British
Literature
Unit
1: Introduction
Unit-1:
Introduction
Impact of the Industrial, Agrarian
and the French Revolutions on the English society, Humanitarian Movements in
England, the Reform Bills and the spread of education.
The Agricultural Revolution that swept
through Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries came many years after the
first Agricultural Revolution recorded by historians, which took place around
10,000 B.C. While the first revolution introduced a societal change from nomadic
lifestyles to stationary farms and villages, the second revolution occurred
because of an influx of new technologies that improved farming techniques and
made farming more efficient.
During the European Agricultural
Revolution, societies continued to live stationary lifestyles, but farming
shifted from just sustaining families and communities to providing economic
benefits too. The climate around Europe gradually grew warmer during the later
part of the 17th century and early years of the 18th century, which in turn
allowed for the introduction of new crops, and more of them. Warmer
temperatures also brought longer growing seasons, which in turn allowed for
production of more crops. Machines replaced human labor, minimizing costs for
farmers and expediting production, and crops were grown on larger scales, then
harvested and shipped for sale. The
Agricultural Revolution was caused by four primary factors:
·
the increased
availability of and access to farmland,
·
a warm and
stable climate for crop production,
·
an increase in
number of livestock
·
a more
voluminous crop yield.
Agrarian revolution in Britain
Agrarian Revolution began in
Britain then spread to the rest of the world. Before the revolution,
agriculture was practiced on small scale using simple tools like sticks, wooden
hoes and wooden ploughs. They mainly practiced mono cropping, ie they grew only
one type of crop in the same place every year.
Agricultural revolution
was the gradual transformation
from the traditional agricultural system followed in Britain in the 18th
century. Aspects of this complex transformation, which was not completed until
the 19th century, included the reallocation of land ownership to make farms
more compact and an increased investment in technical improvements, such as new
machinery, better drainage, scientific methods of breeding, and
experimentation with new crops and systems of crop rotation.
Among those new
crop-rotation methods was the Norfolk
four-course system, established in Norfolk county,
England, which emphasized fodder crops and the absence of the theretofore
conventionally employed fallow year. Wheat was grown in the first
year and turnips in the
second, followed by barley,
with clover and ryegrass undersown in the
third. The clover and ryegrass were cut for feed or grazed in the fourth year.
In the winter, cattle and sheep were fed the turnips. The development of Shorthorn beef cattle
through selective breeding of local cattle of the Teeswater district, Durham
county, typified the advances brought about by scientific breeding.
Thus Agrarian revolution brought in transformation in the use of
farming machines, enlargement of farms , scientific methods of farming and scientific methods of processing foods
including preservation and refrigeration.
The Agrarian revolution in Britain was caused by the following factors:
1. demand for food by the growing urban
population
2. demand for agricultural raw
materials for textile industry
3. the invention of horse drawn seed
drill by Jethro Tull
4. land consolidation and enclosure
system
5. selective bleeding of livestock
which led to increased animal products
6. introduction of new farming tools
7. use of fertilizers and crop rotation
in farming
Effects of Agrarian revolution
in Britain
1. Improved methods of farming led
to increased food production. It
promoted diversification of
agricultural crops like clover, potatoes, beans, maize and citrus fruits
enabling better variety of produce.
2. It promoted industrialization as it
provided the required raw materials to the industries. Machines were used to
process agricultural produce.
3. It led to improvement of transport
system, for example, road networks and railways.
4. Better transportation promoted both local and international trade.
It resulted in the
emergence of a class of rich people in the society.
5. Mechanization of farming led to
unemployment. As a result, jobless people moved to towns to get jobs.
Establishment of large scale farming to replace subsistence farming
created a class of landless people as some became farm laborers while others
moved to towns and mines to look for employment. It resulted to the
landless peasants migrating to other parts of the world eg Canada, South
Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
6. The price of land in Britain increased considerably.
There was improvement in standards of living yet unemployment was common.
Population increased considerably.
7. Agrarian revolution
enhanced research and scientific innovations to cater for the increased needs
of farmers. Jethro Tull and Arthur Young contributed significantly with their
inventions to the Agrarian movement, which, was an essential prelude to the Industrial
Revolution.
INDUSTRIAL
REVOLUTION
The industrial revolution was the
totality of the changes in economic and social organization that began in Great
Britain in 1750's. It was characterized chiefly by the replacement of hand
tools with power-driven machines, such as, the low power loom and the steam
engine, and by the concentration of industry in large establishments.
Cause
of the Industrial Revolution:
1. People were in need for food and goods, they had to find ways to increase productions
2. New machines were invented that changed way of production in farms.
3. Europeans set up more colonies over seas. The colonies were the primary source for raw material and the primary market for the finished produce.
4. Feudalism ended and capital accumulated from trade.
1. People were in need for food and goods, they had to find ways to increase productions
2. New machines were invented that changed way of production in farms.
3. Europeans set up more colonies over seas. The colonies were the primary source for raw material and the primary market for the finished produce.
4. Feudalism ended and capital accumulated from trade.
At the dawn of the eighteenth century, farming was
the primary livelihood in England, with at least 75% of the population making
its living off the land. (Kreis)
This meant that many English families had very little to do during the winter
months except sit around and make careful use of the food and other supplies
that they stored up during the rest of the year. If the harvest had been
smaller than usual or if any other unexpected losses had come about, the winter
could be a very long, cold, and hungry one. The cottage industry was developed
to take advantage of the farmers' free time and use it to produce quality
textiles for a reasonable price.
To begin the process, a cloth merchant from the
city would travel to the countryside and
purchase a load of wool from a sheep farm. He would then distribute the raw
materials among several farming households to be made into cloth (Cottage Industry). The preparation of the wool was a task in
which the whole family took part. Women and girls first washed the wool to
remove the dirt and natural oils and then dyed it as desired. They also carded
the wool, which meant combing it between two pads of nails until the fibres
were all pointed in the same direction. Next, the wool was spun into thread
using a spinning wheel and wound onto a bobbin (this was often the job of an
unmarried daughter; hence, the word "spinster" is still used today to
describe an unmarried woman). The actual weaving of the thread into cloth was
done using a loom operated by hand and foot; it was physically demanding work,
and was therefore the man's job. The task of transforming raw wool into cloth
could be done entirely by one household, or split between two or more (ie.
spinning in one home, weaving in another). The merchant would return at regular
intervals over the season to pick up the finished cloth, which he then brought
back to the city to sell or export, and to drop of a new load of wool to be
processed.
The cottage industry proved to be profitable for
the urban merchants, since they could sell the finished cloth for far more than
they paid the famers to make it. The cottage industry helped to prepare the
country for the Industrial Revolution by boosting the English economy through
the increase of trade that occurred as the country became well-known overseas
for its high-quality and low-cost exports. Previously, tradesmen had done all
the manufacturing themselves, so the idea of subcontracting was new and
appealing. The cottage industry was also a good source of auxiliary funds for
the rural people. However, many farming families came to depend on the
enterprise; thus, when industrialization and the Agricultural Revolution reduced
the need for farm workers, many were forced to leave their homes and move to
the city.
The industrial revolution began in
Great Britain because of the textile industry , they had a abundance of cotton
used in the making of the textiles . New machines were invented because of
manufacturing of clothing at home. Spinning Jenny invented by James
Hargreaves in 1764
allowed one person to spin many threads at once, increasing the amount of finished cotton a worker could produce. Even though thread was coarse and usually lacked strength, you could spin about 80 threads at once. Steam engine originally invented by Thomas Newcomen, and improved upon by James Watt used steam for power. This was applied to ships and railways,
used in mining, to pump water out.
allowed one person to spin many threads at once, increasing the amount of finished cotton a worker could produce. Even though thread was coarse and usually lacked strength, you could spin about 80 threads at once. Steam engine originally invented by Thomas Newcomen, and improved upon by James Watt used steam for power. This was applied to ships and railways,
used in mining, to pump water out.
Why was Britain First?
Why was Britain the first country to industrialize?
This change, which occurred between 1750 and 1830, happened because conditions
were perfect in Britain for the Industrial Revolution. Having used wood for
heat instead of coal, Britain was left with large deposits of coal remaining to
fuel the new ideas. Any raw supplies Britain itself did not have could be
provided by its many colonies. These colonies also provided captive markets for
the abundance of new goods provided by the industrial revolution. The product
was cotton. Cotton was a simple, cheap, and easily made product that everyone
could use. So, between 1796 and 1830 cotton production tripled. The new
production was easily transported, because there remained an old commercial
fleet.
The Product and Market were the simple
requirements, and many countries had them. What set Britain apart from the
others, however, were three unique social elements: education,
"modern" work attitudes, and a "modern" government. Great
Britain had a larger educated workforce to run the machines and create manuals.
The Enlightenment not only meant a larger educated population but also more
modern views on work. The population in Great Britain was ready to move out of
the country and to the city to work. Britain also had the large middle class
and flexible mercantile class necessary. English society, unlike many others,
was not opposed to "new money," and as such was eager to accept the
new wealthy and their new ideas. Lastly, Britain's government, a long-time constitutional
monarchy, was just right for the situation. The government was flexible enough
to support the new system and to a certain degree accepted Adam Smith's
capitalistic "invisible hand." The Dutch were the forerunners
financially, but with the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694, their
supremacy was challenged. The government and the bank provided incredible
backing to new ideas, which soon turned into new wealth.
Many of these elements were achieved because of the
insularity of England. This meant that the industrial development was rarely
interrupted by war. This combination of necessary elements led to the early
mechanization of Britain. Between 1838 and 1850 Britain's rail lines went from
540 to 6621 track kilometers; rail lines were considered the best way to
monitor a country's industrialization.
Living Conditions of the working class
The working class lived in small houses that shared toilet facilities. The streets were usually unpaved, cramped and full of holes. The houses didn't have gutters or drains so it resulted in sinking puddles. There was filthy animal and vegetable refuse everywhere. Many of the British towns suffered from outbreaks of Cholera because of these dirty, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions.
Many parents saw factory child labor as an
opportunity to rely on the incomes of their children that were employed for
extremely low wages, some as young as 5. These children worked in unsanitary
factories and were regularly exposed to harsh, toxic chemicals such as high
levels of phosphorous. This resulted in either rotting teeth or death. The
children that worked in cotton mills handled dangerous machines. Because the
children had to work such long long hours, some would fall into the machines
from being asleep. Others died from being crushed by the machines, injuries or
explosions
The
6 Pros of The Industrial Revolution
1. As an effect of
industrialization, the well being of certain class of people increased. Britain
witnessed the rise of the nouveau riche Middle class . Wealth came to be
accumulated with few and the poor was further exploited. Nations started to
identify national pride and identities.
2. Factories that produce
quality products increased rapidly. The production rate was multiplied because
of the innovation in machinery. As a result of the mass production of goods,
the price of products decreased resulting to enhanced quality living.
3. The means of
transportation changed enormously. It became cheaper, faster and very
comfortable. Easier travel opened up new avenues to many people.
5. The increase in
production was associated to the hike in trade. It produces new jobs and it
increases the employment rate.
6. Cities grew and
offered a lot of work and opportunity.
This resulted in mass migration of working force from the rural country side to
the cities. The Industrial revolution was a time of rapid growth and change
throughout America and Europe. Innovations in machinery, methods, and
techniques of producing goods opened up an entirely new world. More goods where
able to be produced, and in a shorter amount of time. This is owed to
advancements in architecture, agriculture, transportation, and communication.
It provided a great amount of jobs for people, improving the quality of life,
but it also had it’s drawbacks.
The 6 Cons of Industrial Revolution
1. Working from other
factories is exhausting. It causes long working hours, it has bad working
conditions, and there are times that it causes illness and death. There are
cases that factory workers got caught by uncovered machinery resulting to
injury or death. The dust and fumes from chemical factories can also harm a
person’s health.
2. Industrialization in
modern cities attracts immigrants. It promises a good life but not all were
lucky. It causes overcrowded cities and slum areas appeared.
3. Industrialization
comes with pollution. Factories, automobiles and aircrafts produces unthinkable
air pollution to some advanced cities in the world. Chemicals and wastes that
were not properly disposed causes water and land pollution. The condition of
the environment is at stake because of the industrialization.
4. Some machines took the
place of human labor resulting to high unemployment rate for those people who
lack competencies and skills. Because of this, those who cannot look for a
better job to earn for living were forced to commit crime just to support their
families.
5. New lifestyle trend
means new invented products. Some of these are the main cause of lifestyle
diseases like diabetes, heart attack, cancer and a lot more.
6. Another negative
result of industrialization is that it brought a negative impact on culture,
values and morality of mankind. Technology drives the shift in principles,
beliefs and faith.
Impact of
French Revolution in Britain
The French
Revolution and the fall of the Bastille
in July 1789 had an enormous impact on British public opinion in England and
influenced the terms on which political debate would be conducted for the next
thirty years.
Throughout Britain the French Revolution was the
most important subject of debate in literary, philosophical and political
circles. Most of those who took an interest in what was happening across the
Channel responded in either a highly positive or a profoundly negative fashion.
This increasingly sharp division of opinion provided a major stimulus to
extra-parliamentary reformers while also encouraging the growth of popular
loyalism, and re-shaped the political fortunes of the two major groups in
parliament, led by William Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox respectively.
British opinion thus became polarized between those who thought French principles
and actions should set an example to the British people and those who believed
that they should oppose everything the French Revolution was seeking to
achieve.
The dramatic first months of the French Revolution
inspired a positive reaction among men of liberal views both inside and outside
parliament. To such men as Charles James Fox, Richard Price and Robert Southey
the old world seemed to be passing a way and the regeneration of all human
institutions seemed to be at hand. France was seen to be throwing off the
shackles of tyranny and leading mankind to a more rational age when liberty,
equality and fraternity would improve the human condition forever. Many veteran
reformers, who had been campaigning for political change since the 1760s,
hailed the outbreak of revolution in a country long regarded as the prime
example of absolute monarchy and were galvanized into a renewed debate on what
reforms needed to be achieved. By the early 1790s, inspired by French notions
on the rights of man, most British campaigners for parliamentary reform had
adopted the demand for universal manhood suffrage and for a full
democratization of the electoral system. There was widespread agreement that
the right to vote should be attached to the person and not to the property of
man. To deny any man the franchise was to cast a slur on his moral character
and to assert that he was less than a man. The possession of wealth was no
proof of moral worth or civic virtue, and nor was poverty any evidence of the
lack of these qualities.
In the past many British reformers had maintained
that their demand for an extension of the franchise was based on a traditional
right based on England’s ancient constitution. Many of the leading radical
theorists of the early 1790s however abandoned an appeal to history and
stressed instead the natural and inalienable rights of all men. Thomas Paine,
for example, deliberately abandoned any appeal to the past and insisted that
each age had the right to establish any political system which would fit its own
needs. The present age must be free to reject the tyranny of the past and to
inaugurate a new age of liberty. All men must be allowed their natural and
inalienable rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. The
authority of those in power must be limited and must be subject to the
sovereignty of the people. A written constitution must place limits on the
executive and the legislature, and must clearly set out the civil rights of all
subjects. Thomas Paine would have gone further than most parliamentary
reformers to democratize the elections to the House of Commons. He condemned
all hereditary honours, titles and privileges. He saw no justification for a
monarchy or an aristocracy and clearly favoured a democratic republic. Few
other British reformers wanted to go as far as this and only a handful (and
Paine was not among them) campaigned for votes for women. On the other hand, a
few reformers had become interested in a range of social and economic reforms.
Quite a number of reformers favoured educational reforms, changes in the legal
system, the abolition of church tithes and the repeal of the game laws. Paine
argued for a reduction in taxes on the poor and for a property tax on the rich
which would fund such social welfare reforms as child allowances, maternity
grants and old age pensions. Thomas Spence went further still and wanted to
abolish private property and to put all land and natural resources in each
parish under the control of and for the benefit of every man, woman and child living
in it.
The consequences for the political and propertied
elite of reforms such as these, and the alarming example set by the French
revolutionaries who used violence and terror to achieve the changes which they
desired, stimulated a profound conservative reaction in Britain. Conservative
theorists such as Edmund Burke denounced the radical concept of natural rights,
all abstract general principles and reforms based on speculative theories as
the sure and certain road to political upheaval and social anarchy. They
insisted that human beings were so unequal in body, mind, talents and fortune
that they could not lay claim to an equal share of political power.
Conservative propaganda aimed at a mass readership used more pragmatic
arguments than these and adopted simple, direct language and a more impassioned
tone. This propaganda sought to convince the middling and lower orders of
Britain that French principles and the ideas of British radicals posed a
terrible threat to everything that they held most dear. British subjects were
warned that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose if they were
seduced by radical principles. The French revolutionaries were condemned for
rejecting Gods laws and arrogantly putting their trust in human reason. Whereas
the British people were secure in their lives, liberty, property and religion,
the French were experiencing terror, social anarchy and military dictatorship.
This virulent propaganda set out to paint the French in the blackest colours
and to accuse them of spreading terror, oppression and desolation across
Europe. To restrain them, the British people must be prepared to make enormous
sacrifices and to wage a veritable crusade against the French Revolution.
In the closing years of the 18th century, social
and political unrest in Britain was growing rapidly. It was a time of argument
and counter-argument centred on one issue: the rights of man. On one side were
the radicals who backed a revolutionary new idea: democracy. On the other were
the loyalists who strongly opposed any social reform, believing that it would
bring the ancient British 'constitution' into danger. Loyalists saw citizenship
in terms of 'traditional' British values - property, social order, the Church
and the monarchy. They believed that the long-established British political
system was the wisest and most reliable form of government. The radicals, by
contrast, thought that citizenship came from universal 'natural rights'. This
meant that all men (though not necessarily all women) had a right to take part
in politics, whatever their social class, political background or religious
beliefs. When the radical writer Thomas Paine published his book Rights of
Man, in 1791-2, it caused a sensation. A powerful and eloquent defence of
the French Revolution, it praised the downfall of the French ruling classes and
urged the establishment of a democracy and the acceptance of the 'universal
right of citizenship'. Paine's book questioned the traditional values of
Britain and his message was clear: people didn't have to accept the way things
were. He urged people to rise up and rebel against what he believed were
generations of oppression. This kind of thinking was totally new for many
people across the country and, perhaps for the first time, they questioned their
place in society. Paine had written his book to rebut Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790) by the influential Whig
politician Edmund Burke. Burke had argued that ideas such as democracy and the
'rights of man' attacked the very beliefs upon which Britain's 'constitution'
was based. Soon people began to form political societies based on Paine's
ideas, and many openly advocated revolution. By the mid 1790s there were at
least 80 of these groups in England. However, not all of them called for total
change. The London Corresponding Society, for example, founded in January 1792,
campaigned for parliamentary reform, rather than for a democratic republic and
the end of the existing political system.
politician Edmund Burke. Burke had argued that ideas such as democracy and the
'rights of man' attacked the very beliefs upon which Britain's 'constitution'
was based. Soon people began to form political societies based on Paine's
ideas, and many openly advocated revolution. By the mid 1790s there were at
least 80 of these groups in England. However, not all of them called for total
change. The London Corresponding Society, for example, founded in January 1792,
campaigned for parliamentary reform, rather than for a democratic republic and
the end of the existing political system.
French Revolution and
English Society
The French Revolution played a huge role in
influencing Romantic writers. As the Revolution began to play out, the absolute
monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in only three years. This
resulted in a complete transformation of society. A
majority of the population was greatly in favor of this as the working class
had been suffering oppression for many years. According to Albert Hancock, in
his book The French Revolution and the English Poets: a study in historical
criticism, “The French Revolution came, bringing with it the promise of a
brighter day, the promise of regenerated man and regenerated earth. It was
hailed with joy and acclamation by the oppressed, by the ardent lovers of humanity, by the
poets, whose task it is to voice the human spirit.”
A common theme among some of the most widely known
romantic poets is their acceptance and approval of the French Revolution. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron,
and Percy
Shelley all shared the same view of the French
Revolution as it being the beginning of a change in the current ways of
society and helping to improve the lives of the oppressed. As the French
Revolution changed the lives of virtually everyone in the nation and even
continent because of its drastic and immediate shift in social reformation, it
greatly influenced many writers at the time. Hancock writes, “There is no need
to recount here in detail how the French Revolution, at the close of the last
century, was the great stimulus to the intellectual and emotional life of the
civilized world, how it began by inspiring all liberty-loving men with hope and
joy.”
Literature began to take a new turn when the spirit
of the revolution caught the entire nation and turned things in a whole new direction.
The newly acquired freedom of the common people did not only bring about just
laws and living but ordinary people also had the freedom to think for
themselves, and in turn the freedom to express themselves. Triggered by the
revolutionary spirit, the writers of the time were full of creative ideas and
were waiting for a chance to unleash them. Under the new laws writers and
artists were given a considerable amount of freedom to express themselves which
did well to pave the way to set a high standard for literature.
Prior to the French
Revolution, poems and literature were typically written about and to aristocrats and clergy, and rarely
for or about the working man. However, when the roles of society began to shift
resulting from the French Revolution, and with the emergence of Romantic
writers, this changed. Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and
Shelley started to write works for and about the working man; pieces that the
common man could relate to. According to Christensen, “To get the real
animating principle of the Romantic Movement, one must not study it inductively
or abstractly; one must look at it historically. It must be put beside the
literary standards of the eighteenth century. These standards impose limits
upon the Elysian
fields of poetry; poetry must be confined to the common experience of
average men… The Romantic Movement then means the revolt of a group of
contemporary poets who wrote, not according to common and doctrinaire
standards, but as they individually pleased… there are no principles
comprehensive and common to all except those of individualism
and revolt.
The
Reform Bills
No period of British History has been as
tense, as politically and socially disturbed, as the 1830s and early 1840s,
when both the working class and the middle class, separately or in conjunction,
demanded what they regarded as fundamental changes. From 1829 to 1832 their
discontents fused in the demand for Parliamentary Reform, behind which the
massses threw their riots and demonstrations, the businessmen the power of
economic boycott. After the 1832, when several of the demands of the
middle-class radicals were met, the worker's movement fought and failed alone.
— Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, p. 55.
The three
Reform Acts, of 1832, 1867, and 1884, all extended voting rights to
previously disfranchised citizens. The first act, which was the most
controversial, reapportioned representation in Parliament in a way fairer to
the cities of the industrial north, which had experienced tremendous growth,
and did away with "rotten" and "pocket" boroughs like Old
Sarum, which with only seven voters (all controlled by the local squire) was
still sending two members to Parliament. This act not only re-apportioned
representation in Parliament, thus making that body more accurately represent
the citizens of the country, but also gave the power of voting to those lower
in the social and economic scale. Approximately one man in five now had the
right to vote.
For many conservatives, this effect of the bill,
which allowed the middle classes to share power with the upper classes, was
revolutionary in its import. Some historians argue that this transference of
power achieved in England what the French Revolution
achieved eventually in France. Therefore, the agitation preceding (and
following) the first Reform Act, which Dickens
observed at first hand as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter, made many
people consider fundamental issues of society and politics.
The 1867 Reform Act
extended the right to vote still further down the class ladder, adding just
short of a million voters — including many workingmen — and doubling the
electorate, to almost two million in England and Wales.
The 1867 act created major shock waves in
contemporary British culture, some of which appear in works such as Arnold's Culture and Anarchy and Ruskin's Crown of Wild Olive, as authors debated whether this shift of
power would create democracy that would, in turn, destroy high culture.
The 1884 bill and the 1885
Redistribution Act tripled the electorate again, giving the
vote to most agricultural laborers. By this time, voting was becoming a
right rather than the property of the privileged. However, women were not
granted voting rights until the Act of 1918,
which enfranchised all men over 21 and women over thirty. This last bit of
discrimination was eliminated 10 years later (in 1928)
by the Equal Franchise Act.
Industrialization
and need for mass education
In 1751 the population of the British mainland
stood at seven million. By 1821 - after seventy years of industrial revolution
- it had reached fourteen million, and by 1871 it would reach twenty-six
million. The rapid expansion in the overall population was matched by increases
in the proportion of people who lived in towns and cities, and in the
proportion of the population who were children.
England's industrial revolution began in the second
half of the 18th century. At first, new agricultural techniques freed workers
from the land and made it possible to feed a large non-agricultural population.
In the 19th century, relative world peace, the
availability of money, coal and iron ore, and the invention of the steam
engine, all combined to facilitate the construction of factories for the mass
production of goods. The factory system increased the division and
specialisation of labour and resulted in large numbers of people moving to the
new industrial cities, especially in the midlands and the north. It also
resulted in low wages, slum housing and the use of child labour.
Thus the industrial revolution exacerbated the
problems of a society 'divided into those with land or capital or profession
and those with no wealth, no possessions and no privileges' (Benn and Chitty
1996:2).
Perhaps the first sign that the state was beginning
to acknowledge some responsibility for the conditions in which the poor - and
particularly poor children - lived, was Peel's Factory Act of 1802: 'An Act for
the preservation of the health and morals of apprentices and others employed in
cotton and other mills and cotton and other factories'. The Act required an
employer to provide instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic during at
least the first four years of the seven years of apprenticeship. Such secular
instruction was to be part of the twelve hours of daily occupation beginning
not earlier than 6am and ending not later than 9pm. Many of the apprentices
were young pauper children who were frequently brought from distant workhouses
to labour in the cotton mills.
Alongside the upheaval of industrialization, the
process of democratization got under way with the Representation of the People
Act 1832 (commonly known as the Reform Act), which gave a million people the
right to vote.
This dramatic social, political and
economic transformation served to reveal the utter inadequacy of England's
educational provision. A number of reports highlighted the deficiencies and
called for more and better schools. One such report looked at 12,000 parishes
in 1816, and found that 3,500 had no school, 3,000 had endowed schools of
varying quality, and 5,500 had un endowed schools of even more variable
quality. But changes began to be made, led by head masters like Samuel
Butler at Shrewsbury from 1798 to 1836 and Thomas Arnold at Rugby from 1828 to
1841.
Unit
2: Prose
V. Dream-Children
A Revery By Charles Lamb |
CHILDREN love to listen to
stories about their elders, when they were children; to
stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary great-uncle or
grandame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones
crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field,
who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in
which they and papa lived) which had been the scene—so at least it was
generally believed in that part of the country—of the tragic incidents which
they had lately become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in the
Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the children and their cruel
uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the
great hall, the whole story down to the Robin Redbreasts, till a foolish
rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of modern invention in its
stead, with no story upon it. Here Alice put out one of her dear mother’s
looks, too tender to be called upbraiding. Then I went on to say, how
religious and how good their great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and
respected by everybody, though she was not indeed the mistress of this great
house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects she might be
said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her by the owner, who
preferred living in a newer and more fashionable mansion which he had
purchased somewhere in the adjoining county; but still she lived in it in a
manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house
in a sort while she lived, which afterward came to decay, and was nearly
pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried away to the
owner’s other house, where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if some
one were to carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and
stick them up in Lady C.’s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as
much as to say, “that would be foolish indeed.” And then I told how, when she
came to die, her funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and
some of the gentry too, of the neighborhood for many miles round, to show
their respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and religious
woman; so good indeed that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, aye, and a
great part of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread her hands. Then
I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great-grandmother Field
once was; and how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancer—here
Alice’s little right foot played an involuntary movement, till upon my looking
grave, it desisted—the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel
disease, called a cancer, came, and bowed her down with pain; but it could
never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright,
because she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was used to sleep
by herself in a lone chamber of the great lone house; and how she believed
that an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and
down the great staircase near where she slept, but she said “those innocents
would do her no harm”; and how frightened I used to be, though in those days
I had my maid to sleep with me, because I was never half so good or religious
as she—and yet I never saw the infants. Here John expanded all his eyebrows and
tried to look courageous. Then I told how good she was to all her
grand-children, having us to the great house in the holidays, where I in
particular used to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts
of the Twelve Cæsars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till the old marble
heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble with them; how
I never could be tired with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast
empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved
oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed out—sometimes in the spacious
old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself, unless when now and then
a solitary gardening man would cross me—and how the nectarines and peaches
hung upon the walls, without my ever offering to pluck them, because they
were forbidden fruit, unless now and then,—and because I had more pleasure in
strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew trees, or the firs, and
picking up the red berries, and the fir apples, which were good for nothing
but to look at—or in lying about upon the fresh grass, with all the fine
garden smells around me—or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy
myself ripening, too, along with the oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth—or
in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish pond, at the bottom
of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway down the
water in silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings,—I had
more pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet flavors of
peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such like common baits of children. Here
John slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, not
unobserved by Alice, he had mediated dividing with her, and both seemed
willing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. Then, in somewhat a
more heightened tone, I told how, though their great-grandmother Field loved
all her grand-children, yet in an especial manner she might be said to love their
uncle, John L——, because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a king
to the rest of us; and, instead of moping about in solitary corners, like
some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome horse he could get, when but
an imp no bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half over the county
in a morning, and join the hunters when there were any out—and yet he loved
the old great house and gardens too, but had too much spirit to be always
pent up within their boundaries —and how their uncle grew up to man’s
estate as brave as he was handsome, to the admiration of everybody, but of
their great-grandmother Field most especially; and how he used to carry me
upon his back when I was a lame-footed boy—for he was a good bit older than
me—many a mile when I could not walk for pain;—and how in after life he
became lame-footed too, and I did not always (I fear) make allowances enough
for him when he was impatient, and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how
considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed; and how when he died,
though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great
while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death; and how I bore
his death as I thought pretty well at first, but afterward it haunted and haunted
me; and though I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think
he would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not
till then how much I had loved him. I missed his kindness, and I missed his
crossness, and wished him to be alive again, to be quarreling with him (for
we quarreled sometimes), rather than not have him again, and was as uneasy
without him, as he their poor uncle must have been when the doctor took off
his limb. Here the children fell a crying, and asked if their little mourning
which they had on was not for uncle John, and they looked up and prayed me
not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them some stories about their
pretty, dead mother. Then I told them how for seven long years, in hope
sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair
Alice W——n; and, as much as children could understand, I explained to them
what coyness, and difficulty, and denial meant in maidens—when suddenly,
turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with
such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood
there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing,
both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding
till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost
distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of
speech: “We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The
children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than nothing, and
dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious
shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name”—and
immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor armchair,
where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side—but
John L. (or James Elia) was gone forever.
|
AUTHOR NOTE
|
LAMB is the heir of the
eighteenth-century essayists, but with a richer imagination and a more
delicate sensibility. He is an essayist rather than a story-teller,—an
essayist of an intense individuality. But he could dream dreams as the other
poets have done; and here is one of them, contained in the “Essays of Elia,”
published in 1822.
|
STORY NOTE
|
This is hardly a story at all; it
is so slight in substance and in texture; it is a revery only. Yet it has its
movement and its climax; it makes only a single impression; and thus it is
seen to have certain of the essential qualities of the true short-story.
|
"On
Going a Journey"
William
Hazlitt
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like
to do it myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is
company for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.
"The fields his study, nature
was his book."
I cannot see the wit of walking
and talking at the same time. When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like
the country. I am not for criticizing hedge-rows and black cattle. I go out of
town in order to forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for
this purpose go to watering-places and carry the metropolis with them. I like
more elbow-room and fewer incumbrances. I like solitude, when I give myself up
to it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for
"a friend in my retreat
Whom I may whisper, solitude is sweet."
Whom I may whisper, solitude is sweet."
The soul of a journey is liberty,
perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go a journey
chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave
ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little
breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters, where Contemplation
"May plume her feathers and
let grow her wings,
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair'd,"
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair'd,"
that I absent myself from the town
for awhile, without feeling at a loss the moment I am left by myself. Instead
of a friend in a post-chaise or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with and
vary the same stale topics over again, for once let me have a truce with
impertinence. Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf
beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner
-- and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone
heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder
rolling cloud, I plunge into my past being and revel there, as the sunburnt
Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his native shore. Then
long-forgotten things like "sunken wrack and sumless treasuries,"
burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and be myself again.
Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at wit or dull common-places,
mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence.
No one likes puns, alliterations, antitheses, argument, and analysis better
than I do; but I sometimes had rather be without them. "Leave, oh, leave
me to my repose!" I have just now other business in hand which would seem
idle to you, but is with me "very stuff of the conscience." Is not
this wild rose sweet without a comment? Does not this daisy leap to my heart
set in its coat of emerald? Yet if I were to explain to you the circumstance
that has so endeared it to me, you would only smile. Had I not better then keep
it to myself, and let it serve me to brood over, from hear to yonder craggy
point, and from thence onward to the far-distant horizon? I should be but bad
company all that way, and therefore prefer being alone. I have heard it said
that you may, when the moody fit comes on, walk or ride on by yourself and
indulge your reveries. But this looks like a breach of manners, a neglect of
others, and you are thinking all the time that you ought to rejoin your party.
"Out upon such half-faced fellowship," say I. I like to be either
entirely to myself, or entirely at the disposal of others; to talk or be
silent, to walk or sit still, to be sociable or solitary. I was pleased with an
observation of Mr Cobbett'sthat
"he thought it a bad French custom to drink our wine with our meals, and
that an Englishman ought to do only one thing at a time." So I cannot talk
and think, or indulge in melancholy musing and lively conversation by fits and
starts. "Let me have a companion of my way," says Sterne, "were
it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." It is
beautifully said; but in my opinion, this continual comparing of notes
interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the mind and hurts
the sentiment. If you only hint what you feel in a kind of dumb show, it is
insipid; if you have to explain it, it is making a toil of a pleasure. You
cannot read the book of nature without being perpetually put to the trouble of
translating it for the benefit of others. I am for the synthetical method on a
journey, in preference to the analytical. I am content to lay in a stock of
ideas then, and to examine and anatomize them afterwards. I want to see my
vague notions float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to
have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy. For once, I like
to have it all my own way; and this is impossible unless you are alone, or in
such company as I do not covet. I have no objection to argue a point with
anyone for twenty miles of measured road, but not for pleasure. If you remark
the scent of a bean-field crossing the road, perhaps your fellow-traveller has
no smell. If you point to a distant object, perhaps he is short-sighted, and
has to take out his glass to look at it. There is a feeling in the air, a tone
in the colour of a cloud which hits your fancy, but the effect of which you are
unable to account for. There is then no sympathy, but an uneasy craving after
it, and a dissatisfaction which pursues you on the way, and in the end probably
produces ill humour. Now I never quarrel with myself, and take all my own
conclusions for granted till I find it necessary to defend them against
objections. It is not merely that you may not be of accord on
the objects and circumstances that present themselves before you -- these may
recall a number of objects and lead to associations too delicate and refined to
be possibly communicated to others. Yet these I love to cherish, and sometimes
still fondly clutch them, when I can escape from the throng to do so. To give
way to our feelings before company, seems extravagance or affectation; and, on
the other hand, to have to unravel this mystery of our being at every turn, and
to make others take an equal interest in it (otherwise the end is not answered)
is a task to which few are competent. We must "give it an understanding
but no tongue." My old friend ... [Coleridge],
however, could do both. He could go on in the most delightful explanatory way
over hill and dale a summer's day, and convert a landscape into a didactic poem
or a Pindaric ode. "He talked far above singing." If I could so
clothe my ideas in sounding and flowing words, I might perhaps wish to have
some one with me to admire the swelling theme; or I could be more content, were
is possible for me still to hear his echoing voice in the woods of All-Foxden.2 They
had "that fine madness in them which our first poets had"; and if
they could have been caught by some rare instrument, would have breathed such
strains as the following.
"Here be woods as green
As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet
As then smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet
Face of the curled streams, with flow'rs as many
As the young spring gives, and as choice as any;
Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells,
Arbours o'ergrown with woodbine, caves and dells;
Choose where thou wilt; whilst I sit by and sing.
Or gather rushes, to make many a ring
For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love;
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she convey'd him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
Too kiss her sweetest."
Fletcher's
Faithful Shepherdess.
As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet
As then smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet
Face of the curled streams, with flow'rs as many
As the young spring gives, and as choice as any;
Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells,
Arbours o'ergrown with woodbine, caves and dells;
Choose where thou wilt; whilst I sit by and sing.
Or gather rushes, to make many a ring
For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love;
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she convey'd him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
Too kiss her sweetest."
Fletcher's
Faithful Shepherdess.
Had I words and images at command
like these, I would attempt to wake the thoughts that lie slumbering on golden
ridges in the evening clouds; but at the sight of nature my fancy, poor as it
is, droops and closes up its leaves, like flowers at sunset. I can make nothing
out on the spot:--I must have time to collect myself.
In general, a good thing spoils out-of-door prospects; it should be
reserved for table-talk. ... [Lamb] is for
this reason, I take it, the worst company in the world out of doors; because he
is the best within. I grant, there is one subject on which it is pleasant to
talk on a journey; and that is, what one shall have for supper when we get to
our inn at night. The open air improves this sort of conversation or friendly
altercation by setting a keener edge on appetite. Every mile of the road
heightens the flavour of the viands we expect at the end of it. How fine is it
to enter some old town, walled and turreted, just at approach of nightfall, or
to come to some straggling village, with the lights streaming through the
surrounding gloom; and then after inquiring for the best entertainment that the
place affords, to "take one's ease at one's inn!" These eventful
moments in our lives' history are too precious, too full of solid, heart-felt
happiness to be frittered and dribbled away in imperfect sympathy. I would have
them all to myself, and drain them to the last drop; they will do to talk of or
to write about afterwards. What a delicate speculation it is, after drinking
whole goblets of tea,
"The cups that cheer, but not
inebriate,"
And letting the fumes ascend into the brain, to sit
considering what we shall have for supper -- eggs and a rasher, a rabbit
smothered in onions, or an excellent veal-cutlet! Sancho in such a situation
once fixed upon cow-heel; and his choice, though he could not help it, is not
to be disparaged. Then, in the intervals of pictured scenery and Shandean
contemplation, to catch the preparation and the stir in the kitchen [getting
ready for the gentleman in the parlour]3 Procul,
O procul este profani! These hours are sacred to silence and to musing, to
be treasured up in the memory, and to feed the source of smiling thoughts
hereafter. I would not waste them in idle talk; or if I must have the integrity
of fancy broken in upon, I would rather it were by a stranger than a friend. A
stranger takes his hue and character from the time and place; he is a part of
the furniture and costume of an inn. If he is a Quaker, or from the West Riding
of Yorkshire, so much the better. I do not even try to sympathize with him, and
he breaks no squares. [How I love to see the camps of the gypsies, and to sigh
my soul into that sort of life. If I express this feeling to another, he may
qualify and spoil it with some objection.]4 I
associate nothing with my travelling companion but present objects and passing
events. In his ignorance of me and my affairs, I in a manner forget myself. But
a friend reminds one of other things, rips up old grievances, and destroys the
abstraction of the scene. He comes in ungraciously between us and our imaginary
character. Something is dropped in the course of conversation that gives a hint
of your profession and pursuits; or from having some one with you that knows
the less sublime portions of your history, it seems that other people do. You
are no longer a citizen of the world: but your "unhoused free condition is
put into circumspection and confine." The incognito of an inn is one of
its striking privileges -- "Lord of one's self, uncumber'd with a
name." Oh! It is great to shake off the trammels of the world and of
public opinion -- to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal
identity in the elements of nature, and become the creature of the moment,
clear of all ties -- to hold to the universe only by a dish of sweet-breads,
and to owe nothing but the score of the evening -- and no longer seeking for
the applause and meeting with contempt, to be known by no other title than the
Gentleman in the parlour! One may take one's choice of all characters in this
romantic state of uncertainly as to one's real pretensions, and become
indefinitely respectable and negatively right-worshipful. We baffle prejudice
and disappoint conjecture; and from being so to others, begin to be objects of
curiosity and wonder even to ourselves. We are no more those hackneyed
common-places that we appear in the world; an inn restores us to the level of
nature and quits scores with society! I have certainly spent some enviable
hours at inns -- sometimes when I have been left entirely to myself and have
tired to solve some metaphysical problem, as once at Witham-common, where I
found out the proof that likenesss is not a case of the association of ideas --
at other times, when there have been pictures in the room, as at St Neot's (I
think I was), where I first met with Gribelin's engravings of the Cartoons,
into which I entered at once, and at a little inn on the borders of Wales,
where there happened to be hanging some of Westall's drawings, which I compared
triumphantly (for a theory that I had, not for the admired artist) with the
figure of a girl who had ferried me over the Severn, standing up in a boat
between me and the twilight -- at other times I might mention luxuriating in
books, with a peculiar interest in this way, as I remember sitting up half the
night to read Paul and Virgiria , which I picked up at an inn at Bridgewater,
after being drenched in the rain all day; and at the same place I got through
two volumes of Madam D'Arblay's Camilla . It was on the 10th of April, 1798,
that I sat down to a volume of the New Eloise, at the inn at
Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and cold chicken. The letter I chose was
that in which St. Preux describes his feelings as he first caught a glimpse
from the heights of the Jura of the Pays de Vaud, which I had brought with me
as a bon bouche to crown the evening with. It was my
birth-day, and I had for the first time comer from a place in the neighbourhood
to visit this delightful spot. The road to Llangollen turns off between Chirk
and Wrexham; and on passing a certain point you come all at once upon the
valley, which opens like an amphitheatre, broad, barren hills rising in majestic
state on either side, with "green upland swells that echo to the bleat of
flocks" below, and the river Dee babbling over its stony bed in the midst
of them. The valley at this time "glittered green with sunny
showers," and a budding ash-tree dipped its tender branches in the chiding
stream. How proud, how glad I was to walk along the high road that overlooks
the delicious prospect, repeating the lines which I have just quoted from Mr
Coleridge's poems! But besides the prospect which opened beneath my feet,
another also opened to my inward sight, a heavenly vision, on which were
written, in letters large as Hope could make them, these four words, Liberty,
Genius, Love, Virtue; which have since faded in the light of common day or mock
my idle gaze.
"The Beautiful is vanished,
and returns not."
Still I would return some time or
other to this enchanted spot; but I would return to it alone. What other self
could I find to share that influx of thoughts of regret and delight, the
fragments of which I could hardly conjure up myself, so much have they been
broken and defaced! I could stand on some tall rock and over look the precipice
of years that separates me from what I then was. I was at that time going
shortly to visit the poet whom I have above named. Where is he now? Not only I
myself have changed; the world, which was then new to me, has become old and
incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in thought, O sylvan Dee, in joy, in
youth and gladness as though then wert; and thou shalt always be to me the
river of Paradise, where I will drink the waters of life freely!
There is hardly anything that shows the short-sightedness or
capriciousness of the imagination more than travelling does. With change of
place we change our ideas; nay . our opinions and feelings. We can by an effort
indeed transport ourselves to old and long-forgotten scenes, and then the
picture of the mind revives again; but we forget those that we have just left.
It seems that we can think but of one place at a time. The canvas of the fancy
is but of a certain extent, and if we paint one set of objects upon it, they
immediately efface every other. We cannot enlarge our conceptions, we can only
shift our point of view. The landscape bares its bosom to the enraptured eye,
we take our fill of it and seem as if we could form no other image of beauty or
grandeur. We pass on and think no more of it; the horizon that shuts if from
our sight, also blots it from our memory like a dream. In travelling through a
wild, barren country, I can form no idea of a woody and cultivated one. It
appears to me that all the world must be barren, like what I see of it. In the
country we forget the town and in the town we despise the country. "Beyond
Hyde Park," says Sir Fopling Flutter, "all is a desert." All
that part of the map which we do not see before us is a blank. The world in our
conceit of it is not much bigger than a nutshell. It is not one prospect
expanded into another, country joined to country, kingdom to kingdom, land to
seas, making an image voluminous and vast; --the mind can form no larger idea
of space than the eye can take in at a single glance. The rest is a name
written in a map, a calculation of arithmetic. For instance, what is the true
signification of that immense mass of territory and population, known by the
name of China to us? An inch of pasteboard on a wooden globe, of no more
account than a China orange! Things near us are seen at the size of life;
things at a distance are diminished to the size of the understanding. We
measure the universe by ourselves, and even comprehend the texture of our own
being only peace-meal. In this way, however, we remember an infinity of things
and places. The mind is like a mechanical instrument that plays a great variety
of tunes, but it must play them in succession. One idea recalls another, but it
at the same times excludes all others. In trying to renew old recollections, we
cannot as it were unfold the whole web of our existence; we must pick out the
single threads. So in coming to a place where we have formerly lived and with
which we have intimate associations, every one must have found that the feeling
grows more vivid the nearer we approach the spot, from the mere anticipation of
the actual impression; we remember circumstances, feelings, persons, faces,
names that we had not thought of for years; but for the time all the rest of
the world is forgotten! -- To return to the question I have quitted above:
I have no objection to go to see ruins, aqueducts, pictures, in company
with a friend or a party, bur rather the contrary, for the former reason
reversed. They are intelligible matters and will bear talking about. The
sentiment here is not tacit, but communicable and overt. Salisbury Plain is
barren of criticism, but Stonehenge will bear a discussion antiquarian, picturesque,
and philosophical. In setting out on a party of pleasure, the first
consideration is always where we shall go to, in taking a solitary ramble, the
question is what we shall meet with by the way. "The mind is its own
place"; nor are we anxious to arrive at the end of our journey. I can
myself do the honours indifferently well to works or art and curiosity. I once
took a party to Oxford with no mean éclat -- showed them the
seat of the Muses at a distance
"With glistering spires and
pinnacles adorn'd----"
descanted on the learned air that
breathes from the grassy quadrangles and stone walls of halls and colleges --
was at home in the Bodleian; and at Blenheim quite superseded the powered
Cicerone that attended us, and that pointed in vain with his wand to
commonplace beauties in matchless pictures. -- As another exception to the
above reasoning, I should not feel confident in venturing on a journey in a
foreign country without a companion. I should want at intervals to hear the
sound of my own language. There is an involuntary antipathy in the mind of an
Englishmen to foreign manners and notions that requires the assistance of
social sympathy to carry it off. As the distance from home increases, this
relief, which was at first a luxury, becomes a passion and an appetite. A
person would almost feel stifled to find himself in the deserts of Arabia
without friends and countrymen; there must be allowed to be something in the
view of Athens or old Rome that claims the utterance of speech; and I own that
the Pyramids are too mighty for any single contemplation. In such situations,
so opposite to all one's ordinary train of ideas, one seems a species by one's
self, a limb torn off from society, unless one can meet with instant fellowship
and support. -- Yet I did not feel this want or craving very pressing once,
when I first set foot on the laughing shores of France. Calais was peopled with
novelty and delight. The confused, busy murmur of the place was like oil and
wine poured into my ears; nor did the mariner's hymn, which was sung from the
top of an old crazy vessel in the harbour, as the sun went down, send a alien
sound into my soul. I only breathed the air of general humanity. I walked over
"the vine-covered hills and gay regions of France," erect and satisfied;
for the image of man was not cast down and chained to the foot of arbitrary
thrones; I was at no loss for language, for that of all the great schools of
painting was open to me. The whole is vanished like a shade. Pictures, heroes,
glory, freedom, all are fled; nothing remains but the Bourbons and the French
People! -- There is undoubtedly a sensation in travelling into foreign parts
that is to be had nowhere else; but it is more pleasing at the time than
lasting. It is too remote from our habitual associations to be a common topic
of discourse or reference, and, like a dream of another state of existence,
does not piece into our daily modes of life. It is an animated but a momentary
hallucination. It demands an effort to exchange our actual for our ideal
identity; and to feel the pulse of our old transports revive very keenly, we
must "jump" all our present comforts and connexions. Our romantic and
itinerant character is not to be domesticated. Dr. Johnson remarked
how little foreign travel added to the facilities of conversation in those who
had been abroad. In fact, the time we have spent there is both delightful and
in one sense, instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial,
downright existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the same,
but another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time we are out of
our own country. We are lost to ourselves, as well as our friends. So the poet
somewhat quaintly sings,
"Out of my country and myself
I go."
Those who wish to forget painful
thoughts, do well to absent themselves of a while from the ties and objects
that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place
that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the
whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life
to spend afterwards at home!
_______________________________
2 (Near
Nether-Stowey, Somersetshire, where Hazlitt visited Coleridge in 1798.) The
original footnote found in Keynes' collection; I have, in turn, placed them in
parentheses.
3 (Added from the Author's MS.
by W.C.H.) "W.C.H." is Hazlitt's son, William Carew (I believe)
Hazlitt.
In
this piece William Hazlitt discusses going on a journey and how it is best to
travel alone as well as discussing all the things that can be gained and
observed in doing so. To discuss these topics Hazlitt utilizes many literary
devices, including irony when he states “puns alliterations, antitheses,
agreement, and analysis… I sometimes had rather be without them” (110). Hazlitt
makes use of paradox in his first paragraph when explaining why he prefers to
travel alone; “I am never lass alone than when alone” (109). He then uses
metaphor to describe what is gained by journeying alone; “Contemplation may
plume her feathers and let grow her wings, that in various bustle of resort
were all too ruffled, and sometimes impari’d” (109). He then continues to
describe the daily antithesis one feels in societal life; “to talk or be
silent, to walk or sit still, to be sociable or solitary” (110). All of Hazlitt’s
metaphors, antithesis, paradox, and other literary devices combine to portray
his attitude on society, nature, contemplation, and perspective. Hazlitt, like
many Romantics of the day, sees peace in nature, travelling, and solitude. He
also, however, recognizes man’s need for kinship; “I should… like well enough
to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow
another life to spend afterwards at home” (117).
Sesame and Lilies. Lecture I.—Sesame: Of Kings’
Treasuries
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John Ruskin
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MY 1 first duty this evening is to ask your pardon for the ambiguity of title under which the subject of lecture has been announced: for indeed I am not going to talk of kings, known as regnant, nor of treasuries, understood to contain wealth; but of quite another order of royalty, and another material of riches, than those usually acknowledged. I had even intended to ask your attention for a little while on trust, and (as sometimes one contrives, in taking a friend to see a favorite piece of scenery) to hide what I wanted most to show, with such imperfect cunning as I might, until we unexpectedly reached the best point of view by winding paths. But—and as also I have heard it said, by men practised in public address, that hearers are never so much fatigued as by the endeavor to follow a speaker who gives them no clue to his purposes,—I will take the slight mask off at once, and tell you plainly that I want to speak to you about the treasures hidden in books; and about the way we find them, and the way we lose them. A grave subject, you will say; and a wide one! Yes; so wide that I shall make no effort to touch the compass of it. I will try only to bring before you a few simple thoughts about reading, which press themselves upon me every day more deeply, as I watch the course of the public mind with respect to our daily enlarging means of education; and the answeringly wider spreading on the levels, of the irrigation of literature. |
1
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2. It happens that I
have practically some connection with schools for different classes of youth;
and I receive many letters from parents respecting the education of their
children. In the mass of these letters I am always struck by the precedence
which the idea of a “position in life” takes above all other thoughts in the
parents’—more especially in the mothers’—minds. “The education befitting such
and such a station in life”—this is the phrase, this the object,
always. They never seek, as far as I can make out, an education good in
itself; even the conception of abstract rightness in training rarely seems
reached by the writers. But an education “which shall keep a good coat on my
son’s back;—which shall enable him to ring with confidence the visitors’ bell
at double-belled doors; which shall result ultimately in establishment of a
double-belled door to his own house;—in a word, which shall lead to
‘advancement in life’;—this we pray for on bent knees—and this
is all we pray for.” It never seems to occur to the parents
that there may be an education which, in itself, is advancement
in life;—that any other than that may perhaps be advancement in Death; and
that this essential education might be more easily got, or given, than they
fancy, if they set about it in the right way; while it is for no price, and
by no favor, to be got, if they set about it in the wrong.
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3. Indeed, among the
ideas most prevalent and effective in the mind of this busiest of countries,
I suppose the first—at least that which is confessed with the greatest
frankness, and put forward as the fittest stimulus to youthful exertion—is
this of “Advancement in Life.” May I ask you to consider with me what this
idea practically includes, and what it should include?
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Practically, then, at
present, “advancement in life” means, becoming conspicuous in life;—obtaining
a position which shall be acknowledged by others to be respectable or
honorable. We do not understand by this advancement in general, the mere
making of money, but the being known to have made it; not the accomplishment
of any great aim, but the being seen to have accomplished it. In a word, we
mean the gratification of our thirst for applause. That thirst, if the last
infirmity of noble minds, is also the first infirmity of weak ones; and, on
the whole, the strongest impulsive influence of average humanity: the
greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of
praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
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4. I am not about to
attack or defend this impulse. I want you only to feel how it lies at the
root of effort; especially of all modern effort. It is the gratification of
vanity which is, with us, the stimulus of toil, and balm of repose; so
closely does it touch the very springs of life that the wounding of our
vanity is always spoken of (and truly) as in its measure mortal; we
call it “mortification,” using the same expression which we should apply to a
gangrenous and incurable bodily hurt. And although few of us may be
physicians enough to recognize the various effect of this passion upon health
and energy, I believe most honest men know, and would at once acknowledge,
its leading power with them as a motive. The seaman does not commonly desire
to be made captain only because he knows he can manage the ship better than
any other sailor on board. He wants to be made captain that he may be called captain.
The clergyman does not usually want to be made a bishop only because he
believes no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct the diocese through its
difficulties. He wants to be made bishop primarily that he may be called “My
Lord.” And a prince does not usually desire to enlarge, or a subject to gain,
a kingdom, because he believes that no one else can as well serve the State,
upon its throne; but, briefly, because he wishes to be addressed as “Your
Majesty,” by as many lips as may be brought to such utterance.
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5. This, then, being
the main idea of “advancement in life,” the force of it applies, for all of
us, according to our station, particularly to that secondary result of such
advancement which we call “getting into good society.” We want to get into
good society, not that we may have it, but that we may be seen in it; and our
notion of its goodness depends primarily on its conspicuousness.
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Will you pardon me if
I pause for a moment to put what I fear you may think an impertinent
question? I never can go on with an address unless I feel, or know, that my
audience are either with me or against me: I do not much care which, in
beginning; but I must know where they are; and I would fain find out, at this
instant, whether you think I am putting the motives of popular action too
low. I am resolved, to-night, to state them low enough to be admitted as
probable; for whenever, in my writings on Political Economy, I assume that a
little honesty, or generosity—or what used to be called “virtue”—may be
calculated upon as a human motive of action, people always answer me, saying,
“You must not calculate on that: that is not in human nature: you must not
assume anything to be common to men but acquisitiveness and jealousy; no
other feeling ever has influence on them, except accidentally, and in matters
out of the way of business.” I begin, accordingly, to-night low in the scale
of motives; but I must know if you think me right in doing so. Therefore, let
me ask those who admit the love of praise to be usually the strongest motive
in men’s minds in seeking advancement, and the honest desire of doing any
kind of duty to be an entirely secondary one, to hold up their hands. (About
a dozen hands held up—the audience, partly not being sure the lecturer is
serious, and, partly, shy of expressing opinion.) I am quite serious—I
really do want to know what you think; however, I can judge by putting the
reverse question. Will those who think that duty is generally the first, and
love of praise the second, motive, hold up their hands? (One hand reported
to have been held up, behind the lecturer.) Very good; I see you are with
me, and that you think I have not begun too near the ground. Now, without
teasing you by putting farther question, I venture to assume that you will
admit duty as at least a secondary or tertiary motive. You think that the desire
of doing something useful, or obtaining some real good, is indeed an existent
collateral idea, though a secondary one, in most men’s desire of advancement.
You will grant that moderately honest men desire place and office, at least
in some measure, for the sake of beneficent power; and would wish to
associate rather with sensible and well-informed persons than with fools and
ignorant persons, whether they are seen in the company of the sensible ones
or not. And finally, without being troubled by repetition of any common
truisms about the preciousness of friends, and the influence of companions,
you will admit, doubtless, that according to the sincerity of our desire that
our friends may be true, and our companions wise—and in proportion to the
earnestness and discretion with which we choose both, will be the general
chances of our happiness and usefulness.
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6. But, granting that
we had both the will and the sense to choose our friends well, how few of us
have the power! or, at least, how limited, for most, is the sphere of choice!
Nearly all our associations are determined by chance, or necessity; and
restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those
whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher
circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and
partially open. We may, by good fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet,
and hear the sound of his voice; or put a question to a man of science, and
be answered good-humoredly. We may intrude ten minutes’ talk on a cabinet
minister, answered probably with words worse than silence, being deceptive;
or snatch, once or twice in our lives, the privilege of throwing a bouquet in
the path of a Princess, or arresting the kind glance of a Queen. And yet
these momentary chances we covet; and spend our years, and passions, and
powers in pursuit of little more than these; while, meantime, there is a
society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we
like, whatever our rank or occupation;—talk to us in the best words they can
choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it
is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting round us all day
long,—kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to
gain it!—in those plainly furnished and narrow anterooms, our bookcase
shelves,—we make no account of that company,—perhaps never listen to a word
they would say, all day long!
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7. You may tell me,
perhaps, or think within yourselves, that the apathy with which we regard
this company of the noble, who are praying us to listen to them; and the
passion with which we pursue the company, probably of the ignoble who despise
us, or who have nothing to teach us, are grounded in this,—that we can see
the faces of the living men, and it is themselves, and not their sayings,
with which we desire to become familiar. But it is not so. Suppose you never
were to see their faces;—suppose you could be put behind a screen in the
statesman’s cabinet, or the prince’s chamber, would you not be glad to listen
to their words, though you were forbidden to advance beyond the screen? And
when the screen is only a little less, folded in two instead of four, and you
can be hidden behind the cover of the two boards that bind a book, and listen
all day long, not to the casual talk, but to the studied, determined, chosen
addresses of the wisest of men;—this station of audience, and honorable privy
council, you despise!
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8. But perhaps you
will say that it is because the living people talk of things that are
passing, and are of immediate interest to you, that you desire to hear them.
Nay; that cannot be so, for the living people will themselves tell you about
passing matters much better in their writings than in their careless talk.
But I admit that this motive does influence you, so far as you prefer those
rapid and ephemeral writings to slow and enduring writings,—books, properly
so called. For all books are divisible into two classes, the books of the
hour, and the books of all time. Mark this distinction—it is not one of
quality only. It is not merely the bad book that does not last, and the good
one that does. It is a distinction of species. There are good books for the
hour, and good ones for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for
all time. I must define the two kinds before I go farther.
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9. The good book of
the hour, then,—I do not speak of the bad ones,—is simply the useful or
pleasant talk of some person whom you cannot otherwise converse with, printed
for you. Very useful often, telling you what you need to know; very pleasant
often, as a sensible friend’s present talk would be. These bright accounts of
travels; good-humored and witty discussions of question; lively or pathetic
story-telling in the form of novel; firm fact-telling, by the real agents
concerned in the events of passing history,; all these books of the hour,
multiplying among us as education becomes more general, are a peculiar
possession of the present age; we ought to be entirely thankful for them, and
entirely ashamed of ourselves if we make no good use of them. But we make the
worst possible use if we allow them to usurp the place of true books: for
strictly speaking, they are not books at all, but merely letters or
newspapers in good print. Our friend’s letter may be delightful, or
necessary, to-day: whether worth keeping or not, is to be considered. The
newspaper may be entirely proper at breakfast time, but assuredly it is not
reading for all day. So, though bound up in a volume, the long letter which
gives you so pleasant an account of the inns, and roads, and weather last
year at such a place, or which tells you that amusing story, or gives you the
real circumstances of such and such events, however valuable for occasional
reference, may not be, in the real sense of the word, a “book” at all, nor in
the real sense, to be “read.” A book is essentially not a talked thing, but a
written thing; and written, not with the view of mere communication, but of
permanence. The book of talk is printed only because its author cannot speak
to thousands of people at once; if he could, he would—the volume is
mere multiplication of his voice. You cannot talk to your
friend in India, if you could, you would; you write instead: that is
mere conveyance of voice. But a book is written, not to
multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate it. The
author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or
helpfully beautiful. So far as he knows, no one has yet said it; so far as he
knows, no one else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melodiously
if he may; clearly, at all events. In the sum of his life he finds this to be
the thing, or group of things, manifest to him;—this, the piece of true
knowledge, or sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him
to seize. He would fain set it down forever; engrave it on rock, if he could;
saying, “This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept,
loved, and hated, like another; my life was as the vapor and is not; but this
I saw and knew: this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.” That is his
“writing”; it is, in his small human way, and with whatever degree of true
inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a “Book.”
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10. Perhaps you think
no books were ever so written.
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But, again, I ask you,
do you at all believe in honesty, or at all in kindness? or do you think
there is never any honesty or benevolence in wise people? None of us, I hope,
are so unhappy as to think that. Well, whatever bit of a wise man’s work is
honestly and benevolently done, that bit is his book, or his piece of art. 2 It
is mixed always with evil fragments—ill-done, redundant, affected work. But
if you read rightly, you will easily discover the true bits, and those are the
book.
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11. Now books of this
kind have been written in all ages by their greatest men:—by great readers,
great statesmen, and great thinkers. These are all at your choice; and Life
is short. You have heard as much before;—yet have you measured and mapped out
this short life and its possibilities? Do you know, if you read this, that
you cannot read that—that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow?
Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, or your stable-boy, when you may
talk with queens and kings; or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy
consciousness of your own claims to respect that you jostle with the hungry
and common crowd for entrée here, and audience there, when
all the while this eternal court is open to you, with its society, wide as
the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of every
place and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you may take
fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, once entered into it,
you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of
companionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested,
and the motives with which you strive to take high place in the society of
the living, measured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by
the place you desire to take in this company of the Dead.
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12. “The place you
desire,” and the place you fit yourself for, I must also
say; because, observe, this court of the past differs from all living
aristocracy in this:—it is open to labor and to merit, but to nothing else.
No wealth will bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive, the guardian of
those Elysian gates, In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar person ever enters
there. At the portieres of that silent Faubourg St. Germain, there is but
brief question:—“Do you deserve to enter? Pass. Do you ask to be the
companion of nobles? Make yourself noble, and you shall be. Do you long for
the conversation of the wise? Learn to understand it, and you shall hear it.
But on other terms?—no. If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you.
The living lord may assume courtesy, the living philosopher explain his
thought to you with considerate pain; but here we neither feign nor
interpret; you must rise to the level of our thoughts if you would be
gladdened by them, and share our feelings, if you would recognize our
presence”
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13. This, then, is
what you have to do, and I admit that it is much. You must, in a word, love
these people, if you are to be among them. No ambition is of any use. They
scorn your ambition. You must love them, and show your love in these two
following ways:
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I.—First, by a true
desire to be taught by them, and to enter into their thoughts. To enter into
theirs, observe; not to find your own expressed by them. If the person who
wrote the book is not wiser than you, you need not read it; if he be, he will
think differently from you in many respects.
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Very ready we are to
say of a book, “How good this is—that’s exactly what I think!” But the right
feeling is, “How strange that is! I never thought of that before, and yet I
see it is true; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, some day.” But whether
thus submissively or not, at least be sure that you go to the author to get
at his meaning, not to find yours. Judge it afterwards, if
you think yourself qualified to do so; but ascertain it first. And be sure also,
if the author is worth anything, that you will not get at his meaning all at
once;—nay, that at his whole meaning you will not for a long time arrive in
any wise. Not that he does not say what he means, and in strong words too;
but he cannot say it all; and what is more strange, will not, but in a hidden
way and in parables, in order that he may be sure you want it. I cannot quite
see the reason of this, nor analyze that cruel reticence in the breasts of
wise men which makes them always hide their deeper thought. They do not give
it to you by way of help, but of reward; and will make themselves sure that
you deserve it before they allow you to reach it. But it is the same with the
physical type of wisdom, gold. There seems, to you and me, no reason why the
electric forces of the earth should not carry whatever there is of gold
within it at once to the mountain tops, so that kings and people might now
that all the gold they could get was there; and without any trouble and
digging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, and coin as
much as they needed. But Nature does not manage it so. She puts it in little
fissures in the earth, nobody knows where: you may dig long and find none;
you must dig painfully to find any.
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14. And it is just the
same with men’s best wisdom. When you come to a good book, you must ask
yourself, “Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would? Are my
pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves
well up to the elbow, and my breath good, and my temper?” And, keeping the
figure a little longer, even at the cost of tiresomeness, for it is a
thoroughly useful one, the metal you are in search of being the author’s mind
or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in
order to get at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning;
your smelting-furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at any
good author’s meaning without those tools and that fire; often you will need
sharpest, finest chiseling, and patientest fusing, before you can gather one
grain of the metal.
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15. And therefore,
first of all, I tell you, earnestly and authoritatively (I know I
am right in this,) you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words,
and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable—nay, letter by
letter. For though it is only by reason of the opposition of letters in the
function of signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the study of
books is called “literature,” and that a man versed in it is called, by the
consent of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words,
you may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature this real fact:—that
you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long
enough) and remain an utterly “illiterate,” uneducated person; but that if
you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter,—that is to say, with
real accuracy,—you are forevermore in some measure an educated person. The
entire difference between education and non-education (as regards the merely
intellectual part of it) consists in this accuracy. A well-educated gentleman
may not know many languages,—may not be able to speak any but his own,—may
have read very few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely;
whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned
in the peerage of words; knows the words of true descent and
ancient blood at a glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all their
ancestry, their inter-marriages, distant relationships, and the extent to
which they were admitted, and offices they held, among the national noblesse
of words at any time, and in any country. But an uneducated person may know,
by memory, many languages, and talk them all, and yet truly know not a word
of any,—not a word even of his own. An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman
will be able to make his way ashore at most ports; yet he has only to speak a
sentence of any language to be known for an illiterate person: so also the
accent, or turn of expression of a single sentence, will at once mark a
scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so conclusively admitted by educated
persons, that a false accent or a mistaken syllable is enough, in the
parliament of any civilized nation, to assign to a man a certain degree of
inferior standing forever.
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16. And this is right;
but it is a pity that the accuracy insisted on is not greater, and required
to a serious purpose. It is right that a false Latin quantity should excite a
smile in the House of Commons; but it is wrong that a false English meaning should not excite
a frown there. Let the accent of words be watched; and closely: let their
meaning be watched more closely still, and fewer will do the work. A few
words well chosen and distinguished, will do work that a thousand cannot,
when every one is acting, equivocally, in the function of another. Yes; and
words, if they are not watched, will do deadly work sometimes. There are
masked words droning and skulking about us in Europe just now,—(there never
were so many, owing to the spread of a shallow, blotching, blundering,
infectious, “information,” or rather deformation, everywhere, and to the
teaching of catechisms and phrases at schools instead of human meanings)—there
are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody understands, but which everybody
uses, and most people will also fight for, live for, or even die for,
fancying they mean this or that, or the other, of things dear to them: for
such words wear chameleon cloaks—“groundlion” cloaks, of the color of the
ground of any man’s fancy: on that ground they lie in wait, and rend him with
a spring from it. There never were creatures of prey so mischievous, never
diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, as these masked words;
they are the unjust stewards of all men’s ideas: whatever fancy or favorite
instinct a man most cherishes, he gives to his favorite masked word to take
care of for him; the word at last comes to have an infinite power over
him,—you cannot get at him but by its ministry.
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17. And in languages
so mongrel in breed as the English, there is a fatal power of equivocation
put into men’s hands, almost whether they will or no, in being able to use
Greek or Latin words for an idea when they want it to be awful; and Saxon or
otherwise common words when they want it to be vulgar. What a singular and
salutary effect, for instance, would be produced on the minds of people who
are in the habit of taking the Form of the “Word” they live by, for the Power
of which that Word tells them, if we always either retained, or refused, the
Greek form “biblos,” or “biblion,” as the right expression for “book”—instead
of employing it only in the one instance in which we wish to give dignity to
the idea, and translating it into English everywhere else. How wholesome it
would be for many simple persons, if, in such places (for instance) as Acts
xix. 19, we retained the Greek expression, instead of translating it, and
they had to read—“Many of them also which used curious arts, brought their
bibles together, and burnt them before all men; and they counted the price of
them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver”! Or if, on the other
hand, we translated where we retain it, and always spoke of “The Holy Book,”
instead of “Holy Bible,” it might come into more heads than it does at
present, that the Word of God, by which the heavens were, of old, and by
which they are now kept in store, 3 cannot be made a
present of to anybody in morocco binding; nor sown on any wayside by help
either of steam plough or steam press; but is nevertheless being offered to
us daily, and by us with contumely refused; and sown in us daily, and by us,
as instantly as may be, choked.
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18. So, again,
consider what effect has been produced on the English vulgar mind by the use
of the sonorous Latin form “damno,” in translating the Greek [Greek], when
people charitably wish to make it forcible; and the substitution of the temperate
“condemn” for it, when they choose to keep it gentle; and what notable
sermons have been preached by illiterate clergymen on—“He that believeth not
shall be damned”; though they would shrink with horror from translating Heb.
xi. 7, “The saving of his house, by which he damned the world”; or John viii.
10, 11, “Woman, hath no man damned thee? She saith, No man, Lord. Jesus
answered her, Neither do I damn thee; go and sin no more.” And divisions in
the mind of Europe, which have cost seas of blood and in the defense of which
the noblest souls of men have been cast away in frantic desolation, countless
as forest leaves—though, in the heart of them, founded on deeper causes—have
nevertheless been rendered practicably possible, namely, by the European
adoption of the Greek word for a public meeting, “ecclesia,” to give peculiar
respectability to such meetings, when held for religious purposes; and other
collateral equivocations, such as the vulgar English one of using the word
“priest” as a contraction for “presbyter.”
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19. Now, in order to
deal with words rightly, this is the habit you must form. Nearly every word
in your language has been first a word of some other language—of Saxon,
German, French, Latin, or Greek (not to speak of eastern and primitive dialects).
And many words have been all these;—that is to say, have been Greek first,
Latin next, French and German next, and English last: undergoing a certain
change of sense and use on the lips of each nation; but retaining a deep
vital meaning, which all good scholars feel in employing them, even at this
day. If you do not know the Greek alphabet, learn it; young or old—girl or
boy—whoever you may be, if you think of reading seriously (which, of course,
implies that you have some leisure at command), learn your Greek alphabet;
then get good dictionaries of all these languages, and whenever you are in
doubt about a word, hunt it down patiently. Read Max Müller’s lectures
thoroughly, to begin with; and, after that, never let a word escape you that
looks suspicious. It is severe work; but you will find it, even at first,
interesting, and at last, endlessly amusing. And the general gain to your
character, in power and precision, will be quite incalculable.
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Mind, this does not
imply knowing, or trying to know, Greek or Latin, or French. It takes a whole
life to learn any language perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the
meanings through which the English word has passed; and those which in a good
writer’s work it must still bear.
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20. And now, merely
for example’s sake, I will, with your permission, read a few lines of a true
book with you, carefully; and see what will come out of them. I will take a
book perfectly known to you all. No English words are more familiar to us,
yet few perhaps have been read with less sincerity. I will take these few
following lines of “Lycidas”:
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Let us think over this
passage, and examine its words.
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First, is it not
singular to find Milton assigning to St. Peter, not only his full episcopal function,
but the very types of it which Protestants usually refuse most passionately?
His “mitred” locks! Milton was no Bishop—lover; how comes St. Peter to be
“mitred”? “Two massy keys he bore.” Is this, then, the power of the keys
claimed by the Bishops of Rome, and is it acknowledged here by Milton only in
a poetical license, for the sake of its picturesqueness, that he may get the
gleam of the golden keys to help his effect? Do not think it. Great men do
not play stage tricks with doctrines of life and death: only little men do
that. Milton means what he says; and means it with his might too—is going to
put the whole strength of his spirit presently into the saying of it. For
though not a lover of false bishops, he was a lover of true
ones; and the Lake-pilot is here, in his thoughts, the type and head of true
episcopal power. For Milton reads that text, “I will give unto thee the keys
of the kingdom of heaven” quite honestly. Puritan though he be, he would not
blot it out of the book because there have been bad bishops; nay, in order to
understand him, we must understand that verse first; it will
not do to eye it askance, or whisper it under our breath, as if it were a
weapon of an adverse sect. It is a solemn, universal assertion, deeply to be
kept in mind by all sects. But perhaps we shall be better able to reason on
it if we go on a little farther, and come back to it. For clearly this marked
insistence on the power of the true episcopate is to make us feel more
weightily what is to be charged against the false claimants of episcopate; or
generally, against false claimants of power and rank in the body of the
clergy; they who, “for their bellies’ sake, creep, and intrude, and climb
into the fold.”
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21. Never think Milton
uses those three words to fill up his verse, as a loose writer would. He
needs all the three; especially those three, and no more than those—“creep,”
and “intrude.” and “climb”; no other words would or could serve the turn, and
no more could be added. For they exhaustively comprehend the three classes,
correspondent to the three characters, of men who dishonestly seek
ecclesiastical power. First, those who “creep” into the
fold; who do not care for office, nor name, but for secret influence, and do
all things occultly and cunningly, consenting to any servility of office or
conduct, so only that they may intimately discern, and unawares direct, the
minds of men. Then those who “intrude” (thrust, that is) themselves into the
fold, who by natural insolence of heart, and stout eloquence of tongue, and
fearlessly perseverant self-assertion, obtain hearing and authority with the
common crowd. Lastly, those who “climb,” who by labor and learning, both
stout and sound, but selfishly exerted in the cause of their own ambition,
gain high dignities and authorities, and become “lords over the heritage,”
though not “ensamples to the flock.”
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22. Now go on:—
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I pause again, for
this is a strange expression; a broken metaphor, one might think, careless
and unscholarly.
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Not so: its very
audacity and pithiness are intended to make us look close at the phrase and
remember it. Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate
contraries of right character, in the two great offices of the Church—those
of bishop and pastor.
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A “Bishop” means a
“person who sees.”
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A “Pastor” means a
“person who feeds.”
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The most unbishoply
character a man can have is therefore to be Blind.
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The most unpastoral
is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed,—to be a Mouth.
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Take the two reverses
together, and you have “blind mouths.” We may advisably follow out this idea
a little. Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops
desiring power more than light. They want
authority, not outlook. Whereas their real office is not to rule; though it
may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke; it is the king’s office to rule; the
bishop’s office is to oversee the flock; to number it, sheep
by sheep; to be ready always to give full account of it. Now it is clear he
cannot give account of the souls, if he has not so much as numbered the
bodies of his flock. The first thing, therefore, that a bishop has to do is
at least to put himself in a position in which, at any moment, he can obtain
the history, from childhood, of every living soul in his diocese, and of its
present state. Down in that back street, Bill and Nancy, knocking each
other’s teeth out!—Does the bishop know all about it? Has he his eye upon
them? Has he had his eye upon them? Can he circumstantially
explain to us how Bill got into the habit of beating Nancy about the head? If
he cannot, he is no bishop, though he had a mitre as high as Salisbury
steeple; he is no bishop,—he has sought to be at the helm instead of the
masthead; he has no sight of things. “Nay,” you say, “it is not his duty to
look after Bill in the back street.” What! the fat sheep that have full
fleeces—you think it is only those he should look after, while (go back to
your Milton) “the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, besides what the
grim wolf with privy paw” (bishops knowing nothing about it) “daily devours
apace, and nothing said”?
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“But that’s not our
idea of a bishop.” 4 Perhaps not; but
it was St. Paul’s; and it was Milton’s. They may be right, or we may be; but
we must not think we are reading either one or the other by putting our
meaning into their words.
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23. I go on.
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This is to meet the
vulgar answer that “if the poor are not looked after in their bodies, they
are in their souls; they have spiritual food.”
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And Milton says, “They
have no such thing as spiritual food; they are only swollen with wind.” At
first you may think that is a coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, it
is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries,
and find out the meaning of “Spirit.” It is only a contraction of the Latin
word “breath,” and an indistinct translation of the Greek word for “wind.”
The same word is used in writing, “The wind bloweth where is listeth”; and in
writing, “So is every one that is born of the Spirit”; born of the breath, that
is; for it means the breath of God, in soul and body. We have the true sense
of it in our words “inspiration” and “expire.” Now, there are two kinds of
breath with which the flock may be filled; God’s breath, and man’s. The
breath of God is health, and life, and peace to them, as the air of heaven is
to the flocks on the hills; but man’s breath—the word which he calls
spiritual,—is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot
inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a dead body by the vapors of
its own decomposition. This is literally true of all false religious
teaching; the first and last, and fatalest sign of it is that “puffing up.”
Your converted children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts,
who teach honest men; your converted dunces, who, having lived in cretinous
stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awakening to the fact of there being
a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiar people and messengers; your sectarians
of every species, small and great, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or
low, in so far as they think themselves exclusively in the right and others
wrong; and preeminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can be saved
by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and
wish instead of work:—these are the true fog children—clouds, these, without
water; bodies, these, of putrescent vapor and skin, without blood or flesh:
blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with—corrupt, and corrupting,—“Swollen
with wind, and the rank mist they draw.”
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24. Lastly, let us
return to the lines respecting the power of the keys, for now we can
understand them. Note the difference between Milton and Dante in their
interpretation of this power: for once, the latter is weaker in thought; he
supposes both the keys to be of the gate of heaven; one is
of gold, the other of silver: they are given by St. Peter to the sentinel
angel; and it is not easy to determine the meaning either of the substances
of the three steps of the gate, or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, of
gold, the key of heaven; the other, of iron, the key of the prison in which
the wicked teachers are to be bound who “have taken away the key of
knowledge, yet entered not in themselves.”We have seen that the duties of
bishop and pastor are to see and feed; and of all who do so it is said, “He
that watereth, shall be watered also himself.” But the reverse is truth also.
He that watereth not, shall be withered himself, and he that
seeth not, shall himself be shut out of sight—shut into the perpetual
prison-house. And that prison opens here, as well as hereafter: he who is to
be bound in heaven must first be bound on earth. That command to the strong
angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, “Take him and bind him hand
and foot, and cast him out,” issues, in its measure, against the teacher, for
every help withheld, and for every truth refused, and for every falsehood
enforced; so that he is more strictly fettered the more he fetters, and
farther outcast, as he more and more misleads, till at last the bars of the
iron cage close upon him, and as “the golden opes, the iron shuts amain.”
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25. We have got
something out of the lines, I think, and much more is yet to be found in
them; but we have done enough by way of example of the kind of word-by-word
examination of your author which is rightly called “reading”; watching every
accent and expression, and putting ourselves always in the author’s place,
annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be
able assuredly to say, “Thus Milton thought,” not “Thus I thought,
in mis-reading Milton.” And by this process you will gradually come to attach
less weight to your own “Thus I thought” at other times. You will begin to
perceive that what you thought was a matter of no serious
importance;—that your thoughts on any subject are not perhaps the clearest
and wisest that could be arrived at thereupon:—in fact, that unless you are a
very singular person, you cannot be said to have any “thoughts” at all; that
you have no materials for them, in any serious matters; 5—no right to “think,”
but only to try to learn more of the facts. Nay, most probably all your life
(unless, as I said, you are a singular person) you will have no legitimate
right to an “opinion” on any business, except that instantly under your hand.
What must of necessity be done, you can always find out, beyond question, how
to do. Have you a house to keep in order, a commodity to sell, a field to
plough, a ditch to cleanse? There need be no two opinions about these
proceedings; it is at your peril if you have not much more than an “opinion”
on the way to manage such matters. And also, outside of your own business,
there are one or two subjects on which you are bound to have but one opinion.
That roguery and lying are objectionable, and are instantly to be flogged out
of the way whenever discovered;—that covetousness and love of quarreling are
dangerous dispositions even in children, and deadly dispositions in men and
nations;—that in the end, the God of heaven and earth loves active, modest,
and kind people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones;—on these
general facts you are bound to have but one, and that a very strong, opinion.
For the rest, respecting religions, governments, sciences, arts, you will
find That, on the whole, you can know NOTHING,—judge nothing; that the
best you can do, even though you may be a well-educated person, is to be
silent, and strive to be wiser every day, and to understand a little more of
the thoughts of others, which so soon as you try to do honestly, you will
discover that the thoughts even of the wisest are very little more than pertinent
questions. To put the difficulty into a clear shape, and exhibit to you the
grounds for indecision, that is all they can generally do for
you!—and well for them and for us, if indeed they are able “to mix the music
with our thoughts, and sadden us with heavenly doubts.” This writer, from
whom I have been reading to you, is not among the first or wisest: he sees
shrewdly as far as he sees, and therefore it is easy to find out his full
meaning; but with the greater men, you cannot fathom their meaning; they do
not even wholly measure it themselves,—it is so wide. Suppose I had asked
you, for instance, to seek for Shakespeare’s opinion, instead of Milton’s, on
this matter of Church authority?—or for Dante’s? Have any of you, at this
instant, the least idea what either thought about it? Have you ever balanced
the scene with the bishops in “Richard III.” against the character of
Cranmer? the description of St. Francis and St. Dominic against that of him
who made Virgil wonder to gaze upon him,—“disteso, tanto vilmente, nell’
eterno esilio”; or of him whom Dante stood beside, “come ’l frate che
confessa lo perfido assassin?” 6 Shakespeare and
Alighieri knew men better than most of us, I presume! They were both in the
midst of the main struggle between the temporal and spiritual powers. They
had an opinion, we may guess. But where is it? Bring it into court! Put
Shakespeare’s or Dante’s creed into articles, and send it up
for trial by the Ecclesiastical Courts.
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26. You will not be
able, I tell you again, for many and many a day, to come at the real purposes
and teaching of these great men; but a very little honest study of them will
enable you to perceive that what you took for your own “judgment” was mere
chance prejudice, and drifted, helpless, entangled weed of castaway thought:
nay, you will see that most men’s minds are indeed little better than rough
heath wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, partly overgrown
with pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind-sown herbage of evil surmise; that
the first thing you have to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and
scornfully to set fire to this; burn all the jungle into
wholesome ash heaps, and then plough and sow. All the true literary work
before you, for life, must begin with obedience to that order, “Break up your
fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.”
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27. II. 7—Having then faithfully
listened to the great teachers, that you may enter into their Thoughts, you
have yet this higher advance to make;—you have to enter into their Hearts. As
you go to them first for clear sight, so you must stay with them, that you
may share at last their just and mighty Passion. Passion, or “sensation.” I
am not afraid of the word; still less of the thing. You have heard many
outcries against sensation lately; but, I can tell you, it is not less
sensation we want, but more. The ennobling difference between one man and
another,—between one animal and another,—is precisely in this, that one feels
more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not be easily
got for us; if we were earthworms, liable at every instant to be cut in two
by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us. But, being
human creatures, it isgood for us; nay, we are only human in so
far as we are sensitive, and our honor is precisely in proportion to our
passion.
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28. You know I said of
that great and pure society of the dead, that it would allow “no vain or
vulgar person to enter there.” What do you think I meant by a “vulgar”
person? What do you yourselves mean by “vulgarity”? You will find it a
fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies
in want of sensation. Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained
and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity,
there is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of
every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure,
without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart,
in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar;
they are forever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of
sympathy,—of quick understanding,—of all that, in deep insistence on the
common, but most accurate term, may be called the “tact” or “touch—faculty”
of body and soul; that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure
woman has above all creatures;—fineness and fullness of sensation beyond
reason;—the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but determine
what is true: it is the God-given passion of humanity which alone can
recognize what God has made good.
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29. We come then to
the great concourse of the Dead, not merely to know from them what is True,
but chiefly to feel with them what is just. Now, to feel with them, we must
be like them; and none of us can become that without pains. As the true
knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge,—not the first thought that
comes,—so the true passion is disciplined and tested passion,—not the first
passion that comes. The first that come are the vain, the false, the
treacherous; if you yield to them they will lead you wildly and far in vain
pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true purpose and no true
passion left. Not that any feeling possible to humanity is in itself wrong,
but only wrong when undisciplined. Its nobility is in its force and justice;
it is wrong when it is weak, and felt for paltry cause. There is a mean
wonder, as of a child who sees a juggler tossing golden balls, and this is
base, if you will. But do you think that the wonder is ignoble, or the
sensation less, with which every human soul is called to watch the golden
balls of heaven tossed through the night by the Hand that made them? There is
a mean curiosity, as of a child opening a forbidden door, or a servant prying
into her master’s business;—and a noble curiosity, questioning, in the front
of danger, the source of the great river beyond the sand,—the place of the
great continents beyond the sea;—a nobler curiosity still, which questions of
the source of the River of Life, and of the space of the Continent of
Heaven,—things which “the angels desire to look into.” So the anxiety is
ignoble, with which you linger over the course and catastrophe of an idle
tale; but do you think the anxiety is less, or greater, with which you watch,
or ought to watch, the dealings of fate and destiny with the
life of an agonized nation? Alas! it is the narrowness, selfishness,
minuteness, of your sensation that you have to deplore in England at this
day;—sensation which spends itself in bouquets and speeches; in revelings and
junketings; in sham fights and gay puppet shows, while you can look on and
see noble nations murdered, man by man, without an effort or a tear.
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30. I said
“minuteness” and “selfishness” of sensation, but in a word, I ought to have
said “injustice” or “unrighteousness” of sensation. For as in nothing is a
gentleman better to be discerned from a vulgar person, so in nothing is a
gentle nation (such nations have been) better to be discerned from a mob,
than in this,—that their feelings are constant and just, results of due contemplation,
and of equal thought. You can talk a mob into anything; its feelings may
be—usually are—on the whole, generous and right; but it has no foundation for
them, no hold of them; you may tease or tickle it into any, at your pleasure;
it thinks by infection, for the most part, catching an opinion like a cold,
and there is nothing so little that it will not roar itself wild about, when
the fit is on;—nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, when the fit
is past. But a gentleman’s, or a gentle nation’s, passions are just,
measured, and continuous. A great nation, for instance, does not spend its
entire national wits for a couple of months in weighing evidence of a single
ruffian’s having done a single murder; and for a couple of years see its own
children murder each other by their thousands or tens of thousands a day,
considering only what the effect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and
caring nowise to determine which side of battle is in the wrong. Neither does
a great nation send its poor little boys to jail for stealing six walnuts;
and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds or thousands with a bow, and
its bankers, rich with poor men’s savings, to close their doors “under
circumstances over which they have no control,” with a “by your leave”; and
large landed estates to be bought by men who have made their money by going
with armed steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon’s
mouth, and altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the common
highwayman’s demand of “your money or your life,” into that
of “your money and your life.” Neither does a great nation
allow the lives of its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever,
and rotted out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra
per week to its landlords; 8and then debate, with
driveling tears, and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought not piously to
save, and nursingly cherish, the lives of its murderers. Also, a great
nation, having made up its mind that hanging is quite the wholesomest process
for its homicides in general, can yet with mercy distinguish between the
degrees of guilt in homicides; and does not yelp like a pack of frost-pinched
wolf-cubs on the blood-track of an unhappy crazed boy, or gray-haired
clodpate Othello, “perplexed i’ the extreme,” at the very moment that it is
sending a Minister of the Crown to make polite speeches to a man who is
bayoneting young girls in their father’s sight, and killing noble youths in
cool blood, faster than a country butcher kills lambs in spring. And, lastly,
a great nation does not mock Heaven and its Powers, by pretending belief in a
revelation which asserts the love of money to be the root of all evil,
and declaring, at the same time, that it is actuated, and intends to be
actuated, in all chief national deeds and measures, by no other love.
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31. My friends, I do
not know why any of us should talk about reading. We want some sharper
discipline than that of reading; but, at all events, be assured, we cannot
read. No reading is possible for a people with its mind in this state. No
sentence of any great writer is intelligible to them. It is simply and
sternly impossible for the English public, at this moment, to understand any
thoughtful writing,—so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of
avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse than this incapacity
of thought; it is not corruption of the inner nature; we ring true still,
when anything strikes home to us; and though the idea that everything should
“pay” has infected our every purpose so deeply, that even when we would play
the good Samaritan, we never take out our two pence and give them to the host
without saying, “When I come again, thou shalt give me four pence,” there is
a capacity of noble passion left in our hearts’ core. We show it in our
work,—in our war,—even in those unjust domestic affections which make us
furious at a small private wrong, while we are polite to a boundless public
one: we are still industrious to the last hour of the day, though we add the
gambler’s fury to the laborer’s patience; we are still brave to the death,
though incapable of discerning true cause for battle; and are still true in
affection to our own flesh, to the death, as the sea-monsters are, and the
rock-eagles. And there is hope for a nation while this can be still said of
it. As long as it holds its life in its hand, ready to give it for its honor
(though a foolish honor), for its love (though a selfish love), and for its
business (though a base business), there is hope for it. But hope only; for
this instinctive, reckless virtue cannot last. No nation can last, which has
made a mob of itself, however generous at heart. It must discipline its passions,
and direct them, or they will discipline it, one day, with
scorpion whips. Above all a nation cannot last as a money-making mob: it
cannot with impunity,—it cannot with existence,—go on despising literature,
despising science, despising art, despising nature, despising compassion, and
concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you think these are harsh or wild words?
Have patience with me but a little longer. I will prove their truth to you,
clause by clause.
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32. I.—I say first we
have despised literature. What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much
do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as
compared with what we spend on our horses? If a man spends lavishly on his
library you call him mad—a bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a
horsemaniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do
not hear of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower still,
how much do you think the contents of the bookshelves of the United Kingdom,
public and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents of its
wine-cellars? What position would its expenditure on literature take, as
compared with its expenditure on luxurious eating? We talk of food for the
mind, as of food for the body; now a good book contains such food
inexhaustibly; it is a provision for life, and for the best part of us; yet
how long most people would look at the best book before they would give the
price of a large turbot for it! though there have been men who have pinched their
stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose libraries were cheaper to
them, I think, in the end, than most men’s dinners are. We are few of us put
to such trial, and more the pity; for, indeed, a precious thing is all the
more precious to us if it has been won by work or economy; and if public
libraries were half as costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part
of what bracelets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspect
there was good in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling; whereas the
very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book
is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not
worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and reread, and loved,
and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want
in it as a soldier can seize the weapon he needs in an armory, or a housewife
bring the spice she needs from her store. Bread of flour is good: but there
is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book; and the family
must be poor indeed which, once in their lives, cannot, for such multipliable
barley-loaves, pay their baker’s bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and
we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other’s books out of
circulating libraries!
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33. II.—I say we have
despised science. “What!” you exclaim, “are we not foremost in all discovery, 9 and
is not the whole world giddy by reason, or unreason, of our inventions?” Yes;
but do you suppose that is national work? That work is all done in
spite of the nation; by private people’s zeal and money. We are glad
enough, indeed, to make our profit of science; we snap up anything in the way
of a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly enough; but if the
scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to us,that is another
story. What have we publicly done for science? We are obliged to know what
o’clock it is, for the safety of our ships, and therefore we pay for an
observatory; and we allow ourselves, in the person of our Parliament, to be
annually tormented into doing something, in a slovenly way, for the British
Museum; sullenly apprehending that to be a place for keeping stuffed birds in,
to amuse our children. If anybody will pay for his own telescope, and resolve
another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it were our own; if one
in ten thousand of our hunting squires suddenly perceives that the earth was
indeed made to be something else than a portion for foxes, and burrows in it
himself, and tells us where the gold is, and where the coals, we understand
that there is some use in that; and very properly knight him; but is the
accident of his having found out how to employ himself usefully any credit
to us? (The negation of such discovery among his brother
squires may perhaps be some discredit to us, if we would consider
of it.) But if you doubt these generalities, here is one fact for us all to
meditate upon, illustrative of our love of science. Two years ago there was a
collection of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria; the best in
existence, containing many specimens unique for perfectness, and one unique
as an example of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being
announced by that fossil.) This collection, of which the mere market worth,
among private buyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve
hundred pounds, was offered to the English nation for seven hundred; but we
would not give seven hundred, and the whole series would have been in the
Munich Museum at this moment, if Professor Owen 10 had not with
loss of his own time, and patient tormenting of the British public in person
of its representatives, got leave to give four hundred pounds at once, and
himself become answerable for the other three! which the said public will
doubtless pay him eventually, but sulkily, and caring nothing about the
matter all the while; only always ready to cackle if any credit comes of it.
Consider, I beg of you, arithmetically, what this fact means. Your annual
expenditure for public purposes (a third of it for military apparatus) is at
least fifty millions. Now 700l. is to 50,000,000l. roughly,
as seven pence to two thousand pounds. Suppose, then, a gentleman of unknown
income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured from the fact that he spent
two thousand a year on his park-walls and footmen only, professes himself
fond of science; and that one of his servants comes eagerly to tell him that
an unique collection of fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to
be had for the sum of seven pence sterling; and that the gentleman, who is
fond of science, and spends two thousand a year on his park, answers, after
keeping his servant waiting several months, “Well! I’ll give you four pence
for them, if you will be answerable for the extra three pence yourself, till
next year!”
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34. III.—I say you
have despised Art! “What!” you again answer, “have we not Art exhibitions,
miles long? and do we not pay thousands of pounds for single pictures? and
have we not Art schools and institutions, more than ever nation had before?”
Yes, truly, but all that is for the sake of the shop. You would fain sell
canvas as well as coals, and crockery as well as iron; you would take every
other nation’s bread out of its mouth if you could; 11 not being able
to do that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thoroughfares of the world,
like Ludgate apprentices, screaming to every passer-by, “What d’ye lack?” You
know nothing of your own faculties or circumstances; you fancy that, among
your damp, flat fields of clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as the
Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or the Italian under his volcanic
cliffs;—that Art may be learned as bookkeeping is, and when learned, will
give you more books to keep. You care for pictures, absolutely, no more than
you do for the bills pasted on your dead walls. There is always room on the
walls for the bills to be read,—never for the pictures to be seen. You do not
know what pictures you have (by repute) in the country, nor whether they are
false or true, nor whether they are taken care of or not; in foreign
countries, you calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the world rotting
in abandoned wreck—(in Venice you saw the Austrian guns deliberately pointed
at the palaces containing them), and if you heard that all the fine pictures
in Europe were made into sand-bags to-morrow on the Austrian forts, it would
not trouble you so much as the chance of a brace or two of game less in your
own bags, in a day’s shooting. That is your national love of Art.
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35. IV.—You have
despised Nature; that is to say, all the deep and sacred sensations of
natural scenery. The French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of
France; you have made race-courses of the cathedrals of the earth. Your one conception
of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off
their altars. 12 You have put a
railroad bridge over the fall of Schaffhausen. You have tunneled the cliffs
of Lucerne by Tell’s chapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake
of Geneva; there is not a quiet valley in England that you have not filled
with bellowing fire; there is no particle left of English land which you have
not trampled coal ashes into 13—nor any foreign city
in which the spread of your presence is not marked among its fair old streets
and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new hotels and perfumers’
shops: the Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently,
you look upon as soaped poles in a bear garden, which you set yourselves to
climb, and slide down again with “shrieks of delight.” When you are past
shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, you
fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red
with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough of
self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrowfullest spectacles I have
ever seen in humanity, taking the deep inner significance of them, are the
English mobs in the valley of Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty
howitzers; and the Swiss vintagers of Zurich expressing their Christian
thanks for the gift of the vine, by assembling in knots in the “towers of the
vineyards,” and slowly loading and firing horse-pistols from morning till
evening. It is pitiful to have dim conceptions of duty; more pitiful, it
seems to me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth.
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36. Lastly. You
despise compassion. There is no need of words of mine for proof of this. I
will merely print one of the newspaper paragraphs which I am in the habit of
cutting out and throwing into my store-drawer; here is one from a Daily
Telegraph of an early date this year (1867) (date which, though by
me carelessly left unmarked, is easily discoverable; for on the back of the
slip, there is the announcement that “yesterday the seventh of the special
services of this year was performed by the Bishop of Ripon in St. Paul’s”);
it relates only one of such facts as happen now daily; this, by chance,
having taken a form in which it came before the corner….
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“An inquiry was held
on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy coroner, at the White Horse Tavern, Christ
Church, Spitalfields, respecting the death of Michael Collins, aged 58 years.
Mary Collins, a miserable-looking woman, said that she lived with the
deceased and his son in a room at 2, Cobb’s Court, Christ Church. Deceased
was a ‘translator’ of boots. Witness went out and bought old boots; deceased
and his son made them into good ones, and then witness sold them for what she
could get at the shops, which was very little indeed. Deceased and his son
used to work night and day to try and get a little bread and tea, and pay for
the room (2s. a week), so as to keep the home together. On Friday
night week, deceased got up from his bench and began to shiver. He threw down
the boots, saying, “Somebody else must finish them when I am gone, for I can
do no more.’ There was no fire, and he said, ‘I would be better if I was
warm.’ Witness therefore took two pairs of translated boots 14 to sell at the
shop, but she could only get 14d. for the two pairs, for the
people at the shop said, ‘We must have our profit.’ Witness got 14 lbs. of
coal and a little tea and bread. Her son sat up the whole night to make the
‘translations,’ to get money, but deceased died on Saturday morning. The
family never had enough to eat.—Coroner: ‘It seems to me deplorable that you
did not go into the workhouse.’ Witness: ‘We wanted the comforts of our
little home.’ a juror asked what the comforts were, for he only saw a little
straw in the corner of the room, the windows of which were broken. The
witness began to cry, and said that they had a quilt and other little things.
The deceased said he never would go into the workhouse. In summer, when the
season was good, they sometimes made as much as 10s. profit in a
week. They then always saved towards the next week, which was generally a bad
one. In winter they made not half so much. For three years they had been
getting from bad to worse.—Cornelius Collins said that he had assisted his
father since 1847. They used to work so far into the night that both nearly
lost their eyesight. Witness now had a film over his eyes. Five years ago
deceased applied to the parish for aid. The relieving officer gave him a
4-lb. loaf, and told him if he came again he should ‘get the stones.’ 15 That
disgusted deceased, and he would have nothing to do with them since. They got
worse and worse until last Friday week, when they had not even a half penny
to buy a candle. Deceased then lay down on the straw, and said he could not live
till morning.—A juror: ‘You are dying of starvation yourself, and you ought
to go into the house until the summer.’ Witness: ‘If we went in we should
die. When we come out in the summer we should be like people dropped from the
sky. No one would know us, and we would not have even a room. I could work
now if I had food, for my sight would get better.’ Dr. G. P. Walker said
deceased died from syncope, from exhaustion, from want of food. The deceased
had had no bedclothes. For four months he had had nothing but bread to eat.
There was not a particle of fat in the body. There was no disease, but if
there had been medical attendance, he might have survived the syncope or
fainting. The coroner having remarked upon the painful nature of the case,
the jury returned the following verdict: ‘That deceased died from exhaustion,
from want of food and the common necessaries of life; also through want of
medical aid.’”
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37. “Why would witness
not go into the workhouse?” you ask. Well, the poor seem to have a prejudice
against the workhouse which the rich have not; for, of course, every one who
takes a pension from Government goes into the workhouse on a grand scale; 16 only
the workhouses for the rich do not involve the idea of work, and should be
called play-houses. But the poor like to die independently, it appears;
perhaps if we made the play-houses for them pretty and pleasant enough, or
gave them their pensions at home, and allowed them a little introductory
peculation with the public money, their minds might be reconciled to the
conditions. Meantime, here are the facts: we make our relief either so
insulting to them, or so painful, that they rather die than take it at our
hands; or, for third alternative, we leave them so untaught and foolish that
they starve like brute creatures, wild and dumb, not knowing what to do, or
what to ask. I say, you despise compassion; if you did not, such a newspaper
paragraph would be as impossible in a Christian country as a deliberate
assassination permitted in its public streets. 17“Christian,” did I
say? Alas, if we were but wholesomely un-Christian, it would be impossible;
it is our imaginary Christianity that helps us to commit these crimes, for we
revel and luxuriate in our faith, for the lewd sensation of it; dressing it
up, like everything else, in fiction. The dramatic Christianity of the organ
and aisle, of dawn-service and twilight-revival—the Christianity which we do
not fear to mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our play about the devil,
in our Satanellas,—Roberts,—Fausts; chanting hymns through traceried windows
for background effect, and artistically modulating the “Dio” through variation
on variation of mimicked prayer (while we distribute tracts, next day, for
the benefit of uncultivated swearers, upon what we suppose to be the
signification of the Third Commandment);—this gas-lighted, and gas-inspired,
Christianity, we are triumphant in, and draw back the hem of our robes from
the touch of the heretics who dispute it. But to do a piece of common
Christian righteousness in a plain English word or deed; to make Christian
law any rule of life, and found one National act or hope thereon,—we know too
well what our faith comes to for that! You might sooner get lightning out of
incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English
religion. You had better get rid of the smoke, and the organ-pipes, both;
leave them, and the Gothic windows, and the painted glass, to the
property-man; give up your carburetted hydrogen ghost in one healthy
expiration, and look after Lazarus at the door-step. For there is a true
Church wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and that is the only holy
or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall be.
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38. All these
pleasures, then, and all these virtues, I repeat, you nationally despise. You
have, indeed, men among you who do not; by whose work, by whose strength, by
whose life, by whose death, you live, and never thank them. Your wealth, your
amusement, your pride, would all be alike impossible, but for those whom you
scorn or forget. The policeman, who is walking up and down the black lane all
night to watch the guilt you have created there, and may have his brains
beaten out, and be maimed for life, at any moment, and never be thanked; the
sailor wrestling with the sea’s rage; the quiet student poring over his book
or his vial; the common worker, without praise, and nearly without bread, fulfilling
his task as your horses drag your carts, hopeless, and spurned of all: these
are the men by whom England lives; but they are not the nation; they are only
the body and nervous force of it, acting still from old habit in a convulsive
perseverance, while the mind is gone. Our National wish and purpose are to be
amused; our National religion is the performance of church ceremonies, and
preaching of soporific truths (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work,
while we amuse ourselves; and the necessity for this amusement is fastening
on us as a feverous disease of parched throat and wandering eyes—senseless,
dissolute, merciless. How literally that word Dis-Ease, the
Negation and impossibility of Ease, expresses the entire moral state of our
English Industry and its Amusements!
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39. When men are
rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the
color-petals out of a fruitful flower;—when they are faithfully helpful and
compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and
vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse of the body. But now, having no
true business, we pour our whole masculine energy into the false business of
money-making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed
up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily
and darkly, as the idolatrous Jews with their pictures on cavern walls, which
men had to dig to detect. The justice we do not execute, we mimic in the
novel and on the stage; for the beauty we destroy in nature, we substitute
the metamorphosis of the pantomime, and (the human nature of us imperatively
requiring awe and sorrow of some kind) for the noble grief we should have
borne with our fellows, and the pure tears we should have wept with them, we
gloat over the pathos of the police court, and gather the night-dew of the
grave.
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40. It is difficult to
estimate the true significance of these things; the facts are frightful
enough;—the measure of national fault involved in them is, perhaps, not as
great as it would at first seem. We permit, or cause, thousands of deaths
daily, but we mean no harm; we set fire to houses, and ravage peasants’
fields; yet we should be sorry to find we had injured anybody. We are still
kind at heart; still capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers,
at the end of his long life, having had much power with the public, being
plagued in some serious matter by a reference to “public opinion,” uttered
the impatient exclamation, “The public is just a great baby!” And the reason
that I have allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix themselves up
with an inquiry into methods of reading, is that, the more I see of our
national faults and miseries, the more they resolve themselves into
conditions of childish illiterateness, and want of education in the most
ordinary habits of thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, not
dullness of brain, which we have to lament; but an unreachable schoolboy’s
recklessness, only differing from the true schoolboy’s in its incapacity of
being helped, because it acknowledges no master.
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41. There is a curious
type of us given in one of the lovely, neglected works of the last of our
great painters. It is a drawing of Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, and of its
brook, and valley, and hills, and folded morning sky beyond. And unmindful
alike of these, and of the dead who have left these for other valleys and for
other skies, a group of schoolboys have piled their little books upon a
grave, to strike them off with stones. So, also, we play with the words of
the dead that would teach us, and strike them far from us with our bitter,
reckless will; little thinking that those leaves which the wind scatters had
been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an enchanted
vault—nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings, who would awake for
us, and walk with us, if we knew but how to call them by their names. How
often, even if we lift the marble entrance gate, do we but wander among those
old kings in their repose, and finger the robes they lie in, and stir the
crowns on their foreheads; and still they are silent to us, and seem but a
dusty imagery; because we know not the incantation of the heart that would
wake them;—which, if they once heard, they would start up to meet us in their
power of long ago, narrowly to look upon us, and consider us; and, as the
fallen kings of Hades meet the newly fallen, saying, “Art thou also become
weak as we—art thou also become one of us?” so would these kings, with their
undimmed, unshaken diadems, meet us, saying, “Art thou also become pure and
mighty of heart as we—art thou also become one of us?”
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42. Mighty of heart,
mighty of mind—“magnanimous”—to be this, is, indeed, to be great in life; to
become this increasingly, is, indeed, to “advance in life,”—in life
itself—not in the trappings of it. My friends, do you remember that old Scythian
custom, when the head of a house died? How he was dressed in his finest
dress, and set in his chariot, and carried about to his friends’ houses; and
each of them placed him at his table’s head, and all feasted in his presence?
Suppose it were offered to you, in plain words, as it is offered to you in
dire facts, that you should gain this Scythian honor, gradually, while you
yet thought yourself alive. Suppose the offer were this: You shall die
slowly; your blood shall daily grow cold, your flesh petrify, your heart beat
at last only as a rusted group of iron valves. Your life shall fade from you,
and sink through the earth into the ice of Caina; but, day by day, your body
shall be dressed more gaily, and set in higher chariots, and have more orders
on its breast-crowns on its head, if you will. Men shall bow before it, stare
and shout round it, crowd after it up and down the streets; build palaces for
it, feast with it at their tables’ heads all the night long; your soul shall
stay enough within it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the golden
dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the skull;—no
more. Would you take the offer, verbally made by the death-angel? Would the
meanest among us take it, think you? Yet practically and verily we grasp at
it, every one of us, in a measure; many of us grasp at it in its fullness of
horror. Every man accepts it, who desires to advance in life without knowing
what life is; who means only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen,
and more fortune, and more public honor, and—not more personal
soul. He only is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose
blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into Living
peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of
the earth—they, and they only. All other kingships, so far as they are true,
are only the practical issue and expression of theirs; if less than this,
they are either dramatic royalties,—costly shows, set off, indeed, with real
jewels instead of tinsel,—but still only the toys of nations; or else they
are no royalties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere active and practical
issue of national folly; for which reason I have said of them elsewhere,
“Visible governments are the toys of some nations, the diseases of others,
the harness of some, the burdens of more.”
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43. But I have no
words for the wonder with which I hear Kinghood still spoken of, even among
thoughtful men, as if governed nations were a personal property, and might be
bought and sold, or otherwise acquired, as sheep, of whose flesh their king
was to feed, and whose fleece he was to gather; as if Achilles’ indignant
epithet of base kings, “people-eating,” were the constant and proper title of
all monarchs; and enlargement of a king’s dominion meant the same thing as
the increase of a private man’s estate! Kings who think so, however powerful,
can no more be the true kings of the nation than gadflies are the kings of a
horse; they suck it, and may drive it wild, but do not guide it. They, and
their courts, and their armies are, if one could see clearly, only a large
species of marsh mosquito, with bayonet proboscis and melodious,
band-mastered trumpeting in the summer air; the twilight being, perhaps,
sometimes fairer, but hardly more wholesome, for its glittering mists of
midge companies. The true kings, meanwhile, rule quietly, if at all, and hate
ruling; too many of them make “il gran rifiúto”; 18 and if they do not,
the mob, as soon as they are likely to become useful to it, is pretty sure to
make its “gran rifiúto” of them.
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44. Yet the visible
king may also be a true one, some day, if ever day comes when he will
estimate his dominion by the force of it,—not the
geographical boundaries. It matters very little whether Trent cuts you a
cantel out here, or Rhine rounds you a castle less there. But it does matter
to you, king of men, whether you can verily say to this man, “Go,” and he
goeth; and to another, “Come,” and he cometh. Whether you can turn your
people, as you can Trent—and where it is that you bid them come, and where
go. It matters to you, king of men, whether your people hate you, and die by
you, or love you, and live by you. You may measure your dominion by
multitudes better than by miles; and count degrees of love latitude, not
from, but to, a wonderfully warm and indefinite equator.
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45. Measure! nay, you
cannot measure. Who shall measure the difference between the power of those
who “do and teach,” and who are greatest in the kingdoms of earth, as of
heaven—and the power of those who undo, and consume—whose power, at the
fullest, is only the power of the moth and the rust? Strange! to think how
the Moth-kings lay up treasures for the moth; and the Rusk-kings, who are to
their peoples’ strength as rust to armor, lay up treasures for the rust; and
the Robber-kings, treasures for the robber; but how few kings have ever laid
up treasures that needed no guarding—treasures of which, the more thieves
there were, the better! Broidered robe, only to be rent; helm and sword, only
to be dimmed; jewel and gold, only to be scattered;—there have been three
kinds of kings who have gathered these. Suppose there ever should arise a
Fourth order of kings, who had read, in some obscure writing of long ago,
that there was a Fourth kind of treasure, which the jewel and gold could not
equal, neither should it be valued with pure gold. A web made fair in the
weaving, by Athena’s shuttle; an armor, forged in divine fire by Vulcanian
force—a gold to be mined in the sun’s red heart, where he sets over the
Delphian cliffs;—deep-pictured tissue, impenetrable armor, potable gold!—the
three great Angels of Conduct, Toil, and Thought, still calling to us, and
waiting at the posts of our doors, to lead us, with their winged power, and
guide us, with their unerring eyes, by the path which no fowl knoweth, and
which the vulture’s eye has not seen! Suppose kings should ever arise, who
heard and believed this word, and at last gathered and brought forth
treasures of—Wisdom—for their people?
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46. Think what an
amazing business that would be! How inconceivable, in the state of our
present national wisdom! That we should bring up our peasants to a book
exercise instead of a bayonet exercise!—organize, drill, maintain with pay,
and good generalship, armies of thinkers, instead of armies of stabbers!—find
national amusement in reading-rooms as well as rifle—grounds; give prizes for
a fair shot at a fact, as well as for a leaden splash on a target. What an
absurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, that the wealth of the capitalists
of civilized nations should ever come to support literature instead of war!
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47. Have yet patience
with me, while I read you a single sentence out of the only book, properly to
be called a book, that I have yet written myself, the one that will stand (if
anything stand) surest and longest of all work of mine.
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“It is one very awful
form of the operation of wealth in Europe that it is entirely capitalists’
wealth that supports unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much money to
support them; for most of the men who wage such, wage them gratis; but for an
unjust war, men’s bodies and souls have both to be bought; and the best tools
of war for them besides, which make such war costly to the maximum; not to
speak of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations which
have not grace nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to buy an hour’s
peace of mind with; as, at present, France and England, purchasing of each
other ten millions’ sterling worth of consternation, annually (a remarkably
light crop, half thorns and half aspen leaves, sown, reaped, and granaried by
the ‘science’ of the modern political economist, teaching covetousness
instead of truth). And, all unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage
of the enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these loans are repaid by
subsequent taxation of the people, who appear to have no will in the matter,
the capitalists’ will being the primary root of the war; but its real root is
the covetousness of the whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith,
frankness, or justice, and bringing about, therefore, in due time, his own
separate loss and punishment to each person.”
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48. France and England
literally, observe, buy panic of each other; they pay, each of them, for ten
thousand thousand pounds’ worth of terror, a year. Now suppose, instead of
buying these ten millions’ worth of panic annually, they made up their minds
to be at peace with each other, and buy ten millions’ worth of knowledge
annually; and that each nation spent its ten thousand thousand pounds a year
in founding royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal museums, royal
gardens, and places of rest. Might it not be better somewhat for both French
and English?
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49. It will be long,
yet, before that comes to pass. Nevertheless, I hope it will not be long
before royal or national libraries will be founded in every considerable
city, with a royal series of books in them; the same series in every one of
them, chosen books, the best in every kind, prepared for that national series
in the most perfect way possible; their text printed all on leaves of equal
size, broad of margin, and divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand,
beautiful, and strong, and thorough as examples of binders’ work; and that
these great libraries will be accessible to all clean and orderly persons at
all times of the day and evening; strict law being enforced for this
cleanliness and quietness.
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50. I could shape for
you other plans for art galleries, and for natural history galleries, and for
many precious—many, it seems to me, needful—things; but this book plan is the
easiest and needfullest, and would prove a considerable tonic to what we call
our British constitution, which has fallen dropsical of late, and has an evil
thirst, and evil hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You have got its corn
laws repealed for it; try if you cannot get corn laws established for it
dealing in a better bread;—bread made of that old enchanted Arabian grain,
the Sesame, which opens doors;—doors not of robbers’, but of Kings’
Treasuries.
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Note to
§30.—Respecting the increase of rent by the deaths of the poor, for evidence
of which see the preface to the Medical officers’ report to the Privy
Council, just published, there are suggestions in its preface which will make
some stir among us, I fancy, respecting which let me note these points
following:—
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There are two theories
on the subject of land now abroad, and in contention; both false.
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The first is that, by
Heavenly law, there have always existed, and must continue to exist, a
certain number of hereditarily sacred persons to whom the earth, air, and
water of the world belong, as personal property; of which earth, air, and
water, these persons may, at their pleasure, permit, or forbid, the rest of
the human race to eat, breathe, or to drink. This theory is not for many
years longer tenable. The adverse theory is that a division of the land of
the world among the mob of the world would immediately elevate the said mob
into sacred personages; that houses would then build themselves, and corn
grow of itself; and that everybody would be able to live, without doing any
work for his living. This theory would also be found highly untenable in
practice.
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It will, however,
require some rough experiments and rougher catastrophes, before the
generality of persons will be convinced that no law concerning anything,
least of all concerning land, for either holding or dividing it, or renting
it high, or renting it low—would be of the smallest ultimate use to the
people—so long as the general contest for life, and for the means of life,
remains one of mere brutal competition. That contest, in an unprincipled
nation, will take one deadly form or another, whatever laws you make against
it. For instance, it would be an entirely wholesome law for England, if it
could be carried, that maximum limits should be assigned to incomes according
to classes; and that every nobleman’s income should be paid to him as a fixed
salary or pension by the nation; and not squeezed by him in variable sums, at
discretion, out of the tenants of his land. But if you could get such a law
passed to-morrow, and if, which would be farther necessary, you could fix the
value of the assigned incomes by making a given weight of pure bread for a
given sum, a twelvemonth would not pass before another currency would have
been tacitly established, and the power of accumulative wealth would have
reasserted itself in some other article, or some other imaginary sign. There
is only one cure for public distress—and that is public education, directed
to make men thoughtful, merciful, and just. There are, indeed, many laws
conceivable which would gradually better and strengthen the national temper;
but, for the most part, they are such as the national temper must be much
bettered before it would bear. A nation in its youth may be helped by laws,
as a weak child by backboards, but when it is old it cannot that way
straighten its crooked spine.
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And besides, the
problem of land, at its worst, is a bye one; distribute the earth as you
will, the principal question remains inexorable,—Who is to dig it? Which of
us, in brief words, is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest—and for
what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay? Who is
to do no work, and for what pay? And there are curious moral and religious
questions connected with these. How far is it lawful to suck a portion of the
soul out of a great many persons, in order to put the abstracted psychical
quantities together and make one very beautiful or ideal soul? If we had to
deal with mere blood, instead of spirit (and the thing might literally be
done—as it has been done with infants before now)—so that it were possible by
taking a certain quantity of blood from the arms of a given number of the
mob, and putting it all into one person, to make a more azure blooded
gentleman of him, the thing would of course be managed; but secretly, I
should conceive. But now, because it is brain and soul that we abstract, not
visible blood, it can be done quite openly, and we live, we gentlemen, on
delicatest prey, after the manner of weasels; that is to say, we keep a
certain number of clowns digging and ditching, and generally stupefied, in order
that we, being fed gratis, may have all the thinking and feeling to
ourselves. Yet there is a great deal to be said for this. A highly-bred and
trained English, French, Austrian, or Italian gentleman (much more a lady) is
a great production,—a better production than most statues; being beautifully
colored as well as shaped, and plus all the brains; a glorious thing to look
at, a wonderful thing to talk to; and you cannot have it, any more than a
pyramid or a church, but by sacrifice of much contributed life. And it is,
perhaps, better to build a beautiful human creature than a beautiful dome or
steeple—and more delightful to look up reverently to a creature far above us,
than to a wall; only the beautiful human creature will have some duties to do
in return—duties of living belfry and rampart—of which presently.
|
Note
1. This
lecture was given December 6, 1864, at Rusholme Town Hall, Manchester, in aid
of a library fund for the Rusholme Institute.
|
Note
2. Note
this sentence carefully, and compare the “Queen of the Air,” [Section]
106.
|
Note
3. 2
Peter, iii. 5–7.
|
Note
4. Compare
the 13th Letter in “Time and Tide.”
|
Note
5. Modern
“education” for the most part signifies giving people the faculty of thinking
wrong on every conceivable subject of importance to them.
|
Note
6. “Inferno,”
xxiii, 125, 126; xix. 49, 50.
|
Note
7. Compare
¶13 above.
|
Note
8. See
note at end of lecture. I have put it in large type, because the course of
matters since it was written has made it perhaps better worth attention.
|
Note
9. Since
this was written, the answer has become definitely—No; we have surrendered
the field of Arctic discovery to the Continental nations, as being ourselves
too poor to pay for ships.
|
Note
10. I
state this fact without Professor Owen’s permission: which of course he could
not with propriety have granted, had I asked it; but I consider it so
important that the public should be aware of the fact that I do what seems to
be right, though rude.
|
Note
11. That
was our real idea of “Free Trade”—“All the trade to myself.” You find now
that by “competition” other people can manage to sell something as well as
you—and now we call for Protection again. Wretches!
|
Note
12. I
meant that the beautiful places of the world—Switzerland, Italy, South Germany,
and so on—are, indeed, the truest cathedrals—places to be reverent in, and to
worship in; and that we only care to drive through them, and to eat and drink
at their most sacred places.
|
Note
13. I
was singularly struck, some years ago, by finding all the river shore at
Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in its earth, from the mere drift of soot-laden
air from places many miles away.
|
Note
14. One
of the things which we must very resolutely enforce, for the good of all
classes, in our future arrangements, must be that they wear no “translated”
articles of dress.
|
Note
15. This
abbreviation of the penalty of useless labor is curiously coincident in
verbal form with a certain passage which some of us may remember. It may,
perhaps, be well to preserve beside this paragraph another cutting out of my
store-drawer, from the Morning Post, of about a parallel date, Friday, March
10th, 1865:—“The salons of Mme. C——, who did the honors with
clever imitative grace and elegance, were crowded with princes, dukes, marquises,
and counts—in fact, with the same male company as one meets
at the parties of the Princess Metternich and Madame Drouyn de Lhuys. Some
English peers and members of Parliament were present, and appeared to enjoy
the animated and dazzlingly improper scene. On the second floor the
supper-tables were loaded with every delicacy of the season. That your
readers may form some idea of the dainty fare of the Parisian demi-monde, I
copy the menu of the supper, which was served to all the guests (about 200)
seated at four o’clock. Choice Yquem, Johannisberg, Lafitte, Tokay, and
champagne of the finest vintages were served most lavishly throughout the
morning. After supper dancing was resumed with increased animation, and the
ball terminated with a chaîne diaboliqueand a cancan
d’enfer at seven in the morning. (Morning-service—‘Ere the fresh
lawns appeared, under the opening eyelids of the Morn.—’) Here is the menu:
‘Consommé de volaille à la Bagration; 16 hors-d’oeœuvres variés. Bouchées, à
la Talleyrand. Saumons froids, sauce Ravigote. Filets de boeœuf en Bellevue,
timbales milanaises chaudfroid de gibier. Dindes truffées. Pâtés de foies
gras, buissons d’écrevisses, salades vénétiennes, gelées blanches aux fruits,
gateaux mancini, parisiens et parisiennes. Fromages glacés. Ananas.
Dessert.’”
|
Note
16. Please
observe this statement, and think of it, and consider how it happens that a
poor old woman will be ashamed to take a shilling a week from the country—but
no one is ashamed to take a pension of a thousand a year.
|
Note
17. I
am heartily glad to see such a paper as the Pall Mall Gazette established;
for the power of the press in the hands of highly educated men, in
independent position, and of honest purpose, may, indeed, become all that it
has been hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its editor will, therefore, I doubt
not, pardon me, in that, by very reason of my respect for the journal, I do
not let pass unnoticed an article in its third number, page 5, which was
wrong in every word of it, with the intense wrongness which only an honest
man can achieve who has taken a false turn of thought in the outset, and is
following it, regardless of consequences. It contained at the end this
notable passage:—
“The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction—aye, and the bedsteads and blankets of affliction, are the very utmost that the law ought to give to outcasts merely as outcasts.”I merely put beside this expression of the gentlemanly mind of England in 1865, a part of the message which Isaiah was ordered to “lift up his voice like a trumpet” in declaring to the gentlemen of his day: “Ye fast for strife, and to smite with the fist of wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out (margin, ‘afflicted’) to thy house?” The falsehood on which the writer had mentally founded himself, as previously stated by him, was this: “To confound the functions of the dispensers of the poor-rates which those of the dispensers of a charitable institution is a great and pernicious error.” This sentence is so accurately and exquisitely wrong, that its substance must be thus reversed in our minds before we can deal with any existing problem of national distress. “To understand that the dispensers of the poor-rates are the almoners of the nation, and should distribute its alms with a gentleness and freedom of hand as much greater and franker than that possible to individual charity, as the collective national wisdom and power may be supposed greater than those of any single person, is the foundation of all law respecting pauperism.” (Since this was written the Pall Mall Gazette has become a mere party paper—like the rest; but it writes well, and does more good than mischief on the whole. |
Note
18. The
great renunciation.
|
Unit
III: Poetry
LUCY GRAY OR, SOLITUDE - William
Wordsworth
OFT I had heard of Lucy Gray:
And, when I crossed the wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.
No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor,
--The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!
You yet may spy the fawn at play,
The hare upon the green; 10
But the sweet face of Lucy Gray
Will never more be seen.
"To-night will be a stormy night--
You to the town must go;
And take a lantern, Child, to light
Your mother through the snow."
"That, Father! will I gladly do:
'Tis scarcely afternoon--
The minster-clock has just struck two,
And yonder is the moon!" 20
At this the Father raised his hook,
And snapped a faggot-band;
He plied his work;--and Lucy took
The lantern in her hand.
Not blither is the mountain roe:
With many a wanton stroke
Her feet disperse the powdery snow,
That rises up like smoke.
The storm came on before its time:
She wandered up and down; 30
And many a hill did Lucy climb:
But never reached the town.
The wretched parents all that night
Went shouting far and wide;
But there was neither sound nor sight
To serve them for a guide.
At day-break on a hill they stood
That overlooked the moor;
And thence they saw the bridge of wood,
A furlong from their door. 40
They wept--and, turning homeward, cried,
"In heaven we all shall meet;"
--When in the snow the mother spied
The print of Lucy's feet.
Then downwards from the steep hill's edge
They tracked the footmarks small;
And through the broken hawthorn hedge,
And by the long stone-wall;
And then an open field they crossed:
The marks were still the same; 50
They tracked them on, nor ever lost;
And to the bridge they came.
They followed from the snowy bank
Those footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank;
And further there were none!
--Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild. 60
O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
1799.
|
Wordsworth
was a defining member of the English Romantic Movement. Like other Romantics,
Wordsworth’s personality and poetry were deeply influenced by his love of
nature, especially by the sights and scenes of the Lake Country, in which he
spent most of his mature life. A profoundly earnest and sincere thinker, he
displayed a high seriousness tempered with tenderness and a love of simplicity.
The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
By Samuel Taylor
Coleridge
PART I
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din.'
He holds him with his skinny hand,
'There was a ship,' quoth he.
'Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
'The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.
Higher and higher every day,
Till over the mast at noon—'
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.
The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.
The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!
And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollo!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.'
'God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look'st thou so?'—With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
PART II
The Sun now rose upon the right:
Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the sea.
And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariner's hollo!
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!
Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
'Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
And some in dreams assurèd were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
PART III
There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.
At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist;
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.
A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared and neared:
As if it dodged a water-sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail! a sail!
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call:
Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in.
As they were drinking all.
See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel!
The western wave was all a-flame.
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.
And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face.
Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the
Sun,
Like restless gossameres?
Are those her ribs through which the
Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman's mate?
Her lips
were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.
The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
'The game is done! I've won! I've won!'
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out;
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.
We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
My life-blood seemed to sip!
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip—
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The hornèd Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.
One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.
Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.
The souls did from their bodies fly,—
They fled to bliss or woe!
And every soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my cross-bow!
PART IV
'I fear thee, ancient Mariner!
I fear thy skinny hand!
And thou art long, and lank, and brown,
As is the ribbed sea-sand.
I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand, so brown.'—
Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!
This body dropt not down.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay dead like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.
The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
Nor rot nor reek did they:
The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.
An orphan's curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside—
Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charmèd water burnt alway
A still and awful red.
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
PART V
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.
The silly buckets on the deck,
That had so long remained,
I dreamt that they were filled with dew;
And when I awoke, it rained.
My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
My garments all were dank;
Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
And still my body drank.
I moved, and could not feel my limbs:
I was so light—almost
I thought that I had died in sleep,
And was a blessed ghost.
And soon I heard a roaring wind:
It did not come anear;
But with its sound it shook the sails,
That were so thin and sere.
The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire-flags sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.
And the coming wind did roar more loud,
And the sails did sigh like sedge,
And the rain poured down from one black cloud;
The Moon was at its edge.
The thick black cloud was cleft, and still
The Moon was at its side:
Like waters shot from some high crag,
The lightning fell with never a jag,
A river steep and wide.
The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on!
Beneath the lightning and the Moon
The dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up-blew;
The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools—
We were a ghastly crew.
The body of my brother's son
Stood by me, knee to knee:
The body and I pulled at one rope,
But he said nought to me.
'I fear thee, ancient Mariner!'
Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest!
'Twas not those souls that fled in pain,
Which to their corses came again,
But a troop of spirits blest:
For when it dawned—they dropped their arms,
And clustered round the mast;
Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,
And from their bodies passed.
Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun;
Slowly the sounds came back again,
Now mixed, now one by one.
Sometimes a-dropping from the sky
I heard the sky-lark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are,
How they seemed to fill the sea and air
With their sweet jargoning!
And now 'twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel's song,
That makes the heavens be mute.
It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.
Till noon we quietly sailed on,
Yet never a breeze did breathe:
Slowly and smoothly went the ship,
Moved onward from beneath.
Under the keel nine fathom deep,
From the land of mist and snow,
The spirit slid: and it was he
That made the ship to go.
The sails at noon left off their tune,
And the ship stood still also.
The Sun, right up above the mast,
Had fixed her to the ocean:
But in a minute she 'gan stir,
With a short uneasy motion—
Backwards and forwards half her length
With a short uneasy motion.
Then like a pawing horse let go,
She made a sudden bound:
It flung the blood into my head,
And I fell down in a swound.
How long in that same fit I lay,
I have not to declare;
But ere my living life returned,
I heard and in my soul discerned
Two voices in the air.
'Is it he?' quoth one, 'Is this the man?
By him who died on cross,
With his cruel bow he laid full low
The harmless Albatross.
The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow.'
The other was a softer voice,
As soft as honey-dew:
Quoth he, 'The man hath penance done,
And penance more will do.'
PART VI
First Voice
'But tell me, tell me! speak again,
Thy soft response renewing—
What makes that ship drive on so fast?
What is the ocean doing?'
Second Voice
Still as a slave before his lord,
The ocean hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast—
If he may know which way to go;
For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see! how graciously
She looketh down on him.'
First Voice
'But why drives on that ship so fast,
Without or wave or wind?'
Second Voice
'The air is cut away before,
And closes from behind.
Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high!
Or we shall be belated:
For slow and slow that ship will go,
When the Mariner's trance is abated.'
I woke, and we were sailing on
As in a gentle weather:
'Twas night, calm night, the moon was high;
The dead men stood together.
All stood together on the deck,
For a charnel-dungeon fitter:
All fixed on me their stony eyes,
That in the Moon did glitter.
The pang, the curse, with which they died,
Had never passed away:
I could not draw my eyes from theirs,
Nor turn them up to pray.
And now this spell was snapt: once more
I viewed the ocean green,
And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen—
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
But soon there breathed a wind on me,
Nor sound nor motion made:
Its path was not upon the sea,
In ripple or in shade.
It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek
Like a meadow-gale of spring—
It mingled strangely with my fears,
Yet it felt like a welcoming.
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly too:
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze—
On me alone it blew.
Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed
The light-house top I see?
Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is this mine own countree?
We drifted o'er the harbour-bar,
And I with sobs did pray—
O let me be awake, my God!
Or let me sleep alway.
The harbour-bay was clear as glass,
So smoothly it was strewn!
And on the bay the moonlight lay,
And the shadow of the Moon.
The rock shone bright, the kirk no less,
That stands above the rock:
The moonlight steeped in silentness
The steady weathercock.
And the bay was white with silent light,
Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
In crimson colours came.
A little distance from the prow
Those crimson shadows were:
I turned my eyes upon the deck—
Oh, Christ! what saw I there!
Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
And, by the holy rood!
A man all light, a seraph-man,
On every corse there stood.
This seraph-band, each waved his hand:
It was a heavenly sight!
They stood as signals to the land,
Each one a lovely light;
This seraph-band, each waved his hand,
No voice did they impart—
No voice; but oh! the silence sank
Like music on my heart.
But soon I heard the dash of oars,
I heard the Pilot's cheer;
My head was turned perforce away
And I saw a boat appear.
The Pilot and the Pilot's boy,
I heard them coming fast:
Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy
The dead men could not blast.
I saw a third—I heard his voice:
It is the Hermit good!
He singeth loud his godly hymns
That he makes in the wood.
He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away
The Albatross's blood.
PART VII
This Hermit good lives in that wood
Which slopes down to the sea.
How loudly his sweet voice he rears!
He loves to talk with marineres
That come from a far countree.
He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve—
He hath a cushion plump:
It is the moss that wholly hides
The rotted old oak-stump.
The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk,
'Why, this is strange, I trow!
Where are those lights so many and fair,
That signal made but now?'
'Strange, by my faith!' the Hermit said—
'And they answered not our cheer!
The planks looked warped! and see those sails,
How thin they are and sere!
I never saw aught like to them,
Unless perchance it were
Brown skeletons of leaves that lag
My forest-brook along;
When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,
And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That eats the she-wolf's young.'
'Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look—
(The Pilot made reply)
I am a-feared'—'Push on, push on!'
Said the Hermit cheerily.
The boat came closer to the ship,
But I nor spake nor stirred;
The boat came close beneath the ship,
And straight a sound was heard.
Under the water it rumbled on,
Still louder and more dread:
It reached the ship, it split the bay;
The ship went down like lead.
Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,
Which sky and ocean smote,
Like one that hath been seven days drowned
My body lay afloat;
But swift as dreams, myself I found
Within the Pilot's boat.
Upon the whirl, where sank the ship,
The boat spun round and round;
And all was still, save that the hill
Was telling of the sound.
I moved my lips—the Pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy Hermit raised his eyes,
And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars: the Pilot's boy,
Who now doth crazy go,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
'Ha! ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see,
The Devil knows how to row.'
And now, all in my own countree,
I stood on the firm land!
The Hermit stepped forth from the boat,
And scarcely he could stand.
'O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!'
The Hermit crossed his brow.
'Say quick,' quoth he, 'I bid thee say—
What manner of man art thou?'
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
What loud uproar bursts from that door!
The wedding-guests are there:
But in the garden-bower the bride
And bride-maids singing are:
And hark the little vesper bell,
Which biddeth me to prayer!
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemèd there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company!—
To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends
And youths and maidens gay!
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.
He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
Ozymandias
By Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ode to a Nightingale
By
John Keats
My heart aches, and a
drowsy numbness pains
My
sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull
opiate to the drains
One
minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy
of thy happy lot,
But
being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In
some melodious plot
Of
beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O, for a draught of
vintage! that hath been
Cool'd
a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and
the country green,
Dance,
and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of
the warm South,
Full
of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And
purple-stained mouth;
That
I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away,
dissolve, and quite forget
What
thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the
fever, and the fret
Here,
where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a
few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where
youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And
leaden-eyed despairs,
Where
Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Away! away! for I will
fly to thee,
Not
charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless
wings of Poesy,
Though
the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee!
tender is the night,
And
haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But
here there is no light,
Save
what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I cannot see what
flowers are at my feet,
Nor
what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed
darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith
the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket,
and the fruit-tree wild;
White
hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And
mid-May's eldest child,
The
coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and,
for many a time
I
have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names
in many a mused rhyme,
To
take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To
cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In
such an ecstasy!
Still
wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Thou wast not born for
death, immortal Bird!
No
hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this
passing night was heard
In
ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same
song that found a path
Through
the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The
same that oft-times hath
Charm'd
magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word
is like a bell
To
toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot
cheat so well
As
she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy
plaintive anthem fades
Past
the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In
the next valley-glades:
Was
it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
Ulysses
By Alfred Lord Tennyson
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This
is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There
lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with
me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Dover
Beach
By
Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
My
Last Duchess
By
Robert Browning
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—which I have not—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—
E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
Great Expectations
-Charles Dickens
Summary: Chapter 1
As an infant, Philip Pirrip was
unable to pronounce either his first name or his last; doing his best, he
called himself “Pip,” and the name stuck. Now Pip, a young boy, is an orphan
living in his sister’s house in the marsh country in southeast England.
One evening, Pip sits in the isolated
village churchyard, staring at his parents’ tombstones. Suddenly, a horrific
man, growling, dressed in rags, and with his leg in chains, springs out from
behind the gravestones and seizes Pip. This escaped convict questions Pip
harshly and demands that Pip bring him food and a file with which he can saw
away his leg irons.
Summary: Chapter 2
Frightened into obedience, Pip runs to
the house he shares with his overbearing sister and her kindly husband, the
blacksmith Joe Gargery. The boy stashes some bread and butter in one leg of his
pants, but he is unable to get away quickly. It is Christmas Eve, and Pip is
forced to stir the holiday pudding all evening. His sister, whom Pip calls Mrs.
Joe, thunders about. She threatens Pip and Joe with her cane, which she has
named Tickler, and with a foul-tasting concoction called tar-water. Very early
the next morning, Pip sneaks down to the pantry, where he steals some brandy
(mistakenly refilling the bottle with tar-water, though we do not learn this
until Chapter 4)
and a pork pie for the convict. He then sneaks to Joe’s smithy, where he steals
a file. Stealthily, he heads back into the marshes to meet the convict.
Summary: Chapter 3
Unfortunately, the first man he finds
hiding in the marshes is actually a second, different convict, who tries to
strike Pip and then flees. When Pip finally comes upon his original tormentor,
he finds him suffering, cold, wet, and hungry. Pip is kind to the man, but the
convict becomes violent again when Pip mentions the other escapee he
encountered in the marsh, as though the news troubles him greatly. As the
convict scrapes at his leg irons with the file, Pip slips away through the
mists and returns home.
Summary: Chapter 4
As he returns home, Pip is overwhelmed
by a sense of guilt for having helped the convict. He even expects to find a
policeman waiting for him at Joe’s house. When Pip slips into the house, he
finds no policemen, only Mrs. Joe busy in the kitchen cooking Christmas dinner.
Pip eats breakfast alone with Joe. The two go to church; Mrs. Joe, despite her
moralizing habits, stays behind.
Christmas dinner is an agonizing
affair for Pip, who is crowded into a corner of the table by his well-to-do
Uncle Pumblechook and the church clerk, Mr. Wopsle. Terrified that his sneaking
out of the house to help the convict will be discovered, Pip nearly panics when
Pumblechook asks for the brandy and finds the bottle filled with tar-water. His
panic increases when, suddenly, several police officers burst into the house
with a pair of handcuffs.
Summary: Chapter 5
Pip is sure that the policemen have come
to arrest him, but all they want is for Joe to fix their handcuffs. The
bumbling policemen tell Pip and Joe that they are searching for a pair of
escaped convicts, and the two agree to participate in the manhunt. Seeing the
policemen, Pip feels a strange surge of worry for “his” convict.
After a long hunt, the two convicts are
discovered together, fighting furiously with one another in the marsh. Cornered
and captured, Pip’s convict protects Pip by claiming to have stolen the food
and file himself. The convict is taken away to a prison ship and out of Pip’s
life—so Pip believes—forever.
Summary: Chapter 6
Joe carries Pip home, and they finish
their Christmas dinner; Pip sleepily heads to bed while Joe narrates the scene
of the capture to Mrs. Joe and the guests. Pip continues to feel powerfully
guilty about the incident—not on his sister’s account, but because he has not
told the whole truth to Joe.
Summary: Chapter 7
After the incident, some time passes.
Pip lives with his guilty secret and struggles to learn reading and writing at
Mrs. Wopsle’s school. At school, Pip befriends Biddy, the granddaughter of the
teacher. One day, Joe and Pip sit talking; the illiterate Joe admires a piece
of writing Pip has just done. Suddenly, Mrs. Joe bursts in with Pumblechook.
Highly self-satisfied, they reveal that Pumblechook has arranged for Pip to go
play at the house of Miss Havisham, a rich spinster who lives nearby. Mrs. Joe
and Pumblechook hope she will make Pip’s fortune, and they plan to send him
home with Pumblechook before he goes to Miss Havisham’s the next day. The boy
is given a rough bath, dressed in his suit, and taken away by Pumblechook.
Summary: Chapter 8
Over breakfast the next morning,
Pumblechook sternly grills Pip on multiplication problems. At ten, he is taken
to Miss Havisham’s manor, Satis House. The gate is locked, and a small, very
beautiful girl comes to open it. She is rude to Pumblechook and sends him away
when she takes Pip inside. She leads him through the ornate, dark mansion to
Miss Havisham’s candlelit room, where the skeletal old woman waits by her
mirror, wearing a faded wedding dress, surrounded by clocks stopped at twenty
minutes to nine
The girl leaves, and Miss Havisham
orders Pip to play. He tells her earnestly that he is too affected by the
newness and grandeur of the house to play. Miss Havisham forces him to call for
the girl, whose name is Estella. Estella returns, and Miss Havisham orders her
to play cards with Pip. Estella is cold and insulting, criticizing Pip’s low
social class and his unrefined manners. Miss Havisham is morbidly delighted to
see that Pip is nonetheless taken with the girl. Pip cries when he leaves Satis
House.
Summary: Chapter 9
When Pip returns home, he lies to Joe,
Mrs. Joe, and Pumblechook about his experience at Satis House, inventing a wild
story in which Estella feeds him cake and four immense dogs fight over veal
cutlet from a silver basket. He feels guilty for lying to Joe and tells him the
truth in the smithy later that day. Joe, who is astonished to find out that Pip
has lied, advises Pip to keep company with his own class for the present and
tells him that he can succeed someday only if he takes an honest path. Pip
resolves to remember Joe’s words, but that night, as he lies in bed, he can’t
help but imagine how “common” Estella would find Joe, and he falls into a reverie
about the grandeur of his hours at Satis House.
Summary: Chapter 10
Pip continues to suffer through his
schooling, but a new desire for education and social standing makes him agree
to take extra lessons from his sensible friend Biddy. Later the same day, when
Pip goes to the pub to bring Joe home, he sees a mysterious stranger stirring
his drink with the same file Pip stole for the convict. The stranger gives Pip
two pounds, which Pip later gives to Mrs. Joe. He continues to worry that his
aid to the convict will be discovered.
Summary: Chapter 11
Not long after his encounter with
the mysterious man in the pub, Pip is taken back to Miss Havisham’s, where he
is paraded in front of a group of fawning, insincere relatives visiting the
dowager on her birthday. He encounters a large, dark man on the stairs, who
criticizes him. He again plays cards with Estella, then goes to the garden,
where he is asked to fight by a pale young gentleman. Pip knocks the young
gentleman down, and Estella allows him to give her a kiss on the cheek. He
returns home, ashamed that Estella looks down on him.
Summary: Chapter 12
Pip worries that he will be punished
for fighting, but the incident goes unmentioned during his next visit to Miss
Havisham’s. He continues to visit regularly for the next several months,
pushing Miss Havisham around in her wheelchair, relishing his time with
Estella, and becoming increasingly hopeful that Miss Havisham means to raise
him from his low social standing and give him a gentleman’s fortune. Because he
is preoccupied with his hopes, he fails to notice that Miss Havisham encourages
Estella to torment him, whispering “Break their hearts!” in her ear. Partially
because of his elevated hopes for his own social standing, Pip begins to grow
apart from his family, confiding in Biddy instead of Joe and often feeling
ashamed that Joe is “common.” One day at Satis House, Miss Havisham offers to
help with the papers that would officially make Pip Joe’s apprentice, and Pip
is devastated to realize that she never meant to make him a gentleman.
Summary: Chapter 13
Joe visits Satis House to complete
Pip’s apprenticeship papers; with his rough speech and crude appearance, he
seems horribly out of place in the Gothic mansion. Estella laughs at him and at
Pip. Miss Havisham gives Pip a gift of twenty-five pounds, and Pip and Joe go
to Town Hall to confirm the apprenticeship. Joe and Mrs. Joe take Pip out to
celebrate with Pumblechook and Mr. Wopsle, but Pip is surly and angry, keenly
disappointed by this turn in his life.
Summary: Chapter 14
Time passes as Pip begins working in
Joe’s forge; the boy slowly becomes an adolescent. He hates working as Joe’s
apprentice, but out of consideration for Joe’s goodness, he keeps his feelings
to himself. As he works, he thinks he sees Estella’s face mocking him in the
forge, and he longs for Satis House.
Summary: Chapter 15
Pip still tries hard to read and
expand his knowledge, and on Sundays, he also tries to teach Joe to read. One
Sunday, Pip tries to persuade Joe that he needs to visit Miss Havisham, but Joe
again advises him to stay away. However, his advice sounds confused, and Pip
resolves to do as he pleases.
Joe’s forge worker, Dolge Orlick,
makes Pip’s life even less pleasant. Orlick is vicious, oafish, and hateful,
and he treats Pip cruelly. When Pip was still a young child, Orlick frightened
him by convincing him that the devil lived in a corner of the forge. One day,
Mrs. Joe complains about Orlick taking a holiday, and she and Orlick launch
into a shouting match. Mrs. Joe gleefully calls on Joe to defend her honor, and
Joe quickly defeats Orlick in the fight. Mrs. Joe faints from excitement.
Pip visits Miss Havisham and learns
that Estella has been sent abroad. Dejected, he allows Wopsle to take him to
Pumblechook’s for the evening, where they pass the time reading from a play. On
the way home, Pip sees Orlick in the shadows and hears guns fire from the
prison ships. When he arrives home, he learns that Mrs. Joe has been attacked
and is now a brain-damaged invalid.
Summary: Chapter 16
Pip’s old guilt resurfaces when he
learns that convicts—more specifically, convicts with leg irons that have been
filed through—are suspected of the attack on his sister. The detectives who
come from London to solve the crime are bumblers, and the identity of the
attacker remains undiscovered. Mrs. Joe, who is now unable to talk, begins to
draw the letter “T” on her slate over and over, which Pip guesses represents a
hammer. From this, Biddy deduces that she is referring to Orlick. Orlick is
called in to see Mrs. Joe, and Pip expects her to denounce him as her attacker.
Instead, she seems eager to please Orlick and often calls for him in subsequent
days by drawing a “T” on her slate.
Summary: Chapter 17
Biddy moves in to help nurse Mrs.
Joe. Pip visits Satis House again and notices how bleak it is without Estella.
He walks with Biddy on Sunday and confides to her his dissatisfaction with his
place in life. Although he seems to be attracted to Biddy, he tells her the
secret of his love for Estella. When Biddy advises him to stay away from
Estella, Pip is angry with her, but he still becomes very jealous when Orlick
begins trying to flirt with her.
Summary: Chapter 18
At the pub one evening, Pip sits in
a crowd listening to Wopsle read the story of a murder trial from a newspaper.
A stranger begins questioning Wopsle about the legal details of the case. Pip
recognizes him as the large, dark man he met on the stairs at Miss Havisham’s
(in Chapter 11).
The stranger introduces himself as the lawyer Jaggers, and he goes home with
Pip and Joe. Here, he explains that Pip will soon inherit a large fortune. His
education as a gentleman will begin immediately. Pip will move to London and
become a gentleman, he says, but the person who is giving him the fortune
wishes to remain secret: Pip can never know the name of his benefactor.
Pip’s fondest wish has been
realized, and he assumes that his benefactor must be Miss Havisham—after all,
he first met Jaggers at her house, and his tutor will be Matthew Pocket, her
cousin. Joe seems deflated and sad to be losing Pip, and he refuses Jaggers’s
condescending offer of money. Biddy is also sad, but Pip adopts a snobbish
attitude and thinks himself too good for his surroundings. Still, when Pip sees
Joe and Biddy quietly talking together that night, he feels sorry to be leaving
them.
Summary: Chapter 19
Pip’s snobbery is back in the
morning, however, as he allows the tailor to grovel over him when he goes in
for a new suit of clothes. Pip even allows Pumblechook to take him out to
dinner and ingratiate himself. He tries to comfort Joe, but his attempt is
obviously forced, and Biddy criticizes him for it. Preparing to leave for
London, he visits Miss Havisham one last time; based on her excitement and
knowledge of the details of his situation, Pip feels even more certain that she
is his anonymous benefactor. After a final night at Joe’s house, Pip leaves for
London in the morning, suddenly full of regret for having behaved so snobbishly
toward the people who love him most.
Summary: Chapter 20
Jaggers takes Pip to London, where
the country boy is amazed and displeased by the stench and the thronging crowds
in such areas as Smithfield. Jaggers seems to be an important and powerful man:
hordes of people wait outside his office, muttering his name among themselves.
Pip meets Jaggers’s cynical, wry clerk, Wemmick.
Summary: Chapter 21
Wemmick introduces Pip to Herbert Pocket, the son of Pip’s
tutor, with whom Pip will spend the night. Herbert and Pip take an immediate
liking to one another; Herbert is cheerful and open, and Pip feels that his
easy good nature is a contrast to his own awkward diffidence. Whereas Pip’s
fortune has been made for him, Herbert is an impoverished gentleman who hopes
to become a shipping merchant. They realize, surprised, that they have met
before: Herbert is the pale young gentleman whom Pip fought in the garden at
Satis House.
Summary: Chapter 22
Pip asks Herbert to help him learn to be a gentleman, and,
after a feast, the two agree to live together. Herbert subtly corrects Pip’s
poor table manners, gives him the nickname “Handel,” and tells him the whole
story of Miss Havisham. When she was young, her family fortune was misused by
her unruly half brother, and she fell in love with—and agreed to marry—a man
from a lower social class than her own. This man convinced her to buy her half
brother’s share of the family brewery, which he wanted to run, for a huge
price. But on their wedding day, the man never appeared, instead sending a note
which Miss Havisham received at twenty minutes to nine—the time at which she
later stopped all her clocks. It was assumed that Miss Havisham’s lover was in
league with her half brother and that they split the profits from the brewery
sale. At some later point, Miss Havisham adopted Estella, but Herbert does not
know when or where.
Summary: Chapter 23
The next day, Pip visits the unpleasant commercial world of
the Royal Exchange before going to Matthew Pocket’s house to be tutored and to
have dinner. The Pockets’ home is a bustling, chaotic place where the servants
run the show. Matthew is absentminded but kind, and his wife is socially
ambitious but not well born; the children are being raised by the nurse. Pip’s
fellow students are a strange pair: Bentley Drummle, a future baronet, is
oafish and unpleasant, and a young man named Startop is soft and delicate. At
dinner, Pip concentrates on his table manners and observes the peculiarities of
the Pockets’ social lives.
Summary: Chapter 24
Pip returns to Jaggers’s office in order to arrange to share
rooms with Herbert. There Pip befriends the lively Wemmick, who invites him to
dinner. Pip sees Jaggers in the courtroom, where he is a potent and menacing
force, frightening even the judge with his thundering speeches.
Summary: Chapter 25
Pip continues to get to know his fellow students and the
Pockets, attending dinners at both Wemmick’s and Jaggers’s. Wemmick’s house is
like something out of a dream, an absurd “castle” in Walworth that he shares
with his “Aged Parent.” Pip observes that Wemmick seems to have a new
personality when he enters his home: while he is cynical and dry at work, at
home he seems jovial and merry.
Summary: Chapter 26
By contrast, Jaggers’s house is
oppressive and dark, shared only with a gloomy housekeeper, Molly. Pip’s fellow
students attend the dinner at Jaggers’s with Pip, and Pip and Drummle quarrel
over a loan Drummle ungratefully borrowed from Startop. Jaggers warns Pip to
stay away from Drummle, though the lawyer claims to like the disagreeable young
man himself.
Summary: Chapter 27
Joe comes to visit Pip in London.
Because Pip worries that Joe will disapprove of his opulent lifestyle and that
Drummle will look down on him because of Joe, Joe’s visit is strained and
awkward. He tries to tell Pip the news from home: Wopsle, for instance, has
become an actor. But Pip acts annoyed with him until Joe mentions that Estella
has returned to Satis House and that she wishes to see Pip. Pip suddenly feels
more kindly toward Joe, but the blacksmith leaves before Pip can improve his
behavior.
“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of
ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man’s a
blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a
coppersmith. Diwisions among such must come. . . .”
Summary: Chapter 28
Hoping to see Estella and to
apologize to Joe, Pip travels home, forced to share a coach with a pair of
convicts, one of whom is the mysterious stranger who gave Pip money in the pub.
Though this man does not recognize Pip, Pip overhears him explaining that the
convict Pip helped that long-ago night in the marshes had asked him to deliver
the money to Pip. Pip is so terrified by his memory of that night that he gets
off the coach at its first stop within the town limits. When he arrives at his
hotel, he reads a notice in a newspaper, from which he learns that Pumblechook
is taking credit for his rise in status.
Summary: Chapter 29
When he travels to Satis House the
next day, Pip pictures himself as a triumphant knight riding to rescue the Lady
Estella from an evil castle. He encounters Orlick, now Miss Havisham’s porter,
at the gate. When he sees Estella, he is stunned: she has become a ravishing
young woman. Despite his newfound fortune, Pip feels horribly inadequate around
her, as unworthy and clumsy as ever. Miss Havisham goads him on, snapping at
him to continue to love Estella. Pip walks with Estella in the garden, but she
treats him with indifference, and he becomes upset. Pip realizes that she
reminds him of someone, but he can’t place the resemblance. Back inside, he
discovers Jaggers there and feels oppressed by the lawyer’s heavy presence.
Summary: Chapter 30
The next day, Pip tells Jaggers
about Orlick’s past, and Jaggers fires the man from Miss Havisham’s employ. Pip
is mocked by the tailor’s apprentice as he walks down the street. He returns in
low spirits to London, where Herbert tries to cheer him up, though he also
tries to convince him that, even if Miss Havisham is his secret benefactor, she
does not intend for him to marry Estella. Herbert confesses to Pip that he,
too, is in love and, in fact, has a fiancée named Clara, but he is too poor to
marry her.
Summary: Chapter 31
Pip and Herbert go to the theater,
where Wopsle plays a ridiculous Hamlet. Pip takes the hapless actor out to
dinner following the play, but his mood remains sour.
Summary: Chapter 32
Pip receives a note from Estella,
ordering him to meet her at a London train station. He arrives very early and
encounters Wemmick, who takes him on a brief tour of the miserable grounds of
Newgate Prison. Pip feels uncomfortable in the dismal surroundings, but Wemmick
is oddly at home, even introducing Pip to a man who has been sentenced to death
by hanging.
Summary: Chapter 33
When Pip meets Estella, he is again
troubled by her resemblance to someone he can’t place. She treats Pip
arrogantly, but sends him into ecstatic joy when she refers to their
“instructions,” which makes him feel as though they are destined to be married.
After he escorts her through the gaslit London night to the house at which she
is staying, he returns to the Pockets’ home.
Summary: Chapter 34
Pip feels terribly guilty for his
snobbish treatment of Joe and Biddy, and he feels as though his degenerate
lifestyle has been a bad influence on Herbert. The two young men catalog their
debts, but they are interrupted by a letter carrying the news that Mrs. Joe has
died.
Summary: Chapter 35
Pip is surprised by the intensity of
his sadness about his sister’s death. He returns home at once for the funeral.
He meets Pumblechook, who continues to fawn over him irritatingly. He tries to
mend his relations with Joe and Biddy; Biddy is skeptical of his pledges to
visit more often. Pip says goodbye to them the next morning, truly intending to
visit more often, and walks away into the mist.
Summary: Chapter 36
Pip’s twenty-first birthday finally
arrives, meaning that he is an adult and will begin to receive a regular income
from his fortune rather than having to go to Jaggers to access his money. He
feels a great sense of excitement, because he hopes that his entrance into
adulthood will cause Jaggers to tell him the identity of his mysterious
benefactor. Despite Herbert’s warning, he feels increasingly certain that it is
Miss Havisham and that she means for him to marry Estella. But during their
interview, Jaggers is cold and brief; he reveals nothing about the source of
Pip’s fortune, simply telling him that his income will be five hundred pounds a
year and refusing to take responsibility for the outcome. For some reason, the
encounter reminds Pip of his meeting with the convict in the graveyard so many
years before. Still, Pip invites Jaggers to participate in his birthday dinner,
but Jaggers’s oppressive presence makes the evening less enjoyable for Pip and
Herbert.
Summary: Chapter 37
Upon receiving his income, Pip decides to help Herbert by
buying Herbert’s way into the merchant business. He asks Wemmick for advice. At
Jaggers’s office (in Chapter 36),
Wemmick cynically advises Pip not to help Herbert, but later, at the Castle
(where Pip also meets Wemmick’s girlfriend, Miss Skiffins), he jovially offers
exactly the opposite advice and agrees to help Pip with the scheme. They find a
merchant in need of a young partner, and Pip buys Herbert the partnership.
Everything is all arranged anonymously, so that Herbert, like Pip, does not
know the identity of his benefactor.
Summary: Chapter 38
Pip spends a great deal of time with
Estella in the house of her London hostess, Mrs. Brandley. However, he is not
treated as a serious suitor. Rather, he is allowed to accompany Estella
everywhere she goes, watching her treat her other suitors cruelly but being
more or less ignored himself. He cannot understand why Miss Havisham does not
announce the details of their engagement, in which he continues to believe. Pip
and Estella go to visit the old woman, and Pip observes for the first time a
combative relationship between her and Estella: Miss Havisham goads Estella on
to break men’s hearts, but Estella treats Miss Havisham as coldly as she treats
her suitors. Shortly thereafter, Pip learns to his horror that Drummle is
courting Estella. He confronts Estella about the news, but she refuses to take
his concern seriously, reminding Pip that he is the only suitor she doesn’t try
to deceive and entrap. But this only makes Pip feel less important
to her. That night, the young man
imagines his fate as a heavy stone slab hanging over his head, about to fall.
“I begin to think,” said Estella, in
a musing way, after another moment of calm wonder, “that I almost understand
how this comes about.”
Summary: Chapter 39
Time passes, and Pip is now
twenty-three. One night, during a midnight thunderstorm, he hears heavy
footsteps trudging up his stairs. An old sailor enters Pip’s apartment, and Pip
treats him nervously and haughtily before recognizing him. It is Pip’s convict,
the same man who terrorized him in the cemetery and on the marsh when he was a
little boy. Horrified, Pip learns the truth of his situation: the convict went
to Australia, where he worked in sheep ranching and earned a huge fortune.
Moved by Pip’s kindness to him on the marsh, he arranged to use his wealth to
make Pip a gentleman. The convict, not Miss Havisham, is Pip’s secret
benefactor. Pip is not meant to marry Estella at all.
With a crestfallen heart, Pip hears that
the convict is even now on the run from the law, and that if he is caught, he
could be put to death. Pip realizes that though the convict’s story has plunged
him into despair, it is his duty to help his benefactor. He feeds him and gives
him Herbert’s bed for the night, since Herbert is away. Terrified of his new
situation, Pip looks in on the convict, who is sleeping with a pistol on his
pillow, and then locks the doors and falls asleep. He awakes at five o’clock in
the morning to a dark sky tormented by wind and rain.
Summary: Chapter 40
In the morning, Pip trips over a
shadowy man crouching on his staircase. He runs to fetch the watchman, but when
they return the man is gone. Pip turns his attention to the convict, who gives
his name as Abel Magwitch. To keep the servants from learning the truth, Pip
decides to call Magwitch “Uncle Provis,” an alias Magwitch made up for himself
on the ship from Australia to England. Pip arranges a disguise and calls on
Jaggers to confirm Magwitch’s story. Magwitch tramps around the apartment,
embarrassing Pip, “his” gentleman, with his bad table manners and rough speech.
Summary: Chapter 41
After five days of enduring his
guest, Pip is forced to confront his problem head-on when Herbert returns home.
Magwitch leaves, and Herbert and Pip discuss the situation, agreeing that Pip
should no longer use Magwitch’s money. They plan for Pip to take Magwitch
abroad, where he will be safe from the police, before parting ways with him.
Summary: Chapter 42
The next morning, Magwitch tells the young men his story. He
was an orphaned child and lived a life of crime out of necessity. His earliest
memory is of stealing turnips to feed himself. As a young man, he met a
gentleman criminal named Compeyson and fell under his power. Compeyson had
already driven another accomplice, Arthur, into alcoholism and madness. Arthur,
Magwitch says, was driven to despair by the memory of a wealthy woman he and
Compeyson had once victimized. Magwitch remembers a woman from his own past and
becomes distraught, but he does not tell Herbert and Pip about her. He
continues, saying that when he and Compeyson were caught, Compeyson turned on
him, using his gentleman’s manners to obtain a light sentence at the trial.
Magwitch wanted revenge, and Compeyson was the man Pip saw him struggling with
that night on the marsh.
At this point, Herbert passes Pip a note that tangles the
situation even further. The note reveals that Arthur was Miss Havisham’s half
brother; Compeyson was the man who stood her up on their wedding day.
Summary: Chapter 43
Ashamed that his rise to social prominence is owed to such a
coarse, lowborn man, Pip feels that he must leave Estella forever. After an
unpleasant encounter with Drummle at the inn, he travels to Satis House to see
Miss Havisham and Estella one final time.
Summary: Chapter 44
Miss Havisham admits that she knowingly allowed him to
believe she was his benefactor, and she agrees to help Herbert now that Pip can
no longer use his own fortune. Pip finally tells Estella he loves her, but she
coldly replies that she never deceived him into thinking she shared his
feelings. She announces that she has decided to marry Drummle. Surprisingly,
Miss Havisham seems to pity Pip.
Upset beyond words, Pip walks the whole way back to London.
At a gate close to his home, a night porter gives him a note from Wemmick,
reading “don’t go home.”
Summary: Chapter 45
Afraid, Pip spends a night at a
seedy inn called the Hummums. The next day, Pip finds Wemmick, who explains that
he has learned through Jaggers’s office that Compeyson is pursuing Magwitch. He
says that Herbert has hidden Magwitch at Clara’s house, and Pip leaves at once
to go there.
Summary: Chapter 46
Upon arriving, he finds that Clara’s
father is a drunken ogre and feels glad that he has helped Clara and Herbert
escape him. He finds Magwitch upstairs and is surprised by the concern he now
feels for the old convict’s safety; he even shields Magwitch from the news of
Compeyson’s reappearance. Herbert and Pip discuss a plan to sneak Magwitch away
on the river, and Pip begins to consider staying with his benefactor even after
their escape. Pip buys a rowboat, keeping a nervous watch for the dark figure
searching for Magwitch.
Summary: Chapter 47
Pip anxiously waits for Wemmick’s
signal to transport Magwitch downriver. Despite his softening attitude toward
the convict, he feels morally obligated to refuse to spend any more of
Magwitch’s money, and his debts pile up. He realizes that Estella’s marriage to
Drummle must have taken place by now, but he intentionally avoids learning more
about it. All of his worries are for Magwitch.
Pip goes to the theater to forget
his troubles. After the performance, Wopsle tells Pip that in the audience
behind him was one of the convicts from the battle on the marsh so many years
ago. Pip tries to question Wopsle calmly, but inside he is terrified, realizing
that Compeyson must be shadowing him. Pip rushes home to tell Herbert and
Wemmick.
Summary: Chapter 48
Jaggers invites Pip to dinner, where
he gives the young man a note from Miss Havisham. When Jaggers mentions
Estella’s marriage shortly after Jaggers’s housekeeper Molly walks in, Pip
realizes that Molly is the person he couldn’t place, the person Estella
mysteriously resembles. He realizes at once that Molly must be Estella’s
mother. Walking home with Wemmick after the dinner, Pip questions his friend
about Molly, and he learns that she was accused of killing a woman over her
common-law husband and of murdering her little daughter to hurt him. Pip feels
certain that Estella is that lost daughter.
Summary: Chapter 49
Pip visits Miss Havisham, who feels
unbearably guilty for having caused Estella to break his heart. Sobbing, she
clings to Pip’s feet, pleading with him to forgive her. He acts kindly toward
her, then goes for a walk in the garden. There, he has a morbid fantasy that
Miss Havisham is dead. He looks up at her window just in time to see her bend
over the fire and go up in a column of flame. Rushing in to save her, Pip sweeps
the ancient wedding feast from her table and smothers the flames with the
tablecloth. Miss Havisham lives, but she becomes an invalid, a shadow of her
former self. Pip stays with her after the doctors have departed; early the next
morning, he leaves her in the care of her servants and returns to London.
Summary: Chapter 50
Pip himself was badly burned trying
to save Miss Havisham, and while Herbert changes his bandages, they agree that
they have both grown fonder of Magwitch. Herbert tells Pip the part of
Magwitch’s story that the convict originally left out, the story of the woman
in his past. The story matches that of Jaggers’s housekeeper, Molly. Magwitch,
therefore, is Molly’s former common-law husband and Estella’s father.
Summary: Chapter 51
Pip is seized by a feverish
conviction to learn the whole truth. He visits Jaggers and manages to shock the
lawyer by proclaiming that he knows the truth of Estella’s parentage. Pip
cannot convince Jaggers to divulge any information, however, until he appeals to
Wemmick’s human, kind side, the side that until now Wemmick has never shown in
the office. Jaggers is so surprised and pleased to learn that Wemmick has a
pleasant side that he confirms that Estella is Molly’s daughter, though he
didn’t know Magwitch’s role in the story.
Summary: Chapter 52
Pip leaves to finish the task of
securing Herbert’s partnership. He learns that Herbert is to be transferred to
the Middle East, and Herbert fantasizes about escorting Clara to the land of
Arabian Nights.
A message from Wemmick arrives,
indicating that they should be ready to move Magwitch in two days. But Pip also
finds an anonymous note threatening “Uncle Provis,” demanding that Pip travel
to the marshes in secret. Pip travels to the inn near his childhood home, where
he is reminded of how badly he has neglected Joe since he became a gentleman.
Of all his losses, Pip thinks he regrets the loss of Joe’s friendship the most.
That night, humbled and with an arm injured from the fire, he heads out to the
mysterious meeting on the marshes.
Summary: Chapter 53
The night is dark over the marsh; in
the sky the moon is a deep red. Thick mists surround the limekiln to which Pip
travels. He enters an abandoned stone quarry and suddenly finds his candle
extinguished; a noose is thrown over his head in the darkness. He is bound
tightly, and a gruff voice threatens to kill him if he cries out. A flint is
struck, its flame illuminating Orlick’s wicked face.
Orlick accuses Pip of coming between
him and a young woman he fancied, among other things, and declares his
intention to have revenge. He also admits to killing Mrs. Joe, though he says
that Pip is ultimately responsible for her death since Orlick did it to get
back at him. “It was you, villain,” Pip retorts boldly, but inside he is worried:
he is afraid that he will die and none of his loved ones will know how he hoped
to improve himself and to help them. Orlick reveals that he has some connection
with Compeyson and has solved the mystery of Magwitch, and that he was the
shadowy figure lurking in Pip’s stairwell.
Orlick takes a swig of liquor, then
picks up a stone hammer and advances menacingly toward Pip. Pip cries out, and
suddenly Herbert bursts in with a group of men to save him. Herbert had found
Orlick’s note asking Pip to meet him at the marshes and, worried, had followed
Pip there. In the ensuing scuffle, Orlick manages to escape. Rather than
pursuing him, Pip rushes home with Herbert to carry out Magwitch’s escape.
Summary: Chapter 54
In the morning, a sparkling sunrise
dazzles London as Pip and Herbert prepare to put their plan in motion. With
their friend Startop, the pair set out on the river; the Thames is bustling
with activity and crowded with boats. When they stop for Magwitch at Clara’s
house, he looks well and seems contemplative; he drags his hand in the water as
the boat moves and compares life to a river. As they move out of London into
the marshes, though, the mood darkens, the rowing becomes harder, and a sense
of foreboding settles over the group. At the filthy inn where they stop that
night, a servant tells them of an ominous boat he has seen lingering near the
inn; Pip worries that it could be either the police or Compeyson. That night
Pip sees two men looking into his boat, so the group arranges for Pip and Magwitch
to sneak out early the next morning and rejoin the boat further down the river.
Making their way downriver, they see
their goal—a German steamer that will take Pip and Magwitch away—in the
distance. But suddenly another rowboat appears, and a policeman calls for
Magwitch’s arrest. Magwitch recognizes Compeyson on the other boat and dives
into the river to attack him. They grapple, and each slips under the surface,
but only Magwitch resurfaces. He claims not to have drowned Compeyson, though
he says he would have liked to, but he cannot avoid being chained and led away
to prison. Now completely loyal to him, Pip takes his hand and promises to
stand by him.
Summary: Chapter 55
Jaggers is certain that Magwitch
will be found guilty, but Pip remains loyal. He does not worry when he learns
that the state will appropriate Magwitch’s fortune, including Pip’s money.
While Magwitch awaits sentencing, Herbert prepares to marry Clara and Wemmick
enjoys a comical wedding to Miss Skiffins. Herbert offers Pip a job, but Pip
delays his answer.
Summary: Chapter 56
Pip visits Magwitch, who is sick and
imprisoned, and works to free the stricken convict. But when the old man is
found guilty and sentenced to death, as Jaggers had predicted, Magwitch tells
the judge that he believes God has decreed his death as an act of forgiveness.
On the day of his death, he is too ill to speak. Pip eases his final moments by
telling him that Estella—the child he believed to be lost—is alive, well, and a
beautiful lady. Magwitch dies in peace, and Pip prays over his body, pleading
with God to forgive his lost benefactor.
Summary: Chapter 57
After Magwitch’s death, Pip falls
into a feverish illness. He is also arrested for debt and nearly carted away to
prison; he is spared only because of his extreme ill health. He experiences
wild hallucinations, reliving scenes with Orlick and Miss Havisham and
continually seeing Joe’s face. But the last is not a hallucination: Joe has
really come, and he nurses Pip through his illness.
As Pip recovers, Joe tells him the
news from home: Miss Havisham has died, wisely distributing her fortune among
the Pockets. After failing to kill Pip, Orlick robbed Pumblechook, and he since
has been caught and put in jail. And Joe has news about himself: Biddy has
helped him learn how to read and write.
Pip and Joe go on a Sunday outing,
just as they used to do when Pip was a boy. But when Pip tries to tell Joe the
story of Magwitch, Joe refuses to listen, not wanting to revisit painful
memories. Despite Pip’s renewed affection, living in London makes Joe
increasingly unhappy, and one morning Pip finds him gone. Before leaving, he
does Pip one last good turn, paying off all of Pip’s debts. Pip rushes home to
reconcile with Joe and decides to marry Biddy when he gets there.
Summary: Chapter 58
When Pip arrives at his childhood
home, he finds Satis House pulled apart in preparation for an auction.
Pumblechook tracks him down at his hotel and treats him condescendingly, but
Pip rudely takes his leave and goes to find Biddy and Joe. Biddy’s schoolhouse
is empty, as is Joe’s smithy. When Pip finds them, he is shocked to discover
that they have been married. Despite his disappointed expectation of marriage
to Biddy, he expresses happiness for them and decides to take the job with Herbert.
Summary: Chapter 59
Eleven years later, Pip returns to
England. He says he has learned to work hard and is content with the modest
living he makes in the mercantile firm. He goes to visit Joe and Biddy, and
tries to convince Biddy that he has resigned himself to being a bachelor.
Pip then goes to Satis House and
finds that it is no longer standing. In a silvery mist, Pip walks through the
overgrown, ruined garden and thinks of Estella. He has heard that she was
unhappy with Drummle but that Drummle has recently died. As the moon rises, Pip
finds Estella wandering through the old garden. They discuss the past fondly;
as the mists rise, they leave the garden hand in hand, Pip believes, never to
part again.
THE
IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
Oscar Wilde
Act I, Part One
Summary
The play opens in the morning room of Algernon
Moncrieff’s flat in the fashionable Mayfair section of London’s West End. As
the curtain rises, Algernon’s butler, Lane, is onstage laying out afternoon tea
while Algernon, offstage, plays the piano badly. Before long, the music stops
and Algernon enters talking about his playing, but Lane says ironically that he
didn’t feel it was “polite” to listen. Algernon briefly defends his
musicianship, then turns to the matter of Lane’s preparations for tea. Algernon
asks particularly about some cucumber sandwiches he has ordered for Lady
Bracknell, his aunt, who is expected for tea along with her daughter, Gwendolen
Fairfax, Algernon’s cousin. Lane produces the cucumber sandwiches, which
Algernon begins to munch absentmindedly, casually remarking on an extremely
inaccurate entry he’s noticed in the household books. He speculates aloud on
why it is that champagne in bachelors’ homes always gets drunk by the servants.
There follows some philosophical chat about the nature of marriage and the
married state. Then Algernon dismisses Lane and soliloquizes briefly on the
moral duty of the servant class.
Lane reenters and announces the arrival of Mr. Ernest
Worthing, the play’s protagonist, who shortly will come to be known as Jack.
Algernon greets Jack with evident enthusiasm, asking whether business or
pleasure has brought him to town. Jack says pleasure. He notices the elaborate
tea service and asks whom Algernon expects. When Algernon tells him Lady Bracknell
and Gwendolen will be coming by, Jack is delighted. He confesses that he has
come to town for the express purpose of proposing to Gwendolen. A brief debate
follows as to whether this purpose constitutes “business” or “pleasure,” and in
the course of it, Jack reaches for one of the cucumber sandwiches. Algernon
reprimands him, saying that they have been ordered expressly for his aunt. Jack
points out that Algernon has been eating them the whole time they’ve been
talking. Algernon argues that it’s appropriate for him to eat the sandwiches
since Lady Bracknell is his aunt and suggests that Jack help himself to the
bread and butter, which has been ordered for Gwendolen. When Jack begins eating
the bread and butter a bit too enthusiastically, Algernon accuses Jack of behaving
as though he were already married to Gwendolen. He reminds Jack he isn’t yet
engaged to her and says he doubts he ever will be. Surprised, Jack asks what
Algernon means. Algernon reminds Jack that Gwendolen is his first cousin and
tells him that before he gives his consent to the union, Jack “will have to
clear up the whole question of Cecily.” Jack professes bewilderment and says he
doesn’t know anyone named Cecily. By way of explanation, Algernon asks Lane to
find “that cigarette case Mr. Worthing left in the smoking room the last time
he dined here.”
The cigarette case, when it arrives, causes Jack some
consternation and Algernon much glee. Jack seems to have forgotten that the
case bears an inscription from “little Cecily” to “her dear Uncle Jack.” Algernon
forces Jack to explain what the inscription means, and Jack admits his name
isn’t really Ernest at all—it’s Jack. Algernon pretends to be incensed and
disbelieving. He points out that Jack has always introduced himself as Ernest,
that he answers to the name Ernest, that he even looks as though his name
were Ernest. He pulls out one of Jack’s visiting cards and shows him the name
and address on it, saying he intends to keep the card as proof that Jack’s name
is Ernest. With some embarrassment, Jack explains that his name is “Ernest in
town and Jack in the country.”
Algernon is still unsatisfied. He tells Jack he has
always suspected him of being “a confirmed and secret Bunburyist,” a term he
refuses to define until Jack explains why he goes by two completely different
names, and he requests that the explanation be “improbable.” Jack protests that
his explanation is not improbable. He says the old gentleman who adopted him as
a boy, Mr. Thomas Cardew, in his will made him guardian to his granddaughter,
Miss Cecily Cardew, who lives on Jack’s country estate with her governess, Miss
Prism, and addresses Jack as her uncle out of respect. Algernon slips in
questions about the location of Jack’s estate, but Jack refuses to answer and
continues with his explanation.
Jack says that anyone placed in the position of legal
guardian must have moral views about everything, and since the utmost morality
doesn’t bring great happiness, he has always pretended to have a troublesome
younger brother named Ernest who lives at the Albany Hotel and who frequently
gets in trouble. This false brother gives Jack an excuse to go to town whenever
he wants to.
Algernon counters by telling Jack a secret of his own.
Just as Jack has invented a younger brother so as to be able to escape to
London, Algernon has invented a friend called Bunbury, a permanent invalid
whose sudden and frequent relapses afford him a chance to get away to the
country whenever he wants. Bunbury’s illness, for instance, will allow Algernon
to have dinner with Jack that evening, despite the fact that he has been
committed, for over a week, to dining at Lady Bracknell’s. Algernon wants to
explain the rules of “Bunburying” to Jack, but Jack denies being a
“Bunburyist.” He says if Gwendolen accepts his marriage proposal he plans to
kill off his imaginary brother, and that he’s thinking of doing so in any case
because Cecily is taking too much interest in Ernest. Jack suggests that
Algernon do the same with Bunbury. While the two men argue about the uses and
merits of a married man’s “knowing Bunbury,” Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen are
announced.
Act I,
Part TwoSummary
Lady Bracknell comes onstage gossiping
about a friend whose husband has died recently. Seating herself, she asks for
one of the cucumber sandwiches Algernon has promised her. However, no cucumber
sandwiches are in sight—Algernon, without realizing what he was doing, has
devoured every last one. He gazes at the empty plate in horror and asks Lane
sharply why there are no cucumber sandwiches. Quickly sizing up the situation,
Lane explains blandly that he couldn’t find cucumbers at the market that
morning. Algernon dismisses Lane with obvious, and feigned, displeasure. Lady
Bracknell is not concerned, and she chatters about the nice married woman she’s
planning to have Algernon take in to dinner that evening. Regretfully, Algernon
tells Lady Bracknell that due to the illness of his friend Bunbury, he’ll be
unable to come to dinner after all. Lady Bracknell expresses her irritation
about Bunbury’s “shilly-shallying” over the question of whether he’ll live or
die. To appease her, and to give Jack a chance to propose to Gwendolen,
Algernon offers to go over the musical program for an upcoming reception with
her and takes her into the music room.
Alone with Gwendolen, Jack awkwardly
stammers out his admiration, and Gwendolen takes charge. She lets Jack know
right away that she shares his feelings, and Jack is delighted. However, he is
somewhat dismayed to learn that a good part of Gwendolen’s attraction to him is
due to what she believes is his name—Ernest. Gwendolen is fixated on the name
Ernest, which she feels has “a music of its own” and “inspires absolute
confidence.” Gwendolen makes clear that she would not consider marrying a man
who was not named Ernest.
Lady Bracknell returns to the room, and
Gwendolen tells her she is engaged to Jack. Lady Bracknell then interviews Jack
to determine Jack’s eligibility as a possible son-in-law. Jack seems to be
giving all the right answers, until Lady Bracknell inquires into his family
background. Jack explains that he has no idea who his parents were, and that he
was found, by the man who adopted him, in a handbag in the cloakroom at
Victoria Station. Lady Bracknell is scandalized. She forbids him from marrying
Gwendolen and leaves the house angrily.
Algernon enters, and Jack reviews the
results of his interview with Lady Bracknell, explaining that as far as
Gwendolen is concerned the two of them are engaged. Algernon asks mischievously
whether Jack has told her the truth about being “Ernest in town, and Jack in
the country,” and Jack scoffs at the idea. He says he plans to kill off Ernest
by the end of the week by having him catch a severe chill in Paris. Algernon
asks whether Jack has told Gwendolen about his ward, Cecily, and again Jack
scoffs at the question. He claims Cecily and Gwendolen will surely become
friends and “will be calling each other sister.”
Gwendolen reenters and asks to speak
privately with Jack. She tells him how the story of his childhood has stirred
her and declares her undying love, whatever happens. She asks Jack for his
address in the country and Algernon listens in, jotting it down on his cuff.
Jack exits with Gwendolen to show her to her carriage, and Lane comes in with
some bills, which Algernon promptly tears up. He tells Lane he plans to go
“Bunburying” the next day and asks him to lay out “all the Bunbury suits.” Jack
returns, praising Gwendolen, and the curtain falls on Algernon laughing quietly
and looking at his shirt cuff.
Act II, Part One
Summary
In the garden of The Manor House, Jack’s
country estate in Hertfordshire, Miss Prism is trying to interest Cecily in her
German lesson. Cecily would prefer to water the flowers, but Miss Prism reminds
Cecily that Jack encourages Cecily to improve herself in every way. Cecily
expresses some slight irritation with the fact that her Uncle Jack is so serious,
and Miss Prism reminds her of his constant concern over his troublesome brother
Ernest. Cecily, who has begun writing in her diary, says she wishes Jack would
allow Ernest to visit them sometime. She suggests that she and Miss Prism might
positively influence him, but Miss Prism doesn’t approve of the notion of
trying to turn “bad people into good people.” She tells Cecily to put away her
diary and to rely on her memory instead. Cecily points out that memory is
usually inaccurate and also responsible for excessively long, three-volume
novels. Miss Prism tells her not to criticize those long novels, as she once
wrote one herself.
Dr. Chasuble, the local vicar, enters.
Cecily tells Dr. Chasuble teasingly that Miss Prism has a headache and should
take a walk with him, obviously aware of an unspoken attraction between Dr.
Chasuble and Miss Prism. Miss Prism reproaches Cecily gently for fibbing, but
she decides to take Cecily’s advice, and she and Dr. Chasuble go off together.
The butler, Merriman, then enters and announces to Cecily that Mr. Ernest
Worthing has just driven over from the station with his luggage. Merriman
presents Cecily with a visiting card, which is the one Algernon took from Jack
in Act I.
The visiting Mr. Ernest Worthing is
actually Algernon, masquerading as Jack’s nonexistent brother, who enters
dressed to the nines and greets Cecily as his “little cousin.” When Cecily
tells him Jack won’t be back until Monday, Algernon pretends surprise and
disappointment. Cecily tells Algernon that Jack has gone to town to buy Ernest
some traveling clothes, as he plans on sending him to Australia as a last
resort. Algernon proposes another plan: he thinks Cecily should reform him.
Cecily says she doesn’t have time. Algernon decides to reform himself that afternoon,
adding that he is hungry, and he and Cecily flirt with each other as they head
into the house to find sustenance.
Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble return from
their walk, also flirting mildly. They are surprised when Jack enters from the
back of the garden dressed in full Victorian mourning regalia. Jack greets Miss
Prism with an air of tragedy and explains he has returned earlier than expected
owing to the death of Ernest. Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble express surprise,
shock, and condolences, and Miss Prism makes a few moralistic pronouncements.
Jack’s story matches the one he and
Algernon cooked up the previous evening: that Ernest passed away in Paris from
a “severe chill.” Dr. Chasuble suggests that he might mention the sad news in
next Sunday’s service and begins talking about his upcoming sermon. Jack
remembers the problem of Gwendolen and his name, and he asks Dr. Chasuble about
the possibility of being christened Ernest. They make arrangements for a
ceremony that afternoon. As Dr. Chasuble prepares to leave, Cecily emerges from
the house with the news that “Uncle Jack’s brother” has turned up and is in the
dining room.
Act II, Part Two
Summary
When Algernon appears in the doorway,
Jack is furious, not only because Algernon is there, but also because he is
disguised as Jack’s own invented, and now presumably dead, brother. Cecily
takes Jack’s anger as part of the long-standing ill feeling between the two
brothers and insists that Jack shake hands with Algernon, who has evidently
been telling her about his good offices toward his poor friend Bunbury. Jack is
apoplectic at the idea of Algernon talking to Cecily about Bunbury, but he can
do nothing. He cannot expose Algernon without revealing his own deceptions and
hypocrisy, and so he has to go along with the charade.
Jack wants Algernon to leave, but
Algernon refuses as long as Jack is in mourning. As Jack goes off to change his
clothes, Algernon soliloquizes briefly about being in love with Cecily. When
she comes back to water the garden, he uses the opportunity to propose to her.
He is surprised to discover that Cecily already considers herself engaged to
him and charmed when she reveals that her sustained fascination with “Uncle
Jack’s brother” had moved her, some months previously, to invent an elaborate
romance between herself and Ernest. Cecily has created an entire relationship,
complete with love letters (written by herself), a ring, a broken engagement,
and a reconciliation, and chronicled it in her diary. Algernon is less
enchanted with the news that part of Cecily’s interest in him derives from the
name Ernest, which, echoing Gwendolen, Cecily says “inspires absolute
confidence.”
Algernon goes off in search of Dr.
Chasuble to see about getting himself christened Ernest. Meanwhile, Gwendolen
arrives, having decided to pay an unexpected call at the Manor House. She is
shown into the garden. Cecily, who has no idea who Gwendolen is or how she
figures in Jack’s life, orders tea and attempts to play hostess, while
Gwendolen, having no idea who Cecily is, initially takes her to be a visitor at
the Manor House. She is disconcerted to hear that Cecily is “Mr. Worthing’s
ward,” as Ernest has never mentioned having a ward, and she confesses to not
being thrilled by the news or by the fact that Cecily is very young and
beautiful. Cecily picks up on Gwendolen’s reference to “Ernest” and hastens to
explain that her guardian is not Mr. Ernest Worthing but his
brother Jack. Gwendolen asks if she’s sure, and Cecily reassures her, adding
that, in fact, she is engaged to be married to Ernest Worthing. Gwendolen
points out that this is impossible as she herself is engaged to Ernest
Worthing. The tea party degenerates into a kind of catfight in which the two
women insult one another with utmost civility.
Toward the climax of this confrontation,
Jack and Algernon arrive, one after the other, each having separately made
arrangements with Dr. Chasuble to be christened Ernest later that day. Each of
the young ladies takes great pleasure in pointing out that the other has been
deceived: Cecily informs Gwendolen that her fiancé is really named Jack and
Gwendolen informs Cecily that hers is really called Algernon. Shocked and
angry, the two women demand to know where Jack’s brother Ernest is, since both
of them are engaged to be married to him, and Jack is forced to admit that he
has no brother and that Ernest is a complete fiction. Both women are furious.
They retire to the house arm in arm, calling each other “sister.” Alone, Jack
and Algernon must sort out their differences. Each taunts the other with having
been found out and they end up squabbling over muffins and teacake.
Act III, Part One
Summary
Cecily and Gwendolen have retreated to
the drawing room of the Manor House to get away from Algernon and Jack. They
are eager to forgive the men and be reconciled. When Algernon and Jack enter
from the garden, Cecily and Gwendolen confront them about their motives. Cecily
asks Algernon why he pretended to be Jack’s brother, and Algernon says it was
in order to meet her. Gwendolen asks Jack if he pretended to have a brother so
as to be able to come to London to see her as often as possible, and he asks if
she can doubt it. Gwendolen says she has the gravest doubts but intends to
crush them.
Cecily and Gwendolen are on the verge of
forgiving Algernon and Jack when they remember that neither of them is any
longer engaged to a man called Ernest. Algernon and Jack explain that each has
made arrangements to be rechristened Ernest before the day is out, and the
young women, bowled over by men’s “physical courage” and capacity for
“self-sacrifice,” are won over.
As the couples embrace, Lady Bracknell
enters, having bribed Gwendolen’s maid for information about her destination.
On seeing Algernon, she asks whether this house is the house where his friend
Bunbury resides. Algernon, forgetting momentarily that he is supposed to be at
his friend’s bedside, says no, but quickly tries to cover himself and blurts
that Bunbury is dead. He and Lady Bracknell briefly discuss Bunbury’s sudden
demise. Jack then introduces Cecily to Lady Bracknell, and Algernon announces
their engagement. Lady Bracknell asks about Cecily’s background, asking first,
rather acidly, whether she is “connected with any of the larger railway
stations in London.” Jack obligingly volunteers information about Cecily,
answering Lady Bracknell’s presumptuous questions with a withering irony that
goes over Lady Bracknell’s head. Her interest is greatly piqued when she learns
that Cecily is actually worth a great deal of money and stands to inherit even
more when she comes of age.
Jack refuses to give his consent to
Cecily’s marriage to Algernon until Lady Bracknell grants her consent to his
union with Gwendolen, but Lady Bracknell refuses. She summons Gwendolen to her
side and prepares to depart. Before they can leave, however, Dr. Chasuble
arrives to announce that everything is ready for the christenings. Jack
explains that he and Algernon no longer need the christenings immediately and
suggests that the ceremonies be postponed. The rector prepares to withdraw,
explaining that Miss Prism is waiting for him back at the rectory. At the sound
of Miss Prism’s name, Lady Bracknell starts. She asks a number of incisive
questions about Miss Prism then demands that she be sent for. Miss Prism herself
arrives at that moment.
Act III, Part Two
Summary
When Miss Prism sees Lady Bracknell, she
begins behaving in a frightened and furtive manner. Lady Bracknell asks her
severely about the whereabouts of a certain baby that Miss Prism was supposed
to have taken for a walk twenty-eight years ago. Lady Bracknell proceeds to
recount the circumstances of the baby’s disappearance: Miss Prism left a
certain house in Grosvenor Square with a baby carriage containing a male infant
and never returned, the carriage was found some weeks later in Bayswater
containing “a three-volume novel of more than usually revolting
sentimentality,” and the baby in question was never found. Miss Prism confesses
apologetically that she doesn’t know what happened to the baby. She explains
that on the day in question she left the house with both the baby and a handbag
containing a novel she had been working on, but that at some point she must
have absentmindedly confused the two, placing the manuscript in the carriage
and the baby in the handbag.
Now Jack joins the discussion, pressing
Miss Prism for further details: where did she leave the
handbag? Which railway station? What line? Jack excuses himself
and hurries offstage, returning a moment or two later with a handbag. He
presents the handbag to Miss Prism and asks her if she can identify it. Miss
Prism looks the handbag over carefully before acknowledging that it is the handbag she
mislaid. She expresses delight at having it back after so many years. Jack,
under the impression that he has discovered his true parentage, throws his arms
melodramatically around Miss Prism with a cry of “Mother!” Miss Prism, shocked,
reminds Jack that she is unmarried. Jack, misunderstanding her point, launches
into a sentimental speech about forgiveness and redemption through suffering
and society’s double standard about male and female transgression. With great
dignity, Miss Prism gestures toward Lady Bracknell as the proper source of
information about Jack’s history and identity. Lady Bracknell explains that
Jack is the son of her poor sister, which makes him Algernon’s older brother.
The revelation removes all obstacles to
Jack’s union with Gwendolen, but the problem of Jack’s name remains. Gwendolen
points out that they don’t know his true name. Though Lady Bracknell is sure
that as the elder son he was named after his father, no one can recall what
General Moncrieff’s first name was. Fortunately, Jack’s bookshelves contain
recent military records, and he pulls down and consults the appropriate volume.
Jack’s father’s Christian names turn out to have been “Ernest John.” For all
these years, Jack has unwittingly been telling the truth: his name is Ernest, it is also
John, and he does indeed have an unprincipled younger brother—Algernon.
Somewhat taken aback by this turn of events, Jack turns to Gwendolen and asks
if she can forgive him for the fact that he’s been telling the truth his entire
life. She tells him she can forgive him, as she feels he is sure to change.
They embrace, as do Algernon and Cecily and Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble, and
Jack acknowledges that he has discovered “the vital Importance of Being
Earnest.”
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