18. (IV.) I am very grateful for the following piece of letter (as for all other kindness from the Companion to whom I owe it); and really I think it is "enough to make one give up wearing Valenciennes." 1

66 August 9th, 1876.

"MY DEAR MASTER,-I have tried in vain to resist those words in the August Fors, some one tell me,' 2 but at last resolve to say my say, trusting to your indulgence if it is in vain. "Some years ago, a friend of mine visiting Brussels went over the Royal Lace Manufactory, and seeing a woman busily at work on a very fine, and, according to the then fashion, large, collar, went up to her, and inquired how long she had been over this one piece. The woman answered, four years; and handed the work for my friend to examine more closely, but without changing her position, or lifting her eyes from the spot on which they were fixed; and on being asked the reason of this, said it would take too long time to have again to fix her eyes, so she kept them to the one spot through all the working hours. This is quite true. But the women were working in a large, light room-I doubt the correctness of the dark cellar, and do not see the reason for it—but all who have ever done any fine work can understand the loss of time in moving the eyes. But, after all, is lace-making worse for women than the ceaseless treadle movement of the sewingmachine? Lace-making hurts eyes only; the machine injures the whole woman -so I am told."

19. (V.) A letter from a Methodist minister, though written on the 14th, only reaches me here at Venice on the 28th. It will appear in next Fors. The gist of it is contradiction of Mr. Sillar's statement that the Wesleyans altered John Wesley's rules. "The alterations, whether good or bad" (says my new correspondent), were made by himself." I am not surprised to hear this; for had Wesley been a wise Christian, there would no more, now, have been Wesleyan than Apollosian 4 ministers.

[See Letter 71, § 18 (p. 750).]

[See 1 Corinthians i. 12. Compare the next Letter, § 18 (p. 750).]

LETTER 71

THE FEUDAL RANKS 1

VENICE, 4th October, 1876.

1. I AM able at last to give you some of the long-promised opinions of Carpaccio on practical subjects;2 not that, except ironically, I ever call them " opinions." There are certain men who know the truths necessary to human life; they do not "opine" them; and nobody's "opinions," on any subject, are of any consequence opposed to them.3 Hesiod is one of these, Plato another, Dante another, Carpaccio is another. He speaks little, and among the inspired painters may be thought of as one of the lesser prophets; but his brief book is of extreme value.

I have been happy enough to get two of my faithful scholars to work upon it for me; and they have deciphered it nearly all-much more, at all events, than I can tell you either in this Fors, or in several to come.

2. His message is written in the Venetian manner, by painting the myths of the saints, in his own way.

If you will look into the introduction to the Queen of the Air, you will find it explained that a great myth can only be written in the central time of a nation's power. This prophecy of Carpaccio's may be thought of by you as the sweetest, because the truest, of all that Venice was born to utter: the painted syllabling of it is nearly the last work and word of hers in true life. She speaks it, and virtually, thereafter, dies, or begins to die.

It is written in a series of some eighteen to twenty

1 [See below, § 9. "The Feudal System," and "St. Ursula" were rejected titles for this Letter.]

2

[See Letters 18, § 13 (Vol. XXVII. p. 314), and 70, § 12 (above, p. 726).] 3 [Compare Letter 6, §§ 2, 3 (Vol. XXVII. p. 99).]

[Lecture I., §§ 7 seq. (Vol. XIX. p. 301).]*

pictures, chiefly representing the stories of St. Ursula, St. George, and St. Jerome.1

The first, in thoughtful order, of these, the dream of St. Ursula, has been already partly described in Fors (Letter 20, § 142). The authorities of the Venetian Academy have been kind enough to take the picture down and give it me to myself, in a quiet room, where I am making studies, which I hope will be of use in Oxford, and elsewhere.

3

4

3. But there is this to be noted before we begin; that of these three saints, whose stories Carpaccio tells, one is a quite real one, on whose penman's work we depend for our daily Bible-bread. Another, St. George, is a very dimly real one,-very disputable by American faith, and we owe to him, only in England, certain sentiments; the Order of the Garter, and sundry signboards of the George and Dragon. Venice supposed herself to owe more to him; but he is nevertheless, in her mind also, a very ghostly saint,-armour and all, too light to sink a gondola."

Of the third, St. Ursula, by no industry of my good scholars, and none has been refused, can I find the slightest material trace. Under scholarly investigation, she vanishes utterly into the stars and the æther, and literally, as you will hear, and see, into moonshine, and the modern German meaning of everything, -the Dawn.* Not a relic, not a

* The primary form in which the legend shows itself is a Nature myth, in which Ursula is the Bud of flowers, enclosed in its rough or hairy calyx, and her husband, Ether-the air of spring. She opens into lovely life with "eleven thousand other flowers-their fading is their sudden martyrdom. And-says your modern philosopher-"That's all"!

1 [For an account of these pictures, and Ruskin's work upon them, see the Introduction to Vol. XXIV. PP. 1v.-lvii.]

2 [Vol. XXVII. p. 343. For the subsequent re-hanging of the St. Ursula pictures, see Vol. XXIV. p. liv.]

3 [For St. Jerome's translation of the Bible (the Vulgate), see Bible of Amiens, ch. iii. § 40.]

[See Letter 26, § 5 (Vol. XXVII. p. 475); Emerson on St. George.]

5 [The reference is apparently to the legend of the great storm in 1341, when St. George (with St. Mark and St. Nicholas) entered a boat and exorcised the demons who were bent on destroying Venice.]

[See, for instance, Lecture XI. ( Myths of the Dawn") in Max Müller's Lectures on the Science of Language.]

word remains of her, as what Mr. John Stuart Mill calls "a utility embodied in a material object."1

The whole of her utility is Immaterial to us in England, immaterial, of late years, in every conceivable sense. But the strange thing is that Carpaccio paints, of the substantial and indisputable saint, only three small pictures; of the disputable saint, three more important ones; but of the entirely aerial saint, a splendid series, the chief labour of his life.

The chief labour;-and chief rest, or play, it seems also: questionable in the extreme as to the temper of Faith in which it is done.

4. We will suppose, however, at first, for your better satisfaction, that in composing the pictures he no more believed there ever had been a Princess Ursula than Shakespeare, when he wrote Midsummer Night's Dream, believed there had been a Queen Hippolyta: and that Carpaccio had just as much faith in angels as Shakespeare in fairies -and no more. Both these artists, nevertheless, set themselves to paint, the one fairies, the other angels and saints, for popular entertainment (say your modern sages), or popular-instruction, it may yet appear. But take it your own way; and let it be for popular amusement. This play, this picture which I am copying for you, were, both of them we will say, toys, for the English and Venetian people.

5. Well, the next question is, whether the English and Venetians, when they could be amused with these toys, were more foolish than now, when they can only be amused with steam merry-go-rounds.

Below St. George's land at Barmouth, large numbers of the English populace now go to bathe. Of the Venetians, beyond St. George's island, many go now to bathe on the sands of Lido. But nobody thinks of playing a play about queens and fairies, to the bathers on the Welsh beach. The modern intellectual teacher erects swings upon

1 [See Letter 4, § 5 (Vol. XXVII. p. 64).]

the beach. There the suspended population oscillate between sea and sky, and are amused. Similarly in Venice, no decorative painter at Lido thinks of painting pictures of St. Nicholas of the Lido, to amuse the modern Venetian. The white-necktied orchestra plays them a "pot-pourri," and their steamer squeaks to them, and they are amused.1

And so sufficiently amused, that I, hearing with sudden surprise and delight the voice of native Venetian Punch last night, from an English ship, and instantly inquiring, with impatience, why I had not had the happiness of meeting him before, found that he was obliged to take refuge as a runaway, or exile, under the British Flag, being forbidden in his own Venice, for evermore-such the fiat of liberty towards the first Apostolic Vicar thereof."

6. I am willing, however, for my own part, to take Carpaccio a step farther down in the moral scale still. Suppose that he painted this picture, not even to amuse his public-but to amuse himself!

To a great extent I know that this is true. I know -(you needn't ask how, because you can't be shown how, -but I do know, trust me), that he painted this picture greatly to amuse himself, and had extreme delight in the doing of it; and if he did not actually believe that the princess and angel ever were, at least he heartily wished there had been such persons, and could be.

There may

Now this is the first step to real faith. never have been saints: there may be no angels,-there may be no God. Professors Huxley and Tyndall are of opinion that there is no God: they have never found one in a bottle. Well: possibly there isn't; but, my good Sheffield friends, do you wish there was? or are you of the French Republican opinion-"If there were a God, we should have to shoot him "3 as the first great step [See Letter 42, § 5 (p. 94).]

1

2 [Punchinello, or Policinello, was perhaps more a "native" of Rome, and in later days more at home in Naples than in Venice. Wherever he went, however, he was like his ancestor, the Maccus of the ancient Romans, a chartered libertine and a favourite instrument of audacious political satire.]

3 [Compare Letter 53, § 11 (p. 328).]