn Fields of Paris.] 224 MUNBRA PUhVEBIB. which ministers to it. The Creator, and the things created, which He is said to have " seen good " in creating, are ia this their eternal goodness appointed always to be " worshipped," — i. e., to have goodness and worth ascribed to them from the heart ; and the sweep and range of idolatry extend to the rejection of any or all of these, " calling evil good, and good evil, — putting bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter." * For in that rejection and substitution we betray the first of all Loyalties, to the fixed Law of Ufe, and with resolute opposite loyalty serve our own imagination of good, which is the law, not of the House, but of the Grrave, (otherwise called the law of " mark missing,'' which we translate " law of Sin ") ; these "two masters," between whose services we have to choose, being otherwise distinguished as God and Mammon, which Mammon, though we naiTowly take it as the power of money only, is in truth the great evil Spirit of false and fond desire, or " Covetousness, which is Idolatry." So that Iconoclasm — imagre-breaking — is easy ; but an Idol cannot be broken — it must be forsaken ; and this is not so easy, either to do, or persuade to doing. For men may readily be convinced of the weakness of an image ; but not of the emptiness of an imagi- nation. APPENDIX m.— (p. 36.) I HAVE not attempted to support, by the authority of other vmters, any of the statements made in these papers ; indeed, if such authorities were rightly collected, there would be no occasion for my writing at all. Even in the scattered pas- sages referring to this subject in three books of Carlyle's — Sartor Besartus, Past and Present, and the Latter Day Pam- phlets, — all has been said that needs to be said, and far better than I shall ever say it again. But the habit of the public mind at present is to require everything to be uttered dif- fusely, loudly, and a hundred times over, before it will listen; and it has revolted against these papers of mine as if they cou« * Compare the close of tJie Fourth Lecture in Aratra Pentdiei. MUNERA PULVERI8. 225 tained things daring and new, when there is not one assertion in them of which the truth has not been for ages known to the wisest, and proclaimed by the most eloquent of men. It would be [I had written will be ; but have now reached a time of life for which there is but one mood — the conditional,] a far greater pleasure to me hereafter, to collect their words than to add to mine ; Horace's clear rendering of the sub- etance of the passages in the text may be found room for at once. Si qnis emat eitharas, emptas comportet in unum Nee studio oitharae, neo Musae deditus ulli ; Si soalpra et f ormas nou sutor, nautica vela Aversus meroaturis, delirus et amens XJndique dicatur merito. Qui diserepat istis Qui nummos aurumque recondit, nescius uti Compositis ; metuensque velut contingere saorum ? [Which may be roughly thus translated : — " Were anybody to buy fiddles, and collect a number, be- ing in no wise given to fiddHng, nor fond of music : or if, being no cobbler, he collected awls and lasts, or, having no mind for sea-adventure, bought sails, every one would call him a madman, and deservedly. But what diflference is there be- tween such a man and one who lays by coins and gold, and does not know how to use, when he has got them ? "] With which it is perhaps desirable also to give Xenophon's statement, it being clearer than any English one can be, owing to the power of the general Greek term for wealth, " useable things." [I have cut out the Greek because I can't be troubled to correct the accents, and am always nervous about them ; here it is in Enghsh, as well as I can do it : — " This being so, it follows that things are only property to the man who knows how to use them ; as flutes, for instance, are property to the man who can pipe upon them respectably ; but to one who knows not how to pipe, they are no property, unless he can get rid of them advantageously. . . For if they are not sold, the flutes are no property (being service- 226 MTTNEBA PULVEBIS. able for nothing) ; but, sold, they become property. To which Socrates made answer, — ' and only then if he knows how to sell them, for if he sell them to another man who can- not play on them, stiU they are no property.' "\ APPENDIX IV.— (p. 39.) The reader is to include here in the idea of " Government," any branch of the Executive, or even any body of private per- sons, entrusted with the practical management of public in- terests unconnected directly with their own personal ones. In theoretical discussions of legislative interference with polit- ical economy, it is usually, and of course unnecessarily, as- sumed that Government must be always of that form and force in which we have been accustomed to see it ; — that its abuses can never be less, nor its wisdom greater, nor its pow- ers more numerous. But, practically, the custom in most civilized countries is, for every man to deprecate the interfer- ence of Government as long as things tell for his personal advantage, and to call for it when they cease to do so. The request of the Manchester Economists to be supplied with cotton by Government (the system of supply and demand having, for the time, fallen sorrowfully short of the expecta- tions of scientific persons from it), is an interesting case in point. It were to be wished that less wide and bitter suffer- ing, suffering, too, of the innocent, had been needed to force the nation, or some part of it, to ask itself why a body of men, already confessedly capable of managing matters both miUtary and divine, should not be permitted, or even re- quested, at need, to provide in some wise for sustenance as well as for d-iJence ; and secure, if it might be, — (and it might, I think, oven the rather be),— purity of bodily, as well as of spiritual, aliment ? Why, having made many roads for the passage of armies, may they not make a few for the con- veyance of food ; and after organizing, with applause, various ecbewes pf theological instruction for the Public, organize MUNEBA PULVBBIS. 22*? moreover, some methods of bodily nourishment for them? Or is the soul so much less trustworthy in its instincts than the stomach, that legislation is necessary for the one, but in- applicable to the other. APPENDIX v.— (p. 70.) I DEBATED With mysclf whether to make the note on Homer longer by examining the typical meaning of the shipwreck of Ulysses, and his escape from Charybdis by help of her figtree ; but as I should have had to go on to the lovely myth of Leu- cothea's veil, and did not care to spoil this by a hurried account of it, I left it for future examination ; and, three days after the paper was published, observed that the reviewers, with their customary helpfulness, were endeavouring to throw the whole subject back into confusion by dwelling on this single (as they imagined) oversight. I omitted also a note on the sense of the word kvypbv, vdth respect to the pharmacy of Circe, and herb-fields of Helen, (compare its use in Odyssey, xvii., 473, &c.), which would farther have illustrated the nature of the Circean power. But, not to be led too far into the subtleties of these myths, observe respecting them aU, that even in very simple parables, it is not always easy to attach indisputable meaning to every part of them. I recoUect some years ago, throwing an assembly of learned persons who had met to de- light themselves with interpretations of the parable of the prodigal son, (interpretations which had up to that moment gone very smoothly,) into mute indignation, by inadvertently asking who the wnprodigal son was, and what was to be learned by his example. The leading divine of the company, Mr. Molyneux, at last explained to me that the unprodigal son was a lay figure, put in for dramatic efiect, to make the story pret- tier, and that no note was to be taken of him. Without, how- ever, admitting that Homer put in the last escape of Ulysses merely to make his story prettier, this is nevertheless true of all Greek myths, that they have many opposite Ughts and 828 MUNERA PULVEBIS. shades ; they are as changeful as opal, and like opal, usually have one colour by reflected, and another by transmitted light. But they are true jewels for all that, and full of noble enchant- ment for those who can use them ; for those who cannot, I am content to repeat the words I wrote four years ago, in the ap- pendix to the Two Paths — " The entire purpose of a great thinker may be difficult to fathom, and we may be over and over again more or less mis- taken in guessing at hia meaning ; but the real, profound, nay, quite bottomless and unredeemable mistake, is the fool's thought, that he had no meaning.'' APPENDIX VI— (p. 84) The derivation of words is Hke that of rivers : there is ona real source, usually small, unlikely, and difficult to find, far up among the hiUs ; then, as the word flows on and comes into service, it takes in the force of other words from other sources, and becomes quite another word — often much more than one word, after the junction — a word as it were of many waters, sometimes both sweet and bitter. Thus the whole force of our English " charity '' depends on the guttural in " charis " getting confused with the c of the Latin " carus ; " thencefor- ward throughout the middle ages, the two ideas ran on to- gether, and both got confused with St. Paul's dydtrrj, which expresses a different idea in all sorts of ways ; our " charity " having not only brought in the entirely foreign sense of alms* giving, but lost the essential sense of contentment, and lost much more in getting too far away from the " charis " of tha final Gospel benedictions. For truly it is fine Christianity wa have come to, which, professing to expect the perpetual graca or charity of its Founder, has not itself grace or charity enough to hinder it from overreaching its friends in sixpenny bargains ; and which, supphcatiag evening and morning the forgiveness of its own debts, goes forth at noon to take its f eUow-servanta by the throat, saying, — not merely " Pay me that thou owest,* but " Pay me that thou owest me not." MUNEBA PULVERI8. 229 It is true that we sometimes wear Ophelia's rue with a dif- ference, and call it " Herb o' grace o' Sundays," taking conao- lation out of the offertory with — " Look, what he layeth out, it shall be paid him again." Comfortable words indeed, and good to set against the old royalty of Largesse — Whose moste joie was, I wis, When that she gave, and said, "Have thin." [I am glad to end, for this time, with these lovely words ol Chaucer. We have heard only too much lately of " Indis- criminate charity,'' with implied reproval, not of the Indiscrim- ination merely, but of the Charity also. We have partly suc- ceeded in enforcing on the minds of the poor the idea that it is disgraceful to receive ; and are Ukely, without much dif- ficulty, to succeed in persuading not a few of the rich that it is disgraceful to give. But the political economy of a great state makes both giving and receiving graceful ; and the po- litical economy of true religion interprets the saying that " it is more blessed to give than to receive,'' not as the promise of reward in another life for mortified selfishness in this, but aa pledge of bestowal upon us of that sweet and better nature, which does not mortiiy itself in giving.] £rantwood, Ooniston, m. October, 1871. ms mnx PRE-RAPHAELITISM FRANCIS HAWKSWORTH FAWKBS, ESQ. OF PARNLET THESE PAGES WHICH OWE THBIB PREgENT POEM TO ADVANTAGES ORANTBD BY HIS KINDNESS ARE APPECTIONATELT INSOBIBED BY HIS OBLIUED PKIEND JOHN RTISKm PEEFAOE. Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of " Mod- em Painters," I ventured to give the following advice to the young artists of England : — " They should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how beat to penetrate her meaning ; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing." Advice which, whether bad or good, involved infinite labor and humiliation in the f oUovdng it ; and was therefore, for the most part, rejected. It has, however, at last been carried out, to the very letter, by a group of men who, for their reward, have been assailed with the most scurrilous abuse which I ever recollect seeing issue from the public press. I have, therefore, thought it due to them to contradict the directly false statements which have been made respecting their works ; and to point out the kind of merit which, however deficient in some respects, those works possess beyond the possibility of dispute. Denmark Hill, Aug. 1851. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. It m ay be pr osed, with much certainty, that God intends no man to live in this world without working : but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work. It is written, " in the sweat of thy brow," but it was never written, "in the breaking of thine heart," thou shalt eat bread ; and I find that, as on the one hand, infinite misery is caused by idle people, who both faU in doing what was appointed for them to do, and set in motion various springs of mischief ia matters in which they should have had no concern, so on the other hand, no small misery is caused by over-worked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself. Were it not so, I believe the fact of their being unhappy is in itself a violation of divine law, and a sign of some kind of folly or sin in their way of life. Now in order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed : They must be fit for it : They must not do too much of it : and they must have a sense of success in it — not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of other peo- ple for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, 'whatever the world may say or think about it. So that in order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work. The first thing then that he has to do, if unhappily his parents or masters have not done it for him, is to find out what he is fit for. In which inquiry a man may be very safely gujdpd by his likings, if he be not also guided by his pride. 238 PBE-BAPHAELITiaM. People usually reason in some such fashion as this : " I don't seem quite fit for a head-manager in the firm of & Co., therefore, in aU probability, I am fit to be Chancellor of the Exchequer." Whereas, they ought rather to reason thus : " I don't seem quite fit to be head-manager in the firm of & Co., but I daresay I might do something in a small green- grocery business ; I used to be a good judge of peas ; " that is to say, always trying lower instead of trying higher, until they find bottom : once well set oji the ground, a man may build up by degrees, safely, instead of disturbing every one in his neighborhood by perpetual catastrophes. But this kind of humility is rendered especially difficult in these days, by the contumely thrown on men in humble employments. The very removal of the massy bars which once separated one class of society from another, has rendered it tenfold more shameful in foolish people's, i. e. in most people's eyes, to re- main in the lower grades of it, than ever it was before. When a man bom of an artisan was looked upon as an entirely dif- ferent species of animal from a man bom of a noble, it made him no more uncomfortable or ashamed to remain that differ- ent species of animal, than it makes a horse ashamed to re- main a horse, and not to become a giraffe. But now that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself, unreproaehed, with people once far above him, not only is the natural discontentedness of humanity developed to an unheard-of extent;, whatever aT man's position, but it be- comes a veritable shame to him to remain in the state he was bom in, and everybody thinks it his duty to try to be a "gen- tleman." Persons who have any influence in the management of public institutions for charitable education know how com- mon this feeling has become. Hardly a day passes but they receive letters from mothers who want all their six or eight sons to go to college, and make the grand tour in the long vacation, and who think there is something wrong in the foundations of society, because this is not possible. Out of every ten letters of this kind, nine will p,Uege, as the reason of the writers' importunity, their desire to keep their families in such and such a " station of life."^ Tbeyg is nQ real desire PBE-BAPHAELITISM. 239 for the safety, the discipline, or the moral good of the chil- di-en, only a panic horror of the inexpressibly pitiable calamity of theii- living a ledge or two lower on the molehill of the world — a calamity to be averted at any cost whatever, of strug- gle, anxiety, and shortening of life itself. I do not beheve that any greater good could be achieved for the country, than the change in public feehng on this head, which might be brought about by a few benevolent men, undeniably in the class of " gentlemen," who would, on principle, enter into some of our commonest trades, and make them honorable ; showing that it wa,3 possible for a man to retain his dignity, and re- main, in the best sense, a gentleman, though part of his time was every day occupied in manual labor, or even in serving customers over a counter. I do not in the least see why cour- tesy, and gravity, and sympathy with the feelings of others, and courage, and truth, and piety, and what else goes to make up a gentleman's character, should not be found behind a counter as well as elsewhere, if they were demanded, or even hoped for, there. Let us suppose, then, that the man's way of life and man- ner of work have been discreetly chosen ; then the next thing to be required is, that he do not over-work himself therein. I am not going to say anything here about the various errors in our systems of society and commerce, which appear (I am not sure if they ever do more than appear) to force us to over- work ourselves merely that we may Hve ; nor about the still more fruitful cause of unhealthy toil — the incapabiUty, in many men, of being content with the Httle that is indeed necessary to their happiness. I have only a word or two to say about one special cause of over-work — the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things, and the hope of accom- plishing them by immense efforts : hope as vain as it is per- nicious ; not only making men over-work themselves, but ren- dering aU the work they do unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and let the reader be assured of this (it is a truth all-important to the best interests of humanity). No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort ; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and he does it without 240 PBE-BAPEAELITISM. effort. Nothing is, at present, less understood by us than this — nothing is more necessary to be understood. Let me try to say it as clearly, and explain it as fully as I may. I have said no great intellectual thing : for I do not mean the assertion to extend to things moral. On the contrary, it seems to me that just because we are intended, as long as we Uve, to be in a state of intense moral effort, we are not in- tended to be in intense physical or inteUeetual effort. Our full energies are to be given to the soiil's work — to the great fight with the Dragon — the taking the kingdom of heaven by. force. But the body's work and head's work are to be done quietly, and comparatively without effort. Neither limbs nor brain are ever to be strained to their utmost ; that is not the way in which the greatest quantity of work is to be got out of them : they are never to be worked furiously, but with tran- quillity and constancy. We are to follow the plough from sunrise to sunset, but not to pull in race-boats at the twilight : we shall get no fruit of that kind of work, only disease of the heart. How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this great truth and law were but once sincerely, humbly under- stood, — that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily ; that, when it is needed to be done, there is perhaps only one man in the world who can do it ; but he can do it without any trouble — without more trouble, that is, than it costs small people to do small things ; nay, perhaps, with less. And yet what truth lies more openly on the surface of all human phenomena ? Is not the evidence of Ease on the very front of aU the greatest works in existence ? Do they not say plainly to us, not, " there has been a great effort here," but, "there has been a great power here"? It is not the weari- ness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have \,jto recognise in all mighty things ; and that is just what we now never recognise, but think that we are to do great things, by help of iron bars and perspiration : — alas ! we shall do nothing that way but lose some jpounds of our own weight. Yet, let me not be misunderstood, nor this great truth be supposed anywise resolvable into the favorite dogma of young PRE-RAPHAELITI8M. 241 inen, that they need not work if they have genius. The fact is, that a man of genius is always far more ready to work than other people, and gets so much more good from the work that he does, and is often so little conscious of the inherent divin- ity in himself, that he is very apt to ascribe all his capacity to his work, and to tell those who ask how he came to be what he is : " If I am anything, which I much doubt, I made myself so merely by labor." This was Newton's way of talking, and I suppose it would be the general tone of men whose genius had been devoted to the physical sciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, but in whatever field, it wiU always be distinguished by its perpetual, steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating and disciplining its powers, as weU as by its gigantic, incommuni- _fiahle facility in exercising them. Therefore, literally, it is no man's business whether he has genius or not : work he must, whatever he is, but quietly and steadily ; and the natural and unforced results of such work will be always the things that God meant him to do, and will be his best. No agonies nor heart-rendings vpiU enable him to do any better. If he be a great man, they will be great things ; if a small man, small things ; but always, if thus peacefully done, good and right ; always, if restlessly and ambitiously done, false, hoUgw, and despicable. Then the third thing needed was, I said, that a man should be a good judge of his work ; and this chiefly that he may not be dependent upon popular opinion for the manner of doing it, but also that he may have the just encouragement of the sense of progress, and an honest consciousness of victory : how else can he become " That awful independent on to-morrow, Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile." I am persuaded that the real nourishment and help of such a feeling as this is nearly unknown to half the workmen of the present day. For whatever appearance of self-complacency there may be in their outward bearing, it is visible enough, 242 PItE-RArnAELiriSM. by their feverish, jealousy of each other, how little confidence they havelnTihe~sterliag value^f their several doings. Con- ceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up ; and there is too visible'distress and hopelessness in men's aspects to admit of the supposition that they have any stable support of faith in themselves. I have stated these principles generally, because there is no branch of labor to which they do not apply : But there is one in which our ignorance or forgetfulness of them has caused an incalculable amount of suffering : and I would endeavor now to reconsider them vnth especial reference to it, — the branch of the Arts. In general, the men who are employed in the Arts have freely chosen their profession, and suppose themselves to have special faculty for it ; yet, as a body, they are not happy men. For which this seems to me the reason, that they are expected, and themselves expect, to make their bread by being clever — not by steady or quiet work ; and are, therefore, for the most parVTfymg toT^e clever, and so living in an utterly false state of mind and action. This is the case, to the same extent, in no other profession or employment. A lawyer may indeed suspect that, unless he has more wit than those around him, he is not likely to advance in his profession ; but he will not be always thinking how he is to display his wit. He will generally understand, early in his career, that wit must be left to take care of itself, and that it is hard knowledge of law and vigorous examination and collation of the facts of every case entrusted to him, which his clients will mainly demand ; this it is which he has to be paid for ; and this is healthy and measurable labor, payable by the hour. If he happen to have keen natural perception and quick wit, these will come into play in their due time and place, but he will not think of them aa his chief power ; and if he have them not, he may stUl hope that industry and con- scientiousness may enable him to rise in his profession without them. Again in the case of clergymen : that they are sorely tempted to display their eloquence or wit, none who know their own hearts will deny, but then they know this to fie a PRE-RAPHAELITI8M. 213 temptation : they never woulrl suppose that cleverness was all that was to be expected from them, or would sit down delib- erately to write a clever sermon : even the duUest or vainest of them would throw some veil over their vanity, and pretend to some_profitableness of purpose in what they did. They would not openly ask of their hearers— Did you think my sermon ingenious, or my language poetical? They would early understand that they were not paid for being ingenious, nor called to be so, but tojpreach truth ; that if they happened to possess wit, eloquence, or originality, these would appear and be of service in due time, but were not to be continually sought afte r or ex hibited : and if it should happen that they had them not, they might still be serviceable pastors without them. Not so with the unhappy artist. No one expects any honest or useful work of him ; but every one expects him to be in- genious. Originality, dexterity, invention, imagination, every thing is asked of him except what alone is to be had for asking — honesty and sound work, and the due discharge of his function as a painter. What function ? asks the reader in some surprise. He may well ask ; for I suppose few painters have any idea what their function is, or even that they have any at all. And yet surely it is not so difficult to discover. The facul- ties, which when a man finds in himself, he resolves to be a painter, are, I suppose, intenseness of observation and facility ofjgii±ation. The man is created an observer and an imitator ; and his function is to convey knowledge to his fellow-men, of such things as cannot be taught otherwise than ocularly. For a long time this function remained a religious one : it was to impress upon the popular mind the reaUty of the objects of faith, and the truth of the histories of Scripture, by giving visible form to both. That function has now passed away, and none has as yet taken its place. The painter has no pro- fession^ no purpose. He is an idler on the earth, chasing the shadows of his^gTEn^fancies. BuFEe'was^ never meant to be this. The sudden and uni- versal Naturalism, or incHnation to copy ordinary natura' 244 PBE-RAPBAELITI8M. objects, whicli manifested itself among the painters of Europe, at the moment when the invention of printing superseded their legendary labors, was no false instinct. It was mis- understood and misapplied, but it came at the right time, and has maintained itself through all kinds of abuse ; presenting in the recent schools of landscape, perhaps only the first fruits of its power. That instinct was urging every painter in Europe at the same moment to his true duty — the faithful representation of all objects of historical interest, or of natural beauty existent at the period; representations such as might at once aid the advance of the sciences, and keep faithful record of every monument of past ages which was likely to be swept away in the approaching eras of revolutionary change. The instinct came, as I said, exactly at the right moment ; and let the reader consider what amount and kind of general knowledge might by this time have been possessed by the nations of Europe, had their painters understood and obeyed it. Sup pose that, after disciplining themselves so as to be able'^to draw, v?ith unerring precision, each the particular kind of subject in which he most delighted, they had sepa- rated into two great armies of historians and naturalists ; — • that the first had painted mth absolute faithfulness every edi- fice, every city, every battle-field, every scene of the slightest historical interest, precisely and completely rendering their aspect at the time ; and that their companions, according to their several powers, had painted with Hke fidelity the plants and animals, the natural scenery, and the atmospheric phe- nomena of every country on the earth — suppose that a faith- ful and complete record were now in our museums of every building destroyed by war, or time, or innovation, during these last 200 years — suppose that each recess of every moun- tain chain of Europe had been penetrated, and its rocks drawn with such accuracy that the geologist's diagram was no longer necessary— suppose that every tree of the forest had been drawn in its noblest aspect, every beast of the field in ita savage life — that all these gatherings were already in our nar tional galleries, and that the painters of the present day were PRE-RAPIIABLITISM. 24C laboring, happily and earnestly, to multiply them, and put such means of knowledge more and more -within reach of the common people — would not that be a more honorable life for them, than gaining precarious bread by "bright effects?" They think not, perhaps. They think it easy, and therefore contemptible, to be truthful ; they have been taught so all their lives. But it is not so, whoever taught it them. It is most difficult, and worthy of the greatest men's greatest ef- fort, to render, as it should be rendered, the simplest of the natural features of the earth ; but also be it remembered, no man is confined to the simplest ; each may look out work for himself where he chooses, and it will be strange if he cannot find something hard enough for him. The excuse is, however, one of the lips only ; for every painter knows that when he draws back from the attempt to render nature as she is, it is oftener in cowardice than in disdain. I must leave the reader to pursue this subject for himseK ; I have not space to suggest to him the tenth part of the ad- vantages which would follow, both to the painter from such an understanding of his mission, and to the whole people, in the results of his labor. Consider how the man himself would be elevated : how content he would become, how earnest, how full of all accurate and noble knowledge, how free from envy — knowing creation to be infinite, feeling at once the value of what he did, and yet the nothingness. Con- sider the advantage to the people ; the immeasurably larger interest given to art itself ; the easy, pleasurable, and perfect knowledge conveyed by it, in every subject ; the far greater number of men who might be healthily and profitably occu- pied with it as a means of livehhood ; the useful direction of myriads of inferior talents, now left fading away in misery- Conceive all this, and then look around at our exhibitions, and behold the " cattle pieces," and " sea pieces," and "fruit pieces," and " family pieces ; " the eternal brown cows in ditches, and white sails in squaDs, and sliced lemons in sau- cers, and foolish faces in simpers ; — and try to feel what we are, and what we might have been. Take a single instance in one branch of archaeology. Let 246 FRE-RAPHAELITISM. those who are interested in the history of religion consider what a treasure we should now have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables, and drunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies had been set to copy, line for line, the religious and domestic sculpture on the Grerman, Flemish, and French ca- thedrals and castles ; and if every building destroyed in the French or in any other subsequent revolution, had thus been drawn in all its parts with the same precision with which Gerard Douw or Mieris paint basrehefs of Cupids. Consider, even now, what incalculable treasure is still left in ancient basreliefs, full of every kind of legendary interest, of subtle expression, of priceless evidence as to the character, feeHngs, habits, histories, of past generations, in neglected and shat- tered churches and domestic buildings, rapidly disappearing over the whole of Europe — treasure which, once lost, the labor of all men living cannot bring back again ; and then look at the myriads of men, with skiU enough, if they had but the commonest schooUng, to record all this faithfully, who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked women from academy models, or idealities of chivalry fitted out vnth Wardour Street armor, or eternal scenes from Gil Bias, Don Quixote, and the Vicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londoners wearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Do but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible imbeciUty, and then go and stand before that broken basreUef in the southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fibre of the heart in you that will break too. ^ ;> But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, for imagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty ? Yes ; the highest, the noblest place — that which these only can attain when they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without forc- ing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of train- ing which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could receive. The infinite absurdity and failure FRE-BAPHAELITISM. 247 of our present training consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagiaa tion and invention high enough, and suppose that they can be taught. Thi-oughout every sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rank attributed to these powers, — the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be attained, increased, or in any wise modified by teaching, only in various ways capable of being concealed or quenched. Un- derstand this thoroughly ; know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same species of creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our methods of teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinks of bring- ing men up to be poets ? — of producing poets by any kind of general recipe or method of cultivation ? Suppose even that we see in youth that which we hope may, in its development, become a power of this kind, should we instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of him, and nothing else, for- bid him all quiet, steady, rational labor ? Should we force him to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of his boyish brain, and set before him, as the only objects of his study, the laws of versification which criticism has supposed itself to dis- cover in the works of previous writers ? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much be hkely to come of them so treated ? unless, indeed, they were so great as to break through all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and build their own foun- dation in spite of us ; whereas if, as in cases numbering mill- ions against units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this, could any thing come of such training but utter inanity and spuriousness of the whole man ? But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain and bridle the first flame of invention in early youth, heaping material on it as one would on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we desired to feed into greatness? Should we not educate the whole intellect into general strength, and all the afiections into warmth and hon- esty, and look to heaven for the rest ? This, I say, we should have sense enough to do, in order to produce a poet in words : but, it being required to produce a poet on canvas, what is our way of setting to work ? We begin, in all proba- bility, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen, that Nature 248 PBE-RAPHAEL1TI8M. is full of faults, and that he is to improve her ; but that Raph- ael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better ; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original, man- ner : that is to say, he is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a prin- ciple shadow occupying one-third of the same ; that no two people's heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order, which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outUne of nose, partly in proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin ; but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen is to bestow upon God's work in general. This I say is the kind of teaching which through various channels. Royal Acad- emy lecturings, press criticisms, pubUc enthusiasm, and not least by sohd weight of gold, we give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters ! But we do worse than this. Within the last few years some sense of the real tendency of such teaching has appeared in some of our younger painters. It only could appear in the younger ones, our older men having become familiarised with the false system, or else having passed through it and forgotten it, not well knowing the degree of harm they had sustained. This sense appeared, among our youths, — increased, — matured into resolute action. Necessarily, to exist at all, it needed the support both of strong instincts and of considerable self-con- fidence, otherwise it must at once have been borne down by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Strong instincts are apt to make men strange, and rude ; self-confi- dence, however well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance of impertinence. Look at the self-con- fidence of Wordsworth, stiffening every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance ; there is no more of it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little ungraceful here and there. Su^jpose this stubbornness and self-trust in PRB-BAPBABLITISM. 249 a youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is con- fessedly to be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of his work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that he should be regarded with disfavor by many, even the most temperate, of the judges trained in the system he was breaking through, and with utter contempt and reprobation by the envious and the duU. Consider, farther, that the particular system to be overthrown was, in the present case, one of which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the expense of manliness and truth ; and it will seem likely, a priori, that the men intended successfully to resist the influence of such a system should be endowed with little natural sense of beauty, and thus rendered dead to the temptation it presented. Summing up these conditions, there is surely little cause for surprise that pictures painted, in a temper of resistance, by exceedingly young men, of stubborn instincts and positive self-trust, and with little natural per- ception of beauty, should not be calculated, at the first glance, to vsin us from works enriched by plagiarism, polished by convention, invested with all the attractiveness of artificial grace, and recommended to our respect by established authority. We should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and their success in attaining them. All this has actually been the case, but in a degree which it would have been impossible to anticipate. That two youths, of the respective ages of eighteen and twenty, should have conceived for themselves a totally independent and sincere method of study, and enthusiastically persevered in it against every kind of dissuasion and opposition, is strange enough ; that in the third or fourth year of their efforts they should have produced works in many parts not inferior to the best of Albert Durer, this is perhaps not less strange. But the 250 PBE-RAPEABLITISir. loudness and universality of the howl which the common critics of the press have raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help or encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do neither the one nor the other, — these are strangest of all — unimaginable un- less they had been experienced. And as if these were not enough, private maUce is at work against them, in its own small, slimy way. The very day after I had written my second letter to the Times in the defence of the Pre-Eapha elites, I received an anonymous letter respecting one of them, from some person apparently hardly capable of spelling, and about as vile a specimen of petty malignity as ever blotted paper. I think it well that the public should know this, and so get some insight into the sources of the spirit which is at work against these men — how first roused it is difiicult to say, for one would hardly have thought that mere eccentricity in young artists could have excited an hos- tiUty so determined and so cruel ; — hostility which hesitated at no assertion, however impudent. That of the " absence of perspective " was one of the most curious pieces of the hue and cry which began with the Times, and died away in feeble maundering in the Art Union ; I contradicted it in the Times — I here contradict it directly for the second time. There was not a single error in perspective in three out of the four pictures in question. But if otliervnse, would it have been anything remarkable in them ? I doubt, if with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy ; I never met but with two men in my life who knew enough of per- spective to draw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions and curvatures might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our architects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talking to one of the most distinguished among them, the author of several most valuable works, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle in per- spective. And in this state of general science our writers for the press take it upon them to tell us, that the forest trees PBE-BAPHABLiriSM. 251 in Mr. Htint's Sylvia, and the bunches of lilies in Mr. Collbs's Convent Thoughts, are out of perspective.* It might not, I think, iu such circumstances, have been un- graceful or unwise in the Academicians themselves to have defended their young pupils, at least by the contradiction of statements directly false respecting them,f and the direction * It was not a little curious, that in the very number of the Art Union which repeated this direct falsehood about the Pre-Raphaelite rejection of "linear perspective" (by-the-bye, the next time J. B. takes upon him to speak of any one connected with the Universities, he may as well first ascertain the difference between a Graduate and an Under-Grad- uate), the second plate given should have been of a picture of Boning- ton's, — a prof essional landscape painter, observe, — for the want of aerial perspective in which the Art Union itself was obliged to apologise, and in which the artist has committed nearly as many blunders in linear per- spective as there are lines in the picture. f These false statements may be reduced to three principal heads, and directly contradicted in succession. The first, the current fallacy of society as well as of the press, was, that the Pre-Eaphaelites imitated the errors of early painters. A falsehood of this kind could not have obtained credence anywhere but in England, few English people, comparatively, having ever seen a picture of early Italian Masters. If they had, they would have known that the Pre-Raphaelite pictures are just as superior to the early Italian in skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and knowledge of effect, as inferior to them in grace of design ; and that in a word, there is not a shadow of resemblance between the two styles. The Pre-Raphaelites imitate no pictures : they paint from nature only. But they have op- posed themselves as a body to that kind of teaching above described, which only began after Raphael's time : and they have opposed them- selves as sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools ; a feel- ing compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow pride. Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelites. If they adhere to their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with the help of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said, found a new and noble school in England. If their sympathies with the early artists lead them into medisevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among them. There may be some weak ones, whom the Traotarian heresies may touch ; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong stem. I hope all things from the school. The second falsehood was, that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draw 252 PliE-liAPEABLITlSM. of the mind and sight of the public to such real merit as they possess. If Sir Charles Eastlake, Mulready, Edwin and Charles Landseer, Cope, and Dyce would each of them simply state their own private opinion respecting their paintings, sign it, and pubUsh it, I beUeve the act would be of more service to English art than any thing the Academy has done since it was founded. But as I cannot hope for this, I can only ask the public to give their pictures careful examination, and look at them at once with the indulgence and the respect which I have endeavored to show they deserve. Yet let me not be misunderstood. I have adduced them only as examples of the kiad of study which I would desire to see substituted for that of our modern schools, and of sin- gular success in certain characters, finish of detail, and bril- liancy of color. What faculties, higher than imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say ; but I do say, that if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in due time all the more forcibly because they have received training so severe. For it is always to be remembered that no one mind is like another, either in its powers or perceptions ; and while the main principles of training must be the same for all, the result in each wUl be as various as the kinds of truth which each will apprehend ; therefore, also, the modes of effort, even in men whose inner principles and final aims are exactly the same. Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest, equally indus- trious, equally impressed with a humble desire to render some part of what they saw in nature faithfully ; and, othervrise, trained in convictions such as I have above endeavored to in- duce. But one of them is quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, and excessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has a memory which nothing well. This was asserted, and could have been asserted only by persons who had never looked at the pictures. The third falsehood was, that they had no system of light and shade, To which it may be simply replied that their system of light and shade is exactly the same as the Sun's ; which is, I believe, likely to outlast that of the Renaissance, however brilliant. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 253 escapes, an invention which never rests, and is comparatively near-sighted. Set them both free in the same field in a mountain valley. One sees everything, small and large, with almost the same clearness ; mountains and grasshoppers alike ; the leaves on the branches, the veins in the pebbles, the bubbles in the stream : but he can remember nothing, and invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to his mighty task ; abandoning at once aU thoughts of seizing transient effects, or giving general impressions of that which his eyes present to him in micro- scopical dissection, he chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and calculates with courage the number of weeks which must elapse before he can do justice to the in- tensity of his perceptions, or the fulness of matter in his subject. Meantime, the other has been watching the change of the clouds, and the march of the light along the mountain sides ; he beholds the entire scene in broad, soft masses of true gra- dation, and the very feebleness of his sight is in some sort an advantage to him, in making him more sensible of the aerial mystery of distance, and hiding from him the multitudes of circumstances which it would have been impossible for him to represent. But there is not one change in the casting of the jagged shadows along the hoUows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind for ever ; not a flake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud about their bases, but he has watched it as it melts away, and could recall it to its lost place in heaven by the slightest effort of his thoughts. Not only so, but thou- sands and thousands of such images, of older scenes, remain congregated in his mind, each mingliag in new associations with those now visibly passing before him, and these again confused wdth other images of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by in sudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbols and blots, and un- decipherable short-hand : — as for his sitting down to " draw from Nature,'' there was not one of the things which he wished to represent that stayed for so much as five seconds together : but none of them escaped, for aU that : they are 254 PBE-RAPHAELITISM. sealed up in that strange storehouse of his ; he may taie one of them out, perhaps, this day twenty years, and paint it in his dark room, far away. Now, observe, you may tell both of these men, when they are young, that they are to be honest, that they have an important function, and that they are not to care what Eaphael did. This you may wholesomely im- press on them both. But fancy the exquisite absurdity of expecting either of them to possess any of the quaHties of the other. I have supposed the feebleness of sight in the last, and of invention in the first painter, that the contrast between them might be more striking ; but, with very slight modification, both the characters are real. Grant to the first considerable inventive power, with exquisite sense of color ; and give to the second, in addition to all his other faculties, the eye of an eagle ; and the first is John Everett Millais, the second Joseph Mallard William Turner. They are among the few men who have defied all false teaching, and have, therefore, in great measure, done justice to the gifts with which they were entrusted. They stand at opposite poles, marking culminating points of art in both directions ; between them, or in various relations to them, we may class five or six more Uving artists who, in like manner, have done justice to their powers. I trust that I may be pardoned for naming them, in order that the reader may know how the strong innate genius in each has been inva- riably acccompanied with the same humility, earnestness, and industry in study. It is hardly necessary to point out the earnestness or humil- ity in the works of Wilham Hunt ; but it may be so to sug- gest the high value they possess as records of English rural life, and still Ufe. Who is there who for a moment could contend with him in the unaffected, yet humorous truth with which he has painted our peasant children ? Who is there who does not sympathize with him in the simple love with which he dwells on the brightness and bloom of our summer fruit and flowers ? And yet there is something to be regretted concifiming him : why should he be allowed continually to PRE-RAPHAELlTrnX. 255 paint the same hunches of hot-house grapes, and supply to the Water Color Society a succession of pineapples with the regularity of a Covent Garden fruiterer ? He has of late dis- covered that primrose banks are lovely ; but there are other things grow wild besides primroses : what undreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, if he would lose himself for a summer in Highland foregrounds ; if he would paiat the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they nestle in the clefts of the rocks, and the mosses and bright lichens of the rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and bring back a piece of Jura pasture in spring ; with the gentians in their earliest blue, and the soldanelle beside the fading snow ! And return again, and paint a gray waU of Alpine crag, with budding roses crown- ing it like a wreath of rubies. That is what he was meant to do in this world ; not to paint bouquets in china vases. I have in various other places expressed my sincere respect for the works of Samuel Prout : his shortness of sight has necessarily prevented their possessing delicacy of finish or fulness of minor detail ; but I think that those of no other living artist furnish an example so striking of innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular work at the exact and only period when it was possible. At the instant when peace had been established all over Europe, but when neither national character nor national architecture had as yet been seriously changed by promiscuous intercourse or modem " improvement ; " when, however, nearly every ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state of compara- tive neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruinousness, and of separation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiar interest — half sorrowful, half sublime ; — at that mo- ment Prout was trained among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall, until his eye was accustomed to foUow with delight the rents and breaks, and irregularities which, to another man, would have been offensive ; and then, gifted with infinite readiness in composition, but also with infinite affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray, he was sent to preserve, ja an almost irmuwer^ble series of drawings, 256 PIIE-BAPHAELITISM. every one made on the spot, the aspect borne, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by cities which, in a few years more, rekindled wars, or unexpected prosperities, were to ravage, or renovate, into nothingness. It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis ; but there is this fellowship between them, that both seem to have been intended to appreciate the characters of foreign coun- tries more than of their own — nay, to have been born in Eng- land chiefly that the excitement of strangeness might enhance to them the interest of the scenes they had to represent. I believe John Lewis to have done more entire justice to aU his powers (and they are magnificent ones) than any other man amongst us. His mission was evidently to portray the' comparatively animal life of the southern and eastern families, of mankind. For this he was prepared in a somewhat singu- lar way— by being led to study, and endowed with altogether peculiar apprehension of, the most sublime characters of ani- mals themselves. Bubens, Rembrandt, Snyders, Tintoret,, and Titian, have all, in various ways, drawn wild beasts mag- nificently ; but they have in some sort humanized or demon- ized them, making them either ravenous fiends or educated' beasts, that would draw cars, and had respect for hermits. The suUen isolation of the brutal nature ; the dignity and quietness of the mighty limbs ; the shaggy mountainous power, mingled with grace, as of a flowing stream ; the stealthy restraint of strength and vwath in every soundless motion of the gigantic frame ; aU this seems never to have been seen, much less drawn, until Lewis drew and himself engraved a series of animal subjects, now many years ago. Since then, he has devoted himself to the portraiture of those European and Asiatic races, among whom the refinements of civilization exist without its laws or its energies, and in whom the fierceness, indolence, and subtlety of animal nature are associated with brilliant imagination and strong affections. To this task he has brought not only intense perception of the kind of character, but powers of artistical composition like those of the great "Venetians, displaying, at the same time, a refinement of drawing almost miraculous, and appr& PBE-HAPEAELITISM. 257 ciable only, as the minutiae of nature itseK are appreciable, by the help of the microscope. The value, therefore, of his works, as records of the aspect of the scenery and inhabitants of the south of Spain and of the East, in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, is quite above all estimate. I hardly know how to speak of Mulready : in delicacy and completion of drawing, and splendor of color, he takes place beside John Lewis and the pre-Raphaelites ; but he has, throughout his career, displayed no definiteness in choice of subject. He must be named among the painters who have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doing so ; but having obtained a consummate method of ex- ecution, he has thrown it away on subjects either altogether uninteresting, or above his powers, or unfit for pictorial repre- sentation. "The Cherry Woman," exhibited in 1850, may be named as an example of the first kind; the "Burchelland Sophia " of the second (the character of Sir William Thorn- hill being utterly missed) ; the " Seven Ages " of the third ; for this subject cannot be painted. In the written passage, the thoughts are progressive and connected ; in the picture they must be co-existent, and yet separate ; nor can all the characters of the ages be rendered in painting at all. One may represent the soldier at the cannon's mouth, but one can- not paint the " bubble reputation " which he seeks. Mul- ready, therefore, while he has always produced exquisite pieces of painting, has failed in doing anything which can be of true or extensive use. He has, indeed, understood how to discipline his genius, but never how to direct it. Edvrin Landseer is the last painter but one whom I shall name : I need not point out to any one acquainted with his earlier works, the labor, or watchfulness of nature which they . involve, nor need I do more than aUude to the peculiar facul- ties of his mind. It will at once be granted that the highest merits of his pictures are throughout found in those parts of them which are least like what had before been accomplished ; and that it was not by the study of Raphael that he attained his eminent success, but by a healthy love of Scotch terriers. None of these painters, however, it will be answered, afford 258 PBE-RAPIIAELITISM. examples of the rise of the highest imaginative power out of close study of matters of fact. Be it remembered, however, that the imaginative power, in its magnificence, is not to be found every day. Lewis has it in no mean degree ; but we cannot hope to find it at its highest more than once in an age. We have had it once, and must be content. Towards the close of the last century, among the various drawings executed, according to the quiet manner of the time, in greyish blue, with brown foregrounds, some began to be noticed as exhibiting rather more than ordinary diligence and dehcacy, signed W. Turner.* There was nothing, however, in them at all indicative of genius, or even of more than or- dinary talent, unless in some of the subjects a large percep- tion of space, and excessive clearness and decision in the ar- rangement of masses. Gradually and cautiously the blues became mingled with delicate green, and then with gold ; the browns in the foreground became first more positive, and then were slightly mingled with other local colors ; while the touch, which had at first been heavy and broken, like that of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew more and more refined and expressive, until it lost itself in a method of execution often too delicate for the eye to follow, rendering, with a precision before unexampled, both the texture and the form of every object. The style may be considered as per- fectly formed about the year 1800, and it remained unchanged for twenty years. During that period the painter had attempted, and with more or less success had rendered, every order of landscape subject, but always on the same principle, subduing the colors of nature into a harmony of which the key-notes are greyish green and brown ; pure blues and delicate golden yellows being admitted in small quantity, as the lowest and highest limits of shade and light : and bright local colors in extremely small quantity in figures or other minor accessories. Pictures executed on such a system are not, properly speakr * He did not use bis full signature, J. M, W., until about the year 1800, PRERAPHABLITISM. 259 ing, works in color at all ; they are studies of light and shade, in which both the shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which best expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency ; and the lights and the foreground are ex- ecuted in that which best expresses their warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as not, in studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand : but the use of two, three, or four colors, always in the same relations and places, does not in the least constitute the work a study of color, any more than the brown engravings of the Liber Stu- diorum ; nor would the idea of color be in general more pre- sent to the artist's mind, when he was at work on one of these drawings, than when he was using pure brown in the mezzo- tint engraving. But the idea of space, warmth, and freshness being not successfully expressible in a single tint, and perfectly expressible by the admission of three or four, he allows him- self this advantage when it is possible, without in the least embarrassing himself with the actual color of the objects to be represented. A stone in the fore ground might in nature have been cold grey, but it wiU be drawn nevertheless of a rich brown, because it is in the foreground ; a hUl in the dis- tance might in nature be purple with heath, or golden with furze ; but it wiU be drawn nevertheless of a cool grey, because it is in the distance. This at least was the general theory, — carried out with great severity in many, both of the drawings and pictures ex- ecuted by him during the period : in others more or less modified by the cautious introduction of color, as the painter felt his liberty increasing ; for the system was evidently never considered as final, or as anything more than a means of prog- ress : the conventional, easily manageable color, was visibly adopted, only that his mind might be at perfect liberty to ad- dress itself to the acquirement of the first and most necessary knowledge in all art — that of form. But as form, in landscape, implies vast bulk and space, the use of the tints which enabled him best to express them, was actually auxiUary to the mere drawing ; and, therefore, not only permissible, but even neces- sary, while more brilliant or varied tints were never indulged 260 PRB-RAPHAELITISM. in, except when they might be introduced without the slight- est danger of diverting his mind for an instant from his prin- cipal object. And, therefore, it will be generally found in the works of this period, that exactly in proportion to the impor- tance and general toil of the composition, is the severity of the tint ; and that the play of color begins to show itself first in slight and small drawings, where he felt that he could easily secure all that he wanted in form. Thus the "Crossing the Brook," and such other elaborate and large compositions, are actually painted in nothing but grey, brown, and blue, with a point or two of severe local color in the figures ; but in the minor drawings, tender pas- sages of complicated color occur not unfrequently in easy places ; and even before the year 1800 he begins to introduce it with evident joyfulness and longing in his rude and simple studies, just as a child, if it could be supposed to govern itself by a fully developed intellect, would cautiously, but with infi- nite pleasure, add now and then a tiny dish of fruit or other dangerous luxury to the simple order of its daily fare. Thus, in the foregrounds of his most severe drawings, we not unfre- quently find him indulging in the luxury of a peacock ; and it is impossible to express the joyfulness with which he seems to design its graceful form, and deepen with soft pencilling the bloom of its blue, after he has worked through the stern detail of his almost colorless drawing. A rainbow is another of his most frequently permitted indulgences ; and we find him very early allowing the edges of his evening clouds to be touched with soft rose-color or gold ; while, whenever the hues of nat- ure in anywise fall into his system, and can be caught with- out a dangerous departure from it, he instantly throws his whole soul into the faithful rendering of them. Thus the usual brown tones of his foreground become warmed into sudden vigor, and are varied and enhanced with indescribable delight, when he finds himself by the shore of a moorland stream, where they truly express the stain of its golden rocks, and the darkness of its clear. Cairngorm-like pools, and the usual serenity of his aerial blue is enriched into the softness and depth of the sapphii'e, when it can deepen the distant PRE-RAPHA ELITISM. 26l slumber of some Highland lake, or temper the gloomy shad- ows of the evening upon its hills. The system of his color being thus simplified, he could ad- dress all the strength of his mind to the accumulation of facts of form ; his choice of subject, and his methods of treatment, are therefore as various as his color is simple ; and it is not a Httle difficult to give the reader who is unacquainted with his works, an idea either of their infinitude of aims, on the one hand, or of the kind of feeling which prevades them all, on the other. No subject was too low or too high for him ; we find him one day hard at wovk on a cock and hen, with their family of chickens in a farm-yard ; and bringing all the refine- ment of Ms execution into play to express the texture of the plumage ; next day, he is drawing the Dragon of Colchis. One hour he is much interested in a gust of wind blowing away an old woman's cap ; the next he is painting the fifth plague of Egypt. Every landscape painter before him had acquired distinction by confining his efibrts to one class of subject. Hobbima painted oaks ; Euysdael, waterfalls and copses ; Cuyp, river or meadow scenes in quiet afternoons ; Salvator and Poussin, such kind of mountain scenery as people could conceive, who lived in towns in the seventeenth century. But I am well persuaded that if all the works of Turner, up to the year 1820, were divided into classes (as he has himself divided them in the Liber Studiorum), no preponderance could be as- signed to one class over another. There is architecture, in- cluding a large number of formal "gentlemen's seats," I sup- pose drawings commissioned by the owners ; then lowland pastoral scenery of every kind, including nearly aU farming operations, — ploughing, harrowing, hedging and ditching, felling trees, sheep-washing, and I know not what else ; then all kinds of town Ufe — court-yards of inns, starting of mail coaches, interiors of shops, house-buildings, fairs, elections, &c. ; then aU kinds of inner domestic hfe — interiors of rooms, studies of costumes, of still life, and heraldry, including mul- titudes of symbolical vignettes ; then marine scenery of every kind, full of local incident ; every kind of boat and method of fishing for particular fish, being specifically drawn, round the 262 PBE-RAPHABLITISM. whole coast of England ;^pilcliard fishing at St. Ives, wliiting fishing at Margate, herring at Loch Fyne ; and all kinds of shipping, including studies of every separate part of the ves- sels, and many marine battle-pieces, two in particular of Traf- algar, both of high importance, — one of the Victory after the battle, now in Greenwich Hospital ; another of the Death of Nelson, in his own gallery ; then all kinds of mountain scenery, some idealised into compositions, others of definite localities ; together with classical compositions, Eomes and Carthages and such others, by the myriad, with mythological, histori- cal, or allegorical figures, — nymphs, monsters, and spectres ; heroes and divinities.* What general feeling, it may be asked incredulously, can possibly pervade all this ? This, the greatest of all feelings — an utter forgetfulness of self. Throughout the whole period with which we are at present concerned. Turner appears as a man of sympathy absolutely infinite — a sympathy so all-em- bracing, that I know nothing but that of Shakespeare com- parable with it. A soldier's wife resting by the roadside is not beneath it ; Eizpah, the daughter of Aiah, watching the dead bodies of her sons, not above it. Nothing can possibly be so mean as that it will not interest his whole mind, and carry away his whole heart ; nothing so great or solemn but that he can raise himself into harmony with it ; and it is im- possible to prophesy of him at any moment, whether, the next, he will be in laughter or in tears. This is the root of the man's greatness ; and it follows as a matter of course that this sympathy must give him a subtle power of expression, even of the characters of mere material things, such as no other painter ever possessed. The man who can best feel the difierence between rudeness and tender- ness in humanity, perceives also more difference between the branches of an oak and a willow than any one else would ; and. therefore, necessarily the most striking character of the draw- ings themselves is the speciality of whatever they represent — the thorough stii&ess of what is stiff, and grace of what is * I shall give a catalogue rimonnie of all this in the third volume of " Modern Painters." PttE-RAPHAELITISM. ^63 graceful, and vastness of what is vast ; but through and beyond all this, the condition of the mind of the painter himself is easily enough discoverable by comparison of a large number of the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful : in it- self quite passionless, though entering with ease into the ex- ternal passion which it contemplates. By the effort of its will it sympathises with tumult or distress, even in their ex- tremes, but there is no tumult, no sorrow in itself, only a chastened and exquisitely peaceful cheerfulness, deeply medi- tative ; touched without loss of its own perfect balance, by sadnesa on the one side, and stooping to playfulness upon the other. I shaU never cease to regret the destruction, by fire, now several years ago, of a drawing which always seemed to me to be the perfect image of the painter's mind at this period, — the drawing of Brignal Church near Eokeby, of which a feeble idea may still be gathered from the engraving (in the Yorkshire series). The spectator stands on the "Brig- nal banks," looking down into the glen at twilight ; the sky is still full of soft rays, though the sun is gone ; and the Greta glances brightly in the valley, singing its evening-song; two white clouds, following each other, move without wind through the hollows of the ravine, and others lie couched on the far away moorlands ; every leaf of the woods is still in the delicate air ; a boy's kite, incapable of rising, has become en- tangled in their branches, he is climbing to recover it ; and just behind it in the picture, almost indicated by it, the lowly church is seen in its secluded field between the rocks and the stream ; and around it the low churchyard wall, and the few white stones which mark the resting places of those who can climb the rocks no more, nor hear the river sing as it passes. There are many other existing drawings which indicate the same character of mind, though I think none so touching or so beautiful ; yet they are not, as I said above, more numerous than those which express his sympathy with subUmer or more active scenes ; but they are almost always marked by a ten- derness of execution, and have a look of being beloved in every part of them, which shows them to be the truest expres- sion of his own feelings. 264 PRE-RAPUAELtTISM. One other characteristic of liis mind at this period remains to be noticed — its reverence for talent in others. Not the reverence which acts upon the practices of men as if they were the laws of nature, but that which is ready to appreciate the power, and receive the assistance, of every mind which has been previously employed in the same direction, so far as its teaching seems to be consistent with the great text-boot of nature itself. Turner thus studied almost every preceding landscape painter, chiefly Claude, Pqussin, Vandevelde, Loutherbourg, and "Wilson. It was proba]^ by the Sir George Beaumonts and other feeble conventiOT&lists.of the period, that he was persuaded to devote his attennoto to the works of these men ; and his having done so wiU be thought, a few scores of years hence, evidence of perhaps the greatest modesty ever shown by a man of original power. Modesty at once admirable and unfortunate, for the study of th|3 works of Vandevelde and Claude was productive of unmisejk'mischief to him ; he spoiled many of his marine pictures, ag/for instance Lord EUesmere's, by imitation of the former;.!'; and from the latter learned a false ideal, which confiirmed by the notions of Greek art prevalent in London im ihe beginning of this cen- tury, has manifested itself in mafcy vulgarities in his composi- tion pictures, vulgarities whichynay perhaps be best expressed by the general term " Twickg^ham Classicism," as consisting principally in conceptiops of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the er/ction of most of our suburban vUlas. From Nicolo Poussin |iid Loutherbourg he seems to have de- rived advantage ; pevliaps also from Wilson ; and much in his subsequent triir.sis'Jfrom ibx higher men, especially Tintoret and Paul Veronesey' I have myself heard him speaking -with singular deUght of' the putting in of the beech leaves in the upper right-hayd. oprner of Titian's Peter Martyr. I cannot in any of Ms works tr^ce the slightest influence of Salvator ; and I am not surprised at it, for though Salvator was a man of far higher powers than either Vandevelde or Claude, he was a wilful and gross caricaturist. Turner would condescend to be helped by feeble men, but could not be corrupted by falsa men. Besides, he had never himself seen classical life, and PRE-RAPIIABLITiaM. ^65 Claude was represented to him as competent authority for it. But he had seen mountains and toiTents, and knew therefore that Salvator could not paint them. One of the most characteristic drawings of this period for- tunately bears a date, 1818, and brings us within two years of another dated drawing, no less characteristic of what I shall henceforward call Turner's Second period. It is in the possession of Mr. Hawkesworth Pawkes of Famley, one of Turner's earliest and truest friends ; and bears the inscription, unusually conspicuous, heaving itself up and down over the eminences of the foreground — "Passage of Mont Cenis. J. M. W. Turner, January 15th, 1820." The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or what seems to have been a hospice at that time, — I do not remember such at present, — a smaU square-built house, built as if partly for a fortress, with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a kind of drawbridge to the door. This building, about 400 or 500 yards off, is seen in a dim, ashy grey against the light, which by help of a violent blast of mountain wind has broken through the depth of clouds which hangs upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing but this roof of drifting cloud ; but neither is there any weight of darkness — the high air is too thin for it, — all savage, howling, and luminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting out here and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is a desolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it in long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof and through its window in a frantic whirl ; the near ground is all wan with half-thawed, half-trampled snow ; a diligence in front, whose horses, unable to face the wind, have turned right round with fright, its passengers struggling to escape, jammed in th« window ; a little farther on is another carriage off the road, some figures pushing at its wheels, and its driver at the horses" heads, pulling and lashing with all his strength, his lifted arm stretched out against the light of the distance, though too far off for the whip to be seen. Now I am perfectly certain that any one thoroughly accus- 266 PBB-RAPHABL1TI8M. tomed to the earlier works of the painter, and sho-wn this picture for the first time, would be struck by two altogether new characters in it. The first, a seeming enjoyment of the excitement of the scene, totally different from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerly have been regarded. Every incident of motion and of energy is siezed upon -with indescribable delight, and every Hne of the composition animated with a force and fury which are now no longer the mere expression of a contemplated external truth, but have origin in some in- herent feeling in the painter's mind. The second, that although the subject is one in itself almost incapable of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the impression, aU briUiant local color has been refused even where it might easily have been introduced, as in the figures ; yet in the low minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of color have been elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading, instead of a subordinate, element in the composition ; the subdued warm hues of the granite promontories, the duU stone color of the walls of the buildings, clearly opposed, even in shade, to the grey of the snow wreaths heaped against them, and the faint greens and ghastly blues of the glacier ice, being all expressed with delicacies of transition utterly unexampled in any previ- ous drawings. These, accordingly, are the chief characteristics of the works of Turner's second period, as distinguished from the first, — a new energy inherent in the mind of the painter, diminishing the repose and exalting the force and fire of his conceptions, and the presence of Color, as at least an essential, and often a principal, element of design. Not that it is impossible, or even unusual, to find drawings of serene subject, and perfectly quiet feeling, among the com- positions of this period ; but the repose is in them, just as the energy and tumult were in the earlier period, an external quality, which the painter images by an effort of the vdU : it is no longer a character inherent in himself. The " Ulleswater," in the England series, is one of those which are in most per- PBE-BAPHAELIT18M. 267 feet peace : in the "Cowes," the silence is only broken by the dash of the boat's oars, and in the "Alnwick" by a stag drinking ; but in at least nine drawings out of ten, either sky, water, or figures ai-e in rapid motion, and the grandest draw- ings are almost always those which have even violent action in one or other, or in all : e. g. high force of Tees, Coventry, Llanthony, SaUsbury, Llanberis, and such others. The color is, however, a more absolute distinction ; and we must return to Mr. Pawkes's collection in order to see how the change in it was effected. That such a change would take place at one time or other was of course to be securely antici- pated, the conventional system of the first period being, as above stated, merely a means of Study. But the immediate cause was the journey of the year 1820. As might be guessed from the legend on the drawing above described, " Passage of Mont Cenis, January 15th, 1820," that drawing represents what happened on the day in question to the painter himself. He passed the Alps then in the winter of 1820 ; and either in the previous or subsequent summer, but on the same joiu'ney, he made a series of sketches on the Ehine, in body color, now in Mr. Fawkes's collection. Every one of those sketches is the almost instantaneous record of an effect of color or atmo- sphere, taken strictly from nature, the drawing and the details of every subject being comparatively subordinate, and the color nearly as principal as the light and shade had been be- fore, — certainly the leading feature, though the light and shade are always exquisitely harmonized with it. And natu- rally, as the color becomes the leading object, those times of day are chosen in which it is most lovely ; and whereas before, at least five out of six of Turner's drawings represented ordi- nary daylight, we now find his attention directed constantly to the evening : and, for the first time, we have those rosy lights upon the hUls, those gorgeous falls of sun through flaming heavens, those solemn twilights, with the blue moon rising as the western sky grows dim, which have ever since been the themes of his mightiest thoughts. I have no doubt, that the immedwte reason of this change ^as the impression made ujppo him by the colorg of the con- 268 PBE-BAPHAELITISM. tinental skies. When he first travelled on the Continent (1800), he was comparatively a young student ; not yet able to dravr form as he vsranted, he was forced to give all his thoughts and strength to this primary object. But now he was free to receive other impressions ; the time was come for perfecting his art, and the first sunset which he saw on the Khine taught him that aU previous landscape art was vain and valueless, that in comparison with natural color, the things that had been called paintings were mere ink and charcoal, and that all precedent and all authority must be cast away at once, and trodden under foot. He cast them away : the memories of Vandevelde and Claude were at once weeded out of the great mind they had encumbered ; they and aJl the rubbish of the schools together with them ; the waves of the Rhine swept them away for ever ; and a new dawn rose over the rocks of the Siebengebirge. There was another motive at work, which rendered the change still more complete. His feUow artists were already conscious enough of his superior power in drawing, and their best hope was, that he might not be able to color. They had begun to express this hope loudly enough for it to reach his ears. The engraver of one of his most important marine pictures told me, not long ago, that one day about the period in question, Turner came into his room to examine the progress of the plate, not having seen his own picture for several months. It was one of his dark early pictures, but in the foreground was a Uttle piece of luxury, a pearly fish wrought into hues like those of an opal. He stood before the picture for some moments ; then laughed, and pointed joy- ously to the fish ; — " They say that Turner can't color ! " and turned away. Under the force of these various impulses the change was total. Every subject thenceforth was primarily conceived in color ; and no engraving ever gave the sHghtest idea of any drawing of this period. The artists who had any perception of the truth were in despair ; the Beaumontites, classicalists, and " owl species " in general, in as much indignation as their dulness was capa- PBE-RAPEAELITISM. 269 ble o£ They had deliberately closed their eyes to all nature, and had gone on inquiring, "Where do you put your brown tree ? " A vast revelation was made to them at once, enough to have dazzled any one ; but to them, light unendurable as incomprehensible. They " did to the moon complain," in one vociferous, unanimous, continuous " Tu whoo." Shrieking rose from all dark places at the same instant, just the same kind of shrieking that is now raised against the Pre-Eaphael- ites. Those glorious old Arabian Nights, how true they are ! Mocking and whispering, and abuse loud and low by tm-ns, from aU the black stones beside the road, when one Uving soul is toiling up the hill to get the golden water. Mocking and whispering, that he may look back, and become a black stone like themselves. Turner looked not back, but he went on in such a temper as a strong man must be in, when he is forced to walk with his fingers in his ears. He retired into himself ; he could look no longer for help, or counsel, or sympathy from any one ; and the spirit of defiance in which he was forced to labor led him sometimes into violences, from which the shghtest expression of sympathy would have saved him. The new energy that was upon him, and the utter isolation into which he was driven, were both aUke dangerous, and many drawings of the time show the evil effects of both ; some of them being hasty, wild, or experimental, and others little more than magnificent expressions of defiance of public opinion. But all have this noble virtue — they are in everything his own : there are no more reminiscences of dead masters, no more trials of skill in the manner of Claude or Poussin ; every faculty of his soul is fixed upon nature only, as he saw her, or as he remembered her. I have spoken above of his gigantic memory : it is espe- cially necessary to notice this, in order that we may understand the kind of grasp which a man of real imagination takes of aU things that are once brought within his reach — grasp thenceforth not to be relaxed for ever. On looking over any catalogues of his works, or of par- 270 PRE-RAPHAELITISM. ticular series of them, we shall notice the recurrence of the same subject two, three, or even many times. In any other artist this would be nothing remarkable. Probably most modern landscape painters multiply a favorite subject twenty, thirty, or sixty fold, putting the shadows and the clouds in different places, and " inventing," as they are pleased to caU it, anew "effect" every time. But if we examine the suc- cessions of Turner's subjects, we shall find them either the records of a succession of impressions actually perceived by him at some favorite locality, or else repetitions of one im- pression received in early youth, and again and again reahsed as his increasing powers enabled him to do better justice to it. In either case we shall find them records of seen facts ; never compositions in his room to fill up a favorite outline. For instance, every traveller, at least every traveller of thirty years' standing, must love Calais, the place where he first felt himself in a strange world. Turner evidently loved it excessively. I have never catalogued his studies of Calais, but I remember, at this moment, five : there is first the " Pas de Calais," a very large oil painting, which is what he saw in broad daylight as he crossed over, when he got near the French side. It is a careful study of French fishing boats running for the shore before the wind, with the picturesque old city in the distance. Then there is the " Calais Harbor " in the Liber Studiorum : that is what he saw just as he was going into the harbor, — a heavy brig warping out, and very likely to get in his way, or run against the pier, and bad weather coming on. Then there is the " Calais Pier," a large painting, engraved some years ago by Mr. Lupton : * that is what he saw when he had landed, and ran back directly to the pier to see what had become of the brig. The weather had got still worse, the fishwomen were being blown about in a distressful manner on the pier head, and some more fishing boats were running in with all speed. Then there is the " Fortrouge," Calais : that is what he saw after he had been home to Dessein's, and dined, and went out again in the even- ing to walk on the sands, the tide being down. He had never * The plate was, Jip'vy^eyer, never publlgbed. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 271 Been such a waste of sands before, and it made an impression on him. The shrimp girls were all scattered over them too, and moved about in white spots on the wild shore ; and the storm had lulled a little, and there was a sunset — such a sun- set, — and the bars of Fortrouge seen against it, skeleton-wise. He did not paint that directly ; thought over it, — painted it a long while afterwards. Then there is the vignette in the illustrations to Scott. That is what he saw as he was going home, meditatively ; and the revolving hghthouse came blazing out upon him suddenly, and disturbed him. He did not like that so much ; made a vignette of it, however, when he was asked to do a bit of Calais, twenty or thirty years afterwards, having already done all the rest. Turner never told me all this, but any one may see it if he will compare the pictures. They might, possibly, not be im- pressions of a single day, but of two days or three ; though in all human probability they were seen just as I have stated them ; * but they are records of successive impressions, as plainly written as ever traveller's diary. All of them pure veracities. Therefore immortal. I could multiply these series almost indefinitely from the rest of his works. What is curious, some of them have a kind of private mark running through all the subjects. Thus I know three drawings of Scarborough, and all of them have a starfish in the foreground : I do not remember any others of his marine subjects which have a starfish. The other kind of repetition — the recurrence to one early impression — is however still more remarkable. In the collec- tion of F. H Bale, Esq., there is a small drawing of Llanthony Abbey. It is in his boyish manner, its date probably about 1795 ; evidently a sketch from nature, finished at home. It had been a showery day ; the hills were partially concealed by the rain, and gleams of sunshine breaking out at intervals. A man was fishing in the mountain stream. The young * And the more probably because Turner was never fond of staying long at any place, and was least of all likely to make a pause of two or three days at the beginning of his journey. 272 PBE-RAPHAELITI8M. Turner sought a place of some shelter under the bushes ; made his sketch, took great pains when he got home to imi- tate the rain, as he best could ; added his child's luxury of a rainbow ; put in the very bush under which he had taken shelter, and the fisherman, a somewhat O-jointed and long- legged fisherman, in the courtly short breeches which were the fashion of the time. Some thirty years afterwards, with aU his powers in their strongest training, and after the total change in his feehngs and principles which I have endeavored to describe, he un- dertook the series of " England and Wales," and in that series introduced the subject of Llanthony Abbey. And behold, he went back to his boy's sketch, and boy's thought. He kept the very bushes in their places, but brought the fisherman to the other side of the river, and put him, in somewhat less courtly dress, under their shelter, instead of himself. And then he set all his gained strength and new knowledge at work on the weU-remembered shower of rain, that had fallen thirty years before, to do it better. The resultant drawing * is one of the very noblest of his second period. Another of the drawings of the England series, UUeswater, is the repetition of one in Mr. Pawkes's collection, which, by the method of its execution, I should conjecture to have been executed about the year 1808, or 1810 : at aU events, it is a very quiet drawing of the first period. The lake is quite calm ; the western hills in grey shadow, the eastern massed La light. HelveUyn rising Uke a mist between them, aU being mirrored in the cahn water. Some thin and sUghtly evanes- cent cows are standing in the shallow water in front ; a boat floats motionless about a hundred yards from the shore : the foreground is of broken rocks, with lovely pieces of copse on the right and left. This was evidently Turner's record of a quiet evening by the shore of Ulleswater, but it was a feeble one. He could not at that time render the sunset colors : he went back to it therefore in the England series, and painted it again with his new power. The same hills are there, the same shadows, * Vide Modern Painters, Part II. Sect. lU. Chap. IV. § 14. PJRE-BAPRAELITISM. 27u the same cows, — they had stood in his mind, on the same spot, for twenty years, — the same boat, the same rooks, only the copse is cut away — it interfered with the masses of his col- or : some figures are introduced bathiug, and what was grey, and feeble gold in the first drawing, becomes purple, and burn- ing rose-color in the last. But perhaps one of the most curious examples is in the series of subjects from Winchelsea. That in the Liber Stu- diorum, "Winchelsea, Sussex," bears date 1812, and its fig- ures consist of a soldier speaking to a woman, who is resting on the bank beside the road. There is another small subject, with Winchelsea in the distance, of which the engraving bears date 1817. It has two women with bundles, and two soldiers toiling along the embankment in the plain, and a baggage waggon in the distance. Neither of these seems to have sat- isfied him, and at last he did another for the England series, of which the engraving bears date 1830. There is now a regi- ment on the march ; the baggage waggon is there, having got no fui-ther on in the thirteen years, but one of the women is thed, and has fainted on the bank ; another is supporting her against her bundle, and giving her drink ; a third sympathetic woman is added, and the two soldiers have stopped, and one is drinking from his canteen. Nor is it merely of entire scenes, or of particular incidents, that Turner's memory is thus tenacious. The shghtest pas- sages of color or arrangement that have pleased him — the fork of a bough, the casting of a shadow, the fracture of a stone — will be taken up again and again, and strangely worked into new relations with other thoughts. There is a single sketch from nature in one of the portfolios at Farnley, of a common wood-walk on the estate, which has furnished pas- sages to no fewer than three of the most elaborate composi- tions in the Liber Studiorum. I am thus tedious in dwelling on Turner's powers of memory, because I wish it to be thoroughly seen how all his greatness, all his infinite luxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everything that he sees, — on his grasping all, and losing hold of nothing, — on his forgetting himself, and 274 PRE-BAPHAELITISM. forgetting nothing else. I wish it to be understood how every great man paints what he sees or did see, his greatness being indeed little else than his intense sense of fact. And thus Pre-KaphaeUtism and Eaphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one and the same, so far as education can influence them. They are different in their choice, different in their faculties, but all the same in this, that Eaphael himself, so far as he was great, and all who preceded or followed him who ever were great, became so by painting the truths around them as they appeared to each man's own mind, not as he had been taught to see them, except by the God who made both him and them. There is, however, one more characteristic of Turner's second period, on which I have stiU to dwell, especially with reference to what has been above advanced respecting the fallacy of overtoil ; namely, the magnificent ease with which all is done when it is successfully done. For there are one or two drawings of this time which are not done easUy. Turner had in these set himself to do a fine thing to exhibit his powers ; in the common phrase, to excel himself ; so sure as he does this, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever come from his hands are some of this second period, on which he has spent much time and laborious thought ; drawings filled with incident from one side to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and warm lights set against them in violent contrast ; one of Bamborough Castle, a large water-color, may be named as an example. But the truly noble works are those in which, without effort, he has expressed his thoughts as they came, and forgotten himself ; and in these the outpouring of invention is not less miraculous than the swiftness and obedience of the mighty hand that expresses it. Any one who examines the drawings may see the evidence of this facility, in the strange freshness and sharpness of every touch of color ; but when the multitude of delicate touches, with which aU the aerial tones are worked, is taken into con- sideration, it would still appear impossible that the drawing could have been completed with ease, unless we had direct evidence in the matter : fortunately, it is not wanting. There PBE-RAPSAELITI8M. 275 Is a drawing in Mr. Fawkes's collection of a man-of-war taking in stores : it is of the usual size of those of the England se- ries, about sixteen inches by eleven : it does not appear one of the most highly finished, but is still farther removed from slightness. The hull of a first-rate occupies nearly one-half of the picture on the right, her bows towards the spectator, seen in sharp perspective from stem to stem, with all her portholes, guns, anchors, and lower rigging elaborately de- tailed ; there are two other ships of the line in the middle dis- tance, drawn with equal precision ; a noble breezy sea dancing against their broad bows, full of delicate drawing in its waves ; a store-ship beneath the hull of the larger vessel, and several other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky. It might appear no small exertion of mind to draw the detail of all this ship- ping down to the smallest ropes, from memory, in the draw- ing-room of a mansion in the middle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been given for the efifbrt. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter fi'om the first stroke to the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning after break- fast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three hours, and went out to shoot. Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordi- nary painters, and they vrill see the truth of what was above asserted, — that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily ; and let them not torment themselves with twist- ing of compositions this way and that, and repeating, and ex- perimenting, and scene-shifting. If a man can compose at all, he can compose at once, or rather he must compose in spite of himself. And this is the reason of that silence which I have kept in most of my works, on the subject of Composi- tion. Many critics, especially the architects, have found fault with me for not "teaching people how to arrange masses ;" for not " attributing sufBcient importance to composition." Alas ! I attribute far more importance to it than they do ; — 30 much importance, that I should just as soon think of sit- ting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or King Lear, as how to " compose," in the true sense, a sin- gle building or picture. The marvellous stupidity of this age 276 PUE-RAPHAELITISM. of lecturers is, that they do not see that what they call " prin- ciples of composition," are mere principles of common sense in everything, as well as in pictures and buildings ; — A pict- ure is to have a principal light ? Yes ; and so a dinner is to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point, and an air of music a principal note, and every man a principal ob- ject. A picture is to have harmony of relation among its parts ? Yes ; and so is a speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company weU chosen, and a ragout well mixed. Composition ! As if a man were not composing every moment of his life, weU or iU, and would not do it in- stinctively in his picture as well as elsewhere, if he could. Composition of this lower or common kind is of exactly the same importance in a picture that it is in any thing else, — no more. It is well that a man should say what he has to say in good order and sequence, but the main thing is to say it truly. And yet we go on preaching to our pupils as if to have a prin- cipal light was every thing, and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein the courses are indeed weU or- dered, but the dishes empty. It is not, however, only in invention that men overwork themselves, but in execution also ; and here I have a word to say to the Pre-Eaphaelitea specially. They are working too hard. There is evidence in failing portions of their pictures, showing that they have vrrought so long upon them that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that the hand refused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there are cer- tain qualities of drawing which they miss from over-careful- ness. For, let them be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common desire of men to see things done in what they call a " masterly," or " bold," or " broad," manner : a truth op- pressed and abused, like almost every other in this world, but an eternal one nevertheless ; and whatever mischief may have followed from men's looking for nothing else but this facility of execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all right if only it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the truth remains the same :■ — that because it is not in- tended that men shall torment or weary themselves with anj PRE-BAPHAELlTtSM. 27'7 earthly labor, it is appointed that the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease and decision of manipula- tion. I only wish people understood this much of sculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finely finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to the workman's hammer : but at all events, in painting it is felt by all men, and justly felt. The freedom of the lines of nature can only be represented by a similar free- dom in the hand that foUows them ; there are curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, and in the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught but by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care what example is taken, be it the most subtle and careful work of Leonardo himself, there will be found a play and power and ease in the outlines, which no slow effoi-t could ever imitate. And if the Pre-Eaphaelites do not understand how this kind of power, in its highest perfection, may be imited with the most severe rendering of all other orders of truth, and especially of those with which they themselves have most sympathy, let them look at the drawings of John Lewis. These then are the principal lessons which we have to learu from Turner, in his second or central period of labor. There is one more, however, to be received ; and that is a warning ; for towards the close of it, what with doing small conventional vignettes for publishers, making showy drawings from sketches taken by other people of places he had never seen, and touch- ing up the bad engravings from his works submitted to him almost every day, — engravings utterly destitute of animation, and which had to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them over with white, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many conventionalities, and even falsities ; and, having trusted for ten or twelve years almost entirely to his memory and invention, living I believe mostly in London, and receiving a new sensation only from the burning of the Houses of ParHament, he painted many pictures between 1830 and 1840 altogether unworthy of him. But he was not thus to close his career. 278 PRE-RAPHAELITISM. In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook another journey into Switzerland. It was then at least forty years since he had first seen the Alps ; (the source of the Arveron, in Mr. Pawkes's collection, which could not have been painted tiU he had seen the thing itself, bears date 1800,) and the direction of his journey in 1840 marks his fond memory of that earliest one ; for, if we look over the Swiss studies and drawings executed in his first period, we shall be struck with his fondness for the pass of the St. Gothard ; the most elabo- rate drawing in the Parnley collection is one of the Lake of Lucerne from Fluelen ; and, counting the Liber Studiorum subjects, there are, to my knowledge, six compositions taken at the same period from the pass of St. Gothard, and, proba- bly, several others are in existence. The valleys of SaUenche, and Chamouni, and Lake of Geneva, are the only other Swiss scenes which seem to have made very profound impressions on him. He returned in 1841 to Lucerne ; walked up Mont Pilate on foot, crossed the St. Gothard, and returned by Lausanne and Geneva. He made a large number of colored sketches on this journey, and realised several of them on his retixrn. The draw- ings thus produced are different from all that had preceded them, and are the first which belong definitely to what I shall henceforth call his Third period. The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while the faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength ; all conventionality being done away with by the force of the impression which he had received from the Alps, after his long separation from them. The drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of thought : most of them by deep serenity, passing into melancholy ; aU by a richness of color, such as he had never before conceived. They, and the works done in following years, bear the same relation to those of the rest of his life that the colors of sunset do to those of the day; and will be recognised, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapes ever yet conceived by human intellect. Such has been the career of the greatest painter of this PRE-RAPEABLITISM. 270 century. Many a century may pass away before there rises such another ; but what greatness any among us may be capa- ble of, will, at least, be best attained by following in his path ; by beginning in all quietness and hopefulness to use whatever powers we may possess to represent the things around us as we see and feel them ; trusting to the close of Ufe to give the perfect crown to the course of its labors, and knowing assur- edly that the determination of the degree in which watchful- ness is to be exalted into invention, rests with a higher will than our own. And, if not greatness, at least a certain good, is thus to be achieved ; for though I have above spoken of the mission of the more humble artist, as if it were merely to be subservient to that of the antiquarian or the man of science, there is an ulterior aspect in which it is not subservient, but superior. Every archaeologist, every natural philosopher, knows that there is a peculiar rigidity of mind brought on by long devotion to logical and analytical inquiries. Weak men, giving themselves to such studies, are utterly hardened by them, and become incapable of understanding anything nobler, or even of feehng the value of the results to which they lead. But even the best men are in a sort injured by them, and pay a definite price, as in most other matters, for definite advan- tages. They gain a peculiar strength, but lose in tenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, ham- mer in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the mountain ranges he has so laboriously ex- plored, the sublimity or mystery with which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with which they are adorned in the mind of the passing traveller. In his more informed conception, they arrange themselves like a dissected model : where another man would be awe-struck by the magnificence of the precipice, he sees nothing but the emergence of a fos- siliferous rock, familiarised already to his imagination as ex- tending in a shallow stratum, over a perhaps uninteresting district ; where the unlearned spectator would be touched with strong emotion by the aspect of the snowy summits which rise in the distance, he sees only the culminating points of a met- amorphic formation, with an uncomfortable web of fan-Uka 280 PRE-RAPBAELITI8M. fissures radiating, in his imagination, through their centre8> That in the grasp he has obtained of the inner relations of all these things to the universe, and to man, that in the views which have been opened to him of natural energies such aa no human mind would have ventured to conceive, and of past states of being, each in some new way bearing witness to the unity of purpose and everlastingly consistent providence of the Maker of all things, he has received reward well worthy the sacrifice, I would not for an instant deny ; but the sense of the loss is not less painful to him if his mind be rightly constituted ; and it would be vrith infinite gratitude that he would regard the man, who, retaining in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity to the facts of science so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable and credible to the most sternly critical intellect, should yet invest its features again with the sweet veil of their daily aspect ; should make them dazzling with the splendor of wandering light, and involve them in the unsearchableness of stormy obscurity ; should re- store to the divided anatomy its visible vitality of operation, clothe naked crags with soft forests, enrich the moimtain ruins with bright pastures, and lead the thoughts from the monotonous recurrence of the phenomena of the physical world, to the sweet interests and sorrows of human life and death. * This state of mind appears to have been the only one which Words- worth had been able to discern in men of science ; and in disdain of which, he wrote that short-sighted passage iu the Excursion, Book III. 1. 165 — 190, which is, I think, the only one in the whole range of his works which his true friends would have desired to see blotted out. What else has been found fault with as feeble or superfluous, is not so in the intense distinctive relief which it gives to his character. But these lines are written in mere ignorance of the matter they treat ; in mere want of sympathy with the men they describe ; for, observe, though the passage is put into the mouth of the Solitary, it is fully confirmed, and even rendered more scornful, by the speech which follows. THE END. ARATRA PENTELICl SIX LECTURES ON THE ELEMENTS OF SCULPTURE i3IVEN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IK MICHAELMAS TERM, 1870 PEEFAOE. I MUST pray the readers of the following Lectures to re- member that the duty at present laid on me at Oxford is of an exceptionally complex character. Directly, it is to awaken the interest of my pupils in a study which they have hitherto found unattractive, and imagined to be useless ; but more imperatively, it is to define the principles by which the study itself should be guided ; and to vindicate their security against the doubts with which frequent discussion has lately encumbered a subject which all think themselves competent to discuss. The possibihty of such vindication is, of course, imphed in the original consent of the Universities to the es- tablishment of Art Professorships. Nothing can be made an element of education of which it is impossible to determine whether it is ill done or weU ; and the clear assertion that there is a canon law in formative Art is, at this time, a more important function of each University than the instruction of its younger members in any branch of practical skill. It mat- ters comparatively little whether few or many of our students learn to draw ; but it matters much that all who learn should be taught with accuracy. And the number who may be justi- fiably advised to give any part of the time they spend at col- lege to the study of painting or sculpture ought to depend, and finally mtist depend, on their being certified that paint- ing and sculpture, no less than language or than reasoning, have grammar and method, — that they permit a recognizable distinction between scholarship and ignorance, and enforce a constant distinction between Eight and Wrong. This opening course of Lectures on Sculpture is therefore restricted to the statement, not only of first principles, but of 284 PREFACE. those which were illustrated by the practice of one scliool, and by that practice in its simplest branch, the analysis of which could be certified by easily accessible examples, and aided by the indisputable evidence of photography.* The exclusion of the terminal Lecture of the course from the series now published, is in order to mark more definitely this limitation of my subject ; but in other respects the Lect- ures have been amplified in arranging them for the press, and the portions of them trusted at the time to extempore deUvery, (not through indolence, but because explanations of detail are always most iutelUgible when most famiUar,) have been in substance to the best of my power set down, and in what I said too imperfectly, completed. In one essential particular I have felt it necessary to write what I would not have spoken. I had intended to make no reference, in my University Lectures, to existing schools of * Photography cannot exhibit the character of large and finished sculpt- ure ; hut its audacity of shadow is in perfect harmony with the more roughly picturesque treatment necessary in coins. For the rendering of all such frank relief, and for the better explanation of forms disturbed by the lustre of metal or polished stone, the method employed in the plates of this volume will be found, I believe, satisfactory. Casts are first taken from the coins, in white plaster; these are photographed, and the photograph printed by the heliotype process of Messrs. Edwards and Kidd. Plate XII. is exceptional, being a pure mezzotint engraving of the old school, excellently carried through by my assistant, Mr. Allen, who was taught, as a personal favour to myself, by my friend, and Tur- ner's fellow-worker, Thomas Lupton. Plate IV. was intended to be a photograph from the superb vase in the British Museum, No. 564 in Mr. Newton's Catalogue ; but its variety of colour deaed photography, and after the sheets had gone to press I was compelled to reduce Le Normand's plate of it, which is unsatisfactory, but answers my imme- diate purpose. The enlarged photographs for use in the Lecture Room were made for me with most successful skill by Sergeant Spaokman, of South Ken- sington ; and the help throughout rendered to me by Mr. Burgess is acknowledged in the course of the Lectures ; though with thanks which must remain inadequate lest they should become tedious ; for Mr. Bur- gess drew the subjects of Plates III., X., and XIII. ; drew and engraved every woodcut in the book ; and printed all the plates with his own hand. PREP AGE. 285 Art, except in cases where it might be necessary to point out some undervalued excellence. The objects specified in the eleventh paragraph of my inaugural Lecture, might, I hoped, have been accomplished without reference to any works de- serving of blame ; but the Exhibition of the Eoyal Academj in the present year showed me a necessity of departing from my original intention. The task of impartial criticism * is now, unhappily, no longer to rescue modest skUl from neg- lect ; but to withstand the errors of insolent genius, and abate the influence of plausible mediocrity. The Exhibition of 1871 was very notable in this important particvdar, that it embraced some representation of the mod- ern schools of nearly every country in Europe : and I am well assured that looking back upon it after the excitement of that singular interest has passed away, every thoughtful judge of Art will confirm my assertion, that it contained not a single picture of accomplished merit ; while it contained many that were disgraceful to Art, and some that were disgraceful to humanity. It becomes, under such circumstances, my inevitable duty to speak of the existing conditions of Art with plainness enough to guard the youths whose judgments I am entrusted to form, from being misled, either by their own naturally vivid interest in what represents, however unworthily, the scenes and persons of their own day, or by the cunningly de- vised, and, without doubt, powerful allurements of Art which has long since confessed itself to have no other object than to allure. I have, therefore, added to the second of these Lect- ures such illustration of the motives and course of modern industry as naturally arose out of its subject, and shall continue *A pamphlet by the Earl of Southesk, ^^ Britain's Art Paradise,''' (Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh) contains an entirely admirable criticism of the most faultful pictures of the 1871 Exhibition, It is to be regretted that Lord Southesk speaks only to condemn ; but indeed, in my own three days' review of the rooms, I I'ound nothing deserving of notice otherwise, except Mr. Hook's always pleasant sketches from fisher life, and Mr. Pettie's graceful and powerful, though too slightly painted, study from Uenry VI. 286 PREFACE. in future to make similar applications ; rarely, indeed, per. mitting myself, in the Lectures actually read before the University, to introduce subjects of instant, and therefore too exciting, interest ; but completing the addresses which I pre- pare for pubUcation in these, and in any other particulars, which may render them more widely serviceable. The present course of Lectures will be followed, if I am able to fulfil the design of them, by one of a like elementary character on Architecture ; and that by a third series on Christian Sculpture : but, in the meantime, my effort is to direct the attention of the resident students to Natural His- tory, and to the higher branches of ideal Landscape : and it will be, I trust, accepted as sufficient reason for the delay which has occurred in preparing the following sheets for the press, that I have not only been interrupted by a dangerous illness, but engaged, in what remained to me of the summer, in an endeavour to deduce, from the overwhelming complexity of modern classification in the Natural Sciences, some forms capable of easier reference by Art students, to whom the anatomy of brutal and floral nature is often no less important than that of the human body. The preparation of examples for manual practice, and the arrangement of standards for reference, both in Painting and Sculpture, had to be carried on meanwhile, as I was able. For what has already been done, the reader is referred to the Catalogue of the Educational Series, pubhshed at the end of the Spring Term ; of what remains to be done I will make no anticipatory statement, being content to have ascribed to me rather the fault of narrowness in design, than of extravagance in expectation. Denmabk HrLL, 25th Notember, 1871. ARATRA PENTELICI. LECTUEE I. OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS. Nmeniber, 1870. 1. If, as is commonly believed, the subject of study which it is my special function to bring before you had no relation to the great interests of mankind, I should have less courage in asking for your attention to-day, than when I first addressed you ; though, even then, I did not do so without painful di£B- dence. For at this moment, even supposing that in other places it were possible for men to pursue their ordinary avo- cations undisturbed by indignation or pity ; here, at least, in the midst of the deliberative and religious influences of Eng- land, only one subject, I am well assured, can seriously occupy your thoughts — the necessity, namely, of determining how it has come to pass, that in these recent days, iniquity the most reckless and monstrous can be committed unanimously, by men more generous than ever yet in the world's history were de- ceived into deeds of cruelty ; and that prolonged agony of body and spirit, such as we should shrink from inflicting wil- fully on a single criminal, has become the appointed and ac- cepted portion of unnumbered multitudes of innocent per- sons, inhabiting the districts of the world which, of all others, as it seemed, were best instructed in the laws of civilization, and most richly invested with the honour, and indulged in the felicity, of peace. Believe me, however, the subject of Art — instead of being 288 AEATHA PENTELIOI. foreign to these deep questions of social duty and peril, — is so vitally connected with them, that it would he impossible for me now to pursue the line of thought in which I began these lectures, because so ghastly an emphasis would be given to every sentence by the force of passing events. It is well, then, that in the plan I have laid down for your study, we shaU now be led into the examination of technical details, or abstract conditions of sentiment ; so that the hours you spend with me may be times of repose from heavier thoughts. But it chances strangely that, in this course of miautely detailed study, I have first to set before you the most essential piece of human workmanship, the plough, at the very moment when — (you may see the announcement in the journals either of yesterday or the day before) — the swords of your soldiers have been sent for to he sharpened, and not at aU to be beaten iato ploughshares. I permit myself, therefore, to remind you of the watchword of aU my earnest writings — " Soldiers of the Ploughshare, instead of Soldiers of the Sword " — and I know it my duty to assert to you that the work we enter upon to-day is no trivial one, but fuU of solemn hope ; the hope, namely, that among you there may be found men wise enough to lead the national passions towards the arts of peace, instead of the arts of war. I say the work "we enter upon," because the first four lect- ures I gave in the spring were whoUy prefatory ; and the following three only defined for you methods of practice. To- day we begin the systematic analysis and progressive study of our subject. 2. In general, the three great, or fine, Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, are thought of as distinct from the lower and more mechanical formative arts, such as car- pentry or pottery. But we cannot, either verbally, or with any practical advantage, admit such classification. How are we to distinguish painting on canvas from painting on china? — or painting on china from painting on glass? — or painting on glass from infusion of colour into any vitreous substance, such as enamel ? — or the infusion of colour into glass and enamel from the infusion of colour into wool or sOk, and weaving of OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS. 289 pictures in tapestry, or patterns in dress ? You will find that although, in ultimately accurate use of the word, painting must be held to mean only the laying of a pigment on a surface with a soft instrument ; yet, in broad comparison of the func- tions of Art, we must conceive of one and the same great artis- tic faculty, as governing every mode of disposing colours in a permanent relation on, or in, a solid substance ; whether it be by tinting canvas, or dyeing stuffs ; inlaying metals with fused flint, or coating walls with coloured stone. 3. Similarly the word " Sculpture," — though in ultimate ac- curacy it is to be limited to the development of form in hard substances by cutting away portions of their mass — ia broad definition, must be held to signify the reduction of any shape- less mass of solid matter into an intended shape, whatever the consistence of the substance, or nature of the instrument em- ployed ; whether we carve a granite mountain, or a piece of box-wood, and whether we use, for our forming instrument, axe, or hammer, or chisel, or our own hands, or water to soften, or fire to fuse ; — whenever and however we bring a shapeless thing into shape, we do so under the laws of the one great Art of Sculpture. 4. Having thus broadly defined painting and sculpture, we shall see that there is, in the third place, a class of work sep- arated from both, in a specific manner, and including a great group of arts which neither, of necessity, tint, nor for the sake of form merely, shape, the substances they deal with ; but con- struct or arrange them with a view to the resistance of some external force. We construct, for instance, a table with a flat top, and some support of prop, or leg, proportioned in strength to such weights as the table is intended to carry. We con- struct a ship out of planks, or plates of iron, with reference to certain forces of impact to be sustained, and of inertia to be overcome ; or we construct a waU or roof with distinct refer- ence to forces of pressure and oscillation, to be sustained or guarded against ; and therefore, in every case, with especial consideration of the strength of our materials, and the nature of that strength, elastic, tenacious, brittle, and the like. Now although this group of arts nearly always involves the 290 ABATSA PENTELICI. putting of two or more separate pieces together, we must not define it by that accident. The blade of an oar is not less formed with reference to external force than if it were made of many pieces ; and the frame of a boat, whether hollowed out of a tree-trunk, or constructed of planks nailed together, is essentially the same piece of art ; to be judged by its buoyancy and capacity of progression. StiU, from the most wonderful piece of all architecture, the human skeleton, to this simple one,* the ploughshare, on which it depends for its subsistence, the putting of two or more pieces together is curiously necessary to the perfectness of every fine instru- ment ; and the peculiar mechanical work of Daedalus, — inlay- ing, — becomes all the more delightful to us in external aspect, because, as in the jawbone of a Saurian, or the wood of a bow, it is essential to the finest capacities of tension and re- sistance. 5. And observe how unbroken the ascent from this, the simplest architecture, to the loftiest. The placing of the timbers in a ship's stem, and the laying of the stones in a bridge buttress, are similar in art to the construction of the ploughshare, differing in no essential point, either in that they deal with other materials, or because, of the three things pro- duced, one has to divide earth by advancing through it, another to divide water by advancing through it, and the third to divide water which advances against it. And again, the buttress of a bridge differs only from that of a cathedral in having less weight to sustain, and more to resist. We can find no term in the gradation, from the ploughshare to the cathedral buttress, at which we can set a logical distinction. 6. Thus then we have simply three divisions of Art — one, that of giving colours to substance ; another, that of giving form to it without question of resistance to force ; and the third, that of giving form or position which will make it capable of such resistance. AH the fine arts are embraced * I had a real ploughshare on my lecture -table ; but it would inter- rupt the drift of the statements in the text too long if I attempted here to illustrate by figures the relation of the coulter to the share, and of the hard to the soft pieces of metal in the share itself. OF THE mVIsrOlf OF ARTS. iS9l under these three divisions. Do not think that it is only a logical or scientific affectation to mass them together in this manner ; it is, on the contrary, of the first practical im- portance to understand that the painter's faculty, or master- hood over colour, being as subtle as a musician's over sound, must be looked to for the government of every operation in which colour is employed ; and that, in the same manner, the appUance of any art whatsoever to minor objects cannot be right, unless under the direction of a true master of that art. Under the present system, you keep your Academician occu- pied only in producing tinted pieces of canvas to be shown in frames, and smooth pieces of marble to be placed in niches ; whUe you expect your builder or constructor to design coloured patterns in stone and brick, and your china-ware merchant to keep a separate body of workwomen who can paint china, but nothing else. By this division of labour, you ruin all the ai-ts at once. The work of the Academician be- comes mean and effeminate, because he is not used to treat colour on a grand scale and in rough materials ; and your manufactures become base because no well educated person sets hand to them. And therefore it is necessary to under- stand, not merely as a logical statement, but as a practical necessity, that wherever beautiful colour is to be arranged, you need a Master of Painting ; and wherever noble form is to be given, a Master of Sculpture ; and wherever complex mechanical force is to be resisted, a Master of Architecture. 7. But over this triple division there must rule another yet more important. Any of these three arts may be either imitative of natural objects or limited to useful apphance. You may either paint a picture that represents a scene, or your street door, to keep it from rotting ; you may mould a statue, or a plate ; buUd the resemblance of a cluster of lotus stalks, or only a square pier. Generally speaking, Painting and Sculpture will be imitative, and Architecture merely useful ; but there is a great deal of Sculpture — as this crystal ball * for instance, which is not imitative, and a great deal of * A sphere of rock crystal, cut in Japan, enough imaginable by the reader, without a figure. 292 ARATBA PENTELIOI. Architecture whicli, to some extent is so, as the so called foils of Gothic apertures ; and for many other reasons you will find it necessary to keep distinction clear in your minds between the arts — of whatever kind — which are imitative, and produce a resemblance or image of something which is not present ; and those which are limited to the production of some useful reality, as the blade of a knife, or the wall of a house. You will perceive also, as we advance, that sculpture and painting are indeed in this respect only one art ; and that we shall have constantly to speak and think of them as simply graphic, whether with chisel or colour, their principal function being to make us, in the words of Aristotle, " dewpryriKol tov ■jrepl to, o-ui/xaTa KaXXov;" (Polit. 8, 3.), "having capacity and habit of contemplation of the beauty that is in material things ; " while Architecture, and its co-relative arts, are to be practised under quite other conditions of sentiment. 8. Now it is obvious that so far as the fine arts consist either in imitation or mechanical construction, the right judg- ment of them must depend on our knowledge of the things they imitate, and forces they resist : and my function of teaching here would (for instance) so far resolve itself, either into demonstration that this painting of a peach,* does re- semble a peach, or explanation of the way in which this ploughshare (for instance) is shaped so as to throw the earth aside with least force of thrust. And in both of these methods of study, though of course your own diUgence must be your chief master, to a certain extent your Professor of Art can always guide you securely, and can show you, either that the image does truly resemble what it attempts to resemble, or that the structure is rightly prepared for the service it has to perform. But there is yet another virtue of fine art which is, perhaps, exactly that about which you vrill expect your Pro- fessor to teach you most, and which, on the contrary, is exactly that about which you must teach yourselves all that it is essential to learn. 9. I have here in my hand one of the simplest possible * One of William Hunt's peaches ; not, I am afraid, imaginable alto- gether, but still less representable by figure. OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS. 293 examples of the union of the graphic and constructive pow- ers, — one of my breakfast plates. Since all the finely archi- tectural arts, we said, began in the shaping of the cup and the platter, we will begin, ourselves, with the platter. Why has it been made round ? For two structural reasons : first, that the greatest holding surface may be gathered into the smallest space ; and secondly, that in being pushed past other things on the table, it may come into least contact with them. Fig. 1. Next, why has it a rim ? For two other structural reasons ; first, that it is convenient to put salt or mustard upon ; but secondly and chiefly, that the plate may be easily laid hold of. The rim is the simplest form of continuous handle. Farther, to keep it from soiling the cloth, it will be wise to put this ridge beneath, round the bottom ; for as the rim is the simplest possible form of continuous handle, so this is the simplest form of continuous leg. And we get the section given beneath the figure for the essential one of a rightly made platter. 294 ABATSA PENTBLIOI. 10. Thus far our art has been strictly utilitarian having respect to conditions of collision, of carriage, and of support. But now, on the surface of our piece of pottery, here are vari- ous bands and spots of colour which are presumably set there to make it pleasanter to the eye. Six of the spots, seen closely, you discover are intended to represent flowers. These then have as distinctly a graphic purpose as the other properties of the plate have an architectural one, and the first critical question we have to ask about them is, whether they are Hke roses or not. I will anticipate what I have to say in subse- quent lectures so far as to assure you that, if they are to be like roses at all, the liker they can be, the better. Do not suppose, as many people will tell you, that because this is a common manufactured article, your roses on it are the better for being ill-painted, or half-painted. If they had been painted by the same hand that did this peach, the plate would have been all the better for it ; but, as it chanced, there was no hand such as William Hunt's to paint them, and their graphic power is not distinguished. In any case, however, that graphic power must have been subordinate to their effect as pink spots, while the band of green-blue round the plate's edge, and the spots of gold, pretend to no graphic power at all, but are meanLagless spaces of colour or metal. StiU less have they any mechanical office : they add nowise to the service- ableness of the plate ; and their agreeableness, if they possess any, depends, therefore, neither on any imitative, nor any structural, character ; but on some inherent pleasantness in themselves, either of mere colours to the eye (as of taste to the tongue), or in the placing of those colours in relations which obey some mental principle of order, or physical prin- ciple of harmony. 11. These abstract relations and inherent pleasantnesses, whether in space, number, or time, and whether of colours or sounds, form what we may properly term the musical or har- monic element in every art ; and the study of them is an en- tirely separate science. It is the branch of art-philosophy to which the word " aesthetics " should be strictly limited, being the inquii-y into the nature of things that in themselves are OF THE DIVISION Off ARTS. 295 pleasant to the human senses or instincts, though they repre- sent nothing, and serve for nothing, their only service being their pleasantness. Thus it is the province of aesthetics to tell you, (if you did not know it before,) that the taste and colour of a peach are pleasant, and to ascertain, if it be ascer- tainable, (and you have any curiosity to know,) why they are so. 12. The information would, I presume, to most of you, be gratuitous. If it were not, and you chanced to be in a sick state of body in which you disliked peaches, it would be, for the time, to you false information, and, so far as it was true of other people, to you useless. Nearly the whole study of sesthetics is in like manner either gratuitous or useless. Either you like the right things without being recommended to do so, or if you dislike them, your mind cannot be changed by lectures on the laws of taste. Tou recollect the story of Thackeray, provoked, as he was helping himself to strawberries, by a young coxcomb's telling him that " he never took fruit or sweets." " That " replied, or is said to have replied, Thack- eray, " is because you are a sot, and a glutton." And the whole science of a?sthetics is, in the depth of it, expressed by one passage of Goethe's in the end of the 2nd part of Faust ; — the notable one that follows the song of the Lemures, when the angels enter to dispute with the fiends for the soul of Faust. They enter singing — "Pardon to sinners and Ufe to the dust." Mephistopheles hears them first, and exclaims to his troop, "Discord I hear, and filthy jingling " — "Mis- tone hore ich ; garstiges Geklimper." This, you see, is the extreme of bad taste in music. Presently the angelic host begin strewing roses, which discomfits the diabolic crowd al- together. Mephistopheles in vain calls to them — " What do you duck and shrink for — is that proper hellish behaviour ? Stand fast, and let them strew " — " Was duckt und zuckt ihr ; ist das HeUen-brauch ? So haltet stand, und lasst sie streuen." There you have, also, the extreme of bad taste in sight and smelL And in the whole passage is a brief embodiment for you of the ultimate fact that all sesthetics depend on the health of soul and body, and the proper exercise of both, not only through years, but generations. Only by harmony of 296 ARATRA PENTELIOt both collateral and successive lives can the great doctrine of the Muses be received which enables men " yaipav 6p6u>i," " to have pleasures rightly ; " and there is no other definition of the beautiful, nor of any subject of dehght to the aesthetic faculty, than that it is what one noble spirit has created, seen and felt by another of similar or equal nobility. So much as there is in you of ox, or of swine, perceives no beauty, and creates none : what is human in you, in exact proportion to the perfectness of its humanity, can create it, and receive. 13. Returning now to the very elementary form in which the appeal to our aesthetic virtue is made in our breakfast- plate, you notice that there are two distinct kinds of pleasant- ness attempted. One by hues of colour ; the other by pro- portions of space. I have called these the musical elements of the arts relating to sight ; and there are indeed two com- plete sciences, one of the combinations of colour, and the other of the combinations of line and form, which might each of them separately engage us in as intricate study as that of the science of music. But of the two, the science of colour is, in the Greek sense, the more musical, being one of the divis- ions of the ApoUine power ; and it is so practically educa- tional, that if we are not using the faculty for colour to dis- cipUne nations, they will infallibly use it themselves as a means of corruption. Both music and colour are naturally influences of peace ; but in the war trumpet, and the war shield, in the battle song and battle standard, they have con- centrated by beautiful imagination the cruel passions of men ; and there is nothing in all the Divina Commedia of history more grotesque, yet more frightful, than the fact that, from the almost fabulous period when the insanity and impiety of war wrote themselves in the symbols of the shields of the Seven against Thebes, colours have been the sign and stimu- lus of the most furious and fatal passions that have rent the nations : blue against green, in the decline of the Roman Em- pire ; black against white, in that of Florence ; red against white, in the wars of the Royal houses in England ; and at this moment, red against white, in the contest of anarchy and loyalty, in all the world. OP THE DIVISION OF ARTS. 291 14. On the other hand, the du-ectly ethical influence of colour in the sky, the trees, flowers, and colouied creatures round us, and in our own ■various arts massed under the one name of painting, is so essential and constant that we cease to recognize it, because we are never long enough altogether de- prived of it to feel our need ; and the mental diseases induced by the influence of corrupt colour are as little suspected, or traced to their true source, as the bodily weaknesses resultiag from atmospheric miasmata. 15. The second musical science which belongs peculiarly to sculpture (and to painting, so far as it represents form), con- sists in the disposition of beautiful masses. That is to say, beautiful surfaces limited by beautiful lines. Beautiful sur- faces, observe ; and remember what is noted in my fourth lect- ure of the difference between a space and a mass. If you have at any time examined carefully, or practised from, the drawings of shells placed in your copying series, you cannot but have felt the difference in the grace between the aspects of the same line, when enclosing a rounded or unrounded space. The exact science of sculpture is that of the relations between outline and the solid form it hmits ; and it does not matter whether that relation be indicated by drawing or carv- ing, so long as the expression of solid form is the mental pur- pose ; it is the science always of the beauty of relation in three dimensions. To take the simplest possible line of continuous limit — the circle : the flat disc enclosed by it may indeed be made an element of decoration, though a very meagre one : but its relative mass, the ball, being gradated in three dimen- sions, is alvrays dehghtful. Here * is at once the simplest, and in mere patient mechanism, the most skilful, piece of sculpture I can possibly show you, — a piece of the purest rock-crystal, chiselled, (I believe, by mere toil of hand,) into a perfect sphere. Imitating nothing, constructing nothing ; sculpture for sculpture's sake, of purest natural substance into simplest primary form. 16. Again. Out of the nacre of any mussel or oyster-shell you might cut, at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat cir- * The crystal ball above mentioned. 298 ABATRA PENTELIOl. cular discs of the prettiest colour and lustre. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of sheU is used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster becoming itself an unwilling model- ler, agglutinates its juice into three dimensions, and the fact of the surface being now geometrically gradated, together with the savage instinct of attributing value to what is diffi- cult to obtain, make the Uttle boss so precious in men's sight that wise eagerness of search for the kingdom of heaven can be likened to their eagerness of search for it ; and the gates of Paradise can be no otherwise rendered so fair to their poor intelligence, as by telhng them that every several gate was of "one pearl." 17. But take note here. We have just seen that the sum of the perceptive faculty is expressed in those words of Aristotle's " to take pleasure rightly " or straightly — ^aipav opOlo's. Now, it is not possible to do the direct opposite of that, — to take pleasure iniquitously or obliquely — ;(atp€ii' aStKwg or o-xoXtSs — more than you do in enjoying a thing because your neighbour cannot get it. You may enjoy a thing legitimately because it is rare, and cannot be seen often, (as you do a fine aurora, or a sunset, or an unusually lovely flower) ; that is Nature's way of stimulating your attention. But if you enjoy it because your neighbour cannot have it — and, remember, all value at- tached to pearls more than glass beads, is merely and purely for that cause, — then you rejoice through the worst of idola- tries, covetousness ; and neither arithmetic, nor writing, nor any other so-called essential of education, is now so vitally nec- essary to the population of Europe, as such acquaintance with the principles of intrinsic value, as may result in the iconoclasm of jewellery ; and in the clear understanding that we are not in that instinct, civilized, but yet remain wholly savage, so far as we care for display of this selfish kind. You think, perhaps, I am quitting my subject, and proceed- ing, as it is too often with appearance of justice alleged against me, into irrelevant matter. Pardon me ; the end, not only of these lectures, but of my whole professorship, would be ac- complished, — and far more than that, — if only the English nation could be made to understand that the beauty which ia OF TEE DIVISION OP ARTS. 299 indeed to be a joy for ever, must be a joy for all ; and that though the idolatry may not have been wholly divine which sculptured gods, the idolatry is wholly diabolic, which, for vulgar display, sculptures diamonds. 18. To go back to the point \inder discussion. A pearl, or a glass bead, may owe its pleasantness in some degree to its lustre as well as to its roundness. But a mere and simple ball of unpolished stone is enough for sculpturesque value. You may have noticed that the quatrefoil used in the Ducal Palace of Venice owes its complete lovehness in distant effect to the finishing of its cusps. The extremity of the cusp is a mere ball of Istrian marble ; and consider how subtle the faculty of sight must be, since it recognizes at any distance, and is gratified by, the mystery of the termination of cusp ob- tained by the gradated light on the ball. In that Venetian tracery this simplest element of sculptured form is used sparingly, as the most precious that can be em- ployed to finish the fagade. But alike in our own, and the French, central Gothic, the ball-flower is lavished on every liue — and in your St. Mary's spire, and the Salisbury spire, and the towers of Notre Dame of Paris, the rich pleasantness of decoration, — indeed, their so-called " decorated style," — consists only in being datntUy beset with stone balls. It is true the balls are modified into dim likeness of flowers ; but do you trace the resemblance to the rose in their distant, which is their intended effect ? 19. But farther, let the ball have motion ; then the form it generates will be that of a cylinder. You have, perhaps, thought that pure Early English Architecture depended for its charm on visibility of construction. It depends for its charm altogether on the abstract harmony of groups of cylin- ders,* arbitrarily bent into mouldings, and arbitrarily associ- * All grandest effects in mouldings may be, and for the most part have been, obtained by rolls and oavettos of circular (segmental) sec- tion. More refined sections, as that of the fluting of a Doric shaft, are only of use near the eye and in beautiful stone ; and the pursuit of them was one of the many errors of later Gothic. The statement in the text that the mouldings, even of best time, " have no real relation to con- 300 AEATSA PENTELIGI. ated as shafts, having no real relation to construction whatso- ever, and a theoretical relation so subtle that none of us had seen it, till Professor WUHs worked it out for us. 20. And now, proceeding to analysis of higher sculpture, you may have observed the importance I have attached to the porch of San Zenone, at Verona, by making it, among your standards, the first of the group which is to illustrate the sys- tem of sculpture and architecture founded on faith in a future life. That porch, fortunately represented in the photograph, from which Plate I. has been engraved, under a clear and pleasant Ught, furnishes you with examples of sculpture of every kind from the flattest incised bas-relief to solid statues, both in marble and bronze. And the two points I have been pressing upon you are conclusively exhibited here, namely, — (1). That sculpture is essentially the production of a pleasant bossiness or roundness of surface ; (2) that the pleasantness of that bossy condition to the eye is irrespective of imitation on one side, and of structure on the other. 21. (1.) Sculpture is essentially the production of a pleasant bossiness or roundness of surface. If you look from some distance at these two engravings of Greek coins, (place the book open so that you can see the op- posite plate three or four yards off,) you wiU find the reUef on each of them simplifies itself into a pearl-like portion of a sphere, with exquisitely gradated light on its surface. When you look at them nearer, you will see that each smaller por- tion into which they are divided — cheek, or brow, or leaf, or tress of hair — resolves itself also into a rounded or undulated surface, pleasant by gradation of light. Every several sur- face is delightful in itself, as a shell, or a tuft of rounded moss, or the bossy masses of distant forest would be. That these intricately modulated masses present some resemblance to a girl's face, such as the Syracusans imagined that of the water-goddess Arethusa, is entirely a secondary matter ; the Btruction," is scarcely strong enough : they in fact contend with, and deny the construction, their principal purpose seeming t" be the con- cealment of the joints of the voussoirs. Plate I. — Poech of San Zenoke. Vekona. OF TEE DIVISION OF ARTS. 301 primary condition is that the masses shall be beautifully rounded, and disposed with due discretion and order. 22. (2.) It is difScult for you, at first, to feel this order and beauty of surface, apart from the imitation. But you can see there is a pretty disposition of, and relation between, the pro- jections of a fir-cone, though the studded spiral imitates noth- ing. Order exactly the same in kind, only much more com- plex ; and an abstract beauty of surface rendered definite by increase and decUne of Hglit — (for every curve of surface has its own luminous law, and the light and shade on a parabolic soUd differs, specifically, from that on an elliptical or spheri- cal one) — it is the essential business of the sculptor to obtain ; as it is the essential business of a paiater to get good colour, whether he imitates anything or not. At a distance from the picture, or carving, where the things represented become ab- solutely unintelligible, we must yet be able to say, at a glance, " That is good painting, or good carving." And you wiU be surprised to find, when you try the ex- periment, how much the eye must instinctively judge in this manner. Take the front of San Zenone for instance, Plate I. You will find it impossible without a lens, to distinguish in the bronze gates, and in great part of the wall, anything that their bosses represent. You cannot teU whether the sculpture is of men, animals, or trees ; only you feel it to be composed of pleasant projecting masses ; you acknowledge that both gates and wall are, somehow, delightfully roughened ; and only afterwards, by slow degrees, can you make out what this roughness means ; nay, though here (Plate in.) I magnify * one of the bronze plates of the gate to a scale, which gives you the same advantage as if you saw it quite close, in the reaUty, — you may stiU be obliged to me for the information, that this boss represents the Madonna asleep in her little bed, and this smaller boss, the Infant Christ in His ; and this at * Some of the most precious work done for me by my assistant Mr. Burgess, during the course of these lectures, consisted in making en- larged drawings from portions of photographs. Plate III. is engraved from a drawing of his, enlarged from the original photograph of whieb |>late I. is ^ redaction. 302 AEATBA PENTELIOI. the top, a cloud with an angel coming out of it, and these jagged bosses, two of the Three Kings, with their crowns on, looting up to the star, (which is inteUigible enough I admit) ; but what this straggling, three-legged boss beneath signifies, I suppose neither you nor I can tell, unless it be the shep- herd's dog, who has come suddenly upon the Kings with their crowns on, and is greatly startled at them. 23. Farther, and much more definitely, the pleasantness of the surface decoration is independent of structure ; that is to say, of any architectural requirement of stability. The greater part of the sculpture here is exclusively ornamentation of a flat wall, or of door panelling ; only a small portion of the church front is thus treated, and the sculpture has no more to do with the form of the building than a piece of a lace veil would have, suspended beside its gates on a festal day ; the proportions of shaft and arch might be altered in a hundred different ways, without diminishing their stability ; and the piUars would stand more safely on the ground than on the backs of these carved animals. 24. I wish you especially to notice these points, because the false theory that ornamentation should be merely decorated structure is so pretty and plausible, that it is likely to take away your attention from the far more important abstract conditions of design. Structure should never be contradicted, and in the best buildings it is pleasantly exhibited and en- forced ; in this very porch the joints of every stone are visible, and you will find me in the Fifth Lecture insisting on this clearness of its anatomy as a merit ; yet so independent is the mechanical structure of the true design, that when I begin my Lectures on Architecture, the first building I shall give you as a standard will be one in which the structure is whoUy con- cealed. It will be the Baptistry of Florence, which is, in reaUty, as much a buttressed chapel vidth a vaulted roof, as the Chap- ter House of York — but round it, in order to conceal that buttressed structure, (not to decorate, observe, but to conceal) a flat external wall is raised ; simplifying the whole to a mere hexagonal box, like a wooden piece of Tunbridge ware, on the surface of which the eye asd jotellect ai-e to be interested by Plate II. — Tub Aretiidsa of Syiiacuse. 1 1 /I ,,•4 |IW)BiBMt|BJft> t-M f-^^-^f^^il?^;^' ^^^^^^ #Cp5' "-p? ;i;§'^ "' :ii: 1 -■^\i.''. . ■" ■\^;;- ■': ^--tB^-:;.f|i|«?; ^- 1 Sip' C- K" " """ ' -1 Ji OF TEE DIVISION OP ARTS. 303 the relations of dimension and curve between pieces of en- crusting marble of different colours, which have no more tp do with the real make of the building than the diaper of a Harlequin's jacket has to do vpith his bones. 25. The sense of abstract proportion, on which the enjoy- ment of such a piece of art entirely depends, is one of the aesthetic faculties which nothing can develop but time and education. It belongs only to highly-trained nations ; and, among them, to their most strictly refined classes, though the germs of it are found, as part of their innate power, in eveiy people capable of art. It has for the most part vanished at present from the English mind, in consequence of our eager desire for excitement, and for the kind of splendour that ex- hibits wealth, careless of dignity ; so that, I suppose, there are very few now even of our best-trained Londoners who know the difference between the design of Whitehall and that of any modern club-house in PaU-mall. The order and har- mony which, in his enthusiastic account of the Theatre of Epidaurus, Pausanias insists on before beauty, can only be recognized by stern order and harmony in our daily lives ; and the perception of them is as little to be compelled, or taught suddenly, as the laws of stUl finer choice in the conception of dramatic incident which regulate poetic sculpture. 26. And now, at last, I think, we can sketch out the sub- ject before us in a clear light. We have a structural art, divine, and human, of which the investigation comes under the general term, Anatomy ; whether the junctions or joints be in mountains, or in branches of trees, or in buildings, or in bones of animals. We have next a musical art, faffing into two distinct divisions — one using colours, the other masses, for its elements of composition ; lastly, we have an imitative art, concerned with the representation of the outward appear- ances of things. And, for many reasons, I think it best to begin vyith imitative Sculpture ; that being defined as the art which, by the musical disposition of masses, imitates anything of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us ; and does so in ac- cordance with structural laws having due reference to the ma- terials employed. 304 AEATMA PENTELIGL So that you see our task will involve the immediate inquiry what the things are of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us : what, in few words, — if we are to be occupied in the making of graven images — we ought to like to make images of. Secondly, after having determined its subject, what degree of imitation or likeness we ought to desire in our graven image ; and lastly, under what limitations demanded by structure and material, such likeness may be obtained. These inquiries I shall endeavour to pursue with you to some practical conclusion, in my next four lectures, and in the sixth, I will briefly sketch the actual facts that have taken place in the development of sculpture by the two greatest schools of it that hitherto have existed in the world. 27. The tenor of our next lecture then must be an inquiry into the real nature of Idolatry ; that is to say, the invention and service of Idols : and, in the interval, may I commend to your own thoughts this question, not whoUy irrelevant, yet which I cannot pursue ; namely, whether the God to whom we have so habitually prayed for deliverance " from battle, murder, and sudden death," is indeed, seeing that the present state of Christendom is the result of a thousand years' pray- ing to that effect, " as the gods of the heathen who were but idols ; " or whether— (and observe, one or other of these things must be true) — whether our prayers to Him have been, by this much, worse than Idolatry ; — that heathen prayer was true prayer to false gods ; and our prayers have been false prayers to the True One. LECTXIBE n. IDOLATEY. November, 1870. 28. Beginning with the simple conception of sculpture as the art of fiction in solid substance, we are now to consider what its subjects should be. What — having the gift of imag- ery — should we by preference endeavour to image ? A ques- IDOLATRY. 305 tion which is, indeed, subordinate to the deeper one — why we should wish to image anything at all. 29. Some years ago, having been always desirous that the education of women should begin in learning how to cook, I got leave, one day, for a little girl of eleven years old to ex- change, much to her satisfaction, her schoolroom for the kitchen. But as ill fortune would have it, there was some pastry toward, and she was left unadvisedly in command of some dehcately rolled paste ; whereof she made no pies, but an unhmited quantity of cats and mice. Now you may read the works of the gravest critics of art from end to end ; but you will find, at last, they can give you no other true account of the spirit of sculpture than that it is an irresistible human instinct for the making of cats and mice, and other imitable living creatures, in such permanent form that one may play with the images at leisure. Play with them, or love them, or fear them, or worship them. The cat may become the goddess Pasht, and the mouse, in the hand of the sculptured king, enforce his endur- ing words " h ifj-e rtg opeojj/ eio-eyS^s to-rto ; " but the great mimetic instinct underlies all such purpose ; and is zooplastic, — life-shaping, — alike in the reverent and the impious. 30. Is, I say, and has been, hitherto ; none of us dare say that it will be. I shall have to show you hereafter that the greater part of the technic energy of men, as yet, has indi- cated a kind of childhood ; and that the race becomes, if not more wise, at least more manly,* with every gained century. I can fancy that all this sculpturing and painting of ours may be looked back upon, in some distant time, as a kind of doll- making, and that the words of Sir Isaac Newton may be smiled at no more : only it will not be for stars that we desert our stone dolls, but for men. When the day comes, as come it must, in which we no more deface and defile God's image in living clay, I am not sure that we shall any of us care so much for the images made of Him, in burnt clay. 31. But, hitherto, the energy of growth in any people may be almost directly measured by their passion for imitative art ; * Glance forward at once to § 75, read it, and return to this. 306 ABATBA PENTELICL namely, for sculpture, or for the drama, which is living and speaking sculpture, or, as in Greece, for both ; and in national as in actual childhood, it is not merely the making, but the making-believe ; not merely the acting for the sake of the scene, but acting for the sake of acting, that is delightful. And, of the two mimetic arts, the drama, being more passion- ate, and involving conditions of greater excitement and lux ury, is usually in its excellence the sign of culminating strength in the people ; while fine sculpture, requiring always submission to severe law, is an unfailing proof of their being in early and active progress. There is no instance of fine sculpture being produced by a nation either torpid, weak, or in decadence. Their drama may gain in grace and wit ; but their sculpture, in days of decline, is always base. 32. If my little lady in the kitchen had been put in com- mand of colours, as well as of dough, and if the paste would have taken the colours, we may be sure her mice would have been painted brown, and her cats tortoise-shell ; and this, partly indeed for the added delight and prettiness of colour itself, but more for the sake of absolute realization to her eyes and mind. Now all the early sculpture of the most ac- complished nations has been thus coloured, rudely or finely ; and, therefore, you see at once now necessary it is that we should keep the term " graphic '' for imitative art generally ; since no separation can at first be made between carving and painting, with reference to the mental powers exerted in, or addressed by, them. In the earliest known art of the world, a reindeer hunt may be scratched in outline on the flat side of a clean-picked bone, and a reindeer's head carved out of the end of it ; both these are flint-knife work, and, strictly speaking, sculpture : but the scratched outline is the begin- ning of drawing, and the carved head of sculpture proper. When the spaces enclosed by the scratched outline are filled with colour, the colouring soon becomes a principal means of effect ; so that, in the engraving of an Egyptian-colour bas- relief (S. 101), Eosellini has been content to miss tho outlin- ing incisions altogether, and represent it as a painting only. Its proper definition is, "painting accented by sculpture;" IDOLATRY. 307 on the other hand, in solid coloured statues,— Dresden china figures, for example, — we have pretty sculpture accented by painting ; the mental purpose in both kinds of art being to obtain the utmost degree of realization possible, and the ocular impression being the same, whether the delineation is obtained by engraving or painting. For, as I pointed out to you in my fifth lecture, everything is seen by the eye ae patches of colour, and of colour only ; a fact which the Greeks knew well ; so that when it becomes a question in the dialogue of Minos, " rivi ovTL Trj otpu bparai to. opM;n€i/a," the answer is "ala-drjatL Tavrg ry Sia rCv otftOaX/jiuiv Srj\oi(T7] rjfj.iv to. vpu- fiara." — "What kind of power is the sight -with which we see things ? It is that sense which, through the eyes, can reveal colours to us." 33. And now observe that while the graphic arts begin in the mere mimetic effort, they proceed, as they obtain more perfect realization, to act under the influence of a stronger and higher instinct. They begin by scratching the reindeer, the most interesting object of sight. But presently, as the human creature rises in scale of intellect, it proceeds to scratch, not the most interesting object of sight only, but the most in- teresting object of imagination ; not the reindeer, but the Maker and Giver of the reindeer. And the second great condi- tion for the advance of the art of sculpture is that the race should possess, in addition to the mimetic instinct, the realistic or idolizing instinct ; the desire to see as substantial the powers that are unseen, and bring near those that are far off, and to possess and cherish those that are strange. To make in some way tangible and visible the nature of the gods — to illustrate and explain it by symbols ; to bring the immortals out of the recesses of the clouds, and make them Penates ; to bring back the dead from darkness, and make them Lares. 34. Our conception of this tremendous and universal human passion has been altogether narrowed by the current idea that Pagan religious art consisted only, or chiefly, in giving person- ality to the gods. The personality was never doubted ; it was visibility, interpretation, and possession that the hearts of men sought. Possession, first of all — the getting hold of 308 ARATRA PENTELIOI. some hewn log of wild olive-wood that would fall on its kneea if it was pulled from its pedestal — and, afterwards, slowly clearing manifestation ; the exactly right esiDi-ession is used in Lucian's dream, — £i8tas eSei^e tov At'a ; " Showed * Zeus ;" manifested him, nay, in a certain sense, brought forth, oi created, as you have it, in Anacreon's ode to the Rose, of the birth of Athena herself — iroXeju.o/cXoi'oi' r 'A.Brivrfv But I will translate the passage from Lucian to you at length — it is in every way profitable. 35. " There came to me, in the healing f night, a divine dream, so clear that it missed nothing of the truth itself ; yes, and still after all this time, the shapes of what I saw remain in my sight, and the sound of what I heard dwells in my ears "—(note the lovely sense of tvauXos — the sound being as of a stream passing always by in the same channel, — " so dis- tinct was everything to me. Two women laid hold of my hands and pulled me, each towards herself, so violently, that I had like to have been pulled asunder ; and they cried out against one another, — the one, that she was resolved to have me to herself, being indeed her ovrai, and the other that it was vain for her to claim what belonged to others ; — and the one who first claimed me for her own was like a hai-d worker, and had strength as a man's ; and her hair was dusty, and her hand full of horny places, and her dress fastened tight about her, and the folds of it loaded with white marble-dust, so that she looked just as my uncle used to look when he was fihng stones : but the other was pleasant in features, and delicate in form, and orderly in her dress ; and so in the end, they left * There is a primary and vulgar sense of "exhibited" in Lucian's mind ; but the liigher meaning is involved in it. f In the Greek, " ambrosial." Recollect always that ambrosia, as food of gods, is the continual restorer of strength ; that all food is ambrosial when it nourishes, and that the night is called "ambrosial " because it restores strength to the soul through its peace, as, in the 23rd Psalm, the stillness of waters. IDOLATRY. 30d it to me to decide, after hearing what they had to say, with which of them I would go ; and first the hard featured and masculine one spoke : — 36. " ' Dear child, I am the Art of Image-sculpture, which yesterday you began to learn ; and I am as one of your own people, and of your house, for your grandfather, (and she named my mother's father) ' was a stone-cutter ; and both your uncles had good name through me : and if you will keep yourself well clear of the sillinesses and fluent follies that come from this creature,' (and she pointed to the other woman) ' and will foUow me, and live with me, first of all, you shall be brought up as a man should be, and have strong shoulders ; and, besides that, you shall be kept well quit of aU restless desires, and you shaU never be obliged to go away into any foreign places, leaving your own country and the people of your house ; neither shall all men praise you for your talk* And you must not despise this rude serviceableness of my body, neither this meanness of my dusty dress ; for, pushing on in their strength from such things as these, that great Phidias revealed Zeus, and PolycUtus wrought out Hera, and Myron was praised, and Praxiteles marvelled at : therefore are these men worshipped with the gods.' " 37. There is a beautiful ambiguity in the use of the prep- osition with the genitive in this last sentence. " Pushing on from these things " means indeed, justly, that the sculptors rose from a mean state to a noble one ; but not as leaving the mean state ; — not as, from a hard life, attaining to a soft one, — but as being helped and strengthened by the rough life to do what was greatest. Again, " worshipped with the gods " does not mean that they are thought of as in any sense equal to, or like to, the gods, but as being on the side of the gods against what is base and ungodly ; and that the kind of worth which is in them is therefore indeed worshipful, as having its source with the gods. Finally, observe that every one of the expressions, used of the four sculptors, is definitely the best * I have italicised this final promise of blessedness, given hy the noble Spirit of Workmanship. Compare Carlyle's 5th Latter-day pamphlet, throughout ; but especially pp. 12-14, in the first edition. 310 ABATEA PENTELIOT. that Lucian could have chosen. Phidias carved like one who had seen Zeus, and had only to reveal him ; Polyclitus, in labour of intellect, completed his sculpture by just law, and wrought out Hera ; Myron was of all most praised, because he did best what pleased the vulgar ; and Praxiteles, the most wondered at or admired, because he bestowed utmost exqui- siteness of beauty. 38. I am sorry not to go on with the dream ; the more re- fined lady, as you may remember, is liberal or gentlemanly Education, and prevails at last ; so that Lucian becomes an author instead of a sculptor, I think to his own regret, though to our present benefit. One more passage of bis I must refer you to, as illustrative of the point before us ; the description of the temple of the Syrian Hieropolis, where he explains the absence of the images of the sun and moon. " In the temple itself," he says, " on the left hand as one goes in, there is set first the throne of the sun ; but no form of him is thereon, for of these two powers alone, the sun and the moon, they show no carved images. And I also learned why this is their law, for they say that it is permissible, indeed, to make of the other gods, graven images, since the forms of them are not visible to aU men. But Helios and Selenaia are everywhere clear-bright, and all men behold them ; what need is there therefore for sculptured work of these, who appear in the air ? " 39. This, then, is the second instinct necessary to sculpt- ure ; the desire for the manifestation, description, and com- panionship of unknown powers ; and for possession of a bodily substance — the "bronze Strasbourg," which you can embrace, and hang immortelles on the head of — instead of an abstract idea. But if you get nothing more in the depth of the national mind than these two feelings, the mimetic and idol- izing instincts, there may be still no progress possible for the arts except in delicacy of manipulation and accumulative caprice of design. You must have not only the idolizing in- stinct, but an y)Qoi which chooses the right thing to idolize ! Else, you wiU get states of art like those in China or India, non-progressive, and in great part diseased and frightful inOLATRT. f311 being wrought under the influence of foolish terror, or foolish admiration. So that a third condition, completing and con- firming both the others, must exist in order to the develop- ment of the creative power. 40. This third condition is that the heart of the nation shall be set on the discovery of just or equal law, and shall be from day to day developing that law more perfectly. The Greek school of sculpture is formed during, and in conse- quence of, the national effort to discover the nature of justice ; the Tuscan, during, and in consequence of, the national effort to discover the nature of justification. I assert to you at present briefly, what will, I hope, be the subject of prolonged illustration hereafter. 41. Now when a nation with mimetic instinct and imagina- tive longing is also thus occupied earnestly in the discovery of Ethic law, that effort gradually brings precision and truth into all its manual acts ; and the physical progress of sculpt- ure as in the Greek, so in the Tuscan, school, consists in gradually limiting what was before indefinite, in verifying what was inaccurate, and in humanizing what was monstrous. I might perhaps content you by showing these external phe- nomena, and by dwelling simply on the increasing desire of naturalness, which compels, in every successive decade of years, Uterally, in the sculptured images, the mimicked bones to come together, bone to his bone ; and the flesh to come up upon them, until from a flattened and pinched handful of clay, respecting which you may gravely question whether it was intended for a human form at all ; — by slow degrees, and added touch to touch, in increasing consciousness of the bodily truth, — at last the Aphrodite of Melos stands before you, a perfect woman. But all that search for physical accu- racy is merely the external operation, in the arts, of the seek- ing for truth in the inner soul ; it is impossible without that higher effort, and the demonstration of it would be worse than useless to you, unless I made you aware at the same time of its spiritual cause. 42. Observe farther ; the increasing truth in representation is co-relative with increasing beauty in the thing to be repre- 312 ABATRA PENTBLIOI. sented. The pursuit of justice which regulates the imitative effort, regulates also the development of the race into dignity of person, as of mind ; and their culminating art-skill attains the grasp of entire truth at the moment when the truth be- comes most lovely. And then, ideal sculpture may go on safely into portraiture. But I shall not touch on the subject of portrait sculpture to-day ; it introduces many questions of detail, and must be a matter for subsequent consideration. 43. These then are the three great passions which are con- cerned in true sculpture. I cannot find better, or, at least, more easily remembered, names for them than " the Instincts of Mimicry, Idolatry, and Discipline ; " meaning, by the last, the desire of equity and wholesome restraint, in aU acts and works of life. Now of these, there is no question but that the love of Mimicry is natural and right, and the love of Disci- pline is natural and right. But it looks a grave question whether the yearning for Idolatry, (the desire of companion- ship with images,) is right. Whether, indeed, if such an in- stinct be essential to good sculpture, the art founded on it can possibly be " fine " art. 44. I must now beg for your close attention, because I have to point out distinctions in modes of conception which will appear trivial to you, unless accurately understood ; but of an importance in the history of art which cannot be over- rated. When the populace of Paris adorned the statue of Stras- bourg with immortelles, none, even the simplest of the pious decorators, would suppose that the city of Strasbourg itself, or any spirit or ghost of the city, was actually there, sitting in the Place de la Concorde. The figure was delightful to them as a visible nucleus for their fond thoughts about Strasbourg ; but never for a moment supposed to be Strasbourg. Similarly, they might have taken delight in a statue pur- porting to represent a river instead of a city, — the Ehine, or Garonne, suppose,— and have been touched with strong emotion in looking at it, if the real river were dear to them, and yet never think for an instant that the statue was the river. IDOLATRY. 313 And yet again, similarly, but much more distinctly, they might take delight in the beautiful image of a god, because it gathered and perpetuated their thoughts about that god ; and yet never suppose, nor be capable of being deceived by any arguments into supposing, that the statue was the god. On the other hand, if a meteoric stone fell from the sky in the sight of a savage, and he picked it up hot, he would most pi-obably lay it aside in some, to him, sacred place, and be- Hbve the stone itself to be a kind of god, and offer prayer and sacrifice to it. In like manner, any other strange or terrifying object, such, for instance, as a powerfully noxious animal or plant, he would be apt to regard in the same way ; and very pos- sibly also construct for himself frightful idols of some kind, calculated to produce upon him a vague impression of their being ahve ; whose imaginary anger he might deprecate or avert with sacrifice, although incapable of conceiving in them any one attribute of exalted intellectual or moral nature. 45. If you will now refer to § 52-59 of my Introductory Lectures, you will find this distinction between a resolute conception, recognized for such, and an involuntary appre- hension of spiritual existence, already insisted on at some length. And you wiU see more and more clearly as we pro- ceed, that the deliberate and intellectually commanded con- ception is not idolatrous in any evil sense whatever, but is one of the grandest and wholesomest functions of the human soul ; and that the essence of evil idolatry begins only in the idea or belief of a real presence of any kind, in a thing in which there is no such presence. 46. I need not say that the harm of the idolatry must de- pend on the certainty of the negative. If there be a real presence in a pillar of cloud, in an unconsuming flame, or in a stni smaU voice, it is no sin to bow down before these. But, as matter of historical fact, the idea of such presence has generally been both ignoble and false, and confined to nations of inferior race, who are often condemned to remain for ages in conditions of vile terror, destitute of thought. Neai'ly all Indian architectui-e and Chinese design arise out 314: ARATMA PENTELIOI. of such a state : so also, though in a less gross degree, Nin- evite and Phoenician art, early Irish, and Scandinavian ; the latter, however, with vital elements of high intellect mingled in it from the first. But the greatest races are never grossly subject to such terror, even in their childhood, and the course of their minds is broadly divisible into three distinct stages. 47. (I.) In their infancy they begin to imitate the real animals about them, as my little girl made the cats and mice, but with an undercurrent of partial superstition — a sense that there must be more in the creatures than they can see ; also they catch up vividly any of the fancies of the baser nations round them, and repeat these more or less apishly, yet rapidly naturalizing and beautifying them. They then connect all kinds of shapes together, compounding meanings out of the old chimeras, and inventing new ones with the speed of a running wild-fire ; but always getting more of man into their images, and admitting less of monster or brute ; their own characters, meanwhile, expanding and purging themselves, and shaking off the feverish fancy, as springing flowers shake the earth off their stalks. 48. (n.) In the second stage, being now themselves perfect men and women, they reach the conception of true and great gods as existent in the universe; and absolutely cease to think of them as in any wise present in statues or images ; but they have now learned to make these statues beautifully human, and to surround them with attributes that may con- centrate their thoughts of the gods. This is, in Greece, ac- curately the Pindaric time, just a little preceding the Phidian ; the Phidian is already dimmed with a faint shadow of infidel- ity ; still, the Olympic Zeus may be taken as a sufficiently central type of a statue which was no more supposed to fee Zeus, than the gold or elephants' tusks it was made of ; but in which the most splendid powers of human art were ex- hausted in representing a believed and honoured God to the happy and holy imagination of a sincerely religious people. 49. (III.) The third stage of national existence follows, in which, the imagination having now done its utmost, and be- IDOLATRY. 315 ing partlj restrained by the sanctities of tradition, which permit no farther change in the conceptions previously created, begins to be superseded by logical deduction and scientific investigation. At the same moment, the elder ar- tists having done all that is possible in realizing the national conceptions of the Gods, the younger ones, forbidden to change the scheme of existing representations, and incapable of doing anything better in that kind, betake themselves to refine and decorate the old ideas with more attractive skill. Their aims are thus more and more limited to manual dexter- ity, and their fancy paralyzed. Also, in the course of centu- ries, the methods of every art continually improving, and be- ing made subjects of popular inquiry, praise is now to be got, for eminence in these, from the whole mob of the nation ; whereas intellectual design can never be discerned but by the few. So that in this third aera we find every kind of imitative and vulgar dexterity more and more cultivated ; while design and imagination are every day less cared for, and less possible. 50. Meanwhile, as I have just said, the leading minds in literature and science become continually more logical and investigative ; and, once that they are estabHshed in the habit of testing facts accurately, a very few years are enough to convince all the strongest thinkers that the old imaginative religion is untenable, and cannot any longer be honestly taught in its fixed traditional form, except by ignorant per- sons. And at this point the fate of the people absolutely de- pends on the degree of moral strength into which their hearts have been already trained. If it be a strong, industrious, chaste, and honest race, the taking its old gods, or at least the old forms of them, away from it, wUl indeed make it deeply sorrowful and amazed ; but will in no whit shake its will, nor alter its practice. Exceptional persons, naturally disposed to become drunkards, harlots, and cheats, but who had been previously restrained from indulging these disposi- tions by their fear of God, will, of course, break out into open vice, when that fear is removed. But the heads of the fami- lies of the people, instructed in the pure habits and perfect delights of an honest Ufe, and to whom the thought of a 31G ABAmA PENrELICI. Father in heaven had been a comfort, not a restraint, will assuredly not seek relief from the discomfort of their orphan- age by becoming uncharitable and vile. Also the high leaders of their thought gather their whole strength together in the gloom ; and at the first entrance of this valley of the Shadow of Death, look their new enemy full in the eyeless face of hini, and subdue him, and his terror, under their feet. " MetuB omnes, et inexorabile fatum, . . . strepitumque Acheron tis avari." This is the condition of national soul expressed by the art, and the words, of Holbein, Durer, Shakspeare, Pope, and Goethe. 51. But if the people, at the moment when the trial of darkness approaches, be not confirmed in moral character, but are only maintaining a superficial virtue by the aid of a spectral reUgion ; the moment the staff of their faith is broken, the character of the race falls like a climbing plant cut from its hold : then aU the earthUest vices attack it as it Hes in the dust; every form of sensual and insane sin is developed, and half a century is sometimes enough to close, in hopeless shame, the career of the nation in literature, art, and war. 52. Notably, within the last hundred years, all religion has perished from the practically active national mind of Prance and England. No statesman in the senate of either country would dare to use a sentence out of their acceptedly divine Eevelation, as having now a literal authority over them for their guidance, or even a suggestive wisdom for their con- templation. England, especially, has cast her Bible full in the face of her former God ; and proclaimed, with open challenge to Him, her resolved worship of His declared enemy. Mammon. All the arts, therefore, founded on relig- ion, and sculpture chiefly, are here in England effete and corrupt, to a degree which arts never were hitherto in the history of mankind : and it is possible to show you the con- dition of sculpture living, and sculpture dead, in accurate op- position, by simply comparing the nascent Pisan school in Italy with the existing school in England. 53. You were perhaps surprised at my placing in your IDOLATRY. 317 educational series, as a type of original Italian sculpture, the pulpit by Niccola Pisano in the Duomo of Siena. I would rather, had it been possible, have given the pulpit by Giovanni Pisano in the Duomo of Pisa ; but that pulpit is dispersed in fragments through the upper galleries of the Duomo, and the cloister of the Campo Santo ; and the casts of its fragments now put together at Kensington are too coarse to be of use to you. You may partly judge, however, of the method of their execution by the eagle's head, which I have sketched from the marble in the Campo Santo (Edu., No. 113), and the lioness with her cubs, (Edu., No. 103, more carefully studied at Siena) ; and I wDl get you other illustrations in due time. MeanwhUe, I want you to compare the main purpose of the Cathedral of Pisa, and its associated Bell Tower, Baptistery, and Holy Field, with the main purpose of the principal buUd- ing lately raised for the people of London. In these days, we indeed desire no cathedrals ; but we have constructed an enormous and costly edifice, which, in claiming educational influence over the whole London populace, and middle class, is verily the Metropolitan cathedral of this century, — the Crystal Palace. 54 It was proclaimed, at its erection, an example of a newly discovered style of architecture, greater than any hitherto known, — our best popular writers, in their enthusiasm, de- scribing it as an edifice of Fairyland. You are nevertheless to observe that this novel production of fairy enchantment is destitute of every kind of sculpture, except the bosses pro- duced by the heads of naUs and rivets ; while the Duomo of Pisa, in the wreathen work of its doors, in the foliage of its capitals, inlaid colour designs of its fapade, embossed panels of its baptistery font, and figure sculpture of its two pulpits, contained the germ of a school of sculpture which was to maintain, through a subsequent period of four hundred years, the greatest power yet reached by the arts of the world in description of Form, and expression of Thought. 55. Now it is easy to show you the essential cause of the vast discrepancy in the character of these two buUdings. In the vault of the apse of the Duomo of Pisa, was a 318 ABATJIA PENTELICI. colossal image of Christ, in coloured mosaic, bearing to the temple, as nearly as possible, the relation which the statue oi Athena bore to the Parthenon ; and in the same manner, con- centrating the imagination of the Pisan on the attributes of the God in whom he beheved. In precisely the same position with respect to the nave of the building, but of larger size, as proportioned to the three or four times greater scale of the whole, a colossal piece of sculpture was placed by English designers, at the extremity of the Crystal Palace, in preparation for their solemnities in honour of the birthday of Christ, in December, 1867 or 1868. That piece of sculpture was the face of the clown in a pantomime, some twelve feet high from brow to chin, which face, being moved by the mechanism which is our pride, every half minute opened its mouth from ear to ear, showed its teeth, and revolved its eyes, the force of these periodical seasons of expression being increased and explained by the illuminated inscription underneath "Here we are again." 56. When it is assumed, and with too good reason, that the mind of the English populace is to be addressed, in the principal Sacred Festival of its year, by sculpture such as this, I need scarcely poiat out to you that the hope is absolutely futile of advancing their intelligence by collecting within this building, (itself devoid absolutely of every kind of art, and so vilely constructed that those who traverse it are continually in danger of falling over the cross-bars that bind it together) examples of sculpture filched indiscriminately from the past work, bad and good, of Turks, Greeks, Romans, Moors, and Christians, miscoloured, misplaced, and misinterpreted ; * here thrust into unseemly corners, and there mortised together into mere confusion of heterogeneous obstacle ; pronouncing itseK hourly more intolerable in weariness, until any kind of relief is sought from it in steam wheelbarrows or cheap toy- * "Falsely represented," would be the better expression. In the cast of the tomb of Queen Eleanor, for a single instance, the Gothic foliage of which one essential virtue is its change over every shield, is repre- sented by a repetition of casts from one mould, of which the design it- self is entirely conjectural, IDOLATRY. 319 shops ; and most of all in beer and meat, the corks and the bones being dropped through the chinks in the damp deal flooring of the English Fairy Palace. 57. But you mil probably think me unjust in assuming that a building prepared only for the amusement of the peo- ple can typically represent the architecture or sculpture of modern England. You may urge, that I ought rather to de- scribe the qualities of the refined sculpture which is executed in large quantities for private persons belonging to the upper classes, and for sepulchral and memorial purposes. But I could not now criticise that sculpture with any power of con- viction to you, because I have not yet stated to you the prin- ciples of good sculpture in general I will, however, in some points, tell you the facts by anticipation. 68. We have much excellent portrait sculpture ; but portrait sculpture, which is nothing more, is always third-rate work, even when produced by men of genius ;— nor does it in the least require men of genius to produce it. To paint a por- trait, indeed, implies the very highest gifts of painting ; but any man, of ordinary patience and artistic feehng, can carve a satisfactory bust. 59. Of our powers in historical sculpture, I am, without question, just, in taking for sufficient evidence the monuments we have erected to our two greatest heroes by sea and land ; namely, the Nelson Column, and the statue of the Duke of Wellington opposite Apsley House. Nor wiU you, I hope, think me severe, — certainly, whatever you may think me, I am using only the most temperate language, in saying of both these monuments, that they are absolutely devoid of high sculptm-al merit. But, consider how much is involved in the fact thus dispassionately stated, respecting the two monu- ments in the principal places of our capital, to our two great- est heroes. 60. Eemember that we have before our eyes, as subjects oj perpetual study and thought, the art of all the world for three thousand years past : especially, we have the best sculpture of Greece, for example of bodily perfection ; the best of Rome, for example of character in portraitujre ; the beet of Florence, 320 ABATBA PBNTELICI. for example of romantic passion : we have unlimited access to books and other sources of instruction ; we have the most perfect scientific illustrations of anatomy, both human and comparative ; and, we have bribes for the reward of success, large, in the proportion of at least twenty to one, as compared with those offered to the artists of any other period. And with all these advantages, and the stimulus also of fame car- ried instantly by the press to the remotest corners of Europe, the best efforts we can make, on the grandest of occasions, re- sult in work which it is impossible in any one particular to praise. Now consider for yourselves what an intensity of the nega- tion of the faculty of sculpture this impUes in the national mind ! What measures can be assigned to the gulf of inca- pacity, which can deliberately swallow up in the gorge of it the teaching and example of three thousand years, and pro- duce as the result of that instruction, what it is courteous to caU "nothing?" 61. That is the conclusion at which we arrive, on the evi- dence presented by our historical sculpture. To complete the measure of ourselves, we must endeavour to estimate the rank of the two opposite schools of sculpture employed by us in the nominal service of religion, and in the actual service of vice. I am aware of no statue of Christ, nor of any apostle of Christ, nor of any scene related in the New Testament, pro- duced by us within the last three hundred years, which has possessed even superficial merit enough to attract public at- tention. Whereas the steadily immoral effect of the formative art which we learn, more or less apishly, from the French schools, and employ, but too gladly, in manufacturing articles for the amusement of the luxurious classes, must be ranked as one of the chief instruments used by joyful fiends and angry fates, for the ruin of our civilization. If, after I have set before you the nature and principles of true sculpture, in Athens, Pisa, and Florence, you reconsider these facts, — (which you will then at once recognize as such), IDOLATRY. 321 — you ■will find that they absolutely justify my assertion that the state of sculpture in modern England, as compared with that of the great Ancients, is literally one of corrupt and dis- honourable death, as opposed to bright and fameful life. 62. And now, will you bear with me, while I tell you finally why this is so ? The cause with which you are personally concerned is your own frivolity ; though essentially this is not your fault, but that of the system of your early training. But the fact re- mains the same, that here, in Oxford, you, a chosen body of English youth, in no wise care for the history of your coun- try, for its present dangers, or its present duties. You still, like children of seven or eight years old, are interested only in bats, balls, and oars : nay, including with you the students of Germany and Prance, it is certain that the general body of modern European youth have their minds occupied more seri- ously by the sculpture and painting of the bowls of their tobacco-pipes, than by all the divinest workmanship and pas- sionate imagination of Greece, Kome, and Mediaeval Chris- tendom. 63. But the elementary causes, both of this frivolity in you, and of worse than frivolity in older persons, are the two forms of deadly Idolatry which are now all but universal in Eng- land. The first of these is the worship of the Eidolon, or Phan- tasm of Wealth ; worship of which you will find the nature partly examined in the 37th paragraph of my Munera Pul- veris ; but which is briefly to be defined as the servile appre- hension of an active power in Money, and the submission to it as the God of our life. 64 The second elementary cause of the loss of our nobly imaginative faculty, is the worship of the Letter, instead of the Spirit, in what we chiefly accept as the ordinance and teach- ing of Deity ; and the apprehension of a healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book whose primal commands we re- fuse to obey. No feather idol of Polynesia was ever a sign of a more shameful idolatry, than the modem notion in the minds of 322 ARATBA PENTELIOI. certainly the majority of English religious persons, that the Word cl God, by which the heavens were of old, and the earth, standing out of the water and in the water, — the Word of God which came to the prophets, and comes still for ever to all who will hear it, (and to many who will forbear) ; and which, called Faithful and True, is to lead forth, in the judg- ment, the armies of heaven, — that this " Word of God " may yet be bound at our pleasure in morocco, and carried about in a young lady's pocket, with tasseUed ribands to mark the passages she most approves of. 65. Gentlemen, there has hitherto been seen no instance, and England is little likely to give the unexampled spectacle, of a country successful in the noble arts, yet in which the youths were frivolous, the maidens falsely religious, the men, slaves of money, and the matrons, of vanity. Not from all the marble of the hills of Luni will such a people ever shape one statue that may stand nobly against the sky ; not from aU the treasures bequeathed to them by the great dead, will they gather, for their own descendants, any inheritance but shame. LECTUEE m. IMAGINATION. November, 1870. 66. The principal object of the preceding lecture (and I choose rather to incur your blame for tediousness in repeat- ing, than for obscurity in defining it), was to enforce the dis- tinction between the ignoble and false phase of Idolatry, which consists in the attribution of a spiritual power to a material thing ; and the noble and truth-seeking phase of it, to which I shall in these lectures * give the general term of Imagina- * I shall be obliged in future lectures, as hitherto in my other writ- ings, to use the terms, Idolatry and Imagination in a more comprehen- sive sense ; but here I use them for convenience sake, limitedly, to avoid the continual occurrence of the terms, noble and ignoble, or false and true, with refeyeBce to modes of conceptipn, IMAaiNATION. 323 Fia. 3. IMAOINATION. S2fl tion ; — that is to Say, the in-vention of material symbols which may lead us to contemplate the character and nature of gods, spirits, or abstract virtues and powers, without in the least implying the actual presence of such Beings among us, or even their possession, in reality, of the forms we attribute to them. 67. For instance, in the ordinarily received Greek type of Athena, on vases of the Phidian time (sufficiently represented in the opposite woodcut), no Greek would have supposed the vase on which this was painted to be itself Athena, nor to con- tain Athena inside of it, as the Arabian fisherman's casket contained the genie ; neither did he think that this rude black painting, done at speed as the potter's fancy urged his hand, represented anything Uke the form or aspect of the Goddess herself. Nor would he have thought so, even had the image been ever so beautifully wrought. The goddess might, indeed, visibly appear under the form of an armed virgin, as she might under that of a hawk or a swallow, when it pleased her to give such manifestation of her presence ; but it did not, therefore, follow that she was constantly invested with any of these forms, or that the best which human skill could, even by her own aid, picture of her, was, indeed, a Hkeness of her. The real use, at all events, of this rude image, was only to signify to the eye and heart the facts of the existence, in some manner, of a Spirit of wisdom, perfect in gentleness, irresistible in anger ; having also physical do- minion over the air which is the life and breadth of all creat- ures, and clothed, to human eyes, with aegis of fiery cloud, and raiment of falling dew. 68. In the yet more abstract conception of the Spirit of agriculture, in which the wings of the chariot represent the winds of spring, and its crested dragons are originally a mere type of the seed with its twisted root piercing the ground, and sharp-edged leaves rising above it ; we are in still less danger of mistaking the symbol for the presumed form of an actual Person. But I must, with persistence, beg of you to observe that in all the noble actions of imagination in this kind, the distinction from idolatry consists, not in the denial of B26 ASAfBA PENTMLICT. the being, or presence of the Spirit, but only in the due recog- nition of our human incapacity to conceive the one, or compel the other. Fia. 3. 69. Farther — and for this statement I claim your attention still more earnestly. As no nation has ever attained real greatness during periods in which it was subject to any condi- tion of Idolatry, so no nation has ever attained or persevered in greatness, except in reaching and maintaining a passionate Imagination of a spiritual estate higher than that of men ; and of spiritual creatures nobler than men, having a quite real and personal existence, however imperfectly apprehended by us. IMAGINATION. 327 And all the arts of the present age deserving to be included tinder the name of sculpture have been degraded by us, and all principles of just policy have vanished from us, — and that totally, — for this double reason ; that vf e are on one side, given up to idolatries of the most servile kind, as I showed you in the close of the last lecture, — whUe, on the other hand, we have absolutely ceased from the exercise of faithful imagination ; and the only remnants of the desire of truth which remain in us have been corrupted into a prurient itch to discover the origin of hfe in the nature of the dust, and prove that the source of the order of the universe is the accidental concurrence of its atoms. 70. Under these two calamities of our time, the art of sculpt- ure has perished more totally than any other, because the object of that art is exclusively the representation of form as the exponent of life. It is essentially concerned only with the human form, which is the exponent of the highest life we know ; and with all subordinate forms onlj' as they exhibit conditions of vital power which have some certain relation to humanity. It deals with the " particula undique desecta " of the animal nature, and itself contemplates, and brings forward for its disciples' contemplation, all the energies of creation which transform the tt^Xos, or lower still, the /Sop^opoi of the trivia, by Athena's help, into forms of power ; — [to filv o\ov apxneKTuiv airos ^v. avvupyd^ero Si toi /cat ^ 'AOrjva. Ifnrviovcra TW irrjXov KOI l/xi^«^a Troiautra cTvai to. irXd.irp.aTO. ;)* — but it has nothing whatever to do with the representation of forms not living, however beautiful, (as of clouds or waves) ; nor may it condescend to use its perfect skill, except in expressing the noblest conditions of life. These laws of sculpture, being wholly contrary to the prac- tice of our day, I cannot expect you to accept on my assertion, nor do I wish you to do so. By placing definitely good and bad sculpture before you, I do not doubt but that I shall * " And in sum, he himself (Prometheus) was the master-maker, and .'i.thena worked together with him, breathing into tlie clay, and caused the moulded things to have soul (psyche) in them." — LuciAN, PilOME" THBUS. 328 ARATRA PENTBLiat. gradually prove to you the nature of all excelling and endur- ing qualities ; but to-day I will only confirm my assertions by laying before you the statement of the Greeks themselves on the subject ; given in their own noblest time, and assuredly authoritative, in every point which it embraces, for aU time to come. 71. If any of you have looked at the explanation I have given of the myth of Athena in my Queen of the Air, you can- not but have been surprised that I took scarcely any note of the story of her birth. I did not, because that story is con- nected intimately with the ApoUine myths ; and is told of Athena, not essentially as the goddess of the air, but as the goddess of Art- Wisdom. You have probably often smiled at the legend itself, or avoided thinking of it, as revolting. It is indeed, one of the most painful and childish of sacred myths ; yet remember, ludicrous and ugly as it seems to us, this story satisfied the fancy of the Athenian people in their highest state ; and if it did not satisfy — yet it was accepted by, all later mythologists : j'ou may also remember I told you to be prepared to find that, given a certain degree of national intellect, the ruder the symbol, the deeper would be its purpose. And this legend of the birth of Athena is the central myth of all that the Greeks have left us respecting the power of their arts ; and in it they have expressed, as it seemed good to them, the most important things they had to teU us on these matters. We may read them wrongly ; but we must read them here, if anywhere. 72. There are so many threads to be gathered up in the legend, that I cannot hope to put it before you in total clear- ness, but I will take main points. Athena is born in the island of Rhodes ; and that island is raised out of the sea by Apollo, after he had been left without inheritance among the gods. Zeus* would have cast the lot again, but Apollo * His relations witli the two great Titans, Themis and Mnemosyne, belong to another group of myths. The father of Athena is the lower and nearer physical Zeus, from whom Metis, the mother of Athena, long withdraws and disguises herself. TMAOmATlOir. 3^0 orders the golden-girdled Lachesis to stretch out her hands ; and not now by chance or lot, but by noble enchantment, the island rises out of the sea. Physically, this represents the action of heat and light on chaos, especially on the deep sea. It is the " Fiat lux " of Genesis, the first process in the conquest of Pate by Har- mony. The island is dedicated to the Nymph Ehodos, by whom Apollo has the seven sons who teach o-o^MTara voij/xaTo ; because the rose is the most beautiful organism existing in matter not vital, expressive of the direct action of light on the earth, giving lovely form and colour at once ; (compare the use of it by Dante as the form of the sainted crowd in highest heaven) and remember that, therefore, the rose is in the Greek mind, essentially a Doric flower, expressing the worship of Light, as the Iris or Ion is an Ionic one, expressing the wor- ship of the Winds and Dew. 73. To understand the agency of Hephsestus at the birth of Athena, we must again return to the founding of the arts on agriculture by the hand. Before you can cultivate land you must clear it ; and the characteristic weapon of Hephsestus, — which is as much his attribute as the trident is of Poseidon, and the rhabdos of Hermes, is not, as you would have ex- pected, the hammer, but the clearing-axe — the doubled-edged TreXe/cus, the same that Calypso gives Ulysses with which to cut down the trees for his home voyage ; so that both the naval and agricultural strength of the Athenians are expressed by this weapon, with which they had to hew out their fortune. And you must keep in mind this agriculturally laborious character of Hephaestus, even when he is most distinctly the god of serviceable fire ; thus Horace's perfect epithet for him " avidus " expresses at once the devouring eagerness of fire, and the zeal of progressive labour, for Horace gives it to him when he is fighting against the giants. And this rude symbol of his cleaving the forehead of Zeus with the axe, and giving birth to Athena signifies, indeed, physically the thrilling power of heat in the heavens, rending the clouds, and giving birth to the blue air ; but far more deeply it signifies the sub- duing of adverse Fate by true labour ; until, out of the chasm, 330 ABATBA PBNTELICI. cleft by resolute and industrious fortitude, springs the Spirit of Wisdom. 74. Here (Fig. 4) is an early dra-wing of the myth, to which I shall have to refer afterwards in illustration of the childish- ness of the Greek mind at the time when its art-symbols were first fixed ; but it is of peculiar value, because the phys- ical character of Vulcan, as fire, is indicated by his wearing the ivSpoiiiBei of Hermes, while the antagonism of Zeus, as the adverse chaos, either of cloud or of fate, is shown by his striking at Hephsestus with his thunderbolt. But Plate IV. gives you (as far as the light on the rounded vase will allow it to be deciphered) a characteristic representation of the scene, as conceived in later art. 75. I told you in a former lecture of this course that the entire Greek intellect was in a childish phase as compared to that of modern times. Observe, however, childishness does not necessarily imply universal inferiority : there may be a vigorous, acute, pure, and solemn childhood, and there may be a weak, foul, and ridiculous condition of advanced life ; but the one is still essentially the childish, and the other the adult phase of existence. 76. You will find, then, that the Greeks were the first people that were born into complete humanity. All nations before them had been, and aU around them still were, partly IMAGINATION. 331 savage, bestial, clay-encumbered, inhuman ; stiU semi-goat, or semi-ant, or semi-stone, or semi-cloud. But the power of a new spirit came upon the Greeks, and the stones were filled with breath, and the clouds clothed with flesh ; and then came the great spiritual battle between the Centaurs and Lap- ithsB ; and the Uving cj-eatures became " Children of Men." Taught, yet by the Centaur — sown, as they knew, in the fang — from the dappled skin of the brute, from the leprous scale of the serpent, their flesh came again as the flesh of a little child, and they were clean. Fix your mind on this as the very central character of the Greek race — the being born pure and human out of the bru- tal misery of the past, and looking abroad, for the first time, with their children's eyes, wonderingly open, on the strange and divine world. 77. Make some effort to remember, so far as may be possi- ble to you, either what you felt in yourselves when you were young, or what you have observed in other children, of the action of thought and fancy. Children are continually repre- sented as living in an ideal world of their own. So far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is to live always in the tangible present, having little pleasure in memory, and being utterly impatient and tormented by antic- ipation : weak alike in reflection and forethought, but having an intense possession of the actual present, down to the short- est moments and least objects of it ; possessing it, indeed, so intensely that the sweet childish days are as long as twenty days will be ; and setting all the faculties of heart and imag- ination on little things, so as to be able to make anything out of them he chooses. Confined to a little garden, he does not imagine himself somewhere else, but makes a great garden out of that ; possessed of an acorn-cup, he will not despise it and throw it away, and covet a golden one in its stead : it is the adult who does so. The chUd keeps his acorn-cup as a treasure, and makes a golden one out of it in his mind ; so that the wondering grown-up person standing beside him is always tempted to ask concerning his treasures, not, " What would you have more than these?" but " What possibly can 3^0 ABATIiA PENTELIGI. you see in these ? " for, to the bystander, there is a ludicrous and incomprehensible inconsistency between the child's words and the reahty. The little thing tells him gravely, holding up the aoom-cup, that "this is a queen's crown, or a fairy's boat," and, with beautiful effrontery, expects him to believe the same. But observe — the acorn-cup must be there, and in his own hand. " Give it me ; " then I will make more of it for myself. That is the child's one word, always. Pig. 5. 78. It is also the one word of the Greek — " Give it me." Give me any thing definite here in my sight, then I will make more of it. I canaot easily express to you how strange it seems to me that I am obhged, here in Oxford, to take the position of an apologist for Greek art ; that I find, in spite of all the devo- tion of the admirable scholars who have so long maintained o O a. g o B o k^ O Iz ■< c t. e c6 o O u Ea O « o I H «! IMAGINATION. 333 in our public schools the authority of Greek literature, our younger students take no interest in the manual work of the people upon whose thoughts the tone of their early intellect- ual life has exclusively depended. But I am not surprised that the interest, if awakened, should not at first take the form of admiration. The inconsistency between an Homeric description of a piece of furniture or armour, and the actual rudeness of any piece of airt approximating within even three or four centuries, to the Homeric period, is so great, that we at first cannot recognize the art as elucidatory of, or in any way related to, the poetic language. 79. You will find, however, exactly the same kind of dis- crepancy between early sculpture, and the languages of deed and, thought, in the second birth, and childhood, of the world, under Christianity. The same fair thoughts and bright imaginations arise again ; and similarly, the fancy is content with the rudest symbols by which they can be formalized to the eyes. You cannot understand that the rigid figure (2) with chequers or spots on its breast, and sharp lines of drapery to its feet, could represent, to the Greek, the healing majesty of heaven : but can you any better understand how a symbol so haggard as this (Fig. 5) could represent to the noblest hearts of the Christian ages the power and ministra^ tion of angels ? Yet it not only did so, but retained in the rude undulatory and linear ornamentation of its dress, record of the thoughts intended to be conveyed by the spotted asgis and faJHng chiton of Athena, eighteen hundred years before. Greek and Venetian alike, in their noble childhood, knew with the same terror the coihng wind and congealed haU. in heaven — saw with the same thankfulness the dew shed softly on the earth, and on its flowers ; and both recognized, ruling these, and symbolized by them, the great helpful spirit of Wisdom, which leads the children of men to all knowledge, all courage, and all art. 80. Eead the inscription written on the sarcophagus (Plate v.), at the extremity of which this angel is sculptured. It stands in an open recess in the rude brick wall of the west front of the church of St. John and Paul at Venice, being the 334 ABATBA PENTELICI. tomb of tlie two doges, father and son, Jacopo and Lorenzo Tiepolo. This is the inscription : — " Quos natura pares stndiis, virtutibus, arte Edidit, illustres genitor natnsque, sepulti Hac sub rupe Duces. Venetum charissima proles Theupula collatis dedit bos celebranda triumphis. Omnia presentis donavlt predia templi Dux Jacobus : valido fixit moderamine leges Urbis, et ingratam redlmens certamine Jadram Dalmatiosque dedit patrie, post, Marte subaotas Graiorum pelago maculavit sanguine classes. Suscipit oblatos prinoeps Laurentius Istros, Et domuit rigidos, ingenti strage oadentes, Bononie populos. Hino subdita Cervia oessit. Pundavere vlas pacis ; fortlque relictS, Be, superos sacris petierunt mentibus ambo. " Dominus Jachobus hobiit * M.CCLI. Dominus Laurentius hobiit M.CCLXXVIII." You see, therefore, this tomb is an invaluable example of thirteenth century sculpture in Venice. In Plate VI., you have an example of the (coin) sculpture of the date accurately corresponding in Greece to the thirteenth century in Venice, when the meaning of symbols was everything and the work- manship comparatively nothing. The upper head is an Athena, of Athenian work in the seventh or sixth century — (the coin itself may have been struck later, but the archaic type was re- tained). The two smaller impressions below are the front and obverse of a coin of the same age from Corinth, the head of Athena on one side, and Pegasus, with the archaic Koppa, on the other. The smaller head is bare, the hair being looped up at the back and closely bound with an olive branch. You are to note this general outline of the head, already given in a more finished type in Plate H, as a most important element- ary form in the finest sculpture, not of Greece only, but of all Christendom. In the upper head the hair is restrained still more closely by a round helmet, for the most part smooth, * The Latin verses are of later date ; the cpstemporary plain prose re- tains fhe Venetian gutturals and aspirates. Plate VI. — Archaic Athena of Athens and Goiunth. IMAGINATION. 335 but embossed with a single flower tendril, having one bud, one flower, and above it, two olive leaves. You have thus the most absolutely restricted symbol possible to human thought of the power of Athena over the flowers and trees of the earth. An olive leaf by itself could not have stood for the sign of a tree, but the two can, when set in position of growth. I would not give you the reverse of the coin on the same plate, because you would have looked at it only, laughed at it, and not examined the rest ; but here it is, wonderfully en- graved for you (Fig. 6) : of it we shall have more to say afterwards. 81. And now as you look at these rude vestiges of the religion of Greece, and at the vestiges, stUl ruder, on the Ducal tomb, of the religion of Christendom, take warn- ing against two opposite errors. There is a school of teachers who will tell you that nothing but Greek art is deserving of study, and that ^™' *' all our work at this day should be an imitation of it. Whenever you feel tempted to believe them, think of these portraits of Athena and her owl, and be assured that Greek art is not in aU respects perfect, nor exclusively deserving of imitation. There is another school of teachers who vrill tell you that Greek art is good for nothing ; that the soul of the Greek was outcast, and that Christianity entirely superseded its faith, and excelled its works. Whenever you feel tempted to beUeve them, think of this angel on the tomb of Jacopo Tiepolo ; and remember, that Christianity, after it had been twelve hundred years existent as an imaginative power on the earth, could do no better work than this, though with all the former power of Greece to help it ; nor was able to engrave its triumph in having stained its fleets in the seas of Greece with the blood of her people, but between barbarous imitations of the pillars which that people had invented. 336 ABATBA PENTELIGI. 82. Eeceiving these two warnings, receiTe also this lesson. In both examples, childish though it be, this Heathen and Christian art is alike sincere, and alike vividly imaginative : the actual work is that of infancy ; the thoughts, in their vi- sionary simpUcity, are also the thoughts of infancy, but in their solemn virtue, they are the thoughts of men. We, on the contrary, are now, in all that we do, absolutely without sincerity ; — absolutely, therefore, without imagina- tion, and without virtue. Our hands are dexterous with the vile and deadly dexterity of machines ; our minds filled with incoherent fragments of faith, which we cling to in coward- ice, without believing, and make pictures of in vanity, with- out loving. False and base alike, whether we admire or imi- tate, we cannot learn from the Heathen's art, but only pilfer it ; we cannot revive the Christian's art, but only galvanize it ; we are, in the sum of us, not human artists at all, but mechan- isms of conceited clay, masked in the furs and feathers of liv- ing creatm-es, and convulsed with voltaic spasms, in mockery of animation. 83. You think, perhaps, that I am using terms unjustifiable in violence. They would, indeed, be unjustifiable, if, spoken from this chair, they were violent at all. They are, unhap- pily, temperate and aeciu'ate, — except in shortcoming of blame. For we are not only impotent to restore, but strong to defile, the work of past ages. Of the impotence, take but this one, utterly humiliatory, and, in the fuU meaning of it, ghastly, example. We have lately been busy embanking, in the cap- ital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the im- agination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of nature most useful Of all architectural features of the metropoHs, that embankment wiU be, in future, the most conspicuous ; and in its position and purpose it was the most capable of noble adornment. For that adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern poetical imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has, indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes' tails ; but we have not ingenuity IMAGINATION. 337 enough to cast so much as a smelt or a sprat for ourselves ; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble, which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops' in every capital of Europe for the last fifty years. We cast that badly, and give lustre to the ill-cast fish with lacquer in imitation of bronze. On the base of their pedestals, towards the road, we put for advertisement's sate, the initials of the casting firm ; and, for farther originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of Mercury ; and to adorn the front of the pedestals towards the river, being now wholly at our wit's end, we can think of nothing better than to borrow the door-knocker which — again for the last fifty years— has disturbed and dec- orated two or three millions of London street-doors; and magnifying the marvellous device of it, a Uon's head with a ring in its mouth (still boiTOwed from the Greek), we complete the embankment with a row of heads and rings, on a scale which enables them to produce, at the distance at which only they can be seen, the exact effect of a row of sentryboxes. 84 Farther. In the very centre of the city, and at the point where the Embankment commands a view of Westmin- ster Abbey on one side and of St. Paul's on the other — that is to say, at precisely the most important and stately moment of its whole course — it has to pass under one of the arches of Waterloo Bridge, which, in the sweep of its curve, is as vast — ^it alone — as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in proportions. But over the Eialto, though of late and de- based Venetian work, there still reigns some power of human imagination : on the two flanks of it are carved the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation ; on the keystone the de- scending Dove. It is not, indeed, the fault of living designers that the Waterloo arch is nothing more thaia a gloomy and hoUow heap of wedged blocks of bHnd granite. But just beyond the damp shadow of it, the new Embankment is reached by a flight of stairs, which are, in point of fact, the principal approach to it, a-foot, from central London ; the de- scent from the very midst of the metropolis of England to the banks of the chief river of England ; and for this ap- proach, living designers are answerable. 338 ARATBA PENTELIGI. 85. The principal decoration of the descent is again a gas- lamp, but a shattered one, with a brass crown on the top of it or, rather, half-crown, and that turned the wrong way, the back of it to the river and causeway, its flame supplied by a visible pipe far wandering along the wall ; the whole appa- ratus being supported by a rough cross-beam. Fastened to the centre of the arch above is a large placard, stating that the Eoyal Humane Society's drags are in constant readiness, and that their office is at 4, Trafalgar Square. On each side of the arch are temporary, but dismaUy old and battered boardings, across two angles capable of unseemly use by the British public. Above one of these is another placard, stat- ing that this is the Victoria Embankment. The steps them- selves^ — some forty of them — descend under a tunnel, which the shattered gas-lamp lights by night, and nothing by day. They are covered with filthy dust, shaken off from infinitude of filthy feet ; mixed up with shreds of paper, orange-peel, foul straw, rags, and cigar ends, and ashes ; the whole agglu- tinated, more or less, by dry saliva into slippery blotches and patches ; or, when not so fastened, blown dismally by the sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace, Mercy, and Peace of Heaven. 86. I am obliged always to use the English word " Grace " in two senses, but remember that the Greek x'»P« includes them both (the bestowing, that is to say of Beauty and Mercy) ; and especially it includes these in the passage of Pindar's first ode, which gives us the key to the right inter- pretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You remem- ber that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (§ 151), that the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the family of Tantalus ; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them all, the inlaying of the ivory shoul IMAGINATION. 380 der of Pelops. At that story Pindar pauses — not, indeed, ■without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility in the cir- cumstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of Demeter — and gives his own reading of the event, instead of the ancient one. He justifies this to himself, and to his hear- ers, by the plea that myths have, in some sort, or degree, (ttou Tt), led the mind of mortals beyond the truth : and then he goes on : — " Grace, vsrhich creates everything that is kindly and sooth- ing for mortals, adding honour, has often made things at first untrustworthy, become trustworthy through Love." 87. I cannot, except in these lengthened terms, give you the complete force of the passage ; especially of the clttuttov ifi^ffaTo TTUTTov — " made it trustworthy by passionate desire that it should be so " — which exactly describes the temper of religious persons at the present day, who are kindly and sin- cere, in clinging to the forms of faith which either have long been precious to themselves, or which they feel to have been without question instrumental in advancing the dignity of mankind. And it is part of the constitution of humanity — a part which, above others, you are in danger of unvsdsely con- temning under the existing conditions of our knowledge, that the things thus sought for belief with eager passion, do, indeed, become trustworthy to us ; that, to each of us, they verily become what we would have them ; the force of the firjvK and /xv^/n); with which we seek after them, does, indeed, make them powerful to us for actual good or evil ; and it is thus granted to us to create not only with our hands things that exalt or degrade our sight, but with our hearts also, things that exalt or degrade our souls ; giving true substance to aU that we hoped for ; evidence to things that we have not seen, but have desired to see ; and calling, in the sense of creating, things that are not, as though they were. 88. You remember that in distinguishing Imagination from Idolatry, I referred you to the forms of passionate affection with which a noble people commonly regards the rivers and springs of its native land. Some conception of personality or of spiritual power in the stream, is almost necessarily in- 340 ABATHA PBNTBLtOI. volved in such emotion ; and prolonged x vaXiifirjfft ^arifiovos, '6s ^c£ re trdinj^ *i eiSg lris, vvoBi)jiotlivrfaiv "Aflifi^j," 344 ABATEA PBNTBLWI. and the beautiful epithet of Persephone, " SSeipa," as tha Tryer and Knower of good work ; and remembering these, trust Pindar for the truth of his saying, that to the cunning workman — (and let me solemnly enforce the words by adding — that to him only, ) knowledge comes undeceitful. 97. You may have noticed, perhaps, and with a smile, as one of the paradoxes you often hear me blamed for too fondly stating, what I told you in the close of my Third Introductory Lecture, that "so far from art's being immoral, little else ex- cept art is moral." I have now farther to tell you, that little else, except art, is wise ; that all knowledge, unaccompanied by a habit of useful action, is too likely to become deceitful, and that every habit of useful action must resolve itself into some elementary practice of manual labour. And I would, in all sober and direct earnestness advise you, whatever may be the aim, predilection, or necessity of your lives, to resolve upon this one thing at least, that you wiU enable yourselves daily to do actually with your hands, something that is useful to mankind. To do anything well with your hands, useful or not ; — to be, even in trifling, TraXd[irjaL Sa-^fiav, is alreadv much ; — when we come to examine the art of the middle ages I shall be able to show you that the strongest of all influences of right then brought to bear upon character was the neces- sity for exquisite manual dexterity in the management of the spear and bridle ; and in your own experience most of you will be able to recognize the wholesome efl:ect, alike on body and mind, of striving, within proper limits of time, to become either good batsmen, or good oarsmen. But the bat and the racer's oar are children's toys. Resolve that you will be men in usefulness, as well as in strength ; and you will find that then also, but not till then, you can become men in under- standing ; and that every fine vision and subtle theorem will present itself to you thenceforward undeceitfully, iTroftj/Aotrui'j/o-iv 98. But there is more to be gathered yet from the words of Pindar. He is thinking, in his brief, intense way, at once of Athena's work on the soul, and of her literal power on the dust of the Earth. His " KiXevOoi " is a wide word meaning all IMAOINATION. 345 the paths of sea and land. Consider, therefore, what Athena's own work actually is— in the literal fact of it. The blue, clear air is the sculpturing power upon the earth and sea. Where the surface of the earth is reached by that, and its matter and substance inspired with, and filled by that, organic form be- comes possible. You must indeed have the sun, also, and moisture ; the kingdom of Apollo risen out of the sea : but the sculpturing of living things, shape by shape, is Athena's, so that under the brooding spirit of the air, what was without form, and void brings forth the moving creature that hath life. 99. That is her work then — the giving of Form ; then the separately Apolline work is the giving of Light ; or, more strictly. Sight : giving that faculty to the retina to which we owe not merely the idea of light, but the existence of it ; for Hght is to be defined only as the sensation produced in the eye of an animal, under given conditions ; those same conditions being, to a stone, only warmth or chemical influence, but not light. And that power of seeing, and the other various per- sonalities and authorities of the animal body, in pleasure and pain, have never, hitherto, been, I do not say, explained, but in any vdse touched or approached by scientific discovery. Some of the conditions of mere external animal form and of muscular vitality have been shown ; but for the most part that is true, even of external form, which I wrote six years ago. " You may always stand by Form against Force. To a painter, the essential character of anything is the form of it, and the philosophers cannot touch that. They come and teU you, for instance, that there is as much heat, or motion, or calorific energy (or whatever else they Uke to call it), in a tea-kettle, as in a gier-eagle. Very good : that is so ; and it is very inter- esting. It requires just as much heat as wiL. boil the kettle, to take the gier-eagle up to his nest, and as much more to bring him down again on a hare or a partridge. But we painters, acknowledging the equality and similarity of the kettle and the bird in aU scientific respects, attach, for our part, our principal interest to the difference in their forms. For us, the primarily cognisable facts, in the two things, are, 346 ARATBA PENTELIOI. that the kettle has a spout, and the eagle a beak ; the one a lid on its back, the other a pair of -wings ; not to speak of the distinction also of vohtion, which the philosophers may prop- erly call merely a form or mode of force — but, then to an art- ist, the form or mode is the gist of the business.'' 100. As you will find that it is, not to the artist only, but to all of us. The laws under which matter is collected and constructed are the same throughout the universe : the sub- stance so collected, whether for the making of the eagle, or the worm, may be analyzed into gaseous identity ; a diffusive vital force, apparently so closely related to mechanically meas- urable heat as to admit the conception of its being itself me- chanically measurable, and imchanging in total quantity, ebbs and flows alike through the limbs of men, and the fibres of insects. But, above all this, and ruling every grotesque or degraded accident of this, are two laws of beauty in form, and of nobility in character, which stand in the chaos of crea- tion between the Living and the Dead, to separate the things that have in them a sacred and helpful, from those that have in them an accursed and destroying, nature ; and the power of Athena, first physically put forth in the sculpturing of these t/aa. and Ipirera, these living and reptile things, is put forth, finally, in enabling the hearts of men to discern the one from the other ; to know the unquenchable fires of the Spirit from the unquenchable fires of Death ; and to choose, not unaided, between submission to the Love that cannot end, or to the Worm that cannot die. 101. The unconsciousness of their antagonism is the most notable characteristic of the modern scientific mind ; and I believe no credulity or fallacy admitted by the weakness (or it may sometimes rather have been the strength) of early im- agination, indicates so strange a depression beneath the due scale of human intellect, as the failure of the sense of beauty in form, and loss of faith in heroism of conduct, which have become the curses of recent science,* art, and policy. * The best modern illustrated scientific works show perfect faculty of representing monkeys, lizards, and insects ; absolute incapability of representing either a man, a horse, or a lion. IMA QINA TION. S47 102. That depression of intellect has been alike exhibited in the mean consternation confessedly felt on one side, and the mean triumph apparently felt on the other, during the course of the dispute now pending as to the origin of man. Dispute for the present, not to be decided, and of which the decision is to persons in the modem temper of mind, wholly without significance : and I earnestly desire that you, my pupils, may have firmness enough to disengage your energies from investigation so premature and so fruitless, and sense enough to perceive that it does not matter how you have been made, so long as you are satisfied with being what you are. If you are dissatisfied with yourselves, it ought not to console, but humiliate you, to imagine that you were once seraphs ; and if you are pleased with yourselves, it is not any ground of reasonable shame to you if, by no fault of your own, you have passed through the elementary condition of apes. 103. Remember, therefore, that it is of the very highest im- portance that you should know what you are, and determine to be the best that you may be ; but it is of no importance whatever, except as it may contribute to that end, to know what you have been. Whether your Creator shaped you with fingers, or tools, as a sculptor would a lump of clay, or gradu- ally raised you to manhood through a series of inferior forms, is only of moment to you in this respect — that in the one case you cannot expect your children to be nobler creatures than you are yourselves — in the other, every act and thought of your present life may be hastening the advent of a race which win look back to you, their fathers (and you ought at least to have attained the dignity of desiring that it may be so), with incredulous disdain. 104. But that you are yourselves capable of that disdain and dismay ; that you are ashamed of having been apes, if you ever were so ; that you acknowledge instinctively, a relation of better and worse, and a law respecting what is noble and base, which makes it no question to you that the man is worthier than the baboon — this is a fact of infinite sig- nificance. This law of preference in your hearts is the true 348 ABATIU PENTBLIGI. essence of your being, and the consciousness of that law is a more positive existence than any dependent on the coherence or forms of matter. 105. Now, but a few words more of mythology, and I have done. Eemember that Athena holds the weaver's shuttle, not merely as an instrument of texture, but as an instrument of picture ; the ideas of clothing, and of the warmth of life, be- ing thus inseparably connected with those of graphic beauty, and the brightness of life. I have told you that no art could be recovered among us without perfectness in dress, nor with- out the elementary graphic art of women, in divers colours of needlework. There has been no nation of any art-energy, but has strenuously occupied and interested itself in this house- hold picturing, from the web of Penelope to the tapestry of Queen Matilda, and the meshes of Arras and Gobelins. 106. We should then naturally ask what kind of embroidery Athena put on her own robe ; " ircTrXov kavov, ttolkIXov, bv p di^r^ woiT^craTO Kol Koifie \epinv. The subject of that iroiKikia of hers, as you know, was the war of the giants and gods. Now the real name of these giants, remember, is that used by Hesiod, " iniXoxovoi," " mud- begotten,'' and the meaning of the contest between these and Zeus, TnjXoyovoiv iXarrjp, is, again, the inspiration of life into the clay, by the goddess of breath ; and the actual confusion going on visibly before you, daily, of the earth, heaping itself into cumbrous war with the powers above it. 107. Thus briefly, the entire material of Art, under Athena's hand, is the contest of hfe with clay ; and all my task in ex- plaining to you the early thought of both the Athenian and Tuscan schools will only be the tracing of this battle of the giants into its full heroic form, when, not in tapestry only — but in sculpture — and on the portal of the Temple of Delphi itself, you have the "kXovos ev TCLXeari XaiVoio-i yiyavTcflv," and their defeat hailed by the passionate cry of delight from the Athenian maids, beholding Pallas in her full power, " XeuVo-u IlaAXaS' efiav 6e6v," my own goddess. AU our work, I repeat, will be nothing but the inquiry into the development of this the subject, and the pressing fuUy home the question of Plato IMAGINATION. 349 about that embroidery — " And think you that there is verily war With each other among the Gods ? and dreadful enmities and battle, such as the poets have told, and such as our painters set forth in graven scripture, to adorn all our sacred rites and holy places ; yes, and in the great Panathenaea themselves, the Peplus, fuU of such wild picturing, is carried up into the Acropolis — shall we say that these things are true, oh Euthuphron, right-minded friend ? " 108. Yes, we say, and know, that these things are true ; and true for ever : battles of the gods, not among themselves, but against the earth-giants. Battle prevailing age by age, in nobler life and loveUer imagery ; creation, which no theory of mechanism, no definition of force, can explain, the adoption and completing of individual form by individual animation, breathed out of the lips of the Father of Spirits. And to recognize the presence in every knitted shape of dust, by which it lives and moves and has its being — to recognize it, revere, and show it forth, is to be our eternal Idolatry. " Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them.'' " Assuredly no," we answered once, in our pride ; and through porch and aisle, broke down the carved work thereof, with axes and hammers. Who would have thought the day so near when we should bow down to worship, not the creatures, but their atoms, — not the forces that form, but those that dissolve them ? Trust me, gentlemen, the command which is stringent against ado- ration of brutality, is stringent no less against adoration of chaos, nor is faith in an image fallen from heaven to be re- formed by a faith only in the phenomenon of decadence. We have ceased from the making of monsters to be appeased by sacrifice ; — it is well, — if indeed we have also ceased from making them in our thoughts. We have learned to distrust the adorning of fair phantasms, to which we once sought for succour ; — it is well, if we learn to distrust also the adorning of those to which we seek, for temptation ; but the verity of gains like these can only be known by our confession of the divine seal of strength and beauty upon the tempered frame, and honour in the fervent heart, by which, increasing visibly, may 350 ABATJiA PENTELICI. yet be manifested to us the holy presence, and the approving love, of the Loving God, who visits the iniquities of the Fathers upon the Children, unto the third and fourth genera- tion of them that hate Him, and shows mercy unto thousands in them that love Him, and keep His Commandments. LECTURE IV. November, 1870. 109. You were probably vexed, and tired, towards the close of my last lecture, by the time it took us to arrive at the appar- ently simple conclusion, that sculpture must only represent organic form, and the strength of life in its contest with mat- ter. But it is no small thing to have that " XcuVcru IlaAAaSo " fixed in your minds, as the one necessary sign by which you are to recognize right sculpture, and believe me you wiU find it the best of all things, if you can take for yourselves the say- ing from the Ups of the Athenian maids, in its entirety, and say also — Xcuct-o-uj IlaWaS' ifikv Oidv. I proceed to-day into the practical appliance of this apparently speculative, but in reality imperative, law. 110. You observe, I have hitherto spoken of the power of Athena, as over painting no less than sculpture. But her rule over both arts is only so far as they are zoographic ; — ^repre- sentative, that is to say, of animal life, or of such order and discipline among other elements, as may invigorate and purify it. Now there is a speciality of the art of painting beyond this, namely, the representation of phenomena of colour and shadow, as such, without question of the nature of the things that receive them. I am now accordingly obhged to speak of sculpture and painting as distinct arts, but the laws which bind sculpture, bind no less the painting of the higher schools which has, for its main purpose, the showing beauty in human or animal form ; and which is therefore placed by the Greeks LIKENESS. 351 equally under the rule of Athena, as the Spirit, first, of Life, and then of Wisdom in conduct. 111. First, I say, you are to " see Pallas '' in all such work, as the Queen of Life ; and the practical law which follows from this, is one of enormous range and importance, namely, that nothing must be represented hy sculpture, external to any living form, which does not help to enforce or illustrate the conception of hfe. Both dress and armour may be made to do this, by great sculptors, and are continually so used by the greatest. One of the essential distinctions between the Athenian and Florentine schools is dependent on their treat- ment of drapery in this respect ; an Athenian always sets it to exhibit the action of the body, by flowing with it, or over it, or from it, so as to illustrate both its form and gesture ; a Florentine, on the contrary, always uses his drapery to con- ceal or disguise the forms of the body, and exhibit mental emotion : but both use it to enhance the life, either of the body or soul ; Donatello and Michael Angelo, no less than the sculptors of Gothic chivalry, ennoble armour in the same way ; but base sculptors caire drapery and armour for the sake of their folds and picturesqueness only, and forget the body be- neath. The rule is so stem that aU dehght in mere incidental beauty, which painting often triumphs in, is wholly forbidden to sculpture ; — for instance, in painting the branch of a tree, you may rightly represent and enjoy the lichens and moss on it, but a sculptor must not *ouch one of them : they are ines- sential to the tree's Hfe, — he must give the flow and bending of the branch only, else he does not enough "see Pallas" in it. Or to take a higher instance, here is an exquisite little painted poem, by Edward Frere ; a cottage interior, one of the thousands which within the last two months * have been laid desolate in unhappy France. Every accessory in the painting is of value — the fire-side, the tiled floor, the vegetables lying upon it, and the basket hanging from the roof. But not one of these accessories would have been admissible * See date of delivery of Lecture. The picture was of a peasant girl of eleven or twelve years old, peeling carrots by a cottage fire. 352 ABATRA PENTELICI. in ■ sculpture. You must carve • nothing but wh&t has life. " Why " ? you probably feel instantly inclined to ask me. — You see the principle we have got, instead of being blunt or useless, is such an edged tool that you are startled the moment I apply it. " Must we refuse every pleasant accessory and picturesque detail, and petrify nothing but living creatures " ? — Even so : I would not assert it on my own authority. It is the Greeks who say it, but whatever they say of sculpture, be assured, is true. 112. That then is the first law — you must see Pallas as the Lady of Life — the second is, you must see her as the Lady of Wisdom ; or croi^ta — and this is lie chief matter of aU. I can- not but think, that after the considerations into which we have now entered, you will find more interest than hitherto in comparing the statements of Aristotie, in the Ethics, with those of Plato in the Polity, which are authoritative as Greek dfefinitions of goodness in art, and which you may safely hold authoritative as constant definitions of it. You remember, doubtless, that the o-o^ia, or aperq t£xv»;s, for the sake of which Phidias is called o-o(^s as a sculptor, and Polyclitus as an image-maker, Eth. 6. 7. (the opposition is both between ideal and portrait sculpture, and between working in stone and bronze) consists in the "vows tSsv TLfiuaraTav ry vcru," "the mental apprehension of the things that are most honourable in their nature." Therefore what is, indeed, most lovely, the true image-maker will most love ; and what is most hate- ful; he will most hate, and in all things discern the best and strongest part of them, and represent that essentially, or, if the opposite of that, then with manifest detestation and horror. That is his art wisdom ; the knowledge of good and evU, emd the love of good, so that you. may discern, even in his repre- sentation of the vilest thing, his acknowledgment of what re- demption is possible for it, or latent power exists in it ; and, contrariwise, his sense of its present misery. But for the most part, he will idolize, and force us also to idolize, whatever is living, and virtuousj and victoriously right ; opposing to it in some definite mode the image of the conquered ip-irerdv. 113. This is generally true of both the great arts ; but in LIKENESS. 353 severity and precision, true of sculpture. To return to our illustration : this poor little girl was more interesting to Ed- ward Frere, he being a painter, because she was poorly dressed, and wore these clumsy shoes, and old red cap, and patched gown. May we sculpture her so ? No. "We may sculpture her naked, if we like ; but not in rags. But if we may not put her into marble in rags, may we give her a pretty frock with ribands and flounces to it, and put her into marble in that ? No. We may put her simplest peasant's dress, so it be perfect and orderly, into marble ; any- thing finer than that would be more dishonourable in the eyes of Athena than rags. If she were a French princess, you might carve her embroidered robe and diadem ; if she were Joan of Arc you might carve her armour — for then these also would be " Twv rifiiwrdriov,'' not otherwise. 114. Is not this an edge-tool we have got hold of, unawares ? and a subtle one too ; so delicate and scimitar-Uke in decision. For note, that even Joan of Arc's armour must be only sculpt- ured, if she has it on ; it is not the honourableness or beauty of it that are enough, but the direct bearing of it by her body. You might be deeply, even pathetically, interested by looking at a good knight's dinted coat of mail, left in his desolate hall. May you sculpture it where it hangs ? No ; the helmet for his pillow, if you will — no more. You see we did not do our dull work for nothing in last lecture. I define what we have gained once more, and then we will enter on our new ground. 115. The proper subject of sculpture, we have determined, is the spiritual power seen in the form of any living thing, and so represented as to give evidence that the sculptor has loved the good of it and hated the evU. " So represented," we say ; but how is that to be done ? Why should it not be represented, if possible, just as it is seen ? What mode or limit of representation may we adopt ? We are to carve things that have life ; — shall we try so to imi- tate them that they may indeed seem living, — or only half living, and like stone instead of flesh ? It will simplify this question if I show you three examples 354 ABATBA PENTELICI. of what the Greeks actually did : three typical pieces of their sculpture, in order of perfection. 116. And now, observe that in aU our historical work, I will endeavour to do, myself, what I have asked you to do in your drawing exercises ; namely, to outline firmly in the beginning, and then fill in the detail more minutely. I will give you first, therefore, in a symmetrical form, absolutely simple and easily remembered, the large chronology of the Greek school ; within that unforgettable scheme we will place, as we discover them, the minor relations of arts and times. I number the nine centuries before Christ thus, upwards, and divide them into three groups of three each. A. ASOHAIO. B. BEST. 8 7 C COBKUPT. < Then the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries are the period of Archaic Greek Art, steadily progressive wherever it existed. The sixth, fifth, and fourth are the period of central Greek Art ; the fifth, or central centui-y producing the finest. That is easily recollected by the battle of Marathon. And the third, second, and first centuries are the period of steady decline. Learn this ABC thoroughly, and mark, for yourselves, what you, at present, think the vital events in each century. As you know more, you will think other events the vital ones ; but the best historical knowledge only approximates to true Plate VII. — Archaic, Central and Declining Art OF Greece. LIKENESS. 355 thought in that matter ; only be sure that what is truly vital in the character which governs events, is always expressed by the art of the century ; so that if you could interpret that art rightly, the better part of your task in reading history would be done to your hand. 117. It is generally impossible to date with precision art of the archaic period — often difficult to date even that of the central three hundred years. I will not weary you with futile minor divisions of time ; here are three coins (Plate VH ) roughly, but decisively, characteristic of the three ages. The first is an early coin of Tarentum. The city was founded as you know, by the Spartan Phalanthus, late in the eighth century. I beheve the head is meant for that of Apollo Archegetes, it may however be Taras, the son of Poseidon ; it is no matter to us at present whom it is meant for, but the fact that we cannot know, is itself of the greatest import. We cannot say, with any certainty, unless by discovery of some collateral evidence, whether this head is intended for that of a god, or demi-god, or a mortal warrior. Ought not that to disturb some of your thoughts respecting Greek ideaUsm? Farther, if by investigation we discover that the head is meant for that of Phalanthus, we shall know nothing of the charac- ter of Phalanthus from the face ; for there is no portraiture at this early time. 118. The second coin is of .3Enus in Macedonia ; probably of the fifth or early fourth century, and entirely characteristic of the central period. This we know to represent the face of a god — Hermes. The third coin is a king's, not a city's. I will not tell you, at this moment, what king's ; but only that it is a late coin of the third period, and that it is as distinct in purpose as the coin of Tarentum is obscure. We know of this coin, that it represents no god nor demi-god, but a mere mortal ; and we know precisely, from the portrait, what that mortal's face was like. 119. A glance at the three coins, as they are set side by side, will now show you the main differences in the three great Greek styles. The archaic coin is sharp and hard ; every line decisive and numbered, set unhesitatingly in its place ; nothing 356 ARATRA PWNTELICI. is wrong, though everything incomplete, and, to us who havs seen finer art, ugly. The central coin is as decisive and clear in arrangement of masses, but its contours are completely rounded and finished. There is no character in, its execution so prominent that you can give an epithet to the style. It is not hard, it is not soft, it is not delicate, it is not coarse, it is not grotesque, it is not beautiful ; and I am convinced, unless you had been told that this is fine central Greek art, you would have seen nothing at all in it to interest you. Do not let yourselves be anywise forced into admiring it ; there is, indeed, nothing more here, than an approximately true ren- dering of a healthy youthful face, without the slightest attempt to give an expression of activity, cunning, nobility, or any other attribute of the Mercurial mind. Extreme simplicity, unpretending vigour of work, which claims no admiration either for minuteness or dexterity, and suggests no idea of efibrt at all ; refusal of extraneous ornament, and perfectly arranged disposition of counted masses in a sequent order, whether in the beads, or the ringlets of hair ; this is all you have to be pleased with ; neither will you ever find, in the best Greek Art, more. You might at first suppose that the chain of beads round the cap was an extraneous ornament ; but I have little doubt that it is as definitely the proper fillet for the head of Hermes, as the olive for Zeus, or. com for Triptolemus. The cap or petasus cannot have expanded edges, there is no room for them on the coin ; these must be under- stood, therefore ; but the nature of the cloud-petasus is ex- plained by edging it with beads, representing either dew or hail. The shield of Athena often bears white pellets for hail, in like manner. 120. The third coin will, I think, at once strike you by what we moderns should call its "vigour of character." Tou may observe also that the features are finished with great care and subtlety, but at the cost of simplicity and breadth. But the essential difference between it and the central art, is its disorder in design — you see the locks of hair cannot be counted any longer — they are entirely dishevelled and irregular. Now the indi'^ddual character may, or may not LIKENESS. 3C7 be, a sign of decline ; but the licentiousness, the casting loose of the masses in the design, is an infallible one. The effort at portraiture is good for art if the men to be portrayed are good men, not otherwise. In the instance before you, the head is that of Mithridates VI of Pontus, who had, indeed, the good qualities of being a linguist and a patronof the arts ; but as you will remember, murdered, according to report, his mother, certainly his brother, certainly his wives and sisters, I have not counted how many of his children, and from a hun- dred to a iundred and fifty thousand persons besides ; these last in a single day's massacre. The effort to represent this kind of person is not by any means a method of study from life ultimately beneficial to art. 121. This however is not the point I have to urge to-day. What I want you to observe is that, though the master of the great time does not attempt portraiture, he does attempt ani- mation. And as far as his means wiU admit, he succeeds in making the face — younaight almost think — vulgarly animated ; as like a real face, literally, "as it can stare." Yes : and its sculptor meant it to be so ; and that was what Phidias meant his Jupiter to be, if he could manage it. Not, indeed, to be taken for Zeus himself ; and yet, to be as like a Kving Zeus as art could make it. Perhaps you think he tried to make it look living only for the sake of the mob, and would not have tried to do so for connoisseurs. Pardon me ; for real connoisseurs, he would, and did ; and herein consists a truth which belongs to all the arts, and which I will at once drive home in your minds, as firmly as I can. 122. All second-rate artists — (and remember, the second- rate ones are a loquacious multitude, while the great come only one or two in a century ; and then, silently) — all second- rate artists will tell you that the object of fine art is not re- semblance, but some kind of abstraction more refined than reality. Put that out of your heads at once. The object of the great Resemblant Arts is, and always has been, to resemble; and to resemble as closely as possible. It is the function of a good portrait to set the man before you in habit as he livev Tt/itan-arcov. " For in- deed, in aU cases, our right judgment must depend on our wish to give honour only to things and creatures that deserve it. 135. And now I must state to you another principle of veracity, both in sculpture, and all following arts, of wider scope than any hitherto examined. "We have seen that sculpt- ure is to be a true representation of true external form. Much more is it to be a representation of true internal emo- tion. You must carve only what you yourself see as you' see it ; but, much more, you must carve only what you yourself feel, as you feel it. You may no more endeavour to feel through other men's souls, than to see with other men's eyes. Whereas generally now in Europe and America, every man's energy is bent upon acquiring some false emotion, not his own, but belonging to the past, or to other persons, because he has been taught that such and such a result of it will be fine. Every attempted sentiment in relation to art is hypo- critical ; our notions of sublimity, of grace, or pious serenity, »re aU second hand ; and we are practically incapable of de- signing so much as a bell-handle or a door-knocker without borrowing the first notion of it from those who are gone — where we shall not wake them with our knocking. I would we cpiijd, 366 ARATBA PENTELICI. 136. In the midst of this desolation we have nothing to count on for real growth, but what we can find of honest hk- ing and longing, ia ourselves and in others. We must dis- cover, if we would healthily advance, what things are verily TL/xtdyraTa among US ; and if we delight to honour the dis- honourable, consider how, in future, we may better bestow our likings. Now it appears to me from aJl our popular declarations, that we, at present, honour nothing so much as liberty and independence ; and no person so much as the Free man and Self-made man, who will be ruled by no one, and has been taught, or helped, by no one. And the reason I chose a fish for you as the first subject of sculpture, was that in men who are free and self-made, you have the nearest ap- proach, humanly possible, to the state of the fish, and finely organized ipTrtTov. You get the exact phrase in Habakkuk, if you take the Septuagint text. — "Troi^o-ets roiis avOpumovq is roiis i)(Ovas T^s OaXdcrarrj'i, /cat jScXriovas avSpas, koi Trpr yvwfi-qv, Kol T^v ISiav,'' " I deliver to you better men than the God of Money can, both in imagination and feature." So on the other hand, this ichthyoid, reptilian, or mono-chondyloid ideal of the seK-made man can only be reached, universally, by a nation which holds that poverty, either of purse or spirit, — but especially the spiritual character of being irTtoxoi tuI irvivixari, is the lowest of degradations; and which believes Plate IX.— Apollo Chrysocomes of Clazombnce. LIKENESS. 369 that the desire of wealth is the first of manly and moral sen- timents. As I have been able to get the popular ideal repre- sented by its own living art, so I can give you this popular faith in its own living words ; but in words meant seriously and not at all as caricature, from one of our leading journals, professedly eesthetic also in its very name, the Spectator, of August 6th, 1870. " Ml-. Buskin's plan," it says, " would make England poor, in order that she might be cultivated, and refined and artistic. A wUder proposal was never broached by a man of ability ; and it might be regarded as a proof that the assiduous study of art emasculates the intellect, and even the moral sense. Such a theory almost warrants the contempt with which art is often regarded by essentially intellectual natures, like Proudhon " (sic). "Art is noble as the flower of life, and the creations oj a Titian are a great heritage of the race ; but if England could secure high art and Venetian glory of colour only by the sacri- fice of her manufacturing supremacy, and by the acceptance of national pouerty, then the pursuit of such artistic achievements would imply that we had ceased to possess natures of manly strength, or to know the meaning of moral aims. If we must choose between a Titian and a Lancashire cotton mUl, then, in the name of manhood and of morality, give us the cotton mill. Only the dilettantism of the studio ; that dilettantism which loosens the moral no less than the intellectual fibre, and which is as fatal to rectitude of action as to correctness of reasoning power, would make a different choice." You see also, by this interesting and most memorable pas- sage, how completely the question is admitted to be one of ethics — the only real point at issue being, whether this face or that is developed on the truer moral principle. 140. I assume, however, for the present, that this ApoUine type is the kind of form you wish to reach and to represent. And now observe, instantly, the whole question of manner of imitation is altered for us. The fins of the fish, the plumes of the swan, and the flowing of the Sun-God's hair are all repre- sented by incisions — but the incisions do sufficiently repre- sent the fin and feather, — they insufficiently represent the 370 JLRATBA PENTELIOI. hair. If I chose, with a little more care and labour, I could absolutely get the surface of the scales and spines of the fish, and the expression of its mouth ; but no quantity of labour would obtain the real surface of a tress of Apollo's hair, and the fuU expression of his mouth. So that we are compelled at once to caU the imagination to help us, and say to it. You know what the Apollo Chrysocomes must be like ; finish all this for yourseK. Now, the law under which imagination works, is just that of other good workers. " You must give me clear orders ; show me what I have to do, and where I am to begin, and let me alone." And the orders can be given, quite clearly, up to a certain point, in form ; but they cannot be given clearly in colour, now that the subject is subtle. All beauty of this high kind depends on harmony ; let but the slightest discord come into it, and the finer the thing is, the more fatal will be the flaw. Now, on a flat surface, I can command my colour to be precisely what and where I mean it to be ; on a round one I cannot. For aU harmony depends first, on the fixed proportion of the colour of the light, to that of the relative shadow ; and therefore, if I fasten my colour, I must fasten my shade. But on a round surface the shadow changes at every hour of the day ; and therefore, all colouring which is expressive of form, is impossible ; and if the form is fine, (and here there is nothing but what is fine), you may bid farewell to colour. 141. Farewell to colour ; that is to say, if the thing is to be seen distinctly, and you have only wise people to show it to ; but if it is to be seen indistinctly, at a distance, colour may become explanatory ; and if you have simple people to show it to, colour may be necessary to excite their imaginations, though not to excite yours. And the art is great always by meeting its conditions in the straightest way ; and if it is to please a multitude of innocent and bluntly-minded persons, must express itself in the terms that will touch them ; else it is not good. And I have to trace for you through the history of the past, and possibilities of the future, the expedients used by great sculptors to obtain clearness, impressiveness, or splendour ; and the manner of their appeal to the people, under various light and shadow, and with reference to differ- ent degrees of public intelligence : such investigation resolv- ing itself again and again, as we proceed, into questions absolutely ethical ; as for instance, whether colour is to be bright or dull, that is to say, for a populace cheerful or heart- less ; — whether it is to be deUcate or strong, that is to say, for a populace attentive or careless ; whether it is to be a background hke the sky, for a procession of young men and maidens, because your populace revere life — or the shadow of a vault behind a corpse, stained with drops of blackened blood, for a populace taught to worship Death. Every critical deter- mination of rightness depends on the obedience to some ethic law, by the most rational and, therefore, simplest, means. And you see how it depends most, of aU things, on whether you are working for chosen persons or for the mob ; for the joy of the boudoir, or of the Borgo. And if for the mob, whether the mob of Olympia, or of St. Antoine. Phidias, showing his Jupiter for the first time, hides behind the temple door to listen, resolved afterwards, " pvO/jii^etv to ayak/xa irpoi to tois irXeioTots Sokovv, ov yap ■^€ito /xiKpav eivai is from him, as compared to the weakness of days when men vrithout foresight " evpov fiiaj Trdrra." But, so far as we use the word " Providence " as an attribute of the Maker and Giver of all things, it does not mean that in a *Suoh as the sculptureless arch of Waterloo Bridge, for Instance, referred to in the Third Lecture, § 84. 376 AHATRA PENTELICI. shipwreck He takes care of the passengers who are to be saved and takes none of those who are to be drowned ; but it does mean that every race of creatures is bom into the world un- der circumstances of approximate adaptation to its necessities ; and, beyond all others, the ingenious and observant race of man is surrounded with elements naturally good for his food, pleasant to his sight, and suitable for the subjects of his in- genuity ; — the stone, metal, and clay of the earth he walks upon lending themselves at once to his hand, for all manner of workmanship. 150. Thus, his truest respect for the law of the entire crea- tion is shown by his making the most of what he can get most easily ; and there is no virtue of art, nor application of com- mon sense, more sacredly necessary than this respect to the beauty of natural substance, and the ease of local use ; neither are there any other precepts of construction so vital as these — that you show all the strength of your material, tempt none of its weaknesses, and do with it only what can be simply and permanently done. 151. Thus, all good building wiU be vnth rocks, or pebbles, or burnt clay, but with no artificial compound ; all good paint- ing, with common oils and pigments on common canvas, paper, plaster, or wood, — admitting, sometimes for precious work, precious things, but all applied in a simple and visible way. The highest imitative art should not, indeed, at first sight, call attention to the means of it ; but even that, at length, should do so distinctly, and provoke the observer to take pleasure in seeing how completely the workman is master of the particu- lar material he has used, and how beautiful and desirable a substance it was, for work of that kind. In oil painting its unctious quaUty is to be delighted in ; in fresco, its chalky quality ; in glass, its transparency ; in wood, its grain ; in marble, its softness ; in porphyry, its hardness ; in iron, its toughness. In a flint country, one should feel the delightful- ness of having flints to pick up, and fasten together into rug- ged walls. In a marble country one should be always more and more astonished at the exquisite colour and structure of marble ; in a slate country one should feel as if every rock STRUCTURE. 377 cleft itself only for the sake of being built with con- veniently. 152. Now, for sculpture, there are, briefly, two materials — Clay, and Stone ; for glass is only a clay that gets clear and brittle as it cools, and metal a clay that gets opaque and tough as it cools. Indeed, the true use of gold in this world is only as a very pretty and very ductile clay, which you can spread as flat as you like, spin as flne as you hke, and which will neither crack, nor tarnish. All the arts of sculpture in clay may be summed up under the word " Plastic," and all of those in stone, under the word "Glyptic." 153. Sculpture in clay wiU accordingly include all cast brick-work, pottery, and tile-work * — a somewhat important branch of human skUI Next to the potter's work, you have all the arts in porcelain, glass, enamel, and metal ; everything^ that is to say, playful and familiar in design, much of what ia most felicitously inventive, and, in bronze or gold, most pre- cious and permanent. 154. Sculpture in stone, whether granite, gem, or marble, while we accurately use the general term " glyptic " for it, may be thought of with, perhaps, the most clear force under the EngUsh word " engraving." For, from the mere angular incision which the Greek consecrated in the triglyphs of his greatest order of architecture, grow forth all the arts of bas- relief, and methods of localized groups of sculpture connected with each other and with architecture : as, in another direc- tion, the arts of engraving and wood-cutting themselves. 155. Over all this vast field of human skOl the laws which I have enunciated to you rule vdth inevitable authority, embrac- ing the greatest, and consenting to the humblest, exertion ; strong to repress the ambition of nations, if fantastic and vain, but gentle to approve the efibrts of children, made in accord- ance vyith the visible intention of the Maker of all flesh, and * It is strange, at this day, to think of the relation of the Athenian Ceramicus to the French Tile-fields, Tileries, or Tuileries ; and how these last may yet become— have already partly become — "the Potter' fleld," blood-bought. (December, 1870.) 378 AMATRA PENTBLICI. the Giver of all Intelligence. These laws, therefore, I now re peat, and beg of you to observe them as irrefragable. 1. That the work is to be with tools of men. 2. That it is to be in natural materials. 3. That it is to exhibit the virtues of those materials, and aim at no quality inconsistent with them. 4. That its temper is to be quiet and gentle, in harmony with common needs, and in consent to common intelli- gence. We will now observe the bearing of these laws on the ele- mentary conditions of the art at present under discussion. 156. There is, first, work in baked clay, which contracts as it dries, and is very easily frangible. Then you must put no work into it requiring niceness in dimension, nor any so elabo- rate that it would be a great loss if it were broken, but as the clay yields at once to the hand, and the sculptor can do any- thing with it he likes, it is a material for him to sketch with and play with, — to record his fancies in, before they escape him — and to express roughly, for people who can enjoy such sketches, what he has not time to complete in marble. The clay, being ductile, lends itself to all softness of line ; being easily frangible, it would be ridiculous to give it sharp edges, so that a blunt and massive rendering of graceidl gesture will be its natural function ; but as it can be pinched, or pulled, or thrust in a moment into projection which it would take hours of chiselling to get in stone, it will also properly be used for all fantastic and grotesque form, not involving sharp edges. Therefore, what is true of chalk and charcoal, for painters, is equally true of clay, for sculptors ; they are all most precious materials for true masters, but tempt the false ones into fatal license ; and to judge rightly of terra^cotta work is a far higher reach of skill in sculpture-criticism than to distinguish the merits of a finished statue. 157. We have, secondly, work in bronze, iron, gold, and other metals ; in which the laws of structure are still more definite. All kinds of twisted and wreathen work on every scale be- come delightful when wrought in ductile or tenacious metal ,• STRUOTUBE. 379 but metal which is to be hammered into form separates itself into two great divisions — solid, and flat. (A.) In soUd metal work, i. e., metal cast thick enough to resist bending, whether it be hoUow or not, violent and various projection may be admitted, which would be offensive in mar- ble ; but no sharp edges, because it is difficult to produce them with the hammer. But since the permanence of the material justifies exquisiteness of workmanship, whatever del- icate ornamentation can be wrought with rounded surfaces may be advisedly introduced ; and since the colour of bronze or any other metal is not so pleasantly representative of flesh as that of marble, a wise sculptor will depend less on flesh contour, and more on picturesque accessories, which, though they would be vulgar if attempted in stone, are rightly enter- taining in bronze or silver. Verrochio's statue of CoUeone at Venice, CeUini's Perseus at Florence, and Ghiberti's gates at Florence, are models of bronze treatment. (B.) When metal is beaten thin, it becomes what is technically called " plate," (the flattened thing) and may be treated advisably in two ways ; one, by beating it out into bosses, the other by cutting it into strips and ramifications. The vast schools of goldsmith's work and of iron dec- oration, founded on these two principles, have had the most powerful influences over general taste in all ages and countries. One of the sim- plest and most interesting elementary examples of the treatment of flat metal by cutting is the common branched iron bar, Fig. 8, used to close small apertures in countries possessing any good primitive style of ironwork, formed by alternate cuts on its sides, and the bending down of the several portions. The ordinary domestic window balcony of Verona is formed by mere ribands of iron, bent into curves as studiously refined as those of a Greek vase, and decorated merely by their own terminations in spiral volutes. All cast work in metal, unfinished by hand, is inadmissible Flo. 8. 880 ARATItA PENTELIGI. in any school of living art, since it cannot possess the perfec- tion of form due to a permanent substance ; and the continual sight of it is destructive of the faculty of taste : but metal stamped vsdth precision, as in coins, is to sculpture what en- graving is to painting. 158. Thirdly. Stone-sculpture divides itself into three schools : one in very hard material ; one in very soft, and one in that of centrally useful consistence. A. The virtue of work in hard material is the expression of form in shallow rehef, or in broad contours ; deep cutting in hard material is inadmissible, and the art, at once pompous and trivial, of gem engraving, has been in the last degree destructive of the honour and service of sculpture. B. The virtue of work in soft' material is deep cutting, with studiously graceful disposition of the masses of light and shade. The greater number of flamboyant churches of France are cut out of an adhesive chalk ; and the fantasy of their latest decoration was, in great part, induced by the facility of obtainiag contrast of black space, undercut, with white tracery easily left in sweeping and interwoven rods — the lavish use of wood in domestic architecture materially increasing the habit of delight in branched complexity of line. These points, however, I must reserve for illustration in my lectures on ar- chitecture. To-day, I shall limit myself to the illustration of elementary sculptural structure in the best material ; — that is to say, in crystalline marble, neither soft enough to encourage the caprice of the workman, nor hard enough to resist his will. 159. C. By the true "Providence" of Nature, the rock which is thus submissive has been in some places stained with the fairest colours, and in others blanched into the fairest ab- sence of colour, that can be found to give harmony to inlay- ing, or dignity to form. The possession by the Greeks of their Xcvkos Xt'^os was indeed the first circumstance regulating the development of their art ; it enabled them at once to ex- press their passion for Ught by executing the faces, hands, and feet of their dark wooden statues in white marble, so that what we look upon only with pleasure for fineness of texture i o « > o o a o A m a o M Oh STMUOTURE. 381 was to them an imitation of the luminous body of the deity shining from behind its dark robes ; and ivory afterwards is employed in their best statues for its yet more soft and flesh-like brightness, receptive also of the most delicate colour — (therefore to this day the favourite ground of miniature painters). In like manner, the existence of quarries of peach- coloured marble within twelve miles of Verona, and of white marble and green serpentine between Pisa and Genoa, defined the manner both of sculpture and architecture for all the Gothic buildings of Italy. No subtlety of education could have formed a high school of art without these materials. 160. Next to the colour, the fineness of substance which will take a perfectly sharp edge, is essential; and this not merely to admit fine delineation in the sculpture itself, but to secure a delightful precision in placing the blocks of which it is composed. For the possession of too fine marble, as far as regards the work itself, is a temptation instead of an advantage to an inferior sculptor ; and the abuse of the facility of under- cutting, especially of undercutting so as to leave profiles de- fined by an edge against shadow, is one of the chief causes of decHne of style in such encrusted bas-reliefs as those of the Certosa of Pavia and its contemporary monuments. But no undue temptation ever exists as to the fineness of block fit- ting ; nothing contributes to give so pure and healthy a tone to sculpture as the attention of the builder to the jointing of his stones ; and his having both the power to make them fit so perfectly as not to admit of the sUghtest portion of cement showing externally, and the skill to insure, if needful, and to suggest always, their stability in cementless construction. Plate X. represents a piece of entirely fine Lombardic build- ing, the central portion of the arch in the Duomo of Verona, which corresponds to that of the porch of San Zenone, repre- sented in Plate I. In both these pieces of building, the only line that traces the architrave round the arch, is that of the masonry joint ; yet this line is dravm with extremest subtlety, with intention of delighting the eye by its relation of varied curvature to the arch itself ; and it is just as much considered as the finest pen-line of a Eaphael drawing. Every joint of 382 ABATSA PENT ELI 01. the stone is used, in like manner, as a thin black line, which the slightest sign of cement would spoil like a blot. And so proud is the builder of his fine jointing, and so fearless of any distortion or strain spoiling the adjustment afterwards, that in one place he runs his joint quite gratuitously through a bas-relief, and gives the keystone its only sign of pre-emi- nence by the minute inlaying of the head of the Lamb, into the stone of the course above. 161. Proceeding from this fine jointing to fine draughts- manship, you have, in the very outset and earliest stage of sculpture, your flat stone surface given you as a sheet of white paper, on which you are required to produce the utmost effect you can with the simplest means, cutting away as little of the stone as may be, to save both time and trouble ; and, above all, leaving the block itself, when shaped, as solid as you can, that its surface may better resist weather, and the carved parts be as much protected as possible by the masses left around them. 162. The first thing to be done is clearly to trace the out- line of subject with an incision approximating in section to that of the furrow of a plough, only more equal-sided. A fine sculptor strikes it, as his chisel leans, fi'eely, on marble ; an Egyptian, in hard rock, cuts it sharp, as in cuneiform inscrip- tions. In any case, you have a result somewhat like the upper figure, Plate XI., in which I show you the most ele- mentary indication of form possible, by cutting the outline of the typical archaic Greek head with an incision like that of a Greek triglyph, only not so precise in edge or slope, as it is to be modified afterwards. 163. Now, the simplest thing we can do next, is to round off the flat surface vMhin the incision, and put what form we can get into the feebler projection of it thus obtained. The Egyptians do this, often with exquisite skiU, and then, as I showed you in a former lecture, colour the whole— using the incision as an outline. Such a method of treatment is capable of good service in representing, at little cost of pains, subjects in distant effect, and common, or merely picturesque, subjects even near, To show you what it is capable of, and what ■Plate XI. — The First Elements op Sculptuke. Incised Outline and Opened Space. STRUCTUBE. 383 coloured sculpture would be in its rudest type, I have pre- pared the coloured relief of the John Dory * as a natural his- tory drawing for distant effect. You know, also, that I meant him to be ugly — as ugly as any creature can well be. In time, I hope to show you prettier things — peacocks and king- fishers, — butterflies and flowers, on grounds of gold, and the like, as they were ia Byzantine work. I shall expect you, in right use of your aesthetic faculties, to like those better than what I show you to-day. But it is now a question of method only ; and if you will look, after the lecture, first at the mere white relief, and then see how much may be gained by a few dashes of colour, such as a practised workman could lay in a quarter of an hour, — the whole forming, if well done, almost a deceptive image — ^you vnll, at least, have the range of power in Egyptian sculptxire clearly expressed to you. 164. But for fine sculpture, we must advance by far other methods. If we carve the subject with real delicacy, the cast shadow of the incision wiU interfere with its outline, so that, for representation of beautiful things, you must clear away the ground about it, at aU events for a little distance. As the law of work is to use the least pains possible, you clear it only just as far back as you need, and then for the sake of order and finish, you give the space a geometrical outline. By tak- ing, in this case, the simplest I can, — a circle, — I can clear the head with httle labor in the removal of surface round it ; (see the lower figure in Plate XI.) 165. Now, these are the first terms of all well-constructed bas-reHef. The mass you have to treat consists of a piece of stone, which, however you afterwards carve it, can but, at its most projecting point, reach the level of the external plane surface out of which it was mapped, and defined by a depres- sion round it ; that depression being at first a mere trench, then a moat of certain width, of which the outer sloping bank is in contact, as a limiting geometrical line, with the laterally salient portions of sculpture. This, I repeat, is the primal * This relief is now among tlie other casts which I have placed in tha lower school in the University galleries. 384 AEATBA PENTELIOI. construction of good bas-relief, implying, first, perfect pro- tection to its surface from any transverse blow, and a geo- metrically limited space to be occupied by the design, into ■which it shall pleasantly (and as you shall ultimately see, ingeniously,) contract itseK: implying, secondly, a determined depth of projection, which it shall rarely reach, and never ex- ceed : and implying, finally, the production of the whole piece with the least possible labor of chisel and loss of stone. 166. And these, which are the first, are very nearly the last constructive laws of sculpture. You will be surprised to find how much they include, and how much of minor propriety in treatment their observance involves. In a very interesting essay on the architecture of the Par- thenon, by the professor of architecture of the Ecole Polytech- nique, M. Emile Boutmy, you will find it noticed that the Greeks do not usually weaken, by carving, the constructive masses of their building ; but put their chief sculpture in the empty spaces between the triglyphs, or beneath the roof. This is true ; but in so doing, they merely build their panel instead of carving it ; they accept no less than the Goths, the laws of recess and limitation, as being vital to the safety and dignity of their design ; and their noblest recumbent statues are, constructively, the fillings of the acute extremity of a panel in the form of an obtusely Summitted triangle. 167. In gradual descent from that severest type, you wiU find that an immense quantity of sculpture of all times and styles may be generally embraced under the notion of a mass hewn out of, or, at least, placed in, a panel or recess, deepen- ing, it may be, into a niche ; the sculpture being always de- signed with reference to its ; position in such recess ; and, therefore, to the effect of the building out of which the re- cess is hewn. But, for the sake of simplifying our inquiry, I will at first suppose no surrounding protective ledge to exist, and that the area of stone we have to deal with is simply a flat slab, extant from a flat surface depressed all round it. 168. A. flat slab, observe. The flatness of surface is essen- tial to the problem of bas-reliet The lateral limit of the 8TRU0TURE. 385 panel may, or may not, be required ; but the vertical limit of surface must be expressed ; and the art of bas-relief is to give the effect of true form on that condition. For observe, if nothing more vrere needed than to make first a cast of a solid form, then cut it in half, and apply the half of it to the flat surface ; — if, for instance, to carve a bas-relief of an ap- ple, all I had to do was to cut my sculpture of the vrhole apple in half, and pin it to the waU, any ordinary trained sculptor, or even a mechanical vyorkman, could produce bas-relief; but the business is to carve a round thing out of &JM thing ; to carve an apple out of a biscuit ! — to conquer, as a subtle Florentine has here conquered,* his marble, so as not only to get motion into what is most rigidly fixed, but to get bound- lessness iato what is most narrowly bounded ; and carve Ma- donna and CMld, roUing clouds, flying angels, and space of heavenly air behind all, out of a film of stone not the third of an inch thick where it is thickest. 169. Carried, however, to such a degree of subtlety as this, and with so ambitious and extravagant aim, bas-reHef be- comes a tour-de-force ; and, you know, I have just told you all tours-de-force are wrong. The true law of bas-relief is to begin with a depth of incision proportioned justly to the dis- tance of the observer and the character of the subject, and out of that rationally determined depth, neither increased for os- tentation of effect, nor diminished for ostentation of skill, to do the utmost that vrill be easily visible to am observer, sup- posing him to give an average human amount of attention, but not to peer into, or critically scrutinize the work. 170. I cannot arrest you to day by the statement of any of the laws of sight and distance which determine the proper depth of bas-relief. Suppose that depth fixed ; then observe what a pretty problem, or, rather, continually varying cluster of problems, will be offered to us. You might, at first, imag- ine that, given what we may caU our scale of solidity, or scale of depth, the diminution from nature would be in regular * The reference is to a cast from a. small and low relief of Florentinf work in the Kensington Museum, 386 ABATnA PENTELIOI. proportion, as for instance, if the real depth of your subject be, suppose a foot, and the depth of your bas-relief an inch, then the parts of the real subject which were six inches round the side of it would be carved, you might imagine, at the depth of haK-an-inch, and so the whole thing mechanically reduced to scale. But not a bit of it. Here is a Greek bas- reHef of a chariot with two horses (upper figure, Plate XXI). Your whole subject has therefore the depth of two horses side by side, say six or eight feet. Your bas-relief has, on the scale,* say the depth of the third of an incL Now, if you gave only the sixth of an inch for the depth of the off horse, and, dividing him again, only the twelfth of an inch for that of each foreleg, you would make him look a mile away from the other, and his own forelegs a mile apart. Actually, the Greek has made the near leg of the off horse project much be- yond the off leg of the near horse ; and has put nearly the whole depth and power of his relief into the breast of the off horse, while for the whole distance from the head of the near- est to the neck of the other, he has allowed himself only a shallow line ; knowing that, if he deepened that, he would give the nearest horse the look of having a thick nose ; where- as, by keeping that line down, he has not only made the head itself more delicate, but detached it from the other by giving no cast shadow, and left the shadow below to serve for thick- ness of breast, cutting it as sharp down as he possibly can, to make it bolder. 171. Here is a fine piece of business we have got into! — even supposing that all this selection and adaptation were to be contrived under constant laws, and related only to the expression of given forms. But the Greek sculptor, all this while, is not only debating and deciding how to show what he wants, but, much more, debating and deciding what, as he can't show everything, he will choose to show at all. Thus, being himself interested, and supposing that you vrill be, in • The actual bas-relief is on a coin, and the projection not above the twentieth of an inch, but I magnified it in photograph, for this Lecture, so as to represent a relief \rith about the third of an inch for maximuiq projection. STRUCT asM. 387 the manner of the driving, he takes great pains to carve the reins, to show you where they are knotted, and how they are fastened round the driver's waist (you recollect how Hippoly- tus was lost by doing that), but he does not care the least bit about the chariot, and having rather more geometry than he likes in the cross and circle of one wheel of it, entirely omits the other ! 172. I think you must see by this time that the sculptor's is not quite a trade which you can teach Hke brickmaking ; nor its produce an article of which you can supply any quan- tity "demanded " for the next railroad waiting-room. It may perhaps, indeed, seem to you that, in the difficulties thus pre- sented by it, baa-rehef involves more direct exertion of intel- lect than finished sohd sculpture. It is not so, however. The questions involved by bas-relief are of a more curious and amusing kind, requiring great variety of expedients ; though none except such as a true workmanly instinct delights in in- venting and invents easily ; but design in solid sculpture in- volves considerations of weight in mass, of balance, of per- spective and opposition, in projecting forms, and of restraint for those which must not project, such as none but the great- est masters have ever completely solved ; and they, not always ; the difficulty of arranging the composition so as to be agree- able from points of view on all sides of it, being, itself, arduous enough. 173. Thus far, I have been speaking only of the laws of structure relating to the projection of the mass which becomes itself the sculpture. Another most interesting group of con- structive laws governs its relation to the line that contains or defines it. In your Standard Series I have placed a photograph of the south transept of Eouen Cathedral. Strictly speaking, all standards of Gothic are of the thirteenth century ; but, in the fourteenth, certain qualities of richness are obtained by the diminution of restraint ; out of which we must choose what is best in their kinds. The pedestals of the statues which once occupied the lateral recesses are, as you see, covered with groups of figures, enclosed each in a quatrefoil panel ; the 388 ASATSA PENTELICI. spaces between this panel and the enclosing square "being filled with sculptures of animals. You cannot anywhere find a more lovely piece of fancy, or more illustrative of the quantity of result that may be obtained with low and simple chiselling. The figures are all perfectly simple in drapery, the story told by lines of action only in the main group, no accessories being admitted. There is no un- dercutting anywhere, nor exhibition of technical skill, but the fondest and tenderest appliance of it ; and one of the prin- cipal charms of the whole is the adaptation of every subject to its quaint limit. The tale must be told within the four petals of the quatrefoU, and the wildest and playfullest beasts must never come out of their narrow comers. The attention with which spaces of this kind are filled by the Gothic design- ers is not merely a beautiful compliance with architectural re- quirements, but a definite assertion of their deHght in tbe restraint of law ; for, in illuminating books, although, if they chose it, they might have designed floral ornaments, as we now usually do, rambling loosely over the leaves, and although, in later works, such license is often taken by them, in all books of the fine time the wandering tendrils are enclosed by limits approximately rectilinear, and in gracefuUest branching often detach themselves from the right line only by curvature of ex- treme severity. 174 Since the darkness and extent of shadow by which the sculpture is relieved necessarily vary with the depth of the recess, there arise a series of problems, in deciding which the wholesome desire for emphasis by means of shadow is too often exaggerated by the ambition of the sculptor to show his skiU in undercutting. The extreme of vulgarity is usually reached when the entire bas-relief is cut hollow underneath, as in much Indian and Chinese work, so as to relieve its forma against an absolute darkness ; but no formal law can ever be given ; for exactly the same thing may be beautifully done for a wise purpose, by one person, which is basely done, and to no purpose, or to a bad one, by another. Thus, the desire for emphasis itself may be the craving of a deadened imagination, or the passion of a vigorous one ; and relief against shadow STRUCTURE. 389 may be sought by one man only for sensation, and by anottier > for intelligibility. John of Pisa undercuts fiercely, in order to bring out the vigour of life which no level contour could render ; the Lombardi of Venice undercut delicately, in order to obtain beautiful lines, and edges of faultless precision ; but the base Indian craftsmen undercut only that people may wonder how the chiselling was done through the holes, or that they may see every monster white against black. 175. Yet, here again we are met by another necessity for discrimination. There may be a true delight in the inlaying of white on dark, as there is a true dehght in vigorous round- ing. Nevertheless, the general law is always, that, the Ughter the incisions, and the broader the surface, the grander, cseteris paribus, will be the work. Of the structural terms of that workyou now know enough to understand that the schools of good sculpture, considered in relation to projection; divide themselves into four entirely distinct groups : — 1st. Flat Eelief, in which the surface is, in many places, absolutely flat ; and the expression depends greatly on the lines of its outer contour, and on fine incis- ions within them. 2nd. Bound Eelief, in which, as in the best coins, the sculpt- ured mass projects so as to be capable of complete modulation into form, but is not anywhere undercut. The formation of a coin by the blow of a die neces- sitates, of course, the severest obedience to this law. 3rd. Edged Eelief. Undercutting admitted, so as to throw out the forms against a background of shadow. 4th. FuU Eelief. The statue completely solid in form, and unreduced in retreating depth of it, yet connected locally with some definite part of the building, so as to be still dependent on the shadow of its back- ground and direction of protective line. 176. Let me recommend you at once to take what pains may be needful to enable you to distinguish these four kinds of sculpture, for the distinctions between them are not founded on mere differences in gradation of depth. They are truly four species, or orders, of sculpture, separated from each other 390 ABATBA PMNTSLiai. by determiii6d characters. I have used, you may have noted, hitherto in my Lectures, the word " bas-relief " almost indis- criminately for all, because the degree of lowness or highness of reUef is not the question, but the method of relief. Observe again, therefore — A. If a portion of the surface is absolutely flat, you have the first order — Flat Relief. B. If every portion of the surface is rounded, but none un- dercut, you have Bound Belief — essentially that of seals and coins. C. If any part of the edges be undercut, but the general projection of solid form reduced, you have what I think you may conveniently call Foliate Belief, — the parts of the design overlapping each other in places, like edges of leaves. D. If the undercutting is bold and deep, and the projection of solid form unreduced, you have full relief. Learn these four names at once by heart : — Flat BeUef. Bound Belief. Foliate Belief. Full Belief. And whenever you look at any piece of sculpture, determine first to which of these classes it belongs ; and then consider how the sculptor has treated it with reference to the neces- sary structure — that reference, remember, being partly to the mechanical conditions of the material, partly to the means of light and shade at his command. 177. To take a single instance. You know, for these many years, I have been telling our architects with all the force of voice I had in me, that they could design nothing untU they could carve natural forms rightly. Many imagine that work was easy ; but judge for yourselves whether it be or not. In Plate XIL, I have drawn, with approximate accuracy, a cluster of Phillyrea leaves as they grow. Now, if we wanted to cut them in bas-relief, the first thing we should have to consider would be the position of their outline on the marble ; — here it is, as far down as the spring of the leaves. But do you suppose that is what an ordinary sculptor could either lay for STRnOTUBM. 391 his first sketch, or contemplate as a limit to be worked down to ? Then consider how the interlacing and springing of the leaves can be expressed within this outline. It must be done by leaving such projection in the marble as will take the light in the same proportion as the drawing does ; — and a Floren- tine workman could do it, for close sight, without driving one incision deeper, or raising a single surface higher, than the eighth of an inch. Indeed, no sculptor of the finest time Fio. 9. would design such a complex cluster of leaves as this, except for bronze or iron work ; they would take simpler contours for marble ; but the laws of treatment would, under these conditions, remain just as strict : and you may, perhaps, be- heve me now when I tell you that, in any piece of fine struct- ural sculpture by the great masters, there is more subtlety and noble obedience to lovely laws than could be explained to you it I took twenty lectures to do it in, instead of one. 178. There remains yet a point of mechanical treatment, on which I have not yet touched at all ; nor that the least impor- 392 ASATHA PENTELIOt. tant,i — namely, the actual method and style of handling. A great sculptor uses his tools exactly as a painter his pencil, and you may recognize the decision of his thought, and glow of his temper, no less in the workmanship than the design. The modem system of modelling the work in clay, getting it into form by machinery, and by the hands of subordinates, and touching it at last, if indeed the (so called) sculptor touch it at all, only to correct their inefBciencies, renders the pro- duction of good work in marble a physical impossibility. The first result of it is that the sculptor thinks in clay instead of marble, and loses his instinctive sense of the proper treatment of a brittle substance. The second is that neither he nor the public recognize the touch of the chisel as expressive of per- sonal feeUng or power, and that nothing is looked for except mechanical polish. 179. The perfectly simple piece of Greek relief represented in Plate Xm., wiU enable you to understand at -tmce, — exam- inatioa of the original, at your leisure, will prevent you, I trust,.frOm ever forgetting — what is meant by thie virtue of handling in sculpture. The projection, of the heads of the iour -horses, one behind the other, is certainly not more, altogether, than three-quarters of an inch from the flat ground, and, the one in front does not in reality project more than the one behind it, yet, by mere drawing,* you see the sculptor .has got them to appear to re- cede in due order, and by the soft rounding of the flesh sur- faces, and modulation of the veins, he has taken away all look of flatness from the necks. He has drawn the eyes and nos- trils with dark, incision, careful as the finest touches of a painter's pencil : and then, at last, when he comes to the manes, he has let fly hand and chisel with their full force, and where a base workman, (above all, if he had modelled the thing in clay first,) would have lost himself in laborious imitation of hair, the Greek has struck the tresses out with angular inci- * This plate has been executed from a drawing by Mr. Burgess, in which he has followed the curves of incision with exquisite care, and preserved the effect of the surface of the stone, where a photograph would have lest it by exaggerating accidental stains. a I BTUUCfURiS!. 393 sions, deep driven, every one in appointed place and deliberate curve, yet flowing so free under his noble hand that you can- not alter, without harm, the bending of any single ridge, nor contract, nor extend, a point of them. And if you will look back to Plate IX. you vdll see the difference between this sharp incision, used to express horse-hair, and the soft incision with intervening rounded ridge, used to express the hair of Apollo Chrysocomes ; and, beneath, the obliquely ridged incision used to express the plumes of his swan ; in both these cases the handling being much more slow, because the engraving is in metal ; but the structural importance of incision, as the means of effect, never lost sight of. Finally, here are two actual ex- amples of the work in marble of the two great schools of the world ; one, a little Fortune, standing tiptoe on the globe of the Earth, its surface traced with lines in hexagons ; not cha- otic under Fortune's feet ; Greek, this, and by a trained work- man ; — dug up in the temple of Neptune at Corfu ; — and here, a Florentine portrait-marble, found in the recent alterations, face downwards, under the pavement of St^ Maria Novella ; * both of them first-rate of their kind ; and both of them, while exquisitely finished at the telling points, showing, on all their unregarded surfaces, the rough furrow of the fast-driven chisel, as distinctly as the edge of a common paving-stone. 180. Let me suggest to you, in conclusion, one most inter- esting point of mental expression in these necessary aspects of finely executed sculpture. I have already again and again pressed on your attention the beginning of the arts of men in the make and use of the ploughshare. Read more carefully — you might indeed do well to learn at once by heart, — the twenty-seven lines of the Fourth Pythian, which describe the ploughing of Jason. There is nothing grander extant in human fency, nor set down in human words : but this great mythical expression of the conquest of the earth-clay, and brute-force, by vital human energy, will become yet more interesting to you when you reflect what enchantment has been cut, on whiter clay, by the tracing of finer furrows ; — * These two marbles will always, henceforward, be sufficiently ao- oesnible for reference in my room at Corpus Christi College. 394 ABATMA PBNTELIGI. what the delicate and consummate arts of man have done by the ploughing of marble, and granite, and iron. You will learn daily more and more, as you advance m actual practice, how the primary manual art of engraving, in the steadiness, clearness, and irrevocableness of it, is the best art-discipline that can be given either to mind or hand ; * you vrill recog- nize one law of right, pronouncing itself in the well-resolved work of every age ; you will see the firmly traced and irrev- ocable incision determining not only the forms, but, in great part, the moral temper, of all vitally progressive art ; you will trace the same principle and power in the furrows which the oblique sun shows on the granite of his own Egyptian city, — in the white scratch of the stylus through the colour on a Greek vase — in the first delineation, on the wet wall, of the groups of an Italian fresco ; in the unerring and unalterable touch of the great engraver of Nuremberg, — and ia the deep driven and deep bitten ravines of metal by which Turner closed, in embossed limits, the shadows of the Liber Studi- orum. Learn, therefore, in its full extent, the force of the great Greek word, x<»pao-o-(u ; — and, give me pardon — if you think pardon needed, that I ask you also to learn the full meaning of the English word derived from it. Here, at the Ford of the Oxen of Jason, are other furrows to be driven than these in the marble of Pentelicus. The fruitfullest, or the fatallest of all ploughing is that by the thoughts of your youth, on the white field of its imagination. For by these, either down to the disturbed spirit, " KiKcnn-ai koI ^opao-o-tTai niSov;" or around the quiet spirit, and on all the laws of conduct that hold it, as a fair vase its frankincense, are ordained the pure colours, and engraved the just Characters, of Ionian life. * That it was also, in some oases, the earliest that the Greeks gave, is proved by Lucian's account of his first lesson at his uncle's; the cyKinreis, literally "in-cutter" — being the first tool put into his hand, and an earthenware tablet to cut upon, which the boy pressing too hard, presently breaks ; — gets beaten— goes home crying, and becomes, aftei his dream above quoted, a philosopher instead of a sculptor. THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS. 395 LECTUEE VI. THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS. Deeembefr, 1870. 181. It can scarcely be needful for me to tell even the younger members of my present audience, that the conditions neces- sary for the production of a perfect school of sculpture have only twice been met in the history of the world, and then for a short time ; nor for short time only, but also in narrow dis- tricts, namely, in the valleys and islands of Ionian Greece, and in the strip of land deposited by the Amo, between the Apen- nine crests and the sea. All other schools, except these two, led severally by Athens in the fifth century before Christ, and by Florence in the fifteenth of our own era, are imperfect ; and the best of them are derivative : these two are consummate in themselves, and the origin of what is best in others. 182. And observe, these Athenian and Florentine schools are both of equal rank, as essentially original and independ- ent. The Florentine, being subsequent to the Greek, bor- rowed much from it ; but it would have existed just as strongly — and, perhaps, in some respects, more nobly — had it been the first, instead of the latter of the two. The task set to each of these mightiest of the nations was, indeed, practically the same, and as hard to the one as to the other. The Greeks found Phoenician and Etruscan art monstrous, and had to make them human. The Italians found Byzantine and Nor- man art monstrous, and had to make them human. The original power in the one case is easily traced ; in the other it has partly to be unmasked, because the change at Florence was, in many points, suggested and stimulated by the former school. But we mistake in supposing that Athens taught Florence the laws of design ; she taught her, in reality, only the duty of truth. 183. You remember that I told you the highest art could 396 ASATBA PESTBLIOI. do no more than rightly represent the human form. This is the simple test, then, of a perfect school, — that it has repre- sented the human form, so that it is impossible to conceive of its being better done. And that, I repeat, has been accom- plished twice only : once in Athens, once in Florence. And so narrow is the exceUenee even of these two exclusive schools, that it cannot be said of either of them that they represented the entire human form. The Greeks perfectly drew, and per- fectly moulded the body and limbs ; but there is, so far as I am aware, no instance of their representing the face as well as any great Italian. On the other hand, the Italian painted and carved the face insuperably ; but I believe there is no in- stance of his having perfectly represented the body, which, by command of his religion, it became his pride to despise, and his safety to mortify. 184. The general course of your study here renders it de- sirable that you should be accurately acquainted With the lead- ing principles of Greek sculpture ; but I cannot lay these be- fore you without giving undue prominence to some of the special merits of that school, unless I previously indicate the relation it holds to the more advanced, though less disciplined, excellence of Christian art. In this and the last lecture of the present course,* I shall endeavour, therefore, to mass for you, in such rude and dia- gram-like outline as may be possible or intelligible, the main characteristics of the two schools, completing and correcting the details of comparison afterwards ; and not answering, ob- serve, at present, for any generalization I give you, except as a ground for subsequent closer and more qualified statements. And in carrying out this parallel, I shall speak indifferently of works of sculptiure, and of the modes of painting which * The closing Lecture, on the religious temper of the Florentine, though necessary for the complete explanation of the subject to my class, at the time, introduced new points of inquiry which I do not choose to lay before the general reader until they can be examined in fuller sequence. The present volume, therefore, closes with the Sixth Lecture, and that on Christian art will be given as the first of the pub- liBhed oeurse on Florentine Sculpture, TEE SCHOOL OF ATHENS. 397 propose to themselyes the same objects as sculpture. And this indeed Florentine, as opposed to Venetian, painting, and that of Athens in the fifth century, nearly always did. 185. I begin, therefore, by comparing two designs of the simplest kind — engraTings, or, at least, linear drawings, both ; one on clay, one on copper, made in the central periods of each style, and representing the same goddess — Aphrodite. They are now set beside each other in your Rudimentary Series. The first is from a patera lately found at Camirus, authoritatively assigned by Mr. Newton, in his recent catalogue, to the best period of Greek art. The second is from one of the series of engravings executed, probably, by Baccio Baldini, in 1485, out of which I chose your first practical exercise — the Sceptre of Apollo. I cannot, however, make the comparison accurate in all respects, for I am obliged to set the restricted type of the Aphrodite Urania of the Greeks beside the univer- sal Deity conceived by the Italian as governing the air, earth, and sea ; nevertheless the restriction in the mind of the Greek, and expatiation in that of the Florentine, are both character- istic. The Greek Venus Urania is flying in heaven, her power over the waters symbolized by her beiag borne by a swan, and her power over the earth by a single flower in her right hand ; but the Italian Aphrodite is rising out of the actual sea, and only half risen : her Umbs are still in the sea, her merely ani- mal strength filling the waters with their life ; but her body to the loins is in the sunshine, her face raised to the sky ; her hand is about to lay a garland of flowers on the earth. 186. The Venus Urania of the Greeks, in her relation to men, has power only over lawful and domestic love ; there- fore, she is fully dressed, and not only quite dressed, but most daintily and trimly : her feet delicately sandalled, her gown spotted with little stars, her hair brushed exquisitely smooth at the top of her head, trickling in minute waves down her forehead ; and though, because there's such a quantity of it, she can't possibly help having a chignon, look how tightly she has fastened it in with her broad fillet. Of course she is married, so she must wear a cap with pretty minute pendant jewels at the border ; and a very small necklace, ^ that her 398 ABATBA PENTBLIOI. husband can properly afford, just enough to go closely round the neck, and no more. On the contrary, the Aphrodite of the ItaHan, being universal love, is pure-naked ; and her long hair is thrown wUd to the wind and sea. These primal differences in the symbolism, observe, are only because the artists are thinking of separate powers : they do not necessarily involve any national distinction in feeling. But the differences I have next to indicate are es- sential, and characterize the two opposed national modes of mind. 187. First, and chiefly. The Greek Aphrodite is a very pretty person, and the ItaUan a decidedly plaia one. That is because a Greek thought no one could possibly love any but pretty people ; but an Italian thought that love could give dignity to the meanest form that it inhabited, and hght to the poorest that it looked upon. So his Aphrodite wiU not con- descend to be pretty. 188. Secondly. In the Greek Venus the breasts are broad and full, though perfectly severe in their almost conical pro- file ; — (you are allowed on purpose to see the outline of the right breast, under the chiton ;) — also the right arm is left bare, and you can just see the contour of the front of the right limb and knee ; both arm and Umb pure and firm, but lovely. The plant she holds in her hand is a branching and flowering one, the seed vessel prominent. These signs all mean that her essential function is child-bearing. On the contrary, in the Italian Venus the breasts are so small as to be scarcely traceable ; the body strong, and almost masculine in its angles ; the arms meagre and unattractive, and she lays a decorative garland of flowers on the earth. These signs mean that the Itahan thought of love as the strength of an eternal spirit, for ever helpful ; and for ever crowned with flowers, that neither know seed-time nor har- vest, and bloom where there is neither death, nor birtL 189. Thirdly. The Greek Aphrodite is entirely calm, and looks straight forward. Not one feature of her face is dis- turbed, or seems ever to have been subject to emotion. The Italian Aphrodite looks up, her face all quivering and burning THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS. 399 with passion and wasting anxiety. The Greek one is quiet, self-possessed, and self-satisfied ; the Italian incapable of rest ; she has had no thought nor care for herself; her hail: has been bound by a fiUet like the Greeks ; but it is now all fallen loose, and clotted with the sea, or clinging to her body ; only the front tress of it is caught by the breeze from her raised forehead, and lifted, in the place where the tongues of fire rest on the brows, in the early Christian pictures of Pentecost, and the waving fires abide upon the heads of Angelico's ser- aphim. 190. There are almost endless points of interest, great and smaU, to be noted in these differences of treatment. This binding of the hair by the single fillet marks the straight course of one great system of art method, from that Greek head which I showed you on the archaic coin of the seventh century before Christ, to this of the fifteenth of our own era — nay, when you look close, you will see the entire action of the head depends on one lock of hair falling back from the ear, which it does in comphance with the old Greek observance of its being bent there by the pressure of the helmet That rippUng of it dovm her shoulders comes from the Athena of of Corinth ; the raising of it on her forehead, from the knot of the hair of Diana, changed into the vestal fire of the angels. But chiefly, the calmness of the features in the one face, and their anxiety in the other, indicate first, indeed, the character- istic difference in every conception of the schools, the Greek never representing expression, the Italian primarily seieking it ; but far more, mark for us here the utter change in the conception of love ; from the tranquil guide and queen of a happy terrestrial domestic life, accepting its immediate pleasures and natural duties, to the agonizing hope of an in- finite good, and the ever mingled joy and terror of a love di- vine in jealousy, crying, " Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm ; for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave." The vast issues dependent on this change ia the conception of the ruling passion of the human soul, I will endeavour to show you, on a future occasion : in my present lecture, I 400 ABATSA PENTELIGL shall limit myself to the definition of the temper of Greek sculpture, and of its distinctions from Florentine in the treat- ment of any subject whatever, be it love or hatred, hope or despair. These great differences are mainly the following. 191. 1. A Greek never expresses momentary passion ; a Florentine looks to momentary passion as the ultimate object of his skill. When you are next in London, look carefully in the British Museum at the casts from the statues in the pediment of the Temple of Minerva at .Slgina. You have there Greek work of definite date ; — about 600 b.c., certainly before 580 — of the purest kind ; and you have the representation of a noble ideal subject, the combats of the MaxiAm at Troy, with Athena her- seK looking on. But there is no attempt whatever to repre- sent expression in the features, none to give complexity of action or gesture ; there is no struggling, no anxiety, no visi- ble temporary exertion of muscles. There are fallen figfures, one pulling a lance out of his wound, and others in attitudes of attack and defence ; several kneeling to draw their bows. But aU inflict and suffer, conquer or expire, with the same smile. 192. Plate XIV. gives you examples, from more advanced art, of true Greek representation ; the subjects being the two contests of leading import to the Greek heart — that of ApoUo with the Python, and of Hercules with the NemeanLion. You see that in neither case is there the slightest effort to repre- sent the A.vo-0-a, or agony of contest. No good Greek artist would have you behold the suffering, either of gods, heroes, or men ; nor allow you to be apprehensive of the issue of their contest with evil beasts, or evil spirits. All such lower sources of excitement are to be closed to you ; your interest is to be in the thoughts involved by the fact of the war ; and in the beauty or rightness of form, whether active or in- active. I have to work out this subject with you afterwards, and to compare with the pure Greek method of thought, that of modem dramatic passion, engrafted on it, as typically in Turner's contest of Apollo and the Python : in the meantime, Plate XIV. — Apollo and the Python. Heuaclbs and the Nbmean Lion. Plate XV.— Hera of Argos. Zeus of Syracdse. THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS. 401 be content with the statement of this first great principle — that a Greek, as such, never expresses momentary passion. 193. Secondly. The Greek, as such, never expresses per- sonal character, while a Florentine holds it to be the tiltimate condition of beauty. You are startled, I suppose, at my saying this, having had it often pointed out to you, as a tran- scendent piece of subtlety in Greek art, that you could dis- tinguish Hercules from Apollo by his being stout, and Diana from Juno by her being slender. That is very true ; but those are general distinctions of class, not special distinctions of personal character. Even as general, they are bodily, not mental. They are the distinctions, in fleshly aspect, between an athlete and a musician, — between a matron and a huntress ; but in no vrise distinguish the simple-hearted hero from the subtle Master of the Muses, nor the wilful and fitful girl- goddess from the cruel and resolute matron-goddess. But judge for yourselves ; — In the successive plates, XV. — XVlU., I show you,* typically represented as the protectresses of nations, the Argive, Cretan, and Lacinian Hera, the Messenian Demeter, the Athena of Corinth, the Artemis of Syracuse, the fountain Arethusa of Syracuse, and the Sirem Ligeia of Terina. Now, of these heads, it is true that some are more delicate ia feature than the rest, and some softer in expression : in other respects, can you trace any distinction between the Goddesses of Earth and Heaven, or between the Goddess of Wisdom and the Water Nymph of Syracuse ? So little can you do so, that it would have remained a disputed question — had not the name luckily been inscribed on some Syracusan coins — whether the head upon them was meant for Arethusa at all ; and, continually, it becomes a question respecting finished statues, if without attributes, "Is this Bacchus or Apollo — Zeus or Poseidon ? " There is a fact for you ; noteworthy, I think ! There is no personal character in * These plates of coins are given for future reference and examina- tion, not merely for the use made of them in this place. The Lacinian Hera, if a coin could he found unworn in surface, would be very noble -, her hair is thrown free because she is the goddess of the cape of storms, though in her temple, there, the wind never moved the ashes aa. its ->ltar. (Livy, xxiv. 3.) 402 AJUTSA PENTELICI. true Greek art : — abstract ideas of youth and age, strength and swiftness, virtue and Tice, — ^yes : but there is no individu- ality ; and the negative holds down to the revived conven- tionalism of the Greek school by Leonardo, when he tells you how you are to paint young women, and how Old ones ; though a Greek would hardly have been so discourteous to age as the Italian is in his canon of it, — " old women should be repre- sented as passionate and hasty, after the manner of Infernal Furies." 194. " But at least, if the Greeks do not give character, they give ideal beauty ? " So it is said, without contradiction. But will you look again at the series of coins of the best time of Greek art, which I have just set before you ? Are any of these goddesses or nymphs very beautiful? Ceirtainly the Junos are not. Certainly the Demeters are not. The Siren, and Arethusa, have well-formed and regular features ; but I am quite sure that if you look at them without prejudice, you will think neither reach even the average standard of pretty Eng- lish girls. The Venus Urania suggests at first, the idea of a very charming person, but you will find there is no real depth nor sweetness in the contours, looked at clogely. And re- member, these are chosen examples ; the best I can find of art current in Greece at the great time ; and if even I were to take the celebrated statues, of which only two or three are extant, not one of them excels the Venus of Melos ; and she, as I have already asserted, in The Queen of the Air, has noth- ing notable in feature except dignity and simplicity. Of Athena I do not know one authentic type of great beauty ; but the intense ugliness which the Greeks could tolerate in their sym- bolism of her win be convincingly proved to you by the coin represented in Plate VI. You need only look at two or three vases of the best time, to assure yourselves that beauty of feature was, in popular art, not only unattained, but unat- tempted ; and finally, — and this you may accept as a conclusive proof of the Greek insensitiveness to the most subtle beauty — there is little evidence even in their literature, and none in their art, of their having ever perceived any beauty in infancy, or early childhood. Plate XVI.— Dbmeter of Mebsbnb. Hera op Ckossus. Plate XVII. — Athena op Tiittrium. Sbkeib Ligeia op Tebina THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS. 403 195. The Greeks, then, do not give passion, do not give character, do not give refined or naive beauty. But you may think that the absence of these is intended to give dignity to the gods and nymphs ; and that their calm faces vsrould be found, if you long observed them, instinct with some expres- sion of divine mystery or power. I will convince you of the narrow range of Greek thought in these respects, by showing you, from the two sides of one and the same coin, images of the most mysterious of their Deities, and the most powerful, — Demeter and Zeus. Eemember, that just as the west coasts of Ireland and Eng- land catch first on their hUls the rain of the Atlantic, so the western Peloponnese arrests, in the clouds of the first moun- tain ranges of Arcadia, the moisture of the Mediterranean ; andover all the plains of Elis, Pylos, and Messene, the strength and sustenance of men was naturally felt to be granted by Zeus ; as, on the east coast of Greece, the greater clearness of the air by the power of Athena. If you will recollect the prayer of Ehea, in the single line of Calhmachus — " Vala (t>iXri, TtKt KoH (TV- real 8' toStves iXa£randen5urp under the Hohenzollern Kurfiirsts. Book UL Who the HbfaenzollemB were, and how they came to power in Niiremberg, is told in Chap. v. of Book IL Their succession in Brandenburg is given in brief at page 377 (269). I copy it, in absolute barrenness of enumeration, for our momentary convenience, here : Friedrich 1st of Brandenburg (6th o£ Nuremberg), . 1412-1440 Friedriohn., called "Iron Teeth," . . .1440-1478 Albert, 1472-1486 Johann 1486-1499 Joachim L, 1499-1535 Joachim n., 1535-1571 Johann George^ ....... 1571-1598 Joachim Friedrich, 1598-1608 Johann Sigiamund, 1608-1619 George Wilhelm 1619-1640 Friedrich Wilhelm (the Great Elector), . . . 1640-1688 Friedrich, first King ; crowned 18th January, . 1701 Of this line of princes we have to say they followed gener- ally in their ancestor's steps, and had success of the like kind more or less ; Hohenzollems all of them, by character and be- haviour as well as by descent. No lack of quiet energy, of thrift, sound sense. There was likewise solid fair-play in general, no founding of yourself on ground that will not carry, and there was instant, gentle^ but inexorable crushing of mutiny, if it showed itself, which after the Second Elector, or at most the Third, it had altogether ceased to do. This is the general account of them ; of special matters note the following : — n. Friedrich, called "Iron-teeth," from his firumeBB, proves 460 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. a notable manager and governor. Builda the palace at Ber* lin in its first form, and makes it his chief residence. Buys Neumark from the fallen Teutsch Bitters, and generally es- tablishes things on securer footing. TTT Albert, "a fiery, tough old Gentlemen," called the Achilles of Germany in his day ; has half-a-century of fight- ing with his own Ntirembergers, with Bavaria, Prance, Bur- gundy, and its fiery Oharles, besides being head constable to the Kaiser among any disorderly persons in the East. His skuU, long shown on his tomb, "marvellous for strength and with no visible sutures." lY. John, the orator of his race ; (but the orations unre- corded). His second son. Archbishop of Maintz, for whose piece of memorable work see page 223 (143) and read in con- nection with that the history of Margraf George, pp. 237- 241 (152-154), and the 8th chapter of the third book. V. Joachim I., of little note ; thinks there has been enough Reformation, and checks proceedings m a di^ll stubbornness, causing him at least grave domestic difficulties^ — ^Page 271 (173). .... VX Joachim H. Again active in the Beformation, and staunch, though generally in a cautious, weighty, never in a rash, swift way, to the great cause of Protestantism and to all good causes. He was himself a solemnly devout man ; deep, awe-stricken reverence dwelling in his view of this universe. Most serious, though with a jocose dialect, commonly having a cheerful wit in speaking to men. Luther's books he called his Seelenschatz, (soul's treasure) ; Luther and the Bible were his chief reading. Fond of profane learning, too, and of the useful or ornamental arts ; given to music, and " would him- self sing aloud " when he had a melodious leisure hour. Vn. Johann George, a prudent thrifty Herr ; no mistresses, no luxiu:ies allowed ; at the sight of a new-fashioned coat he would fly out on an unhappy youth and pack him from his presence. Very strict, in point of justice ; a peasant once appealing to him in one of his inspection journeys through the country— T , POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUBSIA. 4Sl " Grant me justice, Durchlaucht, against so and so ; I am your Highness's born subject." " Thou shouldst have it, man, wert thou a bom Turk ! " answered Johann George. Thus, generally, we find this line of Electors representing in Europe the Puritan mind of England in a somewhat duller, but less dangerous, form ; receiving what Protestantism could teach of honesty and common sense, but not its anti- Catholic fury, or its selfish spiritual anxiety. Pardon of sins is not to be had from Tetzel ; neither, the HohenzoUern mind advises with itself, from even Tetzel's master, for either the buying, or the asking. On the whole, we had better commit as few as possible, and live just lives and plain ones. A conspicuous thrift, veracity, modest solidity, looks through the conduct of this Herr ; a determined Protestant he too, as indeed all the following were and are. "Vlll. Joachim Friedrich. Gets hold of Prussia, which hitherto, you observe, has always been spoken of as a separate country from Brandenburg. March 11, 1605 — " squeezed his way into the actual guardianship of Preussen and its imbe- cile Duke, which was his by right." For my own part, I do not trouble myself much about these rights, never being able to make out any single one, to begin with, except the right to keep everything and every place about you in as good order as you can — Prussia, Po- land, or what else. I should much like, for instance, just now, to hear of any honest Cornish gentleman of the old Drake breed taking a fancy to land in Spain, and trying what he could make of his rights as far round Gibraltar as he . could enforce them. . At all events. Master Joachim has some- how got hold of Prussia ; and means to keep it. IX. Johann Sigismund. Only notable for our economical purposes, as getting the " guardianship " of Prussia confirmed to him. The story at page 317 (226), "a strong flame of choler," indicates a new order of things among the knights of Europe — ^^" princely etiquettes melting all into smoke." Too 452 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. literally so, that being one of the calamitous functions' of the plain lives we are living, and of the busy life our country is living. In the Duchy of Cleve, especially, concerning which legal dispute begins in Sigismund's time. And it is well worth the lawyers' trouble, it seems. It amounted, perhaps, to two Yorkshires in extent. A nat- urally opulent country of fertile meadows, shipping capabili- ties, metalliferous hills, and at this time, in consequence of the Dutch-Spanish war, and the multitude of Protestant ref- ugees, it was getting filled with ingenious industries, and rising to be what it still is, the busiest quarter of Germany. A country lowing with kine ; the hum of the fiax-spindle heard in its cottages in those old days — " much of the linen called Hollands is made in Jfilich, and only bleached, stamped, and sold by the Dutch," says Btisching. A country in our days which is shrouded at short intervals with the due canopy of coal-smoke, and loud with sovmds of the anvil and the loom. The lawyers took two hundred and six years to settle the question concerning this Duchy, and the thing Johaun Sigis- mund had claimed legally in 1609 was actually handed over to Johann Sigismund's descendant in the seventh generation. "These litigated duchies are now the Prussian provinces, Jtilich, Berg, Cleve, and the nucleus of Prussia's possessions in the 'Rhine country." X. George Wilhehn. Read pp. 325 to 327 (231, 233) on this Elector and German Protestantism, now fallen cold, and somewhat too little dangerous. But George Wilhelm is the only weak prince of all the twelve. For another example how the heart and life of a country depend upon its prince, not on its council, read this, of Gxistavus Adolphus, demand- ing the cession of Spandau and Ettstrin : Which cession Kurfflrst George Wilhelm, though giving all his prayers to the good cause, could by no means grant Gustav had to insist, with more and more emphasis, advanc- ing at last with military menace upon Berlin itself. He was POLITICAL EGONOMT OF PRUSSIA. 453 met by George Wilhelm and his Council, "in the woods of Copenick," short way to the east of that city ; there George Wilhelm and his Council wandered about, sending messages, hopelessly consulting, saying among each other, " Que faire ? ils ont des canons." For many hours so, round the inflexible Gustav, who was there hke a fixed mile-stone, and to all questions and comers had only one answer. On our special question of war and its consequences, read this of the Thirty Tears' one : But on the whole, the grand weapon in it, and towards the latter times, the exclusive one, was hunger. The opposing armies tried to starve one another ; at lowest, tried each not to starve. Each trying to eat the country or, at any rate, to leave nothing eatable in it ; what that will mean for the country we may consider. As the armies too frequently, and the Kaiser's armies habitually, lived without commissariat, often enough without pay, all horrors of war and of being a seat of war, tiiat have been since heard of, are poor to those then practised, the detail of which is still horrible to read. Germany, in all eatable quarters of it, had to undergo the process ; tortured, torn to pieces, wrecked, and brayed as in a mortar, under the iron mace of war. Brandenburg saw its towns seized and sacked, its country populations driven to despair by the one party and the otiker. Three times — first in the Wallenstein-Mecklenburg times, while fire and sword were the weapons, and again, twice over, in the ultimate stages of the struggle, when starvation had become the method — Brandenburg fell to be the principal theatre of con- flict, where all forms of the dismal were at their height. In 1638, three years after that precious "Peace of Prag," . . . the ravages of the starving Gallas and his Imperial- ists excelled all precedent, . . . men ate human flesh, nay, human creatures ate their own children. " Que faire ? ils ont des canons ! " "We have now arrived at the lowest nadir point " (says Carlyle) " of the history of Brandenburg under the Hohen- zollems." Is this then all that Heavy Peg and our nine Kurf firsts have done for us? 454 TBS CROWN OF WILD OLTVB. Carlyle does not mean that ; but even he, greatest of his- torians since Tacitus, is not enough careful to mark for us the growth of national character, as distinct from the pros- perity of dynasties. A republican historian would think of this develop- ment only, and suppose it to be possible without any dy- nasties. Which is indeed in a measure so, and the work now chiefly needed in moral philosophy, as well as history, is an analysis of the constant and prevalent, yet unthought of, influences, which, without any external help from kings, and in a silent and entirely necessary manner, form, in Sweden, in Bava- ria, in the Tyrol, in the Scottish border, and on the French sea-coast, races of noble peasants ; pacific, poetic, heroic, Christian-hearted in the deepest sense, who may indeed perish by sword or famine in any cruel thirty years' war, or ignoble thirty years' peace, and yet leave such strength to their children that the country, apparently ravaged into hope- less ruin, revives, under any prudent king, as the cultivated fields do under the spring rain. How the rock to which no seed can cling, and which no rain can soften, is subdued into the good ground which can bring forth its hundredfold, we forget to watch, while we follow the footsteps of the sower, or mourn the catastrophes of storm. All this while, the Prussian earth — the Prussian soul — has been thus dealt upon by successive fate ; and now, though laid, as it seems, utterly desolate, it can be revived by a few years of wisdom and of peace. Vol. L Book in. Chap, xviii.— The Great Elector, Fried- rich Wilhelm. Eleventh of the dynasty : — There hardly ever came to sovereign power a young man of twenty under more distressing, hopeless-looking circum- stances. Political significance Brandenburg had none ; a mere Protestant appendage, dragged about by a Papist Kai- ser. His father's Prime Minister, as we have seen, was in the interest of his enemies ; not Brandenburg's servant, but Austria's. The very commandants of his fortresses. Com- mandant of Spandau more especially, refused to obey Fried- POLITICAL MGONOMT OP PRUSSIA 455 rich Wilhelm on his accession ; " were bound to obey the Kaiser in the first place." For twenty years past Brandenburg had been scoured by hostile armies, •which, especially the Kaiser's part of ' which, committed outrages new in human history. In a year or two hence, Brandenburg became again the theatre of business, Austrian Gallas advancing thither again (1644) with intent " to shut up Torstenson and his Swedes in Jutland." Gallas could by uo means do what he intended ; on the contrary, he had to run from Torstenson — what feet could do ; was hunted, he and his Merode Brtider (beautiful inventors of the " marauding " art), till they pretty much all died (cre- pirten) says Kohler. No great loss to society, the death of these artists, but we can fancy what their Ufe, and especially what the process of their dying, may have cost poor Branden- burg again ! Friedrich Wilhelm's aim, in this as in other emergencies, was sun-clear to himself, but for most part dim to everybody else. He had to walk very warily, Sweden on one hand of him, suspicious Kaiser on the other : he had to wear semblances, to be ready with evasive words, and advance noiselessly by many circuits. More delicate operation could not be imag- ined. But advance he did ; advance and arrive. With ex- traordinary talent, diligence, and felicity the young man wound himself out of this first fatal position, got those foreign armies pushed out of his country, and kept them out. ffis first concern had been to find some vestige of revenue, to put that upon a clear footing, and by loans or otherwise to scrape a little ready-money together. On the strength of which a small body of soldiers could be collected about him, and drilled into real ability to fight and obey. This as a basis : on this followed all manner of things, freedom from Swedish- Austrian invasions, as the first thing. He was himself, as appeared by-and-by, a fighter of the first quality, when it came to that ; but never was willing to fight if he could help it. Preferred rather to shift, manoeuvre, and negotiate, which he did in most vigilant, adroit, and masterly manner. But by degrees he had grown to have, and could maintain it, an army of twenty-four thousand men, among the best troops then in being. To wear semblances, to be ready with evasive words, how is this, Mr.-Carlyle ? thinks perhaps the rightly thoughtful reader. 456 TBB cnoWN OF WILD OLIVE. Yes, such things have to be. There axe lies and lies, and there are truths and truths. Ulysses cannot ride on the ram's back, like Phryxus;'but must ride under his belly. Read also this, presently following : Shortly after which, Friedrich Wilhelm, who had shone much in the battle of Warsaw, into which he was dragged against his will, changed sides. An inconsistent, treaeherous man? Perhaps not, O reader ! perhaps a man advancing "in circuits," the only way he has ; spirally,' face now to east, now to west, with his own reasonable private aim sun-clear to him. all the while ? The battle of Warsaw, three days long, fought with Gus- tavus, the grandfather of Charles XII., against the Poles, vir- tually ends the Polish power : Old Johann Casimir, not long after that peace of Oliva, getting I tired of his unruly Polish chivalry and their ways, abdicated-^retired to Paris, and "and lived much with Ninon de rEndos and her circle," for the rest of his life. He used to complain of his Polish chivalry, that there was no solidity in f them ; nothing but outside glitter, with tumult and anar- chic noise ; fatal want of one essential talent, the talent of obeying ; and has been heard to prophesy: that a glorious Bepublic, persisting in such courses, would arrive at results which wovdd surprise.it. Onward from this time, Friedrich Wilhelm figures in the world ; public men watching his. procedure ; kings anxious to secure him — Dutch print-sellers sticking up his portraits for a hero-worshipping public. Fighting hero, had the pub- lic known it, was not his essential character, though he had to fight' a great deal He was essentially an industrial man ; great: in organizing, regulating, in constraining chaotic heaps to become cosmic for him. He drains bogs, settles colonies in the > waste places of his dominions, cuts canals ; unwea- riedlyiencourages trade and work. The Friedrich Wilhelm's CaneJ, which still carries tonnage from the Oder to the Spree, is a monument of his zeal in this way ; creditable with the means he had. To the poor French Protestants in the Edict- of-Nantes' affair, he \hts like an express benefit of Heaven ; one helper appointed to whom the help itself was profit- POLITICAL BGONOMr OP PRUSSIA. 457 able. He munMcently welcomed them to Brandenburg; showed, really a Qoble. piety and human pity, as well as judg- ment ; nor did Brandenburg and he want their reward. Some twenty thousand nimble French souls, evidently of the best French quality, found a home there ; made " waste sands about Berlin into potherb gardens ; " and in spiritual Bran- denburg, too, did something of horticulture whidh is still noticeable. Now read carefully the description of the man,; p. 352 (224-5); the story of the battle 6f Fehrbellin, "the Mara- thon of Brandenburg," p. 354 (225); and of the winter cam- paign of 1679, p. 356 (227), 'beginning with its week's marches at sixty miles a day ; his *wife,i as always, being with him : Louisa,, honest and loving Dutch, girl, aunt to our William of Orange, who trimmed ifp her own " Oraiige-burg " (coun- try-house), twenty miles north of Berlin, into a little jewel of the Dutch type, potherb gardens, training-schools for young girls, and the like, a favorite abode of hers when she was at liberty for recreation. But her life was busy and earnest ; she was helpmate, not in name onlj', to an ever busy man. They were married young ; a marriage of love withal. Young Friedrich Wilbelm's courtship ; wedding in Holland ; the honest, trustful walk and conversation of the two sovereign spouses, their joumeyings together, their mutual hopes, fears, and manifold vicissitudes, till death, with stem beauty, shut it in ; all is human, true, and wholesome in it, interesting to look upon, and rare among sovereign persons. Louisa died in 1667, twenty-one years before her husband, who married again — (little to his contentment) — died in 1688 ; and Louisa's second son, Friedrich, ten years old at his mother's death, and now therefore thirty-one, succeeds, be- coming afterwards Friedrich L of Prussia And here we pause on two great questions. Prussia is assuredly at this point a happier and better country than it was, when inhabited by Wends. But is Friedrich I. a hap- pier and better man than Henry the Fowler ? Have all these kings thus improved their country, but never themselves? 458 THE OROWN OP WILD OLtVB. Is this somewhat expensive and ambitious Herr, Friedrich'I. buttoned in diamonds, indeed the best that Protestantism can produce, as against Fowlers, Bears, and Bed Beards? Much more, Friedrich Wilhelm, orthodox on predestination ; most of all, his less orthodox son ; — ^have we, in these, the highest results which Dr. Martin Luther can produce for the present, in the first circles of society? And if not, how is it that the country, having gained so much in inteUigence and strength, lies more passively in their power than the baser country did under that of nobler men ? These, and collateral questions, I mean to work out as I can, with Carlyle's good help ; — but must pause for this time ; in doubt, as heretofore. Only of this one thing I doubt not, that the name of all great khigs, set over Christian nations, must at last be, in fufilment, the hereditary one of these German princes, " Bich in Peace ; " and that their coronation will be with Wild olive, not with gold.