big dark-red granaries, with balconies and archways to the water, and the lofty white mills grinding out their cheering music. "But there were no worse shapes than honest, dusty millers' men, and browned boatmen, decent people; no open vileness and foul language were rampant in our quiet clean town in those days. I can remember how clean the pavement used to look there, and at Doncaster. Both towns are incredibly dirty now. I cannot bear to look at the filthy beslavered causeway, in places where I remember to have never seen anything worse than the big round thunder-drops I used to watch with gleeful interest. "In those days we were proud of the cleanness and sweet air and gentility of Wakefield. Leeds was then considered rather vulgar, as a factory town, and Bradford was obscure, rough and wild; but Wakefield prided itself in refined living on moderate means, and cultured people of small income were fond of settling there. "Market day used to be a great event for us all. "I wish that you could have seen the handsome farmers' wives ranged round the church walls, with their baskets of apricots and cream-cheese, before reform came, and they swept away my dear old school-house of the seventeenth century, to make an ugly barren desert of a market ground. You might have seen, too, the pretty cottagers' daughters, with their bunches of lavender and baskets of fruit, or heaps of cowslips and primroses for the wine and vinegar Wakefield housewives prided themselves upon. On certain days they stood to be hired as maid-servants, and were prized in the country round as neat, clean, modest-spoken girls. "I do not know where they are gone to now, I suppose to the factories. Anyhow, Wakefield ladies cry out that they must get servants from London, and Stafford, and Wales. So class gets parted from class. "Things were different then. Well-to-do ladies prided themselves on doing their marketing in person, and kindly feeling and acquaintanceship sprang up between town and country folk. My Wakefield friends nowadays laugh at the idea of going to market. They order everything through the cook, and hardly know their own tradespeople by sight. We used to get delicious butter at tenpence a pound, and such curds and cream-cheese as I never taste now. 'Cook' brings in indifferent butter mostly, at near two shillings. As for the farmers' wives, they would not like to be seen with a butterbasket. They mostly send the dairy produce off by rail to people whom they never see, and thus class is more sundered from class every day, even by the very facilities that railways afford. I can remember that the townspeople had simple merry-makings and neighbourly ways that this generation would scorn. Many a pleasant walk we had to the farms and halls that belted the old town; and boating parties on the Calder, and tea-drinkings and dances-mostly extempore,—in the easy fashion of Vicar Primrose's days. "But pleasure must be sought farther off now. Our young folks go to London or Paris for their recreation. People seem to have no leisure for being neighbourly, or to get settled in their houses. They seem to be all expecting to make a heap of money, and to be much grander presently, and finally to live in halls and villas, and look down on their early friends. "But I am sorry for the young people. They run through everything so soon, and have nothing left to hope for or dream of in a few years. They are better dressed than we were, and have more accomplishments; but I cannot help thinking that we young folks were happier in the old times, though shillings were not half so plentiful, and we had only two frocks a year. "Tradespeople were different, too, in old Wakefield. "They expected to live with us all their lives; they had high notions of honour as tradesmen, and they and their customers respected each other. "They prided themselves on the 'wear' of their goods. If they had passed upon the housewives a piece of sized calico or shoddy flannel, they would have heard of it for years after. "Now the richer ladies go to Leeds or Manchester to make purchases; the town tradesmen are soured and jealous. They put up big plate-glass fronts, and send out flaming bills; but one does not know where to get a piece of sound calico or stout linen, well spun and well woven. "Give me back our dingy old shops where everything was genuine, instead of these glass palaces where we often get pins without points, needles without eyes, and sewing thread sixty yards to the hundred-which I actually heard a young Quaker defend the other day as an allowable trade practice." 1 10. (III.) I venture to print the following sentences from "a poor mother's" letter,2 that my reply may be more generally intelligible. I wish I could say, useful; but the want of an art-grammar is every day becoming more felt: "I am rather ashamed to tell you how young he is (not quite eleven), fearing you will say I have troubled you idly; but I was sincerely anxious to know your views on the training of a boy for some definite sort of art-work, and I have always fancied such training ought to begin very early—[yes, assuredly]—also, there are reasons why we must decide early in what direction we shall look out for employment for him." (I never would advise any parents to look for employment in art as a means of their children's support. It is only when the natural bias is quite uncontrollable, that future eminence, and comfort of material circumstances, can be looked for. And when it is uncontrollable, it ceases to be a question whether we should control it. We have only to guide it.) "But I seem to dread the results of letting him run idle until he is fourteen or fifteen years old-[most wisely]-and a poor and busy mother like me has not time to superintend the employment of a boy as a richer one might. This makes me long to put him to work under a master early. As he does so little at book-learning, would the practical learning of stone-cutting under the village stonemason (a good man) be likely to lead to anything further?" I do not know, but it would be of the greatest service to the boy meanwhile. Let him learn good joiners' work also, and to plough, with time allowed him for drawing. I feel more and more the need of a useful grammar of art for young people, and simple elementary teaching in public schools. I have always hoped to remedy this want, but have been hindered hitherto, 3 [For the continuation of this Letter from "E. L.," describing Wakefield Old and New, see Letter 57, § 10 (pp. 409-413). Parts of E. L.'s letter were reprinted (by permission) by Mr. R. Somervell (a "Companion" of St. George's Guild) in his Protest against the Extension of Railways in the Lake District, 1876, pp. 61-69. The letter and Ruskin's comments upon it were the subject of an interesting article, with many historical reminiscences, in the Saturday Review of March 4, 1876. article (Mr. Ruskin and Wakefield ") was also reprinted by Mr. Somervell, pp. 71-78. For a Report on the condition of the Calder at Wakefield, see Letter 89 Vol. XXIX. p. 417).] 2 [See Letter 53, § 26 (p. 341).] This 3 [This intention was partly carried out in the Laws of Fésole, 1877 (Vol. XV.).] LETTER 56 TIME-HONOURED LANCASTER1 1. I BELIEVE my readers will scarcely thank me for printing, this month, instead of the continuation of the letter from Wakefield, a theological essay by Mr. Lyttel. But it is my first business, in Fors, to be just,-and only my second or third to be entertaining; so that any person who conceives himself to have been misrepresented must always have my types at his command. On the other side, I must point out, before entering further into controversy of any kind, the constant habit in my antagonists of misrepresenting me. For instance; in an article forwarded to me from a local paper, urging what it can in defence of the arrangements noticed by me as offensive, at Kirkby Lonsdale and Clapham, I find this sentence: 2 "The squire's house does not escape, though one can see no reason for the remark unless it be that Mr. Ruskin dislikes lords, squires, and clergymen." Now I have good reason for supposing this article to have been written by a gentleman;-and even an amiable gentleman,-who, feeling himself hurt, and not at all wishing to hurt anybody, very naturally cries out: and thinks it monstrous in me to hurt him; or his own pet lord, or squire. But he never thinks what wrong there may be in printing his own momentary impression of the character of a man who has been thirty years before the public, without taking the smallest pains to ascertain whether his notion be true or false. 1 [King Richard II., Act i. sc. 1: see below, § 16. "Horses out!" (see § 10) was a discarded title for this letter.] 2 [See Letter 52, §§ 6-14 (pp. 298–304).] 2. It happens, by Fors' appointment, that the piece of my early life which I have already written for this month's letter, sufficiently answers the imputation of my dislike to lords and squires. But I will preface it, in order to illustrate my dislike of clergymen, by a later bit of biography; which, at the rate of my present progress in giving account of myself, I should otherwise, as nearly as I can calculate, reach only about the year 1975. Last summer, in Rome, I lodged at the Hôtel de Russie; and, in the archway of the courtyard of that mansion, waited usually, in the mornings, a Capuchin friar, begging for his monastery. 2 Now, though I greatly object to any clergyman's coming and taking me by the throat, and saying "Pay me that thou owest," ," I never pass a begging friar without giving him sixpence, or the equivalent fivepence of foreign coin; -extending the charity even occasionally as far as tenpence, if no fivepenny-bit chance to be in my purse. And this particular begging friar having a gentle face, and a long white beard, and a beautiful cloak, like a blanket; and being altogether the pleasantest sight, next to Sandro Botticelli's Zipporah, I was like to see in Rome in the course of the day, I always gave him the extra fivepence for looking so nice; which generosity so worked on his mind, -(the more usual English religious sentiment in Rome expending itself rather in buying poetical pictures of monks than in filling their bellies)—that, after some six or seven doles of tenpences, he must needs take my hand one day, and try to kiss it. Which being only just able to prevent, I took him round the neck and kissed his lips instead: and this, it seems, was more to him than the tenpences, for, next day, he brought me a little reliquary, with a certificated fibre in it of St. Francis' cloak (the hair one, now 1 [Matthew xviii. 28.] 2 [In the fresco of "The Life of Moses"; for Ruskin's study of the figure of Zipporah, see in Vol. XXIII. the frontispiece, and pp. xxxvii.-xxxviii., and compare. Vol. XXII. p. 427.] preserved at Assisi); and when afterwards I showed my friend Fra Antonio, the Assisi sacristan, what I had got, it was a pleasure to see him open his eyes, wider than Monsieur the Syndic at Hansli's fifty thousand crowns. He thought I must have come by it dishonestly; but not I, a whit,—for I most carefully explained to the Capuchin, when he brought it me, that I was more a Turk than a Catholic; —but he said I might keep the reliquary, for all that. 3 Contenting myself, for the moment, with this illustration of my present dislike of clergymen, I return to earlier days. 3. But for the reader's better understanding of such further progress of my poor little life as I may trespass on his patience in describing, it is now needful that I give some account of my father's mercantile position in London. 2 The firm of which he was head partner may be yet remembered by some of the older city houses, as carrying on their business in a small counting-house on the first floor of narrow premises, in as narrow a thoroughfare of East London,-Billiter Street, the principal traverse from Leadenhall Street into Fenchurch Street. The names of the three partners were given in full on their brass plate under the counting-house bell,-Ruskin, Telford, and Domecq. 4. Mr. Domecq's name should have been the first, by rights, for my father and Mr. Telford were only his agents. He was the sole proprietor of the estate which was the main capital of the firm,—the vineyard of Macharnudo, the most precious hillside, for growth of white wine, in the Spanish peninsula. The quality of the Macharnudo vintage essentially fixed the standard of Xeres "sack," or 1 [See Vol. XXIII. p. xlvii. n., and Vol. XXV. p. 125. Ruskin ultimately gave the reliquary through Miss Francesca Alexander to her peasant-friend Polissena: see Christ's Folk in the Apennine.] 2 [See Letter 55, § 4 (p. 370).] 3 [For "the under meaning" of this passage, see Letter 76, § 9 (Vol. XXIX. p. 90).] 4 [SS 3-9 of this Letter were used by Ruskin, when writing Præterita, where they appear, slightly revised, as §§ 24-30 of vol. i. ch. i. For the continuation of the autobiographical notes, see below, § 10.] XXVIII. 2 B |