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262 ST. MARK’S REST
let us have the head off him. It went on so, frankly and bravely, to the twelfth century, at the earliest; when men begin to think in a serious manner; more or less of gentle manners and domestic comfort being also then conceivable and attainable. Rosamond is not any more asked to drink out of her father’s skull.1 Rooms begin to be matted and wainscoted; shops to hold store of marvellous foreign wares; knights and ladies learn to spell, and to read, with pleasure; music is everywhere;-Death, also. Much to enjoy-much to learn, and to endure-with Death always at the gates. “If war fail thee in thine own country, get thee with haste into another,” says the faithful old French knight to the boy-chevalier, in early fourteenth-century days.2
70. No country stays more than two centuries in this intermediate phase between Faith and Reason. In France it lasted from about 1150 to 1350; in England, 1200 to 1400; in Venice, 1300 to 1500. The course of it is always in the gradual development of Christianity,-till her yoke gets at once too aerial, and too straight, for the mob, who break through it at last as if it were so much gossamer; and at the same fatal time, wealth and luxury, with the vanity of corrupt learning, foul the faith of the upper classes, who now begin to wear their Christianity, not tossed for a crest high over the armour, but stuck as a plaster over their sores, inside of their clothes. Then comes printing, and universal gabble of fools;-gunpowder, and the end of all the noble methods of war;-trade, and universal swindling,-wealth, and universal gambling,-idleness, and universal harlotry; and so at last-Modern Science and Political Economy; and the reign of St. Petroleum instead of St. Peter. Out of which God only knows what is to come next; but He does know, whatever the Jew swindlers and apothecaries’ ‘prentices think about it.
Meantime, with what remainder of belief in Christ may be left in us; and helping that remnant with all the power
1 [See Vol. XX. p. 360.]
2 [From “The Book of a Hundred Ballads”; the passage is quoted in French in Fors Clavigera, Letter 15, § 5.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
