A Letter Book / Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing

JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)

The peculiar wilfulness—the unkind called it wrong-headedness—which flecked and veined Mr. Ruskin's genius, had, owing to his wealth and to his entire indifference to any but his own opinion, opportunities of displaying itself in all his work, public as well as private, which are not common. Naturally, it showed itself nowhere more than in letters, and perhaps not unnaturally he often adopted the epistolary form in books which, had he chosen, might as well have taken another—while he might have chosen this in some which do not actually call themselves "letters." There is, however, little difference, except "fuller dress" of expression, between any of the classes of his work, whether it range from the first volume of Modern Painters to Verona in time, or from The Seven Lamps of Architecture to Unto This Last in subject. If anybody ever could "write beautifully about a broomstick" he could: though perhaps it is a pity that he so often did. But this faculty, and the entire absence of bashfulness which accompanied it, are no doubt grand accommodations for letter-writing; and the reader of Mr. Ruskin's letters gets the benefit of both very often—of a curious study of high character and great powers uncontrolled by logical self-criticism almost always. The following—part of a still longer letter which he addressed to the Daily Telegraph, Sep. 11, 1865, on the eternal Servant Question—was of course written for publication, but so, practically, was everything that ever came from its author. It so happens too that, putting aside his usual King Charles's Head of Demand and Supply, there is little in it of his more mischievous crotchets, nothing of the petulance (amounting occasionally to rudeness) of language in which he sometimes indulged, but much of his nobler idealism, while it is a capital example of his less florid style. "Launce," "Grumio" and "Old Adam" are of course Shakespeare's: "Fairservice" (of whom, tormenting and selfish as he was, Mr. Ruskin perhaps thought a little too harshly) and "Mattie," Scott's. "Latinity enough"—the unfortunate man had written, and the newspaper had printed, hoc instead of hac. "A book of Scripture," Colenso's work had just been finished. "Charlotte Winsor" a baby-farmer of the day.

53. From "The Daily Telegraph"

September 18, 1865.

DOMESTIC SERVANTS: SONSHIP AND SLAVERY.

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

Sir,

I have been watching the domestic correspondence in your columns with much interest, and thought of offering you a short analysis of it when you saw good to bring it to a close, and perhaps a note or two of my own experience, being somewhat conceited on the subject just now, because I have a gardener who lets me keep old-fashioned plants in the greenhouse, understands that my cherries are grown for the blackbirds, and sees me gather a bunch of my own grapes without making a wry face. But your admirable article of yesterday causes me to abandon my purpose; the more willingly, because among all the letters you have hitherto published there is not one from any head of a household which contains a complaint worth notice. All the masters or mistresses whose letters are thoughtful or well written say they get on well enough with their servants; no part has yet been taken in the discussion by the heads of old families. The servants' letters, hitherto, furnish the best data; but the better class of servants are also silent, and must remain so. Launce, Grumio, or Fairservice may have something to say for themselves; but you will hear nothing from Old Adam nor from Carefu' Mattie. One proverb from Sancho, if we could get it, would settle the whole business for us; but his master and he are indeed "no more." I would have walked down to Dulwich to hear what Sam Weller had to say; but the high-level railway went through Mr. Pickwick's parlour two months ago, and it is of no use writing to Sam, for, as you are well aware, he is no penman. And, indeed, Sir, little good will come of any writing on the matter. "The cat will mew, the dog will have its day." You yourself, excellent as is the greater part of what you have said, and to the point, speak but vainly when you talk of "probing the evil to the bottom." This is no sore that can be probed, no sword nor bullet wound. This is a plague spot. Small or great, it is in the significance of it, not in the depth, that you have to measure it. It is essentially bottomless, cancerous; a putrescence through the constitution of the people is indicated by this galled place. Because I know this thoroughly, I say so little, and that little, as your correspondents think, who know nothing of me, and as you say, who might have known more of me, unpractically. Pardon me, I am no seller of plasters, nor of ounces of civet. The patient's sickness is his own fault, and only years of discipline will work it out of him. That is the only really "practical" saying that can be uttered to him.

The relation of master and servant involves every other—touches every condition of moral health through the State. Put that right, and you put all right; but you will find that it can only come ultimately, not primarily, right; you cannot begin with it. Some of the evidence you have got together is valuable, many pieces of partial advice very good. You need hardly, I think, unless you wanted a type of British logic, have printed a letter in which the writer accused (or would have accused, if he had possessed Latinity enough) all London servants of being thieves because he had known one robbery to have been committed by a nice-looking girl. But on the whole there is much common sense in the letters; the singular point in them all, to my mind, being the inapprehension of the breadth and connection of the question, and the general resistance to, and stubborn rejection of, the abstract ideas of sonship and slavery, which include whatever is possible in wise treatment of servants. It is very strange to see that, while everybody shrinks at abstract suggestions of there being possible error in a book of Scripture, your sensible English housewife fearlessly rejects Solomon's opinion when it runs slightly counter to her own, and that not one of your many correspondents seems ever to have read the Epistle to Philemon. It is no less strange that while most English boys of ordinary position hammer through their Horace at one time or other time of their school life, no word of his wit or his teaching seems to remain by them: for all the good they get out of them, the Satires need never have been written. The Roman gentleman's account of his childhood and of his domestic life possesses no charm for them; and even men of education would sometimes start to be reminded that his "noctes coenaeque Deum!" meant supping with his merry slaves on beans and bacon. Will you allow me, on this general question of liberty and slavery, to refer your correspondents to a paper of mine touching closely upon it, the leader in the Art-Journal for July last? and to ask them also to meditate a little over the two beautiful epitaphs on Epictetus and Zosima, quoted in the last paper of the Idler?

"I, Epictetus, was a slave; and sick in body, and wretched in poverty; and beloved by the gods."

"Zosima, who while she lived was a slave only in her body, has now found deliverance for that also."

How might we, over many an "independent" Englishman, reverse this last legend, and write—

"This man, who while he lived was free only in his body, has now found captivity for that also."

I will not pass without notice—for it bears also on wide interests—your correspondent's question, how my principles differ from the ordinary economist's view of supply and demand. Simply in that the economy I have taught, in opposition to the popular view, is the science which not merely ascertains the relations of existing demand and supply, but determines what ought to be demanded and what can be supplied. A child demands the moon, and, the supply not being in this case equal to the demand, is wisely accommodated with a rattle; a footpad demands your purse, and is supplied according to the less or more rational economy of the State, with that or a halter; a foolish nation, not able to get into its head that free trade does indeed mean the removal of taxation from its imports, but not of supervision from them, demands unlimited foreign beef, and is supplied with the cattle murrain and the like. There may be all manner of demands, all manner of supplies. The true political economist regulates these; the false political economist leaves them to be regulated by (not Divine) Providence. For, indeed, the largest final demand anywhere reported of, is that of hell; and the supply of it (by the broad gauge line) would be very nearly equal to the demand at this day, unless there were here and there a swineherd or two who could keep his pigs out of sight of the lake.

Thus in this business of servants everything depends on what sort of servant you at heart wish for or "demand." If for nurses you want Charlotte Winsors, they are to be had for money; but by no means for money, such as that German girl who, the other day, on her own scarce-floating fragment of wreck, saved the abandoned child of another woman, keeping it alive by the moisture from her lips. What kind of servant do you want? It is a momentous question for you yourself—for the nation itself. Are we to be a nation of shopkeepers, wanting only shop-boys: or of manufacturers, wanting only hands: or are there to be knights among us, who will need squires—captains among us, needing crews? Will you have clansmen for your candlesticks, or silver plate? Myrmidons at your tents, ant-born, or only a mob on the Gillies' Hill? Are you resolved that you will never have any but your inferiors to serve you, or shall Enid ever lay your trencher with tender little thumb, and Cinderella sweep your hearth, and be cherished there? It might come to that in time, and plate and hearth be the brighter; but if your servants are to be held your inferiors, at least be sure they are so, and that you are indeed wiser, and better-tempered, and more useful than they. Determine what their education ought to be, and organize proper servants' schools, and there give it them. So they will be fit for their position, and will do honour to it, and stay in it: let the masters be as sure they do honour to theirs, and are as willing to stay in that. Remember that every people which gives itself to the pursuit of riches, invariably, and of necessity, gets the scum uppermost in time, and is set by the genii, like the ugly bridegroom in the Arabian Nights, at its own door with its heels in the air, showing its shoe-soles instead of a Face. And the reversal is a serious matter, if reversal be even possible, and it comes right end uppermost again, instead of to conclusive Wrong-end.

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