LETTER XL.

I am obliged to go to Italy this spring, and find beside me, a mass of Fors material in arrear, needing various explanation and arrangement, for which I have no time. Fors herself must look to it, and my readers use their own wits in thinking over what she has looked to. I begin with a piece of Marmontel, which was meant to follow, ‘in due time,’ the twenty-first letter,—of which, please glance at the last four pages again. This following bit is from another story professing to give some account of Molière’s Misanthrope, in his country life, after his last quarrel with Celimène. He calls on a country gentleman, M. de Laval, “and was received by him with the simple and serious courtesy which announces neither the need nor the vain desire of making new connections. Behold, said he, a man who does not surrender himself at once. I esteem him the more. He congratulated M. de Laval on the agreeableness of his solitude. You come to live here, he said to him, far from men, and you are very right to avoid them.

I, Monsieur! I do not avoid men; I am neither so weak as to fear them, so proud as to despise them, or so unhappy as to hate them.

This answer struck so home that Alceste was disconcerted by it; but he wished to sustain his debût, and began to satirize the world.

I have lived in the world like another, said M. de Laval, and I have not seen that it was so wicked. There are vices and virtues in it,—good and evil mingled,—I confess; but nature is so made, and one should know how to accommodate oneself to it.

Monsieur, said Alceste to the Viscount, you make me desire to think as you do; and even if the sad truth were on my side, your error would be preferable. Ah, yes, without doubt, replied M. de Laval, ill-humour is good for nothing, the fine part that it is, for a man to play, to fall into a fit of spite like a child!—and why? For the mistakes of the circle in which one has lived, as if the whole of nature were in the plot against us, and responsible for the hurt we have received.

You are right, replied Alceste, it would be unjust to consider all men as partners in fault; yet how many complaints may we not justly lodge against them, as a body? Believe me, sir, my judgment of them has serious and grave motives. You will do me justice when you know me. Permit me to see you often! Often, said the Viscount, will be difficult. I have much business, and my daughter and I have our studies, which leave us little leisure; but sometimes, if you will, let us profit by our neighbourhood, at our ease, and without formality, for the privilege of the country is to be alone, when we like.

I went back to the source of the evil. I addressed myself to the man appointed for the reception of the tribute. Monsieur, I said to him, my vassals groan under the weight of the severe measures necessary to make them pay the tax. I wish to hear no more of them; tell me what is wanting yet to make up the payment for the year, and I will acquit the debt myself. Monsieur, replied the receiver, that cannot be. Why not? said I. Because it is not the rule. What! is it not the rule to pay the King the tribute that he demands with the least expense and the least delay possible? Yes, answered he, that would be enough for the King, but it would not be enough for me. Where should I be if they paid money down? It is by the expense of the compulsory measures that I live; they are the perquisites of my office. To this excellent reason I had nothing to reply, but I went to see the head of the department, and obtained from him the place of receiver-general for my peasants.

Finally, as there was a good deal of superfluous time, I established the workshop that you have seen; it turns everything to account, and brings into useful service time which would be lost between the operations of agriculture: the profits of it are applied to public works. A still more precious advantage of this establishment is its having greatly increased the population—more children are born, as there is certainty of extended means for their support.”

Next, for a little specimen of the state of our own working population; and the “compulsory—not measures, but measureless license,” under which their loyalty and love are placed,—here is a genuine working woman’s letter; and if the reader thinks I have given it him in its own spelling that he may laugh at it, the reader is wrong.

“May 12, 1873.

“Dear ——

Next to this account of Machine-labour, here is one of Hand-labour, also in a genuine letter,—this second being to myself; (I wish the other had been also, but it was to one of my friends.)

“Beckenham, Kent,

“Sept. 24, 1873.

“I should not have troubled you with these remarks, had I not at the moment when I read your paragraph on hand-spinning, received a letter from my daughter, now for a time resident in Coburg, (a friend of Octavia Hill’s,) which bears immediately on the subject. I have therefore ventured to transcribe it for your perusal, believing that the picture she draws from life, beautiful as it is for its simplicity, may give you a moment’s pleasure.”

“Coburg, Sept. 4, 1873.

“On Thursday I went to call on Frau L.; she was not in; so I went to her mother’s, Frau E., knowing that I should find her there. They were all sitting down to afternoon coffee, and asked me to join them, which I gladly did. I had my work-basket with me, and as they were all at work, it was pleasant to do the same thing. Hildigard was there; in fact she lives there, to take care of Frau E. since she had her fall and stiffened her ankle, a year ago. Hildigard took her spinning, and tied on her white apron, filled the little brass basin of the spinning-wheel with water, to wet her fingers, and set the wheel a-purring. I have never seen the process before, and it was very pretty to see her, with her white fingers, and to hear the little low sound. It is quite a pity, I think, ladies do not do it in England,—it is so pretty, and far nicer work than crotchet, and so on, when it is finished. This soft linen made by hand is so superior to any that you get now. Presently the four children came in, and the great hunting dog, Feldman; and altogether I thought, as dear little Frau E. sat sewing in her arm-chair, and her old sister near her at her knitting, and Hildigard at her spinning, while pretty Frau L. sewed at her little girl’s stuff-skirt,—all in the old-fashioned room full of old furniture, and hung round with miniatures of still older dames and officers, in, to our eyes, strange stiff costumes, that it was a most charming scene, and one I enjoyed as much as going to the theatre,—which I did in the evening.”

A most charming scene, my dear lady, I have no doubt; just what Hengler’s Circus was, to me, this Christmas. Now for a little more of the charming scenery outside, and far away.

“12, Tunstall Terrace, Sunderland,

“14th Feb., 1874.

“My dear Sir,—The rice famine is down upon us in earnest, and finds our wretched ‘administration’ unprepared—a ministration unto death!

“It can carry childish gossip ‘by return of post’ into every village in India, but not food; no, not food even for mothers and babes. So far has our scientific and industrial progress attained.

“To-night comes news that hundreds of deaths from starvation have already occurred, and that even high-caste women are working on the roads;—no food from stores of ours except at the price of degrading, health-destroying, and perfectly useless toil. God help the nation responsible for this wickedness!

“Dear Mr. Ruskin, you wield the most powerful pen in England, can you not shame us into some sense of duty, some semblance of human feeling? [Certainly not. My good sir, as far as I know, nobody ever minds a word I say, except a few nice girls, who are a great comfort to me, but can’t do anything. They don’t even know how to spin, poor little lilies!]

“I observe that the ‘Daily News’ of to-day is horrified at the idea that Disraeli should dream of appropriating any part of the surplus revenue to the help of India in this calamity [of course], and even the ‘Spectator’ calls that a ‘dangerous’ policy. So far is even ‘the conscience of the Press’ [What next?] corrupted by the dismal science.

“I am, yours truly.”

So far the Third Fors has arranged matters for me; but I must put a stitch or two into her work.

Look back to my third letter, for March, 1871, page 5. You see it is said there that the French war and its issues were none of Napoleon’s doing, nor Count Bismarck’s; that the mischief in them was St. Louis’s doing; and the good, such as it was, the rough father of Frederick the Great’s doing.

The father of Frederick the Great was an Evangelical divine of the strictest orthodoxy,—very fond of beer, bacon, and tobacco, and entirely resolved to have his own way, supposing, as pure Evangelical people always do, that his own way was God’s also. It happened, however, for the good of Germany, that this king’s own way, to a great extent, was God’s also,—(we will look at Carlyle’s statement of that fact another day,)—and accordingly he maintained, and the ghost of him,—with the help of his son, whom he had like to have shot as a disobedient and dissipated character,—maintains to this day in Germany, such sacred domestic life as that of which you have an account in the above letter. Which, in peace, is entirely happy, for its own part; and, in war, irresistible.

‘Entirely blessed,’ I had written first, too carelessly. I have had to scratch out the ‘blessed’ and put in ‘happy.’ For blessing is only for the meek and merciful, and a German cannot be either; he does not understand even the meaning of the words. In that is the intense, irreconcilable difference between the French and German natures. A Frenchman is selfish only when he is vile and lustful; but a German, selfish in the purest states of virtue and morality. A Frenchman is arrogant only in ignorance; but no quantity of learning ever makes a German modest. “Sir,” says Albert Durer of his own work, (and he is the modestest German I know,) “it cannot be better done.” Luther serenely damns the entire gospel of St. James, because St. James happens to be not precisely of his own opinions.

Accordingly, when the Germans get command of Lombardy, they bombard Venice, steal her pictures, (which they can’t understand a single touch of,) and entirely ruin the country, morally and physically, leaving behind them misery, vice, and intense hatred of themselves, wherever their accursed feet have trodden. They do precisely the same thing by France,—crush her, rob her, leave her in misery of rage and shame; and return home, smacking their lips, and singing Te Deums.

But when the French conquer England, their action upon it is entirely beneficent. Gradually, the country, from a nest of restless savages, becomes strong and glorious; and having good material to work upon, they make of us at last a nation stronger than themselves.

Then the strength of France perishes, virtually, through the folly of St. Louis;—her piety evaporates, her lust gathers infectious power, and the modern Cité rises round the Sainte Chapelle.

It is a woful history. But St. Louis does not perish selfishly; and perhaps is not wholly dead yet,—whatever Garibaldi and his red-jackets may think about him, and their ‘Holy Republic.’

Meantime Germany, through Geneva, works quaintly against France, in our British destiny, and makes an end of many a Sainte Chapelle, in our own sweet river islands. Read Froude’s sketch of the Influence of the Reformation on Scottish Character, in his “Short studies on great subjects.” And that would be enough for you to think of, this month; but as this letter is all made up of scraps, it may be as well to finish with this little private note on Luther’s people, made last week.

4th March, 1874.—I have been horribly plagued and misguided by evangelical people, all my life; and most of all lately; but my mother was one, and my Scotch aunt; and I have yet so much of the superstition left in me, that I can’t help sometimes doing as evangelical people wish,—for all I know it comes to nothing.

One of them, for whom I still have some old liking left, sent me one of their horrible sausage-books the other day, made of chopped-up Bible; but with such a solemn and really pathetic adjuration to read a ‘text’ every morning, that, merely for old acquaintance’ sake, I couldn’t refuse. It is all one to me, now, whether I read my Bible, or my Homer, at one leaf or another; only I take the liberty, pace my evangelical friend, of looking up the contexts if I happen not to know them.

Now I was very much beaten and overtired yesterday, chiefly owing to a week of black fog, spent in looking over the work of days and people long since dead; and my ‘text’ this morning was, “Deal courageously, and the Lord do that which seemeth Him good.” It sounds a very saintly, submissive, and useful piece of advice; but I was not quite sure who gave it; and it was evidently desirable to ascertain that.

“We entered the first room by descending two steps. It seemed to be an old coal-cellar, with an earthen floor, shining in many places from damp, and from a greenish ooze which drained through the wall from a noxious collection of garbage outside, upon which a small window could have looked had it not been filled up with brown paper and rags. There was no grate, but a small fire smouldered on the floor, surrounded by heaps of ashes. The roof was unceiled, the walls were rough and broken, the only light came in from the open door, which let in unwholesome smells and sounds. No cow or horse could thrive in such a hole. It was abominable. It measured eleven feet by six feet, and the rent was 10d. per week, paid in advance. It was nearly dark at noon, even with the door open; but as my eyes became accustomed to the dimness, I saw that the plenishings consisted of an old bed, a barrel with a flagstone on the top of it for a table, a three-legged stool, and an iron pot. A very ragged girl, sorely afflicted with ophthalmia, stood among the ashes doing nothing. She had never been inside a school or church. She did not know how to do anything, but ‘did for her father and brother.’ On a heap of straw, partly covered with sacking, which was the bed in which father, son, and daughter slept, the brother, ill with rheumatism and sore legs, was lying moaning from under a heap of filthy rags. He had been a baker ‘over in the New Town,’ but seemed not very likely to recover. It looked as if the sick man had crept into his dark, damp lair, just to die of hopelessness. The father was past work, but ‘sometimes got an odd job to do.’ The sick man had supported the three. It was hard to be godly, impossible to be cleanly, impossible to be healthy in such circumstances.

“The next room was entered by a low, dark, impeded passage about twelve feet long, too filthy to be traversed without a light. At the extremity of this was a dark winding stair which led up to four superincumbent storeys of crowded subdivided rooms; and beyond this, to the right, a pitch-dark passage with a ‘room’ on either side. It was not possible to believe that the most grinding greed could extort money from human beings for the tenancy of such dens as those to which this passage led. They were lairs into which a starving dog might creep to die, but nothing more. Opening a dilapidated door, we found ourselves in a recess nearly six feet high, and nine feet in length by five in breadth. It was not absolutely dark, yet matches aided our investigations even at noonday. There was an earthen floor full of holes, in some of which water had collected. The walls were black and rotten, and alive with woodlice. There was no grate. The rent paid for this evil den, which was only ventilated by the chimney, is 1s. per week, or £2 12s. annually! The occupier was a mason’s labourer, with a wife and three children. He had come to Edinburgh in search of work, and could not afford a ‘higher rent.’ The wife said that her husband took the ‘wee drap.’ So would the President of the Temperance League himself if he were hidden away in such a hole. The contents of this lair on our first visit were a great heap of ashes and other refuse in one corner, some damp musty straw in another, a broken box in the third, with a battered tin pannikin upon it, and nothing else of any kind, saving two small children, nearly nude, covered with running sores, and pitiable from some eye disease. Their hair was not long, but felted into wisps, and alive with vermin. When we went in they were sitting among the ashes of an extinct fire, and blinked at the light from our matches. Here a neighbour said they sat all day, unless their mother was merciful enough to turn them into the gutter. We were there at eleven the following night, and found the mother, a decent, tidy body, at ‘hame.’ There was a small fire then, but no other light. She complained of little besides the darkness of the house, and said, in a tone of dull discontent, she supposed it was ‘as good as such as they could expect in Edinburgh.’ ”