being beautiful; but beautiful with haunting thought, no less than with form, and full of myths that can be read only with the heart. its first sea kings; and also the compassion and the joy that are woven into the innermost fabric of every great imaginative spirit, born now in countries that have lived by the Christian faith 5 with any courage or truth. And the picture contains also, for us, just this which its maker had in him to give; and can convey it to us, just so far as we are of the temper in which it must be received. It is didactic, if we are For instance, there is at this moment open beside me as I write, a page of Persian manuscript, wrought with wreathed azure and gold, and soft green, and violet, and ruby and scarlet, into one field of pure resplendence. It is wrought to delight the eyes only; and it does delight them; and the man who did it surely 10 worthy to be taught, no otherwise. The pure heart, it will make more pure; the thoughtful, more thoughtful. It has in it no words for the reckless or the base. As I myself look at it, there is no fault nor folly of my life, and both have been many and great, that does not rise up against me, and take away my joy, and shorten my power of possession, of sight, of understanding. every past effort of my life, every gleam of And had eyes in his head; but not much more. It is not didactic art, but its author was happy: and it will do the good, and the harm, that mere pleasure can do. But, opposite me, is an early Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva, 15 taken about two miles from Geneva, on the Lausanne road, with Mont Blanc in the distance. The old city is seen lying beyond the waveless waters, veiled with a sweet misty veil of Athena's weaving: a faint light of morning, 20 rightness or good in it, is with me now, to help peaceful exceedingly, and almost colourless, shed from behind the Voirons, increases into soft amber along the slopes of the Salève, and is just seen, and no more, on the fair warm fields of its summit, between the folds of a white 25 cloud that rests upon the grass, but rises, high and towerlike, into the zenith of dawn above. me in my grasp of this heart, and its vision. So far as I can rejoice in, or interpret either, my power is owing to what of right there is in me. I dare to say it, that, because through all my life I have desired good, and not evil; because I have been kind to many; have wished to be kind to all; have willfully injured none; and because I have loved much, and not selfishly; therefore, the morning light is yet may trust my thought and word in such work as I have to do for you; and you will be glad afterwards that you have trusted them. There is not as much colour in that low amber light upon the hillside as there is in the palest dead leaf. The lake is not blue, but 30 visible to me on those hills, and you, who read, grey in mist, passing into deep shadow beneath the Voirons' pines; a few dark clusters of leaves, a single white flower-scarcely seen-are all the gladness given to the rocks of the shore. One of the ruby spots of the eastern manu- 35 script would give colour enough for all the red that is in Turner's entire drawing. For the mere pleasure of the eye, there is not so much in all those lines of his, throughout the entire landscape, as in half an inch square of 40 the Persian's page. What made him take pleasure in the low colour that is only like the brown of a dead leaf? in the cold grey of dawnin the one white flower among the rocks-in these and no more than these? LIBERTY AND RESTRAINT (From the same) Next to Modesty, and her delight in measures, let us reflect a little on the character of her adversary, the Goddess of Liberty, and her delight in absence of measures, or in false ones. It is true that there are liberties and liberties. 45 Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free enough. Lost, presently, amidst bankless, boundless marsh-soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the poisonous reeds and unresisting slime it is free also. We may choose which liberty we like,-the restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty, which men are now glorifying, and proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and will presently, I suppose, proclaim also to the stars, with invitation to them out of their courses,and of its opposite continence, which is the He took pleasure in them because he had been bred among English fields and hills; because the gentleness of a great race was in his heart, and its power of thought in his brain; because he knew the stories of the Alps, and 50 of the cities at their feet; because he had read the Homeric legends of the clouds, and beheld the clouds of dawn, and the givers of dew to the fields; because he knew the face of the crags, and the imagery of the passionate moun- 55 tains, as a man knows the face of his friend; because he had in him the wonder and sorrow concerning life and death, which are the inheritance of the Gothic soul from the days of clasp and xpuren wepbwn of Aglaia's cestus, we must try to find out something true. For no quality of art has been more powerful in its influence on public mind; none is more frequently the subject of popular praise, or the end of vulgar effort, than what we call "Freedom." It is necessary to determine the justice or injustice of this popular praise. sensation only. With help of right, and in action on a substance which does not quiver nor yield, a fine artist's line is measurable a its purposed direction to considerably less tha 5 the thousandth of an inch. A wide freedom truly! The conditions of popular art which most foster the common ideas about freedom, are merely results of irregularly energetic effor I said, a little while ago, that the practical teaching of the masters of Art was summed up 10 by men imperfectly educated; these conditions by the O of Giotto. "You may judge my being variously mingled with cruder m nerisms resulting from timidity, or actual inperfection of body. Northern hands and eyes are, of course, never so subtle as Southern; and in very cold countries, artistic execution palsied. The effort to break through the timidity, or to refine the bluntness, may les to a licentious impetuosity, or an ostentations minuteness. Every man's manner has this powers or modes of thought; so that in the greatest work there is no manner visible. It is at first uninteresting from its quietness; the majesty of restrained power only dawns gradeally upon us, as we walk towards its horizon. Try to draw a circle yourself with the "free" 20 kind of relation to some defect in his physical hand, and with a single line. You cannot do it if your hand trembles, nor if it hesitates, nor if it is unmanageable, nor if it is in the common sense of the word "free." So far from being free, it must be under a control as 25 absolute and accurate as if it were fastened to an inflexible bar of steel. And yet it must move under this necessary control, with perfect untormented serenity of ease. 40 That is the condition of all good work what- 30 soever. All freedom is error. Every line you lay down is either right or wrong: it may be timidly and awkwardly wrong, or fearlessly and impudently wrong; the aspect of the impudent wrongness is pleasurable to vulgar 35 persons; and it is what they commonly call "free" execution: the timid, tottering, hesitating wrongness is rarely so attractive; yet sometimes, if accompanied with good qualities, and right aims in other directions, it becomes in a manner charming, like the inarticulateness of a child: but, whatever the charm or manner of the error, there is but one question ultimately to be asked respecting every line you draw, Is it right or wrong? If right, it most assuredly is not a "free" line, but an intensely continent, restrained, and considered line; and the action of the hand in laying it is just as decisive, and just as "free" as the hand of a first-rate surgeon in a critical incision. A great operator told me that his hand could check itself within about the two-hundredth of an inch, in penetrating a membrane, and this, of course, without the help of sight, by 1 Golden buckle. Aglaia (splendor) was one of the Graces. Cestus is a girdle. 2 The Pope once sent a messenger to obtain specimens of the work of the chief artists of Italy. Giotto simply drew a circle and gave it to the amazed messenger, who asked if that was all. "Send it," said Giotto, "and we shall see if his Holiness understands the hint." There is, indeed, often great delightfulnes in the innocent manners of artists who hav real power and honesty, and draw, in this way or that, as best they can, under such and suct untoward circumstances of life. But the greater part of the looseness, flimsiness, or audacity of modern work is the expression of an inner spirit of license in mind and heart, connected, as I said, with the peculiar folly of this age, its hope of, and trust in, "liberty Of which we must reason a little in more genera terms. I believe we can nowhere find a better type of a perfectly free creature than in the comon house fly. Nor free only, but brave; and irreverent to a degree which I think no human republican could by any philosophy exal: himself to. There is no courtesy in him does not care whether it is king or clown whom 45 he teases; and in every step of his swift me chanical march, and in every pause of his res olute observation, there is one and the same expression of perfect egotism, perfect inde pendence and self-confidence, and conviction of the world's having been made for flies Strike at him with your hand; and to him, the mechanical fact and external aspect of the matter is, what to you it would be, if an acre of red clay, ten feet thick, tore itself up from the ground in one massive field, hovered over you in the air for a second, and came crashing down with an aim. That is the external aspect of it; the inner aspect, to his fly's mind, is of a quite natural and unimportant 50 55 Occurrence forget) the infinite follies of modern thought in this matter, centred in the notion that liberty is good for a man, irrespectively of the use he is likely to make of it. Folly unfathom 5 able! unspeakable! unendurable to look in the full face of, as the laugh of a cretin. You will send your child, will you, into a room, where a table is loaded with sweet wine and fruit-some poisoned, some not?-you will say to him, one of the momentary conditions of his active ife. He steps out of the way of your hand, and alights on the back of it. You cannot terify him, nor govern him, nor persuade him, or convince him. He has his own positive opinion on all matters; not an unwise one, isually, for his own ends; and will ask no advice of yours. tyrannical instinct to obey. The earthworm has his digging, the bee her gathering and 10 "Choose freely, my little child! it is so good for building; the spider her cunning network; the ant her treasury and accounts. All these are comparatively slaves, or people of vulgar business. But your fly, free in the air, free in He has no work to do-no you to have freedom of choice; it forms your the chamber—a black incarnation of caprice- 15 quired the dignity of a Free child?" You think that puts the case too sharply? I tell you, lover of liberty, there is no choice offered to you, but it is similarly between life and death. There is no act, nor option of act, possible, but the wrong deed or option has poison in it, which will stay in your veins thereafter for ever. Never more to all eternity can you be as you might have been, had you not done that-chosen that. You have For captivity, again, perhaps your poor watch-dog is as sorrowful a type as you will 25 "formed your character," forsooth! No! if you have chosen ill, you have Deformed it, and that for ever! In some choices, it had been better for you that a red-hot iron bar struck you aside, scarred and helpless, than easily find. Mine certainly is. The day is lovely, but I must write this, and cannot go out with him. He is chained in the yard, because I do not like dogs in rooms, and the gardener does not like dogs in gardens. He 30 that you had so chosen. "You will know bet ter next time!" No. Next time will never come. Next time the choice will be in quite another aspect-between quite different things, -you, weaker than you were by the evil into which you have fallen; it, more doubtful than it was, by the increased dimness of your sight. No one ever gets wiser by doing wrong, nor stronger. You will get wiser and stronger only by doing right, whether forced or not; the has no books,-nothing but his own weary thoughts for company, and a group of those free flies whom he snaps at, with sullen ill success. Such dim hope as he may have that I may yet take him out with me, will be, hour 35 by hour, wearily disappointed; or, worse, darkened at once into a leaden despair by an authoritative "No"-too well understood. His fidelity only seals his fate; if he would not watch for me, he would be sent away, and go hunting 40 prime, the one need is to do that, under whatwith some happier master: but he watches, and is wise and faithful, and miserable; and his high animal intellect only gives him the wistful powers of wonder, and sorrow, and desire, and affection, which embitter his cap- 45 tivity. Yet of the two would we rather be watch-dog, or fly? Indeed the first point we have all to determine is not how free we are, but what kind of ever compulsion, until you can do it without compulsion. And then you are a Man. SCIENCE AND LIFE (From Fors Clavigera, 1871-1878) And all true science-which my Savoyard guide rightly scorned me when he thought I creatures we are. It is of small importance to 50 had not,-all true science is "savoir vivre." any of us whether we get liberty; but of the greatest that we deserve it. Whether we can win it, fate must determine; but that we will be worthy of it, we may ourselves determine; and the sorrowfullest fate, of all that we can 55 suffer, is to have it, without deserving it. I have hardly patience to hold my pen and go on writing, as I remember (I would that it were possible for a few consecutive instants to But all your modern science is the contrary of that. It is "savoir mourir." And of its very discoveries, such as they are, it cannot make use. That telegraphic signalling was a discovery; and conceivably, some day, may be a useful one. And there was some excuse for your being a little proud when, about last sixth of April (Cœur de Lion's death-day, and Albert Dürer's), you knotted a copper wire all the way to Bombay, and flashed a message along it, and back. But what was the message, and what the answer? Is India the better for what you said to her? Are you the better for what she replied? be something to boast of. But are you so entirely sure that you have got it-that the mortal disease of plenty, and afflictive affluence of good things, are all you have to 5 dread? Observe. A man and a woman, with their children properly trained, are able easily to cultivate as much ground as will feed them: to build as much wall and roof as will lodg them, and to spin and weave as much cloth as will clothe them. They can all be perfecty happy and healthy in doing this. Supposing that they invent machinery which will buildi plough, thresh, cook, and weave, and that they have none of these things any more to do, but may read, or play croquet, or cricket, all day long, I believe myself that they will neither be so good nor so happy as without the machines. But I waive my belief in this matter for the If not, you have only wasted an all-roundthe-world's length of copper wire,-which is, indeed, about the sum of your doing. If you 10 had had, perchance, two words of common sense to say, though you had taken wearisome time and trouble to send them;-though you had written them slowly in gold, and sealed them with a hundred seals, and sent a squadron 15 of ships of the line to carry the scroll, and the squadron had fought its way round the Cape of Good Hope, through a year of storms, with loss of all its ships but one,-the two words of common sense would have been worth the 20 time. I will assume that they become more carriage, and more. But you have not anything like so much as that, to say, either to India or to any other place. You think it a great triumph to make the sun draw brown landscapes for you. refined and moral persons, and that idleness i future is to be the mother of all good. But observe, I repeat, the power of your machine is only in enabling them to be idle. It will not 25 enable them to live better than they did be fore, nor to live in greater numbers. Get your heads quite clear on this matter. Out of so much ground, only so much living is to he got, with or without machinery. You may set a million of steam-ploughs to work on añ acre, if you like-out of that acre only a giver. number of grains of corn will grow, scratch of scorch it as you will. So that the question is not at all whether, by having more machines, more of you can live. No machines will increase the possibilities of life. They only increase the possibilities of idleness. Suppose. for instance, you could get the oxen in your plough driven by a goblin, who would ask for no pay, not even a cream bowl,-(you have nearly managed to get it driven by an iron goblin, as it is;)—Well, your furrow will take no more seeds than if you had held the stilts yourself. But, instead of holding them, you sit, I presume, on a bank beside the fiel under an eglantine;—watch the goblin at his work, and read poetry. Meantime, your wie in the house has also got a goblin to weave an wash for her. And she is lying on the sofs. reading poetry. That was also a discovery, and some day may be useful. But the sun had drawn landscapes before for you, not in brown, but in green, and blue, and all imaginable colours, here in England. Not one of you ever looked at them 30 then; not one of you cares for the loss of them now, when you have shut the sun out with smoke, so that he can draw nothing more, except brown blots through a hole in a box. There was a rocky valley between Buxton and 35 Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening-Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light-walking in fair processions on the lawns of it, and to and fro 40 among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get); you thought you could get it by what the Times calls "Railroad Enterprise." You Enterprised a Railroad 45 through the valley-you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the Gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every 50 fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange-you Fools Everywhere. To talk at a distance, when you have nothing to say, though you were ever so near; to go fast 55 from this place to that, with nothing to do either at one or the other: these are powers certainly. Much more, power of increased Production, if you, indeed, had got it, would Now, as I said, I don't believe you would be happier so, but I am willing to believe it, only, since you are already such brave me chanists, show me at least one or two places where you are happier. Let me see one smali example of approach to this seraphic condition. I can show you examples, millions of them, of happy people, made happy by their own industry. Farm after farm I can show you in be able to show me five hundred dresses for one that used to be; tidiness ought to have become five hundred fold tidier; tapestry should be increased in cinque-cento-fold' iri5 descence of tapestry. Not only your peasant girl ought to be lying on the sofa reading poetry, but she ought to have in her wardrobe five hundred petticoats instead of one. Is that, indeed, your issue? or are you only on a Bavaria, Switzerland, the Tyrol, and such other places, where men and women are perfectly happy and good, without any iron servants. Show me, therefore, some English family, with its fiery familiar, happier than these. Or bring me-for I am not inconvincible by any kind of evidence,-bring me the testimony of an English family or two to their increased felicity. Or if you cannot do so much as that, can you convince even themselves of 10 curiously crooked way to it? it? They are perhaps happy, if only they knew how happy they were; Virgil thought so,1 long ago, of simple rustics; but you hear at present your steam-propelled rustics are crying out that they are anything else than happy, and 15 have not been able to evoke goblins wholly It is just possible, indeed, that you may not have been allowed to get the use of the goblin's work-that other people may have got the use of it, and you none; because, perhaps, you for your own personal service; but have been borrowing goblins from the capitalist, and paying interest, in the "position of William," on ghostly self-going planes, but suppose you that they regard their boasted progress "in the light of a monstrous Sham." I must tell you one little thing however, which greatly perplexes my imagination of the relieved ploughman sitting under his rose bower, 20 had laid by capital enough, yourselves, to hire all the demons in the world,-nay,-all that are inside of it; are you quite sure you know what you might best set them to work at? and what "useful things" you should com reading poetry. I have told it you before, think it was, a country festival, such as the month, that no economist going (whether by steam, or ghost,) knew what are useful things and what are not. Very few of you know, yourselves, except by bitter experience of the want of them. And no demons, either of iron or spirit, can ever make them. There are three Material things, not only useful, but essential to Life. No one "knows how to live" till he has got them. These are, Pure Air, Water, and Earth. There are three Immaterial things, not only useful, but essential to Life. No one knows how to live till he has got them also. These are, Admiration, Hope, and Love.3 Admiration-the power of discerning and taking delight in what is beautiful in visible form, and lovely in human Character; and, necessarily, striving to produce what is beautiful in form, and to become what is lovely Hope, the recognition, by true Foresight, of better things to be reached hereafter, whether by ourselves or others; necessarily issuing in the straightforward and undisappointable effort to advance, according to our proper power, the gaining of them. But next, as to the inside of the house. Be- 45 in character. 'fore you got your power-looms, a woman could always make herself a chemise and petticoat of bright and pretty appearance. I have seen a Bavarian peasant-woman at church in Munich, looking a much grander creature, 50 and more beautifully dressed, than any of the crossed and embroidered angels in Hesse's high-art frescoes; (which happened to be just above her, so that I could look from one to the other). Well, here you are, in England, served 55 by household demons, with five hundred fingers, at least, weaving, for one that used to weave in the days of Minerva. You ought to 1 Georgics, II. 458. V. Fortunati Nimium, p. 172, supra. Love, both of family and neighbour, faithful, and satisfied. These are the six chiefly useful things to be got by Political Economy, when it has become a science. I will briefly tell you what Modern Five hundred fold. a Cf. Wordsworth's Excursion, Bk. 4. "We live by admiration, hope and love." |