LETTER XLIII.
Rome, Corpus-Domini, 1874.
I wrote, for a preface to the index at the end of the second volume of Fors, part of an abstract of what had been then stated in the course of this work. Fate would not let me finish it; but what was done will be useful now, and shall begin my letter for this month. Completing three and a half volumes of Fors, it may contain a more definite statement of its purpose than any given hitherto; though I have no intention of explaining that purpose entirely, until it is in sufficient degree accomplished. I have a house to build; but none shall mock me by saying I was not able to finish it, nor be vexed by not finding in it the rooms they expected. But the current and continual purpose of Fors Clavigera is to explain the powers of Chance, or Fortune (Fors), as she offers to men the conditions of prosperity; and as these conditions are accepted or refused, nails down and fastens their fate for ever, being thus ‘Clavigera,’—‘nail-bearing.’ [138]The image is one familiar in mythology: my own conception of it was first got from Horace, and developed by steady effort to read history with impartiality, and to observe the lives of men around me with charity. “How you may make your fortune, or mar it,” is the expansion of the title.
Certain authoritative conditions of life, of its happiness, and its honour, are therefore stated, in this book, as far as they may be, conclusively and indisputably, at present known. I do not enter into any debates, nor advance any opinions. With what is debateable I am unconcerned; and when I only have opinions about things, I do not talk about them. I attack only what cannot on any possible ground be defended; and state only what I know to be incontrovertibly true.
You will find, as you read Fors more, that it differs curiously from most modern books in this. Modern fashion is, that the moment a man strikes some little lucifer match, or is hit by any form of fancy, he begins advertising his lucifer match, and fighting for his fancy, totally ignoring the existing sunshine, and the existing substances of things. But I have no matches to sell, no fancies to fight for. All that I have to say is that the day is in heaven, and rock and wood on earth, and that you must see by the one, and work with the other. You have heard as much before, perhaps. I hope you have; I should be ashamed if there were anything in Fors which had not been said before,—and that a thousand times, [139]and a thousand times of times,—there is nothing in it, nor ever will be in it, but common truths, as clear to honest mankind as their daily sunrise, as necessary as their daily bread; and which the fools who deny can only live, themselves, because other men know and obey.
You will therefore find that whatever is set down in Fors for you is assuredly true,—inevitable,—trustworthy to the uttermost,—however strange.1 Not because I have any power of knowing more than other people, but simply because I have taken the trouble to ascertain what they also may ascertain if they choose. Compare on this point, Letter VI., page 5.
The following rough abstract of the contents of the first seven letters may assist the reader in their use.
Letter I. Men’s prosperity is in their own hands; and no forms of government are, in themselves, of the least use. The first beginnings of prosperity must be in getting food, clothes, and fuel. These cannot be got either by the fine arts, or the military arts. Neither painting nor fighting feed men; nor can capital, in the form of money or machinery, feed them. All capital is imaginary or unimportant, except the quantity of food existing in the world [140]at any given moment. Finally, men cannot live by lending money to each other, and the conditions of such loan at present are absurd and deadly.2
Letter II. The nature of Rent. It is an exaction, by force of hand, for the maintenance of Squires: but had better at present be left to them. The nature of useful and useless employment. When employment is given by capitalists, it is sometimes useful, but oftener useless; sometimes moralizing, but oftener demoralizing. And we had therefore better employ ourselves, without any appeal to the capitalists (page 22); and to do this successfully, it must be with three resolutions; namely, to be personally honest, socially helpful, and conditionally obedient (page 23): explained in Letter VII., page 21 to end.
Letter III. The power of Fate is independent of the Moral Law, but never supersedes it. Virtue ceases to be such, if expecting reward: it is therefore never materially rewarded. (I ought to have said, except as one of the appointed means of physical and mental health.) The Fates of England, and proper mode of studying them. Stories of Henry II. and Richard I.
Letter IV. The value and nature of Education. It may be good, bad,—or neither the one nor [141]the other. Knowledge is not education, and can neither make us happy nor rich. Opening discussion of the nature and use of riches. Gold and diamonds are not riches, and the reader is challenged to specify their use. Opening discussion of the origin of wealth. It does not fall from heaven, (compare Letter VII., page 19,) but is certainly obtainable, and has been generally obtained, by pillage of the poor. Modes in which education in virtue has been made costly to them, and education in vice cheap. (Page 23.)
Letter V. The powers of Production. Extremity of modern folly in supposing there can be over-production. The power of machines. They cannot increase the possibilities of life, but only the possibilities of idleness. (Page 13.) The things which are essential to life are mainly three material ones and three spiritual ones. First sketch of the proposed action of St. George’s Company.
Letter VI. The Elysium of modern days. This letter, written under the excitement of continual news of the revolution in Paris, is desultory, and limits itself to noticing some of the causes of that revolution: chiefly the idleness, disobedience, and covetousness of the richer and middle classes.
Letter VII. The Elysium of ancient days. The definitions of true, and spurious, Communism. Explanation of the design of true Communism, in [142]Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia.” This letter, though treating of matters necessary to the whole work, yet introduces them prematurely, being written, incidentally, upon the ruin of Paris.
Assisi, 18th May, 1874.
So ended, as Fors would have it, my abstraction, which I see Fors had her reason for stopping me in; else the abstraction would have needed farther abstracting. As it is, the reader may find in it the real gist of the remaining letters, and discern what a stiff business we have in hand,—rent, capital, and interest, all to be attacked at once! and a method of education shown to be possible in virtue, as cheaply as in vice!
I should have got my business, stiff though it may be, farther forward by this time, but for that same revolution in Paris, and burning of the Tuileries, which greatly confused my plan by showing me how much baser the human material I had to deal with, was, than I thought in beginning.
That a Christian army (or, at least, one which Saracens would have ranked with that they attacked, under the general name of Franks,) should fiercely devastate and rob an entire kingdom laid at their mercy by the worst distress;—that the first use made by this distressed country of the defeat of its armies would be to overthrow its government; and that, when its metropolis had all but perished in conflagration during the contest [143]between its army and mob, no warning should be taken by other civilized societies, but all go trotting on again, next week, in their own several roads to ruin, persistently, as they had trotted before,—bells jingling, and whips cracking,—these things greatly appalled me, finding I had only slime to build with instead of mortar; and shook my plan partly out of shape.
The frightfullest thing of all, to my mind, was the German temper, in its naïve selfishness; on which point, having been brought round again to it in my last letter, I have now somewhat more to say.
In the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ of 7th March, this year, under the head of ‘This Evening’s News,’ appeared an article of which I here reprint the opening portion.
The well-known Hungarian author, Maurus Jokai, is at present a visitor in the German capital. As a man of note he easily obtained access to Prince Bismarck’s study, where an interesting conversation took place, which M. Jokai reports pretty fully to the Hungarian journal the Hon:—
“The Prince was, as usual, easy in his manner, and communicative, and put a stop at the very outset to the Hungarian’s attempt at ceremony. M. Jokai humorously remarked upon the prevalence of ‘iron’ in the surroundings of the ‘iron’ Prince. Among other things, there is an iron couch, and an iron safe, in which the Chancellor appears to keep his cigars. Prince Bismarck was struck by the youthful appearance of his guest, who is ten years his junior, but whose writings he remembers to have seen reviewed long ago, in the Augsburg Gazette (at that time still, the Chancellor said, a clever paper) when he bore a lieutenant’s commission. In the ensuing conversation, Prince Bismarck pointed out the paramount necessity to Europe of a consolidated State in the position of Austro-Hungary. It was mainly on that account that he concluded peace [144]with so great despatch in 1866. Small independent States in the East would be a misfortune to Europe. Austria and Hungary must realize their mutual interdependence, and the necessity of being one. However, the dualist system of government must be preserved, because the task of developing the State, which on this side of the Leitha falls to the Germans, beyond that river naturally falls to the Magyars. The notion that Germany has an inclination to annex more land, Prince Bismarck designated as a myth. God preserve the Germans from such a wish! Whatever more territory they might acquire would probably be undermined by Papal influence, and they have enough of that already. Should the Germans of Austria want to be annexed by Germany, the Chancellor would feel inclined to declare war against them for that wish alone. A German Minister who should conceive the desire to annex part of Austria would deserve to be hanged—a punishment the Prince indicated by gesture. He does not wish to annex even a square foot of fresh territory, not as much as two pencils he kept on playing with during the conversation would cover. Those pencils, however, M. Jokai remarks, were big enough to serve as walking-sticks, and on the map they would have reached quite from Berlin to Trieste. Prince Bismarck went on to justify his annexation of Alsace-Loraine by geographical necessity. Otherwise he would rather not have grafted the French twig upon the German tree.
The French are enemies never to be appeased. Take away from them the cook, the tailor, and the hairdresser, and what remains of them is a copper-coloured Indian.”
Now it does not matter whether Prince Bismarck ever said this, or not. That the saying should be attributed to him in a leading journal, without indication of doubt or surprise, is enough to show what the German temper is publicly recognized to be. And observe what a sentence it is—thus attributed to him. The French are only copper-coloured Indians, finely dressed. This said [145]of the nation which gave us Charlemagne, St. Louis, St. Bernard, and Joan of Arc; which founded the central type of chivalry in the myth of Roland; which showed the utmost height of valour yet recorded in history, in the literal life of Guiscard; and which built Chartres Cathedral!
But the French are not what they were! No; nor the English, for that matter; probably we have fallen the farther of the two: meantime the French still retain, at the root, the qualities they always had; and of one of these, a highly curious and commendable one, I wish you to take some note to-day.
Among the minor nursery tales with which my mother allowed me to relieve the study of the great nursery tale of Genesis, my favourite was Miss Edgeworth’s “Frank.” The authoress chose this for the boy’s name, because she meant him to be a type of Frankness, or openness of heart:—truth of heart, that is to say, liking to lay itself open. You are in the habit, I believe, some of you, still, of speaking occasionally of English Frankness;—not recognizing, through the hard clink of the letter K, that you are only talking, all the while, of English Frenchness. Still less when you count your cargoes of gold from San Francisco, do you pause to reflect what San means, or what Francis means, without the Co;—or how it came to pass that the power of this mountain town of Assisi, where not only no gold can be dug, but where St. Francis forbade his Company to dig [146]it anywhere else—came to give names to Devil’s towns far across the Atlantic—(and by the way you may note how clumsy the Devil is at christening; for if by chance he gets a fresh York all to himself, he never has any cleverer notion than to call it ‘New York’; and in fact, having no mother-wit from his dam, is obliged very often to put up with the old names which were given by Christians,—Nombre di Dios, Trinidad, Vera Cruz, and the like, even when he has all his own way with everything else in the places, but their names).
But to return. You have lately had a fine notion, have you not, of English Liberty as opposed to French Slavery?
Well, whatever your English liberties may be, the French knew what the word meant, before you. For France, if you will consider of it, means nothing else than the Country of Franks;—the country of a race so intensely Free that they for evermore gave name to Freedom. The Greeks sometimes got their own way, as a mob; but nobody, meaning to talk of liberty, calls it ‘Greekness.’ The Romans knew better what Libertas meant, and their word for it has become common enough, in that straitened form, on your English tongue; but nobody calls it ‘Romanness.’ But at last comes a nation called the Franks; and they are so inherently free and noble in their natures, that their name becomes the word for the virtue; and when you now want to talk of freedom of heart, you say Frankness, [147]and for the last political privilege which you have it so much in your English minds to get, you haven’t so much as an English word, but must call it by the French one, ‘Franchise.’3
“Freedom of heart,” you observe, I say. Not the English freedom of Insolence, according to Mr. B., (see above, Letter 29,) but pure French openness of heart, Fanchette’s and her husband’s frankness, the source of joy, and courtesy, and civility, and passing softness of human meeting of kindly glance with glance. Of which Franchise, in her own spirit Person, here is the picture for you, from the French Romance of the Rose,—a picture which English Chaucer was thankful to copy.
“And after all those others came Franchise,
Who was not brown, nor grey,
But she was white as snow.
And she had not the nose of an Orleanois.
Aussi had she the nose long and straight.
Eyes green, and laughing—vaulted eyebrows;
She had her hair blonde and long,
And she was simple as a dove.
The body she had sweet, and brightly bred;
And she dared not do, nor say
To any one, anything she ought not.
And if she knew of any man
Who was in sorrow for love of her,
So soon she had great pity for him, [148]
For she had the heart so pitiful,
And so sweet and so lovely,
That no one suffered pain about her,
But she would help him all she could.
And she wore a surquanye
Which was of no coarse cloth;
There’s none so rich as far as Arras.
And it was so gathered up, and so joined together,
That there was not a single point of it
Which was not set in its exact place, rightly.
Much well was dressed Franchise,
For no robe is so pretty
As the surquanye for a demoiselle.
A girl is more gentle and more darling
In surquanye than in coat,
And the white surquanye
Signifies that sweet and frank
Is she who puts it on her.”
May I ask you now to take to heart those two lines of this French description of Frenchness:
“And she dared not do, nor say
To any one, anything she ought not.”
That is not your modern notion of Frenchness, or franchise, or libertas, or liberty—for all these are synonyms for the same virtue. And yet the strange thing is that the lowest types of the modern French grisette are the precise corruption of this beautiful Franchise: [149]and still retain, at their worst, some of the grand old qualities; the absolute sources of corruption being the neglect of their childhood by the upper classes, the abandonment to their own resources, and the development therefore of “Liberty and Independence,” in your beautiful English, not French, sense.
“Livrée à elle-meme depuis l’âge de treize ans, habituée à ne compter que sur elle seule, elle avait de la vie un expérience dont j’étais confondue. De ce Paris où elle était née, elle savait tout, elle connaissait tout.
Je n’avais pas idée d’une si complete absence de sens moral, d’une si inconsciente dépravation, d’une impudeur si effrontément naïve.
La règle de sa conduite, c’était sa fantaisie, son instinct, le caprice du moment.
Elle aimait les longues stations dans les cafés, les mélodrames entremêlés de chopes et d’oranges pendant les entr’actes, les parties de canot à Asnières, et surtout, et avant tout, le bal.
Elle était comme chez elle à l’Élysée—Montmartre et au Château-Rouge; elle y connaissait tout le monde, le chef d’orchestre la saluait, ce dont elle était extraordinairement fière, et quantité de gens la tutoyaient.
Je l’accompagnais partout, dans les commencements, et bien que je n’étais pas précisément naïve, ni gênée par les scrupules de mon éducation, je fus tellement consternée de l’incroyable désordre de sa vie, que je ne pus m’empêcher de lui en faire quelques représentations. [150]
Elle se fâcha tout rouge.
Tu fais ce qui te plaît, me dit-elle, laisse-moi faire ce qui me convient.
C’est un justice que je lui dois: jamais elle n’essaya sur moi son influence, jamais elle ne m’engagea à suivre son exemple. Ivre de liberté elle respectait la liberté des autres.”
Such is the form which Franchise has taken under republican instruction. But of the true Franchise of Charlemagne and Roland, there were, you must note also, two distinct forms. In the last stanzas of the Chant de Roland, Normandy and France have two distinct epithets,—“Normandie, la franche; France, la solue” (soluta). “Frank Normandy; Loose France. Solute;”—we, adding the dis, use the words loose and dissolute only in evil sense. But ‘France la solue’ has an entirely lovely meaning. The frankness of Normandy is the soldier’s virtue; but the unbinding, so to speak, of France, is the peasant’s.
“And having seen that lovely maid,
Why should I fear to say
That she is ruddy, fleet, and strong,
And down the rocks can leap along
Like rivulets in May?”
It is curious that the most beautiful descriptive line in all Horace,
“montibus altis
Levis crepante lympha desilit pede,”
[151]
comes in the midst of the dream of the blessed islands which are to be won by following the founders of—what city, think you? The city that first sang the “Marseillaise.”
“Juppiter illa piae secrevit litora genti.”
Recollect that line, my French readers, if I chance to find any, this month, nor less the description of those ‘arva beata’ as if of your own South France; and then consider also those prophetic lines, true of Paris as of Rome,—
“Nec fera coerulea domuit Germania pube.
Impia, perdemus devoti sanguinis aetas.”
Consider them, I say, and deeply, thinking over the full force of those words, “devoti sanguinis,” and of the ways in which the pure blood of Normandie la franche, and France la solue, has corrupted itself, and become accursed. Had I but time to go into the history of that word ‘devoveo,’ what a piece of philology it would lead us into! But, for another kind of opposition to the sweet Franchise of old time, take this sentence of description of another French maiden, by the same author from whom I have just quoted the sketch of the grisette:
“C’était une vieille fille d’une cinquantaine d’années, sèche et jaune, avec un grand nez d’oiseau de proie, très noble, encore plus dévote, joueuse comme la dame de pique en personne, et médisante à faire battre des montagnes.”
You see what accurate opposition that gives you of [152]another kind, to Franchise. You even have the ‘nez d’Orleanois’ specified, which the song of the Rose is so careful to tell you Franchise had not.
Here is another illustrative sentence:
“La colère, à la fin, une de ces terribles colères blanches de dévote, chassait des flots de bile au cerveau de Mademoiselle de la Rochecardeau, et blêmissait ses lèvres.”
These three sentences I have taken from two novels of Emile Gaboriau, “L’argent des autres,” and “La Degringolade.” They are average specimens of modern French light literature, with its characteristic qualities and defects, and are both of them in many respects worth careful study; but chiefly in the representation they give, partly with conscious blame, and partly in unconscious corruption, of the Devoti sanguinis aetas; with which, if you would compare old France accurately, read first Froude’s sketch of the life of Bishop Hugo of Lincoln, and think over the scene between him and Cœur de Lion.
You have there, as in life before you, two typical Frenchmen of the twelfth century—a true king, and a true priest, representing the powers which the France of that day contrived to get set over her, and did, on the whole, implicitly and with her heart obey.
They are not altogether—by taking the dancing-master and the hairdresser away from them—reduced to copper-coloured Indians. [153]
If, next, you will take the pains—and it will need some pains, for the book is long and occasionally tiresome—to read the Degringolade, you will find it nevertheless worth your while; for it gives you a modern Frenchman’s account of the powers which France in the nineteenth century contrived to get set over her; and obeyed—not with her heart, but restively, like an ill-bred dog or mule, which have no honour in their obedience, but bear the chain and bit all the same.
But there is a farther and much more important reason for my wish that you should read this novel. It gives you types of existent Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of a very different class. They are, indeed, only heroes and heroines in a quite second-rate piece of literary work. But these stereotypes, nevertheless, have living originals. There is to be found in France, as truly the Commandant Delorge, as the Comte de Combelaine. And as truly Mademoiselle de Maillefert as the Duchesse de Maumussy. How is it, then, that the Count and Duchess command everything in France, and that the Commandant and Demoiselle command nothing?—that the best they can do is to get leave to live—unknown, and unthought-of? The question, believe me, is for England also; and a very pressing one.
Of the frantic hatred of all religion developed in the French republican mind, the sentences I have quoted are interesting examples. I have not time to speak of them in this letter, but they struck me sharply as I [154]corrected the press to-day; for I had been standing most part of the morning by St. Paul’s grave, thinking over his work in the world. A bewildered peasant, from some green dingle of Campagna, who had seen me kneel when the Host passed, and took me therefore to be a human creature and a friend, asked me ‘where St. Paul was’?
‘There, underneath,’ I answered.
‘There?’ he repeated, doubtfully,—as dissatisfied.
‘Yes,’ I answered; ‘his body at least;—his head is at the Lateran.’
‘Il suo corpo,’ again he repeated, still as in discontent. Then, after a pause, ‘E la sua statua?’
Such a wicked thing to ask for that! wasn’t it, my Evangelical friends? You would so much rather have had him ask for Hudson’s! [155]
1 Observe, this is only asserted of its main principles; not of minor and accessory points. I may be entirely wrong in the explanation of a text, or mistake the parish schools of St. Matthias for St. Matthew’s, over and over again. I have so large a field to work in that this cannot be helped. But none of these minor errors are of the least consequence to the business in hand. ↑
2 See first article in the Notes and Correspondence to this number. ↑
