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Lecture I. - SesamePart II. - Sesame: Of Kings` Treasuries
Part II. - Sesame: Of Kings` Treasuries
21. Never think Milton uses those three words to fill up his verse, as a
loose writer would. He needs all the three; especially those three, and no
more than those - "creep," and "intrude." and "climb"; no other words would or
could serve the turn, and no more could be added. For they exhaustively
comprehend the three classes, correspondent to the three characters, of men
who dishonestly seek ecclesiastical power. First, those who "creep" into the
fold; who do not care for office, nor name, but for secret influence, and do
all things occultly and cunningly, consenting to any servility of office or
conduct, so only that they may intimately discern, and unawares direct, the
minds of men. Then those who "intrude" (thrust, that is) themselves into the
fold, who by natural insolence of heart, and stout eloquence of tongue, and
fearlessly perseverant self-assertion, obtain hearing and authority with the
common crowd. Lastly, those who "climb," who by labor and learning, both stout
and sound, but selfishly exerted in the cause of their own ambition, gain high
dignities and authorities, and become "lords over the heritage," though not
"ensamples to the flock."
22. Now go on: -
"Of other care they little reckoning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearers` feast.
Blind mouths -"
I pause again, for this is a strange expression; a broken metaphor, one
might think, careless and unscholarly.
Not so: its very audacity and pithiness are intended to make us look
close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllables express the
precisely accurate contraries of right character, in the two great offices of
the Church - those of bishop and pastor.
A "Bishop" means a "person who sees."
A "Pastor" means a "person who feeds."
The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind.
The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed, - to be a
Mouth.
Take the two reverses together, and you have "blind mouths." We may
advisably follow out this idea a little. Nearly all the evils in the Church
have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority,
not outlook. Whereas their real office is not to rule; though it may be
vigorously to exhort and rebuke; it is the king`s office to rule; the bishop`s
office is to oversee the flock; to number it, sheep by sheep; to be ready
always to give full account of it. Now it is clear he cannot give account of
the souls, if he has not so much as numbered the bodies of his flock. The
first thing, therefore, that a bishop has to do is at least to put himself in
a position in which, at any moment, he can obtain the history, from childhood,
of every living soul in his diocese, and of its present state. Down in that
back street, Bill and Nancy, knocking each other`s teeth out! - Does the
bishop know all about it? Has he his eye upon them? Has he had his eye upon
them? Can he circumstantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit of
beating Nancy about the head? If he cannot, he is no bishop, though he had a
mitre as high as Salisbury steeple; he is no bishop, - he has sought to be at
the helm instead of the masthead; he has no sight of things. "Nay," you say,
"it is not his duty to look after Bill in the back street." What! the fat
sheep that have full fleeces - you think it is only those he should look
after, while (go back to your Milton) "the hungry sheep look up, and are not
fed, besides what the grim wolf with privy paw" (bishops knowing nothing about
it) "daily devours apace, and nothing said"?
"But that`s not our idea of a bishop." ^4 Perhaps not; but it was St.
Paul`s; and it was Milton`s. They may be right, or we may be; but we must not
think we are reading either one or the other by putting our meaning into their
words.
[Footnote 4: Compare the 13th Letter in "Time and Tide."]
23. I go on.
"But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw."
This is to meet the vulgar answer that "if the poor are not looked after
in their bodies, they are in their souls; they have spiritual food."
And Milton says, "They have no such thing as spiritual food; they are
only swollen with wind." At first you may think that is a coarse type, and an
obscure one. But again, it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your
Latin and Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of "Spirit." It is only
a contraction of the Latin word "breath," and an indistinct translation of the
Greek word for "wind." The same word is used in writing, "The wind bloweth
where is listeth"; and in writing, "So is every one that is born of the
Spirit"; born of the breath, that is; for it means the breath of God, in soul
and body. We have the true sense of it in our words "inspiration" and
"expire." Now, there are two kinds of breath with which the flock may be
filled; God`s breath, and man`s. The breath of God is health, and life, and
peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks on the hills; but man`s
breath - the word which he calls spiritual, - is disease and contagion to
them, as the fog of the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by
it, as a dead body by the vapors of its own decomposition. This is literally
true of all false religious teaching; the first and last, and fatalest sign of
it is that "puffing up." Your converted children, who teach their parents;
your converted convicts, who teach honest men; your converted dunces, who,
having lived in cretinous stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awakening to
the fact of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiar people
and messengers; your sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic or
Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think themselves
exclusively in the right and others wrong; and preeminently, in every sect,
those who hold that men can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing
rightly, by word instead of act, and wish instead of work: - these are the
true fog children - clouds, these, without water; bodies, these, of putrescent
vapor and skin, without blood or flesh: blown bagpipes for the fiends to pipe
with - corrupt, and corrupting, - "Swollen with wind, and the rank mist they
draw."
24. Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power of the keys,
for now we can understand them. Note the difference between Milton and Dante
in their interpretation of this power: for once, the latter is weaker in
thought; he supposes both the keys to be of the gate of heaven; one is of
gold, the other of silver: they are given by St. Peter to the sentinel angel;
and it is not easy to determine the meaning either of the substances of the
three steps of the gate, or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold,
the key of heaven; the other, of iron, the key of the prison in which the
wicked teachers are to be bound who "have taken away the key of knowledge, yet
entered not in themselves."
We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to see and feed;
and of all who do so it is said, "He that watereth, shall be watered also
himself." But the reverse is truth also. He that watereth not, shall be
withered himself, and he that seeth not, shall himself be shut out of sight -
shut into the perpetual prison-house. And that prison opens here, as well as
hereafter: he who is to be bound in heaven must first be bound on earth. That
command to the strong angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, "Take
him and bind him hand and foot, and cast him out," issues, in its measure,
against the teacher, for every help withheld, and for every truth refused, and
for every falsehood enforced; so that he is more strictly fettered the more he
fetters, and farther outcast, as he more and more misleads, till at last the
bars of the iron cage close upon him, and as "the golden opes, the iron shuts
amain."
25. We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much more is yet
to be found in them; but we have done enough by way of example of the kind of
word-by-word examination of your author which is rightly called "reading";
watching every accent and expression, and putting ourselves always in the
author`s place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into
his, so as to be able assuredly to say, "Thus Milton thought," not "Thus I
thought, in mis-reading Milton." And by this process you will gradually come
to attach less weight to your own "Thus I thought" at other times. You will
begin to perceive that what you thought was a matter of no serious importance;
- that your thoughts on any subject are not perhaps the clearest and wisest
that could be arrived at thereupon: - in fact, that unless you are a very
singular person, you cannot be said to have any "thoughts" at all; that you
have no materials for them, in any serious matters; ^5 - no right to "think,"
but only to try to learn more of the facts. Nay, most probably all your life
(unless, as I said, you are a singular person) you will have no legitimate
right to an "opinion" on any business, except that instantly under your hand.
What must of necessity be done, you can always find out, beyond question, how
to do. Have you a house to keep in order, a commodity to sell, a field to
plough, a ditch to cleanse? There need be no two opinions about these
proceedings; it is at your peril if you have not much more than an "opinion"
on the way to manage such matters. And also, outside of your own business,
there are one or two subjects on which you are bound to have but one opinion.
That roguery and lying are objectionable, and are instantly to be flogged out
of the way whenever discovered; - that covetousness and love of quarreling are
dangerous dispositions even in children, and deadly dispositions in men and
nations; - that in the end, the God of heaven and earth loves active, modest,
and kind people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones; - on these
general facts you are bound to have but one, and that a very strong, opinion.
For the rest, respecting religions, governments, sciences, arts, you will find
That, on the whole, you can know Nothing, - judge nothing; that the best you
can do, even though you may be a well-educated person, is to be silent, and
strive to be wiser every day, and to understand a little more of the thoughts
of others, which so soon as you try to do honestly, you will discover that the
thoughts even of the wisest are very little more than pertinent questions. To
put the difficulty into a clear shape, and exhibit to you the grounds for
indecision, that is all they can generally do for you! - and well for them and
for us, if indeed they are able "to mix the music with our thoughts, and
sadden us with heavenly doubts." This writer, from whom I have been reading to
you, is not among the first or wisest: he sees shrewdly as far as he sees, and
therefore it is easy to find out his full meaning; but with the greater men,
you cannot fathom their meaning; they do not even wholly measure it
themselves, - it is so wide. Suppose I had asked you, for instance, to seek
for Shakespeare`s opinion, instead of Milton`s, on this matter of Church
authority? - or for Dante`s? Have any of you, at this instant, the least idea
what either thought about it? Have you ever balanced the scene with the
bishops in "Richard III." against the character of Cranmer? the description of
St. Francis and St. Dominic against that of him who made Virgil wonder to gaze
upon him, - "disteso, tanto vilmente, nell` eterno esilio"; or of him whom
Dante stood beside, "come `l frate che confessa lo perfido assassin?" ^6
Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men better than most of us, I presume! They
were both in the midst of the main struggle between the temporal and spiritual
powers. They had an opinion, we may guess. But where is it? Bring it into
court! Put Shakespeare`s or Dante`s creed into articles, and send it up for
trial by the Ecclesiastical Courts.
[Footnote 5: Modern "education" for the most part signifies giving people the
faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance to them.]
[Footnote 6: "Inferno," xxiii, 125, 126; xix. 49, 50.]
26. You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and many a day, to
come at the real purposes and teaching of these great men; but a very little
honest study of them will enable you to perceive that what you took for your
own "judgment" was mere chance prejudice, and drifted, helpless, entangled
weed of castaway thought: nay, you will see that most men`s minds are indeed
little better than rough heath wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly
barren, partly overgrown with pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind-sown
herbage of evil surmise; that the first thing you have to do for them, and
yourself, is eagerly and scornfully to set fire to this; burn all the jungle
into wholesome ash heaps, and then plough and sow. All the true literary work
before you, for life, must begin with obedience to that order, "Break up your
fallow ground, and sow not among thorns."
27. II. ^7 - Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers, that
you may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this higher advance to make; -
you have to enter into their Hearts. As you go to them first for clear sight,
so you must stay with them, that you may share at last their just and mighty
Passion. Passion, or "sensation." I am not afraid of the word; still less of
the thing. You have heard many outcries against sensation lately; but, I can
tell you, it is not less sensation we want, but more. The ennobling difference
between one man and another, - between one animal and another, - is precisely
in this, that one feels more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps
sensation might not be easily got for us; if we were earthworms, liable at
every instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might
not be good for us. But, being human creatures, it is good for us; nay, we are
only human in so far as we are sensitive, and our honor is precisely in
proportion to our passion.
[Footnote 7: Compare section 13 above.]
28. You know I said of that great and pure society of the dead, that it
would allow "no vain or vulgar person to enter there." What do you think I
meant by a "vulgar" person? What do you yourselves mean by "vulgarity"? You
will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the essence of all
vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely
an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred
vulgarity, there is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes
capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without
pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the
dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become
vulgar; they are forever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable
of sympathy, - of quick understanding, - of all that, in deep insistence on
the common, but most accurate term, may be called the "tact" or "touch -
faculty" of body and soul; that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the
pure woman has above all creatures; - fineness and fullness of sensation
beyond reason; - the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but
determine what is true: it is the God-given passion of humanity which alone
can recognize what God has made good.
29. We come then to the great concourse of the Dead, not merely to know
from them what is True, but chiefly to feel with them what is just. Now, to
feel with them, we must be like them; and none of us can become that without
pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge, - not the
first thought that comes, - so the true passion is disciplined and tested
passion, - not the first passion that comes. The first that come are the vain,
the false, the treacherous; if you yield to them they will lead you wildly and
far in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true purpose and
no true passion left. Not that any feeling possible to humanity is in itself
wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined. Its nobility is in its force and
justice; it is wrong when it is weak, and felt for paltry cause. There is a
mean wonder, as of a child who sees a juggler tossing golden balls, and this
is base, if you will. But do you think that the wonder is ignoble, or the
sensation less, with which every human soul is called to watch the golden
balls of heaven tossed through the night by the Hand that made them? There is
a mean curiosity, as of a child opening a forbidden door, or a servant prying
into her master`s business; - and a noble curiosity, questioning, in the front
of danger, the source of the great river beyond the sand, - the place of the
great continents beyond the sea; - a nobler curiosity still, which questions
of the source of the River of Life, and of the space of the Continent of
Heaven, - things which "the angels desire to look into." So the anxiety is
ignoble, with which you linger over the course and catastrophe of an idle
tale; but do you think the anxiety is less, or greater, with which you watch,
or ought to watch, the dealings of fate and destiny with the life of an
agonized nation? Alas! it is the narrowness, selfishness, minuteness, of your
sensation that you have to deplore in England at this day; - sensation which
spends itself in bouquets and speeches; in revelings and junketings; in sham
fights and gay puppet shows, while you can look on and see noble nations
murdered, man by man, without an effort or a tear.
30. I said "minuteness" and "selfishness" of sensation, but in a word, I
ought to have said "injustice" or "unrighteousness" of sensation. For as in
nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned from a vulgar person, so in
nothing is a gentle nation (such nations have been) better to be discerned
from a mob, than in this, - that their feelings are constant and just, results
of due contemplation, and of equal thought. You can talk a mob into anything;
its feelings may be - usually are - on the whole, generous and right; but it
has no foundation for them, no hold of them; you may tease or tickle it into
any, at your pleasure; it thinks by infection, for the most part, catching an
opinion like a cold, and there is nothing so little that it will not roar
itself wild about, when the fit is on; - nothing so great but it will forget
in an hour, when the fit is past. But a gentleman`s, or a gentle nation`s,
passions are just, measured, and continuous. A great nation, for instance,
does not spend its entire national wits for a couple of months in weighing
evidence of a single ruffian`s having done a single murder; and for a couple
of years see its own children murder each other by their thousands or tens of
thousands a day, considering only what the effect is likely to be on the price
of cotton, and caring nowise to determine which side of battle is in the
wrong. Neither does a great nation send its poor little boys to jail for
stealing six walnuts; and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds or
thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor men`s savings, to close
their doors "under circumstances over which they have no control," with a "by
your leave"; and large landed estates to be bought by men who have made their
money by going with armed steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium
at the cannon`s mouth, and altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation,
the common highwayman`s demand of "your money or your life," into that of
"your money and your life." Neither does a great nation allow the lives of its
innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted out of them
by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra per week to its
landlords; ^8 and then debate, with driveling tears, and diabolical
sympathies, whether it ought not piously to save, and nursingly cherish, the
lives of its murderers. Also, a great nation, having made up its mind that
hanging is quite the wholesomest process for its homicides in general, can yet
with mercy distinguish between the degrees of guilt in homicides; and does not
yelp like a pack of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood-track of an unhappy
crazed boy, or gray-haired clodpate Othello, "perplexed i` the extreme," at
the very moment that it is sending a Minister of the Crown to make polite
speeches to a man who is bayoneting young girls in their father`s sight, and
killing noble youths in cool blood, faster than a country butcher kills lambs
in spring. And, lastly, a great nation does not mock Heaven and its Powers, by
pretending belief in a revelation which asserts the love of money to be the
root of all evil, and declaring, at the same time, that it is actuated, and
intends to be actuated, in all chief national deeds and measures, by no other
love.
[Footnote 8: See note at end of lecture. I have put it in large type, because
the course of matters since it was written has made it perhaps better worth
attention.]
31. My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk about reading. We
want some sharper discipline than that of reading; but, at all events, be
assured, we cannot read. No reading is possible for a people with its mind in
this state. No sentence of any great writer is intelligible to them. It is
simply and sternly impossible for the English public, at this moment, to
understand any thoughtful writing, - so incapable of thought has it become in
its insanity of avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse than
this incapacity of thought; it is not corruption of the inner nature; we ring
true still, when anything strikes home to us; and though the idea that
everything should "pay" has infected our every purpose so deeply, that even
when we would play the good Samaritan, we never take out our two pence and
give them to the host without saying, "When I come again, thou shalt give me
four pence," there is a capacity of noble passion left in our hearts` core. We
show it in our work, - in our war, - even in those unjust domestic affections
which make us furious at a small private wrong, while we are polite to a
boundless public one: we are still industrious to the last hour of the day,
though we add the gambler`s fury to the laborer`s patience; we are still brave
to the death, though incapable of discerning true cause for battle; and are
still true in affection to our own flesh, to the death, as the sea-monsters
are, and the rock-eagles. And there is hope for a nation while this can be
still said of it. As long as it holds its life in its hand, ready to give it
for its honor (though a foolish honor), for its love (though a selfish love),
and for its business (though a base business), there is hope for it. But hope
only; for this instinctive, reckless virtue cannot last. No nation can last,
which has made a mob of itself, however generous at heart. It must discipline
its passions, and direct them, or they will discipline it, one day, with
scorpion whips. Above all a nation cannot last as a money-making mob: it
cannot with impunity, - it cannot with existence, - go on despising
literature, despising science, despising art, despising nature, despising
compassion, and concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you think these are harsh
or wild words? Have patience with me but a little longer. I will prove their
truth to you, clause by clause.
32. I. - I say first we have despised literature. What do we, as a
nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our
libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? If
a man spends lavishly on his library you call him mad - a bibliomaniac. But
you never call any one a horsemaniac, though men ruin themselves every day by
their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books.
Or, to go lower still, how much do you think the contents of the bookshelves
of the United Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared with the
contents of its wine-cellars? What position would its expenditure on
literature take, as compared with its expenditure on luxurious eating? We talk
of food for the mind, as of food for the body; now a good book contains such
food inexhaustibly; it is a provision for life, and for the best part of us;
yet how long most people would look at the best book before they would give
the price of a large turbot for it! though there have been men who have
pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose libraries
were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than most men`s dinners are. We are
few of us put to such trial, and more the pity; for, indeed, a precious thing
is all the more precious to us if it has been won by work or economy; and if
public libraries were half as costly as public dinners, or books cost the
tenth part of what bracelets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes
suspect there was good in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling;
whereas the very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget
that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything
which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and
reread, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the
passages you want in it as a soldier can seize the weapon he needs in an
armory, or a housewife bring the spice she needs from her store. Bread of
flour is good: but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a
good book; and the family must be poor indeed which, once in their lives,
cannot, for such multipliable barley-loaves, pay their baker`s bill. We call
ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each
other`s books out of circulating libraries!
33. II. - I say we have despised science. "What!" you exclaim, "are we
not foremost in all discovery, ^9 and is not the whole world giddy by reason,
or unreason, of our inventions?" Yes; but do you suppose that is national
work? That work is all done in spite of the nation; by private people`s zeal
and money. We are glad enough, indeed, to make our profit of science; we snap
up anything in the way of a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly
enough; but if the scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to us, that is
another story. What have we publicly done for science? We are obliged to know
what o`clock it is, for the safety of our ships, and therefore we pay for an
observatory; and we allow ourselves, in the person of our Parliament, to be
annually tormented into doing something, in a slovenly way, for the British
Museum; sullenly apprehending that to be a place for keeping stuffed birds in,
to amuse our children. If anybody will pay for his own telescope, and resolve
another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it were our own; if one
in ten thousand of our hunting squires suddenly perceives that the earth was
indeed made to be something else than a portion for foxes, and burrows in it
himself, and tells us where the gold is, and where the coals, we understand
that there is some use in that; and very properly knight him; but is the
accident of his having found out how to employ himself usefully any credit to
us? (The negation of such discovery among his brother squires may perhaps be
some discred it to us, if we would consider of it.) But if you doubt these
generalities, here is one fact for us all to meditate upon, illustrative of
our love of science. Two years ago there was a collection of the fossils of
Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria; the best in existence, containing many
specimens unique for perfectness, and one unique as an example of a species (a
whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by that fossil.)
This collection, of which the mere market worth, among private buyers, would
probably have been some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the
English nation for seven hundred; but we would not give seven hundred, and the
whole series would have been in the Munich Museum at this moment, if Professor
Owen ^10 had not with loss of his own time, and patient tormenting of the
British public in person of its representatives, got leave to give four
hundred pounds at once, and himself become answerable for the other three!
which the said public will doubtless pay him eventually, but sulkily, and
caring nothing about the matter all the while; only always ready to cackle if
any credit comes of it. Consider, I beg of you, arithmetically, what this fact
means. Your annual expenditure for public purposes (a third of it for military
apparatus) is at least fifty millions. Now 7001. is to 50,000,0001., roughly,
as seven pence to two thousand pounds. Suppose, then, a gentleman of unknown
income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured from the fact that he spent two
thousand a year on his park-walls and footmen only, professes himself fond of
science; and that one of his servants comes eagerly to tell him that an unique
collection of fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to be had for
the sum of seven pence sterling; and that the gentleman, who is fond of
science, and spends two thousand a year on his park, answers, after keeping
his servant waiting several months, "Well! I`ll give you four pence for them,
if you will be answerable for the extra three pence yourself, till next year!"
[Footnote 9: Since this was written, the answer has become definitely - No; we
have surrendered the field of Arctic discovery to the Continental nations, as
being ourselves too poor to pay for ships.]
[Footnote 10: I state this fact without Professor Owen`s permission: which of
course he could not with propriety have granted, had I asked it; but I
consider it so important that the public should be aware of the fact that I do
what seems to be right, though rude.]
34. III. - I say you have despised Art! "What!" you again answer, "have
we not Art exhibitions, miles long? and do we not pay thousands of pounds for
single pictures? and have we not Art schools and institutions, more than ever
nation had before?" Yes, truly, but all that is for the sake of the shop. You
would fain sell canvas as well as coals, and crockery as well as iron; you
would take every other nation`s bread out of its mouth if you could. ^11 not
being able to do that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thoroughfares of
the world, like Ludgate apprentices, screaming to every passer - by, "What
d`ye lack?" You know nothing of your own faculties or circumstances; you fancy
that, among your damp, flat fields of clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as
the Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or the Italian under his volcanic
cliffs; - that Art may be learned as bookkeeping is, and when learned, will
give you more books to keep. You care for pictures, absolutely, no more than
you do for the bills pasted on your dead walls. There is always room on the
walls for the bills to be read, - never for the pictures to be seen. You do
not know what pictures you have (by repute) in the country, nor whether they
are false or true, nor whether they are taken care of or not; in foreign
countries, you calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the world rotting
in abandoned wreck - (in Venice you saw the Austrian guns deliberately pointed
at the palaces containing them), and if you heard that all the fine pictures
in Europe were made into sand-bags to-morrow on the Austrian forts, it would
not trouble you so much as the chance of a brace or two of game less in your
own bags, in a day`s shooting. That is your national love of Art.
[Footnote 11: That was our real idea of "Free Trade" - "All the trade to
myself." You find now that by "competition" other people can manage to sell
something as well as you - and now we call for Protection again. Wretches!]
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