Part 9 (1/2)

VI. A _deliberate_ and _decisive_ one, which shall judge by law, and amend or make law;

VII. An _exemplary_ one, which shall show what is loveliest in the art of life.

You may divide or name those several offices as you will, or they may be divided in practice as expediency may recommend; the plan I have stated merely puts them all into the simplest forms and relations.

160. You see I have just defined the martial power as that ”which punishes knaves and makes idle persons work.” For that is indeed the ultimate and perennial soldiers.h.i.+p; that is the essential warrior's office to the end of time. ”There is no discharge in that war.” To the compelling of sloth, and the scourging of sin, the strong hand will have to address itself as long as this wretched little dusty and volcanic world breeds nettles, and spits fire. The soldier's office at present is indeed supposed to be the defense of his country against other countries; but that is an office which--Utopian as you may think the saying--will soon now be extinct. I say so fearlessly, though I say it with wide war threatened, at this moment, in the East and West.

For observe what the standing of nations on their defense really means. It means that, but for such armed att.i.tude, each of them would go and rob the other; that is to say, that the majority of active persons in every nation are at present--thieves. I am very sorry that this should still be so; but it will not be so long. National exhibitions, indeed, will not bring peace; but national education will, and that is soon coming. I can judge of this by my own mind, for I am myself naturally as covetous a person as lives in this world, and am as eagerly-minded to go and steal some things the French have got, as any housebreaker could be, having clue to attractive spoons. If I could by military incursion carry off Paul Veronese's ”Marriage in Cana,” and the ”Venus Victrix,” and the ”Hours of St. Louis,” it would give me the profoundest satisfaction to accomplish the foray successfully; nevertheless, being a comparatively educated person, I should most a.s.suredly not give myself that satisfaction, though there were not an ounce of gunpowder, nor a bayonet, in all France. I have not the least mind to rob anybody, however much I may covet what they have got; and I know that the French and British public may and will, with many other publics, be at last brought to be of this mind also; and to see farther that a nation's real strength and happiness do not depend on properties and territories, nor on machinery for their defense; but on their getting such territory as they _have_, well filled with none but respectable persons. Which is a way of _infinitely_ enlarging one's territory, feasible to every potentate; and dependent no wise on getting Trent turned, or Rhine-edge reached.

161. Not but that, in the present state of things, it may often be soldiers' duty to seize territory, and hold it strongly; but only from banditti, or savage and idle persons.

Thus, both Calabria and Greece ought to have been irresistibly occupied long ago. Instead of quarreling with Austria about Venice, the Italians ought to have made a truce with her for ten years, on condition only of her destroying no monuments, and not taxing Italians more than Germans; and then thrown the whole force of their army on Calabria, shot down every bandit in it in a week, and forced the peasantry of it into honest work on every hill-side, with stout and immediate help from the soldiers in embanking streams, building walls, and the like; and Italian finance would have been a much pleasanter matter for the King to take account of by this time; and a fleet might have been floating under Garga.n.u.s strong enough to sweep every hostile sail out of the Adriatic, instead of a disgraced and useless remnant of one, about to be put up to auction.

And similarly, _we_ ought to have occupied Greece instantly, when they asked us, whether Russia liked it or not; given them an English king, made good roads for them, and stout laws; and kept them, and their hills and seas, with righteous shepherding of Arcadian fields, and righteous ruling of Salaminian wave, until they could have given themselves a Greek king of men again; and obeyed him, like men.

_April 24._

162. It is strange that just before I finish work for this time, there comes the first real and notable sign of the victory of the principles I have been fighting for, these seven years. It is only a newspaper paragraph, but it means much. Look at the second column of the 11th page of yesterday's 'Pall Mall Gazette,' The paper has taken a wonderful fit of misprinting lately (unless my friend John Simon has been knighted on his way to Weimar, which would be much too right and good a thing to be a likely one); but its straws of talk mark which way the wind blows perhaps more early than those of any other journal--and look at the question it puts in that page, ”Whether political economy be the sordid and materialistic science some account it, or almost the n.o.blest on which thought can be employed?”

Might not you as well have determined that question a little while ago, friend Public? and known what political economy _was_, before you talked so much about it?

But, hark, again--”Ostentation, parental pride and a host of moral”

(immoral?) ”qualities must be recognized as among the springs of industry; political economy should not ignore these, but, to discuss them, _it must abandon its pretensions to the precision of a pure science_.”

163. Well done the 'Pall Mall'! Had it written ”Prudence and parental affection,” instead of ”Ostentation and parental pride,” ”must be recognized among the springs of industry,” it would have been still better; and it would then have achieved the expression of a part of the truth, which I put into clear terms in the first sentence of 'Unto this Last,' in the year 1862--which it has thus taken five years to get half way into the public's head.

”Among the delusions which at different periods have possessed themselves of the minds of large ma.s.ses of the human race, perhaps the most curious--certainly the least creditable--is the modern _soi-disant_ science of political economy, based on the idea that an advantageous code of social action may be determined, irrespectively of the influence of social affection.”

Look also at the definition of skill, p. 87.

”Under the term 'skill' I mean to include the united force of experience, intellect, and pa.s.sion, in their operation on manual labor, and under the term 'pa.s.sion' to include the entire range of the moral feelings.”

164. I say half way into the public's head, because you see, a few lines further on, the 'Pall Mall' hopes for a pause ”half way between the rigidity of Ricardo and the sentimentality of Ruskin.”

With one hand on their pocket, and the other on their heart! Be it so for the present; we shall see how long this statuesque att.i.tude can be maintained; meantime, it chances strangely--as several other things have chanced while I was writing these notes to you--that they should have put in that sneer (two lines before) at my note on the meaning of the Homeric and Platonic Sirens, at the very moment when I was doubting whether I would or would not tell you the significance of the last song of Ariel in 'The Tempest.'

I had half determined not, but now I shall. And this was what brought me to think of it:--

165. Yesterday afternoon I called on Mr. H. C. Sorby, to see some of the results of an inquiry he has been following all last year, into the nature of the coloring matter of leaves and flowers.

You most probably have heard (at all events, may with little trouble hear) of the marvelous power which chemical a.n.a.lysis has received in recent discoveries respecting the laws of light.

My friend showed me the rainbow of the rose, and the rainbow of the violet, and the rainbow of the hyacinth, and the rainbow of forest leaves being born, and the rainbow of forest leaves dying.

And, last, he showed me the rainbow of blood. It was but the three-hundredth part of a grain, dissolved in a drop of water; and it cast its measured bars, for ever recognizable now to human sight, on the chord of the seven colors. And no drop of that red rain can now be shed, so small as that the stain of it cannot be known, and the voice of it heard out of the ground.

166. But the seeing these flower colors, and the iris of blood together with them, just while I was trying to gather into brief s.p.a.ce the right laws of war, brought vividly back to me my dreaming fancy of long ago, that even the trees of the earth were ”capable of a kind of sorrow, as they opened their innocent leaves in vain for men; and along the dells of England her beeches cast their dappled shades only where the outlaw drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; amidst the fair defiles of the Apennines, the twisted olive-trunks hid the ambushes of treachery, and on their meadows, day by day, the lilies, which were white at the dawn, were washed with crimson at sunset.”

And so also now this chance word of the daily journal, about the Sirens, brought to my mind the divine pa.s.sage in the Cratylus of Plato, about the place of the dead.