moment one opened a door, with loud calls of "Stand back there." A group of half-a-dozen children, from eight to fourteen-the girls all in straw hats, with long hanging scarlet ribands-were more or less pleasant to see meanwhile; and sunshine, through the puffs of petulant and cross-purposed steam, promised a pleasant run to Llangollen. I had only the conventional "business man with paper" for this run; and on his leaving the carriage at Llangollen, was just closing the door, thinking to have both windows at command, when my hand was stayed by the father of a family of four children, who, with their mother and aunt, presently filled the carriage, the children fitting or scrambling in anywhere, with expansive kicks and lively struggles. They belonged to the lower middle-class; the mother an ideal of the worthy commonplace, evidently hard put to it to make both ends meet, and wholly occupied in family concerns; her face fixed in the ignoble gravity of virtuous persons to whom their own troublesome households have become monasteries. The father, slightly more conscious of external things, submitting benevolently to his domestic happiness out on its annual holiday. The children ugly, fidgety, and ill-bred, but not unintelligent,-full of questionings, "when" they were to get here, or there? how many rails there were on the line; which side the station was on, and who was to meet them. In such debate, varied by bodily contortions in every direction, they contrived to pass the half-hour which took us through the vale of Llangollen, past some of the loveliest brook and glen scenery in the world. But neither the man, the woman, nor any one of the children, looked out of the window once, the whole way. They got out at Corwen, leaving me to myself for the run past Bala lake and down the Dolgelly valley; but more sorrowful than of late has been my wont, in the sense of my total isolation from the thoughts and ways of the present English people. For I was perfectly certain that among all the crowd of living creatures whom I had that day seen,-scarlet ribands and all,-there was not one to whom I could have spoken a word on any subject interesting to me, which would have been intelligible to them. 10. But the first broad sum of fact, for the sake of which I have given this diary, is that among certainly not less than some seven or eight hundred people, seen by me in the course of this day, I saw not one happy face, and several hundreds of entirely miserable ones. The second broad sum of fact is, that out of the few,-not happy,— but more or less spirited and complacent faces I saw, among the lower and the mercantile classes, what life or spirit they had depended on a peculiar cock-on-a-dunghill character of impudence,' which meant a total inability to conceive any good or lovely thing in this world or any other: and the third sum of fact is, that in this rich England I saw only eight out of eight hundred persons gracefully dressed, and decently mannered. But the particular sign, and prophetic vision of the day, to me, was the man lying with his boots on his Graphic. There is a long article in the Monetary Gazette, sent me this morning, on the folly of the modern theory that the nation is suffering from "over-production.” 3 The writer is quite correct in his condemnation of the fallacy in question; but it has not occurred to him, nor to any other writer that I know of on such matters, to consider whether we may not possibly be suffering from over-destruction. If you use the given quantity of steam power and human ingenuity to produce your Graphic in the morning, and travel from Warrington to Chester with your boots upon it in the afternoon, Is the net result, production, my dear editor? The net result is labour with weariness A.M.,-idleness with disgust P.M., and nothing to eat next day. And do not think 1 [So in all editions; but in his note for the Index, Ruskin wrote "independence."] 2 In the issue of August 16, 1876.] 3 For other criticisms of this "folly," see Vol. XXVII. pp. 80, 235.] For a later reference to this incident, see Letter 87, § 5 (Vol. XXIX. p. 366).] our Warrington friend other than a true type of your modern British employer of industry. The universal British public has no idea of any other use of art, or industry, than he! It reclines everlastingly with its boots on its Graphic. "To-morrow there will be another,—what use is there in the old?" Think of the quantity of energy used in the "production" of the daily works of the British press! The first necessity of our lives in the morning,-old rags in the evening! Or the annual works of the British naval architect? The arrow of the Lord's deliverance1 in January, and old iron in June! The annual industry of the European soldier, of the European swindler,-of the European orator, will you tell me, good Mr. Editor, what it is that they produce? Will you calculate for me, how much of all that is, they destroy? 11. But even of what we do produce, under some colour or fancy, of service to humanity,-How much of it is of any service to humanity, good Mr. Editor? Here is a little bit of a note bearing on the matter, written last Christmas in a fit of uncontrollable provocation at a Christian correspondent's drawl of the popular sentiment, “living is so very expensive, you know!" Why, of course it is, living as you do, in a saucepan full of steam, with no potatoes in it! Here is the first economical fact I have been trying to teach, these fifteen years; and can't get it, yet, into the desperate, leathern-skinned, death-helmeted skull of this wretched England-till Jael-Atropos drive it down, through skull and all, into the ground; 2-that you can't have bread without corn, nor milk without kine; and that being dragged about the country behind kettles won't grow corn on it; and speculating in stocks won't feed mutton on it; and manufacturing steel pens, and scrawling lies with them, won't clothe your backs or fill your bellies, though you 1 [2 Kings xiii. 17.] 2 [Compare Judges iv. 21. The title is here indicated: see above, p. 687.] scrawl England as black with ink as you have strewed her black with cinders. 12. Now look here: I am writing in a friend's house in a lovely bit of pasture country, surrounding what was once a bright bit of purple and golden heath-inlaid as gorse and heather chose to divide their possession of it; and is now a dusty wilderness of unlet fashionable villas, bricks, thistles, and crockery. My friend has a good estate, and lets a large farm; but he can't have cream to his tea, and has "Dorset " butter.* If he ever gets any of these articles off his own farm, they are brought to him from London, having been carried there that they may pay toll to the railroad company, once as they go up, and again as they come down; and have two chances of helping to smash an excursion train. 13. Meantime, at the apothecary's shop in the village, I can buy, besides drugs,-cigars, and stationery; and among other stationery, the "College card," of "eighteen useful articles,”—namely, Bohemian glass ruler, Bohemian glass penholder, pen-box with gilt and diapered lid, pen-wiper with a gilt tin fern leaf for ornament, pencil, india-rubber, and twelve steel pens,-all stitched separately and neatly on the card; and the whole array of them to be bought for sixpence. What times!—what civilization!-what ingenuity !—what cheapness! Yes; but what does it mean? First, that I, who buy the card, can't get cream to my tea! And secondly, that the unhappy wretches,-Bohemian and other,―glass blowers, iron diggers, pen manufacturers, and the like,-who have made the eighteen useful articles, have sixpence to divide * Most London theatre-goers will recollect the Butterman's pity for his son, in Our Boys, as he examines the remains of the breakfast in their lodgings.1 1 [The reference is to H. J. Byron's comedy, first produced at the Vaudeville Theatre, January 16, 1875. In Act iii., when the fathers of the two boys visit their sons' cheap lodgings in London, Perkin Middlewick, the retired butterman, recognizes the butter on the table as "Dossit, my dear sir; inferior Dossit."] among them for their trouble! What sort of cream have they to their tea? But the question of questions about it all, is-Are these eighteen articles "useful articles"? For what? Here's a -nominal-" pencil" on our our "College card." But not a collegian, that I know of, wants to draw,-and if he did, he couldn't draw with this thing, which is not a pencil, but some sand and coal-dust jammed in a stick. The "india-rubber" also, I perceive, is not india-rubber; but a composition for tearing up the surface of paper,-useful only to filthy blunderers; the nasty glass-handled things, which will break if I drop them, and cut the housemaid's fingers, I shall instantly turn out of the house; the pens, for which I bought the card, will perhaps be useful to me, because I have, to my much misery, writing to do; but you, happier animals, who may exist without scratching either paper or your heads,-what is the use of them to you? (N.B.-I couldn't write a word with one of them, after all.) 14. I must go back to my Warrington friend; for there are more lessons to be received from him. I looked at him, in one sense, not undeferentially. He was, to the extent of his experience, as good a judge of art as I. He knew what his Graphic was worth. Pronounced an entirely divine verdict upon it. Put it, beneficently, out of its pictorial pain,-for ever. Do not think that it is so difficult to know good art from bad. The poorest-minded public cannot rest in its bad possessions, wants them new, and ever new. I have given my readers, who have trusted me, four art-possessions, which I do not fear their wishing to destroy; and it will be a long while before I wish them to get another. I have too long delayed beginning to tell them why they are good; and one of my Sheffield men asked Mr. Swan the other day what I had commended the Leucothea for, 1 [See Letter 66, § 17 (p. 625).]} |