195. The Greeks, then, do not give passion, do not give character, do not give refined or naive beauty. But you may think that the absence of these is intended to give dignity to the gods and nymphs; and that their calm faces would be found, if you long observed them, instinct with some expression of divine mystery or power.

I will convince you of the narrow range of Greek thought in these respects, by showing you, from the two sides of one and the same coin, images of the most mysterious of their Deities, and the most powerful,—Demeter and Zeus.

Remember, that just as the west coasts of Ireland and England catch first on their hills the rain of the Atlantic, so the western Peloponnese arrests, in the clouds of the first mountain ranges of Arcadia, the moisture of the Mediterranean; and over all the plains of Elis, Pylos, and Messene, the strength and sustenance of men was naturally felt to be granted by Zeus; as, on the east coast of Greece, the greater clearness of the air by the power of Athena. If you will recollect the prayer of Rhea, in the single line of Callimachus—"[Greek: Gaia phile, teke kai su teai d' odines elaphrai]," (compare Pausanias iv. 33, at the beginning,)—it will mark for you the connection, in the Greek mind, of the birth of the mountain springs of Arcadia with the birth of Zeus. And the centres of Greek thought on this western coast are necessarily Elis, and, (after the time of Epaminondas,) Messene.

196. I show you the coin of Messene, because the splendid height and form of Mount Ithome were more expressive of the physical power of Zeus than the lower hills of Olympia; and also because it was struck just at the time of the most finished and delicate Greek art—a little after the main strength of Phidias, but before decadence had generally pronounced itself. The coin is a silver didrachm, bearing on one side a head of Demeter (Plate XVI., at the top); on the other a full figure of Zeus Aietophoros (Plate XIX., at the top); the two together signifying the sustaining strength of the earth and heaven. Look first at the head of Demeter. It is merely meant to personify fulness of harvest; there is no mystery in it, no sadness, no vestige of the expression which we should have looked for in any effort to realize the Greek thoughts of the Earth Mother, as we find them spoken by the poets. But take it merely as personified abundance;—the goddess of black furrow and tawny grass—how commonplace it is, and how poor! The hair is grand, and there is one stalk of wheat set in it, which is enough to indicate the goddess who is meant; but, in that very office, ignoble, for it shows that the artist could only inform you that this was Demeter by such a symbol. How easy it would have been for a great designer to have made the hair lovely with fruitful flowers, and the features noble in mystery of gloom, or of tenderness. But here you have nothing to interest you, except the common Greek perfections of a straight nose and a full chin.

197. We pass, on the reverse of the die, to the figure of Zeus Aietophoros. Think of the invocation to Zeus in the Suppliants, (525), "King of Kings, and Happiest of the Happy, Perfectest of the Perfect in strength, abounding in all things, Jove—hear us and be with us;" and then, consider what strange phase of mind it was, which, under the very mountain-home of the god, was content with this symbol of him as a well-fed athlete, holding a diminutive and crouching eagle on his fist. The features and the right hand have been injured in this coin, but the action of the arms shows that it held a thunderbolt, of which, I believe, the twisted rays were triple. In the, presumably earlier, coin engraved by Millingen, however,[137] it is singly pointed only; and the added inscription "[Greek: ITHOM]," in the field, renders the conjecture of Millingen probable, that this is a rude representation of the statue of Zeus Ithomates, made by Ageladas, the master of Phidias; and I think it has, indeed, the aspect of the endeavour, by a workman of more advanced knowledge, and more vulgar temper, to put the softer anatomy of later schools into the simple action of an archaic figure. Be that as it may, here is one of the most refined cities of Greece content with the figure of an athlete as the representative of their own mountain god; marked as a divine power merely by the attributes of the eagle and thunderbolt.



198. Lastly. The Greeks have not, it appears, in any supreme way, given to their statues character, beauty, or divine strength. Can they give divine sadness? Shall we find in their artwork any of that pensiveness and yearning for the dead, which fills the chants of their tragedy? I suppose if anything like nearness or firmness of faith in afterlife is to be found in Greek legend, you might look for it in the stories about the Island of Leuce, at the mouth of the Danube, inhabited by the ghosts of Achilles, Patroclus, Ajax the son of Oileus, and Helen; and in which the pavement of the Temple of Achilles was washed daily by the sea-birds with their wings, dipping them in the sea.

Now it happens that we have actually on a coin of the Locrians the representation of the ghost of the Lesser Ajax. There is nothing in the history of human imagination more lovely, than their leaving always a place for his spirit, vacant in their ranks of battle. But here is their sculptural representation of the phantom; (lower figure, Plate XIX.), and I think you will at once agree with me in feeling that it would be impossible to conceive anything more completely unspiritual. You might more than doubt that it could have been meant for the departed soul, unless you were aware of the meaning of this little circlet between the feet. On other coins you find his name inscribed there, but in this you have his habitation, the haunted Island of Leuce itself, with the waves flowing round it.

199. Again and again, however, I have to remind you, with respect to these apparently frank and simple failures, that the Greek always intends you to think for yourself, and understand, more than he can speak. Take this instance at our hands, the trim little circlet for the Island of Leuce. The workman knows very well it is not like the island, and that he could not make it so; that at its best, his sculpture can be little more than a letter; and yet, in putting this circlet, and its encompassing fretwork of minute waves, he does more than if he had merely given you a letter L, or written "Leuce." If you know anything of beaches and sea, this symbol will set your imagination at work in recalling them; then you will think of the temple service of the novitiate sea-birds, and of the ghosts of Achilles and Patroclus appearing, like the Dioscuri, above the storm-clouds of the Euxine. And the artist, throughout his work, never for an instant loses faith in your sympathy and passion being ready to answer his;—if you have none to give, he does not care to take you into his counsel; on the whole, would rather that you should not look at his work.

200. But if you have this sympathy to give, you may be sure that whatever he does for you will be right, as far as he can render it so. It may not be sublime, nor beautiful, nor amusing; but it will be full of meaning, and faithful in guidance. He will give you clue to myriads of things that he cannot literally teach; and, so far as he does teach, you may trust him. Is not this saying much?

And as he strove only to teach what was true, so, in his sculptured symbol, he strove only to carve what was—Right. He rules over the arts to this day, and will for ever, because he sought not first for beauty, nor first for passion, or for invention, but for Rightness; striving to display, neither himself nor his art, but the thing that he dealt with, in its simplicity. That is his specific character as a Greek. Of course, every nation's character is connected with that of others surrounding or preceding it; and in the best Greek work you will find some things that are still false, or fanciful; but whatever in it is false or fanciful, is not the Greek part of it—it is the Phoenician, or Egyptian, or Pelasgian part. The essential Hellenic stamp is veracity:—Eastern nations drew their heroes with eight legs, but the Greeks drew them with two;—Egyptians drew their deities with cats' heads, but the Greeks drew them with men's; and out of all fallacy, disproportion, and indefiniteness, they were, day by day, resolvedly withdrawing and exalting themselves into restricted and demonstrable truth.

201. And now, having cut away the misconceptions which encumbered our thoughts, I shall be able to put the Greek school into some clearness of its position for you, with respect to the art of the world. That relation is strangely duplicate; for on one side, Greek art is the root of all simplicity; and on the other, of all complexity.



On one side I say, it is the root of all simplicity. If you were for some prolonged period to study Greek sculpture exclusively in the Elgin Room of the British Museum, and were then suddenly transported to the Hotel de Cluny, or any other museum of Gothic and barbarian workmanship, you would imagine the Greeks were the masters of all that was grand, simple, wise, and tenderly human, opposed to the pettiness of the toys of the rest of mankind.

202. On one side of their work they are so. From all vain and mean decoration—all weak and monstrous error, the Greeks rescue the forms of man and beast, and sculpture them in the nakedness of their true flesh, and with the fire of their living soul. Distinctively from other races, as I have now, perhaps to your weariness, told you, this is the work of the Greek, to give health to what was diseased, and chastisement to what was untrue. So far as this is found in any other school, hereafter, it belongs to them by inheritance from the Greeks, or invests them with the brotherhood of the Greek. And this is the deep meaning of the myth of Daedalus as the giver of motion to statues. The literal change from the binding together of the feet to their separation, and the other modifications of action which took place, either in progressive skill, or often, as the mere consequence of the transition from wood to stone, (a figure carved out of one wooden log must have necessarily its feet near each other, and hands at its sides), these literal changes are as nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the bestowing of apparent life. The figures of monstrous gods on Indian temples have their legs separate enough; but they are infinitely more dead than the rude figures at Branchidae sitting with their hands on their knees. And, briefly, the work of Daedalus is the giving of deceptive life, as that of Prometheus the giving of real life; and I can put the relation of Greek to all other art, in this function, before you in easily compared and remembered examples.

203. Here, on the right, in Plate XX., is an Indian bull, colossal, and elaborately carved, which you may take as a sufficient type of the bad art of all the earth. False in form, dead in heart, and loaded with wealth, externally. We will not ask the date of this; it may rest in the eternal obscurity of evil art, everywhere and for ever. Now, besides this colossal bull, here is a bit of Daedalus work, enlarged from a coin not bigger than a shilling: look at the two together, and you ought to know, henceforward, what Greek art means, to the end of your days.

204. In this aspect of it then, I say, it is the simplest and nakedest of lovely veracities. But it has another aspect, or rather another pole, for the opposition is diametric. As the simplest, so also it is the most complex of human art. I told you in my fifth Lecture, showing you the spotty picture of Velasquez, that an essential Greek character is a liking for things that are dappled. And you cannot but have noticed how often and how prevalently the idea which gave its name to the Porch of Polygnotus, "[Greek: stoa poikile]," occurs to the Greeks as connected with the finest art. Thus, when the luxurious city is opposed to the simple and healthful one, in the second book of Plato's Polity, you find that, next to perfumes, pretty ladies, and dice, you must have in it "[Greek: poikilia]," which observe, both in that place and again in the third book, is the separate art of joiners' work, or inlaying; but the idea of exquisitely divided variegation or division, both in sight and sound—the "ravishing division to the lute," as in Pindar's "[Greek: poikiloi hymnoi]"—runs through the compass of all Greek art-description; and if, instead of studying that art among marbles you were to look at it only on vases of a fine time, (look back, for instance, to Plate IV. here), your impression of it would be, instead of breadth and simplicity, one of universal spottiness and chequeredness, "[Greek: en angeon Herkesin pampoikilois];" and of the artist's delighting in nothing so much as in crossed or starred or spotted things; which, in right places, he and his public both do unlimitedly. Indeed they hold it complimentary even to a trout, to call him a "spotty." Do you recollect the trout in the tributaries of the Ladon, which Pausanias says were spotted, so that they were like thrushes and which, the Arcadians told him, could speak? In this last [Greek: poikilia], however, they disappointed him. "I, indeed, saw some of them caught," he says, "but I did not hear any of them speak, though I waited beside the river till sunset."



205. I must sum roughly now, for I have detained you too long.

The Greeks have been thus the origin not only of all broad, mighty, and calm conception, but of all that is divided, delicate, and tremulous; "variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made." To them, as first leaders of ornamental design, belongs, of right, the praise of glistenings in gold, piercings in ivory, stainings in purple, burnishings in dark blue steel; of the fantasy of the Arabian roof—quartering of the Christian shield,—rubric and arabesque of Christian scripture; in fine, all enlargement, and all diminution of adorning thought, from the temple to the toy, and from the mountainous pillars of Agrigentum to the last fineness of fretwork in the Pisan Chapel of the Thorn.

And in their doing all this, they stand as masters of human order and justice, subduing the animal nature guided by the spiritual one, as you see the Sicilian Charioteer stands, holding his horse-reins, with the wild lion racing beneath him, and the flying angel above, on the beautiful coin of early Syracuse; (lowest in Plate XXI).

And the beginnings of Christian chivalary were in that Greek bridling of the dark and the white horses.

206. Not that a Greek never made mistakes. He made as many as we do ourselves, nearly;—he died of his mistakes at last—as we shall die of them; but so far he was separated from the herd of more mistaken and more wretched nations—so far as he was Greek—it was by his rightness. He lived, and worked, and was satisfied with the fatness of his land, and the fame of his deeds, by his justice, and reason, and modesty. He became Graeculus esuriens, little, and hungry, and every man's errand-boy, by his iniquity, and his competition, and his love of talk. But his Graecism was in having done, at least at one period of his dominion, more than anybody else, what was modest, useful, and eternally true; and as a workman, he verily did, or first suggested the doing of, everything possible to man.

Take Daedalus, his great type of the practically executive craftsman, and the inventor of expedients in craftsmanship, (as distinguished from Prometheus, the institutor of moral order in art). Daedalus invents,—he, or his nephew,—

The potter's wheel, and all work in clay;

The saw, and all work in wood;

The masts and sails of ships, and all modes of motion; (wings only proving too dangerous!)

The entire art of minute ornament;

And the deceptive life of statues.

By his personal toil, he involves the fatal labyrinth for Minos; builds an impregnable fortress for the Agrigentines; adorns healing baths among the wild parsley fields of Selinus; buttresses the precipices of Eryx, under the temple of Aphrodite; and for her temple itself—finishes in exquisiteness the golden honeycomb.

207. Take note of that last piece of his art: it is connected with many things which I must bring before you when we enter on the study of architecture. That study we shall begin at the foot of the Baptistery of Florence, which, of all buildings known to me, unites the most perfect symmetry with the quaintest [Greek: poikilia]. Then, from the tomb of your own Edward the Confessor, to the farthest shrine of the opposite Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and iridescent dominion of Daedalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division, interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this last summer I found the dark red masses of the rough sandstone of Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had in carving them, into wedged hexagons—reminiscences of the honeycomb of Venus Erycina. His ingenuity plays around the framework of all the noblest things; and yet the brightness of it has a lurid shadow. The spot of the fawn, of the bird, and the moth, may be harmless. But Daedalus reigns no less over the spot of the leopard and snake. That cruel and venomous power of his art is marked, in the legends of him, by his invention of the saw from the serpent's tooth; and his seeking refuge, under blood-guiltiness, with Minos, who can judge evil, and measure, or remit, the penalty of it, but not reward good: Rhadamanthus only can measure that; but Minos is essentially the recognizer of evil deeds "conoscitor delle peccata," whom, therefore, you find in Dante under the form of the [Greek: erpeton]. "Cignesi con la coda tante volte, quantunque gradi vuol che giu sia messa."

And this peril of the influence of Daedalus is twofold; first in leading us to delight in glitterings and semblances of things, more than in their form, or truth;—admire the harlequin's jacket more than the hero's strength; and love the gilding of the missal more than its words;—but farther, and worse, the ingenuity of Daedalus may even become bestial, an instinct for mechanical labour only, strangely involved with a feverish and ghastly cruelty:—(you will find this distinct in the intensely Daedal work of the Japanese); rebellious, finally, against the laws of nature and honour, and building labyrinths for monsters,—not combs for bees.

208. Gentlemen, we of the rough northern race may never, perhaps, be able to learn from the Greek his reverence for beauty: but we may at least learn his disdain of mechanism:—of all work which he felt to be monstrous and inhuman in its imprudent dexterities.

We hold ourselves, we English, to be good workmen. I do not think I speak with light reference to recent calamity, (for I myself lost a young relation, full of hope and good purpose, in the foundered ship London,) when I say that either an AEginetan or Ionian shipwright built ships that could be fought from, though they were under water; and neither of them would have been proud of having built one that would fill and sink helplessly if the sea washed over her deck, or turn upside down if a squall struck her topsail.

Believe me, gentlemen, good workmanship consists in continence and common sense, more than in frantic expatiation of mechanical ingenuity; and if you would be continent and rational, you had better learn more of Art than you do now, and less of Engineering. What is taking place at this very hour,[138] among the streets, once so bright, and avenues once so pleasant, of the fairest city in Europe, may surely lead us all to feel that the skill of Daedalus, set to build impregnable fortresses, is not so wisely applied as in framing the [Greek: treton ponou]—the golden honeycomb.

FOOTNOTES:

[135] The closing Lecture, on the religious temper of the Florentine, though necessary for the complete explanation of the subject to my class, at the time, introduced new points of inquiry which I do not choose to lay before the general reader until they can be examined in fuller sequence. The present volume, therefore, closes with the Sixth Lecture, and that on Christian art will be given as the first of the published course on Florentine Sculpture.

[136] These plates of coins are given for future reference and examination, not merely for the use made of them in this place. The Lacinian Hera, if a coin could be found unworn in surface, would be very noble; her hair is thrown free because she is the goddess of the cape of storms though in her temple, there, the wind never moved the ashes on its altar. (Livy, xxiv. 3.)

[137] Ancient Cities and Kings, Plate IV. No. 20.

[138] The siege of Paris, at the time of the delivery of this Lecture, was in one of its most destructive phases.



THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND.

(Delivered at the R. A. Institution, Woolwich, December 14, 1869.)

I would fain have left to the frank expression of the moment, but fear I could not have found clear words—I cannot easily find them, even deliberately,—to tell you how glad I am, and yet how ashamed, to accept your permission to speak to you. Ashamed of appearing to think that I can tell you any truth which you have not more deeply felt than I; but glad in the thought that my less experience, and way of life sheltered from the trials, and free from the responsibilities of yours, may have left me with something of a child's power of help to you; a sureness of hope, which may perhaps be the one thing that can be helpful to men who have done too much not to have often failed in doing all that they desired. And indeed, even the most hopeful of us, cannot but now be in many things apprehensive. For this at least we all know too well, that we are on the eve of a great political crisis, if not of political change. That a struggle is approaching between the newly-risen power of democracy and the apparently departing power of feudalism; and another struggle, no less imminent, and far more dangerous, between wealth and pauperism. These two quarrels are constantly thought of as the same. They are being fought together, and an apparently common interest unites for the most part the millionaire with the noble, in resistance to a multitude, crying, part of it for bread and part of it for liberty.

And yet no two quarrels can be more distinct. Riches—so far from being necessary to noblesse—are adverse to it. So utterly adverse, that the first character of all the Nobilities which have founded great dynasties in the world is to be poor;—often poor by oath—always poor by generosity. And of every true knight in the chivalric ages, the first thing history tells you is, that he never kept treasure for himself.

Thus the causes of wealth and noblesse are not the same; but opposite. On the other hand, the causes of anarchy and of the poor are not the same, but opposite. Side by side, in the same rank, are now indeed set the pride that revolts against authority, and the misery that appeals against avarice. But, so far from being a common cause, all anarchy is the forerunner of poverty, and all prosperity begins in obedience. So that thus, it has become impossible to give due support to the cause of order, without seeming to countenance injury; and impossible to plead justly the claims of sorrow, without seeming to plead also for those of license.

Let me try, then, to put in very brief terms, the real plan of this various quarrel, and the truth of the cause on each side. Let us face that full truth, whatever it may be, and decide what part, according to our power, we should take in the quarrel.

First. For eleven hundred years, all but five, since Charlemagne set on his head the Lombard crown, the body of European people have submitted patiently to be governed; generally by kings—always by single leaders of some kind. But for the last fifty years they have begun to suspect, and of late they have many of them concluded, that they have been on the whole ill-governed, or misgoverned, by their kings. Whereupon they say, more and more widely, "Let us henceforth have no kings; and no government at all."

Now we said, we must face the full truth of the matter, in order to see what we are to do. And the truth is that the people have been misgoverned;—that very little is to be said, hitherto, for most of their masters—and that certainly in many places they will try their new system of "no masters:"—and as that arrangement will be delightful to all foolish persons, and, at first, profitable to all wicked ones,—and as these classes are not wanting or unimportant in any human society,—the experiment is likely to be tried extensively. And the world may be quite content to endure much suffering with this fresh hope, and retain its faith in anarchy, whatever comes of it, till it can endure no more.

Then, secondly. The people have begun to suspect that one particular form of this past misgovernment has been, that their masters have set them to do all the work, and have themselves taken all the wages. In a word, that what was called governing them, meant only wearing fine clothes, and living on good fare at their expense. And I am sorry to say, the people are quite right in this opinion also. If you inquire into the vital fact of the matter, this you will find to be the constant structure of European society for the thousand years of the feudal system; it was divided into peasants who lived by working; priests who lived by begging; and knights who lived by pillaging; and as the luminous public mind becomes gradually cognizant of these facts, it will assuredly not suffer things to be altogether arranged that way any more; and the devising of other ways will be an agitating business; especially because the first impression of the intelligent populace is, that whereas, in the dark ages, half the nation lived idle, in the bright ages to come, the whole of it may.

Now, thirdly—and here is much the worst phase of the crisis. This past system of misgovernment, especially during the last three hundred years, has prepared, by its neglect, a class among the lower orders which it is now peculiarly difficult to govern. It deservedly lost their respect—but that was the least part of the mischief. The deadly part of it was, that the lower orders lost their habit, and at last their faculty, of respect;—lost the very capability of reverence, which is the most precious part of the human soul. Exactly in the degree in which you can find creatures greater than yourself, to look up to, in that degree, you are ennobled yourself, and, in that degree, happy. If you could live always in the presence of archangels, you would be happier than in that of men; but even if only in the company of admirable knights and beautiful ladies, the more noble and bright they were, and the more you could reverence their virtue the happier you would be. On the contrary, if you were condemned to live among a multitude of idiots, dumb, distorted and malicious, you would not be happy in the constant sense of your own superiority. Thus all real joy and power of progress in humanity depend on finding something to reverence; and all the baseness and misery of humanity begin in a habit of disdain. Now, by general misgovernment, I repeat, we have created in Europe a vast populace, and out of Europe a still vaster one, which has lost even the power and conception of reverence;[139]—which exists only in the worship of itself—which can neither see anything beautiful around it, nor conceive anything virtuous above it; which has, towards all goodness and greatness, no other feelings than those of the lowest creatures—fear, hatred, or hunger a populace which has sunk below your appeal in their nature, as it has risen beyond your power in their multitude;—whom you can now no more charm than you can the adder, nor discipline, than you can the summer fly.

It is a crisis, gentlemen; and time to think of it. I have roughly and broadly put it before you in its darkness. Let us look what we may find of light.

Only the other day, in a journal which is a fairly representative exponent of the Conservatism of our day, and for the most part not at all in favor of strikes or other popular proceedings; only about three weeks since, there was a leader, with this, or a similar, title—"What is to become of the House of Lords?" It startled me, for it seemed as if we were going even faster than I had thought, when such a question was put as a subject of quite open debate, in a journal meant chiefly for the reading of the middle and upper classes. Open or not—the debate is near. What is to become of them? And the answer to such question depends first on their being able to answer another question—"What is the use of them!" For some time back, I think the theory of the nation has been, that they are useful as impediments to business, so as to give time for second thoughts. But the nation is getting impatient of impediments to business; and certainly, sooner or later, will think it needless to maintain these expensive obstacles to its humors. And I have not heard, either in public, or from any of themselves, a clear expression of their own conception of their use. So that it seems thus to become needful for all men to tell them, as our one quite clear-sighted teacher, Carlyle, has been telling us for many a year, that the use of the Lords of a country is to govern the country. If they answer that use, the country will rejoice in keeping them; if not, that will become of them which must of all things found to have lost their serviceableness.

Here, therefore, is the one question, at this crisis, for them, and for us. Will they be lords indeed, and give us laws—dukes indeed, and give us guiding—princes indeed, and give us beginning, of truer dynasty, which shall not be soiled by covetousness, nor disordered by iniquity? Have they themselves sunk so far as not to hope this? Are there yet any among them who can stand forward with open English brows, and say,—So far as in me lies, I will govern with my might, not for Dieu et mon Droit, but for the first grand reading of the war cry, from which that was corrupted, "Dieu et Droit?" Among them I know there are some—among you, soldiers of England, I know there are many, who can do this; and in you is our trust. I, one of the lower people of your country, ask of you in their name—you whom I will not any more call soldiers, but by the truer name of Knights;—Equites of England. How many yet of you are there, knights errant now beyond all former fields of danger—knights patient now beyond all former endurance; who still retain the ancient and eternal purpose of knighthood, to subdue the wicked, and aid the weak? To them, be they few or many, we English people call for help to the wretchedness, and for rule over the baseness, of multitudes desolate and deceived, shrieking to one another this new gospel of their new religion. "Let the weak do as they can, and the wicked as they will."

I can hear you saying in your hearts, even the bravest of you, "The time is past for all that." Gentlemen, it is not so. The time has come for more than all that. Hitherto, soldiers have given their lives for false fame, and for cruel power. The day is now when they must give their lives for true fame, and for beneficent power: and the work is near every one of you—close beside you—the means of it even thrust into your hands. The people are crying to you for command, and you stand there at pause, and silent. You think they don't want to be commanded; try them; determine what is needful for them—honorable for them; show it them, promise to bring them to it, and they will follow you through fire. "Govern us," they cry with one heart, though many minds. They can be governed still, these English; they are men still; not gnats, nor serpents. They love their old ways yet, and their old masters, and their old land. They would fain live in it, as many as may stay there, if you will show them how, there, to live;—or show them even, how, there, like Englishmen, to die.

"To live in it, as many as may!" How many do you think may? How many can? How many do you want to live there? As masters, your first object must be to increase your power; and in what does the power of a country consist? Will you have dominion over its stones, or over its clouds, or over its souls? What do you mean by a great nation, but a great multitude of men who are true to each other, and strong, and of worth? Now you can increase the multitude only definitely—your island has only so much standing room—but you can increase the worth indefinitely. It is but a little island;—suppose, little as it is, you were to fill it with friends? You may, and that easily. You must, and that speedily; or there will be an end to this England of ours, and to all its loves and enmities.

To fill this little island with true friends—men brave, wise, and happy! Is it so impossible, think you, after the world's eighteen hundred years of Christianity, and our own thousand years of toil, to fill only this little white gleaming crag with happy creatures, helpful to each other? Africa, and India, and the Brazilian wide-watered plain, are these not wide enough for the ignorance of our race? have they not space enough for its pain? Must we remain here also savage,—here at enmity with each other,—here foodless, houseless, in rags, in dust, and without hope, as thousands and tens of thousands of us are lying? Do not think it, gentlemen. The thought that it is inevitable is the last infidelity; infidelity not to God only, but to every creature and every law that He has made. Are we to think that the earth was only shaped to be a globe of torture; and that there cannot be one spot of it where peace can rest, or justice reign? Where are men ever to be happy, if not in England? by whom shall they ever be taught to do right, if not by you? Are we not of a race first among the strong ones of the earth; the blood in us incapable of weariness, unconquerable by grief? Have we not a history of which we can hardly think without becoming insolent in our just pride of it? Can we dare, without passing every limit of courtesy to other nations, to say how much more we have to be proud of in our ancestors than they? Among our ancient monarchs, great crimes stand out as monstrous and strange. But their valor, and, according to their understanding, their benevolence, are constant. The Wars of the Roses, which are as a fearful crimson shadow on our land, represent the normal condition of other nations; while from the days of the Heptarchy downwards we have had examples given us, in all ranks, of the most varied and exalted virtue; a heap of treasure that no moth can corrupt, and which even our traitorship, if we are to become traitors to it, cannot sully.

And this is the race, then, that we know not any more how to govern! and this the history which we are to behold broken off by sedition! and this is the country, of all others, where life is to become difficult to the honest, and ridiculous to the wise! And the catastrophe, forsooth, is to come just when we have been making swiftest progress beyond the wisdom and wealth of the past. Our cities are a wilderness of spinning wheels instead of palaces; yet the people have not clothes. We have blackened every leaf of English greenwood with ashes, and the people die of cold; our harbors are a forest of merchant ships, and the people die of hunger.

Whose fault is it? Yours, gentlemen; yours only. You alone can feed them, and clothe, and bring into their right minds, for you only can govern—that is to say, you only can educate them.

Educate, or govern, they are one and the same word. Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. And the true "compulsory education" which the people now ask of you is not catechism, but drill. It is not teaching the youth of England the shapes of letters and the tricks of numbers; and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery, and their literature to lust. It is, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and souls. It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise,—but above all—by example.

Compulsory! Yes, by all means! "Go ye out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in." Compulsory! Yes, and gratis also. Dei Gratia, they must be taught, as, Dei Gratia, you are set to teach them. I hear strange talk continually, "how difficult it is to make people pay for being educated!" Why, I should think so! Do you make your children pay for their education, or do you give it them compulsorily, and gratis? You do not expect them to pay you for their teaching, except by becoming good children. Why should you expect a peasant to pay for his, except by becoming a good man?—payment enough, I think, if we knew it. Payment enough to himself, as to us. For that is another of our grand popular mistakes—people are always thinking of education as a means of livelihood. Education is not a profitable business, but a costly one; nay, even the best attainments of it are always unprofitable, in any terms of coin. No nation ever made its bread either by its great arts, or its great wisdoms. By its minor arts or manufactures, by its practical knowledges, yes: but its noble scholarship, its noble philosophy, and its noble art, are always to be bought as a treasure, not sold for a livelihood. You do not learn that you may live—you live that you may learn. You are to spend on National Education, and to be spent for it, and to make by it, not more money, but better men;—to get into this British Island the greatest possible number of good and brave Englishmen. They are to be your "money's worth."

But where is the money to come from? Yes, that is to be asked. Let us, as quite the first business in this our national crisis, look not only into our affairs, but into our accounts, and obtain some general notion how we annually spend our money, and what we are getting for it. Observe, I do not mean to inquire into the public revenue only; of that some account is rendered already. But let us do the best we can to set down the items of the national private expenditure; and know what we spend altogether, and how.

To begin with this matter of education. You probably have nearly all seen the admirable lecture lately given by Captain Maxse, at Southampton. It contains a clear statement of the facts at present ascertained as to our expenditure in that respect. It appears that of our public moneys, for every pound that we spend on education we spend twelve either in charity or punishment;—ten millions a year in pauperism and crime, and eight hundred thousand in instruction. Now Captain Maxse adds to this estimate of ten millions public money spent on crime and want, a more or less conjectural sum of eight millions for private charities. My impression is that this is much beneath the truth, but at all events it leaves out of consideration much the heaviest and saddest form of charity—the maintenance, by the working members of families, of the unfortunate or ill-conducted persons whom the general course of misrule now leaves helpless to be the burden of the rest.

Now I want to get first at some, I do not say approximate, but at all events some suggestive, estimate of the quantity of real distress and misguided life in this country. Then next, I want some fairly representative estimate of our private expenditure in luxuries. We won't spend more, publicly, it appears, than eight hundred thousand a year, on educating men gratis. I want to know, as nearly as possible, what we spend privately a year, in educating horses gratis. Let us, at least, quit ourselves in this from the taunt of Rabshakeh, and see that for every horse we train also a horseman; and that the rider be at least as high-bred as the horse, not jockey, but chevalier. Again, we spend eight hundred thousand, which is certainly a great deal of money, in making rough minds bright. I want to know how much we spend annually in making rough stones bright; that is to say, what may be the united annual sum, or near it, of our jewellers' bills. So much we pay for educating children gratis;—how much for educating diamonds gratis? and which pays best for brightening, the spirit or the charcoal? Let us get those two items set down with some sincerity, and a few more of the same kind. Publicly set down. We must not be ashamed of the way we spend our money. If our right hand is not to know what our left does, it must not be because it would be ashamed if it did.

That is, therefore, quite the first practical thing to be done. Let every man who wishes well to his country, render it yearly an account of his income, and of the main heads of his expenditure; or, if he is ashamed to do so, let him no more impute to the poor their poverty as a crime, nor set them to break stones in order to frighten them from committing it. To lose money ill is indeed often a crime; but to get it ill is a worse one, and to spend it ill, worst of all. You object, Lords of England, to increase, to the poor, the wages you give them, because they spend them, you say, unadvisedly. Render them, therefore, an account of the wages which they give you; and show them, by your example, how to spend theirs, to the last farthing advisedly.

It is indeed time to make this an acknowledged subject of instruction, to the workingman,—how to spend his wages. For, gentlemen, we must give that instruction, whether we will or no, one way or the other. We have given it in years gone by; and now we find fault with our peasantry for having been too docile, and profited too shrewdly by our tuition. Only a few days since I had a letter from the wife of a village rector, a man of common sense and kindness, who was greatly troubled in his mind because it was precisely the men who got highest wages in summer that came destitute to his door in the winter. Destitute, and of riotous temper—for their method of spending wages in their period of prosperity was by sitting two days a week in the tavern parlor, ladling port wine, not out of bowls, but out of buckets. Well, gentlemen, who taught them that method of festivity? Thirty years ago, I, a most inexperienced freshman, went to my first college supper; at the head of the table sat a nobleman of high promise and of admirable powers, since dead of palsy; there also we had in the midst of us, not buckets, indeed, but bowls as large as buckets; there also, we helped ourselves with ladles. There (for this beginning of college education was compulsory), I choosing ladlefuls of punch instead of claret, because I was then able, unperceived to pour them into my waistcoat instead of down my throat, stood it out to the end, and helped to carry four of my fellow-students, one of them the son of the head of a college, head foremost, down stairs and home.

Such things are no more; but the fruit of them remains, and will for many a day to come. The laborers whom you cannot now shut out of the ale-house are only the too faithful disciples of the gentlemen who were wont to shut themselves into the dining-room. The gentlemen have not thought it necessary, in order to correct their own habits, to diminish their incomes; and, believe me, the way to deal with your drunken workman is not to lower his wages,—but to mend his wits.[140]

And if indeed we do not yet see quite clearly how to deal with the sins of our poor brother, it is possible that our dimness of sight may still have other causes that can be cast out. There are two opposite cries of the great liberal and conservative parties, which are both most right, and worthy to be rallying cries. On their side "let every man have his chance;" on yours "let every man stand in his place." Yes, indeed, let that be so, every man in his place, and every man fit for it. See that he holds that place from Heaven's Providence; and not from his family's Providence. Let the Lords Spiritual quit themselves of simony, we laymen will look after the heretics for them. Let the Lords Temporal quit themselves of nepotism, and we will take care of their authority for them. Publish for us, you soldiers, an army gazette, in which the one subject of daily intelligence shall be the grounds of promotion; a gazette which shall simply tell us, what there certainly can be no detriment to the service in our knowing, when any officer is appointed to a new command,—what his former services and successes have been,—whom he has superseded,—and on what ground. It will be always a satisfaction to us; it may sometimes be an advantage to you: and then, when there is really necessary debate respecting reduction of wages, let us always begin not with the wages of the industrious classes, but with those of the idle ones. Let there be honorary titles, if people like them; but let there be no honorary incomes.

So much for the master's motto, "Every man in his place." Next for the laborer's motto, "Every man his chance." Let us mend that for them a little, and say, "Every man his certainty"—certainty, that if he does well, he will be honored, and aided, and advanced in such degree as may be fitting for his faculty and consistent with his peace; and equal certainty that if he does ill, he will by sure justice be judged, and by sure punishment be chastised; if it may be, corrected; and if that may not be, condemned. That is the right reading of the Republican motto, "Every man his chance." And then, with such a system of government, pure, watchful and just, you may approach your great problem of national education, or in other words, of national employment. For all education begins in work. What we think, or what we know; or what we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do; and for man, woman, or child, the first point of education is to make them do their best. It is the law of good economy to make the best of everything. How much more to make the best of every creature! Therefore, when your pauper comes to you and asks for bread, ask of him instantly—What faculty have you? What can you do best? Can you drive a nail into wood? Go and mend the parish fences. Can you lay a brick? Mend the walls of the cottages where the wind comes in. Can you lift a spadeful of earth? Turn this field up three feet deep all over. Can you only drag a weight with your shoulders? Stand at the bottom of this hill and help up the overladen horses. Can you weld iron and chisel stone? Fortify this wreck-strewn coast into a harbor; and change these shifting sands into fruitful ground. Wherever death was, bring life; that is to be your work; that your parish refuge; that your education. So and no otherwise can we meet existent distress. But for the continual education of the whole people, and for their future happiness, they must have such consistent employment as shall develop all the powers of the fingers, and the limbs, and the brain: and that development is only to be obtained by hand-labor, of which you have these four great divisions—hand-labor on the earth, hand-labor on the sea, hand-labor in art, hand-labor in war. Of the last two of these I cannot speak to-night, and of the first two only with extreme brevity.

I. Hand-labor on the earth, the work of the husbandman and of the shepherd;—to dress the earth and to keep the flocks of it—the first task of man, and the final one—the education always of noblest lawgivers, kings and teachers; the education of Hesiod, of Moses, of David, of all the true strength of Rome; and all its tenderness: the pride of Cincinnatus, and the inspiration of Virgil. Hand-labor on the earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with singing:—not steam-piston labor on the earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with steam-whistling. You will have no prophet's voice accompanied by that shepherd's pipe, and pastoral symphony. Do you know that lately, in Cumberland, in the chief pastoral district of England—in Wordsworth's own home—a procession of villagers on their festa day provided for themselves, by way of music, a steam-plough whistling at the head of them.

Give me patience while I put the principle of machine labor before you, as clearly and in as short compass as possible; it is one that should be known at this juncture. Suppose a farming proprietor needs to employ a hundred men on his estate, and that the labor of these hundred men is enough, but not more than enough, to till all his land, and to raise from it food for his own family, and for the hundred laborers. He is obliged, under such circumstances, to maintain all the men in moderate comfort, and can only by economy accumulate much for himself. But, suppose he contrive a machine that will easily do the work of fifty men, with only one man to watch it. This sounds like a great advance in civilization. The farmer of course gets his machine made, turns off the fifty men, who may starve or emigrate at their choice, and now he can keep half of the produce of his estate, which formerly went to feed them, all to himself. That is the essential and constant operation of machinery among us at this moment.

Nay, it is at first answered; no man can in reality keep half the produce of an estate to himself, nor can he in the end keep more than his own human share of anything; his riches must diffuse themselves at some time; he must maintain somebody else with them, however he spends them. That is mainly true (not altogether so), for food and fuel are in ordinary circumstances personally wasted by rich people, in quantities which would save many lives. One of my own great luxuries, for instance, is candlelight—and I probably burn, for myself alone, as many candles during the winter, as would comfort the old eyes, or spare the young ones, of a whole rushlighted country village. Still, it is mainly true, that it is not by their personal waste that rich people prevent the lives of the poor. This is the way they do it. Let me go back to my farmer. He has got his machine made, which goes creaking, screaming, and occasionally exploding, about modern Arcadia. He has turned off his fifty men to starve. Now, at some distance from his own farm, there is another on which the laborers were working for their bread in the same way, by tilling the land. The machinist sends over to these, saying—"I have got food enough for you without your digging or ploughing any more. I can maintain you in other occupations instead of ploughing that land; if you rake in its gravel you will find some hard stones—you shall grind those on mills till they glitter; then, my wife shall wear a necklace of them. Also, if you turn up the meadows below you will find some fine white clay, of which you shall make a porcelain service for me: and the rest of the farm I want for pasture for horses for my carriage—and you shall groom them, and some of you ride behind the carriage with staves in your hands, and I will keep you much fatter for doing that than you can keep yourselves by digging."

Well—but it is answered, are we to have no diamonds, nor china, nor pictures, nor footmen, then—but all to be farmers? I am not saying what we ought to do, I want only to show you with perfect clearness first what we are doing; and that, I repeat, is the upshot of machine-contriving in this country. And observe its effect on the national strength. Without machines, you have a hundred and fifty yeomen ready to join for defence of the land. You get your machine, starve fifty of them, make diamond-cutters or footmen of as many more, and for your national defence against an enemy, you have now, and can have, only fifty men, instead of a hundred and fifty; these also now with minds much alienated from you as their chief,[141] and the rest, lapidaries or footmen; and a steam plough.

That is one effect of machinery; but at all events, if we have thus lost in men, we have gained in riches; instead of happy human souls, we have at least got pictures, china, horses, and are ourselves better off than we were before. But very often, and in much of our machine-contriving, even that result does not follow. We are not one whit the richer for the machine, we only employ it for our amusement. For observe, our gaining in riches depends on the men who are out of employment consenting to be starved, or sent out of the country. But suppose they do not consent passively to be starved, but some of them become criminals, and have to be taken charge of and fed at a much greater cost than if they were at work, and, others, paupers, rioters, and the like, then you attain the real outcome of modern wisdom and ingenuity. You have your hundred men honestly at country work; but you don't like the sight of human beings in your fields; you like better to see a smoking kettle. You pay, as an amateur, for that pleasure, and you employ your fifty men in picking oakum, or begging, rioting, and thieving.

By hand-labor, therefore, and that alone, we are to till the ground. By hand-labor also to plough the sea; both for food, and in commerce, and in war: not with floating kettles there neither, but with hempen bridle, and the winds of heaven in harness. That is the way the power of Greece rose on her Egean, the power of Venice on her Adria, of Amalfi in her blue bay, of the Norman sea-riders from the North Cape to Sicily:—so, your own dominion also of the past. Of the past mind you. On the Baltic and the Nile, your power is already departed. By machinery you would advance to discovery; by machinery you would carry your commerce;—you would be engineers instead of sailors; and instantly in the North seas you are beaten among the ice, and before the very Gods of Nile, beaten among the sand. Agriculture, then, by the hand or by the plough drawn only by animals; and shepherd and pastoral husbandry, are to be the chief schools of Englishmen. And this most royal academy of all academies you have to open over all the land, purifying your heaths and hills, and waters, and keeping them full of every kind of lovely natural organism, in tree, herb, and living creature. All land that is waste and ugly, you must redeem into ordered fruitfulness; all ruin, desolateness, imperfectness of hut or habitation, you must do away with; and throughout every village and city of your English dominion there must not be a hand that cannot find a helper, nor a heart that cannot find a comforter.

"How impossible!" I know, you are thinking. Ah! So far from impossible, it is easy, it is natural, it is necessary, and I declare to you that, sooner or later, it must be done, at our peril. If now our English lords of land will fix this idea steadily before them; take the people to their hearts, trust to their loyalty, lead their labor;—then indeed there will be princes again in the midst of us, worthy of the island throne,

"This royal throne of kings—this sceptred isle— This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection, and the hand of war; This precious stone set in the silver sea; This happy breed of men—this little world: This other Eden—Demi-Paradise."

But if they refuse to do this, and hesitate and equivocate, clutching through the confused catastrophe of all things only at what they can still keep stealthily for themselves—their doom is nearer than even their adversaries hope, and it will be deeper than even their despisers dream.

That, believe me, is the work you have to do in England; and out of England you have room for everything else you care to do. Are her dominions in the world so narrow that she can find no place to spin cotton in but Yorkshire? We may organize emigration into an infinite power. We may assemble troops of the more adventurous and ambitious of our youth; we may send them on truest foreign service, founding new seats of authority, and centres of thought, in uncultivated and unconquered lands; retaining the full affection to the native country no less in our colonists than in our armies, teaching them to maintain allegiance to their fatherland in labor no less than in battle; aiding them with free hand in the prosecution of discovery, and the victory over adverse natural powers; establishing seats of every manufacture in the climates and places best fitted for it, and bringing ourselves into due alliance and harmony of skill with the dexterities of every race, and the wisdoms of every tradition and every tongue.

And then you may make England itself the centre of the learning, of the arts, of the courtesies and felicities of the world. Yon may cover her mountains with pasture; her plains with corn, her valleys with the lily, and her gardens with the rose. You may bring together there in peace the wise and the pure, and the gentle of the earth, and by their word, command through its farthest darkness the birth of "God's first creature, which was Light." You know whose words those are; the words of the wisest of Englishmen. He, and with him the wisest of all other great nations, have spoken always to men of this hope, and they would not hear. Plato, in the dialogue of Critias, his last, broken off at his death—Pindar, in passionate singing of the fortunate islands—Virgil, in the prophetic tenth eclogue—Bacon, in his fable of the New Atlantis—More, in the book which, too impatiently wise, became the bye-word of fools—these, all, have told us with one voice what we should strive to attain; they not hopeless of it, but for our follies forced, as it seems, by heaven, to tell us only partly and in parables, lest we should hear them and obey.

Shall we never listen to the words of these wisest of men? Then listen at least to the words of your children—let us in the lips of babes and sucklings find our strength; and see that we do not make them mock instead of pray, when we teach them, night and morning, to ask for what we believe never can be granted;—that the will of the Father,—which is, that His creatures may be righteous and happy—should be done, on earth, as it is in Heaven.

FOOTNOTES:

[139] Compare Time and Tide, Sec. 169, and Fors Clavigera, Letter XIV, page 9.

[140] See Appendix, "Modern Education," and compare Sec. 70 of Time and Tide.

[141] [They were deserting, I am informed, in the early part of this year, 1873, at the rate of a regiment a week.]



NOTES ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA.

I am often accused of inconsistency; but believe myself defensible against the charge with respect to what I have said on nearly every subject except that of war. It is impossible for me to write consistently of war, for the groups of facts I have gathered about it lead me to two precisely opposite conclusions.

When I find this the case, in other matters, I am silent, till I can choose my conclusion: but, with respect to war, I am forced to speak, by the necessities of the time; and forced to act, one way or another. The conviction on which I act is, that it causes an incalculable amount of avoidable human suffering, and that it ought to cease among Christian nations; and if therefore any of my boy-friends desire to be soldiers, I try my utmost to bring them into what I conceive to be a better mind. But, on the other hand, I know certainly that the most beautiful characters yet developed among men have been formed in war;—that all great nations have been warrior nations, and that the only kinds of peace which we are likely to get in the present age are ruinous alike to the intellect, and the heart.

The lecture on "War," in this volume, addressed to young soldiers, had for its object to strengthen their trust in the virtue of their profession. It is inconsistent with itself, in its closing appeal to women, praying them to use their influence to bring wars to an end. And I have been hindered from completing my long intended notes on the economy of the Kings of Prussia by continually increasing doubt how far the machinery and discipline of war, under which they learned the art of government, was essential for such lesson; and what the honesty and sagacity of the Friedrich who so nobly repaired his ruined Prussia, might have done for the happiness of his Prussia, unruined.

In war, however, or in peace, the character which Carlyle chiefly loves him for, and in which Carlyle has shown him to differ from all kings up to this time succeeding him, is his constant purpose to use every power entrusted to him for the good of his people; and be, not in name only, but in heart and hand, their king.

Not in ambition, but in natural instinct of duty. Friedrich, born to govern, determines to govern to the best of his faculty. That "best" may sometimes be unwise; and self-will, or love of glory, may have their oblique hold on his mind, and warp it this way or that; but they are never principal with him. He believes that war is necessary, and maintains it; sees that peace is necessary, and calmly persists in the work of it to the day of his death, not claiming therein more praise than the head of any ordinary household, who rules it simply because it is his place, and he must not yield the mastery of it to another.

How far, in the future, it may be possible for men to gain the strength necessary for kingship without either fronting death, or inflicting it, seems to me not at present determinable. The historical facts are that, broadly speaking, none but soldiers, or persons with a soldierly faculty, have ever yet shown themselves fit to be kings; and that no other men are so gentle, so just, or so clear-sighted. Wordsworth's character of the happy warrior cannot be reached in the height of it but by a warrior; nay, so much is it beyond common strength that I had supposed the entire meaning of it to be metaphorical, until one of the best soldiers of England himself read me the poem,[142] and taught me, what I might have known, had I enough watched his own life, that it was entirely literal. There is nothing of so high reach distinctly demonstrable in Friedrich: but I see more and more, as I grow older, that the things which are the most worth, encumbered among the errors and faults of every man's nature, are never clearly demonstrable; and are often most forcible when they are scarcely distinct to his own conscience,—how much less, clamorous for recognition by others!

Nothing can be more beautiful than Carlyle's showing of this, to any careful reader of Friedrich. But careful readers are but one in the thousand; and by the careless, the masses of detail with which the historian must deal are insurmountable.

My own notes, made for the special purpose of hunting down the one point of economy, though they cruelly spoil Carlyle's own current and method of thought, may yet be useful in enabling readers, unaccustomed to books involving so vast a range of conception, to discern what, on this one subject only, may be gathered from that history. On any other subject of importance, similar gatherings might be made of other passages. The historian has to deal with all at once.

I therefore have determined to print here, as a sequel to the Essay on War, my notes from the first volume of Friedrich, on the economies of Brandenburg, up to the date of the establishment of the Prussian monarchy. The economies of the first three Kings of Prussia I shall then take up in Fors Clavigera, finding them fitter for examination in connection with the subject of that book than of this.

I assume, that the reader will take down his first volume of Carlyle, and read attentively the passages to which I refer him. I give the reference first to the largest edition, in six volumes (1858-1865); then, in parenthesis, to the smallest or "people's edition" (1872-1873). The pieces which I have quoted in my own text are for the use of readers who may not have ready access to the book; and are enough for the explanation of the points to which I wish them to direct their thoughts in reading such histories of soldiers or soldier-kingdoms.

I.

Year 928 to 936.—Dawn of Order in Christian Germany.

Book II. Chap. i. p. 67 (47).

Henry the Fowler, "the beginning of German kings," is a mighty soldier in the cause of peace; his essential work the building and organization of fortified towns for the protection of men.

Read page 72 with utmost care (51), "He fortified towns," to end of small print. I have added some notes on the matter in my lecture on Giovanni Pisano; but whether you can glance at them or not, fix in your mind this institution of truly civil or civic building in Germany, as distinct from the building of baronial castles for the security of robbers: and of a standing army consisting of every ninth man, called a "burgher" ("townsman")—a soldier, appointed to learn that profession that he may guard the walls—the exact reverse of our notion of a burgher.

Frederick's final idea of his army is, indeed, only this.

Brannibor, a chief fortress of the Wends, is thus taken, and further strengthened by Henry the Fowler; wardens appointed for it; and thus the history of Brandenburg begins. On all frontiers, also, this "beginning of German kings" has his "Markgraf." "Ancient of the marked place." Read page 73, measuredly, learning it by heart, if it may be. (51-2.)

II.

936-1000.—History of Nascent Brandenburg.

The passage I last desired you to read ends with this sentence: "The sea-wall you build, and what main floodgates you establish in it, will depend on the state of the outer sea."

From this time forward you have to keep clearly separate in your minds, (A) the history of that outer sea, Pagan Scandinavia, Russia, and Bor-Russia, or Prussia proper; (B) the history of Henry the Fowler's Eastern and Western Marches; asserting themselves gradually as Austria and the Netherlands; and (C) the history of this inconsiderable fortress of Brandenburg, gradually becoming considerable, and the capital city of increasing district between them. That last history, however, Carlyle is obliged to leave vague and gray for two hundred years after Henry's death. Absolutely dim for the first century, in which nothing is evident but that its wardens or Markgraves had no peaceable possession of the place. Read the second paragraph in page 74 (52-3), "in old books" to "reader," and the first in page 83 (59) "meanwhile" to "substantial," consecutively. They bring the story of Brandenburg itself down, at any rate, from 936 to 1000.

III.

936-1000.—State of the Outer Sea.

Read now Chapter II. beginning at page 76 (54), wherein you will get account of the beginning of vigorous missionary work on the outer sea, in Prussia proper; of the death of St. Adalbert, and of the purchase of his dead body by the Duke of Poland.

You will not easily understand Carlyle's laugh in this chapter, unless you have learned yourself to laugh in sadness, and to laugh in love.

"No Czech blows his pipe in the woodlands without certain precautions and preliminary fuglings of a devotional nature." (Imagine St. Adalbert, in spirit, at the railway station in Birmingham!)

My own main point for notice in the chapter is the purchase of his body for its "weight in gold." Swindling angels held it up in the scales; it did not weigh so much as a web of gossamer. "Had such excellent odor, too, and came for a mere nothing of gold," says Carlyle. It is one of the first commercial transactions of Germany, but I regret the conduct of the angels on the occasion. Evangelicalism has been proud of ceasing to invest in relics, its swindling angels helping it to better things, as it supposes. For my own part, I believe Christian Germany could not have bought at this time any treasure more precious; nevertheless, the missionary work itself you find is wholly vain. The difference of opinion between St. Adalbert and the Wends, on Divine matters, does not signify to the Fates. They will not have it disputed about; and end the dispute adversely, to St. Adalbert—adversely, even, to Brandenburg and its civilizing power, as you will immediately see.

IV.

1000-1030.—History of Brandenburg in Trouble.

Book II. Chap. iii. p. 83 (59).

The adventures of Brandenburg in contest with Pagan Prussia, irritated, rather than amended, by St. Adalbert. In 1023, roughly, a hundred years after Henry the Fowler's death, Brandenburg is taken by the Wends, and its first line of Markgraves ended; its population mostly butchered, especially the priests; and the Wends' God, Triglaph, "something like three whales' cubs combined by boiling," set up on the top of St. Mary's Hill.

Here is an adverse "Doctrine of the Trinity" which has its supporters! It is wonderful,—this Tripod and Triglyph—three-footed, three-cut faith of the North and South, the leaf of the oxalis, and strawberry, and clover, fostering the same in their simple manner. I suppose it to be the most savage and natural of notions about Deity; a prismatic idol-shape of Him, rude as a triangular log, as a trefoil grass. I do not find how long Triglaph held his state on St. Mary's Hill. "For a time," says Carlyle, "the priests all slain or fled—shadowy Markgraves the like—church and state lay in ashes, and Triglaph, like a triple porpoise under the influence of laudanum, stood, I know not whether on his head or his tail, aloft on the Harlungsberg, as the Supreme of this Universe for the time being."

V.

1030-1130.—Brandenburg under the Ditmarsch Markgraves, or Ditmarsch-Stade Markgraves.

Book II. Chap. iii. p. 85 (60).

Of Anglish, or Saxon breed. They attack Brandenburg, under its Triglyphic protector, take it—dethrone him, and hold the town for a hundred years, their history "stamped beneficially on the face of things, Markgraf after Markgraf getting killed in the business. 'Erschlagen,' 'slain,' fighting with the Heathen—say the old books, and pass on to another." If we allow seven years to Triglaph—we get a clear century for these—as above indicated. They die out in 1130.

VI.

1130-1170.—Brandenburg under Albert the Bear.

Book II. Chap iv. p. 91 (64).

He is the first of the Ascanien Markgraves, whose castle of Ascanica is on the northern slope of the Hartz Mountains, "ruins still dimly traceable."

There had been no soldier or king of note among the Ditmarsch Markgraves, so that you will do well to fix in your mind successively the three men, Henry the Fowler, St. Adalbert, and Albert the Bear. A soldier again, and a strong one. Named the Bear only from the device on his shield, first wholly definite Markgraf of Brandenburg that there is, "and that the luckiest of events for Brandenburg." Read page 93 (66) carefully, and note this of his economies.

* * * * *

Nothing better is known to me of Albert the Bear than his introducing large numbers of Dutch Netherlanders into those countries; men thrown out of work, who already knew how to deal with bog and sand, by mixing and delving, and who first taught Brandenburg what greenness and cow-pasture was. The Wends, in presence of such things, could not but consent more and more to efface themselves—either to become German, and grow milk and cheese in the Dutch manner, or to disappear from the world.

* * * * *

After two-hundred and fifty years of barking and worrying, the Wends are now finally reduced to silence; their anarchy well buried and wholesome Dutch cabbage planted over it; Albert did several great things in the world; but this, for posterity, remains his memorable feat. Not done quite easily, but done: big destinies of nations or of persons are not founded gratis in this world, He had a sore, toilsome time of it, coercing, warring, managing among his fellow-creatures, while his day's work lasted—fifty years or so, for it began early. He died in his castle of Ballenstaedt, peaceably among the Hartz Mountains at last, in the year 1170, age about sixty-five.

* * * * *

Now, note in all this the steady gain of soldiership enforcing order and agriculture, with St. Adalbert giving higher strain to the imagination. Henry the Fowler establishes walled towns, fighting for mere peace. Albert the Bear plants the country with cabbages, fighting for his cabbage-fields. And the disciples of St. Adalbert, generally, have succeeded in substituting some idea of Christ for the idea of Triglaph. Some idea only; other ideas than of Christ haunt even to this day those Hartz Mountains among which Albert the Bear dies so peacefully. Mephistopheles, and all his ministers, inhabit there, commanding mephitic clouds and earth-born dreams.

VII.

1170-1320.—Brandenburg 150 years under the Ascanien Markgraves.

Vol. I. Book II Chap. viii. p. 135 (96).

"Wholesome Dutch cabbages continued to be more and more planted by them in the waste sand: intrusive chaos, and Triglaph held at bay by them," till at last in 1240, seventy years after the great Bear's death, they fortify a new Burg, a "little rampart," Wehrlin, diminutive of Wehr (or vallum), gradually smoothing itself, with a little echo of the Bear in it too, into Ber-lin, the oily river Spree flowing by, "in which you catch various fish;" while trade over the flats and by the dull streams, is widely possible. Of the Ascanien race, the notablest is Otto with the Arrow, whose story see, pp. 138-141 (98-100), noting that Otto is one of the first Minnesingers; that, being a prisoner to the Archbishop of Magdeburg, his wife rescues him, selling her jewels to bribe the canons; and that the Knight, set free on parole and promise of farther ransom, rides back with his own price in his hand; holding himself thereat cheaply bought, though no angelic legerdemain happens to the scales now. His own estimate of his price—"Rain gold ducats on my war-horse and me, till you cannot see the point of my spear atop."

Emptiness of utter pride, you think?

Not so. Consider with yourself, reader, how much you dare to say, aloud, you are worth. If you have no courage to name any price whatsoever for yourself, believe me, the cause is not your modesty, but that in very truth you feel in your heart there would be no bid for you at Lucian's sale of lives, were that again possible, at Christie and Manson's.

Finally (1319 exactly; say 1320, for memory), the Ascanien line expired in Brandenburg, and the little town and its electorate lapsed to the Kaiser: meantime other economical arrangements had been in progress; but observe first how far we have got.

The Fowler, St. Adalbert and the Bear have established order, and some sort of Christianity; but the established persons begin to think somewhat too well of themselves. On quite honest terms, a dead saint or a living knight ought to be worth their true "weight in gold." But a pyramid, with only the point of the spear seen at top, would be many times over one's weight in gold. And although men were yet far enough from the notion of modern days, that the gold is better than the flesh, and from buying it with the clay of one's body, and even the fire of one's soul, instead of soul and body with it, they were beginning to fight for their own supremacy, or for their own religious fancies, and not at all to any useful end, until an entirely unexpected movement is made in the old useful direction forsooth, only by some kind ship-captains of Luebeck!

VIII.

1210-1320.—Civil work, aiding military, during the Ascanien period.

Vol. I. Book II. Chap. vi. p. 109 (77).

In the year 1190, Acre not yet taken, and the crusading army wasting by murrain on the shore, the German soldiers especially having none to look after them, certain compassionate ship-captains of Luebeck, one Walpot von Bassenheim taking the lead, formed themselves into an union for succor of the sick and the dying, set up canvas tents from the Luebeck ship stores, and did what utmost was in them silently in the name of mercy and heaven. Finding its work prosper, the little medicinal and weather-fending company took vows on itself, strict chivalry forms, and decided to become permanent "Knights Hospitallers of our dear Lady of Mount Zion," separate from the former Knights Hospitallers, as being entirely German: yet soon, as the German Order of St. Mary, eclipsing in importance Templars, Hospitallers, and every other chivalric order then extant; no purpose of battle in them, but much strength for it; their purpose only the helping of German pilgrims. To this only they are bound by their vow, "geluebde," and become one of the usefullest of clubs in all the Pall Mall of Europe.

Finding pilgrimage in Palestine falling slack, and more need for them on the homeward side of the sea, their Hochmeister, Hermann of the Salza, goes over to Venice in 1210. There the titular bishop of still unconverted Preussen advises him of that field of work for his idle knights. Hermann thinks well of it: sets his St. Mary's riders at Triglaph, with the sword in one hand and a missal in the other.

Not your modern way of affecting conversion! Too illiberal, you think; and what would Mr. J. S. Mill say?

But if Triglaph had been verily "three whales' cubs combined by boiling," you would yourself have promoted attack upon him for the sake of his oil, would not you? The Teutsch Ritters, fighting him for charity, are they so much inferior to you?

* * * * *

They built, and burnt, innumerable stockades for and against; built wooden forts which are now stone towns. They fought much and prevalently; galloped desperately to and fro, ever on the alert. In peaceabler ulterior times, they fenced in the Nogat and the Weichsel with dams, whereby unlimited quagmire might become grassy meadow—as it continues to this day. Marienburg (Mary's Burg), with its grand stone Schloss still visible and even habitable: this was at length their headquarter. But how many Burgs of wood and stone they built, in different parts; what revolts, surprisals, furious fights in woody, boggy places they had, no man has counted.

But always some preaching by zealous monks, accompanied the chivalrous fighting. And colonists came in from Germany; trickling in, or at times streaming. Victorious Ritterdom offers terms to the beaten heathen: terms not of tolerant nature, but which will be punctually kept by Ritterdom. When the flame of revolt or general conspiracy burnt up again too extensively, high personages came on crusade to them. Ottocar, King of Bohemia, with his extensive far-shining chivalry, "conquered Samland in a month;" tore up the Romova where Adalbert had been massacred, and burned it from the face of the earth. A certain fortress was founded at that time, in Ottocar's presence; and in honor of him they named it King's Fortress, "Koenigsberg." Among King Ottocar's esquires, or subaltern junior officials, on this occasion, is one Rudolf, heir of a poor Swiss lordship and gray hill castle, called Hapsburg, rather in reduced circumstances, whom Ottocar likes for his prudent, hardy ways; a stout, modest, wise young man, who may chance to redeem Hapsburg a little, if he lives.

Conversion, and complete conquest once come, there was a happy time for Prussia; ploughshare instead of sword: busy sea-havens, German towns, getting built; churches everywhere rising; grass growing, and peaceable cows, where formerly had been quagmire and snakes, and for the Order a happy time. On the whole, this Teutsch Ritterdom, for the first century and more, was a grand phenomenon, and flamed like a bright blessed beacon through the night of things, in those Northern countries. For above a century, we perceive, it was the rallying place of all brave men who had a career to seek on terms other than vulgar. The noble soul, aiming beyond money, and sensible to more than hunger in this world, had a beacon burning (as we say), if the night chanced to overtake it, and the earth to grow too intricate, as is not uncommon. Better than the career of stump-oratory, I should fancy, and its Hesperides apples, golden, and of gilt horse-dung. Better than puddling away one's poor spiritual gift of God (loan, not gift), such as it may be, in building the lofty rhyme, the lofty review article, for a discerning public that has sixpence to spare! Times alter greatly.[143]

* * * * *

We must pause here again for a moment to think where we are, and who is with us. The Teutsch Ritters have been fighting, independently of all states, for their own hand, or St. Adalbert's; partly for mere love of fight, partly for love of order, partly for love of God. Meantime, other Riders have been fighting wholly for what they could get by it; and other persons, not Riders, have not been fighting at all, but in their own towns peacefully manufacturing and selling.

Of Henry the Fowler's Marches, Austria has become a military power, Flanders a mercantile one, pious only in the degree consistent with their several occupations. Prussia is now a practical and farming country, more Christian than its longer-converted neighbors.

* * * * *

Towns are built, Koenigsberg (King Ottocar's town), Thoren (Thorn, City of the Gates), with many others; so that the wild population and the tame now lived tolerably together, under Gospel and Luebeck law; and all was ploughing and trading.

* * * * *

But Brandenburg itself, what of it?

The Ascanien Markgraves rule it on the whole prosperously down to 1320, when their line expires, and it falls into the power of Imperial Austria.

IX.

1320-1415.—Brandenburg under the Austrians.

A century—the fourteenth—of miserable anarchy and decline for Brandenburg, its Kurfuersts, in deadly succession, making what they can out of it for their own pockets. The city itself and its territory utterly helpless. Read pp. 180, 181 (129, 130). "The towns suffered much, any trade they might have had going to wreck. Robber castles flourished, all else decayed, no highway safe. What are Hamburg pedlars made for but to be robbed?"

X.

1415-1440.—Brandenburg under Friedrich of Nueremberg.

This is the fourth of the men whom you are to remember as creators of the Prussian monarchy, Henry the Fowler, St. Adalbert, Albert the Bear, of Ascanien, and Friedrich of Nueremberg; (of Hohenzollern, by name, and by country, of the Black Forest, north of the Lake of Constance).

Brandenburg is sold to him at Constance, during the great Council, for about 200,000l. of our money, worth perhaps a million in that day; still, with its capabilities, "dog cheap." Admitting, what no one at the time denied, the general marketableness of states as private property, this is the one practical result, thinks Carlyle (not likely to think wrong), of that oecumenical deliberation, four years long, of the "elixir of the intellect and dignity of Europe. And that one thing was not its doing; but a pawnbroking job, intercalated," putting, however, at last, Brandenburg again under the will of one strong man. On St. John's day, 1412, he first set foot in his town, "and Brandenburg, under its wise Kurfuerst, begins to be cosmic again." The story of Heavy Peg, pages 195-198 (138, 140), is one of the most brilliant and important passages of the first volume; page 199, specially to our purpose, must be given entire:—

The offer to be Kaiser was made him in his old days; but he wisely declined that too. It was in Brandenburg, by what he silently founded there, that he did his chief benefit to Germany and mankind. He understood the noble art of governing men; had in him the justness, clearness, valor, and patience needed for that. A man of sterling probity, for one thing. Which indeed is the first requisite in said art:—if you will have your laws obeyed without mutiny, see well that they be pieces of God Almighty's law; otherwise all the artillery in the world will not keep down mutiny.

Friedrich "travelled much over Brandenburg;" looking into everything with his own eyes; making, I can well fancy, innumerable crooked things straight; reducing more and more that famishing dog-kennel of a Brandenburg into a fruitful arable field. His portraits represent a square-headed, mild-looking, solid gentleman, with a certain twinkle of mirth in the serious eyes of him. Except in those Hussite wars for Kaiser Sigismund and the Reich, in which no man could prosper, he may be defined as constantly prosperous. To Brandenburg he was, very literally, the blessing of blessings; redemption out of death into life. In the ruins of that old Friesack Castle, battered down by Heavy Peg, antiquarian science (if it had any eyes) might look for the taproot of the Prussian nation, and the beginning of all that Brandenburg has since grown to under the sun.

Which growth is now traced by Carlyle in its various budding and withering, under the succession of the twelve Electors, of whom Friedrich, with his heavy Peg, is first, and Friedrich, first King of Prussia, grandfather of Friedrich the Great, the twelfth.

XI.

1416-1701.—Brandenburg under the Hohenzollern Kurfuersts.

Book III.

Who the Hohenzollerns were, and how they came to power in Nueremberg, is told in Chap. v. of Book II.

Their succession in Brandenburg is given in brief at page 377 (269). I copy it, in absolute barrenness of enumeration, for our momentary convenience, here:

Friedrich 1st of Brandenburg (6th of Nueremberg), 1412-1440 Friedrich II., called "Iron Teeth," 1440-1472 Albert, 1472-1486 Johann, 1486-1499 Joachim I., 1499-1535 Joachim II., 1535-1571 Johann George, 1571-1598 Joachim Friedrich, 1598-1608 Johann Sigismund, 1608-1619 George Wilhelm, 1619-1640 Friedrich Wilhelm (the Great Elector), 1640-1688 Friedrich, first King; crowned 18th January, 1701

Of this line of princes we have to say they followed generally in their ancestor's steps, and had success of the like kind more or less; Hohenzollerns all of them, by character and behaviour as well as by descent. No lack of quiet energy, of thrift, sound sense. There was likewise solid fair-play in general, no founding of yourself on ground that will not carry, and there was instant, gentle, but inexorable crushing of mutiny, if it showed itself, which after the Second Elector, or at most the Third, it had altogether ceased to do.

This is the general account of them; of special matters note the following:—

II. Friedrich, called "Iron-teeth," from his firmness, proves a notable manager and governor. Builds the palace at Berlin in its first form, and makes it his chief residence. Buys Neumark from the fallen Teutsch Ritters, and generally establishes things on securer footing.

III. Albert, "a fiery, tough old Gentlemen," called the Achilles of Germany in his day; has half-a-century of fighting with his own Nuerembergers, with Bavaria, France, Burgundy, and its fiery Charles, besides being head constable to the Kaiser among any disorderly persons in the East. His skull, long shown on his tomb, "marvellous for strength and with no visible sutures."

IV. John, the orator of his race; (but the orations unrecorded). His second son, Archbishop of Maintz, for whose piece of memorable work see page 223 (143) and read in connection with that the history of Margraf George, pp. 237-241 (152-154), and the 8th chapter of the third book.

V. Joachim I., of little note; thinks there has been enough Reformation, and checks proceedings in a dull stubbornness, causing him at least grave domestic difficulties.—Page 271 (173).

VI. Joachim II. Again active in the Reformation, and staunch,

though generally in a cautious, weighty, never in a rash, swift way, to the great cause of Protestantism and to all good causes. He was himself a solemnly devout man; deep, awe-stricken reverence dwelling in his view of this universe. Most serious, though with a jocose dialect, commonly having a cheerful wit in speaking to men. Luther's books he called his Seelenschatz, (soul's treasure); Luther and the Bible were his chief reading. Fond of profane learning, too, and of the useful or ornamental arts; given to music, and "would himself sing aloud" when he had a melodious leisure hour.

VII. Johann George, a prudent thrifty Herr; no mistresses, no luxuries allowed; at the sight of a new-fashioned coat he would fly out on an unhappy youth and pack him from his presence. Very strict in point of justice; a peasant once appealing to him in one of his inspection journeys through the country—

"Grant me justice, Durchlaucht, against so and so; I am your Highness's born subject." "Thou shouldst have it, man, wert thou a born Turk!" answered Johann George.

Thus, generally, we find this line of Electors representing in Europe the Puritan mind of England in a somewhat duller, but less dangerous, form; receiving what Protestantism could teach of honesty and common sense, but not its anti-Catholic fury, or its selfish spiritual anxiety. Pardon of sins is not to be had from Tetzel; neither, the Hohenzollern mind advises with itself, from even Tetzel's master, for either the buying, or the asking. On the whole, we had better commit as few as possible, and live just lives and plain ones.

A conspicuous thrift, veracity, modest solidity, looks through the conduct of this Herr; a determined Protestant he too, as indeed all the following were and are.

VIII. Joachim Friedrich. Gets hold of Prussia, which hitherto, you observe, has always been spoken of as a separate country from Brandenburg. March 11, 1605—"squeezed his way into the actual guardianship of Preussen and its imbecile Duke, which was his by right."

For my own part, I do not trouble myself much about these rights, never being able to make out any single one, to begin with, except the right to keep everything and every place about you in as good order as you can—Prussia, Poland, or what else. I should much like, for instance, just now, to hear of any honest Cornish gentleman of the old Drake breed taking a fancy to land in Spain, and trying what he could make of his rights as far round Gibraltar as he could enforce them. At all events, Master Joachim has somehow got hold of Prussia; and means to keep it.

IX. Johann Sigismund. Only notable for our economical purposes, as getting the "guardianship" of Prussia confirmed to him. The story at page 317 (226), "a strong flame of choler," indicates a new order of things among the knights of Europe—"princely etiquettes melting all into smoke." Too literally so, that being one of the calamitous functions of the plain lives we are living, and of the busy life our country is living. In the Duchy of Cleve, especially, concerning which legal dispute begins in Sigismund's time. And it is well worth the lawyers' trouble, it seems.

It amounted, perhaps, to two Yorkshires in extent. A naturally opulent country of fertile meadows, shipping capabilities, metalliferous hills, and at this time, in consequence of the Dutch-Spanish war, and the multitude of Protestant refugees, it was getting filled with ingenious industries, and rising to be what it still is, the busiest quarter of Germany. A country lowing with kine; the hum of the flax-spindle heard in its cottages in those old days—"much of the linen called Hollands is made in Juelich, and only bleached, stamped, and sold by the Dutch," says Buesching. A country in our days which is shrouded at short intervals with the due canopy of coal-smoke, and loud with sounds of the anvil and the loom.

The lawyers took two hundred and six years to settle the question concerning this Duchy, and the thing Johann Sigismund had claimed legally in 1609 was actually handed over to Johann Sigismund's descendant in the seventh generation. "These litigated duchies are now the Prussian provinces, Juelich, Berg, Cleve, and the nucleus of Prussia's possessions in the Rhine country."

X. George Wilhelm. Read pp. 325 to 327 (231, 233) on this Elector and German Protestantism, now fallen cold, and somewhat too little dangerous. But George Wilhelm is the only weak prince of all the twelve. For another example how the heart and life of a country depend upon its prince, not on its council, read this, of Gustavus Adolphus, demanding the cession of Spandau and Kuestrin: