LETTER LIX.

HERNE HILL, 3rd October, 1875.

THE day before yesterday I went with a young English girl to see her nurse; who was sick of a lingering illness, during which, with kindliest intent, and sufficient success, (as she told me,) in pleasing her, books had been chosen for her from the circulating library, by those of her pious friends. whose age and experience qualified them for such a task.

One of these volumes chancing to lie on the table near me, I looked into it, and found it to be Stepping Heavenward;as far as I could make out, a somewhat long, but not unintelligent, sermon on the text of Wordsworth's Stepping Westward. In the five minutes during which I strayed between the leaves of it, and left the talk of my friend with her nurse to its own liberty, I found that the first chapters described the conversion of an idle and careless young lady of sixteen to a solemn view of her duties in life, which she thus expresses at the end of an advanced chapter: "I am resolved never to read worldly books any more; and my music and drawing I have laid aside for ever."*

The spiritually walled cloister to which this charming child of modern enlightenment thus expresses her determination to retire, differs, it would appear, from the materially walled monastic shades of the Dark Ages, first, by the breadth and magnanimity of an Index Expurgatorius rising to interdiction of all uninspired books whatsoever, except Baxter's Saint's Rest, and other classics of evangelical theology; and, secondly, by its holy abhorrence of the arts of picture

* I quote from memory, and may be out in a word or two; not in the sense: but I don't know if the young lady is really approved by the author, and held up as an example to others; or meant, as I have taken her, for a warning. The method of error, at all events, is accurately and clearly shown.

and song, which waste so much precious time, and give so much disagreeable trouble to learn; and which also, when learned, are too likely to be used in the service of idols; while the skills which our modern gospel substitutes for both, of steam-whistle, namely, and photograph, supply, with all that they need of terrestrial pleasure, the ears which God has redeemed from spiritual deafness, and the eyes which He has turned from darkness to light.

My readers are already, I hope, well enough acquainted with the Institutes of the St. George's Company to fear no monastic restrictions of enjoyment, nor imperative choice of their books, carried to this celestially Utopian strictness. And yet, understanding the terms of the sentence with true and scholarly accuracy, I must, in educational legislation, insist on the daughters of my Companions fulfilling this resolution to the letter: "I am resolved never to read worldly books any more, and my music and drawing I have laid aside for ever."

Worldly books"? Yes; very certainly, when you know which they are; for I will have you to abjure, with World, Flesh, and Devil, the literature of all the three :—and your music and drawing,-that is to say, all music and drawing. which you have learned only for your own glory or amusement, and respecting which you have no idea that it may ever become, in a far truer sense, other people's music and drawing.

For all the arts of mankind, and womankind, are only rightly learned, or practised, when they are so with the definite purpose of pleasing or teaching others. A child dancing for its own delight,-a lamb leaping, or a fawn at play, are happy and holy creatures; but they are not artists. An artist is-and recollect this definition, (put in capitals for quick reference,)-A PERSON WHO HAS SUBMITTED TO A LAW WHICH IT WAS PAINFUL TO OBEY, THAT HE MAY BESTOW A DELIGHT WHICH IT IS GRACIOUS TO BESTOW.*

*To make the definition by itself complete, the words 'in his work' should be added after submitted' and 'by his work' after 'bestow'; but it is easier to learn without these phrases, which are of course to be understood.

"A painful law," I say; yet full of pain not in the sense of torture, but of stringency, or constraint; and labour, increasing, it may be, sometimes into aching of limbs, and panting of breasts; but these stronger yet, for every ache, and broader for every pant; and farther and farther strengthened from danger of rheumatic ache, and consumptive pant. This, so far as the Arts are concerned, is 'entering in at the Strait gate,' of which entrance, and its porter's lodge, you will find farther account given in my fourth morning in Florence, which I should like you to read, as a preparation for the work more explicitly now to be directed under St. George. The immediate gist of it, for those who do not care to read of Florence, I must be irksome enough again to give here; namely, that the word Strait, applied to the entrance into Life, and the word Narrow, applied to the road of Life, do not mean that the road is so fenced that few can travel it, however much they wish, (like the entrance to the pit of a theatre), but that, for each person, it is at first so stringent, so difficult, and so dull, being between close hedges, that few will enter it, though all may. In a second sense, and an equally vital one, it is not merely a Strait, or narrow, but a straight, or right road; only, in this rightness of it, not at all traced by hedges, wall, or telegraph wire, or even marked by posts higher than winter's snow; but, on the contrary, often difficult to trace among morasses and mounds of desert, even by skilful sight; and by blind persons, entirely untenable, unless by help of a guide, director, rector, or rex: which you may conjecture to be the reason why, when St. Paul's eyes were to be opened, out of the darkness which meant only the consciousness of utter mistake, to seeing what way he should go, his director was ordered to come to him in the "street which is called Straight."

*

Now, bringing these universal and eternal facts down to this narrow, straight, and present piece of business we have in hand; the first thing we have to learn to draw is an extremely narrow, and an extremely direct, line. Only, observe,

The few there be that find it' is added, as an actual fact; a fact consequent not on the way's being narrow, but on its being disagreeable.

true and vital direction does not mean that, without any deflection or warp by antagonist force, we can fly, or walk, or creep at once to our mark; but that, whatever the antagonist force may be, we so know and mean our mark, that we shall at last precisely arrive at it, just as surely, and it may be in some cases more quickly, than if we had been unaffected by lateral or opposing force. And this higher order of contending and victorious rightness, which in our present business is best represented by the track of an arrow, or rifle-shot, affected in its course both by gravity and the wind, is the more beautiful rightness or directness of the two, and the one which all fine art sets itself principally to achieve. But its quite first step must nevertheless be in the simple production of the mathematical Right line, as far as the hand can draw it; joining two points, that is to say, with a straight visible track, which shall as nearly as possible fulfil the mathematical definition of a line, "length without breadth."

And the two points had better at first be placed at the small distance of an inch from each other, both because it is easy to draw so short a line, and because it is well for us to know, early in life, the look of the length of an inch. And when we have learned the look of our own English inch, we will proceed to learn the look of that which will probably be our currency measure of length, the French inch, for that is a better standard than ours, for European acceptance.

Here, I had made arrangements for the production of a plate, and woodcut, to illustrate the first steps of elementary design; but the black-plague of cloud already more than once spoken of (as connected probably with the diminution of snow on the Alps), has rendered it impossible for my assistants to finish their work in time. This disappointment I accept thankfully as the ordinance of my careful and prudent mistress, Atropos,-the third Fors; and am indeed quickly enough apprehensive of her lesson in it. She wishes me, I doubt not, to recognise that I was foolish in designing the intrusion of technical advice into my political letters; and to understand that the giving of clear and separate direc tions for elementary art-practice is now an imperative duty.

for me, and that these art-lessons must be in companionship with my other school books on the Earth and its Flowers.

I must needs do her bidding; and as I gather my past work on rocks and plants together, so I must, day by day, gather what I now know to be right of my past work on art together; and, not in sudden thought, but in the resumption of purpose which I humbly and sincerely entreat my mistress to pardon me for having abandoned under pressure of extreme fatigue, I will publish, in the same form as the geology and botany, what I desire to ratify, and fasten with nails in a sure place, with instant applicability to school and university exercises, of my former writings on art.*

But this, I beg my readers to observe, will be the seventh large book I have actually at this time passing through the press; besides having written and published four volumes of university lectures in the last six years; every word of them weighed with care. This is what I observe the Daily Telegraph calls giving utterances few and far between.' But it is as much certainly as I am able at present to manage; and I must beg my correspondents, therefore, to have generally patience with me when I don't answer their letters by return of post; and above all things, to write them clear, and in a round hand, with all the ms and ns well distinguished from us.

The woodcut, indeed, prepared for this Fors was to have been a lesson in writing; but that must wait till next year,

* Namely, Modern Painters, Stones of Venice, Seven Lamps, and Elements of Drawing. I cut these books to pieces, because in the three first, all the religious notions are narrow, and many false; and in the fourth, there is a vital mistake about outline, doing great damage to all the rest.

+ Fors, Ariadne, Love's Meinie, Proserpina, Deucalion, Mornings in Florence-and this: and four of these require the careful preparation of drawings for them by my own hand, and one of these drawings alone, for Proserpina, this last June, took me a good ten days' work, and that hard.

Inaugural Lectures, Aratra Pentelici, Val d'Arno, and Eagle's Nest; besides a course on Florentine Sculpture, given last year, and not yet printed, the substance of it being in re-modification for Mornings in Florence.