NOTE TO THE SECOND VOLUME.

The letters relating to Mr. Ruskin's candidature for the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University were published when this volume was almost out of the printer's hands. They have however been included, by Mr. Ruskin's wish, and will be found at the end of this volume, where a letter to the late Mr. W. H. Harrison, which has just been brought to my notice, and two very recent letters on Dramatic Reform, have, at the cost of some delay, been also added.—[Ed.]

November 15, 1880.

[Pg xii][Pg xiii][Pg xiv]

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE LETTERS CONTAINED IN THE SECOND VOLUME.

Note.—In the second and third columns the bracketed words and figures are more or less certainly conjectured; whilst those unbracketed give the actual dating of the letters.

LETTERS ON POLITICS AND WAR.

The Italian Question. 1859. (Three letters: June 6, June 15, and August 1.) The Foreign Policy of England. 1863. The Position of Denmark. 1864. The Jamaica Insurrection. 1865. The Franco-Prussian War. 1870. (Two letters: October 6 and 7.) Modern Warfare. 1876.

[Pg 2] [Pg 3]

ARROWS OF THE CHACE.

LETTERS ON POLITICS AND WAR.

[From "The Scotsman," July 20, 1859.] THE ITALIAN QUESTION.[1] Berlin, June 6, 1859.

I have been thinking of sending a few lines about what I have seen of Austrians and Italians; but every time I took my pen and turned from my own work about clouds and leafage to think for a few minutes concerning political clouds and thickets, I sank into a state of amazement which reduced me to helpless silence. I will try and send you an incoherent line to-day; for the smallest endeavor at coherence will bring me into that atmosphere of astonishment again, in which I find no expression.

You northern Protestant people are always overrating the value of Protestantism as such. Your poetical clergymen make sentimental tours in the Vaudois country, as if there were no worthy people in the Alps but the Vaudois. Did the enlightened Edinburgh evangelicals never take any interest in the freedom of the Swiss, nor hear of such people as Winkelried or Tell? Not but that there is some chance of Tell disappearing one of these days under acutest historical investigation.

[Pg 4]

Still, he, or somebody else, verily got Switzerland rid of much evil, and made it capable of much good; and if you examine the influence of the battles of Morgarten and Sempach on European history, you will find they were good and true pieces of God's work.[2] Do people suppose they were done by Protestants? Switzerland owes all that she is—all that she is ever likely to be—to her stout and stern Roman Catholics, faithful to their faith to this day—they, and the Tyrolese, about the truest Roman Catholics in Christendom and certainly among its worthiest people, though they laid your Zuingli and a good deal of ranting Protestantism which Zuingli in vain tried to make either rational or charitable, dead together on the green meadows of Cappel, and though the Tyrolese marksmen at this moment are following up their rifle practice to good purpose, and with good will, with your Vaudois hearts for targets.

The amazement atmosphere keeps floating with its edges about me, though I write on as fast as I can in hopes of keeping out of it. You Scotch, and we English!! to keep up the miserable hypocrisy of calling ourselves Protestants! And here have been two of the most powerful protests (sealed with quite as much blood as is usually needed for such documents) that ever were made against the Papacy—one in 1848,[3] and [Pg 5]one now—twenty thousand men or thereabouts lying, at this time being, in the form of torn flesh and shattered bones, among the rice marshes of the Novarrese, and not one jot of our precious Protestant blood gone to the signature. Not so much as one noble flush of it, that I can see, on our clay cheeks, besmirched, as they are, with sweat and smoke; but all for gold, and out of chimneys. Of sweat for bread that perishes not, or of the old Sinai smoke for honor of God's law, and revelation thereof—no drop nor shadow. Not so much as a coroner's inquest on those dead bodies in the rice fields—dead men who must have been murdered by somebody. If a

drunken man falls in a ditch, you will have your Dogberry and Verges talk over him by way of doing justice; but your twenty thousand—not drunken, but honest, respectable, well-meaning, and serviceable men—are made rice manure of, and you think it is all right. We Protestants indeed! The Italians are Protestants, and in a measure the French—nay, even the Austrians (at all events those conical-hatted mountaineers), according to their understanding of the matter. What we are, Moloch or Mammon, or the Protestant devil make up of both, perhaps knows.

Do not think I dislike the Austrians. I have great respect and affection for them, and I have seen more of them in familiar intercourse than most Englishmen. One of my best friends in Venice in the winter of 1849-50 was the Artillery officer who had directed the fire on the side of Mestre in 1848. I have never known a nobler person. Brave, kind, and gay—as gentle as a lamb, as playful as a kitten—knightly in courtesy and in all tones of thought—ready at any instant to lay down his life for his country or his Emperor. He was by no means a rare instance either of gentleness or of virtue among the men whom the Liberal portion of our English press represent as only tyrants and barbarians. Radetzky himself was one of the kindest of men—his habitual expression was one of overflowing bonhommie, or of fatherly regard for the welfare of all around him. All who knew him loved him. In little things his kindness was almost ludicrous. I saw him at Verona[Pg 6] run out of his own supper-room and return with a plate of soup in his hand, the waiters (his youngest aides-de-camp) not

serving his lady guests fast enough to please him; yet they were nimble enough, as I knew in a race with two of them among the fire-flies by the Mincio, only the evening before. For a long time I regarded the Austrians as the only protection of Italy from utter dissolution (such as that which, I see to-day, it is reported that the Tuscan army has fallen into, left for five weeks to itself), and I should have looked upon them as such still, if the Sardinian Government had not shown itself fit to take their place. And the moment that any Italian Government was able to take their place, the Austrians necessarily became an obstacle to Italian progress, for all their virtues are incomprehensible to the Italians, and useless to them. Unselfish individually, the Austrians are nationally entirely selfish, and in this consists, so far as it is truly alleged against them, their barbarism. These men of whom I have been speaking would have given, any of them, life and fortune unhesitatingly, at their Emperor's bidding, but their magnanimity was precisely that of the Highlander or the Indian,

incognizant of any principle of action but that of devotion to his chief or nation. All abstract grounds of conscience, all universal and human hopes, were inconceivable by them. Such men are at present capable of no feeling towards Italy but scorn; their power was like a bituminous cerecloth wrapping her corpse—it saved her from the rottenness of revolution; but it must be unwound, if the time has come for her resurrection.

I do not know if that time has come, or can come. Italy's true oppression is all her own. Spain is oppressed by the Spaniard, not by the Austrian. Greece needs but to be saved from the Greeks. No French Emperor, however mighty his arm or sound his faith, can give Italy freedom.

But the time is come at least to bid her be free, if she has the[Pg 7] power of freedom. It is not England, certainly, who should forbid her. I believe that is what it will come to, however—not so much because we are afraid of Napoleon, as because we are jealous of him. But of him and us I have something more to say than there is time for to-night. These good, stupid, affectionate, faithful Germans, too (grand fellows under arms; I never imagined so magnificent a soldiery as 15,000 of them which I made a shift to see, through sand clouds, march past the Prince Frederick William[4] on Saturday morning last). But to hear them fretting and foaming at the French getting into Milan!—they having absolutely no other idea on all this complicated business than that French are fighting Germans! Wrong or right, why or wherefore, matters not a jot to them. French are fighting Germans—somehow, somewhere, for some reason—and beer and Vaterland are in peril, and the English in fault, as we are assuredly, but not on that side, for I believe

it to be quite true which a French friend, high in position, says in a letter this morning—"If the English had not sympathized with the Austrians there would have been no war." By way of keeping up the character of incoherence to which I have vowed myself, I may tell you that before that French letter came, I received another from a very sagacious Scotch friend (belonging, as I suppose most Scotch people do, to the class of persons who call themselves "religious"), containing this marvellous enunciation of moral principle, to be acted upon in difficult circumstances, "Mind your own business." It is a serviceable principle enough for men of the world, but a surprising one in the mouth of a person who professes to be a Bible obeyer. For, as far as I remember the tone of that obsolete book, "our own" is precisely the last business which it ever tells us to mind. It tells us often to mind God's business, often to mind other people's business; our own, in any eager or earnest way, not at all. "What thy hand findeth to [Pg 8]do." Yes; but in God's fields, not ours. One can imagine

the wiser fishermen of the Galilean lake objecting to Peter and Andrew that they were not minding their business, much more the commercial friends of Levi speaking with gentle pity of him about the receipt of Custom. "A bad man of business always—see what has come of it—quite mad at last."

And my astonishing friend went on to say that this was to be our principle of action "where the path was not quite clear"—as if any path ever was clear till you got to the end of it, or saw it a long way off; as if all human possibility of path was not among clouds and brambles—often cold, always thorny—misty with roses occasionally, or dim with dew, often also with shadow of Death—misty, more particularly in England just now, with shadow of that commercially and otherwise valuable smoke before spoken of.

However, if the path is not to be seen, it may be felt, or at least tumbled off, without any particular difficulty. This latter course of proceeding is our probablest, of course.—But I can't write any more to-night. I am, etc.,

J. Ruskin.

Note to p. 6.—The lines quoted are from Wordsworth's "Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty," Part II., Sonnet i. The second line should read, "By all the blended powers of earth and heaven."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This and the two following letters deal, it will be seen, with "the Italian question" in 1859, when the peace of Europe was disturbed by the combined action of France and Sardinia against Austria in the cause of Italian independence. Of these three letters the first was written two days after the defeat of the Austrians at Magenta, followed by the entrance into Milan of the French, and the second a few days before the similar victory of the French and Sardinian armies at Solferino.

[2] Few readers need be reminded of the position of Tell in the list of Swiss patriots (pace the "acutest historical investigation," which puts him in the list of mythical personages) in the early part of the fourteenth century; of Arnold von Winkelried who met the heroic death, by which he secured his country's freedom, at Sempach in 1386; or of Ulrich Zuingli, the Swiss Protestant leader of his time, who fell at Cappel, in the war of the Reformed against the Romish cantons, in 1531. At the battle of Morgarten, in 1315, twenty thousand Austrians were defeated by no more than thirteen hundred Swiss, with such valor that the name of the victors' canton was thereupon extended to the whole country, thenceforth called Switzerland.

It may be further noted that Arnold of Sempach is, with Leonidas, Curtius, and Sir Richard Grenville, named amongst the types of "the divinest of sacrifices, that of the patriot for his country," in Mr. Ruskin's Preface, "Bibliotheca Pastorum," Vol. i. p. xxxiii.

[3] The year of the Lombard insurrection, when Radetzky, the Austrian field-marshal, defeated the insurgents at Custozza near Verona. Radetzky died in 1858.

[4] The Prince Frederick William, now Emperor of Germany (having succeeded his brother Frederick William IV. in January, 1861), was at the date of this letter Regent of Prussia, and Commander-in-chief of the Prussian forces.

[From the "Scotsman," July 23, 1859.] THE ITALIAN QUESTION. Berlin, June 15.

You would have had this second letter sooner, had I not lost myself, after despatching the first, in farther consideration of the theory of Non-Intervention, or minding one's own business. What, in logical terms, is the theory? If one sees a costermonger wringing his donkey's tail, is it proper to "intervene"? and if one sees an Emperor or a System wringing a nation's neck, is it improper to intervene? Or is the Interven[Pg 9]tion allowable only in the case of hides, not of souls? for even so, I think you might find among modern Italians many quite as deserving of intervention as the donkey. Or is interference allowable when one person does one wrong to another person, but not when two persons do two wrongs to two, or three to three, or a multitude to a multitude; and is there any algebraic work on these square and cube roots of morality wherein I may find how many coadjutors or commissions any given crooked requires to make it straight? Or is it a geographical question; and may one advisably interfere at Berwick but not at Haddington? Or is there any graduated scale of intervention,

practicable according to the longitude? I see my way less clearly, because the illustrations of the theory of Non-intervention are as obscure as its statement. The French are at present happy and prosperous; content with their ruler and themselves; their trade increasing, and their science and art advancing; their feelings towards other nations becoming every day more just. Under which circumstances we English non-interventionalists consider it our duty to use every means in our power of making the ruler suspected by the nation, and the nation unmanageable by the ruler. We call both all manner of names; exhaust every term of impertinence and every method of disturbance; and do our best, in indirect and underhand ways, to bring about revolution, assassination, or any other close of the existing system likely to be satisfactory to Royals[5] in general. This is your non-intervention when a nation is prosperous.

On the other hand, the Italian nation is unhappy and unprosperous; its trade annihilated, its arts and sciences retrograde, its nerve and moral sense prostrated together; it is capable only of calling to you for help, and you will not help it. The man you have been calling names, with his unruly colonels, undertakes to help it, and Christian England, with secret hope that, in order to satisfy her spite against the unruly colonels, the French army may be beaten, and the Papacy fully[Pg 10] established over the whole of Italy—Christian England, I say, with this spiteful jealousy for one of her motives, and a dim, stupid, short-sighted, sluggish horror of interruption of business for the other, takes, declaratively and ostensibly, this highly Christian position. "Let who will prosper or perish, die or live—let what will be declared or believed—let whatsoever iniquity be done, whatsoever tyranny be triumphant, how many soever of faithful or fiery soldiery be laid in new embankments of dead bodies along those old embankments of Mincio

and Brenta; yet will we English drive our looms, cast up our accounts, and bet on the Derby, in peace and gladness; our business is only therewith; for us there is no book of fate, only ledgers and betting-books; for us there is no call to meddle in far-away business. See ye to it. We wash our hands of it in that sea-foam of ours; surely the English Channel is better than Abana and Pharpar, or than the silver basin which Pilate made use of, and our soap is of the best almond-cake."

I hear the Derby was great this year.[6] I wonder, sometimes, whether anybody has ever calculated, in England, how much taxation the nation pays annually for the maintenance of that great national institution. Observe—what I say of the spirit in which the English bear themselves at present, is founded on what I myself have seen and heard, not on what I read in journals. I read them little at home—here I hardly see them. I have no doubt that in the Liberal papers one might find much mouthing about liberty, as in the Conservative much about order, it being neither liberty nor order which is wanted, but Justice. You may have Freedom of all Abomination, and Order of all Iniquity—if you look for Forms instead of Facts. Look for the facts first—the doing of justice howsoever and by whatsoever forms or informalities. And the forms will come—shapely enough, and sightly enough, afterwards. Yet, perhaps, not till long afterwards. Earnest as I am for the freedom of Italy, no one can hope less from it, for many a year [Pg 11]to come. Even those Vaudois, whom you Presbyterians admire

so much, have made as yet no great show of fruit out of their religious freedom. I went up from Turin to Torre di Lucerna to look at them last year. I have seldom slept in a dirtier inn, seldom seen peasants' cottages so ill built, and never yet in my life saw anywhere paths so full of nettles. The faces of the people are interesting, and their voices sweet, except in howlings on Sunday evening, which they performed to a very disquieting extent in the street till about half-past ten, waking me afterwards between twelve and one with another "catch," and a dance through the village of the liveliest character. Protestantism is apt sometimes to take a gayer character abroad than with us. Geneva has an especially disreputable look on Sunday evenings, and at Hanover I see the shops are as wide open on Sunday as Saturday; here, however, in Berlin, they shut up as close as you do at Edinburgh. I think the thing that annoyed me most at La Tour, however, was the intense sectarianism of the Protestant dogs. I can make friends generally, fast

enough, with any canine or feline creature; but I could make nothing of those evangelical brutes, and there was as much snarling and yelping that afternoon before I got past the farmhouses to the open hill-side, as in any of your Free Church discussions. It contrasted very painfully with the behavior of such Roman Catholic dogs as I happen to know—St. Bernard's and others—who make it their business to entertain strangers. But the hill-side was worth reaching—for though that Lucerna valley is one of the least interesting I ever saw in the Alps, there is a craggy ridge on the north of it which commands a notable view. In about an hour and a half's walking you may get up to the top of a green, saddle-shaped hill, which separates the Lucerna valley from that of Angrogna; if then, turning to the left (westward), you take the steepest way you can find up the hill, another couple of hours will bring you to a cone of stones which the shepherds have built on the ridge, and there you may see all the historical sites of the valley of Angrogna