and the poor soul slides into utter vice as a boat
adrift goes down into the sea.

Look into the quarters of this poverty: for
convenience, in some of the streets about Good-
man's Fields, swarming like ant-hills : shoals of
children of all ages below four or five encum-
bering the road-way, careless of carriage wheels,
for no vehicle ever enters here except the huck-
ster's cart or the parish hearse; frousy, sodden,
beer-soaked faces of women thrust out at the
windows, cursing their brats who cry in the dirt
below; sauntering men who look at you, if you
are decently dressed, as if your personal safety
were a wrong and injustice to them; young girls,
filthy, slatternly, leering, jeering, and ogling,
imagination can readily conceive what for. Men
do not grow to manhood in such slums and sun-
less ways, or women to virtue or dignity. All is
squalor and filth and utter degradation of the
divine image. And this is one of the inevitable
results of the highest civilisation, as certainly as
that London is greatest and most civic of all
great cities.

For the other great result you have not far
to go. In that region of grim and forbidding
palaces, which, like Ali Baba's cave, are nothing



AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 81

to him who has not, but everything for him
who has, the "open sesame," any one will answer
our purpose this one, for instance, with a
covered way from the door to the street, lest its
dainty inmates should catch a drop of rain on
the way to their carriage. Within all is order
and decorous silence. The foot falls on deep-
piled carpets. In the intonation of the low-toned
command is the highest expression of that incom-
municable, indescribable, and, except by genera-
tions of cultivation, unattainable quality we call
high breeding. In the reply to it is that perfect
antithesis in breeding, which we ought to call
low the profound, unquestioning, and unhesi-
tating prostration of self of the traditional hered-
itary " servant, " disciplined like a soldier, who,
as his master never permits himself to express
a disturbing emotion, never allows himself an
expression of surprise or a word of comment ;
whose self-command is as great as his master's,
perhaps greater a well apparelled statue, save
when an order is given ; whose bows and defer-
ence for his master's guests are graduated by the
distance at which they sit from the head of the
table ; a human creature that sees nothing,
knows nothing, and believes nothing which his
master does not expect him to see and know and
believe ; who, if he thinks of a heaven at all,
never dreams that it can be the same thing for
his master and himself: he hopes to meet his
father and grandfather and great-grandfather in

the servants' hall of that celestial abode where

F



82 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON

his master and all the family for countless gener-
ations will dwell in their mundane state ; his
brains could no more take in the parable of
Dives and Lazarus than the laws of Kepler, and
the most insensate Chartist or Radical could
never inspire in him an ambition to be any-
thing beyond butler in his master's mansion.

All the gorgeousness and luxury about them
master and servant are the fit trappings of
the gentleman's estate. They two make one, a
kind of social centaur, a single brain and a
double body. The civic mechanism necessitates
other grades of mankind, but this is the summit
level. The centaur may be the highest expres-
sion of human culture; he may be a mere vehicle
of pleasures betting, horse-racing, with no con-
ception of or respect for that culture. He is to
all the world the personation of human dignity,
and the King or Queen is only the head of his
order. He may enjoy the refinements his ances-
tors' wealth has gathered round him, and justify
his position, or he may bury himself deeper in
stultifying indulgences by the weight of it be
the best or worst of men; he is still the cynosure
of the Old World's regards milord Anglais. In
his sphere the echo of social wants and wrongs
dies away; the tenants on his estate are as well
cared for as his favourite flocks, and he does his
duty to all who depend socially on him. Beyond,
all is ignored which disturbs the serenity of that
earthly heaven in whose immobility he abides. For
his existence, civilisation, law, order, the church,



AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 83

army, and navy are the guaranties and pre-requis-
ites. It is for him, according to the original theory
of the British constitution, that the state exists.

In other European countries of approximate
civilisation, his congener has gone under ; he,
wiser, draws up to him the social elements that
might menace his supremacy, and which, by their
necessity to the state, are necessary to him
the banker, the successful administrator, soldier,
admiral, and even the church, whose power is not
of this world, is led in by its lord bishops. So
that the centaur, being the governing and the
governed in one, wins over from any possible
opposition, whatever elements may be assimilated
to his class, which outside its limits might be
dangerous, and so fights off the fate which has
befallen his congeners of the Continent.

In the strictest social creed of the centaur, it is
held as an essential to this assimilation that the
candidate shall not only never have done any-
thing useful for its due compensation, but that
society shall not be able to remember when one
of his ancestors did so, the bluest blood being
that of him whose remote forefather did but
follow the original centaurial proposition of
taking all that they wanted wherever they found
it, and, by levying contributions on all the classes
of society, enabling his remotest heirs and suc-
cessors to enjoy the proceeds in complete and
reputable abstention from gain by any useful
employment useless labour, such as breeding
and running race-horses, etc., or unpaid labour



84 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON

in science and art being perfectly allowable and
possibly praiseworthy, with centaurial honours.

Although socially dominant in all England, the
centaur is only to be known in London in
perfection, or the extent of his dominance to
be recognised. He must have his residence in
London, no matter how many others he may
have, and it must be worthy his position. There
are here and there certain literary and intellec-
tual heresies and heretics refusing to recognise
centaurdom as the highest of human good ; but,
in general, the people accept the distinction by
which, when they are overridden by the cen-
taurs, they are privileged to override some one
else in the grade below them, and each one in
the long file of social gradation is permitted and
perhaps expected to be a toady to the superior,
and a bully to the inferior grades. And down
to the very substratum of beggars and crossing-
sweepers, there is a keen recognition of the
social stamp of "useless" and "useful," and an
inherent contempt of the latter individual as
such. I have noticed scores of times that, when
I was carrying a package through the streets of
London, the beggars and sweepers paid no atten-
tion to me. The centaur and the beggar agree
in one thing, that a man who carries his own
parcels is beneath their social recognition.

It is to London, as the centre of all that
England is or can be, that these two classes
gravitate the poles of civilised humanity ; no-
where but in London could they find their com-



AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 85

mensurate importance, and here they attain their
highest perfection and greatest development.
Beggary and aristocracy are the productions par
excellence of the metropolis of civilisation; the
traits which, even more than its size and wealth,
distinguish it from all the cities of the earth.

And from all this antagonism of extremes,
from all the heat and ferment of this alembic
of humanity there comes not only much refuse
dead matter which goes back to decay and
first disorganisation but there distils the truest,
divinest spirit humanity can embody. Here does
but disengage more quickly and more perfectly,
what may be of better than aristocracy and
more beautiful than court or state. If the
individual is securest in his individuality, if the
one talent is best buried in the retirement of
rustic life, if philosopher and poet find in their
hearts to say with their Roman confrere, "ProcuZ,
procul este profana" and float tranquilly down
the stream of life alone, yet in the thickest
melee is the most strength won; and in spite
of the terrible perversion of Christianity, and
the palsying condition of social organisation,
one can find here the rarest types of Christian
and of mankind. Who escapes humanity shuns
God.

I am not a lover of great cities; their ambi-
tions and ideals, their vulgarities and their
urbanities, are alike distasteful to me; but I
must say that I have known in London the
most angelic natures that it has ever been in



86 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON

my lot to encounter. Perhaps I should have seen
still better if my eyes had been open wider.

And it is in this very class which I have, in
no disparaging sense, termed centauric, the aris-
tocracy, where social independence has reached
its highest, that we find here and there, cased
like the flower and fruit of this mighty growth,
in extraneous and deciduous leafage, that best
type of humanity as the world knows it, the
true English gentlefolk beings whose exterior
decorum may be counterfeited by an emulator,
whose inmost gentleness and courtesy may be
shadowed forth in peer or peasant who love
their kind, and feel the common bond of divine
birth ; but whose most perfect expression of noble
demeanour and large - heartedness can only be
found where the best type of mind has been
permitted the largest and richest culture and the
completest freedom of hereditary development in
the most favourable external circumstances. There
are nobles and noblemen men who seem to be
conscious only that surrounding men are lower
than they; and others whose illumination per-
vades every one near them and brings all up
into the same world of light and sweetness.
The prestige of nobility is founded on a true
human instinct; occasionally one finds an English
nobleman who justifies its existence, and makes
U8 snobs in spite of our democracy.

I could, I am certain, point to Americans who,
in every substantial trait of the gentleman, will
stand comparison with any aristocrat born men



AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 87

in whom gentlehood has grown to hereditary
ripeness; the third and fourth generations of
men who have cultivated on American soil the
virtues of honesty, morality, sincerity, courtesy,
self-abnegation, humanity, benevolence ; men and
women whose babyhood was cradled in those
influences which make what we call "good breed-
ing," and to whom the various vulgarities of our
parvenu princes are as foreign as to the bluest-
blooded heir of Norman fortune; and this is to
me a more grateful and sympathetic type of
humanity than that of its English congener. But
to this will always be lacking one grace which
that may possess the majesty of the born
legislator and ruler; the air of habitual com-
mand and control, hereditary as are all generic
traits, good or bad, and which imposes itself on
the consciousness of all men. This, be it for the
bettering or the worsering of the type, is to
our democratic, ruled, levelled, and ballot-boxed
civilisation forbidden forever; and the fustian
heredities of quickly and perhaps ill-made million-
aires, for ever so many times told, will never be
other than a curious caricature of it. Theoretic-
ally, we must gainsay it; but when all is said,
be it of our original paradise-planting, or a devil's
graft got among the thorns and thistles of our
exile, the growth of a certain reverence for a
time-honoured nobility has become a part of
every gentle nature, which only time and as-
siduity can, but which they certainly will eradi-
cate but not to-day, nor while the English



88 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON

nobility is what, as a whole, it is. We may
prefer, in our struggles of race, the independence
of the Athenian hoplite, of the quick-footed
runner; but the centaur had his side of the
story, and the same marble immortalises them
both.

We Americans are fond of talking of being
our own masters; but the man who is his own
master is also his own servant. A well-dis-
ciplined army is the type of highest human de-
velopment compassionate, unflinching strategy
in its head; intelligent, unhesitating and unques-
tioning obedience in its body. He who in an
army will exercise his own judgment and will, is
a mutineer. Independence means isolation and
incompletion ; association is the true life, social,
political, and spiritual.

The empire of England owes its existence to
this phenomenon. The brain to command coupled
with the nerve to obey, and both to care less
for annihilation than for defeat; the will to
lead and the will to follow, co-ordination as if
of brain and hand; the union of antitheses in an
existence more effective and powerful, socially
and politically, than the most perfect individu-
ality that is what I mean by the centaur, a
higher evolution of civic life than our boasted
political equality and personal independence.
This makes empire possible and reconcilable
with the good of ruler and ruled alike. And
more than this, it is the greatest element in that
cause which has for effect that, while every other



AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 89

wealthy nation in our time is drifting into a
social conflict of ominous outlook, with grow-
ing political and social corruption, England has
steadily risen in civic and political purity.
Wherever else I look, in Europe, at least, I see
only reform by revolution, while in England it
comes steadily by law.

London is indeed a microcosm, not merely that
it is large, but because everything is in it; and
with all its intense commonplaceness and hum-
drum conservatism, there is a degree of un-
expectedness which keeps one on an intellectual
alert. No city grows like it; yet you pass from
quarters of new palaces, on ground which even
I remember as once an expanse of kitchen-
gardens as remote from metropolitanism as the
hop-fields of Kent, to others where the dinginess
of the Middle Ages seems to linger, and where
the only change of the century past must be
of deaths and births; into "no thoroughfare"
squares, round which the flood of improvement
has swept without entering; into places that
impress one with the idea of antiquity far more
than does the Parthenon or the Colosseum, dusty,
grassy, and silent, where, if you chance to see
a merry, playing child, it startles you as an an-
achronism. One day, perhaps, the republic and
the proletary and the boulevard will come: be
sure that they will be to the breaking of many
hearts grown old in a world of circumstance and
association which will not suffer change.

But, to the mere passenger, London's most



90 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON

attractive point is her suburban wealth the
lovely wedding of city and country in Richmond,
Twickenham, and Barnes, and so all round by
Clapham, Dulwich, Norwood, and the Crystal
Palace, but especially near the Thames, whose
lovely windings, with frequent villages and luxu-
riant meadows always green with that vivid
greenness which no climate besides this can boast
of, remind me of the early-summer Mohawk in
its most gentle portions. Great glades of oak and
elm come down to the water's edge, and a sward
that all the year round is like a carpet, with a
river-fringe of willows and flags, and the swans
going in and out undisturbed, following the ebb
down to the city even, and the flood back to
their homes, running the gauntlet of steamer
and wherry, with none to make them afraid;
and the lazy, picturesque barges drift down from
their inland markets, catching the ebb while
it serves, and waiting at anchor till it comes
again, their rusty tackle and tawny sails so
unlike what our seafaring man would settle his
fancy to, and yet so beloved by painters and
etchers.

Yes, London ends as it began, with the Thames.
The dreamy reaches of its upper course, with
their framing of rural picturesqueness, their
wealth of park and villa, the meed and stimulus at
once of the greatest of commercial communities,
run by insensible degrees of change into those so
unlike in all surroundings, so stirring and vibrant
with commerce and speculation; and the two



AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 91

extremes, corresponding as heart and brain the
one to the other, or as root and branch, are what
makes the life and immensity of London, and, in
one sense, of England. Above the river in which
the miserable perish and on which the fortunate
grow rich, runs the other tide whose flood leads
on to fortune, whose sources are in the sea empire,
and which debouches in the lands of the little
island; above the river of the painters and poets,
winding through the downs and meadows of the
rarest of cultivated landscape out to the reaches
where the melancholy sea breeds its fogs and
damp east winds, is that of the merchant and
politician, having its springs in the uttermost
parts of the earth, and pouring out its golden
tribute on the lands whence the other steals its
drift and ooze. Ill dawns the day for humanity
when England's prosperity finds its final flood.



JOHN RUSKIN



1 WAS sitting one afternoon with Longfellow, on
the porch of the old house at Cambridge, when
the conversation turned on intellectual develop-
ment, and he referred to a curious phenomenon,
of which he instanced several cases, and which he
compared to the double stars, of two minds not
personally related but forming a binary system,
revolving simultaneously around each other and
around some principle which they regarded in
different lights. I do not remember his instances,
but that which at once came to my mind was the
very interesting one of Turner and Ruskin. The
complementary relation of the great writer and
the imaginative painter is one of the most indeed,
the most interesting that I know in intellectual
history : the one a master in all that belongs to
verbal expression but singularly deficient in the
gifts of the artist, feeble in drawing, with a most
inaccurate perception of colour and no power of
invention; the other the most stupendous of
idealists, the most consummate master of colour
orchestration the world has ever seen, but so
curiously devoid of the gifts of language that he
could hardly learn to write grammatically or coher-
92



JOHN RUSKIN 93

ently, and when he spoke, omitting so many words
that often his utterances, like those of a child,
required interpretation by one accustomed to his
ways before a stranger could understand them.
Ruskin is a man reared and moulded in the
straightest Puritanism, abhorring uncleanness of
all kinds, generous to extravagance, moved by the
noblest humanitarian impulses, morbidly averse
to anything that partakes of sensuality, and re-
sponsive as a young girl to appeals to his ten-
derness and compassion. Turner was a miser ;
churlish ; a satyr in his morals not merely a
sensualist, but satisfied only by occasional in-
dulgences in the most degrading debauchery; and
even in his painting sometimes giving expression
to images so filthy that when, after his death, the
trustees came to overhaul his sketches, there were
many which they were obliged to destroy in regard
for common decency. It is hardly possible to
conceive of a more complete antithesis than that
in the natures of these two, who turn, and will
turn so long as English art and English letters
endure, around the same centre of art and each
around the other. In fact, to the great majority
of our race Turner is seen through the eyes of
Ruskin, and Ruskin is only known as the eulogist
of Turner.

The conjunction leaves both misunderstood by
the general mind. Ruskin looks at the works of
the great landscape painter much as the latter
looked at nature not for what is in the thing
looked at, but for the sentiments it awakens. The



94 JOHN RUSKIN

world's art does not present anything to rival
Turner's in its defiance of nature. He used nature
when it pleased him to do so, but when it pleased
him better he belied her with the most reckless
audacity. He had absolutely no respect for truth.
His colour was the most splendid of impossibilities,
and his topography like the geography of dreams ;
yet Ruskin has spent a great deal of his life in
persuading himself and the world that that colour
was scientifically correct, and in hunting for the
points of view from which he drew his composi-
tions. His conviction that Turner was always
doing his best, if in a mysterious way, to tell the
truth about nature is invincible. Early in the
period of my acquaintance with him we had a
vivacious discussion on this matter in his own
house; and to convince him that Turner was
quite indifferent as to matters of natural pheno-
mena, I called Ruskin's attention to the view out
of the window, which was of the Surrey hills, a
rolling country whose grassy heights were basking
in a glorious summer sunlight and backed by a
pure blue sky, requesting him then to have
brought down from the room where it was hung
a drawing by Turner in which a similar effect was
treated. The hill in nature was, as it always will
be if covered by vegetation and under the same
circumstances, distinctly darker than the sky;
Turner's was relieved in pale yellow green against
a deep blue sky, stippled down to a delicious aerial
profundity. Ruskin gave up the case in point, but
still clung to the general rule. In fact, having



JOHN BUSKIN 95

begun his system of art teaching on the hypothesis
that Turner's way of seeing nature was scientific-
ally the most correct that art knew, he had never
been able to abandon it and admit that Turner
only sought, as was the case, chromatic relations
which had no more to do with facts of colour than
the music of Mendelssohn's " Wedding March "
has to do with the emotions of the occasion on
which it is played. His assumption of Turner's
veracity is the corner-stone of his system, and
its rejection would be the demolition of that
system.

His art criticism is radically and irretrievably
wrong. That which makes art what it is, as art,
has absolutely nothing to do with the phenomena
of nature. Even limiting the term Art to that
form of it embraced in Design, this is true. The
end of art, as art, is decoration; and the earliest,
as well as some of the most exquisite decoration we
know of, is in combination of forms and colours
which are not borrowed from nature. Some of the
best art in the world is devoted to the invention
of purely conventional forms for purely decorative
purposes, and in decorative work any attempt at
distinct naturalism is at once felt as degrading the
decoration. One day that Ruskin and myself were
discussing the theory of art, he asked me to
formulate one. I complied, with this, "Art is the
harmonic (rhythmic or melodic) expression of
human emotion." He expressed himself so pleased
with it that he asked permission to give it in a note
to one of the later volumes of " Modern Painters,"



96 JOHN RUSKIN

which he was then passing through the press. It
never appeared. On second thought, he doubtless
perceived that it clashed with the expressions he
had employed in the work. Art does not lie in
representing nature, but in the manner of repre-
senting her, and may equally be employed in
invented and conventional forms, as in repeating
hers. Naturalism and art are the eternal antithesis
as one rises the other sinks in the scale of the
general results. No art can be gauged by its
fidelity to nature unless we admit in that term the
wider sense which makes nature of the human
soul and all that is the sense of music, the per-
ception of beauty, the grasp of imagination, " the
light that never was, on sea or land," as well as
that which serves the lens of the photographer;
and Ruskin's own work, his teaching in his classes,
and his application of his own standards to all
great work, show that he understands the term
"fidelity to nature" to mean the adherence to
physical facts, the scientific aspects of nature.
Greek art he never has really sympathised with,
nor at heart accepted as supreme, though years
after he took the position he never has avowedly
abandoned, he found that in Greek coinage there
were artistic qualities of the highest refinement;