NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
“The Parsonage, Werrington, Peterborough,
March 4, 1875.
“My dear Sir,—I have no doubt you know better than I do what Gospel is the more widely preached, for while you have been wandering, freer than a bee, from place to place, and from church to church, I have been ‘entangled’ from day to day in stuffy rooms among ignorant and immoral people, in crowded parishes in London and elsewhere; and on Sundays have listened chiefly to the gathered voices of the same ignorant people, led by my own.
“But, not to move from the ground of ascertained fact, I have a right to say that I know that the morality of the parishes best known to me has been made better, and not worse, by the shepherding of the Pastors.
“I have heard and read a good deal, in clerical circles, and clerical books, of doctrines of ‘substitution’ and ‘vicarious righteousness’ such as you rightly condemn as immoral; but if all the sermons preached in the English Church on any given Sunday were fully and fairly reported, I question if a dozen would contain the least trace of these doctrines.
“Amidst all the isms and dogmas by which Clerics are entangled, I find the deep and general conviction getting clearer and clearer utterance, that the one supremely lovely, admirable [110]and adorable thing,—the one thing to redeem and regenerate human life, the one true Gospel for mankind,—is the Spirit and Life of Jesus Christ.
“As to your terrible charge against the Pastors, that they preach for hire, I need only quote your own opinion in this month’s Fors, that all honest minstrels and authors, manifestly possessing talent for their business, should be allowed to claim ‘for their actual toil, in performance of their arts, modest reward, and daily bread.’
“Surely the labourer who spends his life in speaking salutary truth is not less worthy of his hire than he who sings or writes it?
“The reward offered to most Pastors is ‘modest’ enough,
“I am very faithfully yours,
“Edward Z. Lyttel.
“John Ruskin, Esq.”
I willingly insert my correspondent’s second letter, but will not at present answer it, except privately. I wonder, in the meantime, whether he will think the effect of the ministry of Felix Neff on the mind of the sweet English lady whose letter next follows, moral, or immoral? A portion of whose letter, I should have said; its opening touches on household matters little to her mind, to which her first exclamation refers.
“How sorrowful it all is! Yet, I don’t feel so naughty about it as I did on Saturday, because yesterday I read the life of Felix Neff, who went to live by his own wish at that dismal Dormilleuse in the high Alps, amongst the wretched people who were like very unclean animals, and for whom he felt such sublime pity that he sacrificed himself to improve them; and as I read of that terrible Alpine desert, with eight months’ hopeless dreariness, and of the wretched food and filthy hovels in which the miserable people lived, I looked up at my good fire and clean room, with dear white Lily lying so soft on my lap, and the snowdrops [111]outside the window, and I really did feel ashamed of having felt so grumbly and discontented as I did on Saturday. So good Felix Neff’s good work is not done yet, and he will doubtless help others as long as the world lasts.”
The following letter is an interesting and somewhat pathetic example of religious madness; not a little, however, connected with mismanagement of money. The writer has passed great part of his life in a conscientious endeavour to teach what my correspondent Mr. Lyttel would, I think, consider “salutary truth”; but his intense egotism and absence of imaginative power hindered him from perceiving that many other people were doing the same, and meeting with the same disappointments. Gradually he himself occupied the entire centre of his horizon; and he appoints himself to “judge the United States in particular, and the world in general.”
The introductory clause of the letter refers somewhat indignantly to a representation I had irreverently made to him that a prophet should rather manifest his divine mission by providing himself miraculously with meat and drink, than by lodging in widows’ houses without in anywise multiplying their meal for them; and then leaving other people to pay his bill.
“So long as you deliberately refuse to help in any way a man who (you have every reason to know) possesses more of the righteousness of God than yourself, (when you have ample means to do so,) how can you be said to ‘do the will of your Father which is in Heaven’? or how can you expect to receive understanding to ‘know of the doctrine’ of the Saviour, (or of my doctrine,) ‘whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself’? If you possessed a genuine ‘faith,’ you would exercise humanity towards such a man as myself, and leave the result with God; and not presumptuously decide that it was ‘wrong’ to relieve ‘a righteous man’ in distress, lest [112]you should encourage him in delusions which you choose to suppose him to be labouring under.
“People seem to suppose that it is the Saviour who will judge the world, if any one does. He distinctly declares that He will not. ‘If any one hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not; for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.’ John xii. 47, 48. I represent that ‘WORD’ which the Saviour spoke, and I have already judged, and condemned, this country, and the United States, in particular; and Christendom, and the World in general. I have for twenty years been a preacher of ‘the Righteousness of God’ to this generation (as Noah was for a hundred years to his generation), and I have proved by actual experiment that none among the men of this generation can be induced to ‘enter the kingdom of heaven’ until the predicted ‘time of trouble, such as was not since there was a nation,’ comes suddenly, and compels those who are ready to enter the kingdom of God, to do so at once; and I know not how soon after I leave this country the ‘trouble’ will come; perhaps immediately, perhaps in about a year’s time; but come it must; and the sooner it comes, the sooner it will be over, I suppose.
“Yours faithfully.”
The following specimen of the kind of letters which the “judge of the United States in particular, and the World in general,” leaves the people favoured by his judgment to send to his friends, may as well supplement his own letter:—
“Mr. (J. of U.S. in p. and the W. in g.)’s name will, I trust, excuse me to you for writing; but my house entirely failed me, and I, with my child, are now really in great want. I write [113]trusting that, after your former kindness to me, you will feel disposed to send me a little assistance.
“I would not have written, but I am seriously in need.
“Please address to me,” etc.
Whether, however, the judge of the world in general errs most in expecting me to pay the necessary twopences to his hosts, or the world in general itself, in expecting me to pay necessary twopences to its old servants when it has no more need of them, may be perhaps questionable. Here is a paragraph cut out of an application for an hospital vote, which I received the other day:—
Mr. A., aged seventy-one, has been a subscriber to the Pension Fund forty-five years, the Almshouse Fund eighteen years, and the Orphan Fund four years. He is now, in consequence of his advanced age, and the infirmities attendant on a dislocated shoulder, asthma, and failing sight, incapable of earning sufficient for a subsistence for himself and wife, who is afflicted with chronic rheumatic gout. He was apprenticed to Mr. B., and has worked for Mr. C. D. forty years, and his earnings at present are very small.
Next, here is a piece of a letter disclosing another curious form of modern distress, in which the masters and mistresses become dependent for timely aid on their servants. This is at least as old, however, as Miss Edgeworth’s time; I think the custom is referred to at the toilette of Miss Georgiana Falconer in ‘Patronage.’
“Every day makes me bitterly believe more and more what you say about the wickedness of working by fire and steam, and the harm and insidious sapping of true life that comes from large mills and all that is connected with them. One of my servants told my sister to-day (with an apology) that her mother [114]had told her in her letter to ask me if I would sell her my children’s old clothes, etc.—that indeed many ladies did—her mother had often bought things. Oh! it made me feel horrible. We try to buy strong clothes, and mend them to the last, and then sometimes give them away; but selling clothes to poor people seems to me dreadful. I never thought ladies and gentlemen would sell their clothes even to shops—till we came to live here, and happened to know of its being done. It surely must be wrong and bad, or I should not feel something in me speaking so strongly against it, as mean and unholy.”
A piece of country gossip on bees and birds, with a humiliating passage about my own Coniston country, may refresh us a little after dwelling on these serious topics:—
“A humble cow is I fancy more properly a humbled cow—it is so called in Durham—a cow whose horn is no longer set up on high. A humble or bumble bee is there called a ‘bumbler.’ To bumble in Durham means to go buzzing about; a fussy man would be called a great bumbler. But don’t believe it has no sting: it can sting worse than a honey bee, and all but as badly as a wasp. They used to tell us as children that ‘bumblers’ did not sting, but I know from experience that they do. We used as children to feel that we knew that the little yellow mason bee (?) did not sting, but I have no true knowledge on that point. Do you care to have the common village names of birds? I am afraid I can only remember one or two, but they are universally used in the north.
“The wren which makes the hanging nest lined with feathers is called the feather poke; yellow-hammer, yellow-yowley; golden-crested wren, Christian wren; white-throat, Nanny white-throat; hedge-sparrow, Dicky Diky. I could find more if you cared for them. To wind up, I will send you an anecdote I find among father’s writings, and which refers to your country. He is speaking [115]of some time early in 1800. ‘Cock-fighting was then in all its glory. When I was in the neighbourhood of Ulverston, in 18—,8 I was told that about the time of which I am writing, a grave ecclesiastical question had been settled by an appeal to a battle with cocks. The chapelry of Pennington was vacant, but there was a dispute who should present a clerk to the vacant benefice,—the vicar of Ulverston, the mother-church, the church-wardens, the four-and-twenty, or the parishioners at large,—and recourse was had to a Welsh Main.’ ”
Finally, the following letter is worth preserving. It succinctly states the impression on the minds of the majority of booksellers that they ought to be able to oblige their customers at my expense. Perhaps in time, the customers may oblige the booksellers by paying them something for their trouble, openly, instead of insisting on not paying them anything unless they don’t know how much it is.
“Mr. George Allen.
Sir,—We will thank you to send us Ruskin’s
| Aratra Pentelici | £0 | 19 | 0 |
| The Eagle’s Nest | 0 | 9 | 6 |
| Relations between Angelo and Tintoret | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| £1 | 9 | 6 | |
| And continue Account next year Fors Clavigera | 0 | 7 | 0 |
| Cheque enclosed. | £1 | 16 | 6 |
“It cannot be too frequently referred to by the trade,—the unjustifiable mode Ruskin has adopted in the sale of his books. [116]It may be profitable to you (as we hope it is), but to the general trade it is nothing but a swindle. Our customer, for instance (whom we cannot afford to disoblige), pays us for this order just £1 16s. 6d.; and we must come back on him for expense of remitting, else we shall lose by the transaction.
“Your obedient Servant.”
[117]
1 Frightened, (I hear it was guessed in a gossiping newspaper,) by the Shipton accident, and disgusted afterwards by unexpected expenses. The ingenious British public cannot conceive of anybody’s estimating danger before accidents as well as after them, or amusing himself by driving from one place to another, instead of round the Park. There was some grain of truth in the important rumour, however. I have posted, in early days, up and down England (and some other countries) not once nor twice; and I grumbled, in Yorkshire, at being charged twenty-pence instead of eighteen-pence a mile. But the pace was good, where any trace of roads remained under casual outcasting of cinders and brickbats. ↑
2 “Our Lady’s,” doubtless, once. ↑
3 I include in my general term ‘mob,’ lords, squires, clergy, parish beadles, and all other states and conditions of men concerned in the proceedings described. ↑
4 They are round at the end, but do not taper. ↑
5 An Indian one, patiently investigated for me by Mr. Burgess, was fastened with glue which entirely defied cold water, and yielded only to the kettle. ↑
6 She bites them round the edge roughly enough; but pushes them down with a tucked-up rim, quite tight, like the first covering of a pot of preserve. ↑
8 He does not give the date. ↑
FORS CLAVIGERA.
