FORS CLAVIGERA.

FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LXIII.I find it wholly impossible to crush into one Fors what I have been gathering of Bible lesson, natural history lesson, and writing lesson, and to leave room enough for what I have to give of immediate explanation to the Companions, now daily increasing in number. My readers must bear with me—I cannot do more than I am doing, though every day I wonder more at there being so many things apparently my duty to do, while I have only two feeble hands for all of them.But this much of general statement of the meaning of our Companionship is now absolutely necessary.Of course, the first natural idea taken up by persons who merely hear talk, or read newspapers, about the Company, is that their domain is intended for arefugefor the persons who join it—that within its walls the poor are at once to be made rich, and the sorrowful happy.Alas, this is not by any means the notion of the St. George’s Company. It is to be a band of delivering[80]knights—not of churls needing deliverance; of eager givers and servants—not of eager beggars,1and persons needing service. It is only the Rich, and the Strong, whom I receive for Companions,—those who come not to be ministered unto, but to minister. Rich, yet some of them in other kind of riches than the world’s; strong, yet some in other than the world’s strength. But this much at least of literal wealth and strength theymusthave,—the power, and formed habit, of self-support. I accept no Companion by whom I am not convinced that the Society will be aided rather than burdened; and although I value intelligence, resolution, and personal strength, more than any other riches, I hope to find, in a little while, that there are people in the world who can hold money without being blinded, by their possession of it, to justice or duty.The Companions whom I accept will be divided, according to their means and circumstances, into three classes.The first and highest class will be called “Comites Ministrantes,” “Companions Servant.” It will be composed of the few who devote their main energy to the work of the Company; and who, as I do myself, and as the Master must always, pursue their private avocations only in subjection to its interests, being at the same time in positions absolutely independent, and openly shown to be so.[81]The second, or middle class, will be called “Comites Militantes,” “Companions Militant.”These will be persons occupied actually in manual labour on the ground, or in any work which the Master may order, for the fulfilment of the Society’s functions; being dependent on such labour for their maintenance, under the conditions fixed by the Company’s statutes.The third and lowest order will be called “Comites Consilii,” (Friends of, or in, Council,) “Companions Consular,” who will form the general body of the Society, being occupied in their own affairs as earnestly as before they joined it; but giving it the tenth of their income; and in all points, involving its principles, obeying the orders of the Master. Thus almost any tradesman may continue his trade, being a Companion; but, if a jeweller, he must not sell false jewels; or if a butcher, (I have one accepted already, and I very much want to get a butcher’s daughter, if I could; but she won’t come,) must not sell bad meat.I at first meant them to be called Censors, or Companions Estimant, because when the Society comes into real work, the sentences of fine, or other disgrace, pronounced by the marshals’ officers, and the general modes of determining quality and value of goods, must be always ratified by majority of this order, of the Companions, in whom also, by virtue of their number, the election, and therefore censorship, of the Master, will necessarily be vested.[82]To these last, especially, I have now some special matters to write.Will you please look back to the Fors of December 24th, last year, p. 278, and tell me,—or rather, which is chiefly needful, answer to yourselves, how far you have reflected, since reading it, on the nature of “unfruitful works of darkness;” how many you have abandoned, and how many reproved. It is too probable that you have not, even yet, the slightest idea what works of darkness are. You know,—they can’t mean merely murder, or adultery, or theft. You don’t, when you go to church, mean to pray that you may have grace to give up committing murder or adultery, or that you may ‘rather reprovethem’? But what then is it that you pray to give up? If you don’t know, are you not, yet, in the least, ashamed of yourselves, for going every Sunday, if not every day, to pray to God, without having the dimmest idea what you mean to ask Him for?Well,—not to be farther teazing about it,—in the first and simple sense, works of darkness are useless, or ill-done, or half-done, things, which pretend to be good, or to be wholly done; and so mislead or betray.In the deeper and final sense, a work of darkness is one that seeks concealment, and conceals facts; or even casts disdain and disgrace on facts.A work of light is one that seeks light, and that, not for its own sake, but to light all men; so that all workers[83]of good work delight in witnesses; only with true desire that the witnesses’ pleasure may be greater than theirs; and that the Eternal witnesses—the Cloud around us, and Powers above—may have chief pleasure of all:—(see on this matter, ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ page 54). So that, of these works, what was written of St. Bernard must be always true, “Opera sancti Patris velut Sol in conspectu Dei;” for indeed they are a true Light of the world, infinitely better in the Creator’s sight than its dead sunshine; and the discovery by modern science that all mortal strength is from the Sun, while it has thrown foolish persons into atheism, is, to wise ones, the most precious testimony to their faith yet given by physical nature; for it gives us the arithmetical and measurable assurance that men vitally active are living sunshine, having the roots of their souls set in sunlight, as the roots of a tree are in the earth; not that the dust is therefore the God of the tree, but the Tree is the animation of the dust, and the living Soul, of the sunshine. And now you will understand the meaning of the words on our St. George’s wealth,—“Sit splendor.”And you must take care that your works do shine before men, if it may be, as a lamp; but at least, as a shield;—nay, if your Captain in Heaven wills it, as a sword.For the failure of all good people nowadays is that, associating politely with wicked persons, countenancing them in their wickedness, and often joining in[84]it, they think to avert its consequences by collaterally labouring to repair the ruin it has caused; and while, in the morning, they satisfy their hearts by ministering to the wants of two or three destitute persons, in the evening they dine with, envy, and prepare themselves to follow the example of, the rich speculator who has caused the destitution of two or three thousand. They are thus destroying more in hours than they can amend in years; or, at the best, vainly feeding the famine-struck populations, in the rear of a devouring army, always on the increase in mass of numbers, and rapidity of march.Now I call on the St. George’s Company, first, to separate themselves clearly, as a body, from persons who practise recognized, visible, unquestionable iniquity. They are to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of Darkness; but to walk as Children of Light.Literally, observe. Those phrases of the Bible are entirely evaded, because we never apply them to immediate practice.St. George’s Companions are to haveno fellowshipwith works of darkness; no companionship whatsoever with recognizable mischief, or mischievous men. Of every person of your acquaintance, you are solemnly to ask yourselves, ‘Isthis man a swindler, a liar, a gambler, an adulterer, a selfish oppressor, and task-master?’[85]Don’t suppose you can’t tell. You can tell with perfect ease; or, if you meet any mysterious personage of whom it proves difficult to ascertain whether he be rogue or not, keep clear of him till you know. With those whom youknowto be honest,knowto be innocent,knowto be striving, with main purpose, to serve mankind and honour their God, you are humbly and lovingly to associate yourselves: and with none others.“You don’t like to set yourself up for being better than other people? You dare not judge harshly of your fellow-creatures?”I do not tell you to judge them. I only tell you not to dine with them, and not to deal with them. That they lose the pleasure of your company, or the profit on your custom, is no crushing punishment. To their own Master they stand or fall; but toyourMaster, Christ,2youmust stand, with your best might; and in this manner only, self-asserting as you may think it, can you confess Him before men. Why do you suppose that thundrous word of His impends over your denial of Him, “Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before Angels,” but because you are sure to be constantly tempted to such denial?How, therefore, observe, in modern days, are you so tempted. Is not the temptation rather,as it seems,[86]to confess Him? Is it difficult and shameful to go to church?—would it not require more courage to stay away? Is it difficult or shameful to shut your shop on Sunday, in the East,—or, to abstain from your ride in the Park on Sunday, in the West? Is it dangerous to hold family worship in your house, or dishonourable to be seen with a cross on your Prayer Book? None of these modes or aspects of confession will bring any outcry against you from the world. You will have its good word, on the contrary, for each and all of them. But declare that you mean to speak truth,—and speak it, for an hour; that you mean to abstain from luxury,—and abstain from it, for a day; that you, obeying God’s law, will resolutely refuse fellowship with the disobedient;—and be ‘not at home’ to them, for a week: and hearthenwhat the High Priests’ servants will say to you, round the fire.And observe, it is in charity for them, much more than by duty to others, that you are required to do this. For half, at least, of these Caiaphas’ servants sin through pure ignorance, confirmed by custom. The essential difference in business, for instance, between a man of honour and a rogue, is that the first tries to give asmuchto his customer for his money as he can, and the second to give aslittle; but how many are at present engaged in business who are trying to sell their goods at as high a price as possible, supposing that effort to be the very soul and vital principle of[87]business! Now by simply asserting to these ignorant persons that theyarerogues, whether they know it or not; and that, in the present era of general enlightenment, gentlemen and ladies must not only learn to spell and to dance, but also to know the difference between cheating their neighbours and serving them; and that, as on the whole it is inexpedient to receive people who don’t know how to express themselves grammatically, in the higher circles of society, much more is it inexpedient to receive those who don’t know how to behave themselves honestly. And by the mere assertion, practically, of this assured fact to your acquaintance’ faces, by the direct intervention of a deal door between theirs and yours, you will startle them out of their Rogues’ Paradise in a most healthful manner, and be the most orthodox and eloquent evangelical preacher to them that they have ever heard since they were born.But all this must, of course, be done with extreme tenderness and modesty, though with absolute decision; and under much submission to their elders by young people—especially those living in their father’s houses. I shall not, of course, receive any Companions under age; but already there are some names on my list of young unmarried women: and, while I have shown in all former writings that I hold the power of such to be the greatest, because the purest, of all social ones, I must as definitely now warn them against any manifestation[88]of feeling or principle tending to break the unity of their home circles. They are bound to receive their father’s friends as their own, and to comply in all sweet and subjected ways with the wishes and habits of their parents; remaining calmly certain that the Law of God, for them, is that while they remain at home they shall be spirits of Peace and Humility beneath its roof. In all rightly ordered households, the confidence between the parent and child is such that in the event of a parent’s wish becoming contrary to a child’s feeling of its general duty, there would be no fear or discomfort on the child’s part in expressing its thoughts. The moment these are necessarily repressed, there is wrong somewhere; and in houses ordered according to the ways of modern fashionable life, theremustbe wrong, often, and everywhere. But the main curse of modern society is that, beginning by training its youth to be ‘independent’ and disobedient, this carefully cultivated independence shows itself, of course, by rejecting whatever is noble and honourable in their father’s houses, and never by healing or atoning what is faultful.Of all St. George’s young Companions, therefore, he requires first the graces of gentleness and humility; nor, on the whole, much independent action of any kind; but only the quiet resolve to find out what is absolutely right, and so far as it may be kindly and inoffensively practised to fulfil it, at home; and so[89]far as it may be modestly and decorously uttered, to express the same abroad. And a well-bred young lady has always personal power enough of favour and discouragement, among persons of her own age, to satisfy the extremest demands of conscience in this direction.And now let me see what room I have left for talk of present matters. Here is a piece printed a fortnight since, which I can’t be plagued to keep in type till next month.Corpus Christi College, Oxford,8th February, 1876.I am fifty-seven to-day: and may perhaps be allowed to talk a little of myself.Among several pretty love-letters from my pets, which only make me sorrier that I’m fifty-seven—but I really don’t think some of the letters could be nicer if I were only twenty-seven—there’s one with a ghost story in it, more precious to me than all the others, seeing I draw more quickly3near, now, daily, to the Loyal land.I may as well write it as I read, thus;“I heard such a pretty story last night of something that happened at a school in Germany, not long since. It was the custom of one of the masters to go round every night to the dormitories to see that the boys were asleep, all right. One night he was astonished to see a lady go up to one of the boys, stoop over[90]him and kiss him, and then vanish. Next morning, news came that the mother of that particular boy had died at the time. Isn’t it lovely? Even A. believes that.”Yes; and A. does wisely; and so may B., and C.: but yet I should much like to knowwhatparticular boy, in what particular school in Germany.Nevertheless, the story has more value for me because it is written to me by a person who herself saw the shade—or rather light—of her sister, at the time of that sister’s death on the other side of the world; being a member of that branch of my family in which some gift of the Scottish second sight remains, inherited by my maternal grandmother, who ran away with my paternal grandfather when she was not quite sixteen; and my aunt Jessie, (my father’s only sister,) was born a year afterwards; a few weeks after which event, my grandmother, not yet seventeen, was surprised, (by a friend who came into her room unannounced,) dancing a threesome reel, with two chairs for her partners, she having found at the moment no other way of adequately expressing the pleasure she took in this mortal life, and its gifts, and promises.The latter failed somewhat afterwards; and my aunt Jessie, a very precious and perfect creature, beautiful in her dark-eyed, Highland way; utterly religious, in her quiet Puritan way, and very submissive to Fates mostly unkind, married, or was married to—I never could[91]make out exactly which, or why,—a somewhat rough tanner, with a fairly good business, in the good town of Perth; and, when I was old enough to be taken first to visit them, as aforesaid, my aunt and my uncle the tanner lived in a good square-built gray stone house at the ‘Bridge-End’ of Perth, some fifty yards north of the bridge; their garden sloping steeply to the Tay, which eddied, three or four feet deep of sombre crystal, round the steps where the servants dipped their pails.My aggrieved correspondent of Wakefield thought to cure me with her delicate ‘Fie,’ of what she supposed my coarse habit of sneering at people of no ancestry. I have it not; yet might have fallen into it in my youth, for I remember now, with more grief and shame than I can speak, being once ashamed of my own father and mother in Mr. Ryman’s shop here in Oxford; nor am I entirely at ease, at this moment, in writing of my uncles the baker and the tanner; yet my readers may trust me when I tell them, that in now remembering my dreams in the house of the entirely honest chief baker of Market Street, Croydon; and of Peter—not Simon—the tanner, whose house was by the riverside of Perth, I would not change the dreams, far less the tender realities, of those early days, for anything I hear now remembered by lords or dames, of their days of childhood in castle halls, and by sweet lawns and lakes in park-walled forest.[92]I do not mean this for a republican sentiment; quite the opposite. I hate republicans, as I do all other manner of fools. I love Lords and Ladies, (especially unmarried ones, with beautiful three-syllabled Christian-names. I know a simple two-syllabled one, also, very charming); and Earls, and Countesses, and Marquises and Marchionesses, and Honourables, and Sirs; and I bow down before them and worship them, in the way that Mr. Thackeray thought ‘snobs’ did; he never perceiving with all the wit of him, (being mostly spent in mean smell-fungus work which spoiled its scent,) that it ishimselfthe snob truly worships, all the time, and not the Lord he looks at. But my way of worship was Walter Scott’s, which my father taught me (always excepting such recreance as that in Mr. Ryman’s shop). And therefore, when I say I would not change my dreams of Market Street, and Bridge End, and Rose Terrace, (where we used to live after my uncle died, briefly apoplectic, at Bridge End,) for anything that the Palatial and Maxime-Pontifical abodes of Nobles and Bishops give them—I mean simply that I had a home, being a child, and loved it, and did not then, and do not now, covet my neighbour’s house;4but cling to every likeness findable in these ruinous days to the places of peace given me in that lowly time.Peace, and the knowledge of God it gave me. For, by the way, observe in that sacredest of benedictions,[93]which my Dean gave me in my own cathedral last Sunday, (I being an honorary student of Christ Church;—and thereareonly eight, if you please to look in the Oxford Calendar,) “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God;”—observe, I say, for we do not always think of this, it is not the knowledge that is to give peace; but the peace which is to give knowledge; so that as long as we fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness, and bite and devour one another, and are consumed one of another—every traveller paying an eight per cent. tax in his fare, for dividend to a consuming railroad company—we can’t know anything about God at all. And compare again ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ p. 194.There, then, at Rose Terrace, I lived in peace in the fair Scotch summer days, with my widowed aunt, and my little cousin Jessie, then traversing a bright space between her sixth and ninth year; dark-eyed deeply, like her mother, and similarly pious; and she and I used to compete in the Sunday evening Scriptural examinations; and be as proud as two little peacocks because Jessie’s elder brothers, and sister Mary, used to get ‘put down,’ and either Jessie or I was always ‘Dux.’ We agreed upon this that we would be married, when we were a little older; not considering it preparatorily necessary to be in any degree wiser.[94]9th February.I couldn’t go on about my cousin Jessie, for I was interrupted by the second post with more birthday compliments, from young ladies now about Jessie’s age—letters which of course required immediate answer,—some also with flowers, which required to be immediately put into water, and greatly worried me by upsetting themselves among my books all day afterwards; but I let myself be worried, for love;—and, from a well-meaning and kindly feeling friend, some very respectful and respectable poetry, beautifully written, (and I read part of it, for love, but I had much rather he had sent me sixpence, for I hate poetry, mostly, and love pence, always); and to-day, half-past seven before chapel, my mind is otherwise set altogether, for I am reading Leviticus carefully now, for my life of Moses; and, in working out the law of the feast of harvest, chanced on the notable verse, xxiii. 24: “In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a Sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, an holy convocation;” and then flashed on me, all in a minute, the real meaning of Holbein’s introduction to the Dance of Death, (the third woodcut in the first edition), which till this moment I only took for his own symbol of the Triumph of Death, adopted from Orcagna and others, but which I see now, in an instant, to be theun-Holy Convocation; the gathering together to their temple of the Tribes of Death, and the blowing of trumpets on[95]their solemn feast day, and sabbath of rest to the weary in evil doing.And, busy friends, in the midst of all your charming preparations for the Spring season, you will do well to take some method of seeing that design, and meditating, with its help, upon the grave question, what kind of wearinessyouwill have to rest from. My own thoughts of it are disturbed, as I look, by that drummer-death, in front,5with his rattling and ringing kettledrums (hethe chief Musician in the Psalm for the sons of Korah—Dathan and Abiram, because his sounding is on Skin, with sticks of Bone,) not only because of my general interest in drummers, but because, after being much impressed, when I was a child, by the verses I had to learn about the last trump, out of the 15th of 1st Corinthians,—when I became a man, and put away childish things, I used often to wonder what we should all say of any sacred Saga among poor Indians whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, if it told them that they were all to rise from the dead at the sound of the last drum.[96]And here I’m interrupted again by a delightful letter about the resurrection of snails, Atropos really managing matters, at present, like the daintiest and watchfullest housewife for me,—everything in its place, and under my hand.“Dear Mr. Ruskin,—As I have just read the last part of February ‘Fors,’ I want to say what I know about the little shells—(Helix virgata—I suppose). I think—indeed, am pretty sure, nearly, if not quite—all those shells had little live snails in them. I have found them in quantities on the South Downs near Lewes, on Roundway Hill near Devizes, near Lyme Regis, in North Wales; and before any of those places, on our own Hampton Common in Gloucestershire, where my sisters and myself used to gather those and other pretty ones when we were children. If you have any stored by, in a few months I think you will find them (if not shut up) walk away.“When I was a girl I once had to choose a birthday present from one of my aunts, and asked for ‘Turton’s British Shells,’ for I always wanted to know the name and history of everything I found; then I collected all the land and freshwater shells I could find, as I could not getseashells—one of my longings—for I never saw the sea till after I was twenty, except for a few hours at Munsley in Norfolk, when I was eight years old. I have my little shells still; and have four or five varieties of Helix virgata: I think the number of rings increases as the shell goes on growing.‘In the autumn these shells are often suddenly observed in such great numbers as to give rise to the popular notion of their having fallen from the clouds. This shell is very hardy, and appears nearly insensible to cold, as it does not hybernate even when the ground is covered with snow.’[97]“I always fancied the Lord let them lie about in such numbers to be food for some little birds, or may be rooks and starlings, robins, etc., in cold weather when there was so little to eat.“I dare say you know how the blackbirds and thrushes eat the larger snails. I have often seen in the woods a very pretty coloured shell lying on a white stone,—the birds had put it there to crack a hole in it and to take out the snail. The shell looked such a pretty clear colour because it was alive, and yet empty.”Yes; the Holy Ghost of Life, not yet finally departed, can still give fair colours even to an empty shell. Evangelical friends,—worms, as you have long called yourselves, here is a deeper expression of humility suggested possible: may not some of you be only painted shells of worms,—alive, yet empty?Assuming my shell to be Helix virgata, I take down my magnificent French—(let me see if I can write its title without a mistake)—“Manuel de Conchyliologie et de Paléontologie Conchyliologique,” or, in English, “Manual of Shell-talking and Old-body-talking in a Shell-talking manner.” Eight hundred largest octavo—more like folio—pages of close print, with four thousand and odd (nearly five thousand) exquisite engravings of shells; and among them I look for the creatures elegantly, but inaccurately, called by modern naturalists Gasteropods; in English, Belly-feet, (meaning, of course, to say Belly-walkers, for they haven’t got any feet); and among these I find, with much pains, one that is rather like mine, of which I am told that it belongs to the sixteenth sort in the second tribe of[98]the second family of the first sub-order of the second order of the Belly-walkers, and that it is called ‘Adeorbis subcarinatus,’—Adeorbis by Mr. Wood, and subcarinatus by Mr. Montagu; but I am not told where it is found, nor what sort of creature lives in it, nor any single thing whatever about it, except that it is “sufficiently depressed” (“assez déprimée”), and “deeply enough navelled” (assez profondement ombiliquée,—but how on earth can I tell when a shell is navelled to a depth, in the author’s opinion, satisfactory?) and that the turns (taken by the family), are ‘little numerous’ (peu nombreux). On the whole, I am not disposed to think my shell is here described, and put my splendid book in its place again.I next try my English Cuvier, in sixteen octavo volumes; in which I find no notice whatever taken of these minor snails, except a list of thirty-three species, finishing with an etc.; out of which I mark ‘Cretacea,’ ‘Terrestris,’ and ‘Nivea,’ as perhaps likely to fit mine; and then I come, by order of Atropos, on this amazing account of the domestic arrangements of a little French snail, “Helix decollata” (Guillotined snail?) with references to “Cm. Chemn. cxxxvi. 1254–1257,” a species which “has the singular habit of successively fracturing the whorls at the top, (origin, that is,—snails building their houses from heaven towards earth,) of the spire, so that at a particular epoch, of all the whorls of the spire originally possessed by this bulimus, not a single[99]one remains.” Bulimus,—what’s a bulimus? Helix is certainly a screw, and bulimus—in my Riddle’s dictionary—is said to be “empty-bellied.” Then this French snail, revolutionary in the manner of a screw, appears to be a belly-walker with an empty belly, and no neck,—who literally “breaks up” his establishment every year! Query—breaks? or melts? Contraction or confusion?I must put my fine English book back in its place, too;—but here, at last, comes a ‘work of light’ to help us, from my favourite pupil, who was out with me that day on the Downs, and nearly killed himself with keeping a fox in sight on foot, up and down them;—happily surviving, he has pursued the slower creature for me to its cave of silver earth; and writes thus.Common garden snail shells of various ages.“I have sent you two little boxes—one containing common garden snail shells of various ages, and the other black striped Down shells; and you will see that in Box 1 the full-grown ones, with the strong finished lip, have four whorls each, and all the full-grown garden shells I have noticed had the same number, though they varied a little in size. The next largest in the box have only three and a half turns, but if they had lived longer they would have added on another half turn, bigger than all the[100]rest of the shell put together. In fact, if one looks at this shell, one sees that any half whorl is half as large again as all the rest of the shell before it. Then, besides these, there are four or five younger shells, the smallest of which has only two and a half whorls, which exactly correspond to two and a half whorls taken from any of the larger shells; so I think we may conclude that a shell grows by adding onlength onlyto the large end of a tapering tube, like a dunce’s cap, which, however, is curled up like a ram’s horn, to look prettier, take up less room, and allow the occupant to beat a retreat round the corner when a robin comes. By-the-bye, I wonder some birds don’t grow bills like corkscrews, to get at the snails with.“Then in box No. 2 there are several black striped Down shells, and the full-grown ones have six whorls, and the smallest ones, which died young, some four and some five, according to age; but the dunce’s cap is longer, and so there are more whorls.“I couldn’t get these facts clearly stated in two handbooks which I read. I suppose they took it for granted that one knew; but I found, what after all would lead one to infer the rest, that the young snail at birth corresponds to the colourlessAPEXof the shell, and that the colour only comes in that part which grows under the influence of light and air.”“Wednesday, Feb. 9.“Another fact is, that all the shells I ever remember looking at grow in the direction of the sun.“Another fact. Since the shells have been in this room, my chimneypiece has been full of sleepy, small, long-bodied spiders, which had gone to sleep for the winter in these black and white caverns, out of the reach of flocks of half-starved larks and starlings.”I drew the three advancing stages of the common snail’s houses, thus sent me, forthwith; and Mr. Burgess[101]swiftly and rightly engraves them. Note that the apparent irregularities in the spirals are conditions of perspective, necessarily affecting the deeply projecting forms; note also that each whorl is partly hidden by the subsequent one, built with its edge lapping over it; and finally, that there is really, I believe, a modification, to some extent, and enlargement, of the inner whorls; until the domestic creature is satisfied with its length of cave, and expresses its rest in accomplished labour and full age, by putting that binding lip round its border, and term to its hope.Wherein, building for the earth, we may wisely imitate it. Of other building, not with slime for mortar, yet heavenward, we may perhaps conceive in due time.I beg all my readers, but especially my Companions, to read with their best care the paper by Mr. Girdlestone, which, by the author’s kindly gift, I am enabled to send them with this Fors. It is the most complete and logical statement of Economic truth, in the points it touches, that I have ever seen in the English language: and to master it will be the best possible preparation for the study of personal duties to which I shall invite my Companions in my next letter.[103]1See note at end of this letter.↑2I have got no Turks yet in the Company: when any join it, I will give them Koran enough for what I ask of them.↑3Every day taking more away than the one before it.↑4Compare Letter XXI., p. 13.↑5I have desired Mr. Ward to prepare small photographs of this design, in case any reader cares to have it,—but mind, it is not altogether done according to Mr. Stopford Brooke’s notion of the object of true art, “to please”—(see page 88 of the Manual of English Literature, just published by that omniscient divine—under the auspices of the all-and-sundry-scient Mr. T. R. Green, M.A.,—so, if you only want to be pleased, you had better not order it. But at any rate, order, if you wish to understand the next coming Fors, the Etruscan Leucothea, for comparison with your Lippi Madonna. Mr. Ward will have it ready with my signature about the time next Fors comes out;—or you can get it, unmounted, for a shilling, from Mr. Parker’s agent in Rome.↑

FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LXIII.I find it wholly impossible to crush into one Fors what I have been gathering of Bible lesson, natural history lesson, and writing lesson, and to leave room enough for what I have to give of immediate explanation to the Companions, now daily increasing in number. My readers must bear with me—I cannot do more than I am doing, though every day I wonder more at there being so many things apparently my duty to do, while I have only two feeble hands for all of them.But this much of general statement of the meaning of our Companionship is now absolutely necessary.Of course, the first natural idea taken up by persons who merely hear talk, or read newspapers, about the Company, is that their domain is intended for arefugefor the persons who join it—that within its walls the poor are at once to be made rich, and the sorrowful happy.Alas, this is not by any means the notion of the St. George’s Company. It is to be a band of delivering[80]knights—not of churls needing deliverance; of eager givers and servants—not of eager beggars,1and persons needing service. It is only the Rich, and the Strong, whom I receive for Companions,—those who come not to be ministered unto, but to minister. Rich, yet some of them in other kind of riches than the world’s; strong, yet some in other than the world’s strength. But this much at least of literal wealth and strength theymusthave,—the power, and formed habit, of self-support. I accept no Companion by whom I am not convinced that the Society will be aided rather than burdened; and although I value intelligence, resolution, and personal strength, more than any other riches, I hope to find, in a little while, that there are people in the world who can hold money without being blinded, by their possession of it, to justice or duty.The Companions whom I accept will be divided, according to their means and circumstances, into three classes.The first and highest class will be called “Comites Ministrantes,” “Companions Servant.” It will be composed of the few who devote their main energy to the work of the Company; and who, as I do myself, and as the Master must always, pursue their private avocations only in subjection to its interests, being at the same time in positions absolutely independent, and openly shown to be so.[81]The second, or middle class, will be called “Comites Militantes,” “Companions Militant.”These will be persons occupied actually in manual labour on the ground, or in any work which the Master may order, for the fulfilment of the Society’s functions; being dependent on such labour for their maintenance, under the conditions fixed by the Company’s statutes.The third and lowest order will be called “Comites Consilii,” (Friends of, or in, Council,) “Companions Consular,” who will form the general body of the Society, being occupied in their own affairs as earnestly as before they joined it; but giving it the tenth of their income; and in all points, involving its principles, obeying the orders of the Master. Thus almost any tradesman may continue his trade, being a Companion; but, if a jeweller, he must not sell false jewels; or if a butcher, (I have one accepted already, and I very much want to get a butcher’s daughter, if I could; but she won’t come,) must not sell bad meat.I at first meant them to be called Censors, or Companions Estimant, because when the Society comes into real work, the sentences of fine, or other disgrace, pronounced by the marshals’ officers, and the general modes of determining quality and value of goods, must be always ratified by majority of this order, of the Companions, in whom also, by virtue of their number, the election, and therefore censorship, of the Master, will necessarily be vested.[82]To these last, especially, I have now some special matters to write.Will you please look back to the Fors of December 24th, last year, p. 278, and tell me,—or rather, which is chiefly needful, answer to yourselves, how far you have reflected, since reading it, on the nature of “unfruitful works of darkness;” how many you have abandoned, and how many reproved. It is too probable that you have not, even yet, the slightest idea what works of darkness are. You know,—they can’t mean merely murder, or adultery, or theft. You don’t, when you go to church, mean to pray that you may have grace to give up committing murder or adultery, or that you may ‘rather reprovethem’? But what then is it that you pray to give up? If you don’t know, are you not, yet, in the least, ashamed of yourselves, for going every Sunday, if not every day, to pray to God, without having the dimmest idea what you mean to ask Him for?Well,—not to be farther teazing about it,—in the first and simple sense, works of darkness are useless, or ill-done, or half-done, things, which pretend to be good, or to be wholly done; and so mislead or betray.In the deeper and final sense, a work of darkness is one that seeks concealment, and conceals facts; or even casts disdain and disgrace on facts.A work of light is one that seeks light, and that, not for its own sake, but to light all men; so that all workers[83]of good work delight in witnesses; only with true desire that the witnesses’ pleasure may be greater than theirs; and that the Eternal witnesses—the Cloud around us, and Powers above—may have chief pleasure of all:—(see on this matter, ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ page 54). So that, of these works, what was written of St. Bernard must be always true, “Opera sancti Patris velut Sol in conspectu Dei;” for indeed they are a true Light of the world, infinitely better in the Creator’s sight than its dead sunshine; and the discovery by modern science that all mortal strength is from the Sun, while it has thrown foolish persons into atheism, is, to wise ones, the most precious testimony to their faith yet given by physical nature; for it gives us the arithmetical and measurable assurance that men vitally active are living sunshine, having the roots of their souls set in sunlight, as the roots of a tree are in the earth; not that the dust is therefore the God of the tree, but the Tree is the animation of the dust, and the living Soul, of the sunshine. And now you will understand the meaning of the words on our St. George’s wealth,—“Sit splendor.”And you must take care that your works do shine before men, if it may be, as a lamp; but at least, as a shield;—nay, if your Captain in Heaven wills it, as a sword.For the failure of all good people nowadays is that, associating politely with wicked persons, countenancing them in their wickedness, and often joining in[84]it, they think to avert its consequences by collaterally labouring to repair the ruin it has caused; and while, in the morning, they satisfy their hearts by ministering to the wants of two or three destitute persons, in the evening they dine with, envy, and prepare themselves to follow the example of, the rich speculator who has caused the destitution of two or three thousand. They are thus destroying more in hours than they can amend in years; or, at the best, vainly feeding the famine-struck populations, in the rear of a devouring army, always on the increase in mass of numbers, and rapidity of march.Now I call on the St. George’s Company, first, to separate themselves clearly, as a body, from persons who practise recognized, visible, unquestionable iniquity. They are to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of Darkness; but to walk as Children of Light.Literally, observe. Those phrases of the Bible are entirely evaded, because we never apply them to immediate practice.St. George’s Companions are to haveno fellowshipwith works of darkness; no companionship whatsoever with recognizable mischief, or mischievous men. Of every person of your acquaintance, you are solemnly to ask yourselves, ‘Isthis man a swindler, a liar, a gambler, an adulterer, a selfish oppressor, and task-master?’[85]Don’t suppose you can’t tell. You can tell with perfect ease; or, if you meet any mysterious personage of whom it proves difficult to ascertain whether he be rogue or not, keep clear of him till you know. With those whom youknowto be honest,knowto be innocent,knowto be striving, with main purpose, to serve mankind and honour their God, you are humbly and lovingly to associate yourselves: and with none others.“You don’t like to set yourself up for being better than other people? You dare not judge harshly of your fellow-creatures?”I do not tell you to judge them. I only tell you not to dine with them, and not to deal with them. That they lose the pleasure of your company, or the profit on your custom, is no crushing punishment. To their own Master they stand or fall; but toyourMaster, Christ,2youmust stand, with your best might; and in this manner only, self-asserting as you may think it, can you confess Him before men. Why do you suppose that thundrous word of His impends over your denial of Him, “Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before Angels,” but because you are sure to be constantly tempted to such denial?How, therefore, observe, in modern days, are you so tempted. Is not the temptation rather,as it seems,[86]to confess Him? Is it difficult and shameful to go to church?—would it not require more courage to stay away? Is it difficult or shameful to shut your shop on Sunday, in the East,—or, to abstain from your ride in the Park on Sunday, in the West? Is it dangerous to hold family worship in your house, or dishonourable to be seen with a cross on your Prayer Book? None of these modes or aspects of confession will bring any outcry against you from the world. You will have its good word, on the contrary, for each and all of them. But declare that you mean to speak truth,—and speak it, for an hour; that you mean to abstain from luxury,—and abstain from it, for a day; that you, obeying God’s law, will resolutely refuse fellowship with the disobedient;—and be ‘not at home’ to them, for a week: and hearthenwhat the High Priests’ servants will say to you, round the fire.And observe, it is in charity for them, much more than by duty to others, that you are required to do this. For half, at least, of these Caiaphas’ servants sin through pure ignorance, confirmed by custom. The essential difference in business, for instance, between a man of honour and a rogue, is that the first tries to give asmuchto his customer for his money as he can, and the second to give aslittle; but how many are at present engaged in business who are trying to sell their goods at as high a price as possible, supposing that effort to be the very soul and vital principle of[87]business! Now by simply asserting to these ignorant persons that theyarerogues, whether they know it or not; and that, in the present era of general enlightenment, gentlemen and ladies must not only learn to spell and to dance, but also to know the difference between cheating their neighbours and serving them; and that, as on the whole it is inexpedient to receive people who don’t know how to express themselves grammatically, in the higher circles of society, much more is it inexpedient to receive those who don’t know how to behave themselves honestly. And by the mere assertion, practically, of this assured fact to your acquaintance’ faces, by the direct intervention of a deal door between theirs and yours, you will startle them out of their Rogues’ Paradise in a most healthful manner, and be the most orthodox and eloquent evangelical preacher to them that they have ever heard since they were born.But all this must, of course, be done with extreme tenderness and modesty, though with absolute decision; and under much submission to their elders by young people—especially those living in their father’s houses. I shall not, of course, receive any Companions under age; but already there are some names on my list of young unmarried women: and, while I have shown in all former writings that I hold the power of such to be the greatest, because the purest, of all social ones, I must as definitely now warn them against any manifestation[88]of feeling or principle tending to break the unity of their home circles. They are bound to receive their father’s friends as their own, and to comply in all sweet and subjected ways with the wishes and habits of their parents; remaining calmly certain that the Law of God, for them, is that while they remain at home they shall be spirits of Peace and Humility beneath its roof. In all rightly ordered households, the confidence between the parent and child is such that in the event of a parent’s wish becoming contrary to a child’s feeling of its general duty, there would be no fear or discomfort on the child’s part in expressing its thoughts. The moment these are necessarily repressed, there is wrong somewhere; and in houses ordered according to the ways of modern fashionable life, theremustbe wrong, often, and everywhere. But the main curse of modern society is that, beginning by training its youth to be ‘independent’ and disobedient, this carefully cultivated independence shows itself, of course, by rejecting whatever is noble and honourable in their father’s houses, and never by healing or atoning what is faultful.Of all St. George’s young Companions, therefore, he requires first the graces of gentleness and humility; nor, on the whole, much independent action of any kind; but only the quiet resolve to find out what is absolutely right, and so far as it may be kindly and inoffensively practised to fulfil it, at home; and so[89]far as it may be modestly and decorously uttered, to express the same abroad. And a well-bred young lady has always personal power enough of favour and discouragement, among persons of her own age, to satisfy the extremest demands of conscience in this direction.And now let me see what room I have left for talk of present matters. Here is a piece printed a fortnight since, which I can’t be plagued to keep in type till next month.Corpus Christi College, Oxford,8th February, 1876.I am fifty-seven to-day: and may perhaps be allowed to talk a little of myself.Among several pretty love-letters from my pets, which only make me sorrier that I’m fifty-seven—but I really don’t think some of the letters could be nicer if I were only twenty-seven—there’s one with a ghost story in it, more precious to me than all the others, seeing I draw more quickly3near, now, daily, to the Loyal land.I may as well write it as I read, thus;“I heard such a pretty story last night of something that happened at a school in Germany, not long since. It was the custom of one of the masters to go round every night to the dormitories to see that the boys were asleep, all right. One night he was astonished to see a lady go up to one of the boys, stoop over[90]him and kiss him, and then vanish. Next morning, news came that the mother of that particular boy had died at the time. Isn’t it lovely? Even A. believes that.”Yes; and A. does wisely; and so may B., and C.: but yet I should much like to knowwhatparticular boy, in what particular school in Germany.Nevertheless, the story has more value for me because it is written to me by a person who herself saw the shade—or rather light—of her sister, at the time of that sister’s death on the other side of the world; being a member of that branch of my family in which some gift of the Scottish second sight remains, inherited by my maternal grandmother, who ran away with my paternal grandfather when she was not quite sixteen; and my aunt Jessie, (my father’s only sister,) was born a year afterwards; a few weeks after which event, my grandmother, not yet seventeen, was surprised, (by a friend who came into her room unannounced,) dancing a threesome reel, with two chairs for her partners, she having found at the moment no other way of adequately expressing the pleasure she took in this mortal life, and its gifts, and promises.The latter failed somewhat afterwards; and my aunt Jessie, a very precious and perfect creature, beautiful in her dark-eyed, Highland way; utterly religious, in her quiet Puritan way, and very submissive to Fates mostly unkind, married, or was married to—I never could[91]make out exactly which, or why,—a somewhat rough tanner, with a fairly good business, in the good town of Perth; and, when I was old enough to be taken first to visit them, as aforesaid, my aunt and my uncle the tanner lived in a good square-built gray stone house at the ‘Bridge-End’ of Perth, some fifty yards north of the bridge; their garden sloping steeply to the Tay, which eddied, three or four feet deep of sombre crystal, round the steps where the servants dipped their pails.My aggrieved correspondent of Wakefield thought to cure me with her delicate ‘Fie,’ of what she supposed my coarse habit of sneering at people of no ancestry. I have it not; yet might have fallen into it in my youth, for I remember now, with more grief and shame than I can speak, being once ashamed of my own father and mother in Mr. Ryman’s shop here in Oxford; nor am I entirely at ease, at this moment, in writing of my uncles the baker and the tanner; yet my readers may trust me when I tell them, that in now remembering my dreams in the house of the entirely honest chief baker of Market Street, Croydon; and of Peter—not Simon—the tanner, whose house was by the riverside of Perth, I would not change the dreams, far less the tender realities, of those early days, for anything I hear now remembered by lords or dames, of their days of childhood in castle halls, and by sweet lawns and lakes in park-walled forest.[92]I do not mean this for a republican sentiment; quite the opposite. I hate republicans, as I do all other manner of fools. I love Lords and Ladies, (especially unmarried ones, with beautiful three-syllabled Christian-names. I know a simple two-syllabled one, also, very charming); and Earls, and Countesses, and Marquises and Marchionesses, and Honourables, and Sirs; and I bow down before them and worship them, in the way that Mr. Thackeray thought ‘snobs’ did; he never perceiving with all the wit of him, (being mostly spent in mean smell-fungus work which spoiled its scent,) that it ishimselfthe snob truly worships, all the time, and not the Lord he looks at. But my way of worship was Walter Scott’s, which my father taught me (always excepting such recreance as that in Mr. Ryman’s shop). And therefore, when I say I would not change my dreams of Market Street, and Bridge End, and Rose Terrace, (where we used to live after my uncle died, briefly apoplectic, at Bridge End,) for anything that the Palatial and Maxime-Pontifical abodes of Nobles and Bishops give them—I mean simply that I had a home, being a child, and loved it, and did not then, and do not now, covet my neighbour’s house;4but cling to every likeness findable in these ruinous days to the places of peace given me in that lowly time.Peace, and the knowledge of God it gave me. For, by the way, observe in that sacredest of benedictions,[93]which my Dean gave me in my own cathedral last Sunday, (I being an honorary student of Christ Church;—and thereareonly eight, if you please to look in the Oxford Calendar,) “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God;”—observe, I say, for we do not always think of this, it is not the knowledge that is to give peace; but the peace which is to give knowledge; so that as long as we fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness, and bite and devour one another, and are consumed one of another—every traveller paying an eight per cent. tax in his fare, for dividend to a consuming railroad company—we can’t know anything about God at all. And compare again ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ p. 194.There, then, at Rose Terrace, I lived in peace in the fair Scotch summer days, with my widowed aunt, and my little cousin Jessie, then traversing a bright space between her sixth and ninth year; dark-eyed deeply, like her mother, and similarly pious; and she and I used to compete in the Sunday evening Scriptural examinations; and be as proud as two little peacocks because Jessie’s elder brothers, and sister Mary, used to get ‘put down,’ and either Jessie or I was always ‘Dux.’ We agreed upon this that we would be married, when we were a little older; not considering it preparatorily necessary to be in any degree wiser.[94]9th February.I couldn’t go on about my cousin Jessie, for I was interrupted by the second post with more birthday compliments, from young ladies now about Jessie’s age—letters which of course required immediate answer,—some also with flowers, which required to be immediately put into water, and greatly worried me by upsetting themselves among my books all day afterwards; but I let myself be worried, for love;—and, from a well-meaning and kindly feeling friend, some very respectful and respectable poetry, beautifully written, (and I read part of it, for love, but I had much rather he had sent me sixpence, for I hate poetry, mostly, and love pence, always); and to-day, half-past seven before chapel, my mind is otherwise set altogether, for I am reading Leviticus carefully now, for my life of Moses; and, in working out the law of the feast of harvest, chanced on the notable verse, xxiii. 24: “In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a Sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, an holy convocation;” and then flashed on me, all in a minute, the real meaning of Holbein’s introduction to the Dance of Death, (the third woodcut in the first edition), which till this moment I only took for his own symbol of the Triumph of Death, adopted from Orcagna and others, but which I see now, in an instant, to be theun-Holy Convocation; the gathering together to their temple of the Tribes of Death, and the blowing of trumpets on[95]their solemn feast day, and sabbath of rest to the weary in evil doing.And, busy friends, in the midst of all your charming preparations for the Spring season, you will do well to take some method of seeing that design, and meditating, with its help, upon the grave question, what kind of wearinessyouwill have to rest from. My own thoughts of it are disturbed, as I look, by that drummer-death, in front,5with his rattling and ringing kettledrums (hethe chief Musician in the Psalm for the sons of Korah—Dathan and Abiram, because his sounding is on Skin, with sticks of Bone,) not only because of my general interest in drummers, but because, after being much impressed, when I was a child, by the verses I had to learn about the last trump, out of the 15th of 1st Corinthians,—when I became a man, and put away childish things, I used often to wonder what we should all say of any sacred Saga among poor Indians whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, if it told them that they were all to rise from the dead at the sound of the last drum.[96]And here I’m interrupted again by a delightful letter about the resurrection of snails, Atropos really managing matters, at present, like the daintiest and watchfullest housewife for me,—everything in its place, and under my hand.“Dear Mr. Ruskin,—As I have just read the last part of February ‘Fors,’ I want to say what I know about the little shells—(Helix virgata—I suppose). I think—indeed, am pretty sure, nearly, if not quite—all those shells had little live snails in them. I have found them in quantities on the South Downs near Lewes, on Roundway Hill near Devizes, near Lyme Regis, in North Wales; and before any of those places, on our own Hampton Common in Gloucestershire, where my sisters and myself used to gather those and other pretty ones when we were children. If you have any stored by, in a few months I think you will find them (if not shut up) walk away.“When I was a girl I once had to choose a birthday present from one of my aunts, and asked for ‘Turton’s British Shells,’ for I always wanted to know the name and history of everything I found; then I collected all the land and freshwater shells I could find, as I could not getseashells—one of my longings—for I never saw the sea till after I was twenty, except for a few hours at Munsley in Norfolk, when I was eight years old. I have my little shells still; and have four or five varieties of Helix virgata: I think the number of rings increases as the shell goes on growing.‘In the autumn these shells are often suddenly observed in such great numbers as to give rise to the popular notion of their having fallen from the clouds. This shell is very hardy, and appears nearly insensible to cold, as it does not hybernate even when the ground is covered with snow.’[97]“I always fancied the Lord let them lie about in such numbers to be food for some little birds, or may be rooks and starlings, robins, etc., in cold weather when there was so little to eat.“I dare say you know how the blackbirds and thrushes eat the larger snails. I have often seen in the woods a very pretty coloured shell lying on a white stone,—the birds had put it there to crack a hole in it and to take out the snail. The shell looked such a pretty clear colour because it was alive, and yet empty.”Yes; the Holy Ghost of Life, not yet finally departed, can still give fair colours even to an empty shell. Evangelical friends,—worms, as you have long called yourselves, here is a deeper expression of humility suggested possible: may not some of you be only painted shells of worms,—alive, yet empty?Assuming my shell to be Helix virgata, I take down my magnificent French—(let me see if I can write its title without a mistake)—“Manuel de Conchyliologie et de Paléontologie Conchyliologique,” or, in English, “Manual of Shell-talking and Old-body-talking in a Shell-talking manner.” Eight hundred largest octavo—more like folio—pages of close print, with four thousand and odd (nearly five thousand) exquisite engravings of shells; and among them I look for the creatures elegantly, but inaccurately, called by modern naturalists Gasteropods; in English, Belly-feet, (meaning, of course, to say Belly-walkers, for they haven’t got any feet); and among these I find, with much pains, one that is rather like mine, of which I am told that it belongs to the sixteenth sort in the second tribe of[98]the second family of the first sub-order of the second order of the Belly-walkers, and that it is called ‘Adeorbis subcarinatus,’—Adeorbis by Mr. Wood, and subcarinatus by Mr. Montagu; but I am not told where it is found, nor what sort of creature lives in it, nor any single thing whatever about it, except that it is “sufficiently depressed” (“assez déprimée”), and “deeply enough navelled” (assez profondement ombiliquée,—but how on earth can I tell when a shell is navelled to a depth, in the author’s opinion, satisfactory?) and that the turns (taken by the family), are ‘little numerous’ (peu nombreux). On the whole, I am not disposed to think my shell is here described, and put my splendid book in its place again.I next try my English Cuvier, in sixteen octavo volumes; in which I find no notice whatever taken of these minor snails, except a list of thirty-three species, finishing with an etc.; out of which I mark ‘Cretacea,’ ‘Terrestris,’ and ‘Nivea,’ as perhaps likely to fit mine; and then I come, by order of Atropos, on this amazing account of the domestic arrangements of a little French snail, “Helix decollata” (Guillotined snail?) with references to “Cm. Chemn. cxxxvi. 1254–1257,” a species which “has the singular habit of successively fracturing the whorls at the top, (origin, that is,—snails building their houses from heaven towards earth,) of the spire, so that at a particular epoch, of all the whorls of the spire originally possessed by this bulimus, not a single[99]one remains.” Bulimus,—what’s a bulimus? Helix is certainly a screw, and bulimus—in my Riddle’s dictionary—is said to be “empty-bellied.” Then this French snail, revolutionary in the manner of a screw, appears to be a belly-walker with an empty belly, and no neck,—who literally “breaks up” his establishment every year! Query—breaks? or melts? Contraction or confusion?I must put my fine English book back in its place, too;—but here, at last, comes a ‘work of light’ to help us, from my favourite pupil, who was out with me that day on the Downs, and nearly killed himself with keeping a fox in sight on foot, up and down them;—happily surviving, he has pursued the slower creature for me to its cave of silver earth; and writes thus.Common garden snail shells of various ages.“I have sent you two little boxes—one containing common garden snail shells of various ages, and the other black striped Down shells; and you will see that in Box 1 the full-grown ones, with the strong finished lip, have four whorls each, and all the full-grown garden shells I have noticed had the same number, though they varied a little in size. The next largest in the box have only three and a half turns, but if they had lived longer they would have added on another half turn, bigger than all the[100]rest of the shell put together. In fact, if one looks at this shell, one sees that any half whorl is half as large again as all the rest of the shell before it. Then, besides these, there are four or five younger shells, the smallest of which has only two and a half whorls, which exactly correspond to two and a half whorls taken from any of the larger shells; so I think we may conclude that a shell grows by adding onlength onlyto the large end of a tapering tube, like a dunce’s cap, which, however, is curled up like a ram’s horn, to look prettier, take up less room, and allow the occupant to beat a retreat round the corner when a robin comes. By-the-bye, I wonder some birds don’t grow bills like corkscrews, to get at the snails with.“Then in box No. 2 there are several black striped Down shells, and the full-grown ones have six whorls, and the smallest ones, which died young, some four and some five, according to age; but the dunce’s cap is longer, and so there are more whorls.“I couldn’t get these facts clearly stated in two handbooks which I read. I suppose they took it for granted that one knew; but I found, what after all would lead one to infer the rest, that the young snail at birth corresponds to the colourlessAPEXof the shell, and that the colour only comes in that part which grows under the influence of light and air.”“Wednesday, Feb. 9.“Another fact is, that all the shells I ever remember looking at grow in the direction of the sun.“Another fact. Since the shells have been in this room, my chimneypiece has been full of sleepy, small, long-bodied spiders, which had gone to sleep for the winter in these black and white caverns, out of the reach of flocks of half-starved larks and starlings.”I drew the three advancing stages of the common snail’s houses, thus sent me, forthwith; and Mr. Burgess[101]swiftly and rightly engraves them. Note that the apparent irregularities in the spirals are conditions of perspective, necessarily affecting the deeply projecting forms; note also that each whorl is partly hidden by the subsequent one, built with its edge lapping over it; and finally, that there is really, I believe, a modification, to some extent, and enlargement, of the inner whorls; until the domestic creature is satisfied with its length of cave, and expresses its rest in accomplished labour and full age, by putting that binding lip round its border, and term to its hope.Wherein, building for the earth, we may wisely imitate it. Of other building, not with slime for mortar, yet heavenward, we may perhaps conceive in due time.I beg all my readers, but especially my Companions, to read with their best care the paper by Mr. Girdlestone, which, by the author’s kindly gift, I am enabled to send them with this Fors. It is the most complete and logical statement of Economic truth, in the points it touches, that I have ever seen in the English language: and to master it will be the best possible preparation for the study of personal duties to which I shall invite my Companions in my next letter.[103]1See note at end of this letter.↑2I have got no Turks yet in the Company: when any join it, I will give them Koran enough for what I ask of them.↑3Every day taking more away than the one before it.↑4Compare Letter XXI., p. 13.↑5I have desired Mr. Ward to prepare small photographs of this design, in case any reader cares to have it,—but mind, it is not altogether done according to Mr. Stopford Brooke’s notion of the object of true art, “to please”—(see page 88 of the Manual of English Literature, just published by that omniscient divine—under the auspices of the all-and-sundry-scient Mr. T. R. Green, M.A.,—so, if you only want to be pleased, you had better not order it. But at any rate, order, if you wish to understand the next coming Fors, the Etruscan Leucothea, for comparison with your Lippi Madonna. Mr. Ward will have it ready with my signature about the time next Fors comes out;—or you can get it, unmounted, for a shilling, from Mr. Parker’s agent in Rome.↑

FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LXIII.

I find it wholly impossible to crush into one Fors what I have been gathering of Bible lesson, natural history lesson, and writing lesson, and to leave room enough for what I have to give of immediate explanation to the Companions, now daily increasing in number. My readers must bear with me—I cannot do more than I am doing, though every day I wonder more at there being so many things apparently my duty to do, while I have only two feeble hands for all of them.But this much of general statement of the meaning of our Companionship is now absolutely necessary.Of course, the first natural idea taken up by persons who merely hear talk, or read newspapers, about the Company, is that their domain is intended for arefugefor the persons who join it—that within its walls the poor are at once to be made rich, and the sorrowful happy.Alas, this is not by any means the notion of the St. George’s Company. It is to be a band of delivering[80]knights—not of churls needing deliverance; of eager givers and servants—not of eager beggars,1and persons needing service. It is only the Rich, and the Strong, whom I receive for Companions,—those who come not to be ministered unto, but to minister. Rich, yet some of them in other kind of riches than the world’s; strong, yet some in other than the world’s strength. But this much at least of literal wealth and strength theymusthave,—the power, and formed habit, of self-support. I accept no Companion by whom I am not convinced that the Society will be aided rather than burdened; and although I value intelligence, resolution, and personal strength, more than any other riches, I hope to find, in a little while, that there are people in the world who can hold money without being blinded, by their possession of it, to justice or duty.The Companions whom I accept will be divided, according to their means and circumstances, into three classes.The first and highest class will be called “Comites Ministrantes,” “Companions Servant.” It will be composed of the few who devote their main energy to the work of the Company; and who, as I do myself, and as the Master must always, pursue their private avocations only in subjection to its interests, being at the same time in positions absolutely independent, and openly shown to be so.[81]The second, or middle class, will be called “Comites Militantes,” “Companions Militant.”These will be persons occupied actually in manual labour on the ground, or in any work which the Master may order, for the fulfilment of the Society’s functions; being dependent on such labour for their maintenance, under the conditions fixed by the Company’s statutes.The third and lowest order will be called “Comites Consilii,” (Friends of, or in, Council,) “Companions Consular,” who will form the general body of the Society, being occupied in their own affairs as earnestly as before they joined it; but giving it the tenth of their income; and in all points, involving its principles, obeying the orders of the Master. Thus almost any tradesman may continue his trade, being a Companion; but, if a jeweller, he must not sell false jewels; or if a butcher, (I have one accepted already, and I very much want to get a butcher’s daughter, if I could; but she won’t come,) must not sell bad meat.I at first meant them to be called Censors, or Companions Estimant, because when the Society comes into real work, the sentences of fine, or other disgrace, pronounced by the marshals’ officers, and the general modes of determining quality and value of goods, must be always ratified by majority of this order, of the Companions, in whom also, by virtue of their number, the election, and therefore censorship, of the Master, will necessarily be vested.[82]To these last, especially, I have now some special matters to write.Will you please look back to the Fors of December 24th, last year, p. 278, and tell me,—or rather, which is chiefly needful, answer to yourselves, how far you have reflected, since reading it, on the nature of “unfruitful works of darkness;” how many you have abandoned, and how many reproved. It is too probable that you have not, even yet, the slightest idea what works of darkness are. You know,—they can’t mean merely murder, or adultery, or theft. You don’t, when you go to church, mean to pray that you may have grace to give up committing murder or adultery, or that you may ‘rather reprovethem’? But what then is it that you pray to give up? If you don’t know, are you not, yet, in the least, ashamed of yourselves, for going every Sunday, if not every day, to pray to God, without having the dimmest idea what you mean to ask Him for?Well,—not to be farther teazing about it,—in the first and simple sense, works of darkness are useless, or ill-done, or half-done, things, which pretend to be good, or to be wholly done; and so mislead or betray.In the deeper and final sense, a work of darkness is one that seeks concealment, and conceals facts; or even casts disdain and disgrace on facts.A work of light is one that seeks light, and that, not for its own sake, but to light all men; so that all workers[83]of good work delight in witnesses; only with true desire that the witnesses’ pleasure may be greater than theirs; and that the Eternal witnesses—the Cloud around us, and Powers above—may have chief pleasure of all:—(see on this matter, ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ page 54). So that, of these works, what was written of St. Bernard must be always true, “Opera sancti Patris velut Sol in conspectu Dei;” for indeed they are a true Light of the world, infinitely better in the Creator’s sight than its dead sunshine; and the discovery by modern science that all mortal strength is from the Sun, while it has thrown foolish persons into atheism, is, to wise ones, the most precious testimony to their faith yet given by physical nature; for it gives us the arithmetical and measurable assurance that men vitally active are living sunshine, having the roots of their souls set in sunlight, as the roots of a tree are in the earth; not that the dust is therefore the God of the tree, but the Tree is the animation of the dust, and the living Soul, of the sunshine. And now you will understand the meaning of the words on our St. George’s wealth,—“Sit splendor.”And you must take care that your works do shine before men, if it may be, as a lamp; but at least, as a shield;—nay, if your Captain in Heaven wills it, as a sword.For the failure of all good people nowadays is that, associating politely with wicked persons, countenancing them in their wickedness, and often joining in[84]it, they think to avert its consequences by collaterally labouring to repair the ruin it has caused; and while, in the morning, they satisfy their hearts by ministering to the wants of two or three destitute persons, in the evening they dine with, envy, and prepare themselves to follow the example of, the rich speculator who has caused the destitution of two or three thousand. They are thus destroying more in hours than they can amend in years; or, at the best, vainly feeding the famine-struck populations, in the rear of a devouring army, always on the increase in mass of numbers, and rapidity of march.Now I call on the St. George’s Company, first, to separate themselves clearly, as a body, from persons who practise recognized, visible, unquestionable iniquity. They are to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of Darkness; but to walk as Children of Light.Literally, observe. Those phrases of the Bible are entirely evaded, because we never apply them to immediate practice.St. George’s Companions are to haveno fellowshipwith works of darkness; no companionship whatsoever with recognizable mischief, or mischievous men. Of every person of your acquaintance, you are solemnly to ask yourselves, ‘Isthis man a swindler, a liar, a gambler, an adulterer, a selfish oppressor, and task-master?’[85]Don’t suppose you can’t tell. You can tell with perfect ease; or, if you meet any mysterious personage of whom it proves difficult to ascertain whether he be rogue or not, keep clear of him till you know. With those whom youknowto be honest,knowto be innocent,knowto be striving, with main purpose, to serve mankind and honour their God, you are humbly and lovingly to associate yourselves: and with none others.“You don’t like to set yourself up for being better than other people? You dare not judge harshly of your fellow-creatures?”I do not tell you to judge them. I only tell you not to dine with them, and not to deal with them. That they lose the pleasure of your company, or the profit on your custom, is no crushing punishment. To their own Master they stand or fall; but toyourMaster, Christ,2youmust stand, with your best might; and in this manner only, self-asserting as you may think it, can you confess Him before men. Why do you suppose that thundrous word of His impends over your denial of Him, “Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before Angels,” but because you are sure to be constantly tempted to such denial?How, therefore, observe, in modern days, are you so tempted. Is not the temptation rather,as it seems,[86]to confess Him? Is it difficult and shameful to go to church?—would it not require more courage to stay away? Is it difficult or shameful to shut your shop on Sunday, in the East,—or, to abstain from your ride in the Park on Sunday, in the West? Is it dangerous to hold family worship in your house, or dishonourable to be seen with a cross on your Prayer Book? None of these modes or aspects of confession will bring any outcry against you from the world. You will have its good word, on the contrary, for each and all of them. But declare that you mean to speak truth,—and speak it, for an hour; that you mean to abstain from luxury,—and abstain from it, for a day; that you, obeying God’s law, will resolutely refuse fellowship with the disobedient;—and be ‘not at home’ to them, for a week: and hearthenwhat the High Priests’ servants will say to you, round the fire.And observe, it is in charity for them, much more than by duty to others, that you are required to do this. For half, at least, of these Caiaphas’ servants sin through pure ignorance, confirmed by custom. The essential difference in business, for instance, between a man of honour and a rogue, is that the first tries to give asmuchto his customer for his money as he can, and the second to give aslittle; but how many are at present engaged in business who are trying to sell their goods at as high a price as possible, supposing that effort to be the very soul and vital principle of[87]business! Now by simply asserting to these ignorant persons that theyarerogues, whether they know it or not; and that, in the present era of general enlightenment, gentlemen and ladies must not only learn to spell and to dance, but also to know the difference between cheating their neighbours and serving them; and that, as on the whole it is inexpedient to receive people who don’t know how to express themselves grammatically, in the higher circles of society, much more is it inexpedient to receive those who don’t know how to behave themselves honestly. And by the mere assertion, practically, of this assured fact to your acquaintance’ faces, by the direct intervention of a deal door between theirs and yours, you will startle them out of their Rogues’ Paradise in a most healthful manner, and be the most orthodox and eloquent evangelical preacher to them that they have ever heard since they were born.But all this must, of course, be done with extreme tenderness and modesty, though with absolute decision; and under much submission to their elders by young people—especially those living in their father’s houses. I shall not, of course, receive any Companions under age; but already there are some names on my list of young unmarried women: and, while I have shown in all former writings that I hold the power of such to be the greatest, because the purest, of all social ones, I must as definitely now warn them against any manifestation[88]of feeling or principle tending to break the unity of their home circles. They are bound to receive their father’s friends as their own, and to comply in all sweet and subjected ways with the wishes and habits of their parents; remaining calmly certain that the Law of God, for them, is that while they remain at home they shall be spirits of Peace and Humility beneath its roof. In all rightly ordered households, the confidence between the parent and child is such that in the event of a parent’s wish becoming contrary to a child’s feeling of its general duty, there would be no fear or discomfort on the child’s part in expressing its thoughts. The moment these are necessarily repressed, there is wrong somewhere; and in houses ordered according to the ways of modern fashionable life, theremustbe wrong, often, and everywhere. But the main curse of modern society is that, beginning by training its youth to be ‘independent’ and disobedient, this carefully cultivated independence shows itself, of course, by rejecting whatever is noble and honourable in their father’s houses, and never by healing or atoning what is faultful.Of all St. George’s young Companions, therefore, he requires first the graces of gentleness and humility; nor, on the whole, much independent action of any kind; but only the quiet resolve to find out what is absolutely right, and so far as it may be kindly and inoffensively practised to fulfil it, at home; and so[89]far as it may be modestly and decorously uttered, to express the same abroad. And a well-bred young lady has always personal power enough of favour and discouragement, among persons of her own age, to satisfy the extremest demands of conscience in this direction.And now let me see what room I have left for talk of present matters. Here is a piece printed a fortnight since, which I can’t be plagued to keep in type till next month.Corpus Christi College, Oxford,8th February, 1876.I am fifty-seven to-day: and may perhaps be allowed to talk a little of myself.Among several pretty love-letters from my pets, which only make me sorrier that I’m fifty-seven—but I really don’t think some of the letters could be nicer if I were only twenty-seven—there’s one with a ghost story in it, more precious to me than all the others, seeing I draw more quickly3near, now, daily, to the Loyal land.I may as well write it as I read, thus;“I heard such a pretty story last night of something that happened at a school in Germany, not long since. It was the custom of one of the masters to go round every night to the dormitories to see that the boys were asleep, all right. One night he was astonished to see a lady go up to one of the boys, stoop over[90]him and kiss him, and then vanish. Next morning, news came that the mother of that particular boy had died at the time. Isn’t it lovely? Even A. believes that.”Yes; and A. does wisely; and so may B., and C.: but yet I should much like to knowwhatparticular boy, in what particular school in Germany.Nevertheless, the story has more value for me because it is written to me by a person who herself saw the shade—or rather light—of her sister, at the time of that sister’s death on the other side of the world; being a member of that branch of my family in which some gift of the Scottish second sight remains, inherited by my maternal grandmother, who ran away with my paternal grandfather when she was not quite sixteen; and my aunt Jessie, (my father’s only sister,) was born a year afterwards; a few weeks after which event, my grandmother, not yet seventeen, was surprised, (by a friend who came into her room unannounced,) dancing a threesome reel, with two chairs for her partners, she having found at the moment no other way of adequately expressing the pleasure she took in this mortal life, and its gifts, and promises.The latter failed somewhat afterwards; and my aunt Jessie, a very precious and perfect creature, beautiful in her dark-eyed, Highland way; utterly religious, in her quiet Puritan way, and very submissive to Fates mostly unkind, married, or was married to—I never could[91]make out exactly which, or why,—a somewhat rough tanner, with a fairly good business, in the good town of Perth; and, when I was old enough to be taken first to visit them, as aforesaid, my aunt and my uncle the tanner lived in a good square-built gray stone house at the ‘Bridge-End’ of Perth, some fifty yards north of the bridge; their garden sloping steeply to the Tay, which eddied, three or four feet deep of sombre crystal, round the steps where the servants dipped their pails.My aggrieved correspondent of Wakefield thought to cure me with her delicate ‘Fie,’ of what she supposed my coarse habit of sneering at people of no ancestry. I have it not; yet might have fallen into it in my youth, for I remember now, with more grief and shame than I can speak, being once ashamed of my own father and mother in Mr. Ryman’s shop here in Oxford; nor am I entirely at ease, at this moment, in writing of my uncles the baker and the tanner; yet my readers may trust me when I tell them, that in now remembering my dreams in the house of the entirely honest chief baker of Market Street, Croydon; and of Peter—not Simon—the tanner, whose house was by the riverside of Perth, I would not change the dreams, far less the tender realities, of those early days, for anything I hear now remembered by lords or dames, of their days of childhood in castle halls, and by sweet lawns and lakes in park-walled forest.[92]I do not mean this for a republican sentiment; quite the opposite. I hate republicans, as I do all other manner of fools. I love Lords and Ladies, (especially unmarried ones, with beautiful three-syllabled Christian-names. I know a simple two-syllabled one, also, very charming); and Earls, and Countesses, and Marquises and Marchionesses, and Honourables, and Sirs; and I bow down before them and worship them, in the way that Mr. Thackeray thought ‘snobs’ did; he never perceiving with all the wit of him, (being mostly spent in mean smell-fungus work which spoiled its scent,) that it ishimselfthe snob truly worships, all the time, and not the Lord he looks at. But my way of worship was Walter Scott’s, which my father taught me (always excepting such recreance as that in Mr. Ryman’s shop). And therefore, when I say I would not change my dreams of Market Street, and Bridge End, and Rose Terrace, (where we used to live after my uncle died, briefly apoplectic, at Bridge End,) for anything that the Palatial and Maxime-Pontifical abodes of Nobles and Bishops give them—I mean simply that I had a home, being a child, and loved it, and did not then, and do not now, covet my neighbour’s house;4but cling to every likeness findable in these ruinous days to the places of peace given me in that lowly time.Peace, and the knowledge of God it gave me. For, by the way, observe in that sacredest of benedictions,[93]which my Dean gave me in my own cathedral last Sunday, (I being an honorary student of Christ Church;—and thereareonly eight, if you please to look in the Oxford Calendar,) “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God;”—observe, I say, for we do not always think of this, it is not the knowledge that is to give peace; but the peace which is to give knowledge; so that as long as we fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness, and bite and devour one another, and are consumed one of another—every traveller paying an eight per cent. tax in his fare, for dividend to a consuming railroad company—we can’t know anything about God at all. And compare again ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ p. 194.There, then, at Rose Terrace, I lived in peace in the fair Scotch summer days, with my widowed aunt, and my little cousin Jessie, then traversing a bright space between her sixth and ninth year; dark-eyed deeply, like her mother, and similarly pious; and she and I used to compete in the Sunday evening Scriptural examinations; and be as proud as two little peacocks because Jessie’s elder brothers, and sister Mary, used to get ‘put down,’ and either Jessie or I was always ‘Dux.’ We agreed upon this that we would be married, when we were a little older; not considering it preparatorily necessary to be in any degree wiser.[94]9th February.I couldn’t go on about my cousin Jessie, for I was interrupted by the second post with more birthday compliments, from young ladies now about Jessie’s age—letters which of course required immediate answer,—some also with flowers, which required to be immediately put into water, and greatly worried me by upsetting themselves among my books all day afterwards; but I let myself be worried, for love;—and, from a well-meaning and kindly feeling friend, some very respectful and respectable poetry, beautifully written, (and I read part of it, for love, but I had much rather he had sent me sixpence, for I hate poetry, mostly, and love pence, always); and to-day, half-past seven before chapel, my mind is otherwise set altogether, for I am reading Leviticus carefully now, for my life of Moses; and, in working out the law of the feast of harvest, chanced on the notable verse, xxiii. 24: “In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a Sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, an holy convocation;” and then flashed on me, all in a minute, the real meaning of Holbein’s introduction to the Dance of Death, (the third woodcut in the first edition), which till this moment I only took for his own symbol of the Triumph of Death, adopted from Orcagna and others, but which I see now, in an instant, to be theun-Holy Convocation; the gathering together to their temple of the Tribes of Death, and the blowing of trumpets on[95]their solemn feast day, and sabbath of rest to the weary in evil doing.And, busy friends, in the midst of all your charming preparations for the Spring season, you will do well to take some method of seeing that design, and meditating, with its help, upon the grave question, what kind of wearinessyouwill have to rest from. My own thoughts of it are disturbed, as I look, by that drummer-death, in front,5with his rattling and ringing kettledrums (hethe chief Musician in the Psalm for the sons of Korah—Dathan and Abiram, because his sounding is on Skin, with sticks of Bone,) not only because of my general interest in drummers, but because, after being much impressed, when I was a child, by the verses I had to learn about the last trump, out of the 15th of 1st Corinthians,—when I became a man, and put away childish things, I used often to wonder what we should all say of any sacred Saga among poor Indians whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, if it told them that they were all to rise from the dead at the sound of the last drum.[96]And here I’m interrupted again by a delightful letter about the resurrection of snails, Atropos really managing matters, at present, like the daintiest and watchfullest housewife for me,—everything in its place, and under my hand.“Dear Mr. Ruskin,—As I have just read the last part of February ‘Fors,’ I want to say what I know about the little shells—(Helix virgata—I suppose). I think—indeed, am pretty sure, nearly, if not quite—all those shells had little live snails in them. I have found them in quantities on the South Downs near Lewes, on Roundway Hill near Devizes, near Lyme Regis, in North Wales; and before any of those places, on our own Hampton Common in Gloucestershire, where my sisters and myself used to gather those and other pretty ones when we were children. If you have any stored by, in a few months I think you will find them (if not shut up) walk away.“When I was a girl I once had to choose a birthday present from one of my aunts, and asked for ‘Turton’s British Shells,’ for I always wanted to know the name and history of everything I found; then I collected all the land and freshwater shells I could find, as I could not getseashells—one of my longings—for I never saw the sea till after I was twenty, except for a few hours at Munsley in Norfolk, when I was eight years old. I have my little shells still; and have four or five varieties of Helix virgata: I think the number of rings increases as the shell goes on growing.‘In the autumn these shells are often suddenly observed in such great numbers as to give rise to the popular notion of their having fallen from the clouds. This shell is very hardy, and appears nearly insensible to cold, as it does not hybernate even when the ground is covered with snow.’[97]“I always fancied the Lord let them lie about in such numbers to be food for some little birds, or may be rooks and starlings, robins, etc., in cold weather when there was so little to eat.“I dare say you know how the blackbirds and thrushes eat the larger snails. I have often seen in the woods a very pretty coloured shell lying on a white stone,—the birds had put it there to crack a hole in it and to take out the snail. The shell looked such a pretty clear colour because it was alive, and yet empty.”Yes; the Holy Ghost of Life, not yet finally departed, can still give fair colours even to an empty shell. Evangelical friends,—worms, as you have long called yourselves, here is a deeper expression of humility suggested possible: may not some of you be only painted shells of worms,—alive, yet empty?Assuming my shell to be Helix virgata, I take down my magnificent French—(let me see if I can write its title without a mistake)—“Manuel de Conchyliologie et de Paléontologie Conchyliologique,” or, in English, “Manual of Shell-talking and Old-body-talking in a Shell-talking manner.” Eight hundred largest octavo—more like folio—pages of close print, with four thousand and odd (nearly five thousand) exquisite engravings of shells; and among them I look for the creatures elegantly, but inaccurately, called by modern naturalists Gasteropods; in English, Belly-feet, (meaning, of course, to say Belly-walkers, for they haven’t got any feet); and among these I find, with much pains, one that is rather like mine, of which I am told that it belongs to the sixteenth sort in the second tribe of[98]the second family of the first sub-order of the second order of the Belly-walkers, and that it is called ‘Adeorbis subcarinatus,’—Adeorbis by Mr. Wood, and subcarinatus by Mr. Montagu; but I am not told where it is found, nor what sort of creature lives in it, nor any single thing whatever about it, except that it is “sufficiently depressed” (“assez déprimée”), and “deeply enough navelled” (assez profondement ombiliquée,—but how on earth can I tell when a shell is navelled to a depth, in the author’s opinion, satisfactory?) and that the turns (taken by the family), are ‘little numerous’ (peu nombreux). On the whole, I am not disposed to think my shell is here described, and put my splendid book in its place again.I next try my English Cuvier, in sixteen octavo volumes; in which I find no notice whatever taken of these minor snails, except a list of thirty-three species, finishing with an etc.; out of which I mark ‘Cretacea,’ ‘Terrestris,’ and ‘Nivea,’ as perhaps likely to fit mine; and then I come, by order of Atropos, on this amazing account of the domestic arrangements of a little French snail, “Helix decollata” (Guillotined snail?) with references to “Cm. Chemn. cxxxvi. 1254–1257,” a species which “has the singular habit of successively fracturing the whorls at the top, (origin, that is,—snails building their houses from heaven towards earth,) of the spire, so that at a particular epoch, of all the whorls of the spire originally possessed by this bulimus, not a single[99]one remains.” Bulimus,—what’s a bulimus? Helix is certainly a screw, and bulimus—in my Riddle’s dictionary—is said to be “empty-bellied.” Then this French snail, revolutionary in the manner of a screw, appears to be a belly-walker with an empty belly, and no neck,—who literally “breaks up” his establishment every year! Query—breaks? or melts? Contraction or confusion?I must put my fine English book back in its place, too;—but here, at last, comes a ‘work of light’ to help us, from my favourite pupil, who was out with me that day on the Downs, and nearly killed himself with keeping a fox in sight on foot, up and down them;—happily surviving, he has pursued the slower creature for me to its cave of silver earth; and writes thus.Common garden snail shells of various ages.“I have sent you two little boxes—one containing common garden snail shells of various ages, and the other black striped Down shells; and you will see that in Box 1 the full-grown ones, with the strong finished lip, have four whorls each, and all the full-grown garden shells I have noticed had the same number, though they varied a little in size. The next largest in the box have only three and a half turns, but if they had lived longer they would have added on another half turn, bigger than all the[100]rest of the shell put together. In fact, if one looks at this shell, one sees that any half whorl is half as large again as all the rest of the shell before it. Then, besides these, there are four or five younger shells, the smallest of which has only two and a half whorls, which exactly correspond to two and a half whorls taken from any of the larger shells; so I think we may conclude that a shell grows by adding onlength onlyto the large end of a tapering tube, like a dunce’s cap, which, however, is curled up like a ram’s horn, to look prettier, take up less room, and allow the occupant to beat a retreat round the corner when a robin comes. By-the-bye, I wonder some birds don’t grow bills like corkscrews, to get at the snails with.“Then in box No. 2 there are several black striped Down shells, and the full-grown ones have six whorls, and the smallest ones, which died young, some four and some five, according to age; but the dunce’s cap is longer, and so there are more whorls.“I couldn’t get these facts clearly stated in two handbooks which I read. I suppose they took it for granted that one knew; but I found, what after all would lead one to infer the rest, that the young snail at birth corresponds to the colourlessAPEXof the shell, and that the colour only comes in that part which grows under the influence of light and air.”“Wednesday, Feb. 9.“Another fact is, that all the shells I ever remember looking at grow in the direction of the sun.“Another fact. Since the shells have been in this room, my chimneypiece has been full of sleepy, small, long-bodied spiders, which had gone to sleep for the winter in these black and white caverns, out of the reach of flocks of half-starved larks and starlings.”I drew the three advancing stages of the common snail’s houses, thus sent me, forthwith; and Mr. Burgess[101]swiftly and rightly engraves them. Note that the apparent irregularities in the spirals are conditions of perspective, necessarily affecting the deeply projecting forms; note also that each whorl is partly hidden by the subsequent one, built with its edge lapping over it; and finally, that there is really, I believe, a modification, to some extent, and enlargement, of the inner whorls; until the domestic creature is satisfied with its length of cave, and expresses its rest in accomplished labour and full age, by putting that binding lip round its border, and term to its hope.Wherein, building for the earth, we may wisely imitate it. Of other building, not with slime for mortar, yet heavenward, we may perhaps conceive in due time.I beg all my readers, but especially my Companions, to read with their best care the paper by Mr. Girdlestone, which, by the author’s kindly gift, I am enabled to send them with this Fors. It is the most complete and logical statement of Economic truth, in the points it touches, that I have ever seen in the English language: and to master it will be the best possible preparation for the study of personal duties to which I shall invite my Companions in my next letter.[103]

I find it wholly impossible to crush into one Fors what I have been gathering of Bible lesson, natural history lesson, and writing lesson, and to leave room enough for what I have to give of immediate explanation to the Companions, now daily increasing in number. My readers must bear with me—I cannot do more than I am doing, though every day I wonder more at there being so many things apparently my duty to do, while I have only two feeble hands for all of them.

But this much of general statement of the meaning of our Companionship is now absolutely necessary.

Of course, the first natural idea taken up by persons who merely hear talk, or read newspapers, about the Company, is that their domain is intended for arefugefor the persons who join it—that within its walls the poor are at once to be made rich, and the sorrowful happy.

Alas, this is not by any means the notion of the St. George’s Company. It is to be a band of delivering[80]knights—not of churls needing deliverance; of eager givers and servants—not of eager beggars,1and persons needing service. It is only the Rich, and the Strong, whom I receive for Companions,—those who come not to be ministered unto, but to minister. Rich, yet some of them in other kind of riches than the world’s; strong, yet some in other than the world’s strength. But this much at least of literal wealth and strength theymusthave,—the power, and formed habit, of self-support. I accept no Companion by whom I am not convinced that the Society will be aided rather than burdened; and although I value intelligence, resolution, and personal strength, more than any other riches, I hope to find, in a little while, that there are people in the world who can hold money without being blinded, by their possession of it, to justice or duty.

The Companions whom I accept will be divided, according to their means and circumstances, into three classes.

The first and highest class will be called “Comites Ministrantes,” “Companions Servant.” It will be composed of the few who devote their main energy to the work of the Company; and who, as I do myself, and as the Master must always, pursue their private avocations only in subjection to its interests, being at the same time in positions absolutely independent, and openly shown to be so.[81]

The second, or middle class, will be called “Comites Militantes,” “Companions Militant.”

These will be persons occupied actually in manual labour on the ground, or in any work which the Master may order, for the fulfilment of the Society’s functions; being dependent on such labour for their maintenance, under the conditions fixed by the Company’s statutes.

The third and lowest order will be called “Comites Consilii,” (Friends of, or in, Council,) “Companions Consular,” who will form the general body of the Society, being occupied in their own affairs as earnestly as before they joined it; but giving it the tenth of their income; and in all points, involving its principles, obeying the orders of the Master. Thus almost any tradesman may continue his trade, being a Companion; but, if a jeweller, he must not sell false jewels; or if a butcher, (I have one accepted already, and I very much want to get a butcher’s daughter, if I could; but she won’t come,) must not sell bad meat.

I at first meant them to be called Censors, or Companions Estimant, because when the Society comes into real work, the sentences of fine, or other disgrace, pronounced by the marshals’ officers, and the general modes of determining quality and value of goods, must be always ratified by majority of this order, of the Companions, in whom also, by virtue of their number, the election, and therefore censorship, of the Master, will necessarily be vested.[82]

To these last, especially, I have now some special matters to write.

Will you please look back to the Fors of December 24th, last year, p. 278, and tell me,—or rather, which is chiefly needful, answer to yourselves, how far you have reflected, since reading it, on the nature of “unfruitful works of darkness;” how many you have abandoned, and how many reproved. It is too probable that you have not, even yet, the slightest idea what works of darkness are. You know,—they can’t mean merely murder, or adultery, or theft. You don’t, when you go to church, mean to pray that you may have grace to give up committing murder or adultery, or that you may ‘rather reprovethem’? But what then is it that you pray to give up? If you don’t know, are you not, yet, in the least, ashamed of yourselves, for going every Sunday, if not every day, to pray to God, without having the dimmest idea what you mean to ask Him for?

Well,—not to be farther teazing about it,—in the first and simple sense, works of darkness are useless, or ill-done, or half-done, things, which pretend to be good, or to be wholly done; and so mislead or betray.

In the deeper and final sense, a work of darkness is one that seeks concealment, and conceals facts; or even casts disdain and disgrace on facts.

A work of light is one that seeks light, and that, not for its own sake, but to light all men; so that all workers[83]of good work delight in witnesses; only with true desire that the witnesses’ pleasure may be greater than theirs; and that the Eternal witnesses—the Cloud around us, and Powers above—may have chief pleasure of all:—(see on this matter, ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ page 54). So that, of these works, what was written of St. Bernard must be always true, “Opera sancti Patris velut Sol in conspectu Dei;” for indeed they are a true Light of the world, infinitely better in the Creator’s sight than its dead sunshine; and the discovery by modern science that all mortal strength is from the Sun, while it has thrown foolish persons into atheism, is, to wise ones, the most precious testimony to their faith yet given by physical nature; for it gives us the arithmetical and measurable assurance that men vitally active are living sunshine, having the roots of their souls set in sunlight, as the roots of a tree are in the earth; not that the dust is therefore the God of the tree, but the Tree is the animation of the dust, and the living Soul, of the sunshine. And now you will understand the meaning of the words on our St. George’s wealth,—“Sit splendor.”

And you must take care that your works do shine before men, if it may be, as a lamp; but at least, as a shield;—nay, if your Captain in Heaven wills it, as a sword.

For the failure of all good people nowadays is that, associating politely with wicked persons, countenancing them in their wickedness, and often joining in[84]it, they think to avert its consequences by collaterally labouring to repair the ruin it has caused; and while, in the morning, they satisfy their hearts by ministering to the wants of two or three destitute persons, in the evening they dine with, envy, and prepare themselves to follow the example of, the rich speculator who has caused the destitution of two or three thousand. They are thus destroying more in hours than they can amend in years; or, at the best, vainly feeding the famine-struck populations, in the rear of a devouring army, always on the increase in mass of numbers, and rapidity of march.

Now I call on the St. George’s Company, first, to separate themselves clearly, as a body, from persons who practise recognized, visible, unquestionable iniquity. They are to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of Darkness; but to walk as Children of Light.

Literally, observe. Those phrases of the Bible are entirely evaded, because we never apply them to immediate practice.

St. George’s Companions are to haveno fellowshipwith works of darkness; no companionship whatsoever with recognizable mischief, or mischievous men. Of every person of your acquaintance, you are solemnly to ask yourselves, ‘Isthis man a swindler, a liar, a gambler, an adulterer, a selfish oppressor, and task-master?’[85]

Don’t suppose you can’t tell. You can tell with perfect ease; or, if you meet any mysterious personage of whom it proves difficult to ascertain whether he be rogue or not, keep clear of him till you know. With those whom youknowto be honest,knowto be innocent,knowto be striving, with main purpose, to serve mankind and honour their God, you are humbly and lovingly to associate yourselves: and with none others.

“You don’t like to set yourself up for being better than other people? You dare not judge harshly of your fellow-creatures?”

I do not tell you to judge them. I only tell you not to dine with them, and not to deal with them. That they lose the pleasure of your company, or the profit on your custom, is no crushing punishment. To their own Master they stand or fall; but toyourMaster, Christ,2youmust stand, with your best might; and in this manner only, self-asserting as you may think it, can you confess Him before men. Why do you suppose that thundrous word of His impends over your denial of Him, “Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before Angels,” but because you are sure to be constantly tempted to such denial?

How, therefore, observe, in modern days, are you so tempted. Is not the temptation rather,as it seems,[86]to confess Him? Is it difficult and shameful to go to church?—would it not require more courage to stay away? Is it difficult or shameful to shut your shop on Sunday, in the East,—or, to abstain from your ride in the Park on Sunday, in the West? Is it dangerous to hold family worship in your house, or dishonourable to be seen with a cross on your Prayer Book? None of these modes or aspects of confession will bring any outcry against you from the world. You will have its good word, on the contrary, for each and all of them. But declare that you mean to speak truth,—and speak it, for an hour; that you mean to abstain from luxury,—and abstain from it, for a day; that you, obeying God’s law, will resolutely refuse fellowship with the disobedient;—and be ‘not at home’ to them, for a week: and hearthenwhat the High Priests’ servants will say to you, round the fire.

And observe, it is in charity for them, much more than by duty to others, that you are required to do this. For half, at least, of these Caiaphas’ servants sin through pure ignorance, confirmed by custom. The essential difference in business, for instance, between a man of honour and a rogue, is that the first tries to give asmuchto his customer for his money as he can, and the second to give aslittle; but how many are at present engaged in business who are trying to sell their goods at as high a price as possible, supposing that effort to be the very soul and vital principle of[87]business! Now by simply asserting to these ignorant persons that theyarerogues, whether they know it or not; and that, in the present era of general enlightenment, gentlemen and ladies must not only learn to spell and to dance, but also to know the difference between cheating their neighbours and serving them; and that, as on the whole it is inexpedient to receive people who don’t know how to express themselves grammatically, in the higher circles of society, much more is it inexpedient to receive those who don’t know how to behave themselves honestly. And by the mere assertion, practically, of this assured fact to your acquaintance’ faces, by the direct intervention of a deal door between theirs and yours, you will startle them out of their Rogues’ Paradise in a most healthful manner, and be the most orthodox and eloquent evangelical preacher to them that they have ever heard since they were born.

But all this must, of course, be done with extreme tenderness and modesty, though with absolute decision; and under much submission to their elders by young people—especially those living in their father’s houses. I shall not, of course, receive any Companions under age; but already there are some names on my list of young unmarried women: and, while I have shown in all former writings that I hold the power of such to be the greatest, because the purest, of all social ones, I must as definitely now warn them against any manifestation[88]of feeling or principle tending to break the unity of their home circles. They are bound to receive their father’s friends as their own, and to comply in all sweet and subjected ways with the wishes and habits of their parents; remaining calmly certain that the Law of God, for them, is that while they remain at home they shall be spirits of Peace and Humility beneath its roof. In all rightly ordered households, the confidence between the parent and child is such that in the event of a parent’s wish becoming contrary to a child’s feeling of its general duty, there would be no fear or discomfort on the child’s part in expressing its thoughts. The moment these are necessarily repressed, there is wrong somewhere; and in houses ordered according to the ways of modern fashionable life, theremustbe wrong, often, and everywhere. But the main curse of modern society is that, beginning by training its youth to be ‘independent’ and disobedient, this carefully cultivated independence shows itself, of course, by rejecting whatever is noble and honourable in their father’s houses, and never by healing or atoning what is faultful.

Of all St. George’s young Companions, therefore, he requires first the graces of gentleness and humility; nor, on the whole, much independent action of any kind; but only the quiet resolve to find out what is absolutely right, and so far as it may be kindly and inoffensively practised to fulfil it, at home; and so[89]far as it may be modestly and decorously uttered, to express the same abroad. And a well-bred young lady has always personal power enough of favour and discouragement, among persons of her own age, to satisfy the extremest demands of conscience in this direction.

And now let me see what room I have left for talk of present matters. Here is a piece printed a fortnight since, which I can’t be plagued to keep in type till next month.

Corpus Christi College, Oxford,8th February, 1876.

I am fifty-seven to-day: and may perhaps be allowed to talk a little of myself.

Among several pretty love-letters from my pets, which only make me sorrier that I’m fifty-seven—but I really don’t think some of the letters could be nicer if I were only twenty-seven—there’s one with a ghost story in it, more precious to me than all the others, seeing I draw more quickly3near, now, daily, to the Loyal land.

I may as well write it as I read, thus;

“I heard such a pretty story last night of something that happened at a school in Germany, not long since. It was the custom of one of the masters to go round every night to the dormitories to see that the boys were asleep, all right. One night he was astonished to see a lady go up to one of the boys, stoop over[90]him and kiss him, and then vanish. Next morning, news came that the mother of that particular boy had died at the time. Isn’t it lovely? Even A. believes that.”

Yes; and A. does wisely; and so may B., and C.: but yet I should much like to knowwhatparticular boy, in what particular school in Germany.

Nevertheless, the story has more value for me because it is written to me by a person who herself saw the shade—or rather light—of her sister, at the time of that sister’s death on the other side of the world; being a member of that branch of my family in which some gift of the Scottish second sight remains, inherited by my maternal grandmother, who ran away with my paternal grandfather when she was not quite sixteen; and my aunt Jessie, (my father’s only sister,) was born a year afterwards; a few weeks after which event, my grandmother, not yet seventeen, was surprised, (by a friend who came into her room unannounced,) dancing a threesome reel, with two chairs for her partners, she having found at the moment no other way of adequately expressing the pleasure she took in this mortal life, and its gifts, and promises.

The latter failed somewhat afterwards; and my aunt Jessie, a very precious and perfect creature, beautiful in her dark-eyed, Highland way; utterly religious, in her quiet Puritan way, and very submissive to Fates mostly unkind, married, or was married to—I never could[91]make out exactly which, or why,—a somewhat rough tanner, with a fairly good business, in the good town of Perth; and, when I was old enough to be taken first to visit them, as aforesaid, my aunt and my uncle the tanner lived in a good square-built gray stone house at the ‘Bridge-End’ of Perth, some fifty yards north of the bridge; their garden sloping steeply to the Tay, which eddied, three or four feet deep of sombre crystal, round the steps where the servants dipped their pails.

My aggrieved correspondent of Wakefield thought to cure me with her delicate ‘Fie,’ of what she supposed my coarse habit of sneering at people of no ancestry. I have it not; yet might have fallen into it in my youth, for I remember now, with more grief and shame than I can speak, being once ashamed of my own father and mother in Mr. Ryman’s shop here in Oxford; nor am I entirely at ease, at this moment, in writing of my uncles the baker and the tanner; yet my readers may trust me when I tell them, that in now remembering my dreams in the house of the entirely honest chief baker of Market Street, Croydon; and of Peter—not Simon—the tanner, whose house was by the riverside of Perth, I would not change the dreams, far less the tender realities, of those early days, for anything I hear now remembered by lords or dames, of their days of childhood in castle halls, and by sweet lawns and lakes in park-walled forest.[92]

I do not mean this for a republican sentiment; quite the opposite. I hate republicans, as I do all other manner of fools. I love Lords and Ladies, (especially unmarried ones, with beautiful three-syllabled Christian-names. I know a simple two-syllabled one, also, very charming); and Earls, and Countesses, and Marquises and Marchionesses, and Honourables, and Sirs; and I bow down before them and worship them, in the way that Mr. Thackeray thought ‘snobs’ did; he never perceiving with all the wit of him, (being mostly spent in mean smell-fungus work which spoiled its scent,) that it ishimselfthe snob truly worships, all the time, and not the Lord he looks at. But my way of worship was Walter Scott’s, which my father taught me (always excepting such recreance as that in Mr. Ryman’s shop). And therefore, when I say I would not change my dreams of Market Street, and Bridge End, and Rose Terrace, (where we used to live after my uncle died, briefly apoplectic, at Bridge End,) for anything that the Palatial and Maxime-Pontifical abodes of Nobles and Bishops give them—I mean simply that I had a home, being a child, and loved it, and did not then, and do not now, covet my neighbour’s house;4but cling to every likeness findable in these ruinous days to the places of peace given me in that lowly time.

Peace, and the knowledge of God it gave me. For, by the way, observe in that sacredest of benedictions,[93]which my Dean gave me in my own cathedral last Sunday, (I being an honorary student of Christ Church;—and thereareonly eight, if you please to look in the Oxford Calendar,) “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God;”—observe, I say, for we do not always think of this, it is not the knowledge that is to give peace; but the peace which is to give knowledge; so that as long as we fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness, and bite and devour one another, and are consumed one of another—every traveller paying an eight per cent. tax in his fare, for dividend to a consuming railroad company—we can’t know anything about God at all. And compare again ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ p. 194.

There, then, at Rose Terrace, I lived in peace in the fair Scotch summer days, with my widowed aunt, and my little cousin Jessie, then traversing a bright space between her sixth and ninth year; dark-eyed deeply, like her mother, and similarly pious; and she and I used to compete in the Sunday evening Scriptural examinations; and be as proud as two little peacocks because Jessie’s elder brothers, and sister Mary, used to get ‘put down,’ and either Jessie or I was always ‘Dux.’ We agreed upon this that we would be married, when we were a little older; not considering it preparatorily necessary to be in any degree wiser.[94]

9th February.

I couldn’t go on about my cousin Jessie, for I was interrupted by the second post with more birthday compliments, from young ladies now about Jessie’s age—letters which of course required immediate answer,—some also with flowers, which required to be immediately put into water, and greatly worried me by upsetting themselves among my books all day afterwards; but I let myself be worried, for love;—and, from a well-meaning and kindly feeling friend, some very respectful and respectable poetry, beautifully written, (and I read part of it, for love, but I had much rather he had sent me sixpence, for I hate poetry, mostly, and love pence, always); and to-day, half-past seven before chapel, my mind is otherwise set altogether, for I am reading Leviticus carefully now, for my life of Moses; and, in working out the law of the feast of harvest, chanced on the notable verse, xxiii. 24: “In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a Sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, an holy convocation;” and then flashed on me, all in a minute, the real meaning of Holbein’s introduction to the Dance of Death, (the third woodcut in the first edition), which till this moment I only took for his own symbol of the Triumph of Death, adopted from Orcagna and others, but which I see now, in an instant, to be theun-Holy Convocation; the gathering together to their temple of the Tribes of Death, and the blowing of trumpets on[95]their solemn feast day, and sabbath of rest to the weary in evil doing.

And, busy friends, in the midst of all your charming preparations for the Spring season, you will do well to take some method of seeing that design, and meditating, with its help, upon the grave question, what kind of wearinessyouwill have to rest from. My own thoughts of it are disturbed, as I look, by that drummer-death, in front,5with his rattling and ringing kettledrums (hethe chief Musician in the Psalm for the sons of Korah—Dathan and Abiram, because his sounding is on Skin, with sticks of Bone,) not only because of my general interest in drummers, but because, after being much impressed, when I was a child, by the verses I had to learn about the last trump, out of the 15th of 1st Corinthians,—when I became a man, and put away childish things, I used often to wonder what we should all say of any sacred Saga among poor Indians whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, if it told them that they were all to rise from the dead at the sound of the last drum.[96]

And here I’m interrupted again by a delightful letter about the resurrection of snails, Atropos really managing matters, at present, like the daintiest and watchfullest housewife for me,—everything in its place, and under my hand.

“Dear Mr. Ruskin,—As I have just read the last part of February ‘Fors,’ I want to say what I know about the little shells—(Helix virgata—I suppose). I think—indeed, am pretty sure, nearly, if not quite—all those shells had little live snails in them. I have found them in quantities on the South Downs near Lewes, on Roundway Hill near Devizes, near Lyme Regis, in North Wales; and before any of those places, on our own Hampton Common in Gloucestershire, where my sisters and myself used to gather those and other pretty ones when we were children. If you have any stored by, in a few months I think you will find them (if not shut up) walk away.“When I was a girl I once had to choose a birthday present from one of my aunts, and asked for ‘Turton’s British Shells,’ for I always wanted to know the name and history of everything I found; then I collected all the land and freshwater shells I could find, as I could not getseashells—one of my longings—for I never saw the sea till after I was twenty, except for a few hours at Munsley in Norfolk, when I was eight years old. I have my little shells still; and have four or five varieties of Helix virgata: I think the number of rings increases as the shell goes on growing.‘In the autumn these shells are often suddenly observed in such great numbers as to give rise to the popular notion of their having fallen from the clouds. This shell is very hardy, and appears nearly insensible to cold, as it does not hybernate even when the ground is covered with snow.’[97]“I always fancied the Lord let them lie about in such numbers to be food for some little birds, or may be rooks and starlings, robins, etc., in cold weather when there was so little to eat.“I dare say you know how the blackbirds and thrushes eat the larger snails. I have often seen in the woods a very pretty coloured shell lying on a white stone,—the birds had put it there to crack a hole in it and to take out the snail. The shell looked such a pretty clear colour because it was alive, and yet empty.”

“Dear Mr. Ruskin,—As I have just read the last part of February ‘Fors,’ I want to say what I know about the little shells—(Helix virgata—I suppose). I think—indeed, am pretty sure, nearly, if not quite—all those shells had little live snails in them. I have found them in quantities on the South Downs near Lewes, on Roundway Hill near Devizes, near Lyme Regis, in North Wales; and before any of those places, on our own Hampton Common in Gloucestershire, where my sisters and myself used to gather those and other pretty ones when we were children. If you have any stored by, in a few months I think you will find them (if not shut up) walk away.

“When I was a girl I once had to choose a birthday present from one of my aunts, and asked for ‘Turton’s British Shells,’ for I always wanted to know the name and history of everything I found; then I collected all the land and freshwater shells I could find, as I could not getseashells—one of my longings—for I never saw the sea till after I was twenty, except for a few hours at Munsley in Norfolk, when I was eight years old. I have my little shells still; and have four or five varieties of Helix virgata: I think the number of rings increases as the shell goes on growing.

‘In the autumn these shells are often suddenly observed in such great numbers as to give rise to the popular notion of their having fallen from the clouds. This shell is very hardy, and appears nearly insensible to cold, as it does not hybernate even when the ground is covered with snow.’[97]

“I always fancied the Lord let them lie about in such numbers to be food for some little birds, or may be rooks and starlings, robins, etc., in cold weather when there was so little to eat.

“I dare say you know how the blackbirds and thrushes eat the larger snails. I have often seen in the woods a very pretty coloured shell lying on a white stone,—the birds had put it there to crack a hole in it and to take out the snail. The shell looked such a pretty clear colour because it was alive, and yet empty.”

Yes; the Holy Ghost of Life, not yet finally departed, can still give fair colours even to an empty shell. Evangelical friends,—worms, as you have long called yourselves, here is a deeper expression of humility suggested possible: may not some of you be only painted shells of worms,—alive, yet empty?

Assuming my shell to be Helix virgata, I take down my magnificent French—(let me see if I can write its title without a mistake)—“Manuel de Conchyliologie et de Paléontologie Conchyliologique,” or, in English, “Manual of Shell-talking and Old-body-talking in a Shell-talking manner.” Eight hundred largest octavo—more like folio—pages of close print, with four thousand and odd (nearly five thousand) exquisite engravings of shells; and among them I look for the creatures elegantly, but inaccurately, called by modern naturalists Gasteropods; in English, Belly-feet, (meaning, of course, to say Belly-walkers, for they haven’t got any feet); and among these I find, with much pains, one that is rather like mine, of which I am told that it belongs to the sixteenth sort in the second tribe of[98]the second family of the first sub-order of the second order of the Belly-walkers, and that it is called ‘Adeorbis subcarinatus,’—Adeorbis by Mr. Wood, and subcarinatus by Mr. Montagu; but I am not told where it is found, nor what sort of creature lives in it, nor any single thing whatever about it, except that it is “sufficiently depressed” (“assez déprimée”), and “deeply enough navelled” (assez profondement ombiliquée,—but how on earth can I tell when a shell is navelled to a depth, in the author’s opinion, satisfactory?) and that the turns (taken by the family), are ‘little numerous’ (peu nombreux). On the whole, I am not disposed to think my shell is here described, and put my splendid book in its place again.

I next try my English Cuvier, in sixteen octavo volumes; in which I find no notice whatever taken of these minor snails, except a list of thirty-three species, finishing with an etc.; out of which I mark ‘Cretacea,’ ‘Terrestris,’ and ‘Nivea,’ as perhaps likely to fit mine; and then I come, by order of Atropos, on this amazing account of the domestic arrangements of a little French snail, “Helix decollata” (Guillotined snail?) with references to “Cm. Chemn. cxxxvi. 1254–1257,” a species which “has the singular habit of successively fracturing the whorls at the top, (origin, that is,—snails building their houses from heaven towards earth,) of the spire, so that at a particular epoch, of all the whorls of the spire originally possessed by this bulimus, not a single[99]one remains.” Bulimus,—what’s a bulimus? Helix is certainly a screw, and bulimus—in my Riddle’s dictionary—is said to be “empty-bellied.” Then this French snail, revolutionary in the manner of a screw, appears to be a belly-walker with an empty belly, and no neck,—who literally “breaks up” his establishment every year! Query—breaks? or melts? Contraction or confusion?

I must put my fine English book back in its place, too;—but here, at last, comes a ‘work of light’ to help us, from my favourite pupil, who was out with me that day on the Downs, and nearly killed himself with keeping a fox in sight on foot, up and down them;—happily surviving, he has pursued the slower creature for me to its cave of silver earth; and writes thus.

Common garden snail shells of various ages.

“I have sent you two little boxes—one containing common garden snail shells of various ages, and the other black striped Down shells; and you will see that in Box 1 the full-grown ones, with the strong finished lip, have four whorls each, and all the full-grown garden shells I have noticed had the same number, though they varied a little in size. The next largest in the box have only three and a half turns, but if they had lived longer they would have added on another half turn, bigger than all the[100]rest of the shell put together. In fact, if one looks at this shell, one sees that any half whorl is half as large again as all the rest of the shell before it. Then, besides these, there are four or five younger shells, the smallest of which has only two and a half whorls, which exactly correspond to two and a half whorls taken from any of the larger shells; so I think we may conclude that a shell grows by adding onlength onlyto the large end of a tapering tube, like a dunce’s cap, which, however, is curled up like a ram’s horn, to look prettier, take up less room, and allow the occupant to beat a retreat round the corner when a robin comes. By-the-bye, I wonder some birds don’t grow bills like corkscrews, to get at the snails with.“Then in box No. 2 there are several black striped Down shells, and the full-grown ones have six whorls, and the smallest ones, which died young, some four and some five, according to age; but the dunce’s cap is longer, and so there are more whorls.“I couldn’t get these facts clearly stated in two handbooks which I read. I suppose they took it for granted that one knew; but I found, what after all would lead one to infer the rest, that the young snail at birth corresponds to the colourlessAPEXof the shell, and that the colour only comes in that part which grows under the influence of light and air.”

“I have sent you two little boxes—one containing common garden snail shells of various ages, and the other black striped Down shells; and you will see that in Box 1 the full-grown ones, with the strong finished lip, have four whorls each, and all the full-grown garden shells I have noticed had the same number, though they varied a little in size. The next largest in the box have only three and a half turns, but if they had lived longer they would have added on another half turn, bigger than all the[100]rest of the shell put together. In fact, if one looks at this shell, one sees that any half whorl is half as large again as all the rest of the shell before it. Then, besides these, there are four or five younger shells, the smallest of which has only two and a half whorls, which exactly correspond to two and a half whorls taken from any of the larger shells; so I think we may conclude that a shell grows by adding onlength onlyto the large end of a tapering tube, like a dunce’s cap, which, however, is curled up like a ram’s horn, to look prettier, take up less room, and allow the occupant to beat a retreat round the corner when a robin comes. By-the-bye, I wonder some birds don’t grow bills like corkscrews, to get at the snails with.

“Then in box No. 2 there are several black striped Down shells, and the full-grown ones have six whorls, and the smallest ones, which died young, some four and some five, according to age; but the dunce’s cap is longer, and so there are more whorls.

“I couldn’t get these facts clearly stated in two handbooks which I read. I suppose they took it for granted that one knew; but I found, what after all would lead one to infer the rest, that the young snail at birth corresponds to the colourlessAPEXof the shell, and that the colour only comes in that part which grows under the influence of light and air.”

“Wednesday, Feb. 9.“Another fact is, that all the shells I ever remember looking at grow in the direction of the sun.“Another fact. Since the shells have been in this room, my chimneypiece has been full of sleepy, small, long-bodied spiders, which had gone to sleep for the winter in these black and white caverns, out of the reach of flocks of half-starved larks and starlings.”

“Wednesday, Feb. 9.

“Another fact is, that all the shells I ever remember looking at grow in the direction of the sun.

“Another fact. Since the shells have been in this room, my chimneypiece has been full of sleepy, small, long-bodied spiders, which had gone to sleep for the winter in these black and white caverns, out of the reach of flocks of half-starved larks and starlings.”

I drew the three advancing stages of the common snail’s houses, thus sent me, forthwith; and Mr. Burgess[101]swiftly and rightly engraves them. Note that the apparent irregularities in the spirals are conditions of perspective, necessarily affecting the deeply projecting forms; note also that each whorl is partly hidden by the subsequent one, built with its edge lapping over it; and finally, that there is really, I believe, a modification, to some extent, and enlargement, of the inner whorls; until the domestic creature is satisfied with its length of cave, and expresses its rest in accomplished labour and full age, by putting that binding lip round its border, and term to its hope.

Wherein, building for the earth, we may wisely imitate it. Of other building, not with slime for mortar, yet heavenward, we may perhaps conceive in due time.

I beg all my readers, but especially my Companions, to read with their best care the paper by Mr. Girdlestone, which, by the author’s kindly gift, I am enabled to send them with this Fors. It is the most complete and logical statement of Economic truth, in the points it touches, that I have ever seen in the English language: and to master it will be the best possible preparation for the study of personal duties to which I shall invite my Companions in my next letter.[103]

1See note at end of this letter.↑2I have got no Turks yet in the Company: when any join it, I will give them Koran enough for what I ask of them.↑3Every day taking more away than the one before it.↑4Compare Letter XXI., p. 13.↑5I have desired Mr. Ward to prepare small photographs of this design, in case any reader cares to have it,—but mind, it is not altogether done according to Mr. Stopford Brooke’s notion of the object of true art, “to please”—(see page 88 of the Manual of English Literature, just published by that omniscient divine—under the auspices of the all-and-sundry-scient Mr. T. R. Green, M.A.,—so, if you only want to be pleased, you had better not order it. But at any rate, order, if you wish to understand the next coming Fors, the Etruscan Leucothea, for comparison with your Lippi Madonna. Mr. Ward will have it ready with my signature about the time next Fors comes out;—or you can get it, unmounted, for a shilling, from Mr. Parker’s agent in Rome.↑

1See note at end of this letter.↑2I have got no Turks yet in the Company: when any join it, I will give them Koran enough for what I ask of them.↑3Every day taking more away than the one before it.↑4Compare Letter XXI., p. 13.↑5I have desired Mr. Ward to prepare small photographs of this design, in case any reader cares to have it,—but mind, it is not altogether done according to Mr. Stopford Brooke’s notion of the object of true art, “to please”—(see page 88 of the Manual of English Literature, just published by that omniscient divine—under the auspices of the all-and-sundry-scient Mr. T. R. Green, M.A.,—so, if you only want to be pleased, you had better not order it. But at any rate, order, if you wish to understand the next coming Fors, the Etruscan Leucothea, for comparison with your Lippi Madonna. Mr. Ward will have it ready with my signature about the time next Fors comes out;—or you can get it, unmounted, for a shilling, from Mr. Parker’s agent in Rome.↑

1See note at end of this letter.↑

1See note at end of this letter.↑

2I have got no Turks yet in the Company: when any join it, I will give them Koran enough for what I ask of them.↑

2I have got no Turks yet in the Company: when any join it, I will give them Koran enough for what I ask of them.↑

3Every day taking more away than the one before it.↑

3Every day taking more away than the one before it.↑

4Compare Letter XXI., p. 13.↑

4Compare Letter XXI., p. 13.↑

5I have desired Mr. Ward to prepare small photographs of this design, in case any reader cares to have it,—but mind, it is not altogether done according to Mr. Stopford Brooke’s notion of the object of true art, “to please”—(see page 88 of the Manual of English Literature, just published by that omniscient divine—under the auspices of the all-and-sundry-scient Mr. T. R. Green, M.A.,—so, if you only want to be pleased, you had better not order it. But at any rate, order, if you wish to understand the next coming Fors, the Etruscan Leucothea, for comparison with your Lippi Madonna. Mr. Ward will have it ready with my signature about the time next Fors comes out;—or you can get it, unmounted, for a shilling, from Mr. Parker’s agent in Rome.↑

5I have desired Mr. Ward to prepare small photographs of this design, in case any reader cares to have it,—but mind, it is not altogether done according to Mr. Stopford Brooke’s notion of the object of true art, “to please”—(see page 88 of the Manual of English Literature, just published by that omniscient divine—under the auspices of the all-and-sundry-scient Mr. T. R. Green, M.A.,—so, if you only want to be pleased, you had better not order it. But at any rate, order, if you wish to understand the next coming Fors, the Etruscan Leucothea, for comparison with your Lippi Madonna. Mr. Ward will have it ready with my signature about the time next Fors comes out;—or you can get it, unmounted, for a shilling, from Mr. Parker’s agent in Rome.↑

Back to IndexNext