Stray Studies from England and Italy Part 7

[8] "Fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella."

[9] "Agnosco veteris vestigia ammae."

[10] "Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori, Dum mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere."

[11] "Nec me meminisse pigebit Elissae."

TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.

I.

VENICE AND ROME.

It is the strangeness and completeness of the contrast which makes one's first row from Venice to Torcello so hard to forget. Behind us the great city sinks slowly into a low line of domes and towers; around us, dotted here and there over the gleaming surface, are the orange sails of trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose boatmen bandy _lazzi_ and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with which one pa.s.ses from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred with soft lines of violet light and broken with reflections of wall and bell-tower, into this presence of desolation and death. A whole world seems to part those dreary flats broken with lifeless inlets, those patches of sodden fields flung shapelessly among sheets of sullen water, from the life and joy of the Grand Ca.n.a.l. And yet really to understand the origin of Venice, those ages of terror and flight and exile in which the Republic took its birth, we must study them at Torcello. It was from the vast Alpine chain which hangs in the haze of midday like a long dim cloud-line to the north that the hordes of Hun and Goth burst on the Roman world. Their path lay, along the coast trending round to the west, where lost among little villages that stand out white in the distant shadow lie the sites of Heraclea and Altinum. Across these grey shallows cut by the blue serpentine windings of deeper channels the Romans of the older province of Venetia on the mainland fled before Attila or Theodoric or Alboin to found the new Venetia of the lagoon. Eastward over Lido the glimmer of the Adriatic recalls the long centuries of the Pirate war, that, struggle for life which shaped into their after-form the government and destinies of the infant state. Venice itself, the crown and end of struggle and of flight, lies over s.h.i.+ning miles of water to the south. But it is here that one can best study the story of its birth; it is easier to realize those centuries of exile and buffeting for life amid the dreary flats, the solitude, the poverty of Torcello than beneath the gleaming front of the Ducal Palace or the mosaics of St. Mark.

Here in fact lies the secret of Venetian history, the one key by which it is possible to understand the strange riddle of the Republic. For thirteen centuries Venice lay moored as it were off the coast of Western Europe, without political a.n.a.logue or social parallel. Its patriciate, its people, its government were not what government or people or patriciate were in other countries of Western Christendom. The difference lay not in any peculiar inst.i.tutions which it had developed, or in any novel form of social or administrative order which it had invented, but in the very origin of the State itself. We see this the better if we turn from Venice to our own homeland. The same age saw the birth of the two great maritime Powers of modern Europe, for the settlements of the English in Britain cover the same century with those of the Roman exiles in the Venetian Lagoon. But the English colonization was the establishment of a purely Teutonic State on the wreck of Rome, while the Venetian was the establishment of a purely Roman State in the face of the Teuton. Venice in its origin was simply the Imperial province of Venetia floated across to the islands of the sh.o.r.e. Before the successive waves of the northern inroad the citizens of the coast fled to the sandbanks which had long served them as gardens or merchant-ports. The "Chair of Attila," the rough stone seat beside the church of San Fosco, preserves the memory of one destroyer before whom a third part of the people of Altinum fled to Torcello and the islands around. Their city--even materially--pa.s.sed with them. The new houses were built from the ruins of the old. The very stones of Altinum served for the "New Altinum" which arose on the desolate isle, and inscriptions, pillars, capitals came in the track of the exiles across the lagoon to be worked into the fabric of its cathedral.

Neither citizens nor city were changed even in name. They had put out for security a few miles to sea, but the sandbanks on which they landed were still Venetia. The fugitive patricians were neither more nor less citizens of the imperial province because they had fled from Padua or Altinum to Malamocco or Torcello. Their political allegiance was still due to the Empire. Their social organization remained unaffected by the flight. So far were they from being severed from Rome, so far from entertaining any dreams of starting afresh in the "new democracy" which exists in the imagination of Daru and his followers, that the one boast of their annalists is that they are more Roman than the Romans themselves. Their n.o.bles looked with contempt on the barbaric blood which had tainted that of the Colonnas or the Orsini, nor did any Isaurian peasant ever break the Roman line of Doges as Leo broke the line of Roman Emperors. Venice--as she proudly styled herself in after time--was "the legitimate daughter of Rome." The strip of sea-board from the Brenta to the Isonzo was the one spot in the Empire from the Caspian to the Atlantic where foot of barbarian never trod. And as it rose, so it set. From that older world of which it was a part the history of Venice stretched on to the French Revolution untouched by Teutonic influences. The old Roman life which became strange even to the Capitol lingered unaltered, unimpaired, beside the palace of the duke. The strange ducal cap, the red ducal slippers, the fan of bright feathers borne before the ducal chair, all came unchanged from ages when they were the distinctions of every great officer of the Imperial State. It is startling to think that almost within the memory of living men Venice brought Rome--the Rome of Ambrose and Theodosius--to the very doors of the Western world; that the living and unchanged tradition of the Empire pa.s.sed away only with the last of the Doges. Only on the tomb of Manin could men write truthfully, "Hic jacet ultimus Romanorum."

It is this simple continuance of the old social organization which the barbarians elsewhere overthrew that explains the peculiar character of the Venetian patriciate. In all other countries of the West the new feudal aristocracy sprang from the Teutonic invaders. In Italy itself the n.o.bles were descendants of Lombard conquerors, or of the barons who followed Emperor after Emperor across the Alps. Even when their names and characters had alike been moulded into Southern form, the "Seven Houses" of Pisa boasted of their descent from the seven barons of Emperor Otto. But the older genealogies of the senators whose names stood written in the Golden Book of Venice ran, truly or falsely, not to Teutonic but to Roman origins. The Partic.i.p.azii, the Dandoli, the Falieri, the Foscari, told of the flight of their Roman fathers before the barbarian sword from Pavia, Gaeta, Fano, Messina. Every quarter of Italy had given its exiles, but above all the coast round the head of the Gulf from Ravenna to Trieste. It was especially a flight and settlement of n.o.bles. As soon as the barbaric hordes had swept away to the South the farmer or the peasant would creep back to his fields and his cabin and submit to the German master whom the conquest had left behind it. But the patrician had filled too great a place in the old social order to stoop easily to the new. He remained camped as before in his island-refuge, among a crowd of dependents, his fishermen, his dock-labourers. Throughout the long ages which followed, this original form of Venetian society remained unchanged. The populace of dependents never grew into a people. To the last fisherman and gondolier clung to the great houses of which they were the clients, as the fishers of Torcello had clung to the great n.o.bles of Altinum. No difference of tradition or language or blood parted them. Tradition, on the contrary, bound them together. No democratic agitator could appeal from the present to the past, as Rienzi invoked the memories of the Tribunate against the feudal tyranny of the Colonnas. In Venice the past and present were one. The patrician of Venice simply governed the State as his fathers, the curials of Padua or Aquileia, had governed the State ten centuries before him.

It is this unity of Venetian society which makes Venetian history so unlike the history of other Italian towns, and to which Venice owes the peculiar picturesqueness and brightness which charms us still in its decay. Elsewhere the history of mediaeval Italy sprang from the difference of race and tradition between conquered and conquerors, between Lombard n.o.ble and Italian serf. The communal revolt of the twelfth century, the democratic const.i.tutions of Milan or of Bologna, were in effect a rising of race against race, the awakening of a new people in the effort to throw off the yoke of the stranger. The huge embattled piles which flung their dark shadows over the streets of Florence tell of the ceaseless war between baronage and people. The famous penalty by which some of the democratic communes condemned a recreant cobbler or tinker to "descend" as his worst punishment "into the order of the _n.o.blesse_," tells of the hate and issue of the struggle between them. But no trace of struggle or of hate breaks the annals of Venice. There is no people, no democratic Broletto, no Hall of the Commune. And as there was no "people," so in the mediaeval sense of the word there was no "baronage." The n.o.bles of Venice were not Lombard barons but Roman patricians, untouched by feudal traditions or by the strong instinct of personal independence which created feudalism. The shadow of the Empire is always over them, they look for greatness not to independent power or strife, but to joint co-operation in the government of the State. Their instinct is administrative, they shrink from disorder as from a barbaric thing, they are citizens, and n.o.bles only because they are citizens. Of this political att.i.tude of its patricians Venice is itself the type. The palaces of Torcello or Rialto were houses, not of war, but of peace; no dark ma.s.ses of tower and wall, but bright with marbles and frescoes, and broken with arcades of fretted masonry.

Venice, in a word, to her very close was a city of n.o.bles, the one place in the modern world where the old senatorial houses of the fifth century lived and ruled as of old. But it was a city of Roman n.o.bles.

Like the Teutonic pa.s.sion for war the Teutonic scorn of commerce was strange and unknown to the curial houses of the Italian munic.i.p.alities, as it had been strange and unknown to the greatest houses of Rome. The Senator of Padua or Aquileia, of Concordia, Altinum, or Ravenna, had always been a merchant, and in his new refuge he remained a merchant still. Venice was no "crowd of poor fishermen," as it has been sometimes described, who were gradually drawn to wider ventures and a larger commerce. The port of Aquileia had long been the emporium of a trade which reached northwards to the Danube and eastward to Byzantium. What the Roman merchants of Venetia had been at Aquileia they remained at Grado. The commerce of Altinum simply transferred itself to Torcello.

The Paduan merchants pa.s.sed to their old port of Rialto. Vague and rhetorical as is the letter of Ca.s.siodorus, it shows how keen was the mercantile activity of the State from its beginning. Nothing could be more natural, more continuous in its historical developement; nothing was more startling, more incomprehensible to the new world which had grown up in German moulds. The n.o.bles of Henry VIII.'s Court could not restrain their sneer at "the fishermen of Venice," the stately patricians who could look back from merchant-n.o.ble to merchant-n.o.ble through ages when the mushroom houses of England were unheard of. Only the genius of Shakspere seized the grandeur of a social organization which was still one with that of Rome and Athens and Tyre. The merchant of Venice is with him "a royal merchant." His "argosies o'ertop the petty traffickers." At the moment when feudalism was about to vanish away, the poet comprehended the grandeur of that commerce which it scorned and the grandeur of the one State which had carried the n.o.bler cla.s.sic tradition across ages of brutality and ignorance. The great commercial State, whose merchants are n.o.bles, whose n.o.bles are Romans, rises in all its majesty before us in the 'Merchant of Venice.'

TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.

II.

VENICE AND TINTORETTO.

The fall of Venice dates from the League of Cambray, but her victory over the crowd of her a.s.sailants was followed by half a century of peace and glory such as she had never known. Her losses on the mainland were in reality a gain, enforcing as they did the cessation of that policy of Italian aggression which had eaten like a canker into the resources of the State and drawn her from her natural career of commerce and aggrandizement on the sea. If the political power of Venice became less, her political influence grew greater than ever. The statesmen of France, of England, and of Germany studied in the cool, grave school of her Senate. We need only turn to 'Oth.e.l.lo' to find reflected the universal reverence for the wisdom of her policy and the order of her streets. No policy, however wise, could indeed avert her fall. The Turkish occupation of Egypt and the Portuguese discovery of a sea route round the Cape of Good Hope were destined to rob the Republic of that trade with the East which was the life-blood of its commerce. But, though the blow was already dealt, its effects were for a time hardly discernible.

On the contrary, the acc.u.mulated wealth of centuries poured itself out in an almost riotous prodigality. A new Venice, a Venice of loftier palaces, of statelier colonnades, rose under Palladio and Sansovino along the line of its ca.n.a.ls. In the deep peace of the sixteenth century, a peace unbroken even by religious struggles (for Venice was the one State exempt from the struggle of the Reformation), literature and art won their highest triumphs. The press of the Aldi gave for the first time the masterpieces of Greek poetry to Europe. The novels of Venice furnished plots for our own drama, and became the origin of modern fiction. Painting reached its loftiest height in Giorgione, t.i.tian, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese.

The greatest of colourists sprang from a world of colour. Faded, ruined as the city is now, the frescoes of Giorgione swept from its palace fronts by the sea-wind, its very gondoliers bare and ragged, the glory of its sunsets alone remains vivid as of old. But it is not difficult to restore the many-hued Venice out of which its painters sprang. There are two pictures by Carpaccio in the Accademia which bring back vividly its physical aspect. The scene of the first, the 'Miracle of the Patriarch of Grado' as it is called, lies on the Grand Ca.n.a.l immediately in front of the Rialto. It is the hour of sunset, and darker-edged clouds are beginning to fleck the golden haze of the west which still arches over the broken sky-line, roof and turret and bell-tower and chimneys of strange fas.h.i.+on with quaint conical tops. The ca.n.a.l lies dusk in the eventide, but the dark surface throws into relief a crowd of gondolas, and the lithe, glowing figures of their gondoliers. The boats themselves are long and narrow as now, but without the indented prora which has become universal; the sumptuary law of the Republic has not yet robbed them of colour, and instead of the present "coffin" we see canopies of gaily-hued stuffs supported on four light pillars. The gondolier himself is commonly tricked out in almost fantastic finery; red cap with long golden curls flowing down over the silken doublet, slashed hose, the light dress displaying those graceful att.i.tudes into which the rower naturally falls. On the left side of the ca.n.a.l its white marble steps are crowded with figures of the n.o.bler Venetian life; a black robe here or there breaking the gay variety of golden and purple and red and blue, while in the balcony above a white group of clergy, with golden candlesticks towering overhead, are gathered round the daemoniac whose cure forms the subject of the picture.

But the most noteworthy point in it is the light it throws on the architectural aspect of Venice at the close of the fifteenth century. On the right the houses are wholly of mediaeval type, the flat marble-sheeted fronts pierced with trefoil-headed lights; one of them splendid with painted arabesques dipping at its base into the very waters of the ca.n.a.l and mounting up to enwreathe in intricate patterns the very chimney of the roof. The left is filled by a palace of the early Renascence, but the change of architectural style, though it has modified the tone and extent of colour, is far from dismissing it altogether. The flat pilasters which support the round arches of its base are sheeted with a delicately-tinged marble; the flower-work of their capitals and the mask enclosed within it are gilded like the continuous billet moulding which runs round in the hollow of each arch, while the spandrils are filled in with richer and darker marbles, each broken with a central medallion of gold. The use of gold indeed seems a "note" of the colouring of the early Renascence; a broad band of gold wreathes the two rolls beneath and above the cornice, and lozenges of gold light up the bases of the light pillars in the colonnade above. In another picture of Carpaccio, the 'Dismissal of the Amba.s.sadors,' one sees the same principles of colouring extended to the treatment of interiors. The effect is obtained partly by the contrast of the lighter marbles with those of deeper colour or with porphyry, partly by the contrast of both with gold. Everywhere, whether in the earlier buildings of mediaeval art or in the later efforts of the Renascence, Venice seemed to clothe itself in robes of Oriental splendour, and to pour over Western art before its fall the wealth and gorgeousness of the East.

Of the four artist-figures who--in the tradition of Tintoret's picture--support this "Golden Calf" of Venice, Tintoret himself is the one specially Venetian. Giorgione was of Castel Franco; t.i.tian came from the mountains of Cadore; Paolo from Verona. But Jacopo Robusti, the "little dyer," the Tintoretto, was born, lived, and died in Venice. His works, rare elsewhere, crowd its churches, its palaces, its galleries.

Its greatest art-building is the shrine of his faith. The school of San Rocco has rightly been styled by Mr. Ruskin "one of the three most precious buildings in the world"; it is the one spot where all is Tintoret. Few contrasts are at first sight more striking than the contrast between the building of the Renascence which contains his forty masterpieces and the great mediaeval church of the Frari which stands beside it. But a certain oneness after all links the two buildings together. The Friars had burst on the caste spirit of the middle age, its mere cla.s.sification of brute force, with the bold recognition of human equality which ended in the socialism of Wyclif and the Lollards.

Tintoret found himself facing a new caste-spirit in the Renascence, a cla.s.sification of mankind founded on aesthetic refinement and intellectual power; and it is hard not to see in the greatest of his works a protest as energetic as theirs for the common rights of men.

Into the grandeur of the Venice about him, her fame, her wealth, her splendour, none could enter more vividly. He rises to his best painting, as Mr. Ruskin has observed, when his subjects are n.o.ble--doges, saints, priests, senators clad in purple and jewels and gold. But Tintoret is never quite Veronese. He cannot be untrue to beauty, and the pomps and glories of earth are beautiful to him; but there is a beauty too in earth, in man himself. The brown half-naked gondolier lies stretched on the marble steps which the Doge in one of his finest pictures has ascended. It is as if he had stripped off the stately robe and the ducal cap, and shown the soul of Venice in the bare child of the lagoons. The "want of dignity" which some have censured in his scenes from the Gospels is in them just as it is in the Gospels themselves. Here, as there, the poetry lies in the strange, unearthly mingling of the commonest human life with the sublimest divine. In his 'Last Supper,' in San Giorgio Maggiore, the apostles are peasants; the low, mean life of the people is there, but hushed and transfigured by the tall standing figure of the Master who bends to give bread to the disciple by His side. And above and around crowd in the legions of heaven, cherubim and seraphim mingling their radiance with the purer radiance from the halo of their Lord; while amid all this conflict of celestial light the twinkling candles upon the board burn on, and the damsel who enters bearing food, bathed as she is in the very glory of heaven, is busy, unconscious--a serving-maid, and nothing more.

The older painters had seen something undivine in man; the colossal mosaic, the tall unwomanly Madonna, expressed the sense of the Byzantine artist that to be divine was to be unhuman. The Renascence, with little faith in G.o.d, had faith in man, but only in the might and beauty and knowledge of man. With Tintoret the common life of man is ever one with heaven. This was the faith which he flung on "acres of canvas" as ungrudgingly as apostle ever did, toiling and living as apostles lived and toiled. This was the faith he found in Old Testament and New, in saintly legend or in national history. In the 'Annunciation' at San Rocco a great bow of angels streaming either way from the ethereal Dove sweeps into a ruined hut, a few mean chairs its only furniture, the mean plaster dropping from the bare brick pilasters; without, Joseph at work unheeding, amid piles of worthless timber flung here and there. So in the 'Adoration of the Magi' the mother wonders with a peasant's wonder at the jewels and gold. Again, the 'Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents' is one wild, horror-driven rush of pure motherhood, reckless of all in its clutch at its babe. So in the splendour of his 'Circ.u.mcision' it is from the naked child that the light streams on the High Priest's brow, on the mighty robe of purple and gold held up by stately forms like a vast banner behind him. The peasant mother to whose poorest hut that first stir of child-life has brought a vision of angels, who has marvelled at the wealth of precious gifts which a babe brings to her breast, who has felt the sword piercing her own bosom also as danger threatened it, on whose mean world her child has flung a glory brighter than glory of earth, is the truest critic of Tintoret.

What Shakespere was to the national history of England in his great series of historic dramas, his contemporary Tintoret was to the history of Venice. It was perhaps from an unconscious sense that her annals were really closed that the Republic began to write her history and her exploits in the series of paintings which covers the walls of the Ducal Palace. Her apotheosis is like that of the Roman Emperors; it is when death has fallen upon her that her artists raise her into a divine form, throned amid heavenly clouds and crowned by angel hands with the laurel wreath of victory. It is no longer St. Mark who watches over Venice, it is Venice herself who bends from heaven to bless boatman and senator. In the divine figure of the Republic with which Tintoret filled the central cartoon of the Great Hall every Venetian felt himself incarnate. His figure of 'Venice' in the Senate Hall is yet n.o.bler; the blue sea-depths are cleft open, and strange ocean-shapes wave their homage and yet more unearthly forms dart up with tribute of coral and pearls to the feet of the Sea Queen as she sits in the silken state of the time with the divine halo around her. But if from this picture in the roof the eye falls suddenly on the fresco which fills the close of the room, we can hardly help reading the deeper comment of Tintoret on the glory of the State. The Sala del Consiglio is the very heart of Venice. In the double row of plain seats running round it sat her n.o.bles; on the raised dais at the end, surrounded by the graver senators, sat her duke. One long fresco occupies the whole wall above the ducal seat; in the background the blue waters of the Lagoon with the towers and domes of Venice rising from them; around a framework of six bending saints; in front two kneeling Doges in full ducal robes with a black curtain of clouds between them. The clouds roll back to reveal a mighty glory, and in the heart of it the livid figure of a dead Christ taken from the cross. Not one eye of all the n.o.bles gathered in council could have lifted itself from the figure of the Doge without falling on the figure of the dead Christ. Strange as the conception is it is hard to believe that in a mind so peculiarly symbolical as that of Tintoret the contrast could have been without a definite meaning. And if this be so, it is a meaning that one can hardly fail to read in the history of the time. The brief interval of peace and glory had pa.s.sed away ere Tintoret's brush had ceased to toil. The victory of Lepanto had only gilded that disgraceful submission to the Turk which preluded the disastrous struggle in which her richest possessions were to be wrested from the Republic. The terrible plague of 1576 had carried off t.i.tian. Twelve years after t.i.tian Paul Veronese pa.s.sed away. Tintoret, born almost at its opening, lingered till the very close of the century to see Venice sinking into powerlessness and infamy and decay. May not the figure of the dead Christ be the old man's protest against a pride in which all true n.o.bleness and effort had ceased to live, and which was hurrying to so shameful a fall?

THE DISTRICT VISITOR.

It would be hard to define exactly the office and duties of the District Visitor. Historically she is the direct result of the Evangelical movement which marked the beginning of this century; the descendant of the "devout women not a few" who played, like Hannah More, the part of mothers in Israel to the Simeons and Wilberforces of the time. But the mere tract-distributor of fifty years ago has grown into a parochial and ecclesiastical force of far greater magnitude. The District Visitor of to-day is parson and almoner in one; the parochial censor of popular morals, the parochial instructor in domestic economy. She claims the same right as the vicar to knock at every door and obtain admission into every house. But once within it her scope of action is far larger than the parson's. To the spiritual influence of the tract or "the chapter"

she adds the more secular and effective power of the bread-ticket. "The way to the heart of the poor," as she pithily puts it, "lies through their stomachs." Her religious exhortations are backed by scoldings and fussiness. She is eloquent upon rags and tatters, and severe upon dirty floors. She flings open the window and lectures her flock on the advantages of fresh air. She hurries little Johnny off to school and gets Sally out to service. She has a keen nose for drains and a pa.s.sion for clean hands and faces. What worries her most is the fatalism and improvidence of the poor. She is full of exhortations to "lay by" for the rainy day, and seductive in her praises of the Penny Bank. The whole life of the family falls within her supervision. She knows the wages of the husband and the occasional jobs of the wife. She inquires what there is for dinner and gives wise counsels on economical cookery. She has her theory as to the hour when children ought to be in bed, and fetches in Tommy, much weeping, from the last mud-pie of sunset. Only "the master"

himself lies outside of her rule. Between the husband and the District Visitor there exists a sort of armed neutrality. Her visits are generally paid when he is at work. If she arrives when he happens to be at home, he calls for "missus," and retires sheepishly to the 'Blue Boar.' The energetic Dorcas who fixes him in a corner gets little for her pains. He "supposes" that "missus" knows where and when the children go to school, and that "missus" may some day or other be induced to go to church. But the theory of the British labourer is that with his home or his family, their religion or their education, he has nothing personally to do. And so he has nothing to do with the District Visitor.

His only demand is that she should let him alone, and the wise District Visitor soon learns, as parson and curate have long learnt, to let him alone.

Like theirs, her work lies with wife and children, and as we have seen it is of far wider scope even here than the work of the clergy. But, fussy and dictatorial as she is, the District Visitor is as a rule more popular than the clergyman. In the first place, the parson is only doing a duty he is bound to do while the District Visitor is a volunteer. The parson, as the poor roughly say, is paid for it. Again, however simple-hearted and courteous he may be, he never gets very close home to the poor. Their life is not his life, nor their ways his ways. They do not understand his refinement, his delicacy about interference, his gentlemanly reticence, his abhorrence of gossip and scandal. They are accustomed to be ordered about, to rough words, to gossip over their neighbours. And so the District Visitor is "more in their way," as they tell her. She is profuse of questions, routing out a thousand little details that no parson would ever know. She has little of the sensitive pride that hinders the vicar from listening to scandal, or of the manly objection to "telling tales" which hurries him out of the room when neighbour brings charges against neighbour. She is entirely unaffected by his scruples against interference with the conscience or religion of the poor. "Where do you go to church?" and "Why don't you go to church?"

are her first stock questions in her cross-examination of every family.

Her exhortations at the sick-bed have a somewhat startling peremptoriness about them. We can hardly wonder at the wish of a poor patient that she were a rich one, because then she could "die in peace, and have n.o.body to come in and pray over her." What irritates the District Visitor in cases where she has bestowed special religious attention is that people when so effectively prepared for death "won't die." But hard, practical action such as this does not jostle against the feelings of the poor as it would against our own. Women especially forgive all because the District Visitor listens as well as talks. They could no more pour out their little budget of domestic troubles to the parson than to a being from another world. But the District Visitor is the recipient of all. The washerwoman stops her mangle to talk about the hard times and the rise of a halfpenny on the loaf. The matron next door turns up her sleeve to show the bruise her husband bestowed on her on his return from the 'Chequers.' She enters largely and minutely into the merits and defects of her partner's character, and protests with a subtle discrimination that "he's a good father when he ain't bothered with the children, and a good husband when he's off the drink." The old widow down the lane is waiting for "the lady" to write a letter for her to her son in Australia, and to see the "pictur," the cheap photograph of the grandchildren she has never seen or will see, that John has sent home. A girl home from her "place" wants the District Visitor to intercede with her mistress, and listens in all humility to a lecture on her giddiness and love of finery.

The society in fact of the little alley is very much held together by the District Visitor. In her love of goody gossip she fulfils the office which in an Italian town is filled by the barber. She retails t.i.ttle-tattle for the highest ends. She relates Mrs. A.'s misdemeanour for the edification and correction of Mrs. B. She has the true version of the quarrel between Smith and his employer. She is the one person to whom the lane looks for accurate information as to the domestic relations of the two Browns, whose quarrels are the scandal of the neighbourhood. Her influence in fact over the poor is a strange mixture of good and evil, of real benevolence with an interference that saps all sense of self-respect, of real sympathy and womanly feeling with a good deal of womanly meddling, curiosity, and babble.

But her influence on the parish at large is a far more delicate question. To the outer world a parish seems a sheer despotism. The parson prays, preaches, changes the order of service, distributes the parochial charities at his simple discretion. One of the great cries of the Church reformer is generally for the subst.i.tution of some const.i.tutional system, some congregational council, some lay co-operation, for this clerical tyranny. But no one in fact feels the narrow limits of his power more keenly than the parson himself. As the old French monarchy was a despotism tempered by epigrams, so the rule of a parish is a despotism tempered by parochial traditions, by the observation of neighbouring clergymen, by the suggestions of the squire, by the opposition of churchwardens, by the hints and regrets of "Constant Attendants," by the state of the pew-letting or the ups and downs of the offertory, by the influences of local opinion, by the censors.h.i.+p of the District Visitor. What the a.s.sembly of his "elders" is to a Scotch minister, the District Visitors' meeting is to the English clergyman. He has to prove in the face of a standing jealousy that his alms have been equally distributed between district and district. His selection of tracts is freely criticised. Mrs. A. regrets that her poor people have seen so little of their vicar lately. Mrs. B. is sorry to report the failure of her attempts to get her sheep to church, in face of the new Ritualistic developement, the processions, and the surplices.

Mrs. C., whose forte is education, declines any longer to induce mothers to send their children to "such" a master. The curates shudder as Mrs.

D. laments their frequent absence from the Penny Bank, not that they can do any good there, but "we are always glad of the presence and sympathy of our clergy." The curates promise amendment of life. The vicar engages to look out for another schoolmaster, and be more diligent in his attentions to Muck Lane. A surrept.i.tious supply of extra tickets to the ultra-Protestant appeases for the moment her wrath against the choir surplices. But the occasional screw of the monthly meeting is as nothing to the daily pressure applied by the individual District Visitor. At the bottom of every alley the vicar runs up against a parochial censor. The "five minutes' conversation" which the District Visitor expects as the reward of her benevolence becomes a perpetual trickle of advice, remonstrance, and even reproof. A strong-minded parson of course soon makes himself master of his District Visitors, but the ordinary vicar generally feels that his District Visitors are masters of him. The harm that comes of this feminine despotism is the feminine impress it leaves on the whole aspect of the parish. Manly preaching disappears before the disappointed faces the preacher encounters on Monday. A policy of expedients and evasions takes the place of any straightforward attempt to meet or denounce local evils. The vicar's time and energy are frittered away on a thousand little jealousies and envyings, his temper is tried in humouring one person and conciliating another, he learns to be cautious and reserved and diplomatic, to drop hints and suggestions, to become in a word the first District Visitor of his parish. He flies to his wife for protection, and finds in her the most effective buffer against parochial collisions. Greek meets Greek when the vicar's wife meets the District Visitor. But the vicar himself sinks into a parochial n.o.body, a being as sacred and as powerless as the Lama of Thibet.

It was hardly to be expected that the progress of religion and charitable feeling should fail to raise up formidable rivals to the District Visitor. To the more ecclesiastical mind she is hardly ecclesiastical enough for the prominent part she claims in the parochial system. Her lace and Parisian bonnet are an abomination. She has a trick of being terribly Protestant, and her Protestantism is somewhat dictatorial. On the other hand, to the energetic organizer whose ideal of a parish is a well-oiled machine turning out piety and charity without hitches or friction she is simply a parochial impediment. She has no system. Her visiting days are determined by somewhat eccentric considerations. Her almsgiving is regulated by no principle whatever.

She carries silly likes and dislikes into her work among the poor. She rustles into wrath at any attempt to introduce order into her efforts, and regards it as a piece of ungrateful interference. She is always ready with threats of resignation, with petty suspicions of ill-treatment, with jealousies of her fellow-workers. We can hardly wonder that in ecclesiastical quarters she is retreating before the Sister of Mercy, while in the more organized parishes she is being superseded by the Deaconess. The Deaconess has nothing but contempt for the mere "volunteer" movement in charity. She has a strong sense of order and discipline, and a hatred of "francs-tireurs." Above all she is a woman of business. She is without home or child, and her time and labour are arranged with military precision. She has her theory of the poor and of what can be done for the poor, and she rides her hobby from morning to night with an equal contempt for the sentimental almsgiving of the District Visitor and for the warnings of the political economist.

No doubt an amazing deal of good is done, but it is done in a methodical fas.h.i.+on that is a little trying to ordinary flesh and blood.

The parish is elaborately tabulated. The poor are grouped and ticketed.

The charitable agencies of the parish are put in connection with the hospital and the workhouse. This case is referred to the dispensary, that to the overseer. The Deaconess prides herself on not being "taken in." The washerwoman finds that her "outdoor allowance" has been ascertained and set off against her share in the distribution of alms.

The pious old woman who has played off the charity of the church against the charity of the chapel is struck off the list. The miserable creature who drags out existence on a bit of bread and a cup of tea is kindly but firmly advised to try "the house." Nothing can be wiser, nothing more really beneficial to the poor, than the work of the Deaconess, but it is a little dry and mechanical. The ill-used wife of the drunkard sighs after the garrulous sympathy of the District Visitor. The old gossip and dawdle have disappeared from the parochial charity, but with them has gone a good deal of the social contact, the sympathy of rich with poor, in which its chief virtue lay. The very vicar sighs after a little human imperfection and irregularity as he reads the list of sick cases "to be visited this morning."

The one lingering touch of feminine weakness in the Deaconess comes out in her relations with the clergy. The Deaconess is not a "Sister"--she is most precise in enforcing the distinction--but she is a woman with a difference. She has not retired from the world, but a faint flavour of the nun hangs about her. She has left behind all thought of coquetry, but she prefers to work with a married clergyman. Her delicacy can just endure a celibate curate, but it shrinks aghast from a bachelor inc.u.mbent. We know a case where a bishop, anxious to retain a Deaconess in a poor parish, was privately informed that her stay would depend on the appointment of a married clergyman to the vacant living. On the other hand, a married clergyman is as great a trial to the Sister of Mercy as an unmarried one to the Deaconess. The "Sister" idealizes the priesthood as she idealizes the poor. Their poverty is a misfortune; their improvidence an act of faith; their superst.i.tion the last ray of poetic religion lingering in this world of scepticism and commonplace.

All the regularity and sense of order which exists in the Sister's mind is concentrated on her own life in the sisterhood; she is punctilious about her "hours," and lives in a perpetual tinkle of little bells. But in her work among the poor she revolts from system or organization. She hates the workhouse. She looks upon a guardian or an overseer as an oppressor of the poor. She regards theories of pauperism as something very wicked and irreligious, and lavishes her alms with a perfect faith that good must come of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but there is a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely with the sensible prose of the Deaconess. While the one enters in her book of statistics the number of uneducated children, the other is trotting along the street with little Tommy in one hand and little Polly in the other on their way to the school. She has washed their faces and tidied their hair, and believes she has done service to little angels. Tommy and Polly are very far from being angels, but both sides are the happier for the romantic hypothesis. There is a good deal of romance and sentiment in the Sister's view of her work among the poor; but it is a romance that nerves her to a certain grandeur of soul. A London clergyman in whose district the black fever had broken out could get no nurses among the panic-stricken neighbours. He telegraphed to a "Home,"

and next morning he found a ladylike girl on her knees on the floor of the infected house, scrubbing, cleaning, putting the worn-out mother to bed, hus.h.i.+ng the children, nursing quietly and thoroughly as few nurses could do. The fever was beaten, and the little heroine went off at the call of another telegram to charge another battery of death. It is this chivalrous poetic side that atones for the many follies of Sisterhoods; for the pauperism they introduce among the poor, the cliqueism of their inner life, the absurdities of their "holy obedience." Each of these charitable agencies in fact has its work to do, and does it in its own way. On paper there can be no doubt that the Sister of Mercy is the more attractive figure of the three. The inc.u.mbent of a heavy parish will probably turn with a smile to the more methodical labours of the Deaconess. But those who shrink alike from the idealism of one and the system of the other, who feel that the poor are neither angels nor wheels in a machine, and that the chief work to be done among them is the diffusion of kindly feeling and the drawing of cla.s.s nearer to cla.s.s, will probably prefer to either the old-fas.h.i.+oned District Visitor.