scene 2 of "The Deformed Transformed": then Sardanapalus's, act i. scene

2, beginning, "he is gone, and on his finger bears my signet," and finally the "Vision of Judgment," stanzas 3 to 5.]

[Footnote 79: "Island," iii. 3, and compare, of shore surf, the "slings its high flakes, shivered into sleet" of stanza 7.]

[Footnote 80: A modern editor--of whom I will not use the expressions which occur to me--finding the "we" a redundant syllable in the iambic line, prints, "we're." It is a little thing--but I do not recollect, in the forty years of my literary experience, any piece of editor's retouch quite so base. But I don't read the new editions much: that must be allowed for.]

[Footnote 81: "Island," ii. 5. I was going to say, "Look to the context," but am fain to give it here; for the stanza, learned by heart, ought to be our school-introduction to the literature of the world.

"Such was this ditty of Tradition's days, Which to the dead a lingering fame conveys In song, where fame as yet hath left no sign Beyond the sound whose charm is half divine; Which leaves no record to the skeptic eye, But yields young history all to harmony; A boy Achilles, with the centaur's lyre In hand, to teach him to surpass his sire. For one long-cherish'd ballad's simple stave, Rung from the rock, or mingled with the wave, Or from the bubbling streamlet's grassy side, Or gathering mountain echoes as they glide, Hath greater power o'er each true heart and ear, Than all the columns Conquest's minions rear; Invites, when hieroglyphics are a theme For sages' labors or the student's dream; Attracts, when History's volumes are a toil-- The first, the freshest bud of Feeling's soil, Such was this rude rhyme--rhyme is of the rude, But such inspired the Norseman's solitude, Who came and conquer'd; such, wherever rise Lands which no foes destroy or civilize, Exist; and what can our accomplish'd art Of verse do more than reach the awaken'd heart?"]

[Footnote 82: "Shepherd's Calendar." "Coronatiön," loyal-pastoral for Carnation; "sops in wine," jolly-pastoral for double pink; "paunce," thoughtless pastoral for pansy; "chevisaunce," I don't know (not in Gerarde); "flowre-delice"--pronounce dellice--half made up of "delicate" and "delicious."]

[Footnote 83: Herrick, "Dirge for Jephthah's Daughter."]

[Footnote 84: "Passionate Pilgrim."]

[Footnote 85: In this point compare the "Curse of Minerva" with the "Tears of the Muses."]

[Footnote 86: "He,"--Lucifer; ("Vision of Judgment," 24). It is precisely because Byron was _not_ his servant, that he could see the gloom. To the Devil's true servants, their Master's presence brings both cheerfulness and prosperity; with a delightful sense of their own wisdom and virtue; and of the "progress" of things in general:--in smooth sea and fair weather,--and with no need either of helm touch, or oar toil: as when once one is well within the edge of Maelstrom.]

[Footnote 87: "Island," ii. 4; perfectly orthodox theology, you observe; no denial of the fall,--nor substitution of Bacterian birth for it. Nay, nearly Evangelical theology, in contempt for the human heart; but with deeper than Evangelical humility, acknowledging also what is sordid in its civilization.]

FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL.

IV.[88]

79. I fear the editor of the _Nineteenth Century_ will get little thanks from his readers for allowing so much space in closely successive numbers to my talk of old-fashioned men and things. I have nevertheless asked his indulgence, this time, for a note or two concerning yet older fashions, in order to bring into sharper clearness the leading outlines of literary fact, which I ventured only in my last paper to secure in _silhouette_, obscurely asserting itself against the limelight of recent moral creed, and fiction manufacture.

The Bishop of Manchester, on the occasion of the great Wordsworthian movement in that city for the enlargement, adornment, and sale of Thirlmere, observed, in his advocacy of these operations, that very few people, he supposed, had ever seen Tairlmere. His Lordship might have supposed, with greater felicity, that very few people had ever read Wordsworth. My own experience in that matter is that the amiable persons who call themselves "Wordsworthian" have read--usually a long time ago--"Lucy Gray," "The April Mornings," a picked sonnet or two, and the "Ode on the Intimations," which last they seem generally to be under the impression that nobody else has ever met with: and my further experience of these sentimental students is, that they are seldom inclined to put in practice a single syllable of the advice tendered them by their model poet.

Now, as I happen myself to have used Wordsworth as a daily text-book from youth to age, and have lived, moreover, in all essential points according to the tenor of his teaching, it was matter of some mortification to me, when, at Oxford, I tried to get the memory of Mr. Wilkinson's spade honored by some practical spadework at Ferry Hincksey, to find that no other tutor in Oxford could see the slightest good or meaning in what I was about; and that although my friend Professor Rolleston occasionally sought the shades of our Rydalian laurels with expressions of admiration, his professorial manner of "from pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine" was to fill the Oxford Museum with the scabbed skulls of plague-struck cretins.

80. I therefore respectfully venture to intimate to my bucolic friends, that I know, more vitally by far than they, what _is_ in Wordsworth, and what is not. Any man who chooses to live by his precepts will thankfully find in them a beauty and rightness, (_exquisite_ rightness I called it, in "Sesame and Lilies,") which will preserve him alike from mean pleasure, vain hope, and guilty deed: so that he will neither mourn at the gate of the fields which with covetous spirit he sold, nor drink of the waters which with yet more covetous spirit he stole, nor devour the bread of the poor in secret, nor set on his guest-table the poor man's lamb:--in all these homely virtues and assured justices let him be Wordsworth's true disciple; and he will then be able with equanimity to hear it said, when there is need to say so, that his excellent master often wrote verses that were not musical, and sometimes expressed opinions that were not profound.

And the need to say so becomes imperative when the unfinished verse, and uncorrected fancy, are advanced by the affection of his disciples into places of authority where they give countenance to the popular national prejudices from the infection of which, in most cases, they themselves sprang.

81. Take, for example, the following three and a half lines of the 38th Ecclesiastical Sonnet:--

"Amazement strikes the crowd; while many turn Their eyes away in sorrow, others burn With scorn, invoking a vindictive ban From outraged Nature."

The first quite evident character of these lines is that they are extremely bad iambics,--as ill-constructed as they are unmelodious; the turning and burning being at the wrong ends of them, and the ends themselves put just when the sentence is in its middle.

But a graver fault of these three and a half lines is that the amazement, the turning, the burning, and the banning, are all alike fictitious; and foul-fictitious, calumniously conceived no less than falsely. Not one of the spectators of the scene referred to was in reality amazed--not one contemptuous, not one maledictory. It is only our gentle minstrel of the meres who sits in the seat of the scornful--only the hermit of Rydal Mount who invokes the malison of Nature.

What the scene verily was, and how witnessed, it will not take long to tell; nor will the tale be useless: but I must first refer the reader to a period preceding, by nearly a century, the great symbolic action under the porch of St. Mark's.

82. The Protestant ecclesiastic, and infidel historian, who delight to prop their pride, or edge their malice, in unveiling the corruption through which Christianity has passed, should study in every fragment of authentic record which the fury of their age has left, the lives of the three queens of the Priesthood, Theodora, Marozia, and Matilda, and the foundation of the merciless power of the Popes, by the monk Hildebrand. And if there be any of us who would satisfy with nobler food than the catastrophes of the stage, the awe at what is marvelous in human sorrow which makes sacred the fountain of tears in authentic tragedy, let them follow, pace by pace, and pang by pang, the humiliation of the fourth Henry at Canossa, and his death in the church he had built to the Virgin at Spire.

His antagonist, Hildebrand, died twenty years before him; captive to the Normans in Salerno, having seen the Rome in which he had proclaimed his princedom over all the earth, laid in her last ruin; and forever. Rome herself, since her desolation by Guiscard, has been only a grave and a wilderness[89]--what _we_ call Rome, is a mere colony of the stranger in her "Field of Mars." This destruction of Rome by the Normans is accurately and utterly the end of her Capitoline and wolf-suckled power; and from that day her Leonine or Christian power takes its throne in the Leonine city, sanctified in tradition by its prayer of safety for the Saxon Borgo, in which the childhood of our own Alfred had been trained.

And from this date forward, (recollected broadly as 1090, the year of the birth of St. Bernard,) no longer oppressed by the remnants of Roman death,--Christian faith, chivalry, and art possess the world, and recreate it, through the space of four hundred years--the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

And, necessarily, in the first of these centuries comes the main debate between the powers of Monk and Knight which was reconciled in this scene under the porch of St. Mark's.

83. That debate was brought to its crisis and issue by the birth of the new third elemental force of the State--the Citizen. Sismondi's republican enthusiasm does not permit him to recognize the essential character of this power. He speaks always of the Republics and the liberties of Italy, as if a craftsman differed from a knight only in political privileges, and as if his special virtue consisted in rendering obedience to no master. But the strength of the great cities of Italy was no more republican than that of her monasteries, or fortresses. The Craftsman of Milan, Sailor of Pisa, and Merchant of Venice are all of them essentially different persons from the soldier and the anchorite:--but the city, under the banner of its _caroccio_, and the command of its _podesta_, was disciplined far more strictly than any wandering military squadron by its leader, or any lower order of monks under their abbot. In the founding of civic constitutions, the Lord of the city is usually its Bishop:--and it is curious to hear the republican historian--who, however in judgment blind, is never in heart uncandid, prepare to close his record of the ten years' war of Como with Milan, with this summary of distress to the heroic mountaineers--that "they had lost their Bishop Guido, who was their soul."

84. I perceive for quite one of the most hopeless of the many difficulties which Modernism finds, and will find, insuperable either by steam or dynamite, that of either wedging or welding into its own cast-iron head, any conception of a king, monk, or townsman of the twelfth and two succeeding centuries. And yet no syllable of the utterance, no fragment of the arts of the middle ages, far less any motive of their deeds, can be read even in the letter--how much less judged in spirit--unless, first of all, we can somewhat imagine all these three Living souls.

First, a king who was the best knight in his kingdom, and on whose own swordstrokes hung the fate of Christendom. A king such as Henry the Fowler, the first and third Edwards of England, the Bruce of Scotland, and this Frederic the First of Germany.

Secondly, a monk who had been trained from youth in greater hardship than any soldier, and had learned at last to desire no other life than one of hardship;--a man believing in his own and his fellows' immortality, in the aiding powers of angels, and the eternal presence of God; versed in all the science, graceful in all the literature, cognizant of all the policy of his age; and fearless of any created thing, on the earth or under it.

And, lastly, a craftsman absolutely master of his craft, and taking such pride in the exercise of it as all healthy souls take in putting forth their personal powers: proud also of his city and his people; enriching, year by year, their streets with loftier buildings, their treasuries with rarer possession; and bequeathing his hereditary art to a line of successive masters, by whose tact of race, and honor of effort, the essential skills of metal-work in gold and steel, of pottery, glass-painting, woodwork, and weaving, were carried to a perfectness never to be surpassed; and of which our utmost modern hope is to produce a not instantly detected imitation.

These three kinds of persons, I repeat, we have to conceive before we can understand any single event of the Middle Ages. For all that is enduring in them was done by men such as these. History, indeed, records twenty undoings for one deed, twenty desolations for one redemption; and thinks the fool and villain potent as the wise and true. But Nature and her laws recognize only the noble: generations of the cruel pass like the darkness of locust plagues; while one loving and brave heart establishes a nation.

85. I give the character of Barbarossa in the words of Sismondi, a man sparing in the praise of emperors:--

"The death of Frederic was mourned even by the cities which so long had been the objects of his hostility, and the victims of his vengeance. All the Lombards--even the Milanese--acknowledged his rare courage, his constancy in misfortune--his generosity in conquest.

"An intimate conviction of the justice of his cause had often rendered him cruel, even to ferocity, against those who still resisted; but after victory he took vengeance only on senseless walls; and irritated as he had been by the people of Milan, Crema, and Tortona, and whatever blood he had shed during battle, he never sullied his triumph by odious punishments. In spite of the treason which he on one occasion used against Alessandria, his promises were in general respected; and when, after the peace of Constance, the towns which had been most inveterately hostile to him received him within their walls, they had no need to guard against any attempt on his part to suppress the privileges he had once recognized."

My own estimate of Frederic's character would be scarcely so favorable; it is the only point of history on which I have doubted the authority even of my own master, Carlyle. But I am concerned here only with the actualities of his wars in Italy, with the people of her cities, and the head of her religion.

86. Frederic of Suabia, direct heir of the Ghibelline rights, while nearly related by blood to the Guelph houses of Bavaria and Saxony, was elected emperor almost in the exact middle of the twelfth century (1152). He was called into Italy by the voices of Italians. The then Pope, Eugenius III., invoked his aid against the Roman people under Arnold of Brescia. The people of Lodi prayed his protection against the tyrannies of Milan.

Frederic entered the plain of Verona in 1154, by the valley of the Adige,--ravaged the territory of Milan,--pillaged and burned Tortona, Asti, and Chieri,--kept his Christmas at Novara; marched on Rome,--delivered up Arnold to the Pope[90] (who, instantly killing him, ended for that time Protestant reforms in Italy)--destroyed Spoleto; and returned by Verona, having scorched his path through Italy like a level thunderbolt along the ground.

Three years afterwards, Adrian died; and, chiefly, by the love and will of the Roman people, Roland of Siena was raised to the Papal throne, under the name of Alexander III. The conclave of cardinals chose another Pope, Victor III.; Frederic on his second invasion of Italy (1158) summoned both elected heads of the Church to receive judgment of their claims before _him_.

The Cardinals' Pope, Victor, obeyed. The people's Alexander, refused; answering that the successor of St. Peter submitted himself to the judgment neither of emperors nor councils.

The spirit of modern prelacy may perhaps have rendered it impossible for an English churchman to conceive this answer as other than that of insolence and hypocrisy. But a faithful Pope, and worthy of his throne, could answer no otherwise. Frederic of course at once confirmed the claims of his rival; the German bishops and Italian cardinals in council at Pavia joined their powers to the Emperor's and Alexander, driven from Rome, wandered--unsubdued in soul--from city to city, taking refuge at last in France.

87. Meantime, in 1159, Frederic took and destroyed Crema, having first bound its hostages to his machines of war. In 1161, Milan submitted to his mercy, and he decreed that her name should perish. Only a few pillars of a Roman temple, and the church of St. Ambrose, remain to us of the ancient city. Warned by her destruction, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Treviso, and Venice, joined in the vow--called of the Lombard League--to reduce the Emperor's power within its just limits. And, in 1164, Alexander, under the protection of Louis VII. of France and Henry II. of England, returned to Rome, and was received at Ostia by its senate, clergy, and people.

Three years afterwards, Frederic again swept down on the Campagna; attacked the Leonine city, where the basilica of the Vatican, changed into a fortress, and held by the Pope's guard, resisted his assault until, by the Emperor's order, fire was set to the Church of St. Mary of Pity.

The Leonine city was taken; the Pope retired to the Coliseum, whence, uttering once again his fixed defiance of the Emperor, but fearing treachery, he fled in disguise down the Tiber to the sea, and sought asylum at Benevento.

The German army encamped round Rome in August of 1166, with the sign before their eyes of the ruins of the church of Our Lady of Pity. The marsh-fever struck them--killed the Emperor's cousin, Frederic of Rothenburg, the Duke of Bavaria, the Archbishop of Cologne, the Bishops of Liége, Spire, Ratisbonne, and Verden, and two thousand knights; the common dead were uncounted. The Emperor gathered the wreck of his army together, retreated on Lombardy, quartered his soldiery at Pavia, and escaped in secret over the Mont Cenis with thirty knights.

88. No places of strength remained to him south of the Alps but Pavia and Montferrat; and to hold these in check, and command the plains of Piedmont, the Lombard League built the fortress city, which, from the Pope who had maintained through all adversity the authority of his throne and the cause of the Italian people, they named "Alessandria."

Against this bulwark the Emperor, still indomitable, dashed with his utmost regathered strength after eight years of pause, and in the temper in which men set their souls on a single stake. All had been lost in his last war, except his honor--in this, he lost his honor also. Whatever may be the just estimate of the other elements of his character, he is unquestionably, among the knights of his time, notable in impiety. In the battle of Cassano, he broke through the Milanese vanguard to their _caroccio_, and struck down with his own hand its golden crucifix;--two years afterwards its cross and standard were bowed before him--and in vain.[91] He fearlessly claims for himself right of decision between contending popes, and camps against the rightful one on the ashes of the Church of the Virgin.

Foiled in his first assault on Alessandria, detained before it through the inundations of the winter, and threatened by the army of the League in the spring, he announced a truce to the besieged, that they might keep Good Friday. Then violating alike the day's sanctity and his own oath, he attacked the trusting city through a secretly completed mine. And, for a second time, the verdict of God went forth against him. Every man who had obtained entrance within the city was slain or cast from its ramparts;--the Alessandrines threw all their gates open--fell, with the broken fugitives, on the investing troops, scattered them in disorder, and burned their towers of attack. The Emperor gathered their remains into Pavia on Easter Sunday,--spared in his defeat by the army of the League.

89. And yet, once more, he brought his cause to combat-trial. Temporizing at Lodi with the Pope's legates, he assembled, under the Archbishops of Magdebourg and Cologne, and the chief prelates and princes of Germany, a seventh army; brought it down to Como across the Splügen, put himself there at its head, and in the early spring of 1176, the fifteenth year since he had decreed the effacing of the name of Milan, was met at Legnano by the specter of Milan.

Risen from her grave, she led the Lombard League in this final battle. Three hundred of her nobles guarded her _caroccio_; nine hundred of her knights bound themselves--under the name of the Cohort of Death--to win for her, or to die.

The field of battle is in the midst of the plain, now covered with maize and mulberry trees, from which the traveler, entering Italy by the Lago Maggiore, sees first the unbroken snows of the Rosa behind him and the white pinnacles of Milan Cathedral in the south. The Emperor, as was his wont, himself led his charging chivalry. The Milanese knelt as it came;--prayed aloud to God, St. Peter, and St. Ambrose--then advanced round their _caroccio_ on foot. The Emperor's charge broke through their ranks nearly up to their standard--then the Cohort of Death rode against him.

90. And all his battle changed before them into flight. For the first time in stricken field, the imperial standard fell, and was taken. The Milanese followed the broken host until their swords were weary; and the Emperor, struck fighting from his horse, was left, lost among the dead. The Empress, whose mercy to Milan he had forbidden, already wore mourning for him in Pavia, when her husband came, solitary and suppliant, to its gate.

The lesson at last sufficed; and Barbarossa sent his heretic bishops to ask forgiveness of the Pope, and peace from the Lombards.

Pardon and peace were granted--without conditions. "Cæsar's successor" had been the blight of Italy for a quarter of a century; he had ravaged her harvests, burnt her cities, decimated her children with famine, her young men with the sword; and, seven times over, in renewed invasion, sought to establish dominion over her, from the Alps to the rock of Scylla.

She asked of him no restitution;--coveted no province--demanded no fortress, of his land. Neither coward nor robber, she disdained alike guard and gain upon her frontiers: she counted no compensation for her sorrow; and set no price upon the souls of her dead. She stood in the porch of her brightest temple--between the blue plains of her earth and sea, and, in the person of her spiritual father, gave her enemy pardon.

"Black demons hovering o'er his mitered head," think you, gentle sonneteer of the daffodil-marsh? And have Barbarossa's race been taught of better angels how to bear themselves to a conquered emperor,--or England, by braver and more generous impulses, how to protect his exiled son?

The fall of Venice, since that day, was measured by Byron in a single line:

"An Emperor tramples where an emperor knelt."

But what words shall measure the darker humiliation of the German pillaging his helpless enemy and England leaving her ally under the savage's spear?

91. With the clews now given, and an hour or two's additional reading of any standard historian he pleases, the reader may judge on secure grounds whether the truce of Venice and peace of Constance were of the Devil's making: whereof whatever he may ultimately feel or affirm, this at least he will please note for positive, that Mr. Wordsworth, having no shadow of doubt of the complete wisdom of every idea that comes into his own head, writes down in dogmatic sonnet his first impression of black instrumentality in the business; so that his innocent readers, taking him for their sole master, far from caring to inquire into the thing more deeply, may remain even unconscious that it is disputable, and forever incapable of conceiving either a Catholic's feeling, or a careful historian's hesitation, touching the centrally momentous crisis of power in all the Middle Ages! Whereas Byron, knowing the history thoroughly, and judging of Catholicism with an honest and open heart, ventures to assert nothing that admits of debate, either concerning human motives or angelic presences; but binds into one line of massive melody the unerringly counted sum of Venetian majesty and shame.

92. In a future paper, I propose examining his method of dealing with the debate, itself on a higher issue: and will therefore close the present one by trampling a few of the briers and thorns of popular offense out of our way.

The common counts against Byron are in the main, three.

I. That he confessed--in some sort, even proclaimed defiantly (which is a proud man's natural manner of confession)[92]--the naughtiness of his life.

The hypocrisy[93] even of Pall Mall and Petit Trianon does not, I assume, and dares not, go so far as to condemn the naughtiness itself? And that he _did_ confess it, is precisely the reason for reading him by his own motto "Trust Byron." You always may; and the common smooth-countenanced man of the world is guiltier in the precise measure of your higher esteem for him.

II. That he wrote about pretty things which ought never to be heard of.

In the presence of the exact proprieties of modern Fiction, Art, and Drama, I am shy of touching on the question of what should be mentioned, and seen--and should not. All that I care to say, here, is that Byron tells you of realities, and that their being pretty ones is, to my mind,--at the first (literally) blush, of the matter, rather in his favor. If however you have imagined that he means you to think Dudu as pretty as Myrrha,[94] or even Haidee, whether in full dress or none, as pretty as Marina, it is your fault, not his.

93. III. That he blasphemed God and the King.

Before replying to this count, I must ask the reader's patience in a piece of very serious work, the ascertainment of the real and full meaning of the word Blasphemy. It signifies simply "Harmful speaking"--Male-diction--or shortly "Blame"; and may be committed as much against a child or a dog, if you _desire_ to hurt them, as against the Deity. And it is, in its original use, accurately opposed to another Greek word, "Euphemy," which means a reverent and loving manner of benediction--fallen entirely into disuse in modern sentiment and language.

Now the compass and character of essential Male-diction, so-called in Latin, or Blasphemy, so-called in Greek, may, I think, be best explained to the general reader by an instance in a very little thing, first translating the short pieces of Plato which best show the meaning of the word in codes of Greek morality.

"These are the things then" (the true order of the Sun, Moon, and Planets), "oh my friends, of which I desire that all our citizens and youths should learn at least so much concerning the Gods of Heaven, as not to blaspheme concerning them, but to eupheme reverently, both in sacrificing, and in every prayer they pray."--Laws, VII. Steph. 821.

"And through the whole of life, beyond all other need for it, there is need of Euphemy from a man to his parents, for there is no heavier punishment than that of light and winged words," (to _them_)? "for Nemesis, the angel of Divine Recompense, has been throned Bishop over all men who sin in such manner."--IV. Steph. 717.

The word which I have translated "recompense" is more strictly that "heavenly Justice"--the proper Light of the World, from which nothing can be hidden, and by which all who will may walk securely; whence the mystic answer of Ulysses to his son, as Athena, herself invisible, walks with them, filling the chamber of the house with light, "This is the justice of the Gods who possess Olympus." See the context in reference to which Plato quotes the line.--Laws, X. Steph. 904. The little story that I have to tell is significant chiefly in connection with the second passage of Plato above quoted.

94. I have elsewhere mentioned that I was a homebred boy, and that as my mother diligently and scrupulously taught me my Bible and Latin Grammar, so my father fondly and devotedly taught me my Scott, my Pope, and my Byron.[95] The Latin grammar out of which my mother taught me was the 11th edition of Alexander Adam's--(Edinb.: Bell and Bradfute, 1823)--namely, that Alexander Adam, Rector of Edinburgh High School, into whose upper class Scott passed in October 1782, and who--previous masters having found nothing noticeable in the heavy-looking lad--_did_ find sterling qualities in him, and "would constantly refer to him for dates, and particulars of battles, and other remarkable events alluded to in Horace, or _whatever other authors the boys were reading_; and called him the historian of his class" (L. i. 126). _That_ Alex. Adam, also, who, himself a loving historian, remembered the fate of every boy at his school during the fifty years he had headed it, and whose last words--"It grows dark, the boys may dismiss," gave to Scott's heart the vision and the audit of the death of Elspeth of the Craigburn-foot.

Strangely, in opening the old volume at this moment (I would not give it for an illuminated missal) I find, in its article on Prosody, some things extremely useful to me, which I have been hunting for in vain through Zumpt and Matthiæ. In all rational respects I believe it to be the best Latin Grammar that has yet been written.

When my mother had carried me through it as far as the syntax, it was thought desirable that I should be put under a master: and the master chosen was a deeply and deservedly honored clergyman, the Rev. Thomas Dale, mentioned in Mr. Holbeach's article, "The New Fiction," (_Contemporary Review_ for February of this year), together with Mr. Melville, who was our pastor after Mr. Dale went to St. Pancras.

95. On the first day when I went to take my seat in Mr. Dale's schoolroom, I carried my old grammar to him, in a modest pride, expecting some encouragement and honor for the accuracy with which I could repeat, on demand, some hundred and sixty close-printed pages of it.

But Mr. Dale threw it back to me with a fierce bang upon his desk, saying (with accent and look of seven-times-heated scorn), "That's a _Scotch_ thing."

Now, my father being Scotch, and an Edinburgh High School boy, and my mother having labored in that book with me since I could read, and all my happiest holiday time having been spent on the North Inch of Perth, these four words, with the action accompanying them, contained as much insult, pain, and loosening of my respect for my parents, love of my father's country, and honor for its worthies, as it was possible to compress into four syllables and an ill-mannered gesture. Which were therefore pure, double-edged and point-envenomed blasphemy. For to make a boy despise his mother's care, is the straightest way to make him also despise his Redeemer's voice; and to make him scorn his father and his father's house, the straightest way to make him deny his God, and his God's Heaven.

96. I speak, observe, in this instance, only of the actual words and their effect; not of the feeling in the speaker's mind, which was almost playful, though his words, tainted with extremity of pride, were such light ones as men shall give account of at the Day of Judgment. The real sin of blasphemy is not in the saying, nor even in the thinking; but in the wishing which is father to thought and word: and the nature of it is simply in wishing evil to anything; for as the quality of Mercy is not strained, so neither that of Blasphemy, the one distilling from the clouds of Heaven, the other from the steam of the Pit. He that is unjust in little is unjust in much, he that is malignant to the least is to the greatest, he who hates the earth which is God's footstool, hates yet more Heaven which is God's throne, and Him that sitteth thereon. Finally, therefore, blasphemy is wishing ill to _any_ thing; and its outcome is in Vanni Fucci's extreme "ill manners"--wishing ill to God.

On the contrary, Euphemy is wishing well to everything, and its outcome is in Burns' extreme "good manners," wishing well to--

"Ah! wad ye tak a thought, and men'!"

That is the supreme of Euphemy.

97. Fix then, first in your minds, that the sin of malediction, whether Shimei's individual, or John Bull's national, is in the vulgar malignity, not in the vulgar diction, and then note further that the "phemy" or "fame" of the two words, blasphemy and euphemy, signifies broadly the bearing of _false_ witness _against_ one's neighbor in the one case, and of _true_ witness _for_ him in the other: so that while the peculiar province of the blasphemer is to throw firelight on the evil in good persons, the province of the euphuist (I must use the word inaccurately for want of a better) is to throw sunlight on the good in bad ones; such, for instance, as Bertram, Meg Merrilies, Rob Roy, Robin Hood, and the general run of Corsairs, Giaours, Turks, Jews, Infidels, and Heretics; nay, even sisters of Rahab, and daughters of Moab and Ammon; and at last the whole spiritual race of him to whom it was said, "If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?"

98. And being thus brought back to our actual subject, I purpose, after a few more summary notes on the luster of the electrotype language of modern passion, to examine what facts or probabilities lie at the root both of Goethe's and Byron's imagination of that contest between the powers of Good and Evil, of which the Scriptural account appears to Mr. Huxley so inconsistent with the recognized laws of political economy; and has been, by the cowardice of our old translators, so maimed of its vitality, that the frank Greek assertion of St. Michael's not daring to blaspheme the devil,[96] is tenfold more mischievously deadened and caricatured by their periphrasis of "durst not bring against him a railing accusation," than by Byron's apparently--and only apparently--less reverent description of the manner of angelic encounter for an inferior ruler of the people.

"Between His Darkness and His Brightness There passed a mutual glance of great politeness."

PARIS, _September 20, 1880._

POSTSCRIPT.

99. I am myself extremely grateful, nor doubt a like feeling in most of my readers, both for the information contained in the first of the two following letters; and the correction of references in the second, of which, however, I have omitted some closing sentences which the writer will, I think, see to have been unnecessary.[97]

NORTH STREET, WIRKSWORTH: _August 2, 1880._

DEAR SIR,--When reading your interesting article in the June number of the _Nineteenth Century_, and your quotation from Walter Scott, I was struck with the great similarity between some of the Scotch words and my native tongue (Norwegian). _Whigmaleerie_, as to the derivation of which you seem to be in some perplexity, is in Norwegian _Vægmaleri_. _Væg_, pronounced "Vegg," signifying wall, and Maleri "picture," pronounced almost the same as in Scotch, and derived from _at male_, to paint. Siccan is in Danish _sikken_, used more about something comical than great, and scarcely belonging to the written language, in which _slig_, such, and _slig en_, such a one, would be the equivalent. I need not remark that as to the written language Danish and Norwegian is the same, only the dialects differ.

Having been told by some English friends that this explanation would perhaps not be without interest to yourself, I take the liberty of writing this letter. I remain yours respectfully,

THEA BERG.

INNER TEMPLE: _September 9, 1880._

SIR,--In your last article on Fiction, Foul and Fair (_Nineteenth Century_, September 1880) you have the following note:

"Juan viii. 5" (it ought to be 9) "but by your Lordship's quotation, Wordsworth says 'instrument' not 'daughter.'"

Now in Murray's edition of Byron, 1837, octavo, his Lordship's quotation is as follows:--

"But thy most dreaded instrument In working out a pure intent Is man arranged for mutual slaughter; Yea, Carnage is thy daughter."

And his Lordship refers you to "Wordsworth's Thanksgiving Ode."

I have no early edition of Wordsworth. In Moxon's, 1844, no such lines appear in the Thanksgiving Ode, but in the ode dated 1815, and printed immediately before it, the following lines occur.

"But man is thy most awful instrument In working out a pure intent."

It is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that Wordsworth altered the lines after "Don Juan" was written. I am, with great respect, your obedient servant,

RALPH THICKNESSE.

JOHN RUSKIN, Esq.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 88: November, 1880.--ED.]

[Footnote 89: "Childe Harold," iv. 79; compare "Adonais," and Sismondi, vol. i. p. 148.]

[Footnote 90: Adrian the Fourth. Eugenius died in the previous year.]

[Footnote 91: "All the multitudes threw themselves on their knees, praying mercy in the name of the crosses they bore: the Count of Blandrata took a cross from the enemies with whom he had served, and fell at the foot of the throne, praying for mercy to them. All the court and the witnessing army were in tears--the Emperor alone showed no sign of emotion. Distrusting his wife's sensibility, he had forbidden her presence at the ceremony; the Milanese, unable to approach her, threw towards her windows the crosses they carried, to plead for them."--Sismondi (French edition), vol. i. p. 378.]

[Footnote 92: The most noble and tender confession is in Allegra's epitaph, "I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me."]

[Footnote 93: Hypocrisy is too good a word for either Pall Mall or Trianon, being justly applied (as always in the New Testament), only to men whose false religion has become earnest, and a part of their being: so that they compass heaven and earth to make a proselyte. There is no relation between minds of this order and those of common rogues. Neither Tartuffe nor Joseph Surface are hypocrites--they are simply impostors: but many of the most earnest preachers in all existing churches are hypocrites in the highest; and the Tartuffe-Squiredom and Joseph Surface-Masterhood of our virtuous England which build churches and pay priests to keep their peasants and hands peaceable, so that rents and per cents may be spent, unnoticed, in the debaucheries of the metropolis, are darker forms of imposture than either heaven or earth have yet been compassed by; and what they are to end in, heaven and earth only know. Compare again, "Island," ii. 4, "the prayers of Abel linked to deeds of Cain," and "Juan," viii. 25, 26.]

[Footnote 94: Perhaps some even of the attentive readers of Byron may not have observed the choice of the three names--Myrrha (bitter incense), Marina (sea lady), Angiolina (little angel)--in relation to the plots of the three plays.]

[Footnote 95: I shall have lost my wits very finally when I forget the first time that I pleased my father with a couplet of English verse (after many a year of trials); and the radiant joy on his face as he declared, reading it aloud to my mother with emphasis half choked by tears,--that "it was as fine as anything that Pope or Byron ever wrote!"]

[Footnote 96: Of our tingle-tangle-titmouse disputes in Parliament like Robins in a bush, but not a Robin in all the house knowing his great A, hear again Plato: "But they, for ever so little a quarrel, uttering much voice, blaspheming, speak evil one of another,--and it is not becoming that in a city of well-ordered persons, such things should be--no; nothing of them nohow nowhere,--and let this be the one law for all--let nobody speak mischief of anybody ([Greek: Mêdena kakêgoreitô mêdeis])."--Laws, book ii. s. 935; and compare Book iv. 117.]

[Footnote 97: A paragraph beginning "I find press corrections always irksome work, and in my last paper trust the reader's kindness to make some corrections in the preceding paper," is here omitted, and the corrections made.--ED.]

FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL.

V.[98]

THE TWO SERVANTS.

100. I have assumed throughout these papers, that everybody knew what Fiction meant; as Mr. Mill assumed in his Political Economy, that everybody knew what wealth meant. The assumption was convenient to Mr. Mill, and persisted in: but, for my own part, I am not in the habit of talking, even so long as I have done in this instance, without making sure that the reader knows what I am talking about; and it is high time that we should be agreed upon the primary notion of what Fiction is.

A feigned, fictitious, artificial, supernatural, put-together-out-of-one's-head, thing. All this it must be, to begin with. The best type of it being the most practically fictile--a Greek vase. A thing which has two sides to be seen, two handles to be carried by, and a bottom to stand on, and a top to be poured out of, this, every right fiction _is_, whatever else it may be. Planned rigorously, rounded smoothly, balanced symmetrically, handled handily, lipped softly for pouring out oil and wine. Painted daintily at last with images of eternal things--

Forever shalt thou love, and she be fair.

101. Quite a different thing from a "cast,"--this work of clay in the hands of the potter, as it seemed good to the potter to make it. Very interesting, a cast from life may perhaps be; more interesting, to some people perhaps, a cast from death;--most modern novels are like specimens from Lyme Regis, impressions of skeletons in mud.

"Planned rigorously"--I press the conditions again one by one--it must be, as ever Memphian labyrinth or Norman fortress. Intricacy full of delicate surprise; covered way in secrecy of accurate purposes, not a stone useless, nor a word nor an incident thrown away.

"Rounded smoothly"--the wheel of Fortune revolving with it in unfelt swiftness; like the world, its story rising like the dawn, closing like the sunset, with its own sweet light for every hour.

"Balanced symmetrically"--having its two sides clearly separate, its war of good and evil rightly divided. Its figures moving in majestic law of light and shade.

"Handled handily"--so that, being careful and gentle, you can take easy grasp of it and all that it contains; a thing given into your hand henceforth to have and to hold. Comprehensible, not a mass that both your arms cannot get round; tenable, not a confused pebble heap of which you can only lift one pebble at a time.

"Lipped softly"--full of kindness and comfort: the Keats line indeed the perpetual message of it--"For ever shalt thou love, and she be fair." All beautiful fiction is of the Madonna, whether the Virgin of Athens or of Judah--Pan-Athenaic always.

And all foul fiction is _leze majesté_ to the Madonna and to womanhood. For indeed the great fiction of every human life is the shaping of its Love, with due prudence, due imagination, due persistence and perfection from the beginning of its story to the end; for every human soul, its Palladium. And it follows that all right imaginative work is beautiful, which is a practical and brief law concerning it. All frightful things are either foolish, or sick, visits of frenzy, or pollutions of plague.

102. Taking thus the Greek vase at its best time, for the symbol of fair fiction: of foul, you may find in the great entrance-room of the Louvre, filled with the luxurious _orfèvrerie_ of the sixteenth century, types perfect and innumerable: Satyrs carved in serpentine, Gorgons platted in gold, Furies with eyes of ruby, Scyllas with scales of pearl; infinitely worthless toil, infinitely witless wickedness; pleasure satiated into idiocy, passion provoked into madness, no object of thought, or sight, or fancy, but horror, mutilation, distortion, corruption, agony of war, insolence of disgrace, and misery of Death.

It is true that the ease with which a serpent, or something that will be understood for one, can be chased or wrought in metal, and the small workmanly skill required to image a satyr's hoof and horns, as compared to that needed for a human foot or forehead, have greatly influenced the choice of subject by incompetent smiths; and in like manner, the prevalence of such vicious or ugly story in the mass of modern literature is not so much a sign of the lasciviousness of the age, as of its stupidity, though each react on the other, and the vapor of the sulphurous pool becomes at last so diffused in the atmosphere of our cities, that whom it cannot corrupt, it will at least stultify.

103. Yesterday, the last of August, came to me from the Fine Art Society, a series of twenty black and white scrabbles[99] of which I am informed in an eloquent preface that the author was a Michael Angelo of the glebe, and that his shepherds and his herdswomen are akin in dignity and grandeur to the prophets and Sibyls of the Sistine.

Glancing through the series of these stupendous productions, I find one peculiarly characteristic and expressive of modern picture-making and novel-writing,--called "Hauling" or more definitely "Paysan rentrant du Fumier," which represents a man's back, or at least the back of his waistcoat and trousers, and hat, in full light, and a small blot where his face should be, with a small scratch where its nose should be, elongated into one representing a chink of timber in the background.

Examining the volume farther, in the hope of discovering some trace of reasonable motive for the publication of these works by the Society, I perceive that this Michael Angelo of the glebe had indeed natural faculty of no mean order in him, and that the woeful history of his life contains very curious lessons respecting the modern conditions of Imagination and Art.

104. I find in the first place, that he was a Breton peasant; his grandmother's godson, baptized in good hope, and christened Jean, after his father, and François after the Saint of Assisi, his godmother's patron. It was under her care and guidance and those of his uncle, the Abbé Charles, that he was reared; and the dignified and laborious earnestness of these governors of his was a chief influence in his life, and a distinguishing feature in his character. The Millet family led an existence almost patriarchal in its unalterable simplicity and diligence; and the boy grew up in an environment of toil, sincerity and devoutness. He was fostered upon the Bible, and the great book of nature.... When he woke, it was to the lowing of cattle and the song of birds; he was at play all day, among "the sights and sounds of the open landscape; and he slept with the murmur of the spinning-wheel in his ears, and the memory of the evening prayer in his heart.... He learned Latin from the parish priest, and from his uncle Charles; and he soon came to be a student of Virgil, and while yet young in his teens began to follow his father out into the fields, and thenceforward, as became the eldest boy in a large family, worked hard at grafting and plowing, sowing and reaping, scything and shearing and planting, and all the many duties of husbandmen. Meanwhile, he had taken to drawing ... copied everything he saw, and produced not only studies but compositions also; until at last his father was moved to take him away from farming, and have him taught painting."

105. Now all this is related concerning the lad's early life by the prefatory and commenting author, as if expecting the general reader to admit that there had been some advantage for him in this manner of education:--that simplicity and devoutness are wholesome states of mind; that parish curés and uncle Abbés are not betrayers or devourers of youthful innocence--that there is profitable reading in the Bible, and something agreeably soothing--if not otherwise useful--in the sound of evening prayer. I may observe also in passing, that his education, thus far, is precisely what, for the last ten years, I have been describing as the most desirable for all persons intending to lead an honest and Christian life: (my recommendation that peasants should learn Latin having been, some four or five years ago, the subject of much merriment in the pages of _Judy_ and other such nurses of divine wisdom in the public mind.) It however having been determined by the boy's father that he should be a painter, and that art being unknown to the Abbé Charles and the village Curé (in which manner of ignorance, if the infallible Pope did but know it, he and his _now_ artless shepherds stand at a fatal disadvantage in the world as compared with monks who could illuminate with color as well as word)--the simple young soul is sent for the exalting and finishing of its artistic faculties to Paris.

106. "Wherein," observers my prefatory author, "the romantic movement was in the full tide of prosperity."

Hugo had written "Notre Dame," and Musset had published "Rolla" and the "Nuits"; Balzac the "Lys dans la Vallée"; Gautier the "Comédie de la Mort"; Georges Sand "Léone Léonie"; and a score of wild and eloquent novels more; and under the instruction of these romantic authors, his landlady, to whom he had intrusted the few francs he possessed, to dole out to him as he needed, fell in love with him, and finding he could not, or would not, respond to her advances, confiscated the whole deposit, and left him penniless. The preface goes on to tell us how, not feeling himself in harmony with these forms of Romanticism, he takes to the study of the Infinite, and Michael Angelo; how he learned to paint the Heroic Nude; how he mixed up for imitation the manners of Rubens, Ribera, Mantegna, and Correggio; how he struggled all his life with neglect, and endured with his family every agony of poverty; owed his butcher and his grocer, was exposed to endless worry and annoyance from writs and executions; and when first his grandmother died, and then his mother, neither death-bed was able to raise the money that would have carried him from Barbizon to Gruchy.

The work now laid before the public by the Fine Art Society is to be considered, therefore--whatever its merits or defects may be--as an expression of the influence of the Infinite and Michael Angelo on a mind innocently prepared for their reception. And in another place I may take occasion to point out the peculiar adaptability of modern etching to the expression of the Infinite, by the multitude of scratches it can put on a surface without representing anything in particular; and to illustration of the majesty of Michael Angelo by preference of the backs and legs of people to their faces.

107. But I refer to the book in this paper, partly indeed because my mind is full of its sorrow, and I may not be able to find another opportunity of saying so; but chiefly, because the author of the preface has summed the principal authors of depraved Fiction in a single sentence; and I want the reader to ask himself why, among all the forms of the picturesque which were suggested by this body of literary leaders, none were acceptable by, none helpful to, the mind of a youth trained in purity and faith.

He will find, if he reflect, that it is not in romantic, or any other healthy aim, that the school detaches itself from those called sometimes by recent writers "classical"; but first by Infidelity, and an absence of the religious element so total that at last it passes into the hatred of priesthood which has become characteristic of Republicanism; and secondly, by the taint and leprosy of animal passion idealized as a governing power of humanity, or at least used as the chief element of interest in the conduct of its histories. It is with the _Sin_ of Master Anthony that Georges Sand (who is the best of them) overshadows the entire course of a novel meant to recommend simplicity of life--and by the weakness of Consuelo that the same authoress thinks it natural to set off the splendor of the most exalted musical genius.

I am not able to judge of the degree of moral purpose, or conviction, with which any of the novelists wrote. But I am able to say with certainty that, whatever their purpose, their method is mistaken, and that no good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

108. All healthy and helpful literature sets simple bars between right and wrong; assumes the possibility, in men and women, of having healthy minds in healthy bodies, and loses no time in the diagnosis of fever or dyspepsia in either; least of all in the particular kind of fever which signifies the ungoverned excess of any appetite or passion. The "dullness" which many modern readers inevitably feel, and some modern blockheads think it creditable to allege, in Scott, consists not a little in his absolute purity from every loathsome element or excitement of the lower passions; so that people who live habitually in Satyric or hircine conditions of thought find him as insipid as they would a picture of Angelico's. The accurate and trenchant separation between him and the common railroad-station novelist is that, in his total method of conception, only lofty character is worth describing at all; and it becomes interesting, not by its faults, but by the difficulties and accidents of the fortune through which it passes, while, in the railway novel, interest is obtained with the vulgar reader for the vilest character, because the author describes carefully to his recognition the blotches, burrs and pimples in which the paltry nature resembles his own. The "Mill on the Floss" is perhaps the most striking instance extant of this study of cutaneous disease. There is not a single person in the book of the smallest importance to anybody in the world but themselves, or whose qualities deserved so much as a line of printer's type in their description. There is no girl alive, fairly clever, half educated, and unluckily related, whose life has not at least as much in it as Maggie's, to be described and to be pitied. Tom is a clumsy and cruel lout, with the making of better things in him (and the same may be said of nearly every Englishman at present smoking and elbowing his way through the ugly world his blunders have contributed to the making of); while the rest of the characters are simply the sweepings out of a Pentonville omnibus.[100]

109. And it is very necessary that we should distinguish this essentially Cockney literature, developed only in the London suburbs, and feeding the demand of the rows of similar brick houses, which branch in devouring cancer round every manufacturing town,--from the really romantic literature of France. Georges Sand is often immoral; but she is always beautiful, and in the characteristic novel I have named, "Le Péché de Mons. Antoine," the five principal characters, the old Cavalier Marquis,--the Carpenter,--M. de Chateaubrun,--Gilberte,--and the really passionate and generous lover, are all as heroic and radiantly ideal as Scott's Colonel Mannering, Catherine Seyton, and Roland Graeme; while the landscape is rich and true with the emotion of years of life passed in glens of Norman granite and beside bays of Italian sea. But in the English Cockney school, which consummates itself in George Eliot, the personages are picked up from behind the counter and out of the gutter; and the landscape, by excursion train to Gravesend, with return ticket for the City-road.

110. But the second reason for the dullness of Scott to the uneducated or miseducated reader lies far deeper; and its analysis is related to the most subtle questions in the Arts of Design.

The mixed gayety and gloom in the plan of any modern novel fairly clever in the make of it, may be likened, almost with precision, to the patchwork of a Harlequin's dress, well spangled; a pretty thing enough, if the human form beneath it be graceful and active. Few personages on the stage are more delightful to me than a good Harlequin; also, if I chance to have nothing better to do, I can still read my Georges Sand or Alfred de Musset with much contentment, if only the story end well.

But we must not dress Cordelia or Rosalind in robes of triangular patches, covered with spangles, by way of making the _coup d'oeil_ of them less dull; and so the story-telling of Scott is like the robe of the Sistine Zipporah--embroidered only on the edges with gold and blue, and the embroidery involving a legend written in mystic letters.

And the interest and joy which he intends his reader to find in his tale, are in taking up the golden thread here and there in its intended recurrence--and following, as it rises again and again, his melody through the disciplined and unaccented march of the fugue.

111. Thus the entire charm and meaning of the story of the Monastery depend on the degree of sympathy with which we compare the first and last incidents of the appearance of a character, whom perhaps not one in twenty readers would remember as belonging to the dramatis personæ--Stawarth Bolton.

Childless, he assures safety in the first scene of the opening tale to the widow of Glendinning and her two children--the elder boy challenging him at the moment, "I will war on thee to the death, when I can draw my father's sword." In virtually the last scene, the grown youth, now in command of a small company of spearmen in the Regent Murray's service, is on foot, in the first pause after the battle at Kennaquhair, beside the dead bodies of Julian Avenel and Christie, and the dying Catherine.[101]

Glendinning forgot for a moment his own situation and duties, and was first recalled to them by a trampling of horse, and the cry of St. George for England, which the English soldiers still continued to use. His handful of men, for most of the stragglers had waited for Murray's coming up, remained on horseback, holding their lances upright, having no command either to submit or resist.

"There stands our captain," said one of them, as a strong party of English came up, the vanguard of Foster's troop.

"Your captain! with his sword sheathed, and on foot in the presence of his enemy? a raw soldier, I warrant him," said the English leader. "So! ho! young man, is your dream out, and will you now answer me if you will fight or fly?"

"Neither," answered Halbert Glendinning, with great tranquillity.

"Then throw down thy sword and yield thee," answered the Englishman.

"Not till I can help myself no otherwise," said Halbert, with the same moderation of tone and manner.

"Art thou for thine own hand, friend, or to whom dost thou owe service?" demanded the English captain.

"To the noble Earl of Murray."

"Then thou servest," said the Southron, "the most disloyal nobleman who breathes--false both to England and Scotland."

"Thou liest," said Glendinning, regardless of all consequences.

"Ha! art thou so hot now, and wert so cold but a minute since? I lie, do I? Wilt thou do battle with me on that quarrel?"

"With one to one, one to two, or two to five, as you list," said Halbert Glendinning; "grant me but a fair field."

"That thou shalt have. Stand back, my mates," said the brave Englishman. "If I fall, give him fair play, and let him go off free with his people."

"Long life to the noble captain!" cried the soldiers, as impatient to see the duel as if it had been a bull.

"He will have a short life of it, though," said the sergeant, "if he, an old man of sixty, is to fight for any reason, or for no reason, with every man he meets, and especially the young fellows he might be father to. And here comes the warden, besides, to see the sword-play."

In fact, Sir John Foster came up with a considerable body of his horsemen, just as his captain, whose age rendered him unequal to the combat with so strong and active a youth as Glendinning, lost his sword.[102]

"Take it up for shame, old Stawarth Bolton," said the English warden; "and thou, young man, get you gone to your own friends, and loiter not here."

Notwithstanding this peremptory order, Halbert Glendinning could not help stopping to cast a look upon the unfortunate Catherine, who lay insensible of the danger and of the trampling of so many horses around her--insensible, as the second glance assured him, of all and forever. Glendinning almost rejoiced when he saw that the last misery of life was over, and that the hoofs of the war-horses, amongst which he was compelled to leave her, could only injure and deface a senseless corpse. He caught the infant from her arms, half ashamed of the shout of laughter which rose on all sides, at seeing an armed man in such a situation assume such an unwonted and inconvenient burden.

"Shoulder your infant!" cried a harquebusier.

"Port your infant!" said a pikeman.

"Peace, ye brutes!" said Stawarth Bolton, "and respect humanity in others, if you have none yourselves. I pardon the lad having done some discredit to my gray hairs, when I see him take care of that helpless creature, which ye would have trampled upon as if ye had been littered of bitch-wolves, not born of women."

The infant thus saved is the heir of Avenel, and the intricacy and fateful bearing of every incident and word in the scene, knitting into one central moment all the clews to the plot of two romances, as the rich boss of a Gothic vault gathers the shaft moldings of it, can only be felt by an entirely attentive reader; just as (to follow out the likeness on Scott's own ground) the willow-wreaths changed to stone of Melrose tracery can only be caught in their plighting by the keenest eyes. The meshes are again gathered by the master's own hand when the child now in Halbert's arms, twenty years hence, stoops over him to unlace his helmet, as the fallen knight lies senseless on the field of Carberry Hill.[103]

112. But there is another, and a still more hidden method in Scott's designing of story, in which, taking extreme pains, he counts on much sympathy from the reader, and can assuredly find none in a modern student. The moral purpose of the whole, which he asserted in the preface to the first edition of Waverley, was involved always with the minutest study of the effects of true and false religion on the conduct;--which subject being always touched with his utmost lightness of hand and stealthiness of art, and founded on a knowledge of the Scotch character and the human heart, such as no other living man possessed, his purpose often escapes first observation as completely as the inner feelings of living people do; and I am myself amazed, as I take any single piece of his work up for examination, to find how many of its points I had before missed or disregarded.

113. The groups of personages whose conduct in the Scott romance is definitely affected by religious conviction, may be arranged broadly, as those of the actual world, under these following heads:

1. The lowest group consists of persons who, believing in the general truths of Evangelical religion, accommodate them to their passions, and are capable, by gradual increase in depravity, of any crime or violence. I am not going to include these in our present study. Trumbull ("Red Gauntlet"), Trusty Tomkyns ("Woodstock"), Burley ("Old Mortality"), are three of the principal types.

2. The next rank above these consists of men who believe firmly and truly enough to be restrained from any conduct which they clearly recognize as criminal, but whose natural selfishness renders them incapable of understanding the morality of the Bible above a certain point; and whose imperfect powers of thought leave them liable in many directions to the warping of self-interest or of small temptations.

Fairservice. Blattergowl. Kettledrummle. Gifted Gilfillan.

3. The third order consists of men naturally just and honest, but with little sympathy and much pride, in whom their religion, while in the depth of it supporting their best virtues, brings out on the surface all their worst faults, and makes them censorious, tiresome, and often fearfully mischievous.

Richie Moniplies. Davie Deans. Mause Hedrigg.

4. The enthusiastic type, leading to missionary effort, often to martyrdom.

Warden, in "Monastery." Colonel Gardiner. Ephraim Macbriar. Joshua Geddes.

5. Highest type, fulfilling daily duty; always gentle, entirely firm, the comfort and strength of all around them; merciful to every human fault, and submissive without anger to every human oppression.

Rachel Geddes. Jeanie Deans. Bessie Maclure, in "Old Mortality"--the Queen of all.

114. In the present paper, I ask the reader's patience only with my fulfillment of a promise long since made, to mark the opposition of the effects of an entirely similar religious faith in two men of inferior position, representing in perfectness the commonest types in Scotland of the second and third order of religionists here distinguished, Andrew Fairservice ("Rob Roy"), and Richie Moniplies ("Nigel").

The names of both the men imply deceitfulness of one kind or another--Fairservice, as serving fairly only in pretense; Moniplies, as having many windings, turns, and ways of escape. Scott's names are themselves so Moniplied that they need as much following out as Shakespeare's; and as their roots are pure Scotch, and few people have a good Scottish glossary beside them, or would use it if they had, the novels are usually read without any turning of the first keys to them. I did not myself know till very lately the root of Dandie Dinmont's name--"Dinmont," a two-year-old sheep; still less that of Moniplies, which I had been always content to take Master George Heriot's rendering of: "This fellow is not ill-named--he has more plies than one in his cloak." ("Nigel," i. 72.) In its first sense, it is the Scotch word for tripe, Moniplies being a butcher's son.

115. Cunning, then, they both are, in a high degree--but Fairservice only for himself, Moniplies for himself and his friend; or, in grave business, even for his friend first. But it is one of Scott's first principles of moral law that cunning never shall succeed, unless definitely employed _against an enemy_ by a person whose essential character is wholly frank and true; as by Roland against Lady Lochleven, or Mysie Happer against Dan of the Howlet-hirst; but consistent cunning in the character always fails: Scott allows no Ulyssean hero.

Therefore the cunning of Fairservice fails always, and totally; but that of Moniplies precisely according to the degree of its selfishness: wholly, in the affair of the petition--("I am sure I had a' the right and a' the risk," i. 73)--partially, in that of the carcanet. This he himself at last recognizes with complacency:--

"I think you might have left me," says Nigel in their parting scene (i. 286), "to act according to my own judgment."

"Mickle better not," answered Richie; "mickle better not. We are a' frail creatures, and can judge better for ilk ither than in our own cases. And for me--even myself--I have always observed myself to be much more prudential in what I have done in your lordship's behalf, than even in what I have been able to transact for my own interest--whilk last, I have, indeed, always postponed, as in duty I ought."

"I do believe thou hast," answered Lord Nigel, "having ever found thee true and faithful."

And his final success is entirely owing to his courage and fidelity, not to his cunning.

To this subtlety both the men join considerable power of penetration into the weaknesses of character; but Fairservice only sees the surface-failings, and has no respect for any kind of nobleness; while Richie watches the gradual lowering of his master's character and reputation with earnest sorrow.

"My lord," said Richie, "to be round with you, the grace of God is better than gold pieces, and, if they were my last words," he said, raising his voice, "I would say you are misled, and are forsaking the paths your honorable father trode in; and what is more, you are going--still under correction--to the devil with a dishclout, for ye are laughed at by them that lead you into these disordered bypaths" (i. 282).

116. In the third place, note that the penetration of Moniplies,--though, as aforesaid, more into faults than virtues,--being yet founded on the truth of his own nature, is undeceivable. No rogue can escape him for an instant; and he sees through all the machinations of Lord Glenvarloch's enemies from the first; while Fairservice, shrewd enough in detecting the follies of good people, is quite helpless before knaves, and is deceived three times over by his own chosen friends--first by the lawyer's clerk, Touthope (ii. 21), then by the hypocrite MacVittie, and finally by his true blue Presbyterian friend Laurie.

In these first elements of character the men are thus broadly distinguished; but in the next, requiring analysis, the differences are much more subtle. Both of them have, in nearly equal degree, the peculiar love of doing or saying what is provoking, by an exact contrariety to the wishes of the person they are dealing with, which is a fault inherent in the rough side of uneducated Scottish character; but in Andrew, the habit is checked by his self-interest, so that it is only behind his master's back that we hear his opinion of him; and only when he has lost his temper that the inherent provocativeness comes out--(see the dark ride into Scotland).

On the contrary, Moniplies never speaks but in praise of his _absent_ master; but exults in mortifying him in direct colloquy: yet never indulges this amiable disposition except with a really kind purpose, and entirely knowing what he is about. Fairservice, on the other hand, gradually falls into an unconscious fatality of varied blunder and provocation; and at last causes the entire catastrophe of the story by bringing in the candles when he has been ordered to stay downstairs.

117. We have next to remember that with Scott, Truth and Courage are one. He somewhat overvalued _animal_ courage--holding it the basis of all other virtue--in his own words, "Without courage there can be no truth, and without truth no virtue." He would, however, sometimes allow his villains to possess the basis, without the super-structure, and thus Rashleigh, Dalgarno, Balfour, Varney, and other men of that stamp are to be carefully distinguished from his erring _heroes_, Marmion, Bertram, Christie of the Clinthill, or Nanty Ewart, in whom loyalty is always the real strength of the character, and the faults of life are owing to temporary passion or evil fate. Scott differs in this standard of heroism materially from Byron,[104] in whose eyes mere courage, with strong affections, are enough for admiration: while Bertram, and even Marmion, though loyal to his country, are meant only to be pitied--not honored. But neither Scott nor Byron will ever allow any grain of mercy to a coward; and the final difference, therefore, between Fairservice and Moniplies, which decides their fate in Scott's hands, is that between their courage and cowardice. Fairservice is driven out at the kitchen door, never to be heard of more, while Richie rises into Sir Richie of Castle-Collop--the reader may perhaps at the moment think by too careless grace on the King's part; which, indeed, Scott in some measure meant;--but the grotesqueness and often evasiveness of Richie's common manner make us forget how surely his bitter word is backed by his ready blow, when need is. His first introduction to us (i. 33), is because his quick temper overcomes his caution,--

"I thought to mysel', 'Ye are owre mony for me to mell with; but let me catch ye in Barford's Park, or at the fit of the vennel, I could gar some of ye sing another sang.' Sae, ae auld hirpling deevil of a potter behoved just to step in my way and offer me a pig, as he said, just to pit my Scotch ointment in, and _I gave him a push, as but natural_, and the tottering deevil couped owre amang his ain pigs, and damaged a score of them. And then the reird[105] raise"--

while in the close of the events (ii. 365), he wins his wife by a piece of hand-to-hand fighting, of the value of which his cool and stern estimate, in answer to the gay Templar, is one of the great sentences marking Scott's undercurrent of two feelings about war, in spite of his love of its heroism.

"Bravo, Richie," cried Lowestoffe, "why, man, there lies Sin struck down like an ox, and Iniquity's throat cut like a calf."

"I know not why you should upbraid me with my upbringing, Master Lowestoffe," answered Richie, with great composure; "but I can tell you, the shambles is not a bad place for training one to this work."

118. These then being the radical conditions of native character in the two men, wholly irrespective of their religious persuasion, we have to note what form their Presbyterian faith takes in each, and what effect it has on their consciences.

In Richie, it has little to do; his conscience being, in the deep of it, frank and clear. His religion commands him nothing which he is not at once ready to do, or has not habitually done; and it forbids him nothing which he is unwilling to forego. He pleads no pardon from it for known faults; he seeks no evasions in the letter of it for violations of its spirit. We are scarcely therefore aware of its vital power in him, unless at moments of very grave feeling and its necessary expression.

"Wherefore, as the letter will not avail you with him to whom it is directed, you may believe that Heaven hath sent it to _me_, who have a special regard for the writer--have besides, as much mercy and honesty within me as man can weel mak' his bread with, and am willing to aid any distressed creature, that is my friend's friend."

So, again, in the deep feeling which rebukes his master's careless ruin of the poor apprentice--

"I say, then, as I am a true man, when I saw that puir creature come through the ha' at that ordinary, whilk is accurst (Heaven forgive me for swearing) of God and man, with his teeth set, and his hands clenched, and his bonnet drawn over his brows...." He stopped a moment, and looked fixedly in his master's face.

--and again in saving the poor lad himself when he takes the street to his last destruction "with burning heart and bloodshot eye":

"Why do you stop my way?" he said fiercely.

"Because it is a bad one, Master Jenkin," said Richie.

"Nay, never start about it, man; you see you are known. Alack-a-day! that an honest man's son should live to start at hearing himself called by his own name."

"I pray you in good fashion to let me go," said Jenkin. "I am in the humor to be dangerous to myself, or to anyone."

"I will abide the risk," said the Scot, "if you will but come with me. You are the very lad in the world whom I most wish to meet."[106]

"And you," answered Vincent, "or any of your beggarly countrymen, are the last sight I should ever wish to see. You Scots are ever fair and false."

"As to our poverty, friend," replied Richie, "that is as Heaven pleases; but touching our falsity, I'll prove to you that a Scotsman bears as leal and true a heart to his friend as ever beat in an English doublet."

119. In these, and other such passages, it will be felt that I have done Richie some injustice in classing him among the religionists who have little sympathy! For all real distress, his compassion is instant; but his doctrinal religion becomes immediately to him a cause of failure in charity.

"Yon divine has another air from powerful Master Rollock, and Mess David Black of North Leith, and sic like. Alack-a-day, wha can ken, if it please your lordship, whether sic prayers as the Southrons read out of their auld blethering black mess-book there, may not be as powerful to invite fiends, as a right red-het prayer warm from the heart may be powerful to drive them away; even as the evil spirit was driven by the smell of the fish's liver from the bridal chamber of Sara, the daughter of Raguel!"

The scene in which this speech occurs is one of Scott's most finished pieces, showing with supreme art how far the weakness of Richie's superstitious formality is increased by his being at the time partially drunk!

It is on the other hand to be noted to his credit, for an earnest and searching Bible-reader, that he quotes the Apocrypha. Not so gifted Gilfillan,--

"But if your honor wad consider the case of Tobit--!"

"Tobit!" exclaimed Gilfillan with great heat; "Tobit and his dog baith are altogether heathenish and apocryphal, and none but a prelatist or a papist would draw them into question. I doubt I hae been mista'en in you, friend."

Gilfillan and Fairservice are exactly alike, and both are distinguished from Moniplies in their scornfully exclusive dogmatism, which is indeed the distinctive plague-spot of the lower evangelical sect everywhere, and the worst blight of the narrow natures, capable of its zealous profession. In Blattergowl, on the contrary, as his name implies, the _doctrinal_ teaching has become mere Blather, Blatter, or patter--a string of commonplaces spoken habitually in performance of his clerical function, but with no personal or sectarian interest in them on his part.

"He said fine things on the duty o' resignation to the will of God--that did he"; but his own mind is fixed under ordinary circumstances only on the income and privilege of his position. Scott however indicates this without severity as one of the weaknesses of an established church, to the general principle of which, as to all other established and monarchic law, he is wholly submissive, and usually affectionate (see the description of Colonel Mannering's Edinburgh Sunday), so that Blattergowl, _out of the pulpit_, does not fail in his serious pastoral duty, but gives real comfort by his presence and exhortation in the cottage of the Mucklebackits.

On the other hand, to all kinds of Independents and Nonconformists (unless of Roderick Dhu type) Scott is adverse with all his powers; and accordingly, Andrew and Gilfillan are much more sternly and scornfully drawn than Blattergowl.

120. In all the three, however, the reader must not for an instant suspect what is commonly called "hypocrisy." Their religion is no assumed mask or advanced pretense. It is in all a confirmed and intimate faith, mischievous by its error, in proportion to its sincerity (compare "Ariadne Florentina," paragraph 87), and although by his cowardice, petty larceny,[107] and low cunning, Fairservice is absolutely separated into a different class of men from Moniplies--in his fixed religious principle and primary conception of moral conduct, he is exactly like him. Thus when, in an agony of terror, he speaks for once to his master with entire sincerity, one might for a moment think it was a lecture by Moniplies to Nigel.

"O, Maister Frank, a' your uncle's follies and your cousin's fliskies, were nothing to this! Drink clean cap-out, like Sir Hildebrand; begin the blessed morning with brandy-taps like Squire Percy; rin wud among the lasses like Squire John; gamble like Richard; win souls to the Pope and the deevil, like Rashleigh; rive, rant, _break the Sabbath_, and do the Pope's bidding, like them a' put thegither--but merciful Providence! tak' care o' your young bluid, and gang na near Rob Roy."

I said, one might for a moment think it was a Moniplies' lecture to Nigel. But not for two moments, if we indeed can think at all. We could not find a passage more concentrated in expression of Andrew's total character; nor more characteristic of Scott in the calculated precision and deliberate appliance of every word.

121. Observe first, Richie's rebuke, quoted above, fastens Nigel's mind instantly on the _nobleness_ of his father. But Andrew's to Frank fastens as instantly on the _follies_ of his uncle and cousins.

Secondly, the sum of Andrew's lesson is--"do anything that is rascally, if only you save your skin." But Richie's is summed in "the grace of God is better than gold pieces."

Thirdly, Richie takes little note of creeds, except when he is drunk, but looks to conduct always; while Andrew clinches his catalogue of wrong with "doing the Pope's bidding" and Sabbath-breaking; these definitions of the unpardonable being the worst absurdity of all Scotch wickedness to this hour--everything being forgiven to people who go to church on Sunday, and curse the Pope. Scott never loses sight of this marvelous plague-spot of Presbyterian religion, and the last words of Andrew Fairservice are:--

"The villain Laurie! to betray an auld friend that sang aff the same psalm-book wi' him _every Sabbath_ for twenty years,"

and the tragedy of these last words of his, and of his expulsion from his former happy home--"a jargonelle pear-tree at one end of the cottage, a rivulet and flower plot of a rood in extent in front, a kitchen garden behind, and a paddock for a cow" (viii. 6, of the 1830 edition) can only be understood by the reading of the chapter he quotes on that last Sabbath evening he passes in it--the 5th of Nehemiah.

122. For--and I must again and again point out this to the modern reader, who, living in a world of affectation, suspects "hypocrisy" in every creature he sees--the very plague of this lower evangelical piety is that it is _not_ hypocrisy; that Andrew and Laurie _do_ both expect to get the grace of God by singing psalms on Sunday, whatever rascality they practice during the week. In the modern popular drama of "School,"[108] the only religious figure is a dirty and malicious usher who appears first reading Hervey's "Meditations," and throws away the book as soon as he is out of sight of the company. But when Andrew is found by Frank "perched up like a statue by a range of beehives in an attitude of devout contemplation, with one eye watching the motions of the little irritable citizens, and the other fixed on a book of devotion," you will please observe, suspicious reader, that the devout gardener has no expectation whatever of Frank's approach, nor has he any design upon him, nor is he reading or attitudinizing for effect of any kind on any person. He is following his own ordinary customs, and his book of devotion has been already so well used that "much attrition had deprived it of its corners, and worn it into an oval shape"; its attractiveness to Andrew being twofold--the first, that it contains doctrine to his mind; the second, that such sound doctrine is set forth under figures properly belonging to his craft. "I was e'en taking a spell o' worthy Mess John Quackleben's 'Flower of a Sweet Savour sown on the Middenstead of this World'" (note in passing Scott's easy, instant, exquisite invention of the name of author and title of book); and it is a question of very curious interest how far these sweet "spells" in Quackleben, and the like religious exercises of a nature compatible with worldly business (compare Luckie Macleary, "with eyes employed on Boston's 'Crook in the Lot,' while her ideas were engaged in summing up the reckoning"--Waverley, i. 112)--do indeed modify in Scotland the national character for the better or the worse; or, not materially altering, do at least solemnize and confirm it in what good it may be capable of. My own Scottish nurse described in "Fors Clavigera" for April, 1873, would, I doubt not, have been as faithful and affectionate without her little library of Puritan theology; nor were her minor faults, so far as I could see, abated by its exhortations; but I cannot but believe that her uncomplaining endurance of most painful disease, and steadiness of temper under not unfrequent misapprehension by those whom she best loved and served, were in great degree aided by so much of Christian faith and hope as she had succeeded in obtaining, with little talk about it.

123. I knew however in my earlier days a right old Covenanter in my Scottish aunt's house, of whom, with Mause Hedrigg and David Deans, I may be able perhaps to speak further in my next paper.[109] But I can only now write carefully of what bears on my immediate work: and must ask the reader's indulgence for the hasty throwing together of materials intended, before my illness last spring, to have been far more thoroughly handled. The friends who are fearful for my reputation as an "écrivain" will perhaps kindly recollect that a sentence of "Modern Painters" was often written four or five times over in my own hand, and tried in every word for perhaps an hour--perhaps a forenoon--before it was passed for the printer. I rarely now fix my mind on a sentence, or a thought, for five minutes in the quiet of morning, but a telegram comes announcing that somebody or other will do themselves the pleasure of calling at eleven o'clock, and that there's two shillings to pay.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 98: October 1881.]

[Footnote 99: "Jean François Millet." Twenty Etching's and Woodcuts reproduced in Facsimile, and Biographical Notice by William Ernest Henley. London, 1881.]

[Footnote 100: I am sorry to find that my former allusion to the boating expedition in this novel has been misconstrued by a young authoress of promise into disparagement of her own work; not supposing it possible that I could only have been forced to look at George Eliot's by a friend's imperfect account of it.]

[Footnote 101: I am ashamed to exemplify the miserable work of "review" by mangling and mumbling this noble closing chapter of the "Monastery," but I cannot show the web of work without unweaving it.]

[Footnote 102: With ludicrously fatal retouch in the later edition "was deprived of" his sword.]

[Footnote 103: Again I am obliged, by review necessity, to omit half the points of the scene.]

[Footnote 104: I must deeply and earnestly express my thanks to my friend Mr. Hale White for his vindication of Goethe's real opinion of Byron from the mangled representation of it by Mr. Matthew Arnold (_Contemporary Review_, August, 1881).]

[Footnote 105: "Reirde, rerde, Anglo-Saxon reord, lingua, sermo, clamor, shouting" (Douglas glossary). No Scottish sentence in the Scott novels should be passed without examining every word in it, his dialect, as already noticed, being always pure and classic in the highest degree, and his meaning always the fuller, the further it is traced.]

[Footnote 106: The reader must observe that in quoting Scott for illustration of particular points I am obliged sometimes to alter the succession and omit much of the context of the pieces I want, for Scott never lets you see his hand, nor get at his points without remembering and comparing far-away pieces carefully. To collect the evidence of any one phase of character, is like pulling up the detached roots of a creeper.]

[Footnote 107: Note the "wee business of my ain," i. 213.]

[Footnote 108: Its "hero" is a tall youth with handsome calves to his legs, who shoots a bull with a fowling-piece, eats a large lunch, thinks it witty to call Othello a "nigger," and, having nothing to live on, and being capable of doing nothing for his living, establishes himself in lunches and cigars forever, by marrying a girl with a fortune. The heroine is an amiable governess, who, for the general encouragement of virtue in governesses, is rewarded by marrying a lord.]

[Footnote 109: The present paper was, however, the last.--ED.]

FAIRY STORIES.[110]

124. Long since, longer ago than the opening of some fairy tales, I was asked by the publisher who has been rash enough, at my request, to reprint these my favorite old stories in their earliest English form, to set down for him my reasons for preferring them to the more polished legends, moral and satiric, which are now, with rich adornment of every page by very admirable art, presented to the acceptance of the Nursery.

But it seemed to me to matter so little to the majestic independence of the child-public, who, beside themselves, liked, or who disliked, what they pronounced entertaining, that it is only on strict claims of a promise unwarily given that I venture on the impertinence of eulogy; and my reluctance is the greater, because there is in fact nothing very notable in these tales, unless it be their freedom from faults which for some time have been held to be quite the reverse of faults by the majority of readers.

125. In the best stories recently written for the young, there is a taint which it is not easy to define, but which inevitably follows on the author's addressing himself to children bred in schoolrooms and drawing-rooms, instead of fields and woods--children whose favorite amusements are premature imitations of the vanities of elder people, and whose conceptions of beauty are dependent partly on costliness of dress. The fairies who interfere in the fortunes of these little ones are apt to be resplendent chiefly in millinery and satin slippers, and appalling more by their airs than their enchantments.

The fine satire which, gleaming through every playful word, renders some of these recent stories as attractive to the old as to the young, seems to me no less to unfit them for their proper function. Children should laugh, but not mock; and when they laugh, it should not be at the weaknesses and the faults of others. They should be taught, as far as they are permitted to concern themselves with the characters of those around them, to seek faithfully for good, not to lie in wait maliciously to make themselves merry with evil: they should be too painfully sensitive to wrong to smile at it; and too modest to constitute themselves its judges.

126. With these minor errors a far graver one is involved. As the simplicity of the sense of beauty has been lost in recent tales for children, so also the simplicity of their conception of love. That word which, in the heart of a child, should represent the most constant and vital part of its being; which ought to be the sign of the most solemn thoughts that inform its awakening soul and, in one wide mystery of pure sunrise, should flood the zenith of its heaven, and gleam on the dew at its feet; this word, which should be consecrated on its lips, together with the Name which it may not take in vain, and whose meaning should soften and animate every emotion through which the inferior things and the feeble creatures, set beneath it in its narrow world, are revealed to its curiosity or companionship; this word, in modern child-story, is too often restrained and darkened into the hieroglyph of an evil mystery, troubling the sweet peace of youth with premature gleams of uncomprehended passion, and flitting shadows of unrecognized sin.

These great faults in the spirit of recent child-fiction are connected with a parallel folly of purpose. Parents who are too indolent and self-indulgent to form their children's characters by wholesome discipline, or in their own habits and principles of life are conscious of setting before them no faultless example, vainly endeavor to substitute the persuasive influence of moral precept, intruded in the guise of amusement, for the strength of moral habit compelled by righteous authority:--vainly think to inform the heart of infancy with deliberative wisdom, while they abdicate the guardianship of its unquestioning innocence; and warp into the agonies of an immature philosophy of conscience the once fearless strength of its unsullied and unhesitating virtue.

127. A child should not need to choose between right and wrong. It should not be capable of wrong; it should not conceive of wrong. Obedient, as bark to helm, not by sudden strain or effort, but in the freedom of its bright course of constant life; true, with an undistinguished, praiseless, unboastful truth, in a crystalline household world of truth; gentle, through daily entreatings of gentleness, and honorable trusts, and pretty prides of child-fellowship in offices of good; strong, not in bitter and doubtful contest with temptation, but in peace of heart, and armor of habitual right, from which temptation falls like thawing hail; self-commanding, not in sick restraint of mean appetites and covetous thoughts, but in vital joy of unluxurious life, and contentment in narrow possession, wisely esteemed.

Children so trained have no need of moral fairy tales; but they will find in the apparently vain and fitful courses of any tradition of old time, honestly delivered to them, a teaching for which no other can be substituted, and of which the power cannot be measured; animating for them the material world with inextinguishable life, fortifying them against the glacial cold of selfish science, and preparing them submissively, and with no bitterness of astonishment, to behold, in later years, the mystery--divinely appointed to remain such to all human thought--of the fates that happen alike to the evil and the good.

128. And the effect of the endeavor to make stories moral upon the literary merit of the work itself, is as harmful as the motive of the effort is false. For every fairy tale worth recording at all is the remnant of a tradition possessing true historical value;--historical, at least in so far as it has naturally arisen out of the mind of a people under special circumstances, and risen not without meaning, nor removed altogether from their sphere of religious faith. It sustains afterwards natural changes from the sincere action of the fear or fancy of successive generations; it takes new color from their manner of life, and new form from their changing moral tempers. As long as these changes are natural and effortless, accidental and inevitable, the story remains essentially true, altering its form, indeed, like a flying cloud, but remaining a sign of the sky; a shadowy image, as truly a part of the great firmament of the human mind as the light of reason which it seems to interrupt. But the fair deceit and innocent error of it cannot be interpreted nor restrained by a willful purpose, and all additions to it by act do but defile, as the shepherd disturbs the flakes of morning mist with smoke from his fire of dead leaves.

129. There is also a deeper collateral mischief in this indulgence of licentious change and retouching of stories to suit particular tastes, or inculcate favorite doctrines. It directly destroys the child's power of rendering any such belief as it would otherwise have been in his nature to give to an imaginative vision. How far it is expedient to occupy his mind with ideal forms at all may be questionable to many, though not to me; but it is quite beyond question that if we do allow of the fictitious representation, that representation should be calm and complete, possessed to the full, and read down its utmost depth. The little reader's attention should never be confused or disturbed, whether he is possessing himself of fairy tale or history. Let him know his fairy tale accurately, and have perfect joy or awe in the conception of it as if it were real; thus he will always be exercising his power of grasping realities: but a confused, careless, or discrediting tenure of the fiction will lead to as confused and careless reading of fact. Let the circumstances of both be strictly perceived and long dwelt upon, and let the child's own mind develop fruit of thought from both. It is of the greatest importance early to secure this habit of contemplation, and therefore it is a grave error, either to multiply unnecessarily, or to illustrate with extravagant richness, the incidents presented to the imagination. It should multiply and illustrate them for itself; and, if the intellect is of any real value, there will be a mystery and wonderfulness in its own dreams which would only be thwarted by external illustration. Yet I do not bring forward the text or the etchings in this volume as examples of what either ought to be in works of the kind: they are in many respects common, imperfect, vulgar; but their vulgarity is of a wholesome and harmless kind. It is not, for instance, graceful English, to say that a thought "popped into Catherine's head"; but it nevertheless is far better, as an initiation into literary style, that a child should be told this than that "a subject attracted Catherine's attention." And in genuine forms of minor tradition, a rude and more or less illiterate tone will always be discernible; for all the best fairy tales have owed their birth, and the greater part of their power, to narrowness of social circumstances; they belonged properly to districts in which walled cities are surrounded by bright and unblemished country, and in which a healthy and bustling town life, not highly refined, is relieved by, and contrasted with, the calm enchantment of pastoral and woodland scenery, either under humble cultivation by peasant masters, or left in its natural solitude. Under conditions of this kind the imagination is enough excited to invent instinctively (and rejoice in the invention of) spiritual forms of wildness and beauty, while yet it is restrained and made cheerful by the familiar accidents and relations of town life, mingling always in its fancy humorous and vulgar circumstances with pathetic ones, and never so much impressed with its supernatural fantasies as to be in danger of retaining them as any part of its religious faith. The good spirit descends gradually from an angel into a fairy, and the demon shrinks into a playful grotesque of diminutive malevolence, while yet both keep an accredited and vital influence upon the character and mind. But the language in which such ideas will be usually clothed, must necessarily partake of their narrowness; and art is systematically incognizant of them, having only strength under the conditions which awake them to express itself in an irregular and gross grotesque, fit only for external architectural decoration.

130. The illustrations of this volume are almost the only exceptions I know to the general rule. They are of quite sterling and admirable art, in a class precisely parallel in elevation to the character of the tales which they illustrate; and the original etchings, as I have before said in the Appendix to my "Elements of Drawing," were quite unrivaled in masterfulness of touch since Rembrandt (in some qualities of delineation unrivaled even by him). These copies have been so carefully executed, that at first I was deceived by them, and supposed them to be late impressions from the plates (and what is more, I believe the master himself was deceived by them, and supposed them to be his own); and although on careful comparison with the first proofs they will be found no exception to the terrible law that literal repetition of entirely fine work shall be, even to the hand that produced it,--much more to any other,--forever impossible, they still represent, with sufficient fidelity to be in the highest degree instructive, the harmonious light and shade, the manly simplicity of execution, and the easy, unincumbered fancy, of designs which belonged to the best period of Cruikshank's genius. To make somewhat enlarged copies of them, looking at them through a magnifying glass, and never putting two lines where Cruikshank has put only one, would be an exercise in decision and severe drawing which would leave afterwards little to be learnt in schools, I would gladly also say much in their praise as imaginative designs; but the power of genuine imaginative work, and its difference from that which is compounded and patched together from borrowed sources, is of all qualities of art the most difficult to explain; and I must be content with the simple assertions of it.

And so I trust the good old book, and the honest work that adorns it, to such favor as they may find with children of open hearts and lowly lives.

DENMARK HILL, _Easter_, 1868.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 110: This paper forms the introduction to a volume entitled "German Popular Stories, with Illustrations after the original designs of George Cruikshank, edited by Edgar Taylor, with Introduction by John Ruskin, M.A." London: Chatto and Windus, 1868. The book is a reprint of Mr. Edgar Taylor's original (1823) selections of the "Hausmärchen," or "German Popular Stories" of the Brothers Grimm. The original selections were in two octavo volumes; the reprint in one of smaller size, it being (the publisher states in his preface) "Mr. Ruskin's wish that the new edition should appeal to young readers rather than to adults."--ED.]

* * * * *

ECONOMY.

HOME, AND ITS ECONOMIES.

(_Contemporary Review, May_ 1873.)

USURY. A REPLY AND A REJOINDER.

(_Contemporary Review, February_ 1880.)

USURY. A PREFACE.

(_Pamphlet_, 1885.)

* * * * *

HOME, AND ITS ECONOMIES.[111]

131. In the March number of the _Contemporary Review_ appeared two papers,[112] by writers of reputation, which I cannot but hope their authors will perceive upon reflection to have involved errors only the more grave in that they have become, of late, in the minds of nearly all public men, facile and familiar. I have, therefore, requested the editor's permission to offer some reply to both of these essays, their subjects being intimately connected.

The first of which I speak was Mr. Herbert Spencer's, which appeared under the title of "The Bias of Patriotism." But the real subject of the paper (discussed in its special extent, with singular care and equity) was only the bias of National vanity; and the debate was opened by this very curious sentence,--"Patriotism is nationally, that which Egoism is individually."

Mr. Spencer would not, I think, himself accept this statement, if put into the clear form, "What is Egoism in one man, is Patriotism in two or more, and the vice of an individual, the virtue of a multitude."[113] But it is strange,--however strictly Mr. Spencer may of late have confined his attention to metaphysical or scientific subjects, disregarding the language of historical or imaginative literature--it is strange, I repeat, that so careful a student should be unaware that the term "patriotism" cannot, in classical usage, be extended to the action of a multitude. No writer of authority ever speaks of a nation as having felt, or acted, patriotically. Patriotism is, by definition, a virtue of individuals; and so far from being in those individuals a mode of egoism, it is precisely in the sacrifice of their egoism that it consists. It is the temper of mind which determines them to defer their own interests to those of their country.

132. Supposing it possible for any parallel sentiment to animate a nation as one body, it could have reference only to the position it held among other families of the world. The name of the emotion would then be properly "Cosmism," and would signify the resolution of such a people to sacrifice its own special interests to those of Mankind. Cosmism hitherto has indeed generally asserted itself only in the desire of the Cosmic nation that all others should adopt its theological opinions, and permit it to adopt their personal property; but Patriotism has truly existed, and even as a dominant feeling, in the minds of many persons who have been greatly influential on the fates of their races, and that one of our leading philosophers should be unconscious of the nature of this sentiment, and ignorant of its political power, is to be noted as painfully characteristic of the present state of England itself.

It does not indeed follow that a feeling of which we are unaware is necessarily extinguished in us; and the faculties of perception and analysis are always so paralyzed by the lingual ingenuities of logic that it is impossible to say, of any professed logician, whether he may not yet be acting under the real force of ideas of which he has lost both the consciousness and conception. No man who has once entangled himself in what Mr. Spencer defines, farther on, as the "science of the relations implied by the conclusions, exclusions, and overlappings of classes," can be expected during the rest of his life to perceive more of any one thing than that it is included, excluded, or overlapped by something else; which is in itself a sufficiently confused state of mind, and especially harmful in that it permits us to avoid considering whether our intellectual linen is itself clean, while we concern ourselves only to ascertain whether it is included, excluded, or overlapped by our coat collar. But it is a grave phenomenon of the time that patriotism--of all others--should be the sentiment which an English logician is not only unable to define, but attempts to define as its precise contrary. In every epoch of decline, men even of high intellectual energy have been swept down in the diluvium of public life, and the crystalline edges of their minds worn away by friction with blunted ones; but I had not believed that the whole weight of the depraved mob of modern England, though they have become incapable alike of fidelity to their own country, and alliance with any other, could so far have perplexed one of our exactest students as to make him confuse heroism with conceit, and the loves of country and of home with the iniquities of selfishness. Can it be only a quarter of a century since the Last Minstrel died--and have we already answered his "Lives there a man?" with the calm assertion that there live no other than such; and that the "wretch concentered all in self "is the "Patriot" of our generation?

133. Be it so. Let it even be admitted that egoism is the only power conceivable by a modern metaphysician to be the spring of mental energy; just as chemical excitement may be the only power traceable by the modern physician as the source of muscular energy. And still Mr. Spencer's subsequent analysis is inaccurate, and unscholarly. For egoism does not necessarily imply either misapprehension or mismeasurement. There are modes of the love of our country which are definitely selfish, as a cat's of the hearthrug, yet entirely balanced and calm in judicial faculty; passions which determine conduct, but have no influence on opinion. For instance, I have bought for my own exclusive gratification, the cottage in which I am writing, near the lake-beach on which I used to play when I was seven years old. Were I a public-spirited scientific person, or a benevolently pious one, I should doubtless, instead, be surveying the geographical relations of the Mountains of the Moon, or translating the Athanasian Creed into Tartar-Chinese. But I hate the very name of the public, and labor under no oppressive anxiety either for the advancement of science, or the salvation of mankind. I therefore prefer amusing myself with the lake-pebbles, of which I know nothing but that they are pretty; and conversing with people whom I can understand without pains, and who, so far from needing to be converted, seem to me on the whole better than myself. This is moral egoism, but it is not intellectual error. I never form, much less express, any opinion as to the relative beauties of Yewdale crag and the Mountains of the Moon; nor do I please myself by contemplating, in any exaggerated light, the spiritual advantages which I possess in my familiarity with the Thirty-nine Articles. I know the height of my neighboring mountains to a foot; and the extent of my real possessions, theological and material, to an article. Patriotic egoism attaches me to the one; personal egoism satisfies me in the other; and the calm selfishness with which Nature has blessed all her unphilosophical creatures, blinds me to the attractions--as to the faults--of things with which I have no concern, and saves me at once from the folly of contempt, and the discomfort of envy. I might have written, as accurately, "The discomfort of contempt"; for indeed the forms of petulant rivalry and self-assertion which Mr. Spencer assumes to be developments of egoism, are merely its diseases; (taking the word "disease" in its most literal meaning). A man of sense is more an egoist in modesty than a blockhead is in boasting; and it is neither pride nor self-respect, but only ignorance and ill-breeding, that either disguise the facts of life, or violate its courtesies.

134. It will not, I trust, be thought violation of courtesy to a writer of Mr. Spencer's extending influence, if I urge on his attention the danger under which metaphysicians are always placed of supposing that the investigation of the processes of thought will enable them to distinguish its forms. 'As well might the chemist, who had exhaustively examined the conditions of vitreous fusion, imagine himself therefore qualified to number or class the vases bent by the breath of Venice. Mr. Spencer has determined, I believe, to the satisfaction of his readers, in what manner thoughts and feelings are constructed; it is time for him now to observe the results of the construction, whether native to his own mind, or discoverable in other intellectual territories. Patriotism is, however, perhaps the last emotion he can now conveniently study in England, for the temper which crowns the joy of life with the sweetness and decorum of death can scarcely be manifested clearly in a country which is fast rendering herself one whose peace is pollution, and whose battle, crime; within whose confines it is loathsome to live, and in whose cause it is disgraceful to die.

135. The chief causes of her degradation were defended, with delicate apology, in the second paper to which I have above referred; the modification by Mr. W. R. Greg of a letter which he had addressed, on the subject of luxurious expenditure and its economical results, to the _Pall Mall Gazette_; and which Mr. Greg states to have given rise in that journal to a controversy in which four or five combatants took part, the looseness of whose notions induced him to express his own more coherent ones in the _Contemporary Review_.[114]

I am sorry to find that Mr. Greg looked upon my own poor part in that correspondence as controversial. I merely asked him a question which he declared to be insidious and irrelevant (not considering that if it were the one, it could not be the other), and I stated a few facts respecting which no controversy was possible, and which Mr. Greg, in his own terms, "sedulously abstained" from noticing.

But Mr. Greg felt my question to be insidious because it made him partly conscious that he had only examined one half of the subject he was discussing, and even that half without precision.

Mr. Goldwin Smith had spoken of a rich man as consuming the means of living of the poor. Mr. Greg, in reply, pointed out how beneficially the rich man spent what he had got. Upon which I ventured to inquire "how he got it"; which is indeed precisely the first of all questions to be asked when the economical relations of any man with his neighbor are to be examined.

Dick Turpin is blamed--suppose--by some plain-minded person for consuming the means of other people's living. "Nay," says Dick to the plain-minded person, "observe how beneficently and pleasantly I spend whatever I get!"

"Yes, Dick," persists the plain-minded person; "but how do you get it?"

"The question," says Dick, "is insidious and irrelevant."

Do not let it be supposed that I mean to assert any irregularity or impropriety in Dick's profession--I merely assert the necessity for Mr. Greg's examination, if he would be master of his subject, of the manner of Gain in every case, as well as the manner of Expenditure. Such accounts must always be accurately rendered in a well-regulated society.

136. "Le lieutenant adressa la parole au capitaine, et lui dit qu'il venait d'enlever ces mannequins, remplis de sucre, de cannelle, d'amandes, et de raisins sees, à un épicier de Bénavente. Après qu'il eut rendu compte de son expédition au bureau, les dépouilles de l'épicier furent portées dans l'office. Alors il ne fut plus question que de se réjouir; je débutai par le buffet, que je parai de plusieurs bouteilles de ce bon vin que le Seigneur Rolando m'avoit vanté."

Mr. Greg strictly confines himself to an examination of the benefits conferred on the public by this so agreeable festivity; but he must not be surprised or indignant that some inquiry should be made as to the resulting condition of the épicier de Bénavente.

And it is all the more necessary that such inquiry be instituted when the captain of the expedition is a minion, not of the moon, but of the sun; and dazzling, therefore, to all beholders. "It is heaven which dictates what I ought to do upon this occasion,"[115] says Henry of Navarre; "my retreat out of this city,[116] before I have made myself master of it, will be the retreat of my soul out of my body." "Accordingly all the quarter which still held out, we forced," says M. de Rosny, "after which the inhabitants, finding themselves no longer able to resist, laid down their arms, and the city was given up to plunder. My good fortune threw a small iron chest in my way, in which I found about four thousand gold crowns."

I cannot doubt that the Baron's expenditure of this sum would be in the highest degree advantageous to France and to the Protestant religion. But complete economical science must study the effect of its abstraction on the immediate prosperity of the town of Cahors; and even beyond this--the mode of its former acquisition by the town itself, which perhaps, in the economies of the nether world, may have delegated some of its citizens to the seventh circle.[117]

137. And the most curious points in the partiality of modern economical science are that while it always waives this question of ways and means with respect to rich persons, it studiously pushes it in the case of poor ones; and while it asserts the consumption of such an article of luxury as wine (to take that which Mr. Greg himself instances) to be economically expedient, when the wine is drunk by persons who are not thirsty, it asserts the same consumption to be altogether inexpedient, when the privilege is extended to those who are. Thus Mr. Greg dismisses, in one place, with compassionate disdain, the extremely vulgar notion "that a man who drinks a bottle of champagne worth five shillings, while his neighbor is in want of actual food, is in some way wronging his neighbor"; and yet Mr. Greg himself, elsewhere,[118] evidently remains under the equally vulgar impression that the twenty-four millions of such thirstier persons who spend fifteen per cent of their incomes in drink and tobacco, are wronging their neighbors by that expenditure.

138. It cannot, surely, be the difference in degree of refinement between malt liquor and champagne which causes Mr. Greg's undefined sensation of moral delinquency and economical error in the one case, and of none in the other; if that be all, I can relieve him from his embarrassment by putting the cases in more parallel form. A clergyman writes to me, in distress of mind, because the able-bodied laborers who come begging to him in winter, drink port wine out of buckets in summer. Of course Mr. Greg's logical mind will at once admit (as a consequence of his own very just _argumentum ad hominem_ in a previous page[119]) that the consumption of port wine out of buckets must be as much a benefit to society in general as the consumption of champagne out of bottles; and yet, curiously enough, I am certain he will feel my question, "Where does the drinker get the means for his drinking?" more relevant in the case of the imbibers of port than in that of the imbibers of champagne. And although Mr. Greg proceeds, with that lofty contempt for the dictates of nature and Christianity which radical economists cannot but feel, to observe that "while the natural man and the Christian would have the champagne drinker forego his bottle, and give the value of it to the famishing wretch beside him, the radical economist would condemn such behavior as distinctly criminal and pernicious," he would scarcely, I think, carry out with the same triumphant confidence the conclusions of the unnatural man and the anti-christian, with respect to the laborer as well as the idler; and declare that while the extremely simple persons who still believe in the laws of nature, and the mercy of God, would have the port-drinker forego his bucket, and give the value of it to the famishing wife and child beside him, "the radical economist would condemn such behavior as distinctly criminal and pernicious."

Mr. Greg has it indeed in his power to reply that it is proper to economize for the sake of one's own wife and children, but not for the sake of anybody else's. But since, according to another exponent of the principles of Radical Economy, in the _Cornhill Magazine_,[120] a well-conducted agricultural laborer must not marry till he is forty-five, his economies, if any, in early life, must be as offensive to Mr. Greg on the score of their abstract humanity, as those of the richest bachelor about town.

139. There is another short sentence in this same page, of which it is difficult to overrate the accidental significance.

"The superficial observer," says Mr. Greg, "recollects a text which he heard in his youth, but of which he never considered the precise applicability--'He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none.'"

The assumptions that no educated Englishman can ever have heard that text except in his youth, and that those who are old enough to remember having heard it, "never considered its precise applicability," are surely rash, in the treatment of a scientific subject. I can assure Mr. Greg that a few gray-headed votaries of the creed of Christendom still read--though perhaps under their breath--the words which early associations have made precious to them; and that in the bygone days, when that Sermon on the Mount was still listened to with respect by many not illiterate persons, its meaning was not only considered, but very deliberately acted upon. Even the readers of the _Contemporary Review_ may perhaps have some pleasure in retreating from the sunshine of contemporary science, for a few quiet moments, into the shadows of that of the past, and hearing in the following extracts from two letters of Scott's (the first describing the manner of life of his mother, whose death it announces to a friend, the second, anticipating the verdict of the future on the management of his estate by a Scottish nobleman) what relations between rich and poor were possible, when philosophers had not yet even lisped in the sweet numbers of Radical Sociology.

* * * * *

140. "She was a strict economist, which she said, enabled her to be liberal; out of her little income of about £300 a year she bestowed at least a third in well-chosen charities, and with the rest, lived like a gentlewoman, and even with hospitality more general than seemed to suit her age; yet I could never prevail on her to accept of any assistance. You cannot conceive how affecting it was to me to see the little preparations of presents which she had assorted for the New Year, for she was a great observer of the old fashions of her period--and to think that the kind heart was cold which delighted in all these arts of kindly affection."

141. "The Duke is one of those retired and high-spirited men who will never be known until the world asks what became of the huge oak that grew on the brow of the hill, and sheltered such an extent of ground. During the late distress, though his own immense rents remained in arrears, and though I know he was pinched for money, as all men were, but more especially the possessors of entailed estates, he absented himself from London in order to pay, with ease to himself, the laborers employed on his various estates. These amounted (for I have often seen the roll and helped to check it) to nine hundred and fifty men, working at day wages, each of whom on a moderate average might maintain three persons, since the single men have mothers, sisters, and aged or very young relations to protect and assist. Indeed it is wonderful how much even a small sum, comparatively, will do in supporting the Scottish laborer, who in his natural state is perhaps one of the best, most intelligent, and kind-hearted of human beings; and in truth I have limited my other habits of expense very much since I fell into the habit of employing mine honest people. I wish you could have seen about a hundred children, being almost entirely supported by their fathers' or brothers' labor, come down yesterday to dance to the pipes, and get a piece of cake and bannock, and pence apiece (no very deadly largess) in honor of hogmanay. I declare to you, my dear friend, that when I thought the poor fellows, who kept these children so neat, and well taught, and well behaved, were slaving the whole day for eighteen pence or twenty pence at most, I was ashamed of their gratitude, and of their becks and bows. But after all, one does what one can, and it is better twenty families should be comfortable according to their wishes and habits, than that half that number should be raised above their situation."

* * * * *

142. I must pray Mr. Greg farther to observe, if he has condescended to glance at these remains of almost prehistoric thought, that although the modern philosopher will never have reason to blush for any man's gratitude, and has totally abandoned the romantic idea of making even so much as one family comfortable according to their wishes and habits, the alternative suggested by Scott, that half "the number should be raised above their situation" may become a very inconvenient one if the doctrines of Modern Equality and competition should render the other half desirous of parallel promotion.

143. It is now just sixteen years since Mr. Greg's present philosophy of Expenditure was expressed with great precision by the Common Councilmen of New York, in their report on the commercial crisis of 1857, in the following terms:--[121]

"Another erroneous idea is that luxurious living, extravagant dressing, splendid turn-outs and fine houses, are the cause of distress to a nation, No more erroneous impression could exist. Every extravagance that the man of 100.000 or 1,000,000 dollars indulges in, adds to the means, the support, the wealth of ten or a hundred who had little or nothing else but their labor, their intellect, or their taste. If a man of 1,000,000 dollars spends principal and interest in ten years, and finds himself beggared at the end of that time, he has actually made a hundred who have catered to his extravagance, employers or employed, so much richer by the division of his wealth. He may be ruined, but the nation is better off and richer, for one hundred minds and hands, with 10,000 dollars apiece, are far more productive than one with the whole."

Now that is precisely the view also taken of the matter by a large number of Radical Economists in England as well as America; only they feel that the time, however short, which the rich gentleman takes to divide his property among them in his own way, is practically wasted; and even worse, because the methods which the gentleman himself is likely to adopt for the depression of his fortune will not, in all probability, be conducive to the elevation of his character. It appears, therefore, on moral as well as economical grounds, desirable that the division and distribution should at once be summarily effected; and the only point still open to discussion in the views of the Common Councilmen is to what degree of minuteness they would think it advisable to carry the subsequent subdivision.

144. I do not suppose, however, that this is the conclusion which Mr. Greg is desirous that the general Anti-Christian public should adopt; and in that case, as I see by his paper in the last number of the _Contemporary_,[122] that he considers the Christian life itself virtually impossible, may I recommend his examination of the manners of the Pre-Christian? For I can certify him that this important subject, of which he has only himself imperfectly investigated one side, had been thoroughly investigated on all sides, at least seven hundred years before Christ; and from that day to this, all men of wit, sense, and feeling have held precisely the same views on the subjects of economy and charity, in all nations under the sun. It is of no consequence whether Mr. Greg chooses the experience of Boeotia, Lombardy, or Yorkshire, nor whether he studies the relation of work to-day or under Hesiod, Virgil, or Sydney Smith. But it is desirable that at least he should acquaint himself with the opinions of some such persons, as well as with those of the Common Councilmen of New York; for though a man of superior sagacity may be pardoned for thinking, with the friends of Job, that Wisdom will die with him, it can only be through neglect of the existing opportunities of general culture that he remains distinctly under the impression that she was born with him.

145. It may perhaps be well that in conclusion, I should state briefly the causes and terms of the economical crisis of our own day, which has been the subject of the debate between Mr. Goldwin Smith and Mr. Greg.

No man ever became, or can become, largely rich merely by labor and economy.[123] All large fortunes (putting treasure-trove and gambling out of consideration) are founded either on occupation of land, usury, or taxation of labor. Whether openly or occultly, the landlord, money-lender, and capitalist employer, gather into their possession a certain quantity of the means of existence which other people produce by the labor of their hands. The effect of this impost upon the condition of life of the tenant, borrower, and workman, is the first point to be studied;--the results, that is to say, of the mode in which Captain Roland fills his purse.

Secondly, we have to study the effects of the mode in which Captain Roland empties his purse. The landlord, usurer, or labor-master, does not, and cannot, himself consume all the means of life he collects. He gives them to other persons, whom he employs for his own behoof--growers of champagne, jockeys, footmen, jewelers, builders, painters, musicians, and the like. The division of the labor of these persons from the production of food to the production of articles of luxury is very frequently, and at the present day, very grievously the cause of famine. But when the luxuries are produced, it becomes a quite separate question who is to have them, and whether the landlord and capitalist are entirely to monopolize the music, the painting, the architecture, the hand-service, the horse-service, and the sparkling champagne of the world.

146. And it is gradually, in these days, becoming manifest to the tenants, borrowers, and laborers, that instead of paying these large sums into the hands of the landlords, lenders, and employers, for them to purchase music, painting, etc., with, the tenants, borrowers, and workers had better buy a little music and painting for themselves. That, for instance, instead of the capitalist-employer paying three hundred pounds for a full-length portrait of himself, in the attitude of investing his capital, the united workmen had better themselves pay the three hundred pounds into the hands of the ingenious artist, for a painting in the antiquated manner of Leonardo or Raphael, of some subject more religiously or historically interesting to them; and placed where they can always see it. And again instead of paying three hundred pounds to the obliging landlord, for him to buy a box at the opera with, whence to study the refinements of music and dancing, the tenants are beginning to think that they may as well keep their rents to themselves, and therewith pay some Wandering Willie to fiddle at their own doors, or bid some gray-haired minstrel

"Tune, to please a peasant's ear, The harp a king had loved to hear."

And similarly the dwellers in the hut of the field and garret of the city are beginning to think that instead of paying half a crown for the loan of half a fire-place, they had better keep their half-crown in their pockets till they can buy for themselves a whole one.

147. These are the views which are gaining ground among the poor; and it is entirely vain to endeavor to repress them by equivocations. They are founded on eternal laws; and although their recognition will long be refused, and their promulgation, resisted as it will be, partly by force, partly by falsehood, can only be through incalculable confusion and misery, recognized they must be eventually; and with these three ultimate results:--that the usurer's trade will be abolished utterly,--that the employer will be paid justly for his superintendence of labor, but not for his capital, and the landlord paid for his superintendence of the cultivation of land, when he is able to direct it wisely: that both he, and the employer of mechanical labor, will be recognized as beloved masters, if they deserve love, and as noble guides when they are capable of giving discreet guidance; but neither will be permitted to establish themselves any more as senseless conduits through which the strength and riches of their native land are to be poured into the cup of the fornication of its capital.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 111: _Contemporary Review_, May 1873.]

[Footnote 112: These were, first, Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Bias of Patriotism," being the ninth chapter of his "Study of Sociology," first published in the _Contemporary Review_; and, secondly, Mr. W. R. Greg's "What is culpable luxury?" See below, p. 303, § 135.--ED.]

[Footnote 113: I take due note that Mr. Spencer partly means by his adverbial sentence that Patriotism is individual Egoism, expecting its own central benefit through the Nation's circumferent benefit, as through a funnel: but, throughout, Mr. Spencer confuses this sentiment, which he calls "reflex egoism," with the action of "corporate conscience."]

[Footnote 114: See the letters on "How the Rich Spend their Money" (reprinted from the _Pall Mall_) in "Arrows of the Chace," vol. ii., where the origin of the discussion is explained.--ED.]

[Footnote 115: I use the current English of Mrs. Lennox's translation, but Henry's real saying was (see the first--green leaf--edition of Sully), "It is written above what is to happen to me on every occasion." "Toute occasion" becomes "cette occasion" in the subsequent editions, and finally "what is to happen to me" (ce que doit être fait de moi) becomes "what I ought to do" in the English.]

[Footnote 116: Cahors. See the "Memoirs of the Duke of Sully," Book 1. (Bohn's 1856 Edition, vol. i., pp. 118-9.)--ED.]

[Footnote 117: Where violence and brutality are punished. See Dante's "Inferno," Canto xii.--ED.]

[Footnote 118: See the _Contemporary Review_ at pp. 618 and 624.--ED.]

[Footnote 119: Viz.:--That if the expenditure of an income of £30,000 a year upon luxuries is to rob the poor, so _pro tanto_ is the expenditure of so much of an income of £300 as is spent on anything beyond "the simplest necessaries of life."--ED.]

[Footnote 120: Referring to two anonymous articles on "The Agricultural Laborer," in the _Cornhill Magazine_, vol. 27, Jan. and June 1873, pp. 215 and 307.--ED.]

[Footnote 121: See the Times of November 23rd of that year.]

[Footnote 122: "Is a Christian life feasible in these days?"--ED.]

[Footnote 123: See _Munera Pulveris_, § 139: "No man can become largely rich by his personal will.... It is only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others that he can become opulent." And see also _Time and Tide_, § 81.--ED.]

USURY.[124]

A REPLY AND A REJOINDER.

148. I have been honored by the receipt of a letter from the Bishop of Manchester, which, with his Lordship's permission, I have requested the editor of the _Contemporary Review_ to place before the large circle of his readers, with a brief accompanying statement of the circumstances by which the letter has been called forth, and such imperfect reply as it is in my power without delay to render.

J. RUSKIN.

MANCHESTER, _December_ 8, 1879.

DEAR SIR,--In a letter from yourself to the Rev. F. A. Malleson,[125] published in the _Contemporary Review_ of the current month, I observe the following passage:--"I have never yet heard so much as _one_ (preacher) heartily proclaiming against all those 'deceivers with vain words,' that no 'covetous person, which is an idolater, hath _any_ inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and of God;' and on myself personally and publicly challenging the Bishops of England generally, and by name the Bishop of Manchester, to say whether usury was, or was not, according to the will of God, I have received no answer from any one of them." I confess, for myself, that until I saw this passage in print a few days ago, I was unaware of the existence of such challenge, and therefore I could not answer it. It appears to have been delivered (A) in No. 82 of a series of letters which, under the title of _Fors Clavigera_, you have for some time been addressing to the working classes of England, but which, from the peculiar mode of their publication, are not easily accessible to the general reader and which I have only caught a glimpse of, on the library-table of the Athenæum Club, on the rare occasions when I am able to use my privileges as a member of that Society. I have no idea why I had the honor of being specially mentioned by name (B); but I beg to assure you that my silence did not arise from any discourtesy towards my challenger, nor from that discretion which, some people may think, is usually the better part of episcopal valor, and which consists in ignoring inconvenient questions from a sense of inability to answer them; but simply from the fact that I was not conscious that your lance had touched my shield.

149. The question you have asked is just one of those to which Aristotle's wise caution applies: "We must distinguish and define such words, if we would know how far, and in what sense, the opposite views are true" (_Eth. Nic._, ix, c. viii. § 3). What do you mean by "usury"? (C) Do you comprehend under it _any_ payment of money as interest for the use of borrowed capital? or only exorbitant, inequitable, grinding interest, such as the money-lender, Fufidius, extorted?

Quinas hic capiti mercedes exsecat, atque Quanto perditior quisque est, tanto acrius urget: Nomina sectatur modo sumta veste virili Sub patribus duris tironum. Maxime, quis non, Jupiter, exclamat, simul atque audivit?

--_Hor. Sat._ i. 2, 14-18.

Usury, in itself, is a purely neutral word, carrying with it, in its primary meaning, neither praise nor blame; and a "usurer" is defined in our dictionaries as "a person accustomed to lend money and take interest for it"--which is the ordinary function of a banker, without whose help great commercial undertakings could not be carried out; though it is obvious how easily the word may pass into a term of reproach, so that to have been "called a usurer" was one of the bitter memories that rankled most in Shylock's catalogue of his wrongs.

150. I do not believe that anything has done more harm to the practical efficacy of religions sanctions than the extravagant attempts that are frequently made to impose them in cases which they never originally contemplated, or to read into "ordinances," evidently "imposed for a time"--[Greek: dikaiômata mechri kairou] (Heb. ix. 10)--a law of eternal and immutable obligation. Just as we are told (D) not to expect to find in the Bible a scheme of physical science, so I do not expect to find there a scheme of political economy. What I do expect to find, in relation to my duty to my neighbor, are those unalterable principles of equity, fairness, truthfulness, honesty (E), which are the indispensable bases of civil society. I am sure I have no need to remind you that, while a Jew was forbidden by his law to take usury--_i.e._, interest for the loan of money--from his brother, if he were waxen poor and fallen into decay with him, and this generous provision was extended even to strangers and sojourners in the land (Lev. xxv. 35-38), and the interesting story in Nehemiah (v. 1-13), tells us how this principle was recognized in the latest days of the commonwealth--still in that old law there is no denunciation of usury in general, and it was expressly permitted in the case of ordinary strangers[126] (Deut. xxiii. 20).

It seems to me plain also that our Blessed Lord's precept about "lending, hoping for nothing again" (Luke vi. 35), has the same, or a similar, class of circumstances in view, and was intended simply to govern a Christian man's conduct to the poor and needy, and "such as have no helper," and cannot, without a violent twist (F), be construed into a general law determining forever and in all cases the legitimate use of capital. Indeed, on another occasion, and in a very memorable parable, the great Founder of Christianity recognizes, and impliedly sanctions, the practice of lending money at interest. "Thou oughtest," says the master, addressing his unprofitable servant, "thou oughtest"--[Greek: edei se]--"to have put my money to the exchangers; and then, at my coming, I should have received mine own _with usury_."

151. "St. Paul, no doubt, denounces the covetous." (G) But who is the [Greek: pleonektês]? Not the man who may happen to have money out on loan at a fair rate of interest; but, as Liddell and Scott give the meaning of the word, "one who has or claims _more than his share_; hence, greedy, grasping, selfish." Of such men, whose affections are wholly set on things of the earth, and who are not very scrupulous how they gratify them, it may, perhaps, not improperly be said (H) that they "have no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God." But here, again, it would be a manifest "wresting" of the words to make them apply to a case which we have no proof that the Apostle had in contemplation when he uttered them. Rapacity, greed of gain, harsh and oppressive dealing, taking unfair advantage of our own superior knowledge and another's ignorance, shutting up the bowels of compassion towards a brother who we see has need--all these and the like things are forbidden by the very spirit of Christianity, and are manifestly "_not_ according to the will of God," for they are all of them forms of injustice or wrong. But money may be lent at interest without one of these bad passions being brought in to play, and in these cases I confess my inability to see where, either in terms or in spirit, such use of money is condemned either by the Christian code of charity, or by that natural law of conscience which we are told (I) is written on the hearts of men.

152. Let me take two or three simple instances by way of illustration. The following has happened to myself. All my life through--from the time when my income was not a tenth part of what it is now--I have felt it a duty, while endeavoring to discharge all proper claims, to live within that income, so to adjust my expenditure to it that there should be a margin on the right side. This margin, of course, accumulated, and reached in time, say, £1000. Just then, say, the London and North-Western Railway Company proposed to issue Debenture Stock, bearing four per cent. interest, for the purpose of extending the communications, and so increasing the wealth, of the country. Whom in the world am I injuring--what conceivable wrong am I doing--where or how am I thwarting "the Will of God"--if I let the Company have my £1000, and have been receiving from them £40 a year for the use of it ever since? Unless the money had been forthcoming from some quarter or other, a work which was absolutely necessary for the prosperity of the nation, and which finds remunerative employment (K) for an immense number of Englishmen, enabling them to bring up their families in respectability and comfort, would never have been accomplished. Will you tell me that this method of carrying out great commercial enterprises, sanctioned by experience (L) as the most, if not the only, practicable one, is "not according to the Will of God"?

153. Take another instance. In Lancashire a large number of cotton mills have been erected on the joint-stock principle with limited liability. The thing has been pushed too far probably, and at one time there was a good deal of unwholesome speculation in floating companies. But that is not the question before us; and the enterprises gave working men an opportunity of investing their savings, which was a great stimulus to thrift, and, so far, an advantage to the country. In a mill, which it would perhaps cost £50,000 to build and fit with machinery, the subscribed capital, which would be entitled to a division of profits after all other demands had been satisfied, would not amount probably to more than £20,000. The rest would be borrowed at rates of interest varying according to the conditions of the market. You surely would not maintain that those who lent their money for such a purpose, and were content with 5 or 6 per cent, for the use of it, thus enabling, in good times, the shareholders to realize 20 or 25 per cent, on their subscribed capital, were doing wrong either to the shareholders or anyone else, or could in any sense be charged with acting "not according to the will of God"?

154. Take yet one case more. A farmer asks his landlord to drain his land. "Gladly," says his squire, "if you will pay me five per cent on the outlay." In other words, "if you will let me share the increased profits to this extent." The bargain is agreeable to both sides; the productiveness of the land is largely increased; who is wronged? Surely such a transaction could not fairly be described as "not according to the will of God"; surely, unless the commerce and productive industries of the country are to be destroyed, and, with the destruction, its population is to be reduced to what it was in the days of Elizabeth, these and similar transactions--which can be kept entirely clear of the sin of covetousness, and rest upon the well-understood basis of mutual advantage, each and all being gainers by them--are not only legitimate, but inevitable (M). And now that I have taken up your challenge, and, so far as my ability goes, answered it, may I, without staying to inquire how far your charge against the clergy can be substantiated, that they "generally patronize and encourage all the iniquity of the world by steadily preaching away the penalties of it" (N), be at least allowed to demur to your wholesale denunciation of the great cities of the earth, which you say "have become loathsome centers of fornication and covetousness, the smoke of their sin going up into the face of Heaven, like the furnace of Sodom, and the pollution of it rotting and raging through the bones and souls of the peasant people round them, as if they were each a volcano, whose ashes brake out in blains upon man and beast."[127] Surely, Sir, your righteous indignation at evil has caused you to overcharge your language. No one can have lived in a great city, as I have for the last ten years, without being aware of its sins and its pollutions. But unless you can prevent the aggregation of human beings into great cities, these are evils which must necessarily exist; at any rate, which always have existed. The great cities of to-day are not worse than great cities always have been (O). In one capital respect, I believe they are better. There is an increasing number of their citizens who are aware of these evils, and who are trying their best, with the help of God, to remedy them. In Sodom there was but one righteous man who "vexed his soul" at the unlawful deeds that he witnessed day by day, on every side; and he, apparently, did no more than vex his soul. In Manchester, the men and women, of all ranks and persuasions, who are actively engaging in some Christian or philanthropic work, to battle against these gigantic evils, are to be reckoned by hundreds. Nowhere have I seen more conspicuous instances of Christian effort, and of single-hearted devotion to the highest interests of mankind. And though, no doubt, if these efforts were better organized, more might be achieved, and elements, which one could wish absent, sometimes mingle with and mar the work, still a great city, even "with the smoke of its sin going up into the face of Heaven," is the noblest field of the noblest virtues, because it gives the amplest scope for the most varied exercise of them.

If you will teach us clergy how better to discharge our office as ministers of a Kingdom of Truth and Righteousness, we shall all owe you a deep debt of gratitude; which no one will be more forward to acknowledge than, my dear Sir, yours faithfully and with much respect,

J. MANCHESTER.

JOHN RUSKIN, Esq.

155. The foregoing letter, to which I would fain have given my undivided and unwearied attention, reached my hands, as will be seen by its date, only in the close of the year, when my general correspondence always far overpasses my powers of dealing with it, and my strength--such as now is left me--had been spent, nearly to lowest ebb, in totally unexpected business arising out of the threatened mischief at Venice. But I am content that such fragmentary reply as, under this pressure, has been possible to me, should close the debate as far as I am myself concerned. The question at issue is not one of private interpretation; and the interests concerned are too vast to allow its decision to be long delayed.

The Bishop will, I trust, not attribute to disrespect the mode of reply in the form of notes attached to special passages, indicated by inserted letters, which was adopted in _Fors Clavigera_ in all cases of important correspondence, as more clearly defining the several points under debate.

156. (A) "The challenge appears to have been delivered." May I respectfully express my regret that your lordship should not have read the letter you have honored me by answering. The number of _Fors_ referred to does not deliver--it only reiterates--the challenge given in the _Fors_ for January 1st, 1875, with reference to the prayer "Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics, and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to Thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the true Israelites," in these following terms: "Who _are_ the true Israelites, my Lord of Manchester, on your Exchange? Do they stretch their cloth, like other people?--have they any underhand dealings with the liable-to-be-damned false Israelites--Rothschilds and the like? or are they duly solicitous about those wanderers' souls? and how often, on the average, do your Manchester clergy preach from the delicious parable, savoriest of all Scripture to rogues (at least since the eleventh century, when I find it to have been specially headed with golden title in my best Greek MS.) of the Pharisee and Publican,--and how often, on the average, from those objectionable First and Fifteenth Psalms?"

(B) "I have no idea why I had the honor of being specially mentioned by name." By diocese, my Lord; not name, please observe; and for this very simple reason: that I have already fairly accurate knowledge of the divinity of the old schools of Canterbury, York, and Oxford; but I looked to your Lordship as the authoritative exponent of the more advanced divinity of the school of Manchester, with which I am not yet familiar.

157. (C) "What do you mean by usury?" What _I_ mean by that word, my Lord, is surely of no consequence to anyone but my few readers, and fewer disciples. What David and his Son meant by it I have prayed your Lordship to tell your flock, in the name of the Church which dictates daily to them the songs of the one, and professes to interpret to them the commands of the other.

And although I can easily conceive that a Bishop at the court of the Third Richard might have paused in reply to a too curious layman's question of what was meant by "Murder"; and can also conceive a Bishop at the court of the Second Charles hesitating as to the significance of the word "Adultery"; and farther, in the present climacteric of the British Constitution, an elder of the Church of Glasgow debating within himself whether the Commandment which was severely prohibitory of Theft might not be mildly permissive of Misappropriation;--at no time, nor under any conditions, can I conceive any question existing as to the meaning of the words [Greek: tokos], _foenus_; _usura_, or usury: and I trust that your Lordship will at once acquit me of wishing to attach any other significance to the word than that which it was to the full intended to convey on every occasion of its use by Moses, by David, by Christ, and by the Doctors of the Christian Church, down to the seventeenth century.

Nor, even since that date, although the commercial phrase "interest" has been adopted in order to distinguish an open and unoppressive rate of usury from a surreptitious and tyrannical one, has the debate of lawfulness or unlawfulness ever turned seriously on that distinction. It is neither justified by its defenders only in its mildness, nor condemned by its accusers only in its severity. Usury in any degree is asserted by the Doctors of the early Church to be sinful, just as theft and adultery are asserted to be sinful, though neither may have been accompanied with violence; and although the theft may have been on the most splendid scale, and the fornication of the most courtly refinement.

So also, in modern days, though the voice of the Bank of England in Parliament declares a loan without interest to be a monster,[128] and a loan made below the current rate of interest, a monster in its degree, the increase of dividends above that current rate is not, as far as I am aware, shunned by shareholders with an equally religious horror.

158. But--this strange question being asked--I give its simple and broad answer in the words of Christ: "The taking up that thou layedst not down;"--or, in explained and literal terms, usury is any money paid, or other advantage given, for the loan of anything which is restored to its possessor uninjured and undiminished. For simplest instance, taking a cabman the other day on a long drive, I lent him a shilling to get his dinner. If I had kept thirteen pence out of his fare, the odd penny would have been usury.

Or again. I lent one of my servants, a few years ago, eleven hundred pounds, to build a house with, and stock its ground. After some years he paid me the eleven hundred pounds back. If I had taken eleven hundred pounds and a penny, the extra penny would have been usury.

I do not know whether by the phrase, presently after used by your Lordship, "religious sanctions," I am to understand the Law of God which David loved, and Christ fulfilled, or whether the splendor, the commercial prosperity, and the familiar acquaintance with all the secrets of science and treasures of art, which we admire in the City of Manchester, must in your Lordship's view be considered as "cases" which the intelligence of the Divine Lawgiver could not have originally contemplated. Without attempting to disguise the narrowness of the horizon grasped by the glance of the Lord from Sinai, nor the inconvenience of the commandments which Christ has directed those who love Him to keep, am I too troublesome or too exigent in asking from one of those whom the Holy Ghost has made our overseers, at least a distinct chart of the Old World as contemplated by the Almighty; and a clear definition of even the inappropriate tenor of the orders of Christ: if only that the modern scientific Churchman may triumph more securely in the circumference of his heavenly vision, and accept more gratefully the glorious liberty of the free-thinking children of God?

159. To take a definite, and not impertinent, instance, I observe in the continuing portion of your letter that your Lordship recognizes in Christ Himself, as doubtless all other human perfections, so also the perfection of an usurer; and that, confidently expecting one day to hear from His lips the convicting sentence, "Thou knewest that I was an austere man," your Lordship prepares for yourself, by the disposition of your capital no less than of your talents, a better answer than the barren, "Behold, there thou hast that is thine!" I would only observe in reply, that although the conception of the Good Shepherd, which in your Lordship's language is "implied" in this parable, may indeed be less that of one who lays down his life for his sheep, than of one who takes up his money for them, the passages of our Master's instruction, of which the meaning is not implicit, but explicit, are perhaps those which His simpler disciples will be safer in following. Of which I find, early in His teaching, this, almost, as it were, in words of one syllable: "Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away."

There is nothing more "implied" in this sentence than the probable disposition to turn away, which might be the first impulse in the mind of a Christian asked to lend for nothing, as distinguished from the disciple of the Manchester school, whose principal care is rather to find, than to avoid, the enthusiastic and enterprising "him that would borrow of thee." We of the older tradition, my Lord, think that prudence, no less than charity, forbids the provocation or temptation of others into the state of debt, which some time or other we might be called upon, not only to allow the payment of without usury, but even altogether to forgive.

160. (D) "Just as we are told." Where, my Lord, and by whom? It is possible that some of the schemers in physical science, of whom, only a few days since, I heard one of the leading doctors explain to a pleased audience that serpents once had legs, and had dropped them off in the process of development, may have advised the modern disciple of progress of a new meaning in the simple phrase, "upon thy belly shalt thou go"; and that the wisdom of the serpent may henceforth consist, for true believers of the scientific Gospel, in the providing of meats for that spiritual organ of motion. It is doubtless also true that we shall look vainly among the sayings of Solomon for any expression of the opinions of Mr. John Stuart Mill; but at least this much of Natural science, enough for our highest need, we may find in the Scriptures--that by the Word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth;--and this much of Political, that the Blessing of the Lord, _it_ maketh rich--and He addeth no sorrow with it.

(E) "What I do expect to find." Has your Lordship _no_ expectations loftier than these, from severer scrutiny of the Gospel? As for instance, of some ordinance of Love, built on the foundation of Honesty?

161. (F) "Cannot without a violent twist." I have never myself found any person sincerely desirous of obeying the Word of the Lord, who had the least wish, or occasion, to twist it; nay, even those who study it only that they may discover methods of pardonable disobedience, recognize the unturnable edge of its sword--and in the worst extremity of their need, strive not to avert, but to evade. The utmost deceivableness of unrighteousness cannot deceive itself into satisfactory misinterpretation; it is reduced always to a tremulous omission of the texts it is resolved to disobey. But a little while since, I heard an entirely well-meaning clergyman, taken by surprise in the course of family worship in the house of a wealthy friend, and finding himself under the painful necessity of reading the fifteenth Psalm, omit the first sentence of the closing verse. I chanced afterwards to have an opportunity of asking him why he had done so, and received for answer, that the lowliness of Christian attainment was not yet "up" to that verse. The harmonies of iniquity are thus curiously perfect:--the economies of spiritual nourishment approve the same methods of adulteration which are found profitable in the carnal; until the prudent pastor follows the example of the well-instructed dairyman; and provides for his new-born babes the _in_sincere Milk of the Word, that they may _not_ grow thereby.

162. (G) "St. Paul, no doubt, denounces the covetous." Am I to understand your Lordship as considering this undeniable denunciation an original and peculiar view taken by the least of the Apostles--perhaps, in this particular opinion, not worthy to be called an Apostle? The traditions of my earlier days were wont to refer me to an earlier source of the idea; which does not, however, appear to have occurred to your Lordship's mind--else the reference to the authority of Liddell and Scott, for the significance of the noun [Greek: pleonektês], ought to have been made also for that of the verb [Greek: epithumeô] And your Lordship's frankness in referring me to the instances of your own practice in the disposal of your income, must plead my excuse for what might have otherwise seemed impertinent--in noting that the blamelessness of episcopal character, even by that least of the Apostles, required in his first Epistle to Timothy, consists not merely in contentment with an episcopal share of Church property, but in being in no respect either [Greek: aischrokordês]--a taker of gain in a base or vulgar manner, or [Greek: philarguros]--a "lover of silver," this latter word being the common and proper word for covetous, in the Gospels and Epistles; as of the Pharisees in Luke xvi. 14; and associated with the other characters of men in perilous times, 2 Timothy iii. 2, and its relative noun [Greek: philarguria, given in sum for the root of _all_ evil in 2 Timothy vi. 10, while even the authority of Liddell and Scott in the interpretation of [Greek: pleonexia] itself as only the desire of getting more than our share, may perhaps be bettered by the authority of the teacher, who, declining the appeal made to him as an equitable [Greek: meristês] (Luke xii. 14-46), tells his disciples to beware of coveteousness, simply as the desire of getting more than we have got. "For a man's life consisteth not in the _abundance_ of the things which he possesseth."

163. Believe me, my Lord, it is not without some difficulty that I check my natural impulse to follow you, as a scholar, into the interesting analysis of the distinctions which may be drawn between Rapacity and Acquisitiveness; between the Avarice, or the prudent care, of possession; between the greed, and the modest expectation, of gain; between the love of money, which is the root of all evil; and the commercial spirit, which is in England held to be the fountain of all good. These delicate adjustments of the balance, by which we strive to weigh to a grain the relative quantities of devotion which we may render in the service of Mammon and of God, are wholly of recent invention and application; nor have they the slightest bearing, either on the spiritual purport of the final commandment of the Decalogue, or on the distinctness of the subsequent prohibition of practical usury.

It must be remembered, also, how difficult it has become to define the term "filthy" with precision, in the present state, moral and physical, of the English atmosphere; and still more so, to judge how far, in that healthy element, a moderate and delicately sanctified appetite for gold may be developed into livelier qualms of hunger for righteousness. It may be matter of private opinion how far the lucre derived by your Lordship from commission on the fares and refreshments of the passengers by the North-Western may be odoriferous or precious, in the same sense as the ointment on the head of Aaron; or how far that received by the Primate of England in royalties on the circulation of improving literature[129] may enrich--as with perfumes out of broken alabaster--the empyreal air of Addington. But the higher class of laborers in the Lord's vineyard might surely, with true grace, receive, from the last unto the first, the reflected instruction so often given by the first unto the last, "Be content with your wages."

(H) "It may, perhaps, not improperly be said," The Bible Society will doubtless in future gratefully prefix this guarantee to their publications.

(I) "Which we are told." Can we then no more find for ourselves this writing on our hearts--or has it ceased to be legible?

164. (K) "Remunerative employment." I cannot easily express the astonishment with which I find a man of your Lordship's intelligence taking up the common phrase of "giving employment," as if, indeed, labor were the best gift which the rich could bestow on the poor. Of course, every idle vagabond, be he rich or poor, "gives employment" to some otherwise enough burdened wretch, to provide his dinner and clothes for him; and every vicious vagabond, in the destructive power of his vice, gives sorrowful occupation to the energies of resisting and renovating virtue. The idle child who litters its nursery and tears its frock, gives employment to the housemaid and seamstress; the idle woman, who litters her drawing-room with trinkets, and is ashamed to be seen twice in the same dress, is, in your Lordship's view, the enlightened supporter of the arts and manufactures of her country. At the close of your letter, my Lord, you, though in measured terms, indignantly dissent from my statement of the power of great cities for evil, and indeed I have perhaps been led, by my prolonged study of the causes of the Fall of Venice, into clearer recognition of some of these urban influences than may have been possible to your Lordship in the center of the virtues and proprieties which have been blessed by Providence in the rise of Manchester. But the Scriptural symbol of the power of temptation in the hand of the spiritual Babylon--"all kings have been drunk with the wine of her Fornication"--is perfectly literal in its exposition of the special influence of cities over a vicious, that is to say, a declining, people. They are the foci of its fornication, and the practical meaning is that the lords of the soil take the food and labor of the peasants, who are their slaves, and spend them especially in forms of luxury perfected by the definitely so-called "women of the _town_" who, whether East-cheap Doll, or West--much the reverse of cheap--Nell, are, both in the color which they give to the Arts, and in the tone which they give to the Manners, of the State, a literal plague, pestilence and burden to it, quite otherwise malignant and maleficent than the poor country lassie who loses her snood among the heather. And when, at last, _real_ political economy shall exhibit the exact sources and consequences of the expenditure of the great capitals of civilization on their own indulgences, your Lordship will be furnished, in the statistics of their most splendid and most impious pleasure, with record of precisely the largest existing source of "remunerative employment"--(if _that_ were all the poor had to ask for), next after the preparation and practice of war. I believe it is, indeed, probable that "facility of intercourse" gives the next largest quantity of occupation; and, as your Lordship rightly observes, to most respectable persons. And if the entire population of Manchester lost the use of its legs, your Lordship would similarly have the satisfaction of observing, and might share in the profits of providing, the needful machinery of porterage and stretchers. But observe, my Lord--and observe as a final and inevitable truth--that whether you lend your money to provide an invalided population with crutches, stretchers, hearses, or the railroad accommodation which is so often synonymous with the three, the _tax on the use_ of these, which constitutes the shareholder's dividend, is a permanent burden upon them, exacted by avarice, and by no means an aid granted by benevolence.

165. (L) "Sanctioned by experience." The experience of twenty-three years, my Lord, and with the following result:--

"We have now had an opportunity of practically testing the theory. Not more than seventeen" (now twenty-three--I quote from a letter dated 1875) "years have passed since" (by the final abolition of the Usury laws) "all restraint was removed from the growth of what Lord Coke calls 'this pestilent weed,'" and we see Bacon's words verified--"the rich becoming richer, and the poor poorer, throughout the civilized world." Letter from Mr. R. Sillar, quoted in _Fors Clavigera_, No. 43.

(M) "Inevitable." Neither "impossible" nor "inevitable" were words of old Christian Faith. But see the closing paragraph of my letter.

(N) Before you call on me to substantiate this charge, my Lord, I should like to insert after the words, "steadily preaching," the phrase, "and politely explaining"--with the Pauline qualification, "whether by word, or our epistle."

166. (O) "The great cities of to-day are not worse than great cities always have been," I do not remember having said that they were, my Lord; I have never anticipated for Manchester a worse fate than that of Sardis or Sodom; nor have I yet observed any so mighty works shown forth in her by her ministers, as to make her impenitence less pardonable than that of Sidon or Tyre. But I used the particular expression which your Lordship supposes me to have overcharged in righteous indignation, "a boil breaking forth with blains on man and beast," because that particular plague was the one which Moses was ordered, in the Eternal Wisdom, to connect with the ashes of the Furnace--literally, no less than spiritually, when he brought the Israelites forth out of Egypt, _from the midst of the Furnace of Iron_. How literally, no less than in faith and hope, the smoke of "the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt," has poisoned the earth, the waters, and the living creatures, flocks and herds, and the babes that know not their right hand from their left--neither Memphis, Gomorrah, nor Cahors are themselves likely to recognize: but, as I pause in front of the infinitude of the evil that I cannot find so much as thought to follow--how much less words to speak!--a letter is brought to me which gives what perhaps may be more impressive in its single and historical example, than all the general evidence gathered already in the pages of _Fors Clavigera_.

* * * * *

167. "I could never understand formerly what you meant about usury, and about its being wrong to take interest. I said, truly, then that I 'trusted you,' meaning I knew that in such matters you did not 'opine'--and that innumerable things were within your horizon which had no place within mine.

"But as I did not understand I could only watch and ponder. Gradually I came to see a little--as when I read current facts about India--about almost every country, and about our own trade, etc. Then (one of several circumstances that could be seen more closely) among my mother's kindred in the north, I watched the ruin of two lives. They began married life together, with good prospects and sufficient means, in a lovely little nest among the hills, beyond the Rochdale smoke. Soon this became too narrow. 'A splendid trade,' more mills, frequent changes into even finer dwellings, luxurious living, ostentation, extravagance, increasing year by year, all, as now appears, made possible by usury--borrowed capital. The wife was laid in her grave lately, and her friends are _thankful_. The husband, with ruin threatening his affairs, is in a worse, and living, grave of evil habits."

"These are some of the loopholes through which light has fallen upon your words, giving them a new meaning, and making me wonder how I could have missed seeing it from the first. Once alive to it, I recognize the evil on all sides, and how we are entangled by it; and though I am still puzzled at one or two points, I am very clear about the principle--that usury is a deadly thing,"

Yes; and deadly always with the vilest forms of destruction both to soul and body.

168. It happens strangely, my Lord, that although throughout the seven volumes of _Fors Clavigera_, I never have set down a sentence without chastising it first into terms which could be _literally_ as well as in their widest bearing justified against all controversy, you could perhaps not have found in the whole book, had your Lordship read it for the purpose, any saying quite so literally and terrifically demonstrable as this which you have chanced to select for attack. For, in the first place, of all the calamities which in their apparently merciless infliction paralyzed the wavering faith of mediæval Christendom, the "boil breaking forth into blains," in the black plagues of Florence and London, was the fatalest messenger of the fiends: and, in the second place, the broad result of the Missionary labors of the cities of Madrid, Paris, and London, for the salvation of the wild tribes of the New World, since the vaunted discovery of it, may be summed in the stem sentence--Death, by drunkenness and smallpox.

The beneficent influence of recent commercial enterprise in the communication of such divine grace, and divine blessing (not to speak of other more dreadful and shameful conditions of disease), may be studied to best advantage in the history of the two great French and English Companies, who have enjoyed the monopoly of clothing the nakedness of the Old World with coats of skins from the New.

The charter of the English one, obtained from the Crown in 1670, was in the language of modern Liberalism--" wonderfully liberal,"[130] comprising not only the grant of the exclusive trade, but also of full territorial possession, to all perpetuity, of the vast lands within the watershed of Hudson's Bay. The Company at once established some forts along the shores of the great inland sea from which it derived its name, and opened a very lucrative trade with the Indians, _so that it never ceased paying rich dividends_ to the fortunate shareholders, until towards the close of the last century.

Up to this time, with the exception of the voyage of discovery which Herne (1770-71) made under its auspices to the mouth of the Coppermine River, it had done but little for the promotion of geographical discovery in its vast territory.

169. Meanwhile, the Canadian (French) fur traders had become so hateful to the Indians, that these savages formed a conspiracy for their total extirpation. _Fortunately for the white men_, the smallpox broke out about this time among the redskins, and swept them away as the fire consumes the parched grass of the prairies. Their unburied corpses were torn by the wolves and wild dogs, and the survivors were too weak and dispirited to be able to undertake anything against the foreign intruders. The Canadian fur traders now also saw the necessity of combining their efforts for their mutual benefit, instead of ruining each other by an insane competition; and consequently formed in 1783 a society which, under the name of the North-West Company of Canada, ruled over the whole continent from the Canadian lakes to the Rocky Mountains, and in 1806 it even crossed the barrier and established its forts on the northern tributaries of the Columbia river. To the north it likewise extended its operations, encroaching more and more upon the privileges of the Hudson's Bay Company, which, roused to energy, now also pushed on its posts further and further into the interior, and established, in 1812, a colony on the Red River to the south of Winnipeg Lake, thus driving, as it were, a sharp thorn into the side of its rival. But a power like the North-West Company, which had no less than 50 agents, 70 interpreters, and 1120 "voyageurs" in its pay, and whose chief managers used to appear at their annual meetings at Fort William, on the banks of Lake Superior, with all the pomp and pride of feudal barons, was not inclined to tolerate this encroachment; and thus, after many quarrels, a regular war broke out between the two parties, which, after two years' duration, led to the expulsion of the Red River colonists, and the murder of their governor Semple. This event took place in the year 1816, and is but one episode of the bloody feuds which continued to reign between the two rival Companies until 1821.

170. The dissension's of the fur traders had most deplorable consequences for the redskins; for both Companies, to swell the number of their adherents, lavishly distributed spirituous liquors--a temptation which no Indian can resist. The whole of the meeting-grounds of the Saskatchewan and Athabasca were but one scene of revelry and bloodshed. Already decimated by the smallpox, the Indians now became the victims of drunkenness and discord, and it was to be feared that if the war and its consequent demoralization continued, the most important tribes would soon be utterly swept away.

At length wisdom prevailed over passion, and the enemies came to a resolution which, if taken from the very beginning, would have saved them both a great deal of treasure and many crimes. Instead of continuing to swing the tomahawk, they now smoked the calumet, and amalgamated in 1821, under the name of "Hudson's Bay Company," and under the wing of the Charter.

The British Government, as a dowry to the impoverished couple, presented them with a license of exclusive trade throughout the whole of that territory which, under the name of the "Hudson's Bay and North-West territories," extends from Labrador to the Pacific, and from the Red River to the Polar Ocean.

171. Such, my Lord, have been the triumphs of the modern Evangel of Usury, Competition, and Private Enterprise, in a perfectly clear instance of their action, chosen I hope with sufficient candor, since "History," says Professor Hind, "does not furnish another example of an association of private individuals exerting a powerful influence over so large an extent of the earth's surface and administering their affairs with such consummate skill, and unwavering devotion to the original objects of their incorporation."

That original object being, of course, that poor naked America, having yet in a manner two coats, might be induced by these Christian merchants to give to him that had none?

In like manner, may any Christian householder, who has two houses or perchance two parks, ever be induced to give to him that hath none? My temper and my courtesy scarcely serve me, my Lord, to reply to your assertion of the "inevitableness" that, while half of Great Britain is laid out in hunting-grounds for sport more savage than the Indians, the poor of our cities must be swept into incestuous heaps; or into dens and caves which are only tombs disquieted, so changing the whiteness of Jewish sepulchers into the blackness of Christian ones, in which the hearts of the rich and the homes of the poor are alike as graves that appear not;--only their murmur, that sayeth "it is not enough," sounds deeper beneath us every hour; nay, the whole earth, and not only the cities of it, sends forth that ghastly cry; and her fruitful plains have become slime-pits, and her fair estuaries, gulfs of death; for _us_, the Mountain of the Lord has become only Golgotha, and the sound of the new song before the Throne is drowned in the rolling death-rattle of the nations, "Oh Christ; where is thy victory?"

These are thy glorious works, Mammon parent of Good,--and this the true debate, my Lord of Manchester, between the two Angels of your Church,--whether the "Dreamland" of its souls be now, or hereafter,--now, the firelight in the cave, or hereafter, the sunlight of Heaven.

172. How, my Lord, am I to receive, or reply to, the narrow concessions of your closing sentence? The Spirit of Truth was breathed even from the Athenian Acropolis, and the Law of Justice thundered even from the Cretan Sinai; but for _us_, He who said, "I am the Truth," said also, "I am the Way, and the Life;" and for _us_, He who reasoned of Righteousness, reasoned also of Temperance and Judgment to come. Is this the sincere milk of the Word, which takes the hope from the Person of Christ, and the fear from the charge of His apostle, and forbids to English heroism the perilous vision of Immortality? God be with you, my Lord, and exalt your teaching to that quality of Mercy which, distilling as the rain from Heaven--not strained as through channels from a sullen reservoir-may soften the hearts of your people to receive the New Commandment, that they Love one another. So, round the cathedral of your city, shall the merchant's law be just, and his weights true; the table of the money-changer not overthrown, and the bench of the money-lender unbroken.

And to as many as walk according to this rule, Peace shall be on them, and Mercy, and upon the Israel of God.

* * * * *

173. With the preceding letter must assuredly end--for the present, if not forever--my own notes on a subject of which my strength no longer serves me to endure the stress and sorrow; but I may possibly be able to collect, eventually, into more close form, the already manifold and sufficient references scattered through _Fors Clavigera_: and perhaps to reprint for the St. George's Guild the admirable compendium of British ecclesiastical and lay authority on the subject, collected by John Blaxton, preacher of God's Word at Osmington in Dorsetshire, printed by John Norton under the title of "The English Usurer," and sold by Francis Bowman, in Oxford, 1631. A still more precious record of the fierce struggle of usury into life among Christians, and of the resistance to it by Venice and her "Anthony,"[131] will be found in the dialogue "della Usura," of Messer Speron Sperone (Aldus, in Vinegia, MDXIII.), followed by the dialogue "del Cathaio," between "Portia, sola, e fanciulla, fame, e cibo, vita, e morte, di ciascuno che la conosce," and her lover Moresini, which is the source of all that is loveliest in the _Merchant of Venice_. Readers who seek more modern and more scientific instruction may consult the able abstract of the triumph of usury, drawn up by Dr. Andrew Dickson White, President of Cornell University ("The Warfare of Science," H. S. King & Co., 1877), in which the victory of the great modern scientific principle, that two and two make five, is traced exultingly to the final overthrow of St. Chrysostom, St. Jerome, St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Luther, and Bossuet, by "the establishment of the Torlonia family in Rome." A better collection of the most crushing evidence cannot be found than this, furnished by an adversary; a less petulant and pompous, but more earnest voice from America, "Usury the Giant Sin of the Age," by Edward Palmer (Perth Amboys, 1865), should be read together with it. In the meantime, the substance of the teaching of the _former_ Church of England, in the great sermon against usury of Bishop Jewell, may perhaps not uselessly occupy one additional page of the _Contemporary Review_:--

174. "Usury is a kind of lending of money, or corne, or oyle, or wine, or of any other thing, wherein, upon covenant and bargaine, we receive againe the whole principall which we delivered, and somewhat more, for the use and occupying of the same; as if I lend 100 pound, and for it covenant to receive 105 pound, or any other summe, greater then was the summe which I did lend: this is that which we call usury: such a kind of bargaining as no good man, or godly man ever used. Such a kind of bargaining as all men that ever feared God's judgments have alwaies abhorred and condemned. It is filthy gaines, and a worke of darkenesse, it is a monster in nature: the overthrow of mighty kingdoms, the destruction of flourishing States, the decay of wealthy cities, the plagues of the world, and the misery of the people: it is theft, it is the murthering of our brethren, its the curse of God, and the curse of the people. This is Usury. By these signes and tokens you may know it. For wheresoever it raigneth all those mischiefes ensue.

"Whence springeth usury? Soone shewed. Even thence whence theft, murder, adultery, the plagues, and destruction of the people doe spring. All these are the workes of the divell, and the workes of the flesh. Christ telleth the Pharisees, You are of your father the divell, and the lusts of your father you will doe. Even so may it truely be sayd to the usurer, Thou art of thy father the divell, and the lusts of thy father thou wilt doe, and therefore thou hast pleasure in his workes. The divell entered into the heart of Judas, and put in him this greedinesse, and covetousnesse of game, for which he was content to sell his master. Judas's heart was the shop, the divell was the foreman to worke in it. They that will be rich fall into tentation and snares, and into many foolish and noysome lusts, which drowne men in perdition and destruction. For the desire of money is the roote of all evil. And St. John saith, Whosoever committeth sinne is of the Divell, 1 Joh. 3-8. Thus we see that the divell is the planter, and the father of usury.

"What are the fruits of usury? A. 1. It dissolveth the knot and fellowship of mankind. 2. It hardeneth man's heart. 3. It maketh men unnaturall, and bereaveth them of charity, and love to their dearest friends. 4. It breedeth misery and provoketh the wrath of God from heaven. 5. It consumeth rich men, it eateth up the poore, it maketh bankrupts, and undoeth many householders. 6. The poore occupiers are driven to flee, their wives are left alone, their children are hopelesse, and driven to beg their bread, through the unmercifull dealing of the covetous usurer.

175. "He that is an usurer, wisheth that all others may lacke and come to him and borrow of him; that all others may lose, so that he may have gaine. Therefore our old forefathers so much abhorred this trade, that they thought an usurer unworthy to live in the company of Christian men. They suffered not an usurer to be witnesse in matters of Law. They suffer him not to make a Testament, and to bestow his goods by will. When an usurer dyed, they would not suffer him to be buried in places appointed for the buriall of Christians. So highly did they mislike this unmercifull spoyling and deceiving our brethren.

"But what speak I of the ancient Fathers of the Church? There was never any religion, nor sect, nor state, nor degree, nor profession of men, but they have disliked it. Philosophers, Greekes, Latins, lawyers, divines, Catholikes, heretics; all tongues and nations have ever thought an usurer as dangerous as a theefe. The very sense of nature proves it to be so. If the stones could speak they would say as much. But some will say all kindes of usury are not forbidden. There may be cases where usury may stand with reason and equity, and herein they say so much as by wit may be devised to paint out a foule and ugly idoll, and to shadow themselves in manifest and open wickednesse. Whatsoever God sayeth, yet this or this kind of usury, say they, which is done in this or this sort, is not forbidden. It proffiteth the Commonwealth, it relieveth great numbers, the poore should otherwise perish, none would lend them. By like good reason, there are some that defend theft and murder; they say, there may be some case where it is lawful to kill or to steale; for God willed the Hebrews to rob the Ægyptians, and Abraham to kill his owne sonne Isaac. In these cases the robbery and the killing of his sonne were lawfull. So say they. Even so by the like reason doe some of our countrymen maintayne concubines, curtizans, and brothel-houses, and stand in defence of open stewes. They are (say they) for the benefit of the country, they keepe men from more dangerous inconveniences; take them away, it will be worse. Although God say, there shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, neither shall there be a whorekeeper of the sonnes of Israel: yet these men say all manner of whoredom is not forbidden. In these and these cases it is not amisse to alow it."

"As Samuel sayd to Saul, so may we say to the usurer, Thou hast devised cases and colours to hide thy shame, but what regard hath God to thy cases? What careth He for thy reasons? the Lord would have more pleasure, if when thou heareth His voyce thou wouldest obey Him. For what is thy device against the counsell, and ordinance of God? What bold presumption is it for a mortall man to controule the commandments of immortall God? And to weigh his heavenly wisdome in the ballance of humane foolishnesse? When God sayth, Thou shalt not take usury, what creature of God art thou which canst take usury? When God maketh it unlawfull, what art thou, oh man, that sayst, it is lawfull? This is a token of a desperate mind. It is found true in thee, that Paul sayd, the love of money is the root of all ill. Thou art so given over unto the wicked Mammon, that thou carest not to doe the will of God."

Thus far, the theology of Old England. Let it close with the calm law, spoken four hundred years before Christ, [Greek: a mê katethou, mê anelê].

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 124: _Contemporary Review_, February 1880.]

[Footnote 125: See below (p. 393, § 236), in the eighth letter on the Lord's Prayer.--ED.]

[Footnote 126: In Proverbs xxviii. 8, "usury" is coupled with "unjust gain," and a pitiless spirit towards the poor, which shows in what sense the word is to be understood there, and in such other passages as Ps. xv. 5 and Ezek. xviii. 8, 9.]

[Footnote 127: See post, p. 394, § 237.--ED.]

[Footnote 128: Speech of Mr. J. C. Hubbard, M.P. for London, reported in _Standard_ of 26th July, 1879.]

[Footnote 129: See the Articles of Association of the East Surrey Hall, Museum, and Library Company. (_Fors Clavigera_, Letter lxx.)]

[Footnote 130: "The Polar World," p. 342, Longmans, 1874.]

[Footnote 131:

"The dearest friend to me, the kindest man, The best conditioned and unwearied spirit, In doing courtesies; and one in whom _The ancient Roman honor more appears, Than any that draws breath in Italy._"

This is the Shakespearian description of that Anthony, whom the modern British public, with its new critical lights, calls a "sentimentalist and speculator!"--holding Shylock to be the real hero, and innocent victim of the drama.]

USURY.[132]

A PREFACE.

176. In the wise, practical, and affectionate sermon, given from St. Mary's pulpit last autumn to the youth of Oxford, by the good Bishop of Carlisle, his Lordship took occasion to warn his eagerly attentive audience, with deep earnestness, against the crime of debt; dwelling with powerful invective on the cruelty and selfishness with which, too often, the son wasted in his follies the fruits of his father's labor, or the means of his family's subsistence; and involved himself in embarrassments which, said the Bishop, "I have again and again known to cause the misery of all subsequent life."

The sin was charged, the appeal pressed, only on the preacher's undergraduate hearers. Beneath the gallery, the Heads of Houses sate, remorseless; nor from the pulpit was a single hint permitted that any measures could be rationally taken for the protection, no less than the warning, of the youth under their care. No such suggestion would have been received, if even understood, by any English congregation of this time;--a strange and perilous time, in which the greatest commercial people of the world have been brought to think Usury the most honorable and fruitful branch, or rather perennial stem, of commercial industry.

177. But whose the fault that English congregations are in this temper, and this ignorance? The saying of mine,[133] which the author of this book quotes in the close of his introduction, was written by me with a meaning altogether opposite, and far more forcible, than that which it might seem to bear to a careless interpreter.[134] In the present state of popular revolt against all conception and manner of authority, but more especially spiritual authority, the sentence reads as if it were written by an adversary of the Church,--a hater of its Prelacy,--an advocate of universal liberty of thought and license of crime: whereas the sentence is really written in the conviction (I might say knowledge, if I spoke without deference to the reader's incredulity) that the Pastoral Office must forever be the highest, for good or evil, in every Christian land; and that when _it_ fails in vigilance, faith, or courage, the sheep _must_ be scattered, and neither King nor law avail any more to protect them against the fury of their own passions, nor any human sagacity against the deception of their own hearts.

178. Since, however, these things are instantly so, and the Bishops of England have now with one accord consented to become merely the highly salaried vergers of her Cathedrals, taking care that the choristers do not play at leapfrog in the Churchyard, that the Precincts are elegantly iron-railed from the profane parts of the town, and that the doors of the building be duly locked, so that nobody may pray in it at improper times,--these things being so, may we not turn to the "every-man-his-own-Bishop" party, with its Bible Society, Missionary zeal, and right of infallible private interpretation, to ask at least for some small exposition to the inhabitants of their own country, of those Scriptures which they are so fain to put in the possession of others; and this the rather, because the popular familiar version of the New Testament among us, unwritten, seems to be now the exact contrary of that which we were once taught to be of Divine authority.

179. I place, side by side, the ancient and modern versions of the seven verses of the New Testament which were the beginning, and are indeed the heads, of all the teaching of Christ:--

_Ancient._

Blessed are the Poor in Spirit, for their's is the kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger for righteousness, for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

_Modern._

Blessed are the Rich in Flesh, for their's is the kingdom of Earth.

Blessed are they that are merry, and laugh the last.

Blessed are the proud, in that they _have_ inherited the earth.

Blessed are they which hunger for unrighteousness, in that they shall divide its mammon.

Blessed are the merciless, for they shall obtain money.

Blessed are the foul in heart, for they shall see no God.

Blessed are the War-makers, for they shall be adored by the children of men.

180. Who are the true "Makers of War," the promoters and supports of it, I showed long since in the note to the brief sentence of "Unto this last." "It is entirely capitalists' (_i.e._, Usurers') wealth[135] which supports unjust Wars." But to what extent the adoration of the Usurer, and the slavery consequent upon it, has perverted the soul or bound the hands of every man in Europe, I will let the reader hear, from authority he will less doubt than mine:--

"Financiers are the mischievous feudalism of the 19th century. A handful of men have invented distant, seductive loans, have introduced national debts in countries happily ignorant of them, have advanced money to unsophisticated Powers on ruinous terms, and then, by appealing to small investors all over the world, got rid of the bonds. Furthermore, with the difference between the advances and the sale of bonds, they caused a fall in the securities which they had issued, and, having sold at 80, they bought back at 10, taking advantage of the public panic. Again, with the money thus obtained, they bought up consciences, where consciences are marketable, and under the pretense of providing the country thus traded upon with new means of communication, they passed money into their own coffers. They have had pupils, imitators, and plagiarists; and at the present moment, under different names, the financiers rule the world, are a sore of society, and form one of the chief causes of modern crises.

"Unlike the Nile, wherever they pass they render the soil dry and barren. The treasures of the world flow into their cellars, and there remain. They spend one-tenth of their revenues; the remaining nine-tenths they hoard and divert from circulation. They distribute favors, and are great political leaders. They have not assumed the place of the old nobility, but have taken the latter into their service. Princes are their chamberlains, dukes open their doors, and marquises act as their equerries when they deign to ride.

"These new grandees canter on their splendid Arabs along Rotten Ron, the Bois de Boulogne, the Prospect, the Prater, or Unter den Linden. The shopkeepers, and all who save money, bow low to these men, who represent their savings, which they will never again see under any other form. Proof against sarcasms, sure of the respect of the Continental Press, protecting each other with a sort of freemasonry, the financiers dictate laws, determine the fate of nations, and render the cleverest political combinations abortive. They are everywhere received and listened to, and all the Cabinets feel their influence. Governments watch them with uneasiness, and even the Iron Chancellor has his gilded Egeria, who reports to him the wishes of this the sole modern Autocrat"--_Letter from Paris Correspondent_, "_Times_," _30th January_, 1885.

* * * * *

181. But to this statement, I must add the one made to § 149 (see note) of "Munera Pulveris," that if we could trace the innermost of all causes of modern war, they would be found, not in the avarice or ambition, but the idleness of the upper classes. "They have nothing to do but to teach the peasantry to kill each other"--while that the peasantry are thus teachable, is further again dependent on their not having been educated primarily in the common law of justice. See again "Munera Pulveris," Appendix I.: "Precisely according to the number of just men in a nation is their power of avoiding either intestine or foreign war."

I rejoice to see my old friend Mr. Sillar gathering finally together the evidence he has so industriously collected on the guilt of usury, and supporting it by the always impressive language of symbolical art;[136] for indeed I had myself no idea, till I read the connected statement which these pictures illustrate, how steadily the system of money-lending had gained on the nation, and how fatally every hand and foot was now entangled by it. Yet in commending the study of this book to every virtuous and patriotic Englishman, I must firmly remind the reader, that all these sins and errors are only the branches from one root of bitterness--mortal Pride. For this we gather, for this we war, for this we die--here and hereafter; while all the while the Wisdom which is from above stands vainly teaching us the way to Earthly Riches and to Heavenly Peace, "What doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk _humbly_ with thy God?"

BRANTWOOD, _7th March_, 1885.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 132: Introduction to a pamphlet entitled "Usury and the English Bishops," or more fully, "Usury, its pernicious effects on English agriculture and commerce: An allegory dedicated without permission to the Bishops of Manchester, Peterborough and Rochester" (London: A. Southey, 146, Fenchurch Street, 1885). By R. J. Sillar. (See _Fors Clavigera_, vol. v. Letter 56.)--ED.]

[Footnote 133: "Everything evil in Europe is primarily the fault of her Bishops."]

[Footnote 134: "I knew, in using it, perfectly well what you meant." (Note by Mr. Sillar.)]

[Footnote 135: "Cash," I should have said, in accuracy--not "wealth."]

[Footnote 136: Mr. Sillar's pamphlet consists of a collection of paragraphs, all condemnatory of usury, from the writings of the English bishops, from the sixteenth century down to the present time; and is illustrated by five emblematic woodcuts representing an oak tree (English commerce) gradually overgrown and destroyed by an ivy-plant (usury).--ED.]

* * * * *

THEOLOGY.

NOTES ON THE CONSTRUCTION OF SHEEPFOLDS.

(Pamphlet, 1851.)

THE LORD'S PRAYER AND THE CHURCH.

(_Letters and Epilogue_, 1879-1881.)

THE NATURE AND AUTHORITY OF MIRACLE.

(_Contemporary Review, March_ 1873.)

* * * * *

NOTES ON THE CONSTRUCTION OF SHEEPFOLDS.[137]

PREFACE (CALLED "ADVERTISEMENT") TO THE FIRST EDITION.

_Many persons will probably find fault with me for publishing opinions which are not new: but I shall bear this blame contentedly, believing that opinions on this subject could hardly be just if they were not 1800 years old. Others will blame me for making proposals which are altogether new: to whom I would answer, that things in these days seem not so far right but that they may be mended. And others will simply call the opinions false and the proposals foolish--to whose goodwill, if they take it in hand to contradict me, I must leave what I have written--having no purpose of being drawn, at present, into religious controversy. If, however, any should admit the truth, but regret the tone of what I have said, lean only pray them to consider how much less harm is done in the world by ungraceful boldness, than by untimely fear._

DENMARK HILL,

_February, 1851._

PREFACE TO THE SECOND (1851) EDITION.

_Since the publication of these Notes, I have received many letters upon the affairs of the Church, from persons of nearly every denomination of Christians; for all these letters I am grateful, and in many of them I have found valuable information, or suggestion: but I have not leisure at present to follow out the subject farther; and no reason has been shown me for modifying or altering any part of the text as it stands. It is republished, therefore, without change or addition_.

_I must, however, especially thank one of my correspondents for sending me a pamphlet, called "Sectarianism, the Bane of Religion and the Church,"[138] which I would recommend, in the strongest terms, to the reading of all who regard the cause of Christ; and, for help in reading the Scriptures, I would name also the short and admirable arrangement of parallel passages relating to the offices of the clergy, called "The Testimony of Scripture concerning the Christian Ministry."_[139]

PREFACE TO THIRD (CALLED SECOND) EDITION.

_I have only to add to this first preface, that the boldness of the pamphlet,--ungraceful enough, it must be admitted,--has done no one any harm, that I know of; but on the contrary, some definite good, as far as I can judge; and that I republish the whole now, letter for letter, as originally printed, believing it likely to be still serviceable, and, on the ground it takes for argument, (Scriptural authority,) incontrovertible as far as it reaches; though it amazes me to find on re-reading it, that, so late as 1851, I had only got the length of perceiving the schism between sects of Protestants to be criminal, and ridiculous, while I still supposed the schism between Protestants and Catholics to be virtuous and sublime._

_The most valuable part of the whole is the analysis of governments, §§ 213-15; the passages on Church discipline, §§ 204-5, being also anticipatory of much that I have to say in Fors, where I hope to re-assert the substance of this pamphlet on wider grounds, and with more modesty._

BRANTWOOD,

_3rd August, 1875._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 137: This pamphlet was originally published in 1851, under the title of "Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds," by John Ruskin, M.A., author of the "Seven Lamps of Architecture," etc. (Smith, Elder, & Co.). A second edition, with an additional preface, followed in the same year, after which the pamphlet remained out of print till 1875, when it was reprinted in a third, erroneously called a second, edition (George Allen, Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent).--ED.]

[Footnote 138: London: 1846. Nisbet & Co., Berners Street.]

[Footnote 139: London: 1847. T. K. Campbell, 1, Warwick Square.]

NOTES,

ETC., ETC.

182. The following remarks were intended to form part of the appendix to an essay on Architecture: but it seemed to me, when I had put them into order, that they might be useful to persons who would not care to possess the work to which I proposed to attach them: I publish them, therefore, in a separate form; but I have not time to give them more consistency than they would have had in the subordinate position originally intended for them. I do not profess to teach Divinity, and I pray the reader to understand this, and to pardon the slightness and insufficiency of notes set down with no more intention of connected treatment of their subject than might regulate an accidental conversation. Some of them are simply copied from my private diary; others are detached statements of facts, which seem to me significative or valuable, without comment; all are written in haste, and in the intervals of occupation with an entirely different subject. It may be asked of me, whether I hold it right to speak thus hastily and insufficiently respecting the matter in question? Yes. I hold it right to _speak_ hastily; not to _think_ hastily. I have not thought hastily of these things; and, besides, the haste of speech is confessed, that the reader may think of me only as talking to him, and saying, as shortly and simply as I can, things which, if he esteem them foolish or idle, he is welcome to cast aside; but which, in very truth, I cannot help saying at this time.

183. The passages in the essay which required notes, described the repression of the political power of the Venetian Clergy by the Venetian Senate; and it became necessary for me--in supporting an assertion made in the course of the inquiry, that the idea of separation of Church and State was both vain and impious--to limit the sense in which it seemed to me that the word "Church" should be understood, and to note one or two consequences which would result from the acceptance of such limitation. This I may as well do in a separate paper, readable by any person interested in the subject; for it is high time that _some_ definition of the word should be agreed upon. I do not mean a definition involving the doctrine of this or that division of Christians, but limiting, in a manner understood by all of them, the sense in which the _word_ should thenceforward be used. There is grievous inconvenience in the present state of things. For instance, in a sermon lately published at Oxford, by an anti-Tractarian divine, I find this sentence,--"It is clearly within the province of the State to establish a national _church_, or _external institution of certain forms of worship_." Now suppose one were to take this interpretation of the word "Church," given by an Oxford divine, and substitute it for the simple word in some Bible texts, as, for instance, "Unto the angel of the external institution of certain forms of worship of Ephesus, write," etc. Or, "Salute the brethren which are in Laodicea, and Nymphas, and the external institution of certain forms of worship which is in his house,"--what awkward results we should have, here and there! Now I do not say it is possible for men to agree with each other in their religious _opinions_, but it is certainly possible for them to agree with each other upon their religious _expressions_; and when a word occurs in the Bible a hundred and fourteen times, it is surely not asking too much of contending divines to let it stand in the sense in which it there occurs; and when they want an expression of something for which it does _not_ stand in the Bible, to use some other word. There is no compromise of religious opinion in this; it is simply proper respect for the Queen's English.

184. The word occurs in the New Testament, as I said, a hundred and fourteen times.[140] In every one of those occurrences, it bears one and the same grand sense: that of a congregation or assembly of men. But it bears this sense under four different modifications, giving four separate meanings to the word. These are--

I. The entire Multitude of the Elect; otherwise called the Body of Christ; and sometimes the Bride, the Lamb's Wife; including the Faithful in all ages;--Adam, and the children of Adam yet unborn.

In this sense it is used in Ephesians v. 25, 27, 32; Colossians i. 18; and several other passages.

II. The entire multitude of professing believers in Christ, existing on earth at a given moment; including false brethren, wolves in sheep's clothing, goats and tares, as well as sheep and wheat, and other forms of bad fish with good in the net.

In this sense it is used in 1 Cor. x. 32, xv. 9; Galatians i. 13; 1 Tim. iii. 5, etc.

III. The multitude of professed believers, living in a certain city, place, or house. This is the most frequent sense in which the word occurs, as in Acts vii. 38, xiii. 1; 1 Cor. i. 2, xvi. 19, etc.

IV. Any assembly of men: as in Acts xix. 32, 41.

185. That in a hundred and twelve out of the hundred and fourteen texts, the word bears some one of these four meanings, is indisputable.[141] But there are two texts in which, if the word had alone occurred, its meaning might have been doubtful. These are Matt. xvi. 18, and xviii. 17.

The absurdity of founding any doctrine upon the inexpressibly minute possibility that, in these two texts, the word might have been used with a different meaning from that which it bore in all the others, coupled with the assumption that the meaning was this or that, is self-evident: it is not so much a religious error as a philological solecism; unparalleled, so far as I know, in any other science but that of divinity.

Nor is it ever, I think, committed with open front by Protestants. No English divine, asked in a straightforward manner for a Scriptural definition of "the Church," would, I suppose, be bold enough to answer "the Clergy." Nor is there any harm in the common use of the word, so only that it be distinctly understood to be not the Scriptural one; and therefore to be unfit for substitution in a Scriptural text. There is no harm in a man's talking of his son's "going into the Church; "meaning that he is going to take orders: but there is much harm in his supposing this a Scriptural use of the word, and therefore, that when Christ said, "Tell it to the Church," He might possibly have meant, "Tell it to the Clergy."

186. It is time to put an end to the chance of such misunderstanding. Let it but be declared plainly by all men, when they begin to state their opinions on matters ecclesiastical, that they will use the word "Church" in one sense or the other;--that they will accept the sense in which it is used by the Apostles, or that they deny this sense, and propose a new definition of their own. We shall then know what we are about with them--we may perhaps grant them their new use of the term, and argue with them on that understanding; so only that they will not pretend to make use of Scriptural authority, while they refuse to employ Scriptural language. This, however, it is not my purpose to do at present. I desire only to address those who are willing to accept the Apostolic sense of the word Church; and with them, I would endeavor shortly to ascertain what consequences must follow from an acceptance of that Apostolic sense, and what must be our first and most necessary conclusions from the common language of Scripture[142] respecting these following points:--

(1) The distinctive characters of the Church, (2) The Authority of the Church. (3) The Authority of the Clergy over the Church. (4) The Connection of the Church with the State.

187. These are four separate subjects of question; but we shall not have to put these questions in succession with each of the four Scriptural meanings of the word Church, for evidently its second and third meaning may be considered together, as merely expressing the general or particular conditions of the Visible Church, and the fourth signification is entirely independent of all questions of a religious kind. So that we shall only put the above inquiries successively respecting the Invisible and Visible Church; and as the two last--of authority of Clergy, and connection with State--can evidently only have reference to the Visible Church, we shall have, in all, these six questions to consider:--

(1) The distinctive characters of the Invisible Church. (2) The distinctive characters of the Visible Church. (3) The Authority of the Invisible Church. (4) The Authority of the Visible Church, (5) The Authority of Clergy over the Visible Church. (6) The Connection of the Visible Church with the State.

188. (1) What are the distinctive characters of the Invisible Church? That is to say, What is it which makes a person a member of this Church, and how is he to be known for such? Wide question--if we had to take cognizance of all that has been written respecting it, remarkable as it has been always for quantity rather than carefulness, and full of confusion between Visible and Invisible: even the Article of the Church of England being ambiguous in its first clause: "The _Visible_ Church is a congregation of Faithful men." As if ever it had been possible, except for God, to see Faith, or to know a Faithful man by sight! And there is little else written on this question, without some such quick confusion of the Visible and Invisible Church;--needless and unaccountable confusion. For evidently, the Church which is composed of Faithful men is the one true, indivisible, and indiscernible Church, built on the foundation of Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone. It includes all who have ever fallen asleep in Christ, and all yet unborn, who are to be saved in Him: its Body is as yet imperfect; it will not be perfected till the last saved human spirit is gathered to its God.

A man becomes a member of this Church only by believing in Christ with all his heart; nor is he positively recognizable for a member of it, when he has become so, by any one but God, not even by himself. Nevertheless, there are certain signs by which Christ's sheep may be guessed at. Not by their being in any definite Fold--for many are lost sheep at times; but by their sheeplike behavior; and a great many are indeed sheep, which, on the far mountain side, in their peacefulness, we take for stones. To themselves, the best proof of their being Christ's sheep is to find themselves on Christ's shoulders; and, between them, there are certain sympathies (expressed in the Apostles' Creed by the term "communion of Saints"), by which they may in a sort recognize each other, and so become verily visible to each other for mutual comfort.

189. (2) The Limits of the Visible Church, or of the Church in the Second Scriptural Sense, are not so easy to define: they are awkward questions, these, of stake-nets. It has been ingeniously and plausibly endeavored to make Baptism a sign of admission into the Visible Church: but absurdly enough; for we know that half the baptized people in the world are very visible rogues, believing neither in God nor devil; and it is flat blasphemy to call these Visible Christians; we also know that the Holy Ghost was sometimes given before Baptism,[143] and it would be absurdity to call a man, on whom the Holy Ghost had fallen, an Invisible Christian. The only rational distinction is that which practically, though not professedly, we always assume. If we hear a man profess himself a believer in God and in Christ, and detect him in no glaring and willful violation of God's law, we speak of him as a Christian; and, on the other hand, if we hear him or see him denying Christ, either in his words or conduct, we tacitly assume him not to be a Christian. A mawkish charity prevents us from outspeaking in this matter, and from earnestly endeavoring to discern who are Christians and who are not; and this I hold[144] to be one of the chief sins of the Church in the present day; for thus wicked men are put to no shame; and better men are encouraged in their failings, or caused to hesitate in their virtues, by the example of those whom, in false charity, they choose to call Christians. Now, it being granted that it is impossible to know, determinedly, who are Christians indeed, that is no reason for utter negligence in separating the nominal, apparent, or possible Christian, from the professed Pagan or enemy of God. We spend much time in arguing about efficacy of sacraments and such other mysteries; but we do not act upon the very certain tests which are clear and visible. We know that Christ's people are not thieves--not liars--not busybodies--not dishonest--not avaricious--not wasteful--not cruel. Let us then get ourselves well clear of thieves--liars--wasteful people--avaricious people--cheating people--people who do not pay their debts. Let us assure them that they, at least, do not belong to the Visible Church; and having thus got that Church into decent shape and cohesion, it will be time to think of drawing the stake-nets closer.

I hold it for a law, palpable to common sense, and which nothing but the cowardice and faithlessness of the Church prevents it from putting in practice, that the conviction of any dishonorable conduct or willful crime, of any fraud, falsehood, cruelty, or violence, should be ground for the excommunication of any man:--for his publicly declared separation from the acknowledged body of the Visible Church: and that he should not be received again therein without public confession of his crime and declaration of his repentance. If this were vigorously enforced, we should soon have greater purity of life in the world, and fewer discussions about high and low churches. But before we can obtain any idea of the manner in which such law could be enforced, we have to consider the second respecting the Authority of the Church. Now authority is twofold: to declare doctrine, and to enforce discipline; and we have to inquire, therefore, in each kind,--

190. (3) What is the authority of the Invisible Church? Evidently, in matters of doctrine, all members of the Invisible Church must have been, and must ever be, at the time of their deaths, right in the points essential to Salvation. But, (A), we cannot tell who _are_ members of the Invisible Church.

(B) We cannot collect evidence from death-beds in a clearly stated form.

(C) We can collect evidence, in any form, only from some one or two out of every sealed thousand of the Invisible Church. Elijah thought he was alone in Israel; and yet there were seven thousand invisible ones around him. Grant that we had Elijah's intelligence; and we could only calculate on collecting one seven-thousandth part of the evidence or opinions of the part of the Invisible Church living on earth at a given moment: that is to say, the seven-millionth or trillionth of its collective evidence. It is very clear, therefore, we cannot hope to get rid of the contradictory opinions, and keep the consistent ones, by a general equation. But, it has been said, these are no contradictory opinions; the Church is infallible. There was some talk about the infallibility of the Church, if I recollect right, in that letter of Mr. Bennett's to the Bishop of London. If any Church is infallible, it is assuredly the Invisible Church, or Body of Christ: and infallible in the main sense it must of course be by its definition. An Elect person must be saved, and therefore cannot eventually be deceived on essential points: so that Christ says of the deception of such, "If it were _possible_" implying it to be impossible. Therefore, as we said, if one could get rid of the variable opinions of the members of the Invisible Church, the constant opinions would assuredly be authoritative: but, for the three reasons above stated, we cannot get at their constant opinions: and as for the feelings and thoughts which they daily experience or express, the question of Infallibility -which is practical only in this bearing--is soon settled. Observe, St. Paul, and the rest of the Apostles, write nearly all their epistles to the Invisible Church:--those epistles are headed,--Romans, "To the beloved of God, called to be saints; "1 Corinthians, "To them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus; "2 Corinthians, "To the saints in all Achaia;" Ephesians, "To the saints which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus; "Philippians, "To all the saints which are at Philippi; "Colossians, "To the saints and faithful brethren which are at Colosse;" 1 and 2 Thessalonians, "To the Church of the Thessalonians, which is in God the Father, and the Lord Jesus; "1 and 2 Timothy, "To his own son in the faith; "Titus, to the same; 1 Peter, "To the Strangers, Elect according to the foreknowledge of God;" 2 Peter, "To them that have obtained like precious faith with us; " 2 John, "To the Elect lady; " Jude, " To them that are sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, and called."

191. There are thus fifteen epistles, expressly directed to the members of the Invisible Church. Philemon and Hebrews, and 1 and 3 John, are evidently also so written, though not so expressly inscribed. That of James, and that to the Galatians, are as evidently to the Visible Church: the one being general, and the other to persons "removed from Him that called them." Missing out, therefore, these two epistles, but including Christ's words to His disciples, we find in the Scriptural addresses to members of the Invisible Church, fourteen, if not more, direct injunctions "not to be deceived."[145] So much for the "Infallibility of the Church."

Now, one could put up with Puseyism more patiently, if its fallacies arose merely from peculiar temperaments yielding to peculiar temptations. But its bold refusals to read plain English; its elaborate adjustments of tight bandages over its own eyes, as wholesome preparation for a walk among traps and pitfalls; its daring trustfulness in its own clairvoyance all the time, and declarations that every pit it falls into is a seventh heaven; and that it is pleasant and profitable to break its legs;--with all this it is difficult to have patience. One thinks of the highwayman with his eyes shut in the "Arabian Nights"; and wonders whether any kind of scourging would prevail upon the Anglican highwayman to open "first one and then the other."

192. (4) So much, then, I repeat, for the infallibility of the _In_visible Church, and for its consequent authority. Now, if we want to ascertain what infallibility and authority there is in the Visible Church, we have to alloy the small wisdom and the light weight of Invisible Christians, with the large percentage of the false wisdom and contrary weight of Undetected Anti-Christians. Which alloy makes up the current coin of opinions in the Visible Church, having such value as we may choose--its nature being properly assayed--to attach to it.

There is, therefore, in matters of doctrine, _no such thing_ as the Authority of the Church. We might as well talk of the authority of a morning cloud. There may be light _in_ it, but the light is not of it; and it diminishes the light that it gets; and lets less of it through than it receives, Christ being its sun. Or, we might as well talk of the authority of a flock of sheep--for the Church is a body to be taught and fed, not to teach and feed: and of all sheep that are fed on the earth, Christ's Sheep are the most simple, (the children of this generation are wiser): always losing themselves; doing little else in this world _but_ lose themselves;--never finding themselves; always found by Some One else; getting perpetually into sloughs, and snows, and bramble thickets, like to die there, but for their Shepherd, who is forever finding them and bearing them back, with torn fleeces and eyes full of fear.

193. This, then, being the No-Authority of the Church in matter of Doctrine, what Authority has it in matters of Discipline?

Much, every way. The sheep have natural and wholesome power (however far scattered they may be from their proper fold) of getting together in orderly knots; following each other on trodden sheepwalks, and holding their heads all one way when they see strange dogs coming; as well as of casting out of their company any whom they see reason to suspect of not being right sheep, and being among them for no good. All which things must be done as the time and place require, and by common consent. A path may be good at one time of day which is bad at another, or after a change of wind; and a position may be very good for sudden defense, which would be very stiff and awkward for feeding in. And common consent must often be of such and such a company on this or that hillside, in this or that particular danger,--not of all the sheep in the world: and the consent may either be literally common, and expressed in assembly, or it may be to appoint officers over the rest, with such and such trusts of the common authority, to be used for the common advantage. Conviction of crimes, and excommunication, for instance, could neither be effected except before, or by means of, officers of some appointed authority.

194. (5) This then brings us to our fifth question. What is the Authority of the Clergy over the Church?

The first clause of the question must evidently be,--Who _are_ the Clergy? And it is not easy to answer this without begging the rest of the question.

For instance, I think I can hear certain people answering, that the Clergy are folk of three kinds;--Bishops, who overlook the Church; Priests, who sacrifice for the Church; Deacons, who minister to the Church: thus assuming in their answer, that the Church is to be sacrificed _for_, and that the people cannot overlook and minister to her at the same time;--which is going much too fast. I think, however, if we define the Clergy to be the "Spiritual Officers of the Church,"--meaning, by Officers, merely People in office,--we shall have a title safe enough and general enough to begin with, and corresponding too, pretty well, with St. Paul's general expression [Greek: proistamenoi], in Rom. xii. 8, and 1 Thess. v. 13.

Now, respecting these Spiritual Officers, or office-bearers, we have to inquire, first, What their Office or Authority is, or should be? secondly, Who gave, or should give, them that Authority? That is to say, first, What is, or should be, the _nature_ of their office? and secondly, What the _extent_, or force, of their authority in it? for this last depends mainly on its derivation.

195. First, then, What should be the offices, and of what kind should be the authority, of the Clergy?

I have hitherto referred to the Bible for an answer to every question. I do so again; and, behold, the Bible gives me no answer. I defy you to answer me from the Bible. You can only guess, and dimly conjecture, what the offices of the Clergy _were_ in the first century. You cannot show me a single command as to what they shall be. Strange, this; the Bible gives no answer to so apparently important a question! God surely would not have left His word without an answer to anything His children ought to ask. Surely it must be a ridiculous question--a question we ought never to have put, or thought of putting. Let us think of it again a little. To be sure,--It _is_ a ridiculous question, and we should be ashamed of ourselves for having put it:--What should be the offices of the Clergy? That is to say, What are the possible spiritual necessities which at any time may arise in the Church, and by what means and men are they to be supplied?--evidently an infinite question. Different kinds of necessities must be met by different authorities, constituted as the necessities arise. Robinson Crusoe, in his island, wants no Bishop, and makes a thunderstorm do for an Evangelist. The University of Oxford would be ill off without its Bishop; but wants an Evangelist besides; and that forthwith. The authority which the Vaudois shepherds need is of Barnabas, the Son of Consolation; the authority which the city of London needs is of James, the Son of Thunder. Let us then alter the form of our question, and put it to the Bible thus: What are the necessities most likely to arise in the Church? and may they be best met by different men, or in great part by the same men acting in different capacities? and are the names attached to their offices of any consequence? Ah, the Bible answers now, and that loudly. The Church is built on the Foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the corner-stone. Well; we cannot have two foundations, so we can have no more Apostles nor Prophets:--then, as for the other needs of the Church in its edifying upon this foundation, there are all manner of things to be done daily;--rebukes to be given; comfort to be brought; Scripture to be explained; warning to be enforced; threatenings to be executed; charities to be administered; and the men who do these things are called, and call themselves, with absolute indifference, Deacons, Bishops, Elders, Evangelists, according to what they are doing at the time of speaking. St. Paul almost always calls himself a deacon, St. Peter calls himself an elder, 1 Peter v. 1; and Timothy, generally understood to be addressed as a bishop, is called a deacon in 1 Tim. iv. 6--forbidden to rebuke an elder, in v. 1, and exhorted to do the work of an evangelist, in 2 Tim. iv. 5. But there is one thing which, as officers, or as separate from the rest of the flock, they _never_ call themselves,--which it would have been impossible, as so separate, they ever _should_ have called themselves; that is--_Priests_.

196. It would have been just as possible for the Clergy of the early Church to call themselves Levites, as to call themselves (ex-officio) Priests. The whole function of Priesthood was, on Christmas morning, at once and forever gathered into His Person who was born at Bethlehem; and thenceforward, all who are united with Him, and who with Him make sacrifice of themselves; that is to say, all members of the Invisible Church become, at the instant of their conversion, Priests; and are so called in 1 Peter ii. 5, and Rev. i. 6, and xx. 6, where, observe, there is no possibility of limiting the expression to the Clergy; the conditions of Priesthood being simply having been loved by Christ, and washed in His blood. The blasphemous claim on the part of the Clergy of being _more_ Priests than the godly laity--that is to say, of having a higher Holiness than the Holiness of being one with Christ,--is altogether a Romanist heresy, dragging after it, or having its origin in, the other heresies respecting the sacrificial power of the Church officer, and his repeating the oblation of Christ, and so having power to absolve from sin:--with all the other endless and miserable falsehoods of the Papal hierarchy; falsehoods for which, that there might be no shadow of excuse, it has been ordained by the Holy Spirit that no Christian minister shall once call himself a Priest from one end of the New Testament to the other, except together with his flock; and so far from the idea of any peculiar sanctification, belonging to the Clergy, ever entering the Apostles' minds, we actually find St. Paul defending himself against the possible imputation of inferiority: "If any man trust to himself that he is Christ's, let him of himself think this again, that, as he is Christ's, even so are we Christ's" (2 Cor. x. 7). As for the unhappy retention of the term Priest in our English Prayer-book, so long as it was understood to mean nothing but an upper order of Church officer, licensed to tell the congregation from the reading-desk, what (for the rest) they might, one would think, have known without being told,--that "God pardoneth all them that truly repent,"--there was little harm in it; but, now that this order of Clergy begins to presume upon a title which, if it mean anything at all, is simply short for Presbyter, and has no more to do with the word Hiereus than with the word Levite, it is time that some order should be taken both with the book and the Clergy. For instance, in that dangerous compound of halting poetry with hollow Divinity, called the "Lyra Apostolica," we find much versification on the sin of Korah and his company: with suggested parallel between the Christian and Levitical Churches, and threatening that there are "Judgment Fires, for high-voiced Korahs in their day." There are indeed such fires. But when Moses said, "a Prophet shall the Lord raise up unto you, like unto me," did he mean the writer who signs [Greek: g] in the "Lyra Apostolica"? The office of the Lawgiver and Priest is now forever gathered into One Mediator between God and man; and THEY are guilty of the sin of Korah who blasphemously would associate themselves in His Mediatorship.

197. As for the passages in the "Ordering of Priests" and "Visitation of the Sick" respecting Absolution, they are evidently pure Romanism, and might as well not be there, for any practical effect which they have on the consciences of the Laity; and had much better not be there, as regards their effect on the minds of the Clergy. It is indeed true that Christ promised absolving powers to His Apostles: He also promised to those who believed, that they should take up serpents; and if they drank any deadly thing, it should not hurt them. His words were fulfilled literally; but those who would extend their force to beyond the Apostolic times, must extend both promises or neither.

Although, however, the Protestant laity do not often admit the absolving power of their clergy, they are but too apt to yield, in some sort, to the impression of their greater sanctification; and from this instantly results the unhappy consequence that the sacred character of the Layman himself is forgotten, and his own Ministerial duty is neglected. Men not in office in the Church suppose themselves, on that ground, in a sort unholy; and that, therefore, they may sin with more excuse, and be idle or impious with less danger, than the Clergy: especially they consider themselves relieved from all ministerial function, and as permitted to devote their whole time and energy to the business of this world. No mistake can possibly be greater. Every member of the Church is equally bound to the service of the Head of the Church; and that service is pre-eminently the saving of souls. There is not a moment of a man's active life in which he may not be indirectly preaching; and throughout a great part of his life he ought to be _directly_ preaching, and teaching both strangers and friends; his children, his servants, and all who in any way are put under him, being given to him as special objects of his ministration. So that the only difference between a Church officer and a lay member is either a wider degree of authority given to the former, as apparently a wiser and better man, or a special appointment to some office more easily discharged by one person than by many: as, for instance, the serving of tables by the deacons; the authority or appointment being, in either case, commonly signified by a marked separation from the rest of the Church, and the privilege or power[146] of being maintained by the rest of the Church, without being forced to labor with his hands, or incumber himself with any temporal concerns.

198. Now, putting out of the question the serving of tables, and other such duties, respecting which there is no debate, we shall find the offices of the Clergy, whatever names we may choose to give to those who discharge them, falling mainly into two great heads:--Teaching; including doctrine, warning, and comfort: Discipline; including reproof and direct administration of punishment. Either of which functions would naturally become vested in single persons, to the exclusion of others, as a mere matter of convenience: whether those persons were wiser and better than others or not; and respecting each of which, and the authority required for its fitting discharge, a short inquiry must be separately made.

199. I. Teaching.--It appears natural and wise that certain men should be set apart from the rest of the Church that they may make Theology the study of their lives: and that they should be thereto instructed specially in the Hebrew and Greek tongues; and have entire leisure granted them for the study of the Scriptures, and for obtaining general knowledge of the grounds of Faith, and best modes of its defense against all heretics: and it seems evidently right, also, that with this Scholastic duty should be joined the Pastoral duty of constant visitation and exhortation to the people; for, clearly, the Bible, and the truths of Divinity in general, can only be understood rightly in their practical application; and clearly, also, a man spending his time constantly in spiritual ministrations, must be better able, on any given occasion, to deal powerfully with the human heart than one unpracticed in such matters. The unity of Knowledge and Love, both devoted altogether to the service of Christ and His Church, marks the true Christian Minister; who, I believe, whenever he has existed, has never failed to receive due and fitting reverence from all men,--of whatever character or opinion; and I believe that if all those who profess to be such were such indeed, there would never be question of their authority more.

200. But, whatever influence they may have over the Church, their authority never supersedes that of either the intellect or the conscience of the simplest of its lay members. They can assist those members in the search for truth, or comfort their over-worn and doubtful minds; they can even assure them that they are in the way of truth, or that pardon is within their reach: but they can neither manifest the truth, nor grant the pardon. Truth is to be discovered, and Pardon to be won, for every man by himself. This is evident from innumerable texts of Scripture, but chiefly from those which exhort every man to seek after Truth, and which connect knowing with doing. We are to seek after knowledge as silver, and search for her as for hid treasures; therefore, from every man she must be naturally hid, and the discovery of her is to be the reward only of personal search. The kingdom of God is as treasure hid in a field; and of those who profess to help us to seek for it, we are not to put confidence in those who say,--Here is the treasure, we have found it, and have it, and will give you some of it; but in those who say,--We think that is a good place to dig, and you will dig most easily in such and such a way.

201. Farther, it has been promised that if such earnest search be made, Truth shall be discovered: as much truth, that is, as is necessary for the person seeking. These, therefore, I hold, for two fundamental principles of religion,--that, without seeking, truth cannot be known at all; and that, by seeking, it may be discovered by the simplest. I say, without seeking it cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in Articles, nor in anywise "prepared and sold" in packages, ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by himself out of its husk, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own. In what science is knowledge to be had cheap? or truth to be told over a velvet cushion, in half an hour's talk every seventh day? Can you learn chemistry so?--zoology?--anatomy? and do you expect to penetrate the secret of all secrets, and to know that whose price is above rubies; and of which the depth saith,--It is not in me,--in so easy fashion? There are doubts in this matter which evil spirits darken with their wings, and that is true of all such doubts which we were told long ago--they can "be ended by action alone."[147]

202. As surely as we live, this truth of truths can only so be discerned: to those who act on what they know, more shall be revealed; and thus, if any man will do His will, he shall know the doctrine whether it be of God. Any man,--not the man who has most means of knowing, who has the subtlest brains, or sits under the most orthodox preacher, or has his library fullest of most orthodox books,--but the man who strives to know, who takes God at His word, and sets himself to dig up the heavenly mystery, roots and all, before sunset, and the night come, when no man can work. Beside such a man, God stands in more and more visible presence as he toils, and teaches him that which no preacher can teach--no earthly authority gainsay. By such a man, the preacher must himself be judged.

203. Doubt you this? There is nothing more certain nor clear throughout the Bible: the Apostles themselves appeal constantly to their flocks, and actually _claim_ judgment from them, as deserving it, and having a right to it, rather than discouraging it. But, first notice the way in which the discovery of truth is spoken of in the Old Testament: "Evil men understand not judgment; but they that seek the Lord understand all things," Proverbs xxviii. 5. God overthroweth, not merely the transgressor or the wicked, but even "the words of the transgressor," Proverbs xxii. 12, and "the counsel of the wicked," Job v. 13, xxi. 16; observe again, in Proverbs xxiv. 14, "My son, eat thou honey, because it is good--so shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul, when thou hast _found it_, there shall be a reward;" and again, "What man is he that feareth the Lord? him shall He teach in the way that He shall choose;" so Job xxxii. 8, and multitudes of places more; and then, with all these places, which express the definite and personal operation of the Spirit of God on every one of His people, compare the place in Isaiah, which speaks of the contrary of this human teaching: a passage which seems as if it had been written for this very day and hour. "Because their fear towards me is taught by the _precept of men_; therefore, behold, the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid" (xxix. 13,14). Then take the New Testament, and observe how St. Paul himself speaks of the Romans, even as hardly needing his epistle, but able to admonish one another: "_Nevertheless, brethren, I have written the more boldly unto you in some sort, as putting you in mind_" (xv. 15). Anyone, we should have thought, might have done as much as this, and yet St. Paul increases the modesty of it as he goes on; for he claims the right of doing as much as this, only "because of the grace given to me of God, that I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles." Then compare 2 Cor. v. 11, where he appeals to the consciences of the people for the manifestation of his having done his duty; and observe in verse 21 of that, and I of the next chapter, the "pray" and "beseech," not "command"; and again in chapter vi. verse 4, "approving ourselves as the ministers of God." But the most remarkable passage of all is 2 Cor. iii. 1, whence it appears that the churches were actually in the habit of giving letters of recommendation to their ministers; and St. Paul dispenses with such letters, not by virtue of his Apostolic authority, but because the power of his preaching was enough manifested in the Corinthians themselves. And these passages are all the more forcible, because if in any of them St. Paul had claimed absolute authority over the Church as a teacher, it was no more than we should have expected him to claim, nor could his doing so have in anywise justified a successor in the same claim. But now that he has not claimed it,--who, following him, shall dare to claim it? And the consideration of the necessity of joining expressions of the most exemplary humility, which were to be the example of succeeding ministers, with such assertion of Divine authority as should secure acceptance for the epistle itself in the sacred canon, sufficiently accounts for the apparent inconsistencies which occur in 2 Thess. iii. 14, and other such texts.

204. So much, then, for the authority of the Clergy in matters of Doctrine. Next, what is their authority in matters of Discipline? It must evidently be very great, even if it were derived from the people alone, and merely vested in the clerical officers as the executors of their ecclesiastical judgments, and general overseers of all the Church. But granting, as we must presently, the minister to hold office directly from God, his authority of discipline becomes very great indeed; how great, it seems to me most difficult to determine, because I do not understand what St. Paul means by "delivering a man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh." Leaving this question, however, as much too hard for casual examination, it seems indisputable that the authority of the Ministers or court of Ministers should extend to the pronouncing a man Excommunicate for certain crimes against the Church, as well as for all crimes punishable by ordinary law. There ought, I think, to be an ecclesiastical code of laws; and a man ought to have jury trial, according to this code, before an ecclesiastical judge; in which, if he were found guilty, as of lying, or dishonesty, or cruelty, much more of any actually committed violent crime, he should be pronounced excommunicate; refused the Sacrament; and have his name written in some public place as an excommunicate person until he had publicly confessed his sin and besought pardon of God for it. The jury should always be of the laity, and no penalty should be enforced in an ecclesiastical court except this of excommunication.

205. This proposal may seem strange to many persons; but assuredly this, if not much more than this, is commanded in Scripture, first in the (much-abused) text, "Tell it unto the Church;" and most clearly in 1 Cor. v. 11-13; 2 Thess. iii. 6 and 14; 1 Tim. v. 8 and 20; and Titus