The least thing has play in it-the slightest word, wit, when your hands are busy and your heart is free. But if you make the aim of your life amusement, the day will come when all the agonies of a pantomime will not bring you an honest laugh. Play actively and gaily; and cherish, without straining, the natural powers of jest in others and yourselves;remembering all the while that your hand is every instant on the helm of the ship of your life, and that the Master, on the far shore of Araby the blest,1 looks for its sail on the horizon,-to its hour.2 I can't tell you more till next letter. 26. (IV.) Extract from a letter of one of my own girl-pupils and charges: 3 "What is to be done with town children? Do you remember going with me to see Mrs. G- our old servant? She has died since, and left two children for us to love and care for, for her. The elder, Louie, is thirteen; unusually intelligent and refined; I was helping her last night in her work for an examination. She had Tennyson's 'Dora' to learn by heart, and said it beautifully, with so much spirit,—and then, asked me what the harvest was. She said she had such a vague idea about it, she shouldn't know how to explain it, if the Inspector asked her. "I am just going to take her down to the picture gallery, to give her a geography lesson on moors and lakes, etc., which is the best I can do for her here; but isn't that dreadful? "Much love, dear Godfather, 27. (V.) I accept the offer of subjoined letter thankfully. Our Companion, Mr. Rydings, is henceforward to be answerable for our arithmetic; and all sums below fifty pounds are to be sent to him, not to me. "LAXEY, April 14th, 1876. "MY DEAR MASTER,-At page 579, April Fors Subscription List, balance in hand £106, 16s. 5d., should be £107, 16s. 5d. "P.S.-Would it be possible to have these items checked before being printed? I should feel it a pleasure if I could be of use." 1 [Paradise Lost, Book IV., 1. 163.] [Here the reprint in the Letter to Young Girls ends, resuming at Letter 66, § 24 (p. 635).] 3 [Miss Oldham; for Ruskin's visit to her nurse, see Letter 59, § 1 (p. 439).] { LETTER 661 MIRACLE BRANTWOOD, 14th May, 1876. 1. THOSE of my readers who have followed me as far as I have hitherto gone in our careful reading of the Pentateuch, must, I think, have felt with me, in natural consequence of this careful reading, more than hitherto, the life and reality of the record; but, in the degree of this new life, new wonderfulness, and difficult credibility! For it is always easy to imagine that we believe what we do not understand; and often graceful and convenient to consent in the belief of others, as to what we do not care about. But when we begin to know clearly what is told, the question if it be fable or fact becomes inevitable in our minds; and if the fact, once admitted, would bear upon our conduct, its admission can no longer be made a matter of mere social courtesy. Accordingly, I find one of my more earnest readers already asking me, privately, if I really believed that the hail on Good Friday last had been sent as a punishment for national sin?-and I should think, and even hope, that 1 [In the first edition the following notice was printed in italics at the head of this Letter: "(All Signed Petitions against Rydal Railway to be sent immediately to me at Brantwood, Coniston, Lancashire.)" This refers to an advertisement by "The author of Modern Painters" which was inserted in Mr. Robert Somervell's Protest against the Extension of Railways in the Lake District, first issued towards the end of 1875. In it Ruskin "earnestly requested all persons who may have taken interest in his writings, or who have any personal regard for him," to sign Mr. Somervell's Protest. To a later edition of the Protest Ruskin contributed a Preface (dated June 22, 1876); this is reprinted in a later volume of this edition, where also will be found a circular of thanks issued by Ruskin for the petitions sent in to him in consequence of the present notice.] other of my readers would like to ask me, respecting the same passage, whether I believed that the sun ever stood still? 1 2. To whom I could only answer, what I answered some time since in my paper on Miracle for the Metaphysical Society (Contemporary Review), that the true miracle, to my mind, would not be in the sun's standing still, but is in its going on! We are all of us being swept down to death in a sea of miracle; we are drowned in wonder, as gnats in a Rhine whirlpool: unless we are worse, -drowned in pleasure, or sloth, or insolence. Nevertheless, I do not feel myself in the least called upon to believe that the sun stood still, or the earth either, during that pursuit at Ajalon. Nay, it would not anywise amaze me to find that there never had been any such pursuit-never any Joshua, never any Moses; and that the Jews, "taken generally," as an amiable clerical friend told me from his pulpit a Sunday or two ago, were a Christian people." 66 But it does amaze me—almost to helplessness of hand and thought-to find the men and women of these days careless of such issue; and content, so that they can feed and breathe their fill, to eat like cattle, and breathe like plants, questionless of the Spirit that makes the grass to grow for them on the mountains, or the breeze they breathe on them, its messengers, or the fire that dresses their food, its minister. Desolate souls, for whom the sun-beneath, not above, the horizon-stands still for ever. 3. "Amazed," I say, "almost to helplessness of hand and thought "-quite literally both. I was reading yesterday, by Fors' order, Mr. Edward B. Tylor's idea of the Greek faith in Apollo: "If the sun travels along its course like a glittering chariot, forthwith the wheels, and the driver, 1 [See Letter 65, § 13 (p. 598).] 2 [March 1873; reprinted in On the Old Road, 1885, vol. ii. §§ 267-277; and in a later volume of this edition.] 3 [Joshua x. 12, 13; compare Ariadne Florentina, § 202 (Vol. XXII. p. 438).] [Psalms civ. 4: quoted and discussed in Vol. XXIV. p. 102.] 4 and the horses are there; "* and Mr. Frederic Harrison's gushing article on Humanity, in the Contemporary Review;1 and a letter about our Cotton Industry (hereafter to be quoted †), and this presently following bit of Sir Philip Sidney's 68th Psalm ;-and my hands are cold this morning, after the horror, and wonder, and puzzlement of my total Sun-less-day, and my head is now standing still, or at least turning round, giddy, instead of doing its work by Shrewsbury clock; and I don't know where to begin with the quantity I want to say,-all the less that I've said a great deal of it before, if I only knew where to tell you to find it. All up and down my later books, from Unto this Last to Eagle's Nest, and again and again throughout Fors, you will find references to the practical connection between physical and spiritual light-of which now I would fain state, in the most unmistakable terms, this sum: that you cannot love the real sun, that is to say physical light and colour, rightly, unless you love the spiritual sun, that is to say justice and truth, rightly. That for unjust and untrue persons, there is no real joy in physical light, so that they don't even know what the word means. That the entire system of modern life is so corrupted with the ghastliest forms of injustice and untruth, carried to the point of not recognizing themselves as either-for as long as Bill Sykes knows that he is a robber, and Jeremy * Early History of Mankind (a book of rare value and research, however), p. 379. † In the meantime, if any of my readers will look at the leading articles of the Monetary Gazette, whose editor I thank with all my heart and soul, for the first honest commercial statements I ever saw in English journals, they will get sufficient light on such matters. 1 ["Humanity: a Dialogue," in the Contemporary Review for May 1876, vol. 27, pp. 862-885. See below, p. 619 n. 2 [This, however, was not done.] 31 King Henry IV., Act v. sc. 4.] 4 [See Unto this Last, § 44 (Vol. XVII. p. 59), and Eagle's Nest, §§ 115, 116 (Vol. XXII. pp. 203-204); and compare Letters 9, 12 (Vol. XXVII. pp. 164, 219), 60, and 63 (above, pp. 463, 541).] 5 [For other references to Oliver Twist, see Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 14.] [See the references to these articles in letters from Ruskin given in Vol. XVII. p. 486.] 6 2 Diddler1 that he is a rascal, there is still some of Heaven's light left for both-but when everybody steals, cheats, and goes to church, complacently, and the light of their whole body is darkness, how great is that darkness! And that the physical result of that mental vileness is a total carelessness of the beauty of sky, or the cleanness of streams, or the life of animals and flowers: and I believe that the powers of Nature are depressed or perverted, together with the Spirit of Man; and therefore that conditions of storm and of physical darkness, such as never were before in Christian times, are developing themselves, in connection also with forms of loathsome insanity, multiplying through the whole genesis of modern brains. 4. As I correct this sheet for press, I chance, by Fors' order, in a prayer of St. John Damascene's to the Virgin, on this, to me, very curious and interesting clause; "Redeem me from the dark metamorphosis of the angels, rescuing me from the bitter law-giving of the farmers of the air, and the rulers of the darkness.' 66 “ τῆς σκοτεινῆς με τῶν δαιμόνων λυτροῦ μετημορφῆς (I am not answerable either for Damascene Greek, or for my MS. of it, in 1896), τοῦ πικροτάτου λογοθεσίου τῶν τελωνῶν τοῦ ἀέρος καὶ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ σκότους ἐξαίρουσα.” 5. And now-of this entangling in the shrine of halfborn and half-sighted things, see this piece of Sir Philip Sidney's psalm. I want it also for the bit of conchology at the end. The italics are mine. 3 "And call ye this to utter what is just, You that of justice hold the sov'raign throne? O no: it is your long malicious will Now to the world to make by practice known, 1 [See Raising the Wind, by James Kenney (1780-1849), a play first produced at Covent Garden Theatre in 1803.] 2 [Matthew vi. 23.] 3 Psalm lviii. For additional notes upon it, see Rock Honeycomb.] |