Chapter 2

But stern as were his theories, there is hardly a home within his district that has not some memory left of the love and tenderness of his personal charity. I hardly like to tell how often I have seen the face of the sick and dying brighten as he drew near, or how the little children, as they flocked out of school, would run to him, shouting his name for very glee. For the Sunday-school was soon transformed by his efforts into a day-school for children, whose parents were really unable to pay school-fees; and a large schoolroom, erected near John's Place, was filled with dirty little scholars. Here too he gathered round him a class of working men, to whom he lectured on the Bible every Wednesday evening; and here he delivered addresses to the dock-labourers whom he had induced to attend, of a nature somewhat startling to those who talk of "preaching down to the intelligence of the poor." I give the sketch of one of these sermons (on "Not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together") in his own words:--"I presented Christianity as a society; investigated the origin of societies, the family, the tribe, the nation, with the attendant expanded ideas of rights and duties; the common weal, the bond of union; rising from the family dinner-table to the sacrificial rites of the national gods; drew parallels with trades' unions and benefit clubs, and told them flatly they would not be Christians till they were communicants." No doubt this will seem to most sensible people extravagant enough, even without the quotations from "Wordsworth, Tennyson, and even Pope" with which his addresses were enlivened; but I must confess that my own experience among the poor agrees pretty much with Edward Denison's, and that I believe "high thinking" put into plain English to be more likely to tell on a dock-yard labourer than all the "simple Gospel sermons" in the world.

His real power however for good among the poor lay not so much in what he did as in what he was. It is in no spirit of class self-sufficiency that he dwells again and again throughout these letters on the advantages to such a neighbourhood of the presence of a "gentleman" in the midst of it. He lost little, in the end he gained much, by the resolute stand he made against the indiscriminate almsgiving which has done so much to create and encourage pauperism in the East of London. The poor soon came to understand the man who was as liberal with his sympathy as he was chary of meat and coal tickets, who only aimed at being their friend, at listening to their troubles, and aiding them with counsel, as if he were one of themselves, at putting them in the way of honest work, at teaching their children, at protecting them with a perfect courage and chivalry against oppression and wrong. He instinctively appealed in fact to their higher nature, and such an appeal seldom remains unanswered. In the roughest costermonger there is a vein of real nobleness, often even of poetry, in which lies the whole chance of his rising to a better life. I remember, as an instance of the way in which such a vein can be touched, the visit of a lady, well known for her work in the poorer districts of London, to a low alley in this very parish. She entered the little mission-room with a huge basket, filled not with groceries or petticoats, but with roses. There was hardly one pale face among the women bending over their sewing that did not flush with delight as she distributed her gifts. Soon, as the news spread down the alley, rougher faces peered in at window and door, and great "navvies" and dock-labourers put out their hard fists for a rosebud with the shyness and delight of schoolboys. "She was a _real_ lady," was the unanimous verdict of the alley; like Edward Denison she had somehow discovered that man does not live by bread alone, and that the communion of rich and poor is not to be found in appeals to the material but to the spiritual side of man.

"What do you look on as the greatest boon that has been conferred on the poorer classes in later years?" said a friend to me one day, after expatiating on the rival claims of schools, missions, shoe-black brigades, and a host of other philanthropic efforts for their assistance. I am afraid I sank in his estimation when I answered, "Sixpenny photographs." But any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a labourer's fireplace, still gathering together into one the "home" that life is always parting--the boy that has "gone to Canada," the girl "out at service," the little one with the golden hair that sleeps under the daisies, the old grandfather in the country--will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world.

It is easy indeed to resolve on "helping" the poor; but it is far less easy to see clearly how we can help them, what is real aid, and what is mere degradation. I know few books where any one who is soberly facing questions like these can find more help than in the "Letters" of Edward Denison. Broken and scattered as his hints necessarily appear, the main lines along which his thought moves are plain enough. He would discriminate between temporary, and chronic distress, between the poverty caused by a sudden revolution of trade and permanent destitution such as that of Bethnal Green. The first requires exceptional treatment; the second a rigid and universal administration of the Poor Laws. "Bring back the Poor Law," he repeats again and again, "to the spirit of its institution; organize a sufficiently elastic labour test, without which no outdoor relief to be given; make the few alterations which altered times demand, and impose every possible discouragement on private benevolence." The true cure for pauperism lies in the growth of thrift among the poor. "I am not drawing the least upon my imagination when I say that a young man of twenty could in five years, even as a dock-labourer, which is much the lowest employment and least well paid there is, save about £20. This is not exactly Utopia; it is within the reach of nearly every man, if quite at the bottom of the tree; but if it were of anything like common occurrence the destitution and disease of this life would be within manageable limits."

I know that words like these are in striking contrast with the usual public opinion on the subject, as well as with the mere screeching over poverty in which sentimentalists are in the habit of indulging. But it is fair to say that they entirely coincide with my own experience. The sight which struck me most in Stepney was one which met my eyes when I plunged by sheer accident into the back-yard of a jobbing carpenter, and came suddenly upon a neat greenhouse with fine flowers inside it. The man had built it with his own hands and his own savings; and the sight of it had so told on his next-door neighbour--a cobbler, if I remember rightly--as to induce him to leave off drinking, and build a rival greenhouse with savings of his own. Both had become zealous florists, and thrifty, respectable men; but the thing which surprised both of them most was that they had been able to save at all.

It is in the letters themselves however rather than in these desultory comments of mine that the story of these two years of earnest combat with the great problem of our day must be studied. Short as the time was, it was broken by visits to France, to Scotland, to Guernsey, and by his election as Member of Parliament for the borough of Newark. But even these visits and his new parliamentary position were meant to be parts of an effort for the regeneration of our poorer classes. His careful examination of the thrift of the peasantry of the Channel Islands, his researches into the actual working of the "Assistance Publique" in Paris, the one remarkable speech he delivered in Parliament on the subject of vagrancy, were all contributions to this great end. In the midst of these labours a sudden attack of his old disease forced him to leave England on a long sea-voyage, and within a fortnight of his landing in Australia he died at Melbourne. His portrait hangs in the school which he built, and rough faces as they gaze at it still soften even into tears as they think of Edward Denison.

SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.

I.

CANNES AND ST. HONORAT.

In a colloquial sort of way we talk glibly enough of leaving England, but England is by no means an easy country to leave. If it bids us farewell from the cliffs of Dover, it greets us again on the quay of Calais. It would be a curious morning's amusement to take a map of Europe, and mark with a dot of red the settlements of our lesser English colonies. A thousand Englands would crop up along the shores of the Channel or in quiet nooks of Normandy, around mouldering Breton castles or along the banks of the Loire, under the shadow of the Maritime Alps or the Pyrenees, beneath the white walls of Tunis or the Pyramids of the Nile. During the summer indeed England is everywhere--fishing in the fiords of Norway, sketching on the Kremlin, shooting brigands in Albania, yachting among the Cyclades, lion-hunting in the Atlas, crowding every steamer on the Rhine, annexing Switzerland, lounging through Italian galleries, idling in the gondolas of Venice. But even winter is far from driving England home again; what it really does is to concentrate it in a hundred little Britains along the sunny shores of the South. Each winter resort brings home to us the power of the British doctor. It is he who rears pleasant towns at the foot of the Pyrenees, and lines the sunny coasts of the Riviera with villas that gleam white among the olive groves. It is his finger that stirs the camels of Algeria, the donkeys of Palestine, the Nile boats of Egypt. At the first frosts of November the doctor marshals his wild geese for their winter flitting, and the long train streams off, grumbling but obedient, to the little Britains of the South.

Of these little Britains none is more lovely than Cannes. The place is a pure creation of the health-seekers whose gay villas are thrown fancifully about among its sombre fir-woods, though the "Old Town," as it is called nowadays, remains clinging to its original height, street above street leading up to a big bare church of the Renascence period, to fragments of mediæval walls and a great tower which crowns the summit of the hill. At the feet of this height lie the two isles of Lerins, set in the blue waters of the bay; on the east the eye ranges over the porphyry hills of Napoul to the huge masses of the Estrelles; landwards a tumbled country with bright villas dotted over it rises gently to the Alps. As a strictly winter resort Cannes is far too exposed for the more delicate class of invalids; as a spring resort it is without a rival. Nowhere is the air so bright and elastic, the light so wonderfully brilliant and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous fragments, sparkles at our feet. Colour takes a depth as well as a refinement strange even to the Riviera; nowhere is the sea so darkly purple, nowhere are the tones of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent, nowhere are the sunsets so sublime. The scenery around harmonizes in its gaiety, its vivacity, its charm with this brightness of air and light. There is little of grandeur about it, little to compare in magnificence with the huge background of the cliffs behind Mentone or the mountain wall which rises so steeply from its lemon groves. But everywhere there is what Mentone lacks--variety, largeness, picturesqueness of contrast and surprise. Above us is the same unchanging blue as there, but here it overarches gardens fresh with verdure and bright with flowers, and houses gleaming white among the dark fir-clumps; hidden little ravines break the endless tossings of the ground; in the distance white roads rush straight to grey towns hanging strangely against the hill-sides; a thin snow-line glitters along the ridge of the Maritime Alps; dark purple shadows veil the recesses of the Estrelles.

Nor is it only this air of cheerfulness and vivacity which makes Cannes so pleasant a spring resort for invalids; it possesses in addition an advantage of situation which its more sheltered rivals necessarily want. The high mountain walls that give their complete security from cold winds to Mentone or San Remo are simply prison walls to visitors who are too weak to face a steep ascent on foot or even on donkey-back, for drives are out of the question except along one or two monotonous roads. But the country round Cannes is full of easy walks and drives, and it is as varied and beautiful as it is accessible. You step out of your hotel into the midst of wild scenery, rough hills of broken granite screened with firs, or paths winding through a wilderness of white heath. Everywhere in spring the ground is carpeted with a profusion of wild-flowers, cistus and brown orchis, narcissus and the scarlet anemone; sometimes the forest scenery sweeps away, and leaves us among olive-grounds and orange-gardens arranged in formal, picturesque rows. And from every little height there are the same distant views of far-off mountains, or the old town flooded with yellow light, or islands lying gem-like in the dark blue sea, or the fiery hue of sunset over the Estrelles.

Nor are these land-trips the only charm of Cannes. No one has seen the coast of Provence in its beauty who has not seen it from the sea. A sail to the isles of Lerins reveals for the first time the full glory of Cannes even to those who have enjoyed most keenly the large picturesqueness of its landscapes, the delicate colouring of its distant hills, the splendour of its sunsets. As one drifts away from the shore the circle of the Maritime Alps rises like the framework of some perfect picture, the broken outline of the mountains to the left contrasting with the cloud-capt heights above Turbia, snow-peaks peeping over the further slopes between them, delicate lights and shadows falling among the broken country of the foreground, Cannes itself stretching its bright line of white along the shore. In the midst of the bay, the centre as it were of this exquisite landscape, lie the two isles of Lerins. With the larger, that of St. Marguerite, romance has more to do than history, and the story of the "Man in the Iron Mask," who was so long a prisoner in its fortress, is fast losing the mystery which made it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St. Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism of Egypt first penetrated into the West.

The devotees whom the fame of Antony and of the Coenobites of the Nile had drawn in crowds to the East returned at the close of the fourth century to found similar retreats in the isles which line the coasts of the Mediterranean. The sea took the place of the desert, but the type of monastic life which the solitaries had found in Egypt was faithfully preserved. The Abbot of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary cells, and linked together by the common ties of obedience and prayer. By a curious concurrence of events the coenobitic life of Lerins, so utterly unlike the later monasticism of the Benedictines, was long preserved in a remote corner of Christendom. Patrick, the most famous of its scholars, transmitted its type of monasticism to the Celtic Church which he founded in Ireland, and the vast numbers, the asceticism, the loose organization of such abbeys as those of Bangor or Armagh preserved to the twelfth century the essential characteristics of Lerins. Nor is this all its historical importance. What Iona is to the ecclesiastical history of Northern England, what Fulda and Monte Cassino are to the ecclesiastical history of Germany and Southern Italy, that this Abbey of St. Honorat became to the Church of Southern Gaul. For nearly two centuries, and those centuries of momentous change, when the wreck of the Roman Empire threatened civilization and Christianity with ruin like its own, the civilization and Christianity of the great district between the Loire, the Alps, and the Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the barbaric invaders who poured down on the Rhône and the Garonne, it exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona till the Synod of Whitby exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious sees of Southern Gaul were filled by prelates who had been reared at Lerins; to Arles, for instance, it gave in succession Hilary, Cæsarius, and Virgilius. The voice of the Church was found in that of its doctors; the famous rule of faith, "quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus," is the rule of Vincent of Lerins; its monk Salvian painted the agony of the dying Empire in his book on the government of God; the long fight of semi-Pelagianism against the sterner doctrines of Augustin was chiefly waged within its bounds.

Little remains to illustrate this earlier and more famous period of the monastic history of Lerins which extends to the massacre of its monks by Saracen pirates at the opening of the eighth century. The very look of the island has been changed by the revolutions of the last hundred years. It is still a mere spit of sand, edged along the coast with sombre pines; but the whole of the interior has been stripped of its woods by the agricultural improvements which are being carried on by the Franciscans who at present possess it, and all trace of solitude and retirement has disappeared. A well in the centre of the island and a palm-tree beside the church are linked to the traditional history of the founders of the abbey. Worked into the later buildings we find marbles and sculptures which may have been brought from the mainland, as at Torcello, by fugitives who had escaped the barbaric storm. A bas-relief of Christ and the Apostles, which is now inserted over the west gate of the church, and a column of red marble which stands beside it, belong probably to the earliest days of the settlement at Lerins. In the little chapels scattered over the island fragments of early sarcophagi, inscriptions, and sculpture have been industriously collected and preserved. But the chapels themselves are far more interesting than their contents. Of the seven which originally lined the shore, two or three only now remain uninjured; in these the building itself is either square or octagonal, pierced with a single rough Romanesque window, and of diminutive size. The walls and vaulting are alike of rough stonework. The chapels served till the Revolution as seven stations which were visited by the pilgrims to the island, but we can hardly doubt that in these, as in the Seven Chapels at Glendalough, we see relics of the earlier coenobitic establishment.

The cloister of the abbey is certainly of a date later than the massacre of the monks, which took place according to tradition in the little square of wild greensward which lies within it; but the roughness of its masonry, the plain barrel roof, and the rude manner in which the low, gloomy vaulting is carried round its angles, are of the same character as in the usual tenth-century buildings of Southern Gaul. With the exception of the masonry of its side walls there is nothing in the existing remains of the abbey church itself earlier than its reconstruction at the close of the eleventh century. The building has been so utterly wrecked that little architectural detail is left; but the broad nave, with its narrow side aisles, the absence, as in the Aquitanian churches, of triforium and clerestory, and the shortness of the choir space, give their own individual mark to St. Honorat. Of the monastic buildings directly connected with the church only a few rooms remain, and these are destitute of any features of interest. They are at present used as an orphanage by the Franciscans whom the Bishop of Frejus, by whom the island was purchased some fifteen years ago, has settled there as an agricultural colony, and whose reverence for the relics around them is as notable as their courtesy to the strangers who visit them. If it is true that the island narrowly escaped being turned into a tea-garden and resort for picnics by some English speculators, we can only feel a certain glow of gratitude to the Bishop of Frejus. The brown train of the eleven brothers as we saw them pacing slowly beneath the great caroub-tree close to the abbey, or the row of boys blinking in the sunshine as they repeat their lesson to the lay-brother who acts as schoolmaster, jar less roughly on the associations of Lerins than the giggle of happy lovers or the pop of British champagne.

There is little interest in the later story of St. Honorat, from the days of the Saracen massacre to its escape from conversion into a tea-garden. The appearance of the Moslem pirates at once robbed it of its old security, and the cessation of their attacks was followed by new dangers from the Genoese and Catalans who infested the coast in the fourteenth century. The isle was alternately occupied by French and Spaniards in the war between Francis and Charles V.; it passed under the rule of Commendatory abbots, and in 1789, when it was finally secularized, the four thousand monks of its earlier history had shrunk to four. Perhaps the most curious of all the buildings of Lerins is that which took its rise in the insecurity of its mediæval existence. The Castle of Lerins, which lies on the shore to the south of the church, is at once a castle and an abbey. Like many of the great monasteries of the East, its first object was to give security to its inmates against the marauders who surrounded them. Externally its appearance is purely military; the great tower rises from its trench cut deep in the rock, a portcullis protects the gate, the walls are pierced with loopholes and crowned with battlements. But within, the arrangements, so far as it is possible to trace them in the present ruined state of the building, seem to have been purely monastic. The interior of the tower is occupied by a double-arched cloister, with arcades of exquisite first-pointed work, through which one looks down into the little court below. The visitor passes from this into the ruins of the abbot's chapel, to which the relics were transferred for security from the church of St. Honorat, and which was surrounded by the cells, the refectory, and the domestic buildings of the monks. The erection of the castle is dated in the twelfth century, and from this time we may consider the older abbey buildings around the church to have been deserted and left to ruin; but we can hardly grumble at a transfer which has given us so curious a combination of military and monastic architecture in the castle itself.

Something of the feudal spirit which such a residence would be likely to produce appears in the abbot's relations with the little town of Cannes, which formed a part of his extensive lordship on the mainland. Its fishers were harassed by heavy tolls on their fishery, and the rights of first purchase in the market and forced labour were rigorously exacted by the monastic officers. It is curious to compare, as one's boat floats back across the waters of the bay, the fortunes of these serfs and of their lords.

SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.

II.

CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE.