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LETTER VI

The Corruption of Modern Pleasure.-(The Japanese Jugglers)

February 28, 1867.

25. I HAVE your pleasant letter with references to Frederick. I will look at them carefully.* Mr. Carlyle himself will be pleased to hear this letter when he comes home. I heard from him last week at Mentone. He is well, and glad of the light and calm of Italy.' I must get back to the evil light and uncalm, of the places I was taking you through.

* Appendix 2 [p. 466].

[Mrs. Carlyle had died in 1866. At Christmas time Tyndall took him to the Riviera, where he spent some months in Lady Ashburton's villa at Mentone. The letter to Ruskin here referred to was as follows:

"MENTONE, February 15th, 1867.

"DEAR RUSKIN,-If the few bits of letters I have written from this place had gone by the natural priority and sequence, this would have been the first, or among the very first :-and indeed it is essentially so,-the first that I have written except upon compulsion, or in answer to something written. My aversion to writing is at all times great. But I begin to feel a great want of hearing some news from you, at least of hearing that you are not fallen unwell; and there is no other method of arousing you to your duty.

"I have done passably well since getting out hither; and cannot but count it a kind of benefit that the impetuous Tyndall tore me out from the sleety mud-abysses of London, as if by the hair of the head; and dropped me here, on a shore where there is at least clean air to breathe, and a climate that is bright and cheerful to move about in,-and where, if frost did fall, and the streets became all of glass, people would not be 'fined for throwing ashes before their door, and trying to save one's bones or brains from being broken if one ventured out! That is really hitherto the most unmanageable, or almost the one unmanageable point for me in the problem of my London Winter: compelled to take no exercise except under peril of life or limb:-'most thinking people,' was there ever the match of you for a power of 'common sense' especially!

"I dare say you have been here; and description of scenery, locality, etc., would be quite thrown away on you. From Antibes on the west to Bordighera on the east, a stretch of perhaps forty miles diameter, is a beautiful semicircular alcove, guarded by the maritime Alps from all bad winds; included in this big bay (or alcove) are five or six smaller ones,-of which Mentone, towards Bordighera, is the last but one :-no climate, you perceive, can have a better chance to be good and indeed, ever since Christmas last, when I arrived, it has far surpassed all my expectations, or requirements in that particular-rather too hot for most part, and driving me into the olive woods and shaggy ravines, if the sun is still high. One's paths there are steep exceedingly and rough exceedingly (donkey paths for the country people, paved into dreadful stairs in the bad places), but they are silent, solitary; a walk there is soothing to one's sad thoughts instead of irritating, and does one good, though of a mournful kind. As to scenery,' you know me to care next to nothing for it; but I must own, these pinnacles that stud the back of our little Mentone alcove, for example, are the strangest and grandest things of the mountain kind I ever saw; bare rocks, sharp as icicles, jagged as if hewn by lightning; most

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(Parenthetically, did you see the article in the Times of yesterday on bribery,' and the conclusion of the commission-"No one sold any opinions, for no one had any opinions to sell"?)

Both on Thursday and Friday last I had been tormented by many things, and wanted to disturb my course of thought any way I could. I have told you what entertainment I got on Friday, first, for it was then that I began meditating over these letters; let me tell you now what entertainment I found on Thursday.

26. You may have heard that a company of Japanese jugglers has come over to exhibit in London. There has long been an increasing interest in Japanese art, which has > been very harmful to many of our own painters, and I greatly desired to see what these people were, and what they did. Well, I have seen Blondin, and various English and

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grim, perilous, cruel: sitting there,' I sometimes say, like so many witches of Endor, naked to the waist, but therefrom with the amplest petticoats of dark or bright green' (for all is terraced, and covered with olives, or oranges and lemons, down almost to the sea),-a really fine scene, especially at morning and evening in light and shade, under a sky so clear and pure; scene which I never yet raise my eyes to without something of surprise and recognition.

"The worst of my existence here is that I am thoroughly idle,-for the 'work' I try at intervals is a mockery of work; and my real task is to walk about four or five miles every day, and to guard myself vigilantly from being bored by surrounding black heads. For we are about eight hundred here; and none of us has really anything to do. Patience, Vigilance,—and shirk off into the olive woods!

"Often I begin to think of my route home again, and what I shall next do there. Alas, all is abstruse and gloomy on that latter head; but surely something should and must be settled as to all that too; while the days are, and any remnant of strength is, one ought not to wander in mere sadness of soul doing nothing. The only point I look forward to with any fixed satisfac tion yet, is that of having Ruskin again every Wednesday evening, and tasting a little human conversation once in the week, if oftener be not practicable! But the very time of my returning is uncertain, though I care not for your March tempests, and perhaps had better be at Chelsea even now: but there are grand speculations about seeing Rome first, Genoa at least and Florence first-and many attempts to awaken my appetite that way, hitherto without success perceptible. It is strange how one's love of travel perfects itself by simply sitting still, if one can do that long enough.

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Adieu, my Friend: I want a little Note from you quam primum. I send many regards to the good and dear old lady: and am ever,

"Yours gratefully,

"T. CARLYLE."]

[A leading article on the Reports of the Yarmouth and Reigate Election Commissions; both boroughs were disfranchised on account of habitual and systematic bribery and corruption.]

2 [At this time, it will be remembered (as Mr. Greenwood says in the article referred to on p. 333 n.), "although the deftness of Japanese art, the almost unaecountable touch of genius upon all manner of Japanese work, were a wondering excitement in European studios, there were no distinct conceptions of the people of Japan." For other references by Ruskin to Japanese art, see Queen of the Air, § 94 n., where it is said that the pure colour-gift of the Japanese has stayed intellectual progress in their art; Aratra Pentelici, § 207, where the element of

French circus work, but never yet anything that surprised me so much as one of these men's exercises on a suspended pole. Its special character was a close approximation to the action and power of the monkey; even to the prehensile power in the foot; so that I asked a sculptor-friend who sat in front of me, whether he thought such a grasp could be acquired by practice, or indicated difference in race. He said he thought it might be got by practice. There was also much inconceivably dexterous work in spinning of tops, -making them pass in balanced motion along the edge of a sword, and along a level string, and the like;—the father performing in the presence of his two children, who encouraged him continually with short, sharp cries, like those of animals. Then there was some fairly good sleight-ofhand juggling of little interest; ending with a dance by the juggler, first as an animal, and then as a goblin. Now, there was this great difference between the Japanese masks used in this dance and our common pantomime masks for beasts and demons,-that our English masks are only stupidly and loathsomely ugly, by exaggeration of feature, or of defect of feature. But the Japanese masks (like the frequent monsters of Japanese art) were inventively frightful, like fearful dreams; and whatever power it is that acts on human minds, enabling them to invent such, appears to me not only to deserve the term "demoniacal," as the only word expressive of its character; but to be logically capable of no other definition.

27. The impression, therefore, produced upon me by the whole scene, was that of being in the presence of human creatures of a partially inferior race, but not without great human gentleness, domestic affection, and ingenious intellect; who were, nevertheless, as a nation, afflicted by an evil

cruelty is noted "in the intensely Daedal work of the Japanese." Compare Art of England, § 104; and ibid., § 52, where the limitations of the "literally imitative dexterities of Japan" are noted. See also Fors Clavigera, Letter 65, ad fin., where Ruskin records the acceptance for his Museum at Sheffield of some pieces of Japanese inlaid work "of quite unsurpassable beauty."]

spirit, and driven by it to recreate themselves in achiev ing, or beholding the achievement, through years of patience, of a certain correspondence with the nature of the lower animals.

28. These, then, were the two forms of diversion or recreation of my mind possible to me, in two days, when I needed such help, in this metropolis of England. I might, as a rich man, have had better music, if I had so chosen, though, even so, not rational or helpful; but a poor man could only have these, or worse than these, if he cared for any manner of spectacle. (I am not at present, observe, speaking of pure acting, which is a study, and recreative only as a noble book is; but of means of mere amusement.)

Now, lastly, in illustration of the effect of these and other such" amusements," and of the desire to obtain them, on the minds of our youth, read the Times correspondent's letter from Paris, in the tenth page of the paper, to-day;* and that will be quite enough for you to read, for the present, I believe.

* Appendix 3 [p. 468].

LETTER VII

Of the various Expressions of National Festivity

March 4, 1867.

29. THE subject which I want to bring before you is now branched, and worse than branched, reticulated, in so many directions, that I hardly know which shoot of it to trace, or which knot to lay hold of first.

I had intended to return to those Japanese jugglers, after a visit to a theatre in Paris; but I had better, perhaps, at once tell you the piece of the performance which, in connection with the scene in the English pantomime, bears most on matters in hand.

It was also a dance by a little girl-though one older than Ali Baba's daughter, (I suppose a girl of twelve or fourteen). A dance, so called, which consisted only in a series of short, sharp contractions and jerks of the body and limbs, resulting in attitudes of distorted and quaint ugliness, such as might be produced in a puppet by sharp twitching of strings at its joints: these movements being made to the sound of two instruments, which between them accomplished only a quick vibratory beating and strumming, in nearly the time of a hearth-cricket's song, but much harsher, and of course louder, and without any sweetness; only in the monotony and aimless construction of it, reminding one of various other insect and reptile cries or warnings: partly of the cicala's hiss; partly of the little melancholy German frog which says Mu, mu, mu," all summer-day long, with its nose out of the pools by Dresden and Leipsic; and partly of the deadened quivering and intense continuousness of the alarm of the rattlesnake.

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