Brantwood, 18th September, 1873.

Looking up from my paper, as I consider what I am to say in this letter, and in what order to say it, I see out of my window, on the other side of the lake, the ivied chimneys (thick and strong-built, like castle towers, and not at all disposed to drop themselves over people below,) of the farmhouse where, I told you the other day, I saw its mistress preparing the feast of berry-bread for her sheep-shearers. In that farmhouse, about two hundred and fifty years ago, warmed himself at the hearth, ten feet across, of its hall, the English squire who wrote the version of the Psalms from which I chose for you the fourteenth and fifteenth, last November. Of the said squire I wish you, this November, to know somewhat more; here, to begin, is his general character, given by a biographer who may be trusted:—

“He was a true model of worth; a man fit for conquest, plantation, reformation, or what action soever is greatest and hardest among men; withal such a lover of mankind and goodness, that whosoever had any real parts in him found comfort, participation, and protection to the uttermost of his power. The universities abroad and at home accounted him a general MÆcenas of learning, dedicated their books to him, and communicated every invention or improvement of knowledge with him. Soldiers honoured him, and were so honoured by him, as no man thought he marched under the true banner of Mars, that had not obtained his approbation. Men of affairs in most parts of Christendom entertained correspondency with him. But what speak I of these? His heart and capacity were so large, that there was not a cunning painter, a skilful engineer, an excellent musician, or any other artificer of extraordinary fame, that made not himself known to this famous spirit, and found him his true friend without hire, and the common rendezvous of worth, in his time.”

This being (and as I can assure you, by true report,) his character, and manner of life, you are to observe these things, farther, about his birth, fate, and death.

When he was born, his mother was in mourning for her father, brother, and sister-in-law, who all had died on the scaffold. Yet, very strangely, you will find that he takes no measures, in his political life, for the abolition of capital punishment.

Perhaps I had better at once explain to you the meaning of his inactivity in that cause, although for my own part I like best to put questions only, and leave you to work them out for yourselves as you are able. But you could not easily answer this one without help. This psalm-singing squire has nothing to urge against capital punishment, because his grandfather, uncle, and aunt-in-law all died innocent. It is only rogues who have a violent objection to being hanged, and only abettors of rogues who would desire anything else for them. Honest men don’t in the least mind being hanged occasionally by mistake, so only that the general principle of the gallows be justly maintained; and they have the pleasure of knowing that the world they leave is positively minded to cleanse itself of the human vermin with which they have been classed by mistake.

The contrary movement—so vigorously progressive in modern days—has its real root in a gradually increasing conviction on the part of the English nation that they are all vermin. (‘Worms’ is the orthodox Evangelical expression.) Which indeed is becoming a fact, very fast indeed;—but was by no means so in the time of this psalm-singing squire. In his days, there was still a quite sharp separation between honest men and rogues; and the honest men were perfectly clear about the duty of trying to find out which was which. The confusion of the two characters is a result of the peculiar forms of vice and ignorance, reacting on each other, which belong to the modern Evangelical sect, as distinguished from other bodies of Christian men; and date therefore, necessarily, from the Reformation.

They consist especially in three things. First, in declaring a bad translation of a group of books of various qualities, accidentally associated, to be the ‘Word of God.’ Secondly, reading, of this singular ‘Word of God,’ only the bits they like; and never taking any pains to understand even those.1 Thirdly, resolutely refusing to practise even the very small bits they do understand, if such practice happen to go against their own worldly—especially money—interests. Of which three errors, the climax is in their always delightedly reading—without in the slightest degree understanding—the fourteenth Psalm; and never reading, nor apparently thinking it was ever intended they should read, the next one to it—the fifteenth. For which reason I gave you those two together, from the squire’s version, last November,—and, this November and December, will try to make you understand both. For among those books accidentally brought together, and recklessly called the ‘Word of God,’ the book of Psalms is a very precious one. It is certainly not the ‘Word of God’; but it is the collected words of very wise and good men, who knew a great many important things which you don’t know, and had better make haste to know,—and were ignorant of some quite unimportant things, which Professor Huxley knows, and thinks himself wiser on that account than any quantity of Psalmists, or Canticle-singers either. The distinction between the two, indeed, is artificial, and worse than that, non-natural. For it is just as proper and natural, sometimes, to write a psalm, or solemn song, to your mistress, and a canticle, or joyful song, to God, as to write grave songs only to God, and canticles to your mistress. And there is, observe, no proper distinction in the words at all. When Jean de Meung continues the love-poem of William de Loris, he says sorrowfully:—

And the best word for “Canticles” in the Bible is “Asma,” or Song, which is just as grave a word as Psalmos, or Psalm.

And as it happens, this psalm-singing, or, at least, exquisitely psalm-translating, squire, mine ancient neighbour, is just as good a canticle-singer. I know no such lovely love poems as his, since Dante’s.

Here is a specimen for you, which I choose because of its connection with the modern subject of railroads; only note, first,

The word Squire, I told you, meant primarily a “rider.” And it does not at all mean, and never can mean, a person carried in an iron box by a kettle on wheels. Accordingly, this squire, riding to visit his mistress along an old English road, addresses the following sonnet to the ground of it,—gravel or turf, I know not which:—

Hundreds of years! You think that a mistake? No, it is the very rapture of love. A lover like this does not believe his mistress can grow old, or die. How do you think the other verses read, apropos of railway signals and railway scrip?

But to keep our eyes and ears with our squire. Presently he comes in sight of his mistress’s house, and then sings this sonnet:—

And here is one more, written after a quarrel, which is the prettiest of all as a song; and interesting for you to compare with the Baron of Bradwardine’s song at Lucky M’Leary’s:—

Now if you don’t like these love-songs, you either have never been in love, or you don’t know good writing from bad, (and likely enough both the negatives, I’m sorry to say, in modern England). But perhaps if you are a very severe Evangelical person, you may like them still less, when you know something more about them. Excellent love-songs seem always to be written under strange conditions. The writer of that “Song of Songs” was himself, as you perhaps remember, the child of her for whose sake the Psalmist murdered his Hittite friend; and besides, loved many strange women himself, after that first bride. And these, sixty or more, exquisite love-ditties, from which I choose, almost at random, the above three, are all written by my psalm-singing squire to somebody else’s wife, he having besides a very nice wife of his own.

For this squire is the, so called, ‘Divine’ Astrophel, ‘Astrophilos,’ or star lover,—the un-to-be-imitated Astrophel, the ‘ravishing sweetness of whose poesy,’ Sir Piercie Shafton, with his widowed voice,—“widowed in that it is no longer matched by my beloved viol-de-gambo,”—bestows on the unwilling ears of the Maid of Avenel.3 And the Stella, or star, whom he loved was the Lady Penelope Devereux, who was his first love, and to whom he was betrothed, and remained faithful in heart all his life, though she was married to Robert, Lord Rich, and he to the daughter of his old friend, Sir Francis Walsingham.

How very wrong, you think?

Well, perhaps so;—we will talk of the wrongs and the rights of it presently. One of quite the most curious facts bearing upon them is that the very strict queen (the mother of Coeur-de-Lion) who poisoned the Rose of Woodstock and the world for her improper conduct, had herself presided at the great court of judgment held by the highest married ladies of Christian Europe, which re-examined, and finally re-affirmed, the decree of the Court of Love, held under the presidency of Ermengarde, Countess of Narbonne;—decree, namely, that “True love cannot exist between married persons.”4 Meantime let me finish what I have mainly to tell you of the divine Astrophel. You hear by the general character first given of him that he was as good a soldier as a lover, and being about to take part in a skirmish in the Netherlands,—in which, according to English history, five hundred, or a few more, English, entirely routed three thousand Dutchmen,—as he was going into action, meeting the marshal of the camp lightly armed, he must needs throw off his own cuishes, or thigh armour, not to have an unfair advantage of him; and after having so led three charges, and had one horse killed under him and mounted another, “he was struck by a musket shot a little above his left knee, which brake and rifted the bone, and entered the thigh upward; whereupon he unwillingly left the field,” (not without an act of gentleness, afterwards much remembered, to a poor soldier, wounded also;) and, after lingering sixteen days in severe and unceasing pain, “which he endured with all the fortitude and resignation of a Christian, symptoms of mortification, the certain forerunner of death, at length appeared; which he himself being the first to perceive, was able nevertheless to amuse his sick-bed by composing an ode on the nature of his wound, which he caused to be sung to solemn music, as an entertainment that might soothe and divert his mind from his torments; and on the 16th October breathed his last breath in the arms of his faithful secretary and bosom companion, Mr. William Temple, after giving this charge to his own brother: “Love my memory; cherish my friends. Their faith to me may assure you they are honest. But above all govern your will and affections by the will and word of your Creator,5 in me beholding the end of this world, with all its vanities.”

Thus died, for England, and a point of personal honour, in the thirty-second year of his age, Sir Philip Sidney, whose name perhaps you have heard before, as well as that of his aunt-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, for whose capital punishment, as well as that of the Duke of Northumberland, (his grandfather,) his mother, as above stated, was in mourning when he was born.

And Spenser broke off his FaËry Queen, for grief, when he died; and all England went into mourning for him; which meant, at that time, that England was really sorry, and not that an order had been received from Court.

16th October. (St. Michael’s.)—I haven’t got my goose-pie made, after all; for my cook has been ill, and, unluckily, I’ve had other things as much requiring the patronage of St. Michael, to think of. You suppose, perhaps, (the English generally seem to have done so since the blessed Reformation,) that it is impious and Popish to think of St. Michael with reference to any more serious affair than the roasting of goose, or baking thereof; and yet I have had some amazed queries from my correspondents, touching the importance I seem to attach to my pie; and from others, questioning the economy of its construction. I don’t suppose a more savoury, preservable, or nourishing dish could be made, with Michael’s help, to drive the devil of hunger out of poor men’s stomachs, on the occasions when Christians make a feast, and call to it the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the blind. But, putting the point of economy aside for the moment, I must now take leave to reply to my said correspondents, that the importance and reality of goose-pie, in the English imagination, as compared with the unimportance and unreality of the archangel Michael, his name, and his hierarchy, are quite as serious subjects of regret to me as to them; and that I believe them to be mainly traceable to the loss of the ideas, both of any ‘arche,’ beginning, or princedom of things, and of any holy or hieratic end of things; so that, except in eggs of vermin, embryos of apes, and other idols of genesis enthroned in Mr. Darwin’s and Mr. Huxley’s shrines, or in such extinction as may be proper for lice, or double-ends as may be discoverable in amphisbaenas, there is henceforward, for man, neither alpha nor omega,—neither, beginning nor end, neither nativity nor judgment; no Christmas Day, except for pudding; no Michaelmas, except for goose; no Dies IrÆ, or day of final capital punishment, for anything; and that, therefore, in the classical words of Ocellus Lucanus, quoted by Mr. Ephraim Jenkinson, “Anarchon kai atelutaion to pan.”

There remains, however, among us, very strangely, some instinct of general difference between the abstractedly angelic, hieratic, or at least lord- and lady-like character;—and the diabolic, non-hieratic, or slave- and (reverse-of-lady-) like character. Instinct, which induces the ‘London Journal,’ and other such popular works of fiction, always to make their heroine, whether saint or poisoner, a ‘Lady’ something; and which probably affects your minds not a little in connection with the question of capital punishment; so that when I told you just now who Sir Philip’s aunt was, perhaps you felt as if I had cheated you by the words of my first reference to her, and would say to yourselves, “Well, but Lady Jane Grey wasn’t hanged!”

No; she was not hanged; nor crucified, which was the most vulgar of capital punishments in Christ’s time; nor kicked to death, which you at present consider the proper form of capital punishment for your wives; nor abused to death, which the mob will consider the proper form of capital punishment for your daughters,6 when Mr. John Stuart Mill’s Essay on Liberty shall have become the Gospel of England, and his statue be duly adored.

She was only decapitated, in the picturesque manner represented to you by Mr. Paul de la Roche in that charming work of modern French art which properly companions the series of Mr. Gerome’s deaths of duellists and gladiators, and Mr. Gustave DorÉ’s pictures of lovers, halved, or quartered, with their hearts jumping into their mistresses’ laps. Of all which pictures, the medical officer of the Bengalee-Life-insurance Society would justly declare that “even in an anatomical point of view, they were—per-fection.”

She was only decapitated, by a man in a black mask, on a butcher’s block; and her head rolled into sawdust,—if that’s any satisfaction to you. But why on earth do you care more about her than anybody else, in these days of liberty and equality?

I shall have something soon to tell you of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, no less than Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. The following letter, though only a girl’s, contains so much respecting the Arcadia of Modern England which I cannot elsewhere find expressed in so true and direct a way, that I print it without asking her permission, promising however, hereby, not to do so naughty a thing again,—to her, at least; new correspondents must risk it.

“I wish people would be good, and do as you wish, and help you. Reading ‘Fors’ last night made me determined to try very hard to be good. I cannot do all the things you said in the last letter you wanted us to do, but I will try.

“Oh dear! I wish you would emigrate, though I know you won’t. I wish we could all go somewhere fresh, and begin anew: it would be so much easier. In fact it seems impossible to alter things here. You cannot think how it is, in a place like this. The idea of there being any higher law to rule all one’s actions than self-interest, is treated as utter folly; really, people do not hesitate to say that in business each one must do the best he can for himself, at any risk or loss to others. You do know all this, perhaps, by hearsay, but it is so sad to see in practice. They all grow alike—by constant contact I suppose; and one has to hear one after the other gradually learning and repeating the lesson they learn in town—to trust no one, believe in no one, admire no one; to act as if all the world was made of rogues and thieves, as the only way to be safe, and not to be a rogue or thief oneself if it’s possible to make money without. And what can one do? They laugh at me. Being a woman, of course I know nothing; being, moreover, fond of reading, I imagine I do know something, and so get filled with foolish notions, which it is their duty to disabuse me of as soon as possible. I should so like to drag them all away from this wretched town, to some empty, new, beautiful, large country, and set them all to dig, and plant, and build; and we could, I am sure, all be pure and honest once more. No, there is no chance here. I am so sick of it all.

“I want to tell you one little fact that I heard the other day that made me furious. It will make a long letter, but please read it. You have heard of ——,—the vilest spot in all the earth, I am sure, and yet they are very proud of it. It is all chemical works, and the country for miles round looks as if under a curse. There are still some farms struggling for existence, but the damage done to them is very great, and to defend themselves, when called upon to make reparation, the chemical manufacturers have formed an association, so that if one should be brought to pay, the others should support him. Of course, generally it is almost impossible to say which of the hundreds of chimneys may have caused any particular piece of mischief; and further frightened by this coalition, and by the expense of law,7 the farmers have to submit. But one day, just before harvest-time this year, a farmer was in his fields, and saw a great stream, or whatever you would call it, of smoke come over his land from one of these chimneys, and, as it passed, destroy a large field of corn. It literally burns up vegetation, as if it were a fire. The loss to this man, who is not well off, is about £400. He went to the owners of the works and asked for compensation. They did not deny that it might have been their gas, but told him he could not prove it, and they would pay nothing. I dare say they were no worse than other people, and that they would be quite commended by business men. But that is our honesty, and this is a country where there is supposed to be justice. These chemical people are very rich, and could consume all this gas and smoke at a little more cost of working. I do believe it is hopeless to attempt to alter these things, they are so strong. Then the other evening I took up a ‘Telegraph’—a newspaper is hardly fit to touch nowadays—but I happened to look at this one, and read an account of some cellar homes in St. Giles’. It sent me to bed miserable, and I am sure that no one has a right to be anything but miserable while such misery is in the world. What cruel wretches we must all be, to suffer tamely such things to be, and sit by, enjoying ourselves! I must do something; yet I am tied hand and foot, and can do nothing but cry out. And meanwhile—oh! it makes me mad—our clergymen, who are supposed to do right, and teach others right, are squabbling over their follies; here they are threatening each other with prosecutions, for exceeding the rubric, or not keeping the rubric, and mercy and truth are forgotten. I wish I might preach once, to them and to the rich;—no one ought to be rich; and if I were a clergyman I would not go to one of their dinner-parties, unless I knew that they were moving heaven and earth to do away with this poverty, which, whatever its cause, even though it be, as they say, the people’s own fault, is a disgrace to every one of us. And so it seems to me hopeless, and I wish you would emigrate.

“It is no use to be more polite, if we are less honest. No use to treat women with more respect outwardly, and with more shameless, brutal, systematic degradation secretly. Worse than no use to build hospitals, and kill people to put into them; and churches, and insult God by pretending to worship Him. Oh dear! what is it all coming to? Are we going like Rome, like France, like Greece, or is there time to stop? Can St. George fight such a Dragon? You know I am a coward, and it does frighten me. Of course I don’t mean to run away, but is God on our side? Why does He not arise and scatter His enemies? If you could see what I see here! This used to be quite a peaceful little country village; now the chemical manufacturers have built works, a crowd of them, along the river, about two miles from here. The place where this hideous colony has planted itself, is, I am sure, the ugliest, most loathsome spot on the earth.” (Arcadia, my dear, Arcadia.) “It has been built just as any one wanted either works or a row of cottages for the men,—all huddled up, backs to fronts, any way; scrambling, crooked, dirty, squeezed up; the horrid little streets separated by pieces of waste clay, or half-built-up land. The works themselves, with their chimneys and buildings, and discoloured ditches, and heaps of refuse chemical stuff lying about, make up the most horrible picture of ‘progress’ you can imagine. Because they are all so proud of it. The land, now every blade of grass and every tree is dead, is most valuable—I mean, they get enormous sums of money for it,—and every year they build new works, and say, ‘What a wonderful place —— is!’ It is creeping nearer and nearer here. There is a forest of chimneys visible, to make up, I suppose, for the trees that are dying. We can hardly ever now see the farther bank of our river, that used to be so pretty, for the thick smoke that hangs over it. And worse than all, the very air is poisoned with their gases. Often the vilest smells fill the house, but they say they are not unhealthy. I wish they were—perhaps then they would try to prevent them. It nearly maddens me to see the trees, the poor trees, standing bare and naked, or slowly dying, the top branches dead, the few leaves withered and limp. The other evening I went to a farm that used to be (how sad that ‘used to be’ sounds) so pretty, surrounded by woods. Now half the trees are dead, and they are cutting down the rest as fast as possible, so that they can at least make use of the wood. The gas makes them useless. Yesterday I went to the house of the manager of some plate-glass works. He took me over them, and it was very interesting, and some of it beautiful. You should see the liquid fire streaming on to the iron sheets, and then the sparkling lakes of gold, so intensely bright, like bits out of a setting sun sometimes. When I was going away, the manager pointed proudly to the mass of buildings we had been through, and said, ‘This was all corn-fields a few years ago!’ It sounded so cruel, and I could not help saying, ‘Don’t you think it was better growing corn than making glass?’ He laughed, and seemed so amused; but I came away wondering, if this goes on, what will become of England. The tide is so strong—they will try to make money, at any price. And it is no use trying to remedy one evil, or another, unless the root is rooted out, is it?—the love of money.”

It is of use to remedy any evil you can reach: and all this will very soon now end in forms of mercantile catastrophe, and political revolution, which will end the “amusement” of managers, and leave the ground (too fatally) free, without “emigration.”

Oxford, 24th October.

The Third Fors has just put into my hands, as I arrange my books here, a paper read before a Philosophical Society in the year 1870, (in mercy to the author, I forbear to give his name; and in respect to the Philosophical Society, I forbear to give its name,) which alleges as a discovery, by ‘interesting experiment,’ that a horizontal plank of ice laid between two points of support, bends between them; and seriously discusses the share which the ‘motive power of heat’ has in that amazing result. I am glad, indeed, to see that the author “cannot, without some qualifications agree” in the lucid opinion of Canon Moseley, that since, in the Canon’s experiments, ice was crushed under a pressure of 308 lb. on the square inch, a glacier over 710 feet thick would crush itself to pieces at the bottom. (The Canon may still further assist modern science by determining what weight is necessary to crush an inch cube of water; and favouring us with his resulting opinion upon the probable depth of the sea.) But I refer to this essay only to quote the following passages in it, to prove, for future reference, the degree of ignorance to which the ingenuity of Professor Tyndall had reduced the general scientific public, in the year 1870:—

“The generally accepted theory proved by the Rev. Canon Moseley to be incorrect.—Since the time that Professor Tyndall had shown that all the phenomena formerly attributed by Professor Forbes to plasticity could be explained upon the principle of regelation, discovered by Faraday, the viscous theory of glacier-motion has been pretty generally given up. The ice of a glacier is now almost universally believed to be, not a soft plastic substance, but a substance hard, brittle, and unyielding. The power that the glacier has of accommodating itself to the inequalities of its bed without losing its apparent continuity is referred to the property of regelation possessed by ice. All this is now plain.”

“The present state of the question.—The condition which the perplexing question of the cause of the descent of glaciers has now reached seems to be something like the following. The ice of a glacier is not in a soft and plastic state, but is solid, hard, brittle, and unyielding.”

I hope to give a supplementary number of Fors, this winter, on glacier questions; and will only, therefore, beg my readers at present to observe that the opponents of Forbes are simply, in the position of persons who deny the flexibility of chain-mail because ‘steel is not flexible;’ and, resolving that steel is not flexible, account for the bending of an old carving-knife by the theory of ‘contraction and expansion.’

Observe, also, that ‘regelation’ is only scientific language for ‘freezing again;’ and it is supposed to be more explanatory, as being Latin.

Similarly, if you ask any of these scientific gentlemen the reason of the forms of hoar-frost on your window-pane, they will tell you they may be all explained by the “theory of congelation.”

Finally; here is the first part of the question, in brief terms for you to think over.

A cubic foot of snow falls on the top of the Alps. It takes, more or less, forty years (if it doesn’t melt) to get to the bottom of them. During that period it has been warmed by forty summers, frozen by forty winters; sunned and shaded,—sopped and dried,—dropped and picked up again,—wasted and supplied,—cracked and mended,—squeezed together and pulled asunder, by every possible variety of temperature and force that wind, weather, and colossal forces of fall and weight, can bring to bear upon it.

How much of it will get to the bottom? With what additions or substitutions of matter, and in what consistence?