to the little company of you, who are minded, as I hear, out of your steam-crane and all other such labour in Sheffield, pestilent to the enduring Sabbath of human peace on earth and goodwill towards men, to take St. George's shield for your defence in Faith, and begin truly the quiet work and war-his, and all the saints,-cleaving the wide "seas of Death, and sunless gulfs of Doubt." Remember, however, always that seas of Death must mean antecedent seas of Life; and that this voice, coming to you from the laureated singer of England, prophesying in the Nineteenth century,* does truly tell you what state Britannia's ruled waves have at present got into, under her supremely wise ordination. I wonder if Mr. Tennyson, of late years, has read any poetry but his own; or if, in earlier years, he never read, with attention enough to remember, words which most other good English scholars will instantly compare with his somewhat forced-or even, one might say, steam-craned rhyme, to 'wills," "Roaring moon of-Daffodils." Truly, the nineteenth century altogether, and no less in Midsummer than March, may be most fitly and pertinently described as a 'roaring moon': but what has it got to do with daffodils, which belong to lakes of Life, not Death? Did Mr. Tennyson really never read the description of that golden harbour in the little lake which my Companions and I have been striving to keep the nineteenth century from changing into a cesspool with a beach of broken ginger-beer bottles? "The waves beside them danced; but they Outdid the sparkling waves in glee. A poet could not but be gay In such a jocund company." No steam-craned versification in that, you will observe, by the way; but simple singing for heart's delight, which you will find to be the vital form of real poetry; disciplined singing, also, if it may be, but natural, all the while. So also architecture, sculpture, painting,-Sheffield ironwork. * The sonnet referred to begins, I hear, the periodical so named. Natural to Sheffield,*-joyful to Sheffield, otherwise an entirely impossible form of poetry there. (Three enormous prolonged trumpetings, or indecent bellowings-audible, I should think, ten miles off-from another steamer entering the Giudecca, interrupt me again,—and you need not think that I am peculiar in sensitiveness: no decent family worship, no gentle singing, no connectedly thoughtful reading. would be possible to any human being under these conditions, wholly inevitable now by any person of moderate means in Venice. With considerable effort, and loss of nervous energy, I force myself back into course of thought.) You don't, perhaps, feel distinctly how people can be joyful in ironwork, or why I call it 'poetry'? Yet the only piece of good part-singing I heard in Italy, for a whole summer, was over a blacksmith's forge; (and there has been disciplined music, as you know, made of its sounds before now; and you may, perhaps, have seen and heard Mr. G. W. Moore as the Christy Blacksmith). But I speak of better harmonies to be got out of your work than Handel's, when you come at it with a true heart, fervently, as I hope this company of you are like to do, to whom St. George has now given thirteen acres of English ground for their own so long as they observe his laws. They shall not be held to them at first under any formal strictness-for this is mainly their own adventure; St. George merely securing coign of vantage for it, and requir ing of them observance only of his bare first principlesgood work, and no moving of machinery by fire. But I believe they will be glad, in many respects, to act by St. George's advice; and, as I hope, truly begin his active work; of which, therefore, it seems to me now necessary to state unambiguously the religious laws which underlie the * All the fine work of man must be first instinctive, for he is bound to be a fine Animal-King of Animals; then, moral or disciplined, for he is bound to be a fine Spirit also, and King of Spirits. The Spirit power begins in directing the Animal power to other than egoistic ends. Read, in connection with last Fors, The Animals of the Bible, by John Worcester, Boston, Lockwood and Brooke, 1875. Creed and vow of full Companionship, and of which his retainers will, I doubt not, soon recognize the outward observance to be practically useful. You cannot but have noticed-any of you who read attentively, that Fors has become much more distinctly Christian in its tone, during the last two years; and those of you who know with any care my former works, must feel a yet more vivid contrast between the spirit in which the preface to The Crown of Wild Olive was written, and that in which I am now collating for you the Mother Laws of the Trades of Venice. This is partly because I am every day compelled, with increasing amazement, and renewed energy, to contradict the idiotic teaching of Atheism which is multiplied in your ears; but it depends far more essentially on two vital causes the first, that since Fors began, "such things have befallen me "* personally, which have taught me much, but of which I need not at present speak; the second, that in the work I did at Assisi in 1874, I discovered a fallacy which had underlain all my art-teaching, (and the teaching. of Art, as I understand it, is the teaching of all things,) since the year 1858. Of which I must be so far tedious to you as to give some brief account. For it is continually said of me, and I observe has been publicly repeated lately by one of my very good friends, that I have "changed my opinions" about painting and architecture. And this, like all the worst of falsehoods, has one little kernel of distorted truth in the heart of it, which it is practically necessary, now, that you, my Sheffield essayists of St. George's service, should clearly know. All my first books, to the end of the Stones of Venice, were written in the simple belief I had been taught as a child; and especially the second volume of Modern Painters was an outcry of enthusiastic praise of religious painting, in which you will find me placing Fra Angelico, (see the closing paragraph of the book,) above all other painters. *Leviticus x. 19. But during my work at Venice, I discovered the gigantic power of Tintoret, and found that there was a quite different spirit in that from the spirit of Angelico: and, analysing Venetian work carefully, I found,-and told fearlessly, in spite of my love for the masters, that there was "no religion whatever in any work of Titian's; and that Tintoret only occasionally forgot himself into religion.”—I repeat now, and reaffirm, this statement; but must ask the reader to add to it, what I partly indeed said in other places at the time, that only when Tintoret forgets himself, does he truly find himself. Now you see that among the four pieces of art I have given you for standards to study, only one is said to be 'perfect,'-Titian's. And ever since the Stones of Venice were written, Titian was given in all my art-teaching as a standard of perfection. Conceive the weight of this problem, then, on my inner mind-how the most perfect work I knew, in my special business, could be done "wholly without religion"! I set myself to work out that problem thoroughly in 1858, and arrived at the conclusion-which is an entirely sound one, and which did indeed alter, from that time forward, the tone and method of my teaching,—that human work must be done honourably and thoroughly, because we are now Men; -whether we ever expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter. We are now Human creatures, and must, at our peril, do Human-that is to say, affectionate, honest, and earnest work.* Farther, I found, and have always since taught, and do teach, and shall teach, I doubt not, till I die, that in resolving to do our work well, is the only sound foundation of any religion whatsoever; and that by that resolution only, and what we have done, and not by our belief, Christ will judge *This is essentially what my friend Mr. Harrison means (if he knew it) by his Religion of Humanity,— -one which he will find, when he is slightly more advanced in the knowledge "of all life and thought," was known and acted on in epochs considerably antecedent to that of modern Evolution. us, as He has plainly told us He will, (though nobody believes Him,) in the Resurrection. But, beyond this, in the year 1858, I came to another conclusion, which was a false one. My work on the Venetians in that year not only convinced me of their consummate power, but showed me that there was a great worldly harmony running through all they didopposing itself to the fanaticism of the Papacy; and in this worldly harmony of human and artistic power, my own special idol, Turner, stood side by side with Tintoret; so also Velasquez, Sir Joshua, and Gainsborough, stood with Titian and Veronese; and those seven men- - quite demonstrably and indisputably giants in the domain of Art, of whom, in the words of Velasquez himself, "Tizian z'e quel che porta la Bandiera,"-stood, as heads of a great Worldly Army, worshippers of Worldly visible Truth, against (as it seemed then to me), and assuredly distinct from, another sacred army, bearing the Rule of the Catholic Church in the strictest obedience, and headed by Cimabue, Giotto, and Angelico; worshippers not of a worldly and visible Truth, but of a visionary one, which they asserted to be higher; yet under the (as they asserted-supernatural) teaching of the Spirit of this Truth, doing less perfect work than their unassisted opposites! All this is entirely so; fact tremendous in its unity, and difficult enough, as it stands to me even now; but as it stood to me then, wholly insoluble, for I was still in the bonds of my old Evangelical faith; and, in 1858, it was with me, Protestantism or nothing: the crisis of the whole turn of my thoughts being one Sunday morning, at Turin, when, from before Paul Veronese's Queen of Sheba, and under quite overwhelmed sense of his God-given power, I went away to a Waldensian chapel, where a little squeaking idiot was preaching to an audience of seventeen old women and three louts, that they were the only children of God in Turin ; and that all the people in Turin outside the chapel, and all * * Counted at the time;-I am not quite sure now if seventeen or eighteen. |