Brantwood, 20th Feb., 1873.

I was again stopped by a verse in St. John’s gospel this morning: not because I have not thought of it before, often enough; but because it bears much on our immediate business in one of its expressions,—“Ye shall be scattered, every man to his own.”

His own what?

His own property, his own rights, his own opinions, his own place, I suppose one must answer? Every man in his own place; and every man acting on his own opinions; and every man having his own way. Those are somewhat your own notions of the rightest possible state of things, are they not?

And you do not think it of any consequence to ask what sort of a place your own is?

As for instance, taking the reference farther on, to the one of Christ’s followers who that night, most distinctly of all that were scattered, found his place, and stayed in it,—“This ministry and Apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell, that he might go to his own place.” What sort of a place?

It should interest you, surely, to ask of such things, since you all, whether you like them or not, have your own places; and whether you know them or not, your own opinions. It is too true that very often you fancy you think one thing, when, in reality, you think quite another. Most Christian persons, for instance, fancy they would like to be in heaven. But that is not their real opinion of the place at all. See how grave they will look, if their doctor hints to them that there is the least probability of their soon going there.

And the ascertaining what you really do think yourself, and do not merely fancy you think, because other people have said so; as also the ascertaining, if every man had indeed to go to his own place, what place he would verily have to go to, are most wholesome mental exercises; and there is no objection whatever to your giving weight to that really ‘private opinion,’ and that really ‘individual right.’

But if you ever come really to know either what you think, or what you deserve, it is ten to one but you find it as much the character of Prudence as of Charity, that she “seeketh not her own.” For indeed that same apostle, who so accurately sought his own, and found it, is, in another verse, called the “Son of Loss.” “Of them whom Thou gavest me, have I lost none, but the Son of Loss,” says Christ (your unlucky translation, again, quenches the whole text by its poor Latinism—“perdition”). Might it not be better to lose your place than to find it, on such terms?

But, lost or found, what do you think is your place at this moment? Are you minded to stay in it, if you are in it? Do you mind where it is, if you are out of it? What sort of creatures do you think yourselves? How do those you call your best friends think of you, when they advise you to claim your just place in the world?

I said, two letters back, that we would especially reverence eight saints, and among them St. Paul. I was startled to hear, only a few days afterwards, that the German critics have at last positively ascertained that St. Paul was Simon Magus;—but I don’t mind whether he was or not;—if he was, we have got seven saints, and one of the Magi, to reverence, instead of eight saints;—plainly and practically, whoever wrote the 13th of 1st Corinthians is to be much respected and attended to; not as the teacher of salvation by faith, still less of salvation by talking, nor even of salvation by almsgiving or martyrdom, but as the bold despiser of faith, talk-gift, and burning, if one has not love. Whereas this age of ours is so far contrary to any such Pauline doctrine that, without especial talent either for faith or martyrdom, and loquacious usually rather with the tongues of men than of angels, it nevertheless thinks to get on, not merely without love of its neighbour, but founding all its proceedings on the precise contrary of that,—love of itself, and the seeking of every man for his own,—I should say of every beast for its own; for your modern social science openly confesses that it no longer considers you as men, but as having the nature of Beasts of Prey;1 which made me more solicitous to explain to you the significance of that word ‘Park’ in my last letter; for indeed you have already pulled down the railings of those small green spots of park to purpose—and in a very solemn sense, turned all England into a Park. Alas!—if it were but even so much. Parks are for beasts of the field, which can dwell together in peace: but you have made yourselves beasts of the Desert, doleful creatures, for whom the grass is green no more, nor dew falls on lawn or bank; no flowers for you—not even the bare and quiet earth to lie down on, but only the sand-drift, and the dry places which the very Devils cannot rest in. Here and there, beside our sweet English waters, the sower may still send forth the feet of the ox and the ass; but for men with ox’s heads, and ass’s heads,—not the park, for these; by no manner of means the Park; but the everlasting Pound. Every man and beast being in their own place, that you choose for yours.

I have given you therefore, this month, for frontispiece, the completest picture I can find of that pound or labyrinth which the Greeks supposed to have been built by Daedalus, to enclose the bestial nature, engrafted on humanity. The Man with the Bull’s head. The Greek Daedalus is the power of mechanical as opposed to imaginative art;2 and this is the kind of architecture which Greeks and Florentines alike represent him as providing for human beasts. Could anything more precisely represent the general look of your architecture now? When I come down here; to Coniston, through Preston and Wigan, it seems to me that I have seen that thing itself, only built a little higher, and smoking, or else set on its side, and spinning round, a thousand times over in the course of the day.

Then the very writing of the name of it is so like your modern education! You miss the first letter of your lives; and begin with A for apple-pie, instead of L for love; and the rest of the writing is—some little—some big—some turned the wrong way; and the sum of it all to you Perplexity. “Abberinto.”

For the rest, the old Florentine engraver took the story as it ran currently, that Theseus deserted Ariadne (but, indeed, she was the letter L lost out of his life), and besides, you know if he ever did do anything wrong, it was all Titania’s fault,—

If you have young eyes, or will help old ones with a magnifying glass, you will find all her story told. In the front, Theseus is giving her his faith; their names, TESEO . ADRIANNA, are written beneath them. He leans on his club reversed. She brings him three balls of thread, in case one, or even two, should not be long enough. His plumed cap means earthly victory; her winged one heavenly power and hope. Then, at the side of the arched gate of the labyrinth, Theseus has tied one end of the clue to a ring, and you see his back and left leg as he goes in. And just above, as the end of the adventure, he is sailing away from Naxos, with his black sail. On the left is the isle of Naxos, and deserted Adriane waving Theseus back, with her scarf tied to a stick. Theseus not returning, she throws herself into the sea; you can see her feet, and her hand, still with the staff in it, as she plunges in backwards. Whereupon, winged Jupiter, GIOVE, comes down and lifts her out of the sea; you see her winged head raised to him. Then he carries her up to heaven. He holds her round the waist, but, strangely, she is not thinking of Jupiter at all, but of something above and more than Jupiter; her hands and head raised, as in some strong desire. But on the right, there is another fall, without such rising. Theseus’ father throws himself into the sea from the wall of Athens, and you see his feet as he goes in; but there is no God to lift him out of the waves. He stays, in his place, as Adriane in hers.

“Such an absurd old picture, or old story, you never saw or heard of? The very blaze of fireworks, in which Jupiter descends, drawn with black sparks instead of white! the whole point of the thing, the ‘terrific combat,’ missed out of the play! and nothing, on the whole, seen, except people’s legs, as in a modern pantomime, only not to so much advantage.”

That is what you think of it? Well, such as it is, that is ‘fine art’ (if you will take my opinion in my own business); and even this poor photograph of it is simply worth all the illustrations in your ‘Illustrated News’ or ‘Illustrated Times’ from one year’s end to another. Worth them all—nay, there is no comparison, for these illustrated papers do you definite mischief, and the more you look at them, the worse for you. Whereas, the longer you look at this, and think of it, the more good you will get.

Examine, for instance, that absurdly tall crest of Theseus. Behind it, if you look closely, you will see that he also has the wings of hope on his helmet; but the upright plumes nearly hide them. Have you never seen anything like them before? They are five here, indeed; but you have surely met with them elsewhere,—in number, Three—those curling, upright plumes?

For that Prince who waited on his father and the French Knights in the castle of Calais, bears them in memory of the good knight and king who fought sightless at Cressy; whose bearings they were, with the motto which you know so well, yet are so little minded to take for your own,—“I serve.” Also the cap of the Knights of St. George has these white plumes ‘of three falls,’ but the Prince of Wales more fitly, because the meaning of the ostrich feather is order and rule; for it was seen that, long and loose though the filaments seemed, no wind could entangle or make them disorderly. “So this plume betokeneth such an one as nothing can disturb his mind or disquiet his spirits, but is ever one and the same.” Do you see how one thing bears out and fulfils another, in these thoughts and symbols of the despised people of old time? Do you recollect Froissart’s words of the New Year’s Feast at Calais?

“So they were served in peace, and in great leisure.”

You have improved that state of things, at any rate. I must say so much for you, at Wolverton, and Rugby, and such other places of travellers’ repose.

Theseus then, to finish with him for this time, bears these plumes specially as the Institutor of Order and Law at Athens; the Prince or beginner of the State there; and your own Prince of Wales bears them in like manner as the beginner of State with us, (the mocking and purposeful lawlessness, of Henry the Fifth when Prince, yet never indeed violating law, or losing self-command, is one of the notablest signs, rightly read, in the world’s history). And now I want you to consider with me very carefully the true meaning of the words he begins his State with:—

“I serve.”

You have, I hope, noticed that throughout these letters addressed to you as workmen and labourers,—though I have once or twice ventured to call myself your fellow-workman, I have oftener spoken as belonging to, and sharing main modes of thought with, those who are not labourers, but either live in various ways by their wits—as lawyers, authors, reviewers, clergymen, parliamentary orators, and the like—or absolutely in idleness on the labour of others,—as the representative Squire. And, broadly speaking, I address you as workers, and speak in the name of the rest as idlers, thus not estimating the mere wit-work as work at all: it is always play, when it is good.

Speaking to you, then, as workers, and of myself as an idler, tell me honestly whether you consider me as addressing my betters or my worses? Let us give ourselves no airs on either side. Which of us, do you seriously think, you or I, are leading the more honourable life? Would you like to lead my life rather than your own; or, if you couldn’t help finding it pleasanter, would you be ashamed of yourselves for leading it? Is your place, or mine, considered as cure and sinecure, the better? And are either of us legitimately in it? I would fain know your own real opinion on these things.

But note further: there is another relation between us than that of idler and labourer; the much more direct one of Master and Servant. I can set you to any kind of work I like, whether it be good for you or bad, pleasant to you or painful. Consider, for instance, what I am doing at this very instant—half-past seven, morning, 25th February, 1873. It is a bitter black frost, the ground deep in snow, and more falling. I am writing comfortably in a perfectly warm room; some of my servants were up in the cold at half-past five to get it ready for me; others, a few days ago, were digging my coals near Durham, at the risk of their lives; an old woman brought me my watercresses through the snow for breakfast yesterday; another old woman is going two miles through it to-day to fetch me my letters at ten o’clock. Half a dozen men are building a wall for me to keep the sheep out of my garden, and a railroad stoker is holding his own against the north wind, to fetch me some Brobdignag raspberry plants3 to put in it. Somebody in the east end of London is making boots for me, for I can’t wear those I have much longer; a washerwoman is in suds, somewhere, to get me a clean shirt for to-morrow; a fisherman is in dangerous weather somewhere, catching me some fish for Lent; and my cook will soon be making me pancakes, for it is Shrove Tuesday. Having written this sentence, I go to the fire, warm my fingers, saunter a little, listlessly, about the room, and grumble because I can’t see to the other side of the lake.

And all these people, my serfs or menials, who are undergoing any quantity or kind of hardship I choose to put on them,—all these people, nevertheless, are more contented than I am: I can’t be happy, not I,—for one thing, because I haven’t got the MS. Additional, (never mind what number,) in the British Museum, which they bought in 1848, for two hundred pounds, and I never saw it! And have never been easy in my mind, since.

But perhaps it is not the purpose of Heaven to make refined personages, like me, easy in our minds; we are supposed to be too grand for that. Happy, or easy, or otherwise, am I in my place, think you; and you, my serfs, in yours?

‘You are not serfs,’ say you, ‘but free-born Britons’? Much good may your birth do you. What does your birth matter to me, since, now that you are grown men, you must do whatever I like, or die by starvation? ‘Strike!’—will you? Can you live by striking? And when you are forced to work again, will not your masters choose again, as they have chosen hitherto, what work you are to do? Not serfs!—it is well if you are so much as that; a serf would know what o’clock he had to go to his work at; but I find that clocks are now no more comprehensible in England than in Italy, and you also have to be “whistled for like dogs,” all over Yorkshire—or rather buzzed for, that being the appropriate call to business, of due honey-making kind. “Hark,” says an old Athenian, according to Aristophanes, “how the nightingale has filled the thickets with honey” (meaning, with music as sweet). In Yorkshire, your steam-nightingales fill the woods with—Buzz; and for four miles round are audible, summoning you—to your pleasure, I suppose, my free-born?

It is well, I repeat, if you are so much as serfs. A serf means a ‘saved person’—the word comes first from a Greek one, meaning to drag, or drag away into safety, (though captive safety), out of the slaughter of war. But alas, the trades most of you are set to now-a-days have no element of safety in them, either for body or soul. They take thirty years from your lives here;—what they take from your lives hereafter, ask your clergy. I have no opinion on that matter.

But I used another terrible word just now—‘menial.’ The modern English vulgar mind has a wonderful dread of doing anything of that sort!

I suppose there is scarcely another word in the language which people more dislike having applied to them, or of which they less understand the application. It comes from a beautiful old Chaucerian word, ‘meinie,’ or many, signifying the attendant company of any one worth attending to; the disciples of a master, scholars of a teacher, soldiers of a leader, lords of a King. Chaucer says the God of Love came, in the garden of the Rose with ‘his many’;—in the court of the King of Persia spoke a Lord, one ‘of his many.’ Therefore there is nothing in itself dishonourable in being menial: the only question is—whose many you belong to, and whether he is a person worth belonging to, or even safe to be belonged to; also, there is somewhat in the cause of your following: if you follow for love, it is good to be menial—if for honour, good also;—if for ten per cent.—as a railroad company follows its Director, it is not good to be menial. Also there is somewhat in the manner of following: if you obey your Taskmaster’s eye, it is well;—if only his whip, still, well; but not so well:—but, above all, or below all, if you have to obey the whip as a bad hound, because you have no nose, like the members of the present House of Commons, it is a very humble form of menial service indeed.

But even as to the quite literal form of it, in house or domestic service, are you sure it is so very disgraceful a state to live in?

Among the people whom one must miss out of one’s life, dead, or worse than dead, by the time one is fifty-four, I can only say, for my own part, that the one I practically and truly miss most, next to father and mother, (and putting losses of imaginary good out of the question,) was a ‘menial,’ my father’s nurse, and mine. She was one of our many—(our many being always but few), and, from her girlhood to her old age, the entire ability of her life was given to serving us. She had a natural gift and specialty for doing disagreeable things; above all, the service of a sick room; so that she was never quite in her glory unless some of us were ill. She had also some parallel specialty for saying disagreeable things; and might be relied upon to give the extremely darkest view of any subject, before proceeding to ameliorative action upon it. And she had a very creditable and republican aversion to doing immediately, or in set terms, as she was bid; so that when my mother and she got old together, and my mother became very imperative and particular about having her teacup set on one side of her little round table, Anne would observantly and punctiliously put it always on the other; which caused my mother to state to me, every morning after breakfast, gravely, that, if ever a woman in this world was possessed by the Devil, Anne was that woman. But in spite of these momentary and petulant aspirations to liberality and independence of character, poor Anne remained verily servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people’s wills instead of her own, and seeking other people’s good instead of her own: nor did I ever hear on any occasion of her doing harm to a human being, except by saving two hundred and some odd pounds for her relations; in consequence of which some of them, after her funeral, did not speak to the rest for several months.

Two hundred and odd pounds;—it might have been more; but I used to hear of little loans to the relations occasionally; and besides, Anne would sometimes buy a quite unjustifiably expensive silk gown. People in her station of life are always so improvident. Two hundred odd pounds at all events she had laid by, in her fifty-seven years of unselfish labour. Actually twenty ten-pound notes. I heard the other day, to my great satisfaction, of the approaching marriage of a charming girl;—but to my dissatisfaction, that the approach was slow. “We can’t marry yet”—said she;—“you know, we can’t possibly marry on five hundred a year.” People in that station of life are always so provident.

Two hundred odd pounds,—that was what the third Fors, in due alliance with her sisters, thought fit to reward our Annie with, for fifty years of days’ work and nights’ watching; and what will not a dash of a pen win, sometimes in the hands of superior persons! Surely the condition must be a degraded one which can do no better for itself than this?

And yet, have you ever taken a wise man’s real opinion on this matter? You are not fond of hearing opinions of wise men; you like your anonymous penny-a-liners’ opinions better. But do you think you could tolerantly receive that of a moderately and popularly wise man—such an one as Charles Dickens, for example? Have you ever considered seriously what his opinion was, about ‘Dependants’ and ‘Menials’? He did not perhaps quite know what it was himself;—it needs wisdom of stronger make than his to be sure of what it does think. He would talk, in his moral passages, about Independence, and Self-dependence, and making one’s way in the world, just like any hack of the ‘Eatanswill Independent.’ But which of the people of his imagination, of his own true children, did he love and honour most? Who are your favourites in his books—as they have been his? Menials, it strikes me, many of them. Sam, Mark, Kit, Peggoty, Mary-my-dear,—even the poor little Marchioness! I don’t think Dickens intended you to look upon any of them disrespectfully. Or going one grade higher in his society, Tom Pinch, Newman Noggs, Tim Linkinwater, Oliver Twist—how independent, all of them! Very nearly menial, in soul, if they chance on a good master; none of them brilliant in fortune, nor vigorous in action. Is not the entire testimony of Dickens, traced in its true force, that no position is so good for men and women, none so likely to bring out their best human character, as that of a dependent, or menial? And yet with your supreme modern logic, instead of enthusiastically concluding from his works “let us all be servants,” one would think the notion he put in your heads was quite the other, “let us all be masters,” and that you understood his ideal of heroic English character to be given in Mr. Pecksniff or Sir Mulberry Hawk!

Alas! more’s the pity, you cannot all be dependants and menials, even if you were wise enough to wish it. Somebody there must be to be served, else there could be no service. And for the beatitudes and virtues of Masterhood, I must appeal to a wiser man than Dickens—but it is no use entering on that part of the question to-day; in the meantime, here is another letter of his, (you have had one letter already in last Fors,) just come under my hand, which gives you a sketch of a practical landlord, and true Master, on which you may meditate with advantage:

“Here, above all, we had the opportunity of seeing in what universal respect and comfort a gentleman’s family may live in that country, and in far from its most favoured district; provided only they live there habitually and do their duty as the friends and guardians of those among whom Providence has appointed their proper place. Here we found neither mud hovels nor naked peasantry, but snug cottages and smiling faces all about. Here there was a very large school in the village, of which masters and pupils were, in nearly equal proportion, Protestants and Roman Catholics, the Protestant Squire himself making it a regular part of his daily business to visit the scene of their operations, and strengthen authority and enforce discipline by personal superintendence. Here, too, we pleased ourselves with recognising some of the sweetest features in Goldsmith’s picture of ‘Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain;’ and, in particular, we had ‘the playful children just let loose from school’ in perfection. Mr. Edgeworth’s paternal heart delighted in letting them make a playground of his lawn; and every evening, after dinner, we saw leap-frog going on with the highest spirit within fifty yards of the drawing-room windows, while fathers and mothers, and their aged parents also, were grouped about among the trees watching the sport. It is a curious enough coincidence that Oliver Goldsmith and Maria Edgeworth should both have derived their early love and knowledge of Irish character and manners from the same identical district. He received part of his education at this very school of Edgeworthstown; and Pallasmore (the ‘locus cui nomen est Pallas’ of Johnson’s epitaph), the little hamlet where the author of the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ first saw the light, is still, as it was in his time, the property of the Edgeworths.”

“Strengthen authority,” “enforce discipline”! What ugly expressions these! and a “whole hamlet,” though it be a little one, “the property of the Edgeworths”! How long are such things yet to be? thinks my Republican correspondent, I suppose—from whom, to my regret, I have had no further dispatch since I endeavoured to answer his interrogations.4 Only, note further respecting this chief question of the right of private property, that there are two kinds of ownership, which the Greeks wisely expressed in two different ways: the first, with the word which brought me to a pause in St. John’s Gospel, ‘idios,’ signifying the way, for instance, in which a man’s opinions and interests are his own; ‘idia,’ so that by persisting in them, independently of the truth, which is above opinion, and of the public interest, which is above private, he becomes what we very properly, borrowing the Greek word, call an ‘idiot.’ But their other phrase expresses the kind of belonging which is nobly won, and is truly and inviolably ours, in which sense a man may learn the full meaning of the word ‘Mine’ only once in his life,—happy he who has ever so learnt it. I was thinking over the prettiness of the word in that sense, a day or two ago, and opening a letter, mechanically, when a newspaper clipping dropped out of it (I don’t know from what paper), containing a quotation from the ‘Cornhill Magazine’ setting forth the present privileges of the agricultural labourer attained for him by modern improvements in machinery, in the following terms:—

“An agricultural labourer, from forty to forty-five years of age, of tried skill, of probity, and sobriety, with £200 in his pocket, is a made man. True, he has had to forego the luxury of marriage; but so have his betters.”

And I think you may be grateful to the Third Fors for this clipping; which you see settles, in the region of Cornhill, at least, the question whether you are the betters or the worses of your masters. Decidedly the worses, according to the ‘Cornhill.’ Also, exactly the sum which my old nurse had for her reward at the end of her life, is, you see, to be the agricultural labourer’s reward in the crowning triumph of his;—provided always that he has followed the example of his betters on the stock exchange and in trade, in the observance of the strictest probity;—that he be entirely skilful;—not given to purchasing two shillings’ worth of liquor for twenty-seven and sixpence,—and finally, until the age of forty-five, has dispensed with the luxury of marriage.

I have just said I didn’t want to make Catholics of you; but truly I think your Protestantism is becoming too fierce in its opposition to the Popedom. Cannot it be content with preaching the marriage of the clergy, but it must preach also the celibacy of the laity?

And the moral and anti-Byronic Mrs. B. Stowe, who so charmingly and pathetically describes the terrors of slavery, as an institution which separates men from their wives, and mothers from their children! Did she really contemplate, among the results contributed to by her interesting volumes, these ultimate privileges of Liberty,—that the men, at least under the age of forty-five, are not to have any wives to be separated from; and that the women, who under these circumstances have the misfortune to become mothers, are to feel it a hardship, not to be parted from their children, but to be prevented from accelerating the parting with a little soothing syrup?