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On the Old Road Volume 2 (of 2), essay(s) by John Ruskin |
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Literature - Fiction--Fair And Foul - IV |
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_ IV.[88]
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:--
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 Liege, 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 Spluegen, 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. "Caesar'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 Matthiae. 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. PARIS, _September 20, 1880._
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]
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.
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:--
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.
RALPH THICKNESSE. JOHN RUSKIN, Esq.
[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: Medena kakegoreito medeis])."--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.] _ |
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