The Crown of Wild Olive
an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of the things which deserve to
be hated); and it is not an indifferent nor optional thing whether we
love this or that; but it is just the vital function of all our being.
What we _like_ determines what we _are_, and is the sign of what we are;
and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. As I was thinking
over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the
title of a book standing open in a bookseller's window. It was--'On the
necessity of the diffusion of taste among all classes.' 'Ah,' I thought
to myself, 'my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste,
where will your classes be? The man who likes what you like, belongs to
the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You may put him to
other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him
into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You
get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate
Calendar for literature, and "Pop goes the Weasel" for music. You think
you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your
lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him:--he won't like
to go back to his costermongering.'
And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time
to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any vice,
or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and for ever, either in bad
art, or by want of art; and that there is no national virtue, small or
great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the art which
circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to produce. Take,
for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and patient courage.
You have at present in England only one art of any consequence--that is,
iron-working. You know thoroughly well how to cast and hammer iron. Now,
do you think in those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to
melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the Infernos you have
created; do you think, on those iron plates, your courage and endurance
are not written for ever--not merely with an iron pen, but on iron
parchment? And take also your great English vice--European vice--vice of
all the world--vice of all other worlds that roll or shine in heaven,
bearing with them yet the atmosphere of hell--the vice of jealousy,
which brings competition into your commerce, treachery into your
councils, and dishonour into your wars--that vice which has rendered for
you, and for your next neighbouring nation, the daily occupations of
existence no longer possible, but with the mail upon your breasts and
the sword loose in its sheath; so that, at last, you have realised for
all the multitudes of the two great peoples who lead the so-called
civilisation of the earth,--you have realised for them all, I say, in
person and in policy, what was once true only of the rough Border riders
of your Cheviot hills--
'They carved at the meal
With gloves of steel,
And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd;--
do you think that this national shame and dastardliness of heart are not
written as legibly on every rivet of your iron armour as the strength of
the right hands that forged it? Friends, I know not whether this thing
be the more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is quite unspeakably
both. Suppose, instead of being now sent for by you, I had been sent for
by some private gentleman, living in a suburban house, with his garden
separated only by a fruit-wall from his next door neighbour's; and he
had called me to consult with him on the furnishing of his drawing room.
I begin looking about me, and find the walls rather bare; I think such
and such a paper might be desirable--perhaps a little fresco here and
there on the ceiling--a damask curtain or so at the windows. 'Ah,' says
my employer, 'damask curtains, indeed! That's all very fine, but you
know I can't afford that kind of thing just now!' 'Yet the world credits
you with a splendid income!' 'Ah, yes,' says my friend, 'but do you
know, at present, I am obliged to spend it nearly all in steel-traps?'
'Steel-traps! for whom?' 'Why, for that fellow on the other side the
wall, you know: we're very good friends, capital friends; but we are
obliged to keep our traps set on both sides of the wall; we could not
possibly keep on friendly terms without them, and our spring guns. The
worst of it is, we are both clever fellows enough; and there's never a
day passes that we don't find out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or
something; we spend about fifteen millions a year each in our traps,
take it all together; and I don't see how we're to do with less.' A
highly comic state of life for two private gentlemen! but for two
nations, it seems to me, not wholly comic? Bedlam would be comic,
perhaps, if there were only one madman in it; and your Christmas
pantomime is comic, when there is only one clown in it; but when the
whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart's
blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic, I think.
Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly allow for that.
You don't know what to do with yourselves for a sensation: fox-hunting
and cricketing will not carry you through the whole of this unendurably
long mortal life: you liked pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and
rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better made: but then the
worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, was not play to the
sparrows; and what is play to you now, is not play to the small birds of
State neither; and for the black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking
shots at them, if I mistake not.
I must get back to the matter in hand, however. Believe me, without
farther instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation's
vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the soldiership of early
Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of Tuscany;
the splendid human energy and beauty of Venice. I have no time to do
this to-night (I have done it elsewhere before now); but I proceed to
apply the principle to ourselves in a more searching manner.
I notice that among all the new buildings that cover your once wild
hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large
proportion, with your mills and mansions and I notice also that the
churches and schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions and
mills are never Gothic. Will you allow me to ask precisely the meaning
of this? For, remember, it is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. When
Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as churches; and when
the Italian style superseded the Gothic, churches were Italian as well
as houses. If there is a Gothic spire to the cathedral of Antwerp, there
is a Gothic belfry to the Hotel de Ville at Brussels; if Inigo Jones
builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an Italian St.
Paul's. But now you live under one school of architecture, and worship
under another. What do you mean by doing this? Am I to understand that
you are thinking of changing your architecture back to Gothic; and that
you treat your churches experimentally, because it does not matter what
mistakes you make in a church? Or am I to understand that you consider
Gothic a pre-eminently sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you
think, like the fine frankincense, should be mixed for the tabernacle
only, and reserved for your religious services? For if this be the
feeling, though it may seem at first as if it were graceful and
reverent, you will find that, at the root of the matter, it signifies
neither more nor less than that you have separated your religion from
your life.
For consider what a wide significance this fact has; and remember that
it is not you only, but all the people of England, who are behaving thus
just now.
You have all got into the habit of calling the church 'the house of
God.' I have seen, over the doors of many churches, the legend actually
carved, '_This_ is the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.'
Now, note where that legend comes from, and of what place it was first
spoken. A boy leaves his father's house to go on a long journey on foot,
to visit his uncle; he has to cross a wild hill-desert; just as if one
of your own boys had to cross the wolds of Westmoreland, to visit an
uncle at Carlisle. The second or third day your boy finds himself
somewhere between Hawes and Brough, in the midst of the moors, at
sunset. It is stony ground, and boggy; he cannot go one foot farther
that night. Down he lies, to sleep, on Wharnside, where best he may,
gathering a few of the stones together to put under his head;--so wild
the place is, he cannot get anything but stones. And there, lying under
the broad night, he has a dream; and he sees a ladder set up on the
earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven, and the angels of God are
ascending and descending upon it. And when he wakes out of his sleep, he
says, 'How dreadful is this place; surely, this is none other than the
house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' This PLACE, observe; not
this church; not this city; not this stone, even, which he puts up for a
memorial--the piece of flint on which his head has lain. But this
_place_; this windy slope of Wharnside; this moorland hollow,
torrent-bitten, snow-blighted; this _any_ place where God lets down the
ladder. And how are you to know where that will be? or how are you to
determine where it may be, but by being ready for it always? Do you know
where the lightning is to fall next? You _do_ know that, partly; you can
guide the lightning; but you cannot guide the going forth of the Spirit,
which is that lightning when it shines from the east to the west.
But the perpetual and insolent warping of that strong verse to serve a
merely ecclesiastical purpose, is only one of the thousand instances in
which we sink back into gross Judaism. We call our churches 'temples.'
Now, you know, or ought to know, they are _not_ temples. They have never
had, never can have, anything whatever to do with temples. They are
'synagogues'--'gathering places'--where you gather yourselves together
as an assembly; and by not calling them so, you again miss the force of
another mighty text--'Thou, when thou prayest, shalt not be as the
hypocrites are; for they love to pray standing in the _churches_' [we
should translate it], 'that they may be seen of men. But thou, when thou
prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray
to thy Father,'--which is, not in chancel nor in aisle, but 'in
secret.'
Now, you feel, as I say this to you--I know you feel--as if I were
trying to take away the honour of your churches. Not so; I am trying to
prove to you the honour of your houses and your hills; I am trying to
show you--not that the Church is not sacred--but that the whole Earth
is. I would have you feel, what careless, what constant, what infectious
sin there is in all modes of thought, whereby, in calling your churches
only 'holy,' you call your hearths and homes profane; and have separated
yourselves from the heathen by casting all your household gods to the
ground, instead of recognising, in the place of their many and feeble
Lares, the presence of your One and Mighty Lord and Lar.
'But what has all this to do with our Exchange?' you ask me,
impatiently. My dear friends, it has just everything to do with it; on
these inner and great questions depend all the outer and little ones;
and if you have asked me down here to speak to you, because you had
before been interested in anything I have written, you must know that
all I have yet said about architecture was to show this. The book I