A> c «"'«'» '^ '- -ov* :» -e^ ^ -'^m'' "^^^ .-i* /^V/k*- ^^. > .' ■'^^i'^- ^^^♦' /••^'\ .^°^^^'> /'-^^'"^'.^ •^t. > .N^ ♦ e>.* ^^"^. ^^40^ ^^/^-■^\/ .. "% r .^''.< *^ .^:^ 40, * r^ SESAME AND LILIES TWO LECTURES BY JOHN RUSKIN EDITED IVITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY ROBERT KILBURN ROOT Tutor in English at Yale College NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1901 ^K IHt LIBRARY Of7 \^^ OCJGRESS, ' ^ Two CoHta Received NOV. ? 1901 COPVRIQHT ENTRY CLASS «. XXc. No. ^ ^ If O COPY a Copyright, iqoi, BY HENRY HOLT & CO. THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, RAHWAY, N. J. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction Life of Ruskin v Sesame and Lilies xiii Sesame and Lilies Of Kings' Treasuries i Of Queens' Gardens 67 Notes Of Kings' Treasuries iii Of Queens' Gardens 130 PREFACE. The present edition is based upon experience gained in reading Sesame and Lilies with a class of college freshmen, and is intended for use in colleges or in the. more advanced grades of the secondary school. The notes are, for the most part, explana- tory rather than critical; having as their object a thorough elucidation of the author's thought, rather than an appreciation of its value, since it is believed that this latter end is better attained by the class- room discussion. Merely verbal comment, and in general such information as is readily obtainable in a good dictionary, has been, in the main, ex- cluded. In the case of literary allusions, the more obvious are not noticed : a student is rightly offended at being informed that Achilles is the hero of Homer's Iliad. On the contrary, even the most obvious of Ruskin's many Biblical allusions are ex- plained, since the editor has found that such expla- nation is, unfortunately, necessary. It would have been easy to multiply parallels from Ruskin's other works illustrating the thought of the present essay, but they have been admitted only where they aid materially in the understanding of the passage under consideration. In a word, the edition is selective rather than exhaustive. The text followed is that of the Brantwood IV PREFACE. edition, the American authorized edition of Rus- kin's works. I am indebted to ColHngwood's Life of Riiskin for the matter contained in such por- tions of my introductory sketch of Ruskin's Hfe as are not based directly on Prccterita. I have already acknowledged in my notes an occasional indebtedness to the work of previous editors. To Professor Albert S. Cook, who has read my work in proof, and to my friend and colleague, Dr. Charles G. Osgood, I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness for many helpful suggestions. R. K. R. August 30, 1 901. INTRODUCTION. LIFE OF RUSKIN. John Ruskin was born in London on the 8th of February, 1819, and in London, or the neighboring suburb of Dulwich, he spent the best years of his Hfe. Yet in blood and in character he was a Scotchman, and inherited from his Scotch parents the keen, imaginative intellect and intense moral earnestness which have always distinguished the race. Ruskin's father was a prosperous wine mer- chant, who, beginning business with no capital but a legacy of paternal debt, was able by hard work to pay off the debts, for which he felt himself morally responsible, and to amass a very consid- erable fortune. Ruskin was able to write over his grave that he was ' an entirely honest merchant.' He was more than this: a man of culture and refinement ; a lover of the best in literature and art ; a devoted admirer of nature ; so that the stern Scotch Puritanism of Ruskin's home was tempered by the gentle influences of a broader culture. Mrs. Ruskin seems to have been a stricter Puri- tan than her husband, and to her was intrusted the early training of the only child. ' My mother's gen- eral principles of first treatment,' Ruskin writes, Vi INTRODUCTION. * were to guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger; and for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful nor troublesome. But the law was that I should find my own amusement.' The inven- tions of the toy-maker were, in Mrs. Ruskin's eyes, part of the vanity of this world. At first she allowed none at all, but later admitted a cart and ball, and a set of wooden blocks. ' With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient posses- sions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion; and could pass my days con- tentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colors of my carpet ; — examining the bricks in the opposite houses ; with rapturous intervals of ex- citement during the filling of the water-cart, through its leathern pipe, from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge.' When Ruskin was about four years old the fam- ily removed to a suburban residence at Heme Hill, near what was then the country village of Dul- wich. Here the pleasures of the brick wall and the watering-cart were exchanged for the more varied delights of a garden, which seemed to the lonely little boy a veritable paradise. ' The differences of primal importance which I observed between the nature of this garden and that of Eden, as I had imagined it, were that in this one all the fruit was forbidden; and there were no companionable INTRODUCTION. ^ Vll beasts/ He had no playmates, and even his father and mother seemed to him merely visible forces of nature. His earliest lesson-book was the Bible. At his mother's knee he learned long chapters of it by heart and read it aloud, hard names and^all, every year. ' To that discipline — patient, accurate, and resolute — I owe, not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature.' There is probably no English writer since Bunyan whose style is so strongly colored, in substance and in phrase, with reminiscences of the Bible. For other reading he had the Waverley Novels and Pope's Homer, with •Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim's Progress for Sun- days ; and on winter evenings the elder Ruskin would often read aloud from Shakespeare or Cer- vantes or Walter Scott, while the boy John, en- sconced in a little niche by the fireside, with his bowl of bread and milk before him, listened or not as he pleased; unconsciously learning to love the best in literature, tuning his ear to the harmonies and cadences of noble English. Living in the company of great writers, Ruskin began at a surprisingly early age to write himself. His first dated poem was written before he was quite seven ; all that he saw and did was chronicled in prose or rime, and laboriously written out in Roman letters in imitation of the printed page. When nine he began a work called ' Eudosia, a Vlll IN TROD UCTION. Poem on the Universe,' and in the following year he presented to his father, as a birthday present, an elaborately printed volume entitled ' Battle of Waterloo, a Play in Two Acts with other Small Poems by John Ruskin.' As he learned how to draw, illustrations by the author were added ; and the volumes took on the appearance of ' real books.' Fortunately for Ruskin and for us, his horizon was not limited by the low hills of Surrey. Every summer a comfortable post chaise drew up before the house at Heme Hill, and father and mother and son started on a two months' drive through England or Scotland. The object of these journeys was primarily to get orders for Mr. Rus- kin's wine trade, but the wine merchant seems to have cared quite as much for scenery as for orders, so that the boy w^as able, while still young, to see the loveliest parts of his own land. And when their journey took them near some great nobleman's estate, Mr. Ruskin would show his son the house and whatever pictures it might contain. If we see in Ruskin's later life an intense love for the highest beauty, of nature or of art, we can trace it directly to the peculiarly fortunate circumstances of his childhood. On his fourteenth birthday his father's business partner gave Ruskin a copy of Rogers' Italy, a volume of indifferent descriptive verse, but illus- trated by the great Turner. The book seems to have exerted the greatest influence on Ruskin's life, for it not only deepened in him the love of nature. INTRODUCTION. IX and revealed to him her grander phases, but filled him with admiration for the artist whom he was to defend so ardently in Modern Painters. In the following summer the annual tour through Great Britain was replaced by a Continental tour, which included Switzerland ; and Ruskin was able to fol- low Turner through his Alpine passes, imitating with the crow-quill the master's fine vignettes. In October of 1836 Ruskin matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford. Except that he won the New- digate prize in poetry in 1839, his course was not extraordinarily brilliant, and in 1840 he was com- pelled by bad health to leave without his degree, which was not received till 1842. From this point on Ruskin's life, all that is most vital of it, is to be found in his books. We shall look at it only in its broad features. He found himself in possession of a good edu- cation, a generous income, and boundless energy. He had no taste for business, nor for the Church — to which his mother had fondly dedicated him ; he followed his inclinations and became an art critic. From 1842 to i860 he was at work on Mod- ern Painters and the other art studies which grew out of it. We see him living quietly with his par- ents, studying and writing, making frequent, and sometimes extended, visits to the Continent; pa- tiently seeking out the meaning of some old painting by a half-forgotten master; eagerly reading the history of mediaeval Venice in the stones of her churches and palaces, or searching out God's provi- X IN TROD UC TION. dence in the rocks and glaciers of the towering Alps. All this while his fame and the popularity of his works were increasing; the public bought his books and flocked to his lectures, though there were many to combat his novel theories. It is necessary to touch on a tragic episode in this period of Ruskin's life, which, though affecting his activity but slightly, cast its gloom upon his soul. He was married on April lo, 1848, to a beautiful Scotch girl. The marriage seems to have been on both sides a matter of parental arrangement. It is very certain that their temperaments were ill- suited to each other, for Mrs. Ruskin was a lover of gay social life, and little in sympathy with her husband's quiet, thoughtful ways. In 1854 she left him. Save that he ought never to have mar- ried her, Ruskin was apparently without blame. The year i860 marks the turning-point in Rus- kin's life, when he ceased to tell people what they should admire, and tried to tell them what they should be. The importance of this change and the reason for it are discussed later on. The period was necessarily one of great spiritual storm and stress. The evil of the world loomed up before him in all its gloom and apparent hopelessness. Like his great successor, Tolstoi, he turned his back on his earlier work; recanting many of his earlier doctrines and dogmas, setting his face reso- lutely toward the sterner problems of life. Though at times he wrote again of art, it was with a more distinctly ethical and religious purpose. IN TROD UC TION. XI Ruskin's social reform finds external expression in the Guild of St. George, the story of which is to be found in Fors Clavigera, the series of monthly letters written to workingmen between 187 1 and 1884. The guild was an attempt to put into prac- tice the theories of his political economy. As this economy rests on the postulate that ' there is no wealth but life,' the true welfare of its members was the first care of the guild. Co-operation was to replace competition in the affairs of the company. Both in manufacture and in agriculture, machine labor was to be replaced by the healthier and more intelligent labor of the hands. Schools and mu- seums were to be maintained for the benefit of those employed. Ruskin, generous always with his money, contributed a tenth of all his possessions, and others were found to take a part in the scheme, so that land was bought and the guild actually started. But its success has not been great except indirectly, as an example. From 1869 to 1879, and again for a short time in 1883-84, Ruskin held the Slade Pro- fessorship of Art at Oxford, where his lectures were thronged by enthusiastic admirers. His power over his students is shown by an anecdote of this period. There was a bad bit of country road near Oxford, which the local authorities were too lazy to repair. Ruskin spoke of it in one of his lectures, and called for volunteers. The volun- teers came, and, dressed in old clothes and armed with picks, professors and students sallied out and Xll L\r TROD UCTION. mended the road, despite the jeers of the unre- generate. The last years of Ruskin's Hfe, darkened by re- peated attacks of brain fever, which left him ever weaker in body and mind, were spent at Brantwood, the quiet home on the shores of Coniston Water in Lancashire. The house stands on a hillside, em- bowered in trees, and from the front windows Rus- kin could look down a grassy slope to the lake, and on the farther shore could watch the mists gather about the summit of Coniston Old Man. Here, at Brantwood, Ruskin died on January 20, 1900, and in the churchyard of the near-by village of Coniston he lies buried — an easy drive from Wordsworth's quiet grave at Grasmere. Among the many gifts of flowers which came from all parts of the kingdom, and from all ranks of society, was one from the village tailor at Conis- ton. The man had felt Ruskin's power, and so he sent with his flowers a card inscribed with the words : ' There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.' The difference in externals be- tween that John of the camel's hair and the leathern girdle, uttering his cry 'in the wilderness, and the cultured John of modern England is great enough ; but Ruskin is, none the less, a prophet, and his message, too, is, ' Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.' We are told that a Yorkshire farmer tried one day to tell him how much he had enjoyed his books. Almost fiercely Ruskin interrupted him : * I don't care whether you enjoyed them ; did they INTRODUCTION. Xlll do you any good ? ' To be good and to see and love the kingdom of God, which is always at hand — that is Ruskin's message. ' All my work,' he says, ' is to help those who have eyes and see not.' SESAME AND LILIES. I. RusKiN Stands before us as an original and in- spiring art critic, a zealous social reformer, and a master of nineteenth century English prose. To be sure, he has written much that is neither art criti- cism nor political economy — treatises, more or less scientific, on geology and mineralogy, on botany, and on the interpretation of Greek myths. But these other phases of his activity are distinctly subordi- nate ; it is as art critic that he is chiefly known ; it was as reformer and political economist that he wished to be remembered. * What has an artist to do with economics ? ' was the general cry, when Ruskin ceased to tell his countrymen what in nature and in art they should admire, and sternly showed them what they should do and be. And to-day, also, the combination seems at first sight incongruous. It is easy to see how, in a discussion of landscape painting, the critic might be led to consider more closely the forms of trees and mountains, and so come naturally to his botany and geology ; but it is surely a long leap to ques- XIV INTRODUCTION. tions of wages and the factory laws. None the less, Ruskin's life work is, in its essentials, consistent and unified. When one understands his fundamen- tal principles of art and of economics, the com- bination seems not only reasonable, but inevitable. It is not easy to place a just valuation on Rus- kin's art criticism. One must surely beware of taking it as an infallible guide ; many of Ruskin's individual judgments seem capricious and arbi- trary. Yet it would be hard to suggest an author who can so well arouse an enthusiasm for, and an intelligent interest in, the best of painting and architecture; it would be hard to name a writer who has exerted half so great an influence on the aesthetic tastes of the English-speaking world. In principle, at least, Ruskin's method of criticism is excellent. It consists in a constant reference to laws and first principles, drawn, in most instances, from nature — nature inanimate and the nature of man, as outward and visible manifestations of the Divine Nature. So we have in Modern Painters an elaborate theory of aesthetics, with chapters on the ' imagination penetrative ' and the ' imagination contemplative.' We have a close examination of the form of waves and clouds and mountains. Art which does not follow the forms and the laws of nature, material or spiritual, is out of harmony with the Divine Nature, and therefore bad. The theory, as Ruskin develops it, is logical and con- vincing, and offers a welcome escape from the base- less likes and dislikes of the mere impressionist. It INTRODUCTION. XV is in his application of the theory to individual cases that he ceases to convince. At times we feel the presence of his personal likes and prejudices, col- oring and distorting the argument. It would not be far from truth to say that the enduring value of Ruskin's art criticism, as art criticism, lies in the immense suggestiveness of its theories and in- terpretations, rather than in its individual dicta. But, after all, perhaps its highest value lies not so much in its artistic as in its ethical teaching; it is an impassioned appeal for better and nobler liv- ing. For, to Ruskin, art and morality are abso- lutely and indissolubly united. The most funda- mental principle of his criticism is that of the de- pendence of art on moral character. All art which is true art, sincere and vital, comes from the soul of the artist : if the soul is noble, the art will be noble ; if the soul is mean, the art will be mean. ' Men do not gather grapes from thorns, nor figs from this- tles.' Of course it is not enough that a man should have a noble soul : he must have, also, what Rus- kin calls the art gift; he must possess that sen- sitiveness of eye and ear, that fineness of expression, which distinguish the born artist. It often hap- pens that this art gift is found in men of unholy life ; but even here art is not independent of mo- rality, for without generations of moral ancestors the art gift itself is impossible.* Now it may be possible for a noble and pure painter to preserve his own nobility and purity, and * See further, note on 11:30. XV i IN TROD UC TION. to paint great pictures, even in a corrupt age; it may be possible for a Milton to write his great poem, though fallen on evil days. But when we come to the distinctly social art of architecture, the case is different ; for the building of a house, much more for the building of a great cathedral, we need the co-operation of many hands, perhaps of the whole community through several generations. A national architecture reflects the virtues and the vices of a whole nation. The character of the an- cient Athenians may be read in their Parthenon. The streets of modern London, mean and squalid or soullessly magnificent — what do they reflect of the character of modern society? From an art theory such as this, in which the ethical and social element is so prominent, it is an easy step to a theory of economics which, like that of Ruskin, lays its stress, not on the accumulation of material wealth, but on the ennobling of human life and human character. If national art implies a nobility of national life, we must seek first the noble life. This change in Ruskin's work was announced to the public by the appearance of Unto This Last in the Cornhill Magazine, late in the summer of i860; but for some time previous the burden of life's mystery had been weighing upon him. The strict Protestant orthodoxy of his parents was be- coming impossible to him; he had not yet reached the broader, more catholic Christianity of his later life. The hypocrisy and injustice of the world be- IN TROD UCTION. XVll came every day more apparent. What was he ac- compHshing by his work? The pubhc read his books and flocked to his lectures ; they were glad to know what pictures they should admire, and what condemn. They enjoyed the splendid music of his sentences. But what effect was it having on their lives? Ruskin felt that he, too, was come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly. As we must have life, and a noble life, for the production of art, so, too, there must be a no- bility of soul for the right appreciation of it. * As I myself look at it ' — he is speaking of a picture by Turner — ' there is no fault or folly of my life — and both have been many and great — that does not rise up against me, and take away my joy, and shorten my power of possession, of sight, of understanding. And every past effort of my life, every gleam of Tightness or good in it, is with me now, to help me in the grasp of this art and its vision. So far as I can rejoice in or interpret either, my power is owing to what of right there is in me.' '^ It was because England seemed to have despised life and * concen- trated its soul on pence,' that Ruskin ceased speak- ing to it of art, and put on him the mantle of the prophet and reformer. It is not my purpose to speak at any length of Ruskin's social theories. They are all summed up in his fundamental maxim, ' There is no wealth but life.' It is not territory which makes the strength of a nation ; no, nor cities and factories and \ * Queen of the Air, § iii. XVill INTRODUCTIOISf. railway systems. That nation is greatest which has the most abundant, national life. And so all practical questions are approached by Ruskin not with the question ' Which will pay best ? ' but ' Which method will best develop the life of those concerned ? ' What shall it profit a nation if it shall gain the whole world, and lose its own life? I have tried to show that Ruskin's theory of economics is the natural and consistent outgrowth of his theories of art. It was but a broadening of his horizon, and a growing sense of values, which made him abandon art as an end in itself, and make of it a means to a greater end. 11. The two lectures composing Sesame and Lilies were delivered at Manchester in December, 1864,"^ and were published with a short preface in the following year. In 1869 was added a third lecture, entitled The Mystery of Life and its Arts, and in 1 87 1 the enlarged work was republished with a new * Kings' Treasuries was given at the Rusholme Town Hall, Manchester, December 6, 1864, in aid of a library fund for the Rusholme Institute. Queens^ Gardens was given December 14, at the Town Hall, King Street, Manchester, in aid of schools for Ancoats, a thickly populated quarter of the city. An examination of the reports of the lectures in the Manchester daily papers of December 7 and 15 shows that the original lectures were consid- erably revised before publication in book form. On both evenings the hall was crowded with the most influential people of the city, and the speaker was frequently interrupted by applause. INTRODUCTION. XIX and longer preface. Both the preface and the ad- ditional lecture have a tone of gloom, almost of de- spair. In 1882 Ruskin withdrew them both, and reprinted the first edition with a third preface. In the present edition I have followed the text of 1882, though omitting the preface. The book comes, then, just after the turning- point in Ruskin's work, and though it deals scarcely at all with either art or economics, combines, better perhaps than any other of his works, the two ele- ments of his teaching — the intense love for nature and the arts, and the burning zeal for righteous- ness ; for it treats of that true ' advancement in life,' for man and for woman, which is the burden of his whole prophecy. In the preface of 1882 Rus- kin says of it : ' I have only to add farther, respect- ing the book, that it was written while my energies were still unbroken and my temper unfettered ; and that, if read in connection with Unto This Last, it contains the chief truths I have endeavored through all my past life to display, and which, under the warnings I have received to prepare for its close, I am chiefly thankful to have learnt and taught.' The first lecture treats of books in their relation to the conduct of life. ' What and how to read,' * the treasures hidden in books ; the way we find them and the way we lose them ' — this is the sub- ject of Sesame, and, in his development of the theme, Ruskin applies to the art of literature the same ethical principles which he applies to the art XX INTR OD UC TlOISr. of the painter or the architect. ' Whatever bit of a wise man's work is honestly and benevolently done, that bit is his book or his piece of art.' Such is the ' good book for all time ' which alone de- serves our serious attention. Such is the king's treasure-house which may yield us the best of all wealth — a fuller, more abundant life. As honesty and benevolence are necessary in the author of a true book, so are they necessary in us his readers ; there must be in us an essential right- ness of heart, or the work will seem to us no more than a ' dusty imagery.' The treasure of a good book can be gathered only by him who, with pa- tient effort and humility of heart, strives to enter into the thoughts of the great dead, and, having accomplished that, is able, by still greater effort, to enter into their hearts and feel with them. We lose these treasures by our indifference to the higher things of life — literature, science, art, na- ture, compassion — and by our national belief that a man's life does, after all, consist in the abundance of the things which he possesses. And so we come naturally and logically, as Rus- kin came in his life work, to questions of national morality or immorality; to the eager, bitter denun- ciations of national callousness, and to passionate appeals for a new and more abundant national life. ' My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk about reading. We want some sharper dis- cipline than that of reading; but, at all events, be assured, we cannot read. It is simply and sternly IN TR OD UC TION. xxi impossible for the English public, at this moment, to understand any thoughtful writing — so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of ava- rice.' These sentences mark the crisis or turning- point in the argument of Kings' Treasuries, as the discovery of their truth marks the turning-point of Ruskin's work. The progress of this lecture follows in miniature the progress of Ruskin's life. Though inferior in interest and importance, the second lecture continues, in some sort, the teaching of the first. It, too, treats of the conduct of life; presenting an ideal of noble womanhood, and the majesty of woman's influence in the life of the race. It is the theme which Tennyson had already developed in his Princess, and in essentials the ideal of the two works is the same. Ruskin's argu- ment falls into three divisions. First, by an ap- peal to the wisdom of the great dead, he maintains the right of woman to a queenly, directing power in the affairs of life ; he next considers what educa- tion may best prepare a woman for this queenly function ; and lastly, he shows how, and to what ends, her power should be exercised. Written, then, in his best manner, and dealing as it does with the most vital part of his teaching, Sesame and Lilies serves admirably as an in- troduction to Ruskin and to his work. It is hon- estly and benevolently done ; in the fullest sense of the word, a Book. If we are tempted at times to resent the dogmatism and the denunciations, we must remember that Ruskin did not write to amuse xxu INTRODUCTION. people ; that he was deeply and terribly in earnest ; and that when a man not only means what he says, but feels it with all his soul, it is hard for him to be perfectly calm, or absolutely sane. III. In the Queen of the Air Ruskin says of his own style : ' I have always had three different ways of writing; one with the single view of making myself understood, in which case I necessarily omit a great deal of what comes into my head ; another, in .which I say what I think ought to be said, in what I suppose to be the best words I can find for it (which is in reality an afifected style — ^be it good or bad) ; and my third way of writing is to say all that comes into my head for my own pleasure, in the first words that come, retouching them afterwards into (approximate) grammar.' Sesame and Lil- ies — the greater part of it, at any rate — is writ- ten in the second of these styles, which, despite Rus- kin's self-charge of affectation, is his great style, the style which gives him his undisputed place among the prose-writers of the nineteenth century. This style is, I think, marked by three dominant traits : its forcibleness, its wealth of illustration and allusion, and its poetic color. I shall consider these three qualities in order. The forcibleness of Ruskin's style is not, like that of Carlyle, gained by a mere succession of sharp hammer blows, or by a disregard of normal sen- INTRODUCTION. xxill tence structure. It is the more refined strength of an Apollo, not the impetuous rage of a Norse Thor. Neither is it like the strength of a New- man, due to strict subordination of details and careful grouping of thought. Ruskin's style gains strength gradually as it proceeds, and by ac- cretion, as it were. The paragraph begins with a short simple sentence, stating its main theme. The succeeding sentences take up the theme, adding and illustrating, each a little longer and more im- passioned than its predecessor. Last we have a long, highly wrought sentence, which gathers up into itself the strength of all the rest, and with the roar and plunge of a majestic wave hurls itself at us.* Within the sentence itself a similar method of ac- cretion may be noticed. The sentences are rarely periodic, yet they do not impress us disagreeably by their looseness. They proceed by the addition of clause to clause, but every addition marks an ad- vance to something more important or more im- passioned. These clauses are very often to be found in groups of three, four, or even five.f At times, often in denunciatory passages, an adjective or a group of adjectives is kept till the end of the * Examples of this typical paragraph are §§ 41, 42, 45, of Kings' Treasuries. At times, as in §45, the long sentence is followed by a single shorter one ; at times the longest sentence is nearly midway, and the paragraph becomes a rise and fall of intensity. As an example of this latter structure, see § 37. f For examples see §§ 38, 42. § 45 furnishes a remarkable instance of the triple grouping. XXIV INTRODUCTION. sentence, to be hurled at us after we think the dread voice is past. The following sentence illus- trates both the grouping of clauses and this saving up of adjectives. * Our National wish and purpose are to be amused ; our National religion is the per- formance of church ceremonies, and preaching of soporific truths (or untruths), to keep the mob quietly at work, w^hile we amuse ourselves; and the necessity for this amusement is fastening on us as a feverous disease of parched throat and wander- ing eyes — senseless, dissolute, merciless.' No less obvious than the earnestness and strength of Ruskin's style is its wealth of illustration and allusion. The range of this illustration and allusion is considerable — from the Bible and the great poets to contemporary literature, history, and newspaper gossip. When we remember the place occupied by the Bible in Ruskin's early education, and his as- sertion in Prcetcrita that to his familiarity with it he owes the best part of his taste in literature, we shall not be surprised to find it occupying chief place in his writings. At times he quotes out- right, at times he merely alludes to* or borrows a Biblical phrase or turn of language. In other places — notably in the last paragraph of Queens' Gardens — his language becomes a mere mosaic of Bible verses, in which Old Testament and New blend into and color each other. Sometimes the Bible language serves as the basis of a paragraph, and lends itself under Ruskin's fancy to new in- terpretation and expansion.* * Sec, especially, § 45 and notes, INTRODUCTION. XXV What is the result of this constant ilkistration and allusion? At times it is bewildering, espe- cially if one does not recognize the allusion — a not infrequent occurrence, since Ruskin is' often referring to some contemporary event of pass- ing interest. It nearly always retards the progress of the thought. Not infrequently it seems overdone. But this retardation is not with- out its intended effect. Ruskin does not wish us to arrive at his full thought until we are ready to receive it and accept it. It is not his way to cut down forests and lay low every mountain and hill, that our pathway may be straight and plain. He prefers rather to lead us through many a bypath meadow and many a grassy glade, beguiling us with a fair flower or a pleasing prospect, till we are off our guard, and come quite unexpectedly to the end he wishes us to reach. He is like the keen-eyed eagle, who soars in great circles above his prey be- fore he is ready to swoop down upon it ; the watcher knows not when he will strike, but the eagle's eye never leaves its object. But, if Ruskin's prose is marked by its force and by its allusiveness, it is still more strongly char- acterized by its poetic color. Always an orna- mented, imaginative style, it rises at times into a manner so highly wrought, so vividly image-build- ing, that it ceases to be prose at all and becomes poetry, while the language assumes sympathetically the subtlest rhythms and most expressive harmo- nies. And this quality of his writings is so obvious XXVI IN TROD UC TION. that it needs but slight analysis. Turn from Sesame to the graceful delicacy and limpidness of Addison or the clear intellectuality of Arnold, and we feel ourselves in another atmosphere. Rus- kin's love of metaphor shows itself in the very titles of his books, and there is scarce a page without its simile. As an example of his power of sustained simile, turn to the Scythian guest of § 42. As an example of his highly imaginative metaphor, take this splendidly rhythmical sentence from § 41. ' How often, even if we lift the marble entrance gate, do we but wander among those old kings in their repose, and finger the robes they lie in, and stir the crowns on their foreheads ; and still they are silent to us, and seem but a dusty imagery ; because we know not the incantation of the heart that would wake them ; — which, if they once heard, they would start up to meet us in their power of long ago, nar- rowly to look upon us, and consider us ; and as the fallen kings of Hades meet the newly fallen, saying, " Art thou also become weak as we ? art thou also become one of us ? " so would these kings, with their undimmed, unshaken diadems, meet us, say- ing, " Art thou also become pure and mighty of heart as we? art thou also become one of us? " ' Forcibleness, wealth of illustration, poetic im- agery — these three ; one might mention other lesser characteristics, but these are what mark Ruskin's style in Sesame and Lilies. i It is one of Ruskin's basic theories that in the building we can read the architect. May we not INTRODUCTION. xxvii reverse the proposition, and say that from the man we can tell what sort of building he would build? Ruskin's work always suggests to me one of those great French cathedrals which he loved, built in the ornamental style of Gothic just before it degener- ated into the fantastic license of the flamboyant; combining the grace and beauty of storied portico and leaf-girt column with the dignity and strength of a God-devoted purpose. LIST OF RUSKIN'S MORE IMPORTANT WORKS. 1 843- 1 860. Modern Painters. 1849. The Seven Lamps of Architecture. 185 1. The King of the Golden River. 1 85 1 . Pre-Raphaelitism. 1851-1853. The Stones of Venice. 1853- 1 860. Giotto and His Work in Padua. 1854. Lectures on Architecture and Painting. 1857. The Political Economy of Art. 1859. The Tzvo Paths. i860. Unto This Last. 1865. Sesame and Lilies. 1866. The Ethics of the Dust. 1866. The Grown of Wild Olive. 1869. The Queen of the Air. 1 871-1884. Fors Glavigera. 1 885- 1 889. PrcBterita. SESAME AND LILIES. LECTURE I.— SESAME. '' You shall each have a cake of sesame,— and ten pound." LuciAN : T/ie Fisherman. I. My first duty this evening is to ask your par- don for the ambiguity of title under which the sub- ject of lecture has been announced: for indeed I am not going to talk of kings, known as regnant, 5 nor of treasuries, understood to contain wealth ; but of quite another order of royalty, and another material of riches, than those usually acknowl- edged. I had even intended to ask your atten- tion for a little while on trust, and (as some- lo times one contrives, in taking a friend to see a favourite piece of scenery) to hide what I wanted most to show, with such imperfect cunning as I might, until we unexpectedly reached the best point of view by winding paths. But — and as also 15 I have heard it said, by men practised in public address, that hearers are never so much fatigued as by the endeavour to follow a speaker who gives them no clue to his purpose, — I will take the slight mask off at once, and tell you plainly that I want 20 to speak to you about the treasures hidden in 2 SESAME AND LILIES. books; and about the way we find them, and the way we lose them. A grave subject, you will say; and a wide one! Yes; so wide that I shall make no effort to touch the compass of it. I will try only to bring before you a few simple thoughts 5 about reading, which press themselves upon me every day more deeply, as I watch the course of the public mind with respect to our daily enlarging means of education; and the answeringly wider spreading on the levels, of the irrigation of lit- 10 erature. 2. It happens that I have practically some con- nection with schools for different classes of youth; and I receive many letters from parents respect- ing the education of their children. In the mass 15 of these letters I am always struck by the prece- dence which the idea of a " position in life " takes above all other thoughts in the parents' — more es- pecially in the mothers' — minds. " The education befitting such and such a station in life " — this is the 20 phrase, this the object, always. They never seek, as far as I can make out, an education good in itself; even the conception of abstract rightness in training rarely seems reached by the writers. But, an education '* which shall keep a good coat on my 25 son's back; — which shall enable him to ring with confidence the visitors' bell at double-belled doors; which shall result ultimately in the establishment of a double-belled door to his own house; — in a word, which shall lead to advancement in life; — 30 this we pray for on bent knees — and this is all we OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 3 pray for." It never seems to occur to the parents that there may be an education which, in itself, is advancement in Life; — that any other than that may perhaps be advancement in Death; and that 5 this essential education might be more easily got, or given, than they fancy, if they set about it in the right way; while it is for no price, and by no favour, to be got, if they set about it in the wrong. 3. Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and 10 effective in the mind of this busiest of countries, I suppose the first — at least that which is confessed with the greatest frankness, and put forward as the fittest stimulus to youthful exertion — is this of " Advancement in life." May I ask you to con- 15 sider with me, what this idea practically includes, and what it should include? Practically, then, at present, " advancement in life" means, becoming conspicuous in life; obtain- ing a position which shall be acknowledged by 20 others to be respectable or honourable. We do not understand by this advancement, in general, the mere making of money, but the being known to have made it; not the accomplishment of any great aim, but the being seen to have accomplished it. 25 In a word, we mean the gratification of our thirst for applause. That thirst, if the last infirmity of noble minds, is also the first infirmity of weak ones; and, on the whole, the strongest impulsive influence of average humanity : the greatest efforts of the race 30 have always been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure. 4 SESAME AND LILIES. 4. I am not about to attack or defend this im- pulse. I want you only to feel how it lies at the root of effort; especially of all modern effort. It is the gratification of vanity which is, with us, the stim- ulus of toil and balm of repose; so closely does it 5 touch the very springs of life that the wounding of our vanity is always spoken of (and truly) as in its measure mortal; we call it " mortification," using the same expression which we should apply to a gangrenous and incurable bodily hurt. And al- 10 though a few of us may be physicians enough to recognise the various effect of this passion upon health and energy, I believe most honest men know, and would at once acknowledge, its leading power with them as a motive. The seaman does 15 not commonly desire to be made captain only be- cause he knows he can manage the ship better than any other sailor on board. He wants to be made captain that he may be called captain. The clergy- man does not usually want to be made a bishop 20 only because he believes that no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct the diocese through its dif- ficulties. He wants to be made bishop primarily that he may be called '* My Lord." And a prince does not usually desire to enlarge, or a subject to 25 gain, a kingdom, because he believes that no one else can as well serve the State, upon its throne; but, briefly, because he wishes to be addressed as " Your Majesty," by as many lips as may be brought to such utterance. ' . 30 5. This, then, being the main idea of " advance- OP KINGS' TREASURIES. 5 ment in life," the force of it applies, for all of us, according to our station, particularly to that sec- ondary result of such advancement which we call " getting into good society." We want to get into 5 good society not that we may have it, but that we may be seen in it; and our notion of its goodness depends primarily on its conspicuousness. Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put what I fear you may think an impertinent ques- lotion? I never can go on with an address unless I feel, or know, that my audience are either with me or against me: I do not much care which, in begin- ning; but I must know where they are; and I would fain find out, at this instant, whether you think I 15 am putting the motives of popular action too low. I am resolved, to-night, to state them low enough to be admitted as probable; for whenever, in my writings on Political Economy, I assume that a little honesty, or generosity, — or what used to be 20 called " virtue " — may be calculated upon as a hu- man motive of action, people always answer me, saying, " You must not calculate on that : that is not in human nature: you must not assume any- thing to be common to men but acquisitiveness 25 and jealousy; no other feeling ever has influence on them, except accidentally, and in matters out of the way of business." I begin, accordingly, to-night low in the scale of motives; but I must know if you think me right in doing so. Therefore, let me ask 30 those who admit the love of praise to be usually the strongest motive in men's minds in seeking ad- 6 SESAME AND LILIES. vancement, and the honest desire of doing any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary one, to hold up their hands. {About a dozen hands held up — the audience, partly, not being sure the lecturer is seri- ous, and, partly, shy of expressing opinion.) I am 5 quite serious — I really do want to know what you think; however, I can judge by putting the reverse question. Will those who think that duty is gen- erally the first, and love of praise the second, mo- tive, hold up their hands? (One hand reported to 10 have been held up, behind the lecturer.) Very good: I see you are with me, and that you think I have not begun too near the ground. Now, with- out teasing you by putting farther question, I ven- ture to assume that you will admit duty as at least a ^5 secondary or tertiary motive. You think that the desire of doing something useful, or obtaining some real good, is indeed an existent collateral idea, though a secondary one, in most men's desire of advancement. You will grant that moderately hon- 20 est men desire place and ofifice, at least in some measure, for the sake of beneficent power; and would wish to associate rather with sensible and well-informed persons than with fools and ignorant persons, whether they are seen in the company of 25 the sensible ones or not. And finally, without be- ing troubled by repetition of any common truisms about the preciousness of friends, and the influence of companions, you will admit, doubtless, that ac- cording to the sincerity of our desire that our 30 friends may be true, and our companions wise,— OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 7 and in proportion to the earnestness and discretion with which we choose both, will be the general chances of our happiness and usefulness. 6. But granting that we had both the will and 5 the sense to choose our friends well, how few of us have the power! or, at least, how limited, for most, is the sphere of choice! Nearly all our associations are determined by chance, or necessity; and re- stricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know lo whom we would ; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open. We may, by good fortune, obtain a glimpse 15 of a great poet, and hear the sound of his voice; or put a question to a man of science, and be answered (rood-humouredlv. We mav intrude ten minutes' talk on a cabinet minister, answered probably with words worse than silence, being deceptive; or 2o snatch, once or twice in our lives, the privilege of throwing a bouquet in the path of a Princess, or arresting the kind glance of a Queen. And yet these momentary chances we covet; and spend our years, and passions and powers in pursuit of little 25 more than these; v/hile, meantime, there is a so- ciety continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or oc- cupation; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And 30 this society, because it is so numerous and so gen- tle, and can be kept waiting round us all day long, 8 SESAME AND LILIES. — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! — in those plainly furnished and narrow anterooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all 5 day long! 7. You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves, that the apathy with which we regard this company of the noble, who are praying us to listen to them; and the passion with which we pur- 10 sue the company, probably of the ignoble, who despise us, or who have nothing to teach us, are grounded in this, — that we can see the faces of the living men, and it is themselves, and not their say- ings, with which we desire to become familiar. But ^5 it is not so. Suppose you never were to see their faces: — suppose you could be put behind a screen in the statesman's cabinet, or the prince's chamber, would you not be glad to listen to their words, though you were forbidden to advance beyond the 20 screen? And when the screen is only a little less, folded in two instead of four, and you can be hidden behind the cover of the two boards that bind a book, and listen all day long, not to the casual talk, but to the studied, determined, chosen addresses of 25 the wisest of men; — this station of audience, and honourable privy council, you despise! 8. But perhaps you will say that it is because the living people talk of things that are passing, and are of immediate interest to you, that you desire to 30 hear them. Nay; that cannot be so, for the living OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 9 people will themselves tell you about passing mat- ters, much better in their writings than in their careless talk. But I admit that this motive does influence you, so far as you prefer those rapid and 5 ephemeral writings to slow and enduring writings — books, properly so called. For all books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this distinction — it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the lo bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. It is a distinction of species. There are good books for the hour, and good ones for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time. I must define the two kinds before I go 15 farther. 9. The good book of the hour, then, — I do not speak of the bad ones — is simply the useful or pleas- ant talk of some person whom you cannot other- wise converse with, printed for you. Very useful 20 often, telling you what you need to know; very pleasant often, as a sensible friend's present talk would be. These bright accounts of travels; good- humoured and witty discussions of question; lively or pathetic story-telling in the form of novel; firm 25 fact-telling, by the real agents concerned in the events of passing history; — all these books of the hour, multiplying among us as education becomes more general, are a peculiar possession of the pres- ent age: we ought to be entirely thankful for them, 30 and entirely ashamed of ourselves if we make no good use of them. But we make the worst possible lo SESAME AND LILIES. use if we allow them to usurp the place of true books: for, strictly speaking, they are not books at all-, but merely letters or newspapers in good print. Our friend's letter may be delightful, or necessary, to-day : whether worth keeping or not, is to be con- 5 sidered. The newspaper may be entirely proper at breakfast-time, but assuredly it is not reading for all day. So, though bound up in a volume, the long letter which gives you so pleasant an account of the inns, and roads, and weather last year at such lo a place, or which tells you that amusing story, or gives you the real circumstances of such and such events, however valuable for occasional reference, may not be, in the real sense of the word, a " book " at all, nor in the real sense, to be '' read." A book i5 is essentially not a talked thing, but a written thing; and written, not with a view of mere communica- tion, but of permanence. The book of talk is printed only because its author cannot speak to thousands of people at once; if he could, he would 20 — the volume is mere multiplication of his voice. You cannot talk to your friend in India; if you could, you would; you write instead: that is mere conveyance of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, 25 but to perpetuate it. The author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So far as he knows, no one has yet said it; so far as he knows, no one else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melodi- 30 ouslv if he mav; clearlv, at all events. In the sum OF KINGS' TREASURIES. II of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him; — this, the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. He would 5 fain set it down for ever; engrave it on rock, if he could; saying, " This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like another; my life was as the vapour, and is not; but this I saw and knew: this, if anything of mine, is lo worth your memory." That is his "writing"; it is, in his small human way, and with whatever de- gree of true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a " Book." 10. Perhaps you think no books were ever so 15 written? But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in honesty, or at all in kindness? or do you think there is never any honesty or benevolence in wise people? None of us, I hope, are so unhappy as to think that. 20 Well, whatever bit of a wise man's work is honestly and benevolently done, that bit is his book, or his piece of art.'^ It is mixed always with evil frag- ments — ill-done, redundant, affected work. But if you read rightly, you will easily discover the true 25 bits, and those arc the book. 11. Now, books of this kind have been written in all ages by their greatest men, — by great readers, great statesmen, and great thinkers. These are all at your choice; and Life is short. You have heard 30 * Note this sentence carefully, and compare the ' Queen of the Air,' ^ 106, 12 SESAME AND LILIES. as much before; — yet, have you measured and mapped out this short Hfe and its possibihties? Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read that — that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow? Will you go and gossip with your 5 housemaid, or your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and kings; or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy consciousness of your own claims to respect, that you jostle with the hungry and common crowd for entree here, and audience 10 there, when all the while this eternal court is open to you, with its society, wide as the world, multi- tudinous as its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of every place and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you may take fellowship and rank ^ 5 according to your wish; from that, once entered into it, you can never be an outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive to 20 take high place in the society of the living, meas- ured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take in this com- pany of the Dead. 12. " The place you desire," and the place you 25 fit yourself for, I must also say; because, observe, this court of the past differs from all living aristoc- racy in this : — it is open to labour and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth will bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive, the guardian of those 30 Elysian gates. In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 13 person ever enters there. At the portieres of that silent Faubourg St. Germain, there is but brief question: "Do you deserve to enter? Pass. Do you ask to be the companion of nobles? Make 5 yourself noble, and you shall be. Do you long for the conversation of the wise? Learn to understand it, and you shall hear it. But on other terms? — no. If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you. The living lord may assume courtesy, the living 10 philosopher explain his thought to you with con- siderate pain; but here we neither feign nor inter- pret; you must rise to the level of our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, and share our feelings if you would recognise our presence." 15 13. This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit that it is much. You must, in a word, love these people, if you are to be among them. No am- bition is of any use. They scorn your ambition. You must love them, and show your love in these 20 two following ways. I. — First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and to enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, observe; not to find your own expressed by them. If the person who wrote the book is not 25 wiser than you, you need not read it ; if he be, he will think differently from you in many respects. Very ready we are to say of a book, " How good this is — that's exactly what I think! " But the right feeling is, " How strange that is! I never thought 30 of that before, and yet I see it is true ; or if I do not noAv, I hope I shall, some day." But whether 14 SESAME AND LILIES. thus submissively or not, at least be sure that you g"o to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. Judge it afterwards if you think yourself qualified to do so; but ascertain it first. And be sure also, if the author is worth anything, that you 5 will not get at his meaning all at once; — nay, that at his whole meaning you will not for a long time arrive in any wise. Not that he does not say what he means, and in strong words too; but he cannot say it all; and what is more strange, zmll not, but in 10 a hidden way and in parable, in order that he may be sure you want it. I cannot quite see the reason of this, nor analyse that cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men which makes them always hide their deeper thought. They do not give is it you by way of help, but of reward; and will make themselves sure that you deserve it before they al- low you to reach it. But it is the same with the physical type of wisdom, gold. There seems, to you and me, no reason why the electric forces of the 20 earth should not carry whatever there is of gold within it at once to the mountain tops, so that kings and people might know that all the gold they could get was there; and without any trouble of digging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, 25 and coin as much as they needed. But Nature does not manage it so. She puts it in little fissures in the earth, nobody knows where; you may dig long and find none ; you must dig painfully to find any. 14. And it is just the same with men's best wis- 30 dpm. When you come to a good book, you must OF KINGS TREASURIES. 1 5 ask yourself, '' Am I inclined to work as an Aus- tralian miner would? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my breath good, 5 and my temper? " And, keeping the figure a little longer, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thor- oughly useful one, the metal you are in search of being the author's mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in lo order to get at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at any good author's meaning without those tools and that fire; often you will need sharpest, finest chisel- 15 ling, and patientest fusing, before you can gather one grain of the metal. 15. And, therefore, first of all, I tell you earnestly and authoritatively, (I knozv I am right in this,) you must get into the habit of looking intensely at 20 words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syl- lable by syllable — nay, letter by letter. For though it is only by reason of the opposition of letters in the function of signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the study of books is called " literature," 25 and that a man versed in it is called, by the con- sent of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature this real fact, — that you might read all the books in the British Museum 30 (if you could live long enough), and remain an ut- terly " illiterate," uneducated person; but that if you 1 6 SESAME AND LILIES. read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — ■ that is to say, with real accuracy, — you are for ever- more in some measure an educated person. The entire difference between education and non-educa- tion (as regards the merely intellectual part of it), 5 consists in this accuracy. A well-educated gentle- man may not know many languages, — may not be able to speak any but his own, — may have read very few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces, 10 he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the peerage of words; knows the words of true de- scent and ancient blood, at a glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry, their intermarriages, distant relationships, and the ex- 15 tent to which they were admitted, and offices they held, among the national noblesse of words at any time, and in any country. But an uneducated per- son may know, by memory, many languages, and talk them all, and yet truly know not a word of any, 20 — not a word even of his own. An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able to make his way ashore at most ports; yet he has only to speak a sentence of any language to be known for an il- literate person ; so also the accent, or turn of ex- 25 pression of a single sentence, will at once mark a scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so con- clusively admitted, by educated persons, that a false accent or a mistaken syllable is enough, in the par- liament of any civilized nation, to assign to a man 30 a certain degree of inferior standing for ever. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. I? i6. And this is right; but it is a pity that the ac- curacy insisted on is not greater, and required to a serious purpose. It is right that a false Latin quantity should excite a smile in the House of 5 Commons; but it is wrong that a false English meaning should not excite a frown there. Let the accent of words be watched; and closely: let their meaning be watched more closely still, and fewer will do the work. A few words, well chosen and 10 distinguished, will do work that a thousand cannot, when every one is acting, equivocally, in the func- tion of another. Yes; and words, if they are not watched, will do deadly work sometimes. There are masked words droning and skulking about us 15 in Europe just now, — (there never were so many, owing to the spread of a shallow, blotching, blun- dering, infectious " information," or rather de- formation, everywhere, and to the teaching of cate- chisms and phrases at schools instead of human 20 meanings) — there are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody understands, but which everybody uses, and most people will also fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this or that, or the other, of things dear to them : for such words 25 wear chamaeleon cloaks — " groundlion " cloaks, of the colour of the ground of any man's fancy: on that ground they lie in wait, and rend him with a spring from it. There never were creatures of prey so mischievous, never diplormatists so cunning, never 30 poisoners so deadly, as these masked words ; they are the unjust stewards of all men's ideas: what- 1 8 SESAME AND LILIES. ever fancy or favourite instinct a man most cher- ishes, he gives to his favourite masked word to take care of for him; the word at last comes to have an infinite power over him, — you cannot get at him but by its ministry. 5 17. And in languages so mongrel in breed as the English, there is a fatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, almost whether they will or no, in being able to use Greek or Latin words for an idea when they want it to be awful ; and Saxon or 10 otherwise common words when they want it to be vulgar. What a singular and salutary effect, for instance, would be produced on the minds of people who are in the habit of taking the Form of the " Word " they live by, for the Power of which ^5 that Word tells them, if we always either retained, or refused, the Greek form *' biblos," or " biblion," ais the right expression for " book " — instead of em- ploying it only in the one instance in which we wish to give dignity to the idea, and translating it into 20 English everywhere else. How wholesome it would be for many simple persons if, in such places (for instance) as Acts xix. 19, we retained the Greek expression, instead of translating it, and they had to read — " Many of them also which used curi- 25 ous arts, brought their Bibles together, and burnt them before all men; and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of sil- ver"! Or if, on the other hand, we translated where we retain it, and always spoke of "the 30 Holy Book," instead of " Holy Bible," it might OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 1 9 come into more heads than it does at present, that the Word of God, by which the heavens were of old, and by which they are now kept in store, "^ can- not be made a present of to anybody in morocco 5 binding; nor sown on any wayside by help either of steam plough or steam press ; but is nevertheless being offered to us daily, and by us with contumely refused: and sown in us daily, ;^nd by us, as in- stantly as may be, choked. lo i8. So, again, consider what effect has been pro- duced on the English vulgar mind by the use of the sonorous Latin form " damno," in translating the Greek KaTaKpivoD, when people charitably wish to make it forcible ; and the substitution of the tem- ^5 perate " condemn " for it, when they choose to keep it gentle; and what notable sermons have been preached by illiterate clergymen on — " He that be- lieveth not shall be damned ; " though they would shrink with horror from translating Heb. xi. 7, 20 '' The saving of his house, by which he damned the world," or John viii. lo-ii, "Woman, hath no man damned thee? She saith, No man, Lord. Jesus answered her. Neither do I damn thee: go, and sin no more." And divisions in the mind of 25 Europe, which have cost seas of blood, and in the defence of which the noblest souls of men have been cast away in frantic desolation, countless as forest- leaves — though, in the heart of them, founded on deeper causes — have nevertheless been rendered 30 practically possible, mainly, by the European * 2 Peter iii. 5-7. 20 SESAME AND LILIES. adoption of the Greek word for a public meeting, '' ecclesia," to give peculiar respectability to such meetings, when held for religious purposes; and other collateral equivocations, such as the vulgar English one of using the word " priest " as a con- 5 traction for " presbyter.'" 19. Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the habit you must form. Nearly every word in your language has been first a word of some other language — of Saxon, German, French, Latin, 10 or Greek; (not to speak of eastern and primitive dialects). And many words have been all these; — that is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next, French or German next, and English last: under- going a certain change of sense and use on the lips ^5 of each nation; but retaining a deep vital meaning, which all good scholars feel in employing them, even at this day. If you do not know the Greek alphabet, learn it; young or old — girl or boy — who- ever you may be, if you think of reading seriously 20 (which, of course, implies that you have some leisure at command), learn your Greek alphabet; then get good dictionaries of all these languages, and whenever you are in doubt about a word, hunt it down patiently. Read Max Miiller's lectures 25 thoroughly, to begin with; and, after that, never let a word escape you that looks suspicious. It is severe work; bu^ you will find it,. even at first, inter- esting, and at last, endlessly amusing. And the general gain to your character, in power and pre- 30 cision, will be quite incalculable. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 21 Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to know, Greek, or Latin, or French. It takes a whole life to learn any language perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the meanings through wliich the 5 English word has passed; and those which in a good writer's work it must still bear. 20. And now, merely for example's sake, I will, with your permission, read a few lines of a true book with you, carefully; and see what will come lo out of them. I will take a book perfectly known to you all. No English words are more familiar to us, yet few perhaps have been read with less sin- cerity. I will take these few following lines of Lycidas : 15 *' Last came, and last did go, The pilot of the Galilean lake. Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, (The golden opes, the iron shuts amain,) He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake. 20 ' How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, Enow of such as for their bellies' sake Creep, and intrude, and climb into the foldl Of other care they little reckoning make^ Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 25 And shove away the worthy bidden guest; Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to "hold A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else, the least That to the faithful herdman's art belongs ^ What recks it them? What need they? They are spedj 30 And when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw. The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; 2 2 SESAME AND LILIES. Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said.'" Let US think over this passage, and examine its words. First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning 5 to St. Peter, not only his full episcopal function, but the very types of it which Protestants usually refuse most passionately? His '* mitred " locks! Milton was no Bishop-lover; how comes St. Peter to be '* mitred "? '' Two massy keys he bore." Is 10 this, then, the power of the keys claimed by the Bishops of Rome, and is it acknowledged here by Milton only in a poetical licence, for the sake of its picturesqueness, that he may get the gleam of the golden keys to help his efifect? 15 Do not think it. Great men do not play stage tricks with the doctrines of life and death : only little men do that. Milton means what he says; and means it with his might too — is going to put the whole strength of his spirit presently into the say- 20 ing of it. For though not a lover of false bishops, he zvas a lover of true ones; and the Lake-pilot is here, in his thoughts, the type and head of true episcopal power. For Milton reads that text, " I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of 25 Heaven " quite honestly. Puritan though he be, he would not blot it out of the book because there have been bad bishops ; nay, in order to understand him, we must understand that verse first; it will not do to eye it askance, or whisper it under our breath, as 30 if it were a weapon of an adverse sect. It is a OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 2$ solemn, universal assertion, deeply to be kept in mind by all sects. But perhaps we shall be better able to reason on it if we go on a little farther, and come back to it. For clearly this marked insistence 5 on the power of the true episcopate is to make us feel more weightily what is to be charged against the false claimants of episcopate; or generally, against false claimants of power and rank in the body of the clergy: they who, *' for their bellies' lo sake, creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold." 21. Never think Milton uses those three words to fill up his verse, as a loose writer would. He needs all the three; — specially those three, and no more than those — " creep," and '' intrude," and 15 " climb "; no other words would or could serve the turn, and no more could be added. For they ex- haustively comprehend the three classes, corre- spondent to the three characters, of men who dis- honestly seek ecclesiastical power. First, those 20 who ''creep" into the fold; who do not care for ofifice, nor name, but for secret influence, and do all things occultly and cunningly, consenting to any servility of office or conduct, so only that they may intimately discern, and unawares direct, the minds 25 of men. Then those who '' intrude " (thrust, that is) themselves into the fold, who by natural inso- lence of heart, and stout eloquence of tongue, and fearlessly perseverant self-assertion, obtain hearing and authority with the common crowd. Lastly, 30 those who " climb," who, by labour and learning, both stout and sound, but selfishly exerted in the 24 SESAME AND LILIES. cause of their own ambition, gain high dignities and authorities, and become '' lords over the her- itage," thoug-h not *' ensamples to the flock." ^^. Now go on: — " Of other care they little reckoning make, 5 Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast. Blind jnouths " I pause again, for this is a strange expression: a broken metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly. 10 Not so; its very audacity and pithiness are in- tended to make us look close at the phrase and re- member it. Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries of right character, in the two great offices of the Church — those of bishop 15 and pastor. A " Bishop " means '' a person who sees." A " Pastor " means '' a person who feeds." The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind. 20 The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed, — to be a Mouth. Take the two reverses together, and you have ** blind mouths." We may advisably follow out this idea a little. Nearly all the evils in the Church have 25 arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook. Whereas their real office is not to rule; though it may be vigor- ously to exhort and rebuke; it is the king's office to rule; the bishop's office is to oversee the flock; to 30 OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 25 number it, sheep by sheep; to be ready always to give full account of it. Now, it is clear he cannot give account of the souls, if he has not so much as numbered the bodies of his flock. The first thing, 5 therefore, that a bishop has to do is at least to put himself in a position in which, at any moment, he can obtain the history, from childhood, of every living soul in his diocese, and of its present state. Down in that back street. Bill, and Nancy, knock- 10 ing each other's teeth out! — Does the bishop know all about it? Has he his eye upon them? Has he had his eye upon them? Can he circumstantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit of beating Nancy about the head? If he cannot he is no 15 bishop, though he had a mitre as high as Salisbury steeple; he is no bishop, — he has sought to be at the helm instead of the masthead; he has no sight of things. " Nay," you say, " it is not his duty to look after Bill in the back street." What! the fat 20 sheep that have full fleeces — you think it is only those he should look after, while (go back to your Milton) " the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw " (bishops knowing nothing about it) '' daily devours 25 apace, and nothing said "? " But that's not our idea of a bishop." * Per- haps not; but it was St. Paul's; and it was Milton's. They may be right, or we may be; but we must not think we are reading either one or the other 30 by putting our meaning into their words. * Compare the 13th Letter in ' Time and Tide.' 26 SESAME AND LILIES. 2^. I go on. " But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw." This is to meet the vulgar answer that " if the poor are not looked after in their bodies, they are in their souls; they have spiritual food." 5 And Milton says, " They have no such thing as spiritual food; they are only swollen with wind." At first you may think that is a coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, it is a quite literally ac- curate one. Take up your Latin and Greek die- 10 tionaries, and find out the meaning of " Spirit." It is only a contraction of the Latin word " breath," and an indistinct translation of the Greek word for " wind." The same word is used in writing, " The wind bloweth where it listeth; " and in writing, " So 15 is every one that is born of the Spirit; " born of the breath, that is; for it means the breath of God, in soul and body. We have the true sense of it in our words *' inspiration " and '' expire." Now, there are two kinds of breath with which the flock 20 may be filled; God's breath and man's. The breath of God is health, and life, and peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks on the hills; but man's breath — the word which he calls spiritual — is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of the 25 fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a dead body by the vapours of its own de- composition. This is literally true of all false religious teaching; the first, and last, and fatal- est sign of it is that " puffing up." Your con- 30 OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 27 verted children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, who teach honest men; your converted dunces, who, having hved in cretinous stupefaction half their lives, suddenly 5 awaking to the fact of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiar people and messengers; your sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think themselves exclusively loin the right and others wrong; and pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and wish instead of work; — these are the true fog children — clouds, these, with- 15 out water; bodies, these, of putrescent vapour and skin, without blood or flesh: blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with — corrupt, and corrupting, — " Swoln with wind, and the r^nk mist they draw." 24. Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting 20 the power of the keys, for now we can understand them. Note the difference between Milton and Dante in their interpretation of this power: for once, the latter is weaker in thought; he supposes both the keys to be of the gate of heaven; one is of 25 gold, the other of silver: they are given by St. Peter to the sentinel angel; and it is not easy to determine the meaning either of the substances of the three steps of the gate, or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, the key of heaven; the 30 other, of iron, the key of the prison in which the wicked teachers are to be bound who " have taken 28 SESAME AND LILIES. away the key of knowledge, yet entered not in themselves." We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to see, and feed; and of all who do so it is said, ** He that watereth, shall be watered also himself." 5 But the reverse is truth also. He that watereth not, shall be withered himself; and he that seeth not, shall himself be shut out of sight — shut into the per- petual prison-house. And that prison opens here, as well as hereafter ; he who is to be bound in lo heaven must first be bound on earth. That com- mand to the strong angels, of which the rock- apostle is the image, " Take him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast him out," issues, in its measure, against the teacher, for every help with- ^5 held, and for every truth refused, and for every falsehood enforced; so that he is more strictly fet- tered the more he fetters, and farther outcast, as he more and more misleads, till at last the bars of the iron cage close upon him, and as '' the golden opes, 20 the iron shuts amain." 25. We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much more is yet to be found in them; but we have done enough by way of example of the kind of word-by-word examination of your au- 25 thor which is rightly called " reading " ; watching every accent and expression, and putting ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able assuredly to say, " Thus Milton thought," 30 not " Thus / thought, in mis-reading Milton." OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 29 And by this process you will gradually come to at- tach less weight to your own " Thus I thought " at other times. You will begin to perceive that what you thought was a matter of no serious im- Sportance; — that your thoughts on any subject are not perhaps the clearest and wisest that could be arrived at thereupon: — in fact, that unless you are a very singular person, you cannot be said to have any " thoughts " at all; that you have no materials 10 for them, in any serious matters; "^^ — no right to " think," but only to try to learn more of the facts. Nay, most probably all your life (unless, as I said, you are a singular person) you will have no legiti- mate right to an " opinion " on any business, ex- 15 cept that instantly under your hand. What must of necessity be done, you can always find out, beyond question, how to do. Have you a house to keep in order, a commodity to sell, a field to plough, a ditch to cleanse? There need be no two opinions about 20 the proceedings ; it is at your peril if you have not much more than an " opinion " on the way to man- age such matters. And also, outside of your own business, there are one or two subjects on which you are bound to have but one opinion. That 25 roguery and lying are objectionable, and are in- stantly to be fiogged out of the way whenever dis- covered; — that covetousness and love of quarrelling are dangerous dispositions even in children, and * Modern " education" for the most part signifies giving 30 people the faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance to them. 30 SESAME AND LILIES. deadly dispositions in men and nations ; — that in the end, the God of heaven and earth loves active, mod- est, and kind people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones; — on these general facts you are bound to have but one, and that a very strong, 5 opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, govern- ments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on the whole, you can know nothing, — judge nothing; that the best you can do, even though you may be a well-educated person, is to be silent, and strive lo to be wiser every day, and to understand a little more of the thoughts of others, which so soon as you try to do honestly, you will discover that the thoughts even of the wisest are very little more than pertinent questions. To put the difficulty into a i5 clear shape, and exhibit to you the grounds for i/idecision, that is all they can generally do for you! — and well for them and for us, if indeed they are able " to mix the music with our thoughts, and sadden us with heavenly doubts." This writer, from 20 whom I have been reading to you, is not among the first or wisest: he sees shrewdly as far as he sees, and therefore it is easy to find out his full meaning; but with the greater men, you cannot fathom their meaning; they do not even wholly 25 measure it themselves, — it is so wide. Suppose I had asked you, for instance, to seek for Shake- speare's opinion instead of Milton's, on this matter of Church authority? — or of Dante's? Have any of you, at this instant, the least idea what either 30 thought about -it? Have you ever balanced the OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 3^ scene with the bishops in Richard III. against the character of Cranmer? the description of St. Francis and St. Dominic against that of him who made Virgil wonder to gaze upon him,—" disteso, 5 tanto vilmente, nell' eterno esilio " ; or of him whom Dante stood beside, " come '1 frate che confessa lo perfido assassin"?* Shakespeare and Ahghieri knew men better than most of us, I presume! They were both in the midst of the main struggle be- lo tween the temporal and spiritual powers. They had an opinion, we may guess. But where is it? Bring it into court! Put Shakespeare's or Dante's creed into articles, and send it up for trial by the Ec- clesiastical Courts! 15 26. You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and many a day, to come at the real purposes and teaching of these great men; but a very little honest study of them will enable you to perceive that what you took for your own " judgment " was 20 mere chance prejudice, and drifted, helpless, en- tangled weed of castaway thought; nay, you will see that most men's minds are indeed little better than rough heath wilderness, neglected and stub- born, partly barren, partly overgrown with pestilent 25 brakes, and venomous, wind-sown herbage of evil surmise; that the first thing you have to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and scornfully to set fire to this; burn all the jungle into wholesome ash- heaps, and then plough and sow. All the true lit- 3oerary work before you, for life, must begin with * Inf. xxiii. 125, 126; xix. 49, 50. 32 SESAME AND LILIES. obedience to that order, " Break np your fallow ground, and .wzc ni)t among thorns.^' 2y. II.* Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers, that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this higher advance to 5 make; — you have to enter into their Hearts. As you go to them first for clear sight, so you must stay with them, that you may share at last their just and mighty Passion. Passion, or " sensation." I am not afraid of the word; still less of the thing. lo You have heard many outcries against sensation lately; but, I can tell you, it is not less sensation we want, but more. The ennobling difference be- tween one man and another, — between one ani- mal and another, — is precisely in this, that one 15 feels more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not be easily got for us; if we were earth-worms, liable at every in- stant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us. But 20 being human creatures, it is good for us; nay, we are only human in so far as we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely in proportion to our pas- sion. 28. You know I said of that great and pure so- 25 ciety of the Dead, that it would allow " no vain or vulgar person to enter there." What do you think I meant by a *' vulgar " person? What do you yourselves mean by " vulgarity "? You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the es- 30 ♦Compare ^ 13 above. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 33 sence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an un- trained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a dread- 5 ful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capa- ble cf every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, lothat men become vulgar; they are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy — of quick understanding, — of all that, in deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may be called the " tact " or " touch-faculty," 15 of body and soul: that tact which the Mimosa has jn trees, which the pure woman has above all crea- tures; — fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason; — the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but determine what is true: — it is the 20 God-given passion of humanity which alone can recognize what God has made good. 29. We come then to that great concourse of the Dead, not merely to know from them what is true, but chiefly to feel with them what is just. Now, 25 to feel with them, we must be like them; and none of us can become that without pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge, — not the first thought that comes, — so the true pas- sion is disciplined and tested passion, — not the first 30 passion that comes. The first that come are the vain, the false, the treacherous; if you yield to them, 34 SESAME AND LILIES. they will lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true pur- pose and no true passion left. Not that any feel- ing possible to humanity is in itself wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined. Its nobility is in its 5 force and justice; it is wrong when it is weak, and felt for paltry cause. There is a mean wonder, as of a child who sees a juggler tossing golden balls, and this is base, if you will. But do you think that the wonder is ignoble, or the sensation less, with which lo every human soul is called to watch the golden balls of heaven tossed through the night by the Hand that made them? There is a mean curiosity, as of a child opening a forbidden door, or a servant pry- ing into her master's business ; — and a noble curi- 15 osity, questioning, in the front of danger, the source of the great river beyond the sand, — the place of the great continent beyond the sea ; — ^a nobler curi- osity still, which questions of the source of the River of Life, and of the space of the Continent of 20 Heaven — things which " the angels desire to look into." So the anxiety is ignoble, with which you linger over the course and catastrophe of an idle tale; but do you think the anxiety is less, or greater, with which you watch, or ought to watch, the deal- 25 ings of fate and destiny with the life of an agonized nation? Alas! it is the narrowness, selfishness, minuteness, of your sensation that you have to de- plore in England at this day; — sensation which spends itself in bouquets and speeches ; in revellings 30 and junketings; in sham fights and gay puppet OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 35 shows, while you can look on and see noble nations murdered, man by man, without an effort or a tear. 30. I said '' minuteness " and *' selfishness " of sensation, but it would have been enough to have 5 said '' injustice " or '' unrighteousness " of sensa- tion. For as in nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned from a vulgar person, so in nothing is a gentle nation (such nations have been) better to be discerned from a mob, than in this, — that their 10 feelings are constant and just, results of due con- templation, and of equal thought. You can talk a mob into anything; its feelings may be — usually are — on the whole, generous and right; but it has no foundation for them, no hold of them; you may 15 tease or tickle it into any, at your pleasure; it thinks by infection, for the most part, catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing so little that it will not roar itself wild about, when the fit is on; — nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, when 20 the fit is past. But a gentleman's, or a gentle na- tion's, passions are just, measured, and continuous. A great nation, for instance, does not spend its en- tire national wits for a couple of months in weigh- ing evidence of a single ruffian's having done a 25 single murder; and for a couple of years see its own children murder each other by their thousands or tens of thousands a day, considering only what the effect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and car- ing nowise to determine which side of battle is in 30 the wrong. Neither does a great nation send its poor little boys to jail for stealing six walnuts; and 36 SESAME AND LILIES. allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds of thou- sands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor men's savings, to close their doors " under circum- stances over which they have no control/' with a "by your leave"; and large landed estates to be 5 bought by men who have made their money by going with armed steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth, and altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the common highwayman's demand of '' your money lo or your life," into that of '' your money and your life." Neither does a great nation allow the lives of its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted out of them by dung-hill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra peris week to its landlords ; * and then debate, with driv- elling tears, and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought not piously to save, and nursingly cherish, the lives of its murderers. Also, a great nation having made up its mind that hanging is quite the 20 wholesomest process for its homicides in general, can yet with mercy distinguish between the degrees of guilt in homicides; and does not yelp like a pack of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood-track of an unhappy crazed boy, or grey-haired clodpate 25 Othello, ** perplexed i' the extreme," at the very moment that it is sending a Minister of the Crown to make polite speeches to a man who is bayoneting * See note at end of lecture. I have put it in large type, because the course of matters since it was written has 30 made it perhaps better worth attention. OF KIMGS' TREASURIES 37 young girls in their fathers' sight, and killing noble youths in cool blood, faster than a country butcher kills lambs in spring. And, lastly, a great nation does not mock Heaven and its Powers, by pretend- 5 ing belief in a revelation which asserts the love of money to be the root of all evil, and declaring, at the same time, that it is actuated, and intends to be actuated, in all chief national deeds and measures, by no other love. lo 31. My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk about reading. We want some sharper discipline than that of reading; but, at all events, be assured, we cannot read. No reading is possi- ble for a people with its mind in this state. No sen- 15 tence of any great writer is intelligible to them. It is simply and sternly impossible for the English public, at this moment, to understand any thought- ful writing, — so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of avarice. Happily, our disease is, 20 as yet, little worse than this incapacity of thought; it is not corruption of the inner nature; we ring true still, when anything strikes home to us; and though the idea that everything should *' pay " has infected our every purpose so deeply, that even when we 25 would play the good Samaritan, we never take out our twopence and give them to the host, without saying, " When I come again, thou shalt give me fourpence," there is a capacity of noble passion left in our hearts' core. We show it in our work — in 30 our war, — even in those unjust domestic affections which make us furious at a small private wrong, 38 SESAME AND LILIES. while we are polite to a boundless public one: we are still industrious to the last hour of the day, though we add the gambler's fury to the labourer's patience; we are still brave to the death, though in- capable of discerning true cause for battle; and are 5 still true in affection to our own flesh, to the death, as the sea-monsters are, and the rock-eagles. And there is hope for a nation while this can be still said of it. As long as it holds its life in its hand, ready to give it for its honour (though a foolish lo honour), for its love (though a selfish love), and for its business (though a base business), there is hope for it. But hope only; for this instinctive, reckless virtue cannot last. No nation can last, which has made a mob of itself, however generous at heart. i5 It must discipline its passions, and direct them, or they will discipline it, one day, with scorpion-whips. Above all, a nation cannot last as a money-making mob: it cannot with impunity, — it cannot with ex- istence, — go on despising literature, despising 20 science, despising art, despising nature, despising compassion, and concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you think these are harsh or wild words? Have patience with me but a little longer. I will prove their truth to you, clause by clause. 25 32. I. I say first we have despised literature. What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? If a man spends lavishly 30 on his library, you call him mad — a bibliomaniac. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 39 But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower still, how much do 5 you think the contents of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents of its wine-cellars? What position would its expenditure on literature take, as compared with its expenditure on luxurious locating? We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the body: now a good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it is a provision for life, and for the best part of us; yet how long most people would look at the best book before they would give the 15 price of a large turbot for it! Though there have been men who have pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than most men's dinners are. We are few of us put to 20 such trial, and more the pity; for, indeed, a pre- cious thing is all the more precious to us if it has been won by work or economy; and if public li- braries were half as costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets do, even 25 foolish men and women might sometimes suspect there was good in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling; whereas the very cheapness of lit- erature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No 36 book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re- 40 SESAME AND LILIES. read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he needs in an armoury, or a house-wife bring the spice she needs from her store. Bread of flour is good; but there 5 is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book; and the family must be poor indeed which, once in their lives, cannot, for such multi- pliable barley-loaves, pay their baker's bill. We call . ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthy and foolish lo enough to thumb each other's books out of circulat- ing libraries! 33. II. I say we have despised science. "What!" you exclaim, " are we not foremost in all discov- ery,* and is not the whole world giddy by reason, 15 or unreason, of our inventions? " Yes, but do you suppose that is national work? That work is all done ui spite of the nation; by private people's zeal and money. We are glad enough, indeed, to make our profit of science ; we snap up anything in the 20 way of a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly enough; but if the scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to its, that is another story. What have we publicly done for science? We are obliged to know what o'clock it is, for the safety of our ships, 25 and therefore we pay for an Observatory; and we allow ourselves, in the person of our Parliament, to * Since this was written, the answer has become definite!}'- — No ; we having surrendered the field of Arctic discovery to the Continental nations, as being ourselves '30 too poor to pay for ships, OF KINGS' TREASURIES. \\ be annually tormented into doing something, in a slovenly way, for the British Museum; sullenly ap- prehending that to be a place for keeping stuffed birds in, to amuse our children. If anybody will 5 pay for their own telescope, and resolve another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it were our own; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires suddenly perceives that the earth was indeed made to be something else than a portion for foxes, lo and burrows in it himself, and tells us where the gold is, and where the coals, we understand that there is some use in that; and very properly knight him: but is the accident of his having found out how to employ himself usefully any credit to us? 15 (The negation of such discovery among his brother squires may perhaps be some ^i^credit to us, if we would consider of it.) But if you doubt these gen- eralities, here is one fact for us all to meditate upon, illustrative of our love of science. Two years ago 20 there was a collection of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria: the best in existence, con- taining many specimens unique for perfectness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being an- 25 nounced by that fossil). This collection, of which the mere market worth, among private buyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the English nation for seven hundred: but we would not give seven 30 hundred, and the whole series would have been in the Munich museum at this moment, if Professor 4« SESAME AND LILIES. Owen * had not, with loss of his own time, and pa- tient tormenting of the British pubHc in person of its representatives, got leave to give four hundred pounds at once, and himself become answerable for the other three! which the said public will doubtless 5 pay him eventually, but sulkily, and caring nothing about the matter all the while; only always ready to cackle if any credit comes of it. Consider, I beg of you, arithmetically, what this fact means. Your annual expenditure for public purposes (a third of lo it for military apparatus,) is at least fifty millions. Now seven hundred pounds is to fifty million pounds, roughly, as seven-pence to two thousand pounds. Suppose, then, a gentleman of unknown income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured 15 from the fact that he spent two thousand a year on his park walls and footmen only, professes him- self fond of science; and that one of his servants comes eagerly to tell him that an unique collection of fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to 20 be had for the sum of seven-pence sterling; and that the gentleman, who is fond of science, and spends two thousand a year on his park, answers, after keeping his servant waiting several months, "Well! I'll give you four-pence for them, if you 25 will be answerable for the extra three-pence your- self, till next year! " * I state this fact without Professor Owen's permission, which of course he could not with propriety have granted, had I asked it; but I consider it so important that the 30 public should be aware of the fact, that I do what seems to me right, though rude, OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 43 34. III. I say you have despised Art! *' What! " you again answer, " have we not Art exhibitions, miles long? and do not we pay thousands of pounds for single pictures? and have we not Art schools 5 and institutions, more than ever nation had be- fore? " Yes, truly, but all that is for the sake of the shop. You would fain sell canvas as well as coals, and crockery as well as iron; you would take every other nation's bread out of its mouth if you 10 could; * not being able to do that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thoroughfares of the world, like Ludgate apprentices, screaming to every passer-by, "What d'ye lack?" You know nothing of your own faculties or circumstances; you fancy that, 15 among your damp, flat, fat fields of clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as the Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or the Italian under his volcanic cliffs; — that Art may be learned as book-keeping is, and when learned, will give you more books to 20 keep. You care for pictures, absolutely, no more than you do for the bills pasted on your dead walls. There is always room on the wall for the bills to be read, — never for the pictures to be seen. You do not know what pictures you have (by repute) in 25 the country, nor whether they are false or true, nor whether they are taken care of or not; in foreign countries, you calmly see the noblest existing pic- *That was our real idea of "Free Trade" — "All the trade to myself." You find now that by "competition" 30 other people can manage to sell something as well as you— and now we call for Protection again. Wretches! 44 SESAME AND LILIES. tures in the world rotting in abandoned wreck — (in Venice you saw the Austrian guns deliberately pointed at the palaces containing them), and if you heard that all the fine pictures in Europe were made into sand-bags to-morrow on the Austrian forts, 5 it would not trouble you so much as the chance of a brace or two of game less in your own bags, in a day's shooting. That is your national love of Art. 35. IV. You have despised nature; that is to 10 say, all the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made race- courses of the cathedrals of the earth. Your mie conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad car- 15 riages round their aisles, and eat ofif their altars.* You have put a railroad-bridge over the falls of SchafYhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lu- cerne by Tell's chapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva; there is not 20 a quiet valley in England that you have not filled with bellowing fire ; there is no particle left of Eng- lish land which you have not trampled coal ashes into t — nor any foreign city in which the spread *I meant that the beautiful places of the world— Swit- 25 zerland, Italy, South Germany, and so on — are, indeed, the truest cathedrals — places to be reverent in, and to worship in ; and that we only care to drive through them ; and to eat and drink at their most sacred places. f I was singularly struck, some years ago, by finding all 30 the river shore 9,t Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in its OF KINGS' TREASURIES, 45 of your presence is not marked among its fair old streets and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new hotels and perfumers' shops: the Alps themselves, which your own poets used to 5 love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to clii;ib and slide down again, with '* shrieks of delight." When you are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill 10 the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrow- fullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, tak- 15 ing the deep inner significance of them, are the English mobs in the valley of Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty howitzers; and the Swiss vintagers of Zurich expressing their Chris- tian thanks for the gift of the vine, by assembling 20 in knots in the " towers of the vineyards," and slowly loading and firing horse-pistols from morn- ing till evening. It is pitiful, to have dim concep- tions of duty; more pitiful, it seems to me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth. 25 36. Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no need of words of mine for proof of this. I will merely print one of the newspaper paragraphs which I am in the habit of cutting out and throw- ing into my store-drawer; here is one from a ' Daily 30 earth, from the mere drift of soot-laden air from places many miles away. 46 SESAME AND LILIES. Telegraph ' of an early date this year (1865) ; (date which, though by me carelessly left unmarked, is easily discoverable; for on the back of the slip, there is the announcement that " yesterday the seventh of the special services of this year was performed 5 by the Bishop of Ripon in St. Paul's";) it relates only one of such facts as happen now daily; this by chance having taken a form in w^hich it came before the coroner, I will print the paragraph in red. [Printed here in italics.] Be sure, the facts 10 themselves are written in that colour, in a book which we shall all of us, literate or ilhterate, have to read our page of, some day. A?t ifigin'rywas held on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy coro7ier, at the White Horse tavern, Christ Churchy Spital- 15 fields, respecti7ig the death of Michael Collins, aged ^8 years. Mary Collins, a 7niserable-looking woman, said that she lived with the deceased and his son in a room at 2, Cobb's Court, Christ Church. Deceased "was a " trans- lator " of boots. Witness went out and bought old boots ; ^^ deceased aftd his son made thejn into good ones^ and then witfiess sold them for what she could get at the shops, which was very little ijideed. Deceased and his son used to work 7iight a7id day to try a7id get a little bread a7id tea, and pay for the r 00771 {2s. a week), so as to keep the ho7ne 25 together. O71 Friday-7iight week deceased got upfro77i his be7ich a7id bega7i to shiver. He threw dow7i the boots, sayi7ig, " So7nebody else 77iust finish the77i whe7t I a77t gone,for I ca7t do no 77iore." There was 710 fire, and he said, " /would be better if I was war77i." Wit7tess there- 30 fore took two pairs of tra7islated boots * to sell at the *One of the things which we must very resolutely enforce, for the good of all classes, in our future arrange- OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 47 shop, but she coicld only get i4d.for the two pairs, for the people at the shop said, " We tnust have our profits Witness got 141b. of coal, a?id a little tea and bread. Her son sat tcp the whole night to 7nake the " translations," to 5 get money, but deceased died on Saturday tnorning. The family never had e7iough to eat. — Coroner : " // seems to me deplorable that you did not go into the workhouse.'' Witness : " We wanted the comforts of our little home'' A juror asked what the coinforts were, for he only saw a ^o little straw in the corner of the room, the windows of which were broken. The witness began to cry, and said that they had a quilt a7id other little things. The deceased said he never would go into the workhouse, hi summer, whe?t the season was good, they sometimes 15 7nade as 7nuch as los. profit in the week. They then always saved towards the 7iextweek, which was ge7ierally a bad one. In winter they 7nade not half so 77iuch. For three years they had been getting from bad to worse. — Cornelius Collins said that he had assisted his father si7ice 20 1847. They used to work so far into the 7iight that both nearly lost their eyesight. Wit7tess now had a fil77i over his eyes. Five years ago deceased applied to the parish for aid. The relieving officer gave hi77i a 41b. loaf, a7id told him if he came again he should get the " st07ies.'' * 25 ments, must be that they wear no " translated" article of dress. See the preface. * This abbreviation of the penalty of useless labour is curiously coincident in verbal form v^^ith a certain passage w^hich some of us may remember. It may perhaps be well 30 to preserve beside this paragraph another cutting out of my store-drawer, from the ' Morning Post,' of about a parallel date, Friday, March loth, 1865: — "The salons of Mme. C , who did the honours with clever imitative grace and elegance, were crowded with princes, dukes, 35 marquises, and counts— in fact, with the same male com- pany as one meets at the parties of the Princess Metternich 48 SESAME AND LILIES. That disgusted deceased, and he zuoiild have iiothing to do with them since. They got worse and worse until last Friday week, when they had not eveji a halfpenny to buy a candle. Deceased then lay down on the straw, and said he could not live till morning. — A juror : " You are dying 5 of starvation yourself, and you ought to go into the house until the S2immer. " — Witness : "■ If we went in, we should die. When we come out in the su7nmer, we should be like people dropped from the sky. No one would know us, and we would not have even a room. I could work now 10 if I had food, for iny sight would get better.'' Dr. G. P. Walker said deceased died from syncope, from exhaustion frojn watit of food. The deceased had had no bedclothes. For four months he had had nothing but bread to eat. and Madame Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English peers and 15 members of Parliament were present, and appeared to enjoy the animated and dazzling improper scene. On the second floor the supper tables were loaded with every delicacy of the season. That your readers may form some idea of the dainty fare of the Parisian demi-monde, I copy 20 the menu of the supper, which was served to all the guests (about 200) seated at four o'clock. Choice Yquem, Johan- nisberg, Laffitte, Tokay, and champagne of the finest vintages were served most lavishly throughout the morn- ing. After supper dancing was resumed with increased 25 animation, and the ball terminated with Sichaine diabolique and a cajtcan d'enfer at seven in the morning. (Morning service — ' Ere the fresh lawns appeared, under the open- ing eyelids of the Morn.') Here is the menu: — 'Con- somme de volaille a la Bagration : 16 hors-d'oeuvres varies. 30 Bouchees a la Talleyrand. Saumons froids, sauce Ravi- gote. Filets de boeuf en Bellevue, timbales milanaises, chaudfroid de gibier. Dindes truffees. Pates de foies gras, buissons d'ecrevisses, salades venetiennes, gelees blanches aux fruits, gateaux mancini, parisiens et parisi- 35 ennes. Fromages glaces. Ananas. Dessert.'" • OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 49 There was not a particle of fat in the body. There laas no disease^ but if tJiere had been medical atte7idance, he might have survived the syncope or fainting. The coro7ier having remarked upon the painful nature of the Scase, the jury returned the following verdict, " That deceased died from exhaustion from wajit of food and the com7non 7iecessaries of life ; also through want of medical aid.'' 37. " Why would witness not go into the work- 10 house?" you ask. Well, the poor seem to have a prejudice against the workhouse which the rich have not ; for of course every one who lakes a pension from Government goes into the workhouse on a grand scale: ^ only the workhouses for the rich do 15 not involve the idea of work, and should be called play-houses. But the poor like to die indepen- dently, it appears; perhaps if we made the play- houses for them pretty and pleasant enough, or gave them their pensions at home, and allowed 20 them a little introductory peculation with the public money, their minds might be reconciled to the con- ditions. Meantime, here are the facts: we make our relief either so insulting to them, or so painful, that they rather die than take it at our hands; or, for 25 third alternative, we leave them so untaught and foolish that they starve like brute creatures, wild and dumb, not knowing what to do, or what to ♦Please observe this statement, and think of it, and consider how it happens that a poor old woman will be 30 ashamed to take a shilling a week from the country — but no one is ashamed to take a pension of a thousand a year 50 SESAME AND LILIES. ask. I say, you despise compassion; if you did not, such a newspaper paragraph would be as impossi- ble in a Christian country as a deliberate assassina- tion permitted in its public streets.* '' Christian " * I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the ' Pall 5 Mall Gazette' established; for the power of the press in the hands of highly-educated men, in independent posi- tion, and of honest purpose, may indeed become all that it has been hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its editor will therefore, I doubt not, pardon me, in that, by very reason 10 of my respect for the journal, I do not let pass unnoticed an article in its third number, page 5, which was wrong in every word of it, with the intense wrongness which only an honest man can achieve who has taken a false turn of thought in the outset, and is following it, regardless 15 of consequences. It contained at the end this notable passage : — " The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction — aye, and the bedstead and blankets of affliction, are the very utmost that the law ought to give to outcasts 7Jierely as 20 outcasts.'' I merely put beside this expression of the gentlemanly mind of England in 1865, a part of the mes- sage which Isaiah was ordered to " lift up his voice like a trumpet" in declaring to the gentlemen of his day: "Ye fast for strife, and to smite with the fist of wickedness. 25 Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out (margin, 'afflicted') to thy house?" The falsehood on which the writer had mentally founded himself, as previously stated by him, was this: "To confound the 30 functions of the dispensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers of a charitable institution is a great and pernicious error," This sentence is so accurately and ex- quisitely wrong, that its substance must be thus reversed in our minds before we can deal with any existing problem 35 of national distress. " To understand that the dispensers OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 5 1 did I say? Alas, if we were but wholesomely un- Christian, it would be impossible: it is our imagi- nary Christianity that helps us to commit these crimes, for we revel and luxuriate in our faith, for 5 the lewd sensation of it ; dressing it up, like every- thing else, in fiction. The dramatic Christianity of the organ and aisle, of dawn-service and twilight- revival — the Christianity which we do not fear to mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our play about lo the devil, in our Satanellas, — Roberts, — Fausts; chanting hymns through traceried windows for background effect, and artistically modulating the " Dio " through variation on variation of mimicked prayer: (while we distribute tracts, next day, for the 15 benefit of uncultivated swearers, upon what we sup- pose to be the signification of the Third Command- ment; — ) this gas-lighted, and gas-inspired, Chris- tianity, we are triumphant in, and draw back the hem of our robes from the touch of the heretics who 20 dispute it. But to do a piece of common Christian righteousness in a plain English word or deed; to make Christian law any rule of life, and found one of the poor-rates are the almoners of the nation, and should distribute its alms with a gentleness and freedom 25 of hand as much greater and franker than that possible to individual charity, as the collective national wisdom and power may be supposed greater than those of any single person, is the foundation of all law respecting pauper- ism." (Since this was written the ' Pall Mall Gazette' 30 has become a mere party paper — like the rest; but it writes well, and does more good than mischief on the whole.) 52 SESAME AXD LILIES. National act or hope thereon, — we know too well what our faith comes to for that! You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English re- ligion. You had better get rid of the smoke, and 5 the organ pipes, both: leave them, and the Gothic windows, and the painted glass, to the property man; give up your carburetted hydrogen ghost in one healthy expiration, and look after Lazarus at the doorstep. For there is a true Church wherever lo one hand meets another helpfully, and that is the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall be. 38. All these pleasures then, and all these virtues, I repeat, you nationally despise. You have, indeed, ^5 men among you who do not; by whose work, by whose strength, by whose life, by whose death, you live, and never thank them. Your wealth, your amusement, your pride, would all be alike impossi- ble, but for those whom you scorn or forget. The 20 policeman, who is walking up and down the black lane all night to watch the guilt you have created there; and may have his brains beaten out, and be maimed for life, at any moment, and never be thanked; the sailor wrestling with the sea's rage; 25 the quiet student poring over his book or his vial; the common worker, without praise, and nearly without bread, fulfilling his task as your horses drag your carts, hopeless, and spurned of all: these are the men by whom England lives ; but they are 30 not the nation; they are only the body and nervous OF KIXGS' TREASURIES. 53 force of it, acting still from old habit in a convulsive perseverance, while the mind is gone. Our Na- tional wish and purpose are only to be amused; our National religion is the performance of church ccre- 5 monies, and preaching of soporific truths (or un- truths) to keep the mob quietly at work, while we amuse ourselves; and the necessity for this amuse- ment is fastening on us, as a feverous disease of parched throat and wandering eyes — senseless, dis- lo solute, merciless. How literally that word Dis- Ease, the Negation and possibility of Ease, ex- presses the entire moral state of our English In- dustry and its Amusements! 39. When men are rightly occupied, their amuse- 15 ment grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower; — when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions be- come steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But now, 2" having no true business, we pour our whole mas- culine energy into the false business of money- making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and 25 darkly, as the idolatrous Jews with their pictures on cavern walls, which men had to dig to detect. The justice we do not execute, we mimic in the novel and on the stage; for the beauty we destroy in na- ture, we substitute the metamorphosis of the panto- 30 mime, and (the human nature of us imperatively re- quiring awe and sorrow of some kind) for the noble 54 SESAME AND LILIES. grief we should have borne with our fellows, and the pure tears we should have wept with them, we gloat over the pathos of the police court, and gather the night-dew of the grave. 40. It is difficult to estimate the true significance 5 of these things ; the facts are frightful enough ; — the measure of national fault involved in them is per- haps not as great as it would at first seem. We permit, or cause, thousands of deaths daily, but we mean no harm; we set fire to houses, and ravage 10 peasants' fields, yet we should be sorry to find we had injured anybody. We are still kind at heart; still capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, at the end of his long life, having had much power with the public, being plagued in some i5 serious matter by a reference to " public opinion," uttered the impatient exclamation, *' The public is just a great baby! " And the reason that I have allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix themselves up with an inquiry into methods of 20 reading, is that, the more I see of our national faults or miseries, the more they resolve themselves into conditions of childish illiterateness and want of edu- cation in the most ordinary habits of thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, not dulness of 25 brain, which we have to lament; but an unreach- able schoolboy's recklessness, only differing from the true schoolboy's in its incapacity of being helped, because it acknowledges no master. 41. There is a curious type of us given in one of 30 the lovely, neglected works of the last of our great OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 55 painters. It is a drawing of Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, and of its brook, and valley, and hills, and folded morning sky beyond. And unmindful alike of these, and of the dead who have left these 5 for other valleys and for other skies, a group of schoolboys have piled their little books upon a grave, to strike them off with stones. So, also, we play with the words of the dead that would teach us, and strike them far from us with our bitter, lo reckless will; little thinking that those leaves which the wind scatters had been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an enchanted vault — nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings, who would awake for us, and walk with us, if we 15 knew but how to call them by their names. How often, even if we lift the marble entrance gate, do we but wander among those old kings in their re- pose, and finger the robes they lie in, and stir the crowns on their foreheads, and still they are silent 20 to us, and seem but a dusty imagery; because we know not the incantation of the heart that would wake them; — which, if they once heard, they would start up to meet us in their power of long ago, nar- rowly to look upon us, and consider us; and, as the 25 fallen kings of Hades meet the newly fallen, saying, " Art thou also become weak as we — art thou also become one of us?" so would these kings, with their undimmed, unshaken diadems, meet us, say- ing, " Art thou also become pure and mighty of 30 heart as we? art thou also become one of us? " 42. Mighty of heart, mighty of mind—" mag- 56 SESAME AND LILIES. nanimous " — to be this, is indeed to be great in life; to become this increasingly, is, indeed, to *' ad- vance in life," — in life itself — not in the trappings of it. My friends, do you remember that old Scythian custom, when the head of a house died? 5 How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his chariot, and carried about to his friends' houses; and each of them placed him at his table's head, and all feasted in his presence? Suppose it were. oflfered to you in plain words, as it is offered to you lo in dire facts, that you should gain this Scythian honour, gradually, while you yet thought yourself alive. Suppose the offer were this: You shall die slowly; your blood shall daily grow cold, your flesh petrify, your heart beat at last only as a rusted i5 group of iron valves. Your life shall fade from you, and sink through the earth into the ice of Caina; but, day by day, your body shall be dressed more gaily, and set in higher chariots, and have more orders on its breast — crowns on its heads, if you 20 will. Men shall bow before it, stare and shout round it, crowd after it up and down the streets; build palaces for it, feast with it at their tables' heads all the night long; your soul shall stay enough within it to know what they do, and feel 25 the weight of the golden dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the skull ; — no more. * Would you take the offer, verbally made by the death-angel? Would the meanest among us take it, think you? Yet practically and verily we 30 grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure; many of OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 57 US grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts it, who desires to advance in Hfe without knowing what Hfe is; who means only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, and more 5 fortune, and more public honour, and — not more personal soul. He only is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into Living * peace. And the men who have this life in them are lo the true lords or kings of the earth — they, and they only. All other kingships, so far as they are true, ue only the practical issue and expression of theirs ; if less than this, they are either dramatic royalties, — costly shows, set off, indeed, with real jewels in- 15 stead of tinsel — but still only the toys of nations; or else, they are no royalties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere active and practical issue of national folly; for which reason I have said of them elsewhere, " yisible governments are the toys of some nations, 20 the diseases of others, the harness of some, the bur- dens of more." 43. But I have no words for the wonder with which I hear Kinghood still spoken of, even among thoughtful men, as if governed nations were a per- 25 sonal property, and might be bought and sold, or otherwise acquired, as sheep, of whose flesh their king was to feed, and whose fleece he was to gather; as if Achilles' indignant epithet of base kings, " people-eating," were the constant and proper title 30 of all monarchs ; and enlargement of a king's do- * " t6 5^ SESAME AND LILIES. beautiful human creature than a beautiful dome or steeple — and more delightful to look up reverently to a creature far above us, than to a wall; only the beautiful human creature will have some duties io do in return — duties of living belfry and rampart — of which presently. LECTURE II.— LILIES. •' Be thou glad, oh thirsting Desert; let the desert be made cheerful, and bloom as the lily; and the barren places of Jordan shall run wild with wood." — Isaiah xxxv. I. (Septuagmt.) 51. It will, perhaps, be well, as this Lecture is the sequel of one previously given, that I should shortly state to you my general intention in both. The questions specially proposed to you in the first, 5 namely. How and What to Read, rose out of a far deeper one, which it was my endeavour to make you propose earnestly to yourselves, namely, Why to Read. I want you to feel, with me, that whatever advantage we possess in the present day in the dif- 10 fusion of education and of literature, can only be rightly used by any of us when we have appre- hended clearly what education is to lead to, and lit- erature to teach. I wish you to see that both well- directed moral training and well-chosen reading 15 lead to the possession of a power over the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, according to the measure of it, in the truest sense, kingly; conferring indeed the purest kingship that can exist among men: too many other kingships (however distinguished by 67 68 SESAME AND LILIES. visible insignia or material power) being either spectral, or tyrannous; — spectral — that is to say, aspects and shadows only of royalty, hollow as death, and which only the *' likeness of a kingly crown have on; " or else tyrannous — that is to say, 5 substituting their own will for the law of justice and love by which all true kings rule. 52. There is, then, I repeat — and as I want to leave this idea with you, I begin with it, and shall end with it — only one pure kind of kingship ; an in- 10 evitable and eternal kind, crowned or not: the king- ship, namely, which consists in a stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state, than that of others; enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to raise them. Observe that word ''State"; we have got into ^5 a loose way of using it. It means literally the stand- ing and stability of a thing; and you have the full force of it in the derived word " statue " — " the im- movable thing." A king's majesty or *' state," then, and the right of his kingdom to be called a state, 20 depends on the movelessness of both: — without tremor, without quiver of balance; established and enthroned upon a foundation of eternal law which nothing can alter, nor overthrow. 53. Believing that all literature and all education 25 are only useful so far as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, and therefore kingly, power, — first, over ourselves, and, through ourselves, over all around us, — I am now going to ask you to con- sider with me, farther, what special portion or kind 30 of this royal authority, arising out of noble educa- OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 69 tion, may rightly be possessed by women; and how far they also are called to a true queenly power, — not in their households merely, but over all within their sphere. And in what sense, if they rightly 5 understood and exercised this royal or gracious in- fluence, the order and beauty induced by such be- nignant power would justify us in speaking of the territories over which each of them reigned, as " Queens' Gardens." 10 54. And here, in the very outset, we are met by a far deeper question, which — strange though this may seem — remains among many of us yet quite undecided, in spite of its infinite importance. We cannot determine what the queenly power of 15 women should be, until we are agreed what their ordinary power should be. We cannot consider how education may fit them for any widely extending duty, until we are agreed what is their true constant duty. And there never was a time when wilder 20 words were spoken, or more vain imagination per- mitted, respecting this question — quite vital to all social happiness. The relations of the womanly to the manly nature, their different capacities of intel- lect or of virtue, seem never to have been yet esti- 25 mated with entire consent. We hear of the " mis- sion " and of the " rights " of Woman, as if these could ever be separate from the mission and the rights of Man; — as if she and her lord were crea- tures of independent kind, and of irreconcilable 30 claim. This, at least, is wrong. And not less wrong — perhaps even more foolishly wrong (for I 70 SESAME AND LILIES, will anticipate thus far what I hope to prove) — is the idea that woman is only the shadow and at- tendant image of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile obedience, and supported altogether in her weakness, by the pre-eminence of his fortitude. 5 This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors re- specting her who was made to be the helpmate of man. As if he could be helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave! 55. Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at 10 some clear and harmonious idea (it must be har- monious if it is true) of what womanly mind and virtue are in power and office, with respect to man's; and how their relations, rightly accepted, aid, and increase, the vigour, and honour, and au- 15 thority of both. And now I must repeat one thing I said in the last lecture: namely, that the first use of education was to enable us to consult with the wisest and the greatest men on all points of earnest difficulty. 20 That to use books rightly, was to go to them for help: to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power of thought failed: to be led by them into wider sight, — purer conception, — than our own, and receive from them the united sentence of the 25 judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinion. Let us do this now. Let us see whether the greatest, the wisest, the purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in any wise on this point : let us hear the 30 testimony they have left respecting what they held OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 7 1 to be the true dignity of woman, and her mode of help to man. 56. And first let us take Shakespeare. Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no 5 heroes;— he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic figure in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated for the purposes of the stage; and the still slighter Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In 10 his laboured and perfect plays you have no hero. Othello would have been one, if his simplicity had not been so great as to leave him the prey erf every base practice round him; but he is the only exam- ple even approximating to the heroic type. Cori- 15 olanus— Caesar— Antony stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities;— Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to ad- verse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely no- 20 ble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks into the ofifice of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, com- forted, saved, by Rosalind. Whereas there is 25 hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and errorless purpose ; Cor- delia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, 30 are all faultless; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity. 72 SESAME AND LILIES. 57. Then observe, secondly, The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a man; the redemption, if there by any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none. The catas- 5 trophe of King Lear is owing to his own want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his misunderstand- ing of his children; the virtue of his one true daugh- ter would have saved him from all the injuries of the others, unless he had cast her away from him; 10 as it is, she all but saves him. Of Othello I need not trace the tale; nor the one weakness of his so mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to that even of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia who dies i5 in wild testimony against his error: " Oh, murderous coxcomb ! what should such a fool Do with so good a wife ? " In Romeo and Juliet, the w^ise and brave strategem of the wife is brought to ruinous issue 20 by the reckless impatience of her husband. In The Winter's Tale, and in Cymbeline, the happi- ness and existence of two princely households, lost through long years, and imperilled to the death by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are re- 25 deemed at last by the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. In Measure for Measure, the foul injustice of the judge, and the foul cowardice of the brother, are opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine purity of a woman. In Coriolanus, 30 OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 73 the mother's counsel, acted upon in time, would have saved her son from all evil; his momentary forgetfulness of it is his ruin; her prayer, at last, granted, saves him — not, indeed, from death, but 5 from the curse of living as the destroyer of his country. And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickleness of a lover who is a mere wicked child? — of Helena, against the petulance and insult of a lo careless youth? — of the patience of Hero, the pas- sion of Beatrice, and the calmly devoted wisdom of the " unlessoned girl," who appears among the helplessness, the blindness, and the vindictive pas- sions of men, as a gentle angel, bringing courage 15 and safety by her presence, and defeating the worst malignities of crime by what women are fancied most to fail in, — precision and accuracy of thought. 58. Observe, further, among all the principal fig- ures in Shakespeare's plays, there is only one weak 20 woman — Ophelia; and it is because she fails Ham- let at the critical moment, and is not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide to him when he needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows. Fi- nally, though there are three wicked women among 25 the principal figures. Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril, they are felt at once to be frightful ex- ceptions to the ordinary laws of life; fatal in their influence also, in proportion to the power for good which they have abandoned. 30 Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's testimony to the position and character of w^omen in human 74 SESAME AND LILIES. life. He represents them as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors, — incorruptibly just and pure ex- amples, — strong always to sanctity, even when they cannot save. 59. Not as in any wise comparable in knowl- 5 edge of the nature of man, — still less in his under- standing of the causes and courses of fate, — but only as the writer who has given us the broadest view of the conditions and modes of ordinary thought in modern society, I ask you next to re- 10 ceive the witness of Walter Scott. I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no value, and though the early romantic poetry is very beautiful, its testimony is of no weight, other than that of a boy's ideal. But his 15 true works, studied from Scottish life, bear a true witness; and, in the whole range of these, there are but three men who reach the heroic type * — Dandie Dinmont, Rob Roy, and Claverhouse; of these, one is a border farmer; another a freebooter; the third 20 a soldier in a bad cause. And these touch the ideal *I ought, in order to make this assertion fully under- stood, to have noted the various weaknesses which lower the ideal of other great characters of men in the Waverley novels — the selfishness and narrowness of thought in 25 Redgauntlet, the weak religious enthusiasm in Edward Glendinning, and the like; and I ought to have noticed that there are several quite perfect characters sketched sometimes in the backgrounds; three — let us accept joy- ously this courtesy to England and her soldiers — are 3c English officers: Colonel Gardiner, Colonel Talbot, and Colonel Mannering. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 75 of heroism only in their courage and faith, together with a strong, but uncultivated, or mistakenly ap- plied, intellectual power; while his younger men are the gentlemanly playthings of fantastic fortune, 5 and only by aid (or accident) of that fortune, sur- vive, not vanquish, the trials they involuntarily sus- tain. Of any disciplined, or consistent character, earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing with forms of hostile evil, definitely challenged and lo resolutely subdued, there is no trace in his con- ceptions of young men. Whereas in his imagina- tions of women, — in the characters of Ellen Douglas, of Flora Maclvor, Rose Bradwardine, Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgaunt- 15 let, Alice Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans, — with endless varieties of grace, tenderness, and intellectual power, we find in all a quite infallible sense of dignity and justice; a fearless, instant, and untiring self-sacrifice, to even the appearance of 20 duty, much more to its real claims; and, finally, a patient wisdom of deeply-restrained affection, which does infinitely more than protect its objects from a momentary error; it graduahy forms, animates, and exalts the characters of the unworthy lovers, 25 until, at the close of the tale, we are just able, and no more, to take patience in hearing of their unmer- ited success. So that, in all cases, with Scott as with Shake- speare, it is the woman who watches over, teaches, 30 and guides the youth ; it is never, by any chance, the youth who watches over, or educates, his mistress. 76 SESAME AND LILIES. 60. Next, take, though more briefly, graver testi- mony — that of the great ItaHans and Greeks. You know well the plan of Dante's great poem — that it is a love-poem to his dead lady; a song of praise for her watch over his soul. Stooping only to pity, 5 never to love, she yet saves him from destruction — saves him from hell. He is going eternally astray in despair; she comes down from heaven to his help, and throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, interpreting for him the most difficult 10 truths, divine and human; and leading him, with rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star. I do not insist upon Dante's conceptions; if I began, I could not cease: besides, you might think this a wild imagination of one poet's heart. So I 15 will rather read to you a few verses of the deliberate writing of a knight of Pisa to his living lady, wholly characteristic of the feeling of all the noblest men of the thirteenth, or early fourteenth, century, pre- served among many other such records of knightly 20 honour and love, which Dante Rossetti has gath- ered for us from among the early Italian poets. " For lo! thy law is passed That this my love should manifestly be To serve and honour thee: 25 And so I do; and my delight is full, Accepted for the servant of thy rule. " Without almost, I am all rapturous, Since thus my will was set: To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence: 30 Nor ever seems it anything could rouse A pain or a regret. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 77 But on thee dwells my every thought and sense; Considering that from thee all virtues spread As from a fountain head, — That in thy gift is wisdom" s best avail, 5 And honour without fail; With whom each sovereign good dwells separate, Fulfilling the perfection of thy state. " Lady, since I conceived Thy pleasurable aspect in my heart, JO My life has been apart In shining brightness and the place of truth; Which till that time, good sooth. Groped among shadows in a darken'd place, Where many hours and days J5 It hardly ever had remember'd good. But now my servitude Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. A man from a wild beast Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived." 20 61. You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight would have had a lower estimate of women than this Christian lover. His spiritual subjection to them was indeed not so absolute; but as regards their own personal character, it was only because 25 you could not have followed me so easily, that I did not take the Greek women instead of Shake- speare's; and instance, for chief ideal types of hu- man beauty and faith, the simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache; the divine, yet re- 3ojected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful kindness and simple princess-life of happy Nausicaa; the housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with its watch upon the sea; the ever patient, fearless, hopelessly 78 SESAME AND LILIES. devoted piety of the sister and daughter, in An- tigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb-Hke and silent ; and, finally, the expectation of the resur- rection, made clear to the soul of the Greeks in the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, to save 5 her husband, had passed calmly through the bitter- ness of death. 62. Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind upon you if I had time. I would take Chaucer, and show you why he wrote a Legend 10 of Good Women; but no Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser, and show you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and some- times vanquished; but the soul of Una is never darkened, and the spear of Britomart is never 15 broken. Nay, I could go back into the mythical teaching of the most ancient times, and show you how the great people, — by one of whose princesses it was appointed that the Lawgiver of all the earth should be educated, rather than by his own kindred: 20 — how that great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a woman; and into her hand, for a symbol, the weaver's shuttle; and how the name and the form of that spirit, adopted, believed, and obeyed by the 25 Greeks, became that Athena of the olive-helm, and cloudy shield, to faith in whom you owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most precious in art, in literature, or in types of national virtue. 63. But I will not wander into this distant and 30 mythical element; I w^ill only ask you to give its OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 79 legitimate value to the testimony of these great poets and men of the world, — consistent, as you see it is, on this head. I will ask you whether it can be supposed that these men, in the main work 5 of their lives, are amusing themselves with a ficti- tious and idle view of the relations between man and woman; nay, worse than fictitious or idle; for a thing may be imaginary, yet desirable, if it were possible; but this, their ideal of woman, is, accord- lo ing to our common idea of the marriage relation, wholly undesirable. The woman, we say, is not to guide, nor even to think for herself. The man is always to be the wiser; he is to be the thinker, the ruler, the superior in knowledge and discretion, as 15 in power. 64. Is it not somewhat important to make up our minds on this matter? Are all these great men mis- taken, or are we? Are Shakespeare and ^schylus, Dante and Homer, merely dressing dolls for us; 20 or, worse than dolls, unnatural visions, the realiza- tion of which, were it possible, would bring anarchy into all households and ruin into all affections? Nay, if you can suppose this, take lastly the evi- dence of facts given by the human heart itself. In 25 all Christian ages which have been remarkable for their purity of progress, there has been absolute yielding of obedient devotion, by the lover, to his mistress. I say obedient: — not merely enthusiastic and worshipping in imagination, but entirely sub- 30 ject, receiving from the beloved woman, however young, not only the encouragement, the praise, and 8o SESAME AND LILIES. the reward of all toil, but, so far as any choice Is open, or any question difficult of decision, the direc- tion of all toil. That chivalry, to the abuse and dis- honour of which are attributable primarily what- ever is cruel in war, unjust in peace, or corrupt and 5 ignoble in domestic relations; and to the original purity and power of which we owe the defence alike of faith, of law, and of love; — that chivalry, I say, in its very first conception of honourable life, as- sumes the subjection of the young knight to the lo command — should it even be the command in ca- price — of his lady. It assumes this, because its masters knew that the first and necessary impulse of every truly taught and knightly heart is this of blind service to its lady: that where that true faith 15 and captivity are not, all wayward and wicked pas- sion must be; and that in this rapturous obedience to the single love of his youth, is the sanctification of all man's strength, and the continuance of all his purposes. And this, not because such obedience 20 would be safe, or honpurable, were it ever rendered to the unworthy; but because it ought to be impos- sible for every noble youth — it is impossible for every one rightly trained — to love any one whose gentle counsel he cannot trust, or whose prayerful 25 command he can hesitate to obey. 65. I do not insist by any farther argument on this, for I think it should commend itself at once to your knowledge of what has been, and to your feel- ing of what should be. You cannot think that the 30 buckling on of the knight's armour by his lady's OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 8 1 hand was a mere caprice of romantic fashion. It is the type of an eternal truth — that the soul's armour is never well set to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when 5 she braces it loosely that the honour of manhood fails. Know you not those lovely lines — I would they were learned by all youthful ladies of Eng- land — " Ah, wasteful woman! — she who may ID On her sweet self set her own price, Knowing he cannot choose but pay — How has she cheapen'd Paradise! How given for nought her priceless gift. How spoil'd the bread and spill'd the wine, 15 Which, spent with due respective thrift, Had made brutes men, and men divine! "* 66. Thus much, then, respecting the relations of lovers I believe you will accept. But what we too often doubt is the fitness of the continuance of 20 such a relation throughout the whole of human life. We think it right in the lover and mistress, not in the husband and wife. That is to say, we think that a reverent and tender duty is due to one whose afifection we still doubt, and whose character we as 25 yet do but partially and distantly discern; and that this reverence and duty are to be withdrawn, when ♦ Coventry Patmore. You cannot read him too often or too carefully; as far as I know, he is the only living poet who always strengthens and purifies; the others some- 30 times darken and nearly always depress, and discourage the imagination they deeply seize. 82 SESAME AND LILIES. the affection has become wholly and limitlessly our own, and the character has been so sifted and tried that we fear not to entrust it with the happiness of our lives. Do you not see how ignoble this is, as well as how unreasonable? Do you not feel that 5 marriage,— when it is marriage at all, — is only the seal which marks the vowed transition of temporary into untiring service, and of fitful into eternal love? 67. But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guiding function of the woman reconcilable with a 10 true wifely subjection? Simply in that it is a guid- ing, not a determining, function. Let me try to s'how you briefly how these powers seem to be rightly distinguishable. We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in 15 speaking of the " superiority " of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completes the other, and is completed by the other: they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and 20 perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give. 68. Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man's power is active, progressive, de- 25 fensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for specu- lation and invention: his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest wherever war is just, wher- ever conquest necessary. But the woman's power 30 is for rule, not for battle, — and her intellect is not OF QUEENS' GARDEl^S. H for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees the quahties of things, their claims, and their places. Her great function is Praise: she enters into no contest, but 5 infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in the open world, must encounter all peril and trial : —to him, therefore, must be the failure, the offence, lothe inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued; often misled; and ahvays hardened. But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of 15 error or offence. This is the true nature of home —it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, 20 and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and 25 lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love,— so far as it is this, and roof and fire are types only 30 of a nobler shade and light,— shade as of the rock in a weary land, and light as of the Pharos in the 84 SESAME AND LILIES. Stormy sea; — so far it vindicates the name, and ful- fils the praise, of Home. And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night-cold grass may 5 be the only lire at her foot: but home is yet wher- ever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless. 10 69. This, then, I believe to be, — will you not ad- mit it to be? — the woman's true place and power. But do not you see that, to fulfil this, she must — as far as one can use such terms of a human crea- ture — be incapable of error? So far as she rules, 15 all must be right, or nothing is. She must be en- duringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infalli- bly wise — wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from 20 his side: wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentle- ness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely ap- plicable, modesty of service — the true changeful- ness of woman. In that great sense — " La donna 25 e mobile," not '' Qual pium' al vento "; no, nor yet " Variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made " ; but variable as the light, manifold in fair and serene division, that it may take the colour of all that it falls upon, and exalt it. 30 70. II. I have been trying, thus far, to show you OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 85 what should be the place, and what the power, of woman. Now, secondly, we ask. What kind of education is to fit her for these? And if you indeed think this a true conception of 5 her office and dignity, it will not be difficult to trace the course of education which would fit her for the one, and raise her to the other. The first of our duties to her — no thoughtful per- sons now doubt this, — is to secure for her such 10 physical training and exercise as may confirm her health, and perfect her beauty; the highest refine- ment of that beauty being unattainable without splendour of activity and of delicate strength. To perfect her beauty, I say, and increase its power; it 15 cannot be too powerful, nor shed its sacred light too far: only remember that all physical freedom is vain to produce beauty without a corresponding freedom of heart. There are two passages of that poet who is distinguished, it seems to me, from all 20 others — not by power, but by exquisite jHghtness — which point you to the source, and describe to you, in a few syllables, the completion of womanly beauty. I will read the introductory stanzas, but the last is the one I wish you specially to notice: — 25 " Three years she grew in sun and shower, Then Nature said, ' A lovelier flower ' On earth was never sown; ' This child I to myself will take; ' She shall be mine, and 1 will make 30 ' A lady of my own. ** ' Myself will to my darling be ' Both law and impulse; and with me 86 SESAME AND LILIES. ' The girl, in rock and plain, ' In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, ' Shall feel an overseeing power * To kindle, or restrain. " ' The floating clouds their state shall lend 5 ' To her, for her the willow bend; ' Nor shall she fail to see ' Even in the motions of the storm, * Grace that shall mould the maiden's form * By silent sympathy. 10 " * And vital feelings of delight ' Shall rear her form to stately height, — * Her virgin bosom swell. * Such thoughts to Lucy I will give, * While she and I together live, 15 ' Here in this happy dell.' "* " Vital feeling of delight," observe. There are deadly feelings of delight; but the natural ones are vital, necessary to very life. And they must be feelings of delight, if they are 20 to be vital. Do not think you can make a girl lovely, if you do not make her happy. There is not one restraint you put on a good girl's nature — there is not one check you give to her instincts of affec- tion or of effort — which will not be indelibly written 25 on her features, with a hardness which is all the more painful because it takes away the brightness from the eyes of innocence, and the charm from the brow of virtue. * Observe, it is " Nature " who is speaking throughout, 30 and who says, " while she and I together live." OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 87 71. This for the means: now note the end. Take from the same poet, in two hnes, a perfect descrip- tion of womanly beauty — " A countenance in which did meet 5 Sweet records, promises as sweet," The perfect loveHness of a woman's countenance can only consist in that majestic peace which is founded in memory of happy aiid useful years, — full of sweet records; and from the joining of this with 10 that yet more majestic childishness, which is still full of change and promise; — opening always — modest at once, and bright, with hope of better things to be won, and to be bestowed. There is no old age where there is still that promise. 15 y2. Thus, then, you have first to mould her physi- cal frame, and then, as the strength she gains will permit you, to fill and temper her mind with all knowledge and thoughts which tend to confirm its natural instincts of justice, and refine its natural 20 tact of love. All such knowledge should be given her as may enable her to understand, and even to aid, the work of men: and yet it should be given, not as knowl- edge, — not as if it were, or could be, for her an 25 object to know; but only to feel, and to judge. It is of no moment, as a matter of pride or perfectness in herself, whether she knows many languages or one; but it is of the utmost, that she should be able to show kindness to a stranger, and to understand 30 the sweetness of a stranger's tongue. It is of no 55 SESAME AND LILIES. moment to her own worth or dignity that she should be acquainted with this science or that; but it is of the highest that she should be trained in habits of accurate thought; that she should understand the meaning, the inevitable- 5 ness, and the loveliness of natural laws; and follow at least some one path of scientific attainment, as far as to the threshold of that bitter Valley of Hu- miliation, into which only the wisest and bravest of men can descend, owning themselves for ever 10 children, gathering pebbles on a boundless shore. It is of little consequence how many positions of cities she knows, or how many dates of events, or names of celebrated persons — it is not the object of education to turn the woman into a dictionary; but 15 it is deeply necessary that she should be taught to enter with her whole personality into the history she reads; to picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagination; to apprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic circumstances and 20 dramatic relations, which the historian too often only eclipses by his reasoning, and disconnects by his arrangement: it is for her to trace the hidden equities of divine reward, and catch sight, through the darkness, of the fateful threads of woven fire 25 that connect error with retribution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend the limits of her sympathy with respect to that history which is be- ing for ever determined as the moments pass in which she draws her peaceful breath ; and to the 30 contemporary calamity, which, were it but rightly OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 89 mourned by her, would recur no more hereafter. She is to exercise herself in imagining what would be the effects upon her mind and conduct, if she were daily brought into the presence of the sufifer- 5 ing which is not the less real because shut from her sight. She is to be taught somewhat to under- stand the nothingness of the proportion which that little world in which she lives and loves, bears to the world in which God lives and loves; — and sol- 10 emnly she is to be taught to strive that her thoughts of piety may not be feeble in proportion to the num- ber they embrace, nor her prayer more languid than it is for the momentary relief from pain of her hus- band or her child, when it is uttered for the multi- 15 tudes of those who have none to love them, — and is, " for all who are desolate and oppressed." 73. Thus far, I think, I have had your concur- rence; perhaps you will not be with me in what I believe is most needful for me to say. There is one 20 dangerous science for women — one which they 7 must indeed beware how they profanely touch — \ J. that of theology. Strange, and miserably strange, J^ that while they are modest enough to doubt their "P powers, and pause at the threshold of sciences 25 where every step is demonstrable and sure, they will plunge headlong, and without one thought of in- y competency, into that science in which the greatest men have trembled, and the wisest erred. Strange, that they will complacently and pridefully bind up 30 whatever vice or folly there is in them, whatever A arrogance, petulance, or blind incomprehensive- c 1 90 SESAME AND LILIES. ness, into one bitter bundle of consecrated myrrh. Strange in creatures born to be Love visible, that where they can know least, they will condemn first, and think to recommend themselves to their. Mas- ter, by crawling up the steps of His judgment- 5 throne, to divide it with Him. Strangest of all, that they should think they were led by the Spirit of the Comforter into habits of- mind which have become in them the unmixed elements of home discomfort; and that they dare to turn the Household Gods of 10 Christianity into ugly idols of their own ;^spiritual dolls, for them to dress according to their caprice; and from which their husbands must turn away in grieved contempt, lest they should be shrieked at for breaking them. 15 74. I believe, then, with this exception, that a girl's education should be nearly, in its course and material of study, the same as a boy's; but quite differently directed. A woman, in any rank of life, ought to know whatever her husband is likely to 20 know, but to know it in a diliferent way. His com- mand of it should be foundational and progressive; hers, general and accomplished for daily and help- ful use. Not but that it would often be wiser in men to learn things in a womanly sort of way, for 25 present use, and to seek for the discipline and train- ing of their mental powers in such branches of study as will be afterwards fitted for social service; but, speaking broadly, a man ought to know any lan- guage or science he learns, thoroughly — while a 30 woman ought to know the same language, or OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 9 1 science, only so far as may enable her to sympathise in her husband's pleasures, and in those of his best friends. 75. Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy as far 5 as she reaches. There is a wide difference between elementary knowledge and superficial knowledge — between a firm beginning, and an infirm attempt at compassing. A woman may always help her husband by what she knows, however little; by 10 what she half-knows, or mis-knows, she will only tease him. And indeed, if there were to be any difference between a girl's education and a boy's, I should say that of the two the girl should be earlier led, 15 as her intellect ripens faster, into deep and serious subjects: and that her range of literature should be, not more, but less frivolous; calculated to add the qualities of patience and seriousness to her natural poignancy of thought and quickness of wit; and 20 also to keep her in a lofty and pure element of thought. I enter not now into any question of choice of books; only let us be sure that her books are not heaped up in her lap as they fall out of the package of the circulating library, wet with the last 25 and lightiest spray of the fountain of folly. 76. Or even of the fountain of wit; for with re- spect to the sore temptation of novel reading, it is not the badness of a novel that we should dread, so much as its overwrought interest. Tlie weakest 30 romance is not so stupefying as the lower forms of religious exciting literature, and the worst romance 92 SESAME AND LILIES is not SO corrupting as false history, false philos- ophy, or false political essays. But the best ro- mance becomes dangerous, if, by its excitement, it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting, and increases the morbid thirst for useless acquaint- 5 ance with scenes in which we shall never be called upon to act. yy. I speak therefore of good novels only; and our modern literature is particularly rich in types of such. Well read, indeed, these books have seri- 10 ous use, being nothing less than treatises on moral anatomy and chemistry; studies of human nature in the elements of it. But I attach little weight to this function; they are hardly ever read with ear- nestness enough to permit them to fulfil it. The ut- 15 most they usually do is to enlarge somewhat the charity of a kind reader, or the bitterness of a ma- licious one; for each will gather, from the novel, food for her own disposition. Those who are nat- urally proud and envious will learn from Thackeray 20 to despise humanity; those who are naturally gentle, to pity it; those who are naturally shallow, to laugh at it. So, also, there might be a serviceable power in novels to bring before us, in vividness, a human truth which we had before dimly conceived; but 25 the temptation to picturesqueness of statement is so great, that often the best writers of fiction cannot resist it; and our views are rendered so violent and one-sided, that their vitality is rather a harm than good. 30 78. Without, however, venturing here on any at- OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 93 tempt at decision how much novel reading should be allowed, let me at least clearly assert this, that whether novels, or poetry, or history be read, they should be chosen, not for their freedom from evil, 5 but for their possession of good. The chance and scattered evil that may here and there haunt, or hide itself in, a powerful book, never does any harm to a noble girl; but the emptiness of an author op- presses her, and his amiable folly degrades her. 10 And if she can have access to a good library of old and classical books, there need be no choosing at all. Keep the modern magazine and novel out of your girl's way ; turn her loose into the old library every wet day, and let her alone. She will find what 15 is good for her; you cannot; for there is just this difference between the making of a girl's character and a boy's — you may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But 20 you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does, — she will wither ' without sun; she will decay in her sheath, as a narcissus will, if you do not give her air enough; she may fall, and defile her head in dust, if you leave her without 25 help at some moments of her life ; but you cannot fetter her; she must take her own fair form and way, if she take any, and in mind as in body, must have always. " Her household motions light and free, 30 And steps of virgin liberty." 94 SESAME AND LILIES. Let her loose in the Hbrary, I say, as you do a fawn in the field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better than you; and the good ones too, and will eat some bitter and prickly ones, good for it, which you had not the slightest thought would have 5 been so. 79. Then, in art, keep the finest models before her, and let her practice in all accomplishments be accurate and thorough, so as to enable her to un- derstand more than she accomplishes. I say the 10 finest models — that is to say, the truest, simplest, usefullest. Note those epithets; they will range through all the arts. Try them in music, where you might think them the least applicable. I say the truest, that in which the notes most closely and 15 faithfully express the meaning of the words, or the character of intended emotion; again, the simplest, that in which the meaning and melody are attained with the fewest and most significant notes possible; and, finally, the usefullest, that music which makes 20 the best words most beautiful, which enchants them in our memories each w4th its own glory of sound, and w^hich applies them closest to the heart at the moment we need them. 80. And not only in the material and in the 25 course, but yet more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl's education be as serious as a bay's. You bring up your girls as if they were meant for side- board ornaments, and then complain of their frivol- ity. Give them the same advantages that you give 30 their brothers — appeal to the same grand instincts OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 95 of virtue in them; teach them, also, that courage and truth are the pillars of their being: — do you think that they would not answer that appeal, brave and true as they are even now, when you know 5 that there is hardly a girls' school in this Christian kingdom where the children's courage or sincerity would be thought of half so much importance as their way of coming in at a door; and when the whole system of society, as respects the mode of lo establishing them in life, is one rotten plague of cowardice and imposture — cowardice, in not daring to let them live, or love, except as their neighbours choose; an imposture, in bringing, for the purposes of our own pride, the full glow of the world's worst 15 vanity upon a girl's eyes, at the very period when the whole happiness of her future existence depends upon her remaining undazzled? 81. And give them, lastly, not only noble teach- ings, but noble teachers. You consider somewhat, 20 before you send your boy to school, what kind of a man the master is; — whatsoever kind of man he is, you at least give him full authority over your son, and show some respect to him yourself: — if he comes to dine with you, you do not put him at a 25 side table: you know also that, at college, your child's immediate tutor will be under the direction of some still higher tutor, for whom you have abso- lute reverence. You do not treat the Dean of Christ Church or the Master of Trinity as your 30 inferiors. But what teachers do you give your girls, and g6 SESAME AND LILIES. what reverence do you show to the teachers you have chosen? Is a girl Hkely to think her own con- duct, or her own intellect, of much importance, when you trust the entire formation of her char- acter, moral and intellectual, to a person whom you 5 let your servants treat with less respect than they do your housekeeper (as if the soul of your child were a less charge than jams and groceries), and whom you yourself think you confer an honour upon by letting her sometimes sit in the drawing- 10 room in the evening? 82. Thus, then, of literature as her help and thus of art. There is one more help which she cannot do without — one which, alone, has sometimes done more than all other influences besides, — the help 15 of wild and fair nature. Hear this of the education of Joan of Arc : — "The education of this poor girl was mean, according to the present standard; was ineffably grand, according to a purer philosophical standard; and only not good for 20 our age, because for us it would be unattainable. . . . " Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most to the advantages of her situation. The fountain of ' Domremy was on the brink of a boundless forest; and it was haunted to that degree by fairies, that the parish 25 priest {curd) was obliged to read mass there once a year, in order to keep them in decent bounds. . . . " But the forests of Domremy— those were the glories of the land; for in them abode mysterious powers and ancient secrets that towered into tragic strength. Abbeys 30 there were, and abbey windows, — ' like Moorish temples of the Hindoos,' — that exercised even princely power both in Touraine and in the German Diets. These had their OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 97 sweet bells that pierced the forests for many a league at matins or vespers, and each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, and scattered enough were these abbeys, so as in no degree to disturb the deep solitude of the region; 5 yet many enough to spread a network or awning of Christian sanctity over what else might have seemed a heathen wilderness."* Now, you cannot, indeed, have here in England, woods eighteen miles deep to the centre; btit you 10 can, perhaps, keep a fairy or two for your children yet, if you wish to keep them. But do you wish it? Suppose you had each, at the back of your houses, a garden, large enough for your children to play in, with just as much lawn as would give them 15 room to run,— no more — and that you could not change your abode; but that, if you chose, you could double your income, or quadruple it, by dig- ging a coal shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the flower-beds into heaps of coke. Would 20 you do it? I hope not. I can tell you, you would be wrong if you did, though it gave you income sixty-fold instead of four-fold. 83. Yet this is what you are doing with all Eng- land. The whole country is but a little garden, not 25 more than enough for your children to run on the lawns of, if you would let them all run there. And this little garden you will turn into furnace ground, and fill with heaps of cinders, if you can ; and those children of yours, not you, will suffer for it. For 30 *" Joan of Arc: in reference to M. Michelet's ' History of France.' "-De Quincey's Works, vol. iii., p. 217. 9^ SESAME AND LILIES. the fairies will not be all banished; there are fairies of the furnace as of the wood, and their first gift seems to be "sharp arrows of the mighty"; but their last gifts are " coals of juniper." 84. And yet I cannot — though there is no part 5 of my subject that I feel more — press this upon you; for we made so little use of the power of na- ture while we had it that we shall hardly feel what we have lost. Just on the other side of the Mersey you have your Snowdon, and your Menai Straits, 10 and that mighty granite rock beyond the moors of Anglesea, splendid in its heathery crest, and foot planted in the deep sea, once thought of as sacred — a divine promontory, looking westward; the Holy Head or Headland, still not without awe when its 15 red light glares first through storm. These are the hills, and these the bays and blue inlets, which, among the Greeks, would have been always loved, always fateful in influence on the national mind. That Snowdon is your Parnassus ; but where are its 20 Muses? That Holyhead mountain is your Island of yEgina; but where is its Temple to Minerva? 85. Shall I read you what the Christian Minerva had achieved under the shadow of our Parnassus up to the year 1848? — Here is a little account of a 25 Welsh school, from page 261 of the Report on Wales, published by the Committee of Council on Education. This is a school close to a town con- taining five thousand persons: — " I then called up a larger class, most of whom had 30 recently come to the school. Three girls repeatedly de- OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 99 clared they had never heard of Christ, and two that they had never heard of God. Two out of six thought Christ was on earth now " (they might have had a worse thought perhaps), "three knew nothing about the Crucifixion. 5 Four out of seven did not know the names of the months nor the number of days in a year. They had no addition; beyond two and two, or three and three, their minds were perfect blanks." Oh, ye women of England! from the Princess lo of that Wales to the simplest of you, do not think your own children can be brought into their true fold of rest, while these are scattered on the hills, as sheep having no shepherd. And do not think your daughters can be trained to the truth of their 15 own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which God made at once for their school-room and their play-ground, lie desolate and defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly in those inch-deep fonts of yours, unless you baptize them also in the sweet 20 waters which the great Lawgiver strikes forth for ever from the " rocks of your native land — waters which a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and you worship only with pollution. You cannot lead your children faithfully to those narrow 25 axe-hewn church altars of yours, while the dark azure altars in heaven — the mountains that sustain your island throne, — mountains on which a Pagan would have seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud — remain for you without inscrip- sotion; altars built, not to, but by an Unknown God. 86. III. Thus far, then, of the nature, thus far of the teaching, of woman, and thus of her house- L.of C. lOO SESAME AXD LILIES. hold office, and queenliness. W'e come now to our last, our widest question, — What is her queenly of- fice with respect to the state? Generally, we are under an impression that a man's duties are public, and a woman's private. 5 But this is not altogether so. A man has a personal work or duty, relating to his own home, and a public work or duty, which is the expansion of the other, relating to the state. So a woman has a personal work or duty, relating to her own home, 10 and a public work or duty, which is also the ex- pansion of that. Now, the man's work for his own home is, as has been said, to secure its maintenance, progress, and defence: the woman's to secure its order, com- 15 fort, and loveliness. Expand both these functions. The man's duty, as a member of a commonwealth, is to assist in the maintenance, in the advance, in the defence of the state. The woman's duty, as a member of the com- 20 monwealth, is to assist in the ordering, in the com- forting, and in the beautiful adornment of the state. What the man is at his own gate, defending it, if need be, against insult and spoil, that also, not in a less, but in a more devoted measure, he is to be 25 at the gate of his country, leaving his home, if need be, even to the spoiler, to do his more incumbent work there. And. in like manner, what the woman is to be within her gates, as the centre of order, the balm 30 of distress, and the mirror of beautv: that she is OF QUEENS' GARDE XS. lOI also to be without her gates, where order is more difficult, distress more imminent, loveliness more rare. And as within the human heart there is always 5 set an instinct for all its real duties, — an instinct which you cannot quench, but only warp and cor- rupt if you withdraw it from its true purpose: — as there is the intense instinct of love, which, rightly disciplined, maintains all the sanctities of life, and, 10 misdirected, undermines them; and must do either the one or the other; — so there is in the human heart an inextinguishable instinct, the love of power, which, rightly directed, maintains all the majesty of law and life, and misdirected, wrecks 15 them. 87. Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart of man, and of the heart of woman, God set it there, and God keeps it there. \'ainly, as falsely, you blame or rebuke the desire of power! — For Heav- 20 en's sake, and for ]\Ian's sake, desire it all you can. But i^'hat power? That is all the question. Power to destroy? the lion's limb, and the dragon's breath? Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide, and to guard. Power of the sceptre and shield; the power 25 of the royal hand that heals in touching, — that binds the fiend, and looses the captive; the throne that is founded on the rock of Justice, and descended from only by steps of ^lercy. \\\\\ you not covet such power as this, and seek such throne as this, and be 30 no more housewives, but queens? 88. It is now long since the women of England 102 SESAME AND LILIES. arrogated, universally, a title which once belonged to nobility only; and, having once been in the habit of accepting the simple title of gentlewoman, as correspondent to that of gentleman, insisted on the privilege of assuming the title of '* Lady," * which 5 properly corresponds only to the title of " Lord." I do not blame them for this; but only for their narrow motive in this. I would have them desire and claim the title of Lady, provided they claim, not merely the title, but the office and duty sig- 10 nified by it. Lady means " bread-giver " or '' loaf- giver," and Lord means '* maintainer of laws," and both titles have reference, not to the law which is maintained in the house, nor to the bread which is given to the household; but to law maintained for 15 the multitude, and to bread broken among the multitude. So that a Lord has legal claim only to his title in so far as he is the maintainer of the jus- tice of the Lord of Lords; and a Lady has legal claim to her title, only so far as she communicates 20 that help to the poor representatives of her Master, which women once, ministering to Him of their * I wish there were a true order of chivalry instituted for our English youth of certain ranks, in which both boy and girl should receive, at a given age, their knighthood and 25 ladyhood by true title; attainable only by certain proba- tion and trial both of character and accomplishment; and to be forfeited, on conviction, by their peers, of any dis- honourable act. Such an institution would be entirely, and with all noble results, possible, in a nation which loved 30 honour. That it would not be possible among us, is not to the discredit of the scheme. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 103 substance, were permitted to extend to that Master Himself; and when she is known, as He Himself once was, in breaking of bread. 89. And this beneficent and legal dominion, this 5 power of the Dominus, or House-Lord, and of the Domina, or House-Lady, is great and venerable, not in the number of those through whom it has lineally descended, but in the number of those whom it grasps within its sway; it is always re- 10 garded with reverent worship wherever its dynasty is founded on its duty, and its ambition correlative with its beneficence. Your fancy is pleased with the thought of being noble ladies, with a train of vassals? Be it so; you cannot be too noble, and 15 your train cannot be too great; but see to it that your train is of vassals whom you serve and feed, not merely of slaves who serve and feed yon; and that the multitude which obeys you is of those whom you have comforted, not oppressed, — whom 20 you have redeemed, not led into captivity. 90. And this, which is true of the lower or household dominion, is equally true of the queenly dominion; — that highest dignity is open to you, if you will also accept that highest duty. Rex 25 et Regina — Roi et Reine — '' Right-doers "; they dif- fer but from the Lady and Lord, in that their power is supreme over the mind as over the person — that they not only feed and clothe, but direct and teach. And whether consciously or not, you must be, in 30 many a heart, enthroned: there is no putting by that crown; queens you must always be; queens tQ I04 SESAME AND LILIES. your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons; queens of higher mystery to the world be- yond, which bows itself, and will for ever bow, be- fore the myrtle crown, and the stainless sceptre of womanhood. But, alas! you are too often idle and 5 careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest; and leaving misrule and violence to work their will among men, in defiance of the power which, hold- ing straight in gift from the Prince of all Peace, lo the wicked among you betray, and the good forget. 91. " Prince of Peace." Note that name. When kings rule in that name, and nobles, and the judges of the earth, they also, in their narrow place, and mortal measure, receive the power of it. There are 15 no other rulers than they: other rule than theirs is but 7;2wrule; they who govern verily " Dei gratia" are all princes, yes, or princesses, of Peace. There is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women are answerable for it; not in that you 20 have provoked, but in that you have not hindered. Men, by their nature, are prone to fight; they will fight for any cause, or for none. It is for you to choose their cause for them, and to forbid them when there is no cause. There is no suffering, no 25 injustice, no misery in the earth, but the guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear the sight of it, but you should not be able to bear it. Men may tread it down without sympathy in their own struggle; but men are feeble in sympathy, and contracted in 30 hope ; it is you only who can feel the depths of pain, OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 105 and conceive the way of its healing. Instead of trying to do this, you turn away from it; you shut yourselves within your park walls and garden gates; and you are content to know that there is 5 beyond them a whole world in wilderness — a world of secrets which you dare not penetrate, and of suf- fering which you dare not conceive. 92. I tell you that this is to me quite the most amazing among the phenomena of humanity. I am 10 surprised at no depths to which, when once warped from its honour, that humanity can be degraded. I do not wonder at the miser's death, with his hands, as they relax, dropping gold. I do not wonder at the sensualist's life, with the shroud wrapped about 15 his feet. I do not wonder at the single-handed murder of a single victim, done by the assassin in fhe darkness of the railway, or reed-shadow of the marsh. I do not even wonder at the myriad-handed murder of multitudes, done boastfully in the day- 20 light, by the frenzy of nations, and the immeasura- ble, unimaginable guilt, heaped up from hell to heaven, of their priests, and kings. But this is won- derful to me — oh, how wonderful! — to see the ten- der and delicate woman among you, with her child 25 at her breast, and a power, if she would wield it, over it, and over its father, purer than the air of heaven, and stronger than the seas of earth — nay, a magnitude of blessing which her husband would not part with for all that earth itself, though it were 30 made of one entire and perfect chrysolite: — to see her abdicate this majesty to play at precedence with Io6 SESAME AND LILIES. her next-door neighbour! This is wonderful — oh, wonderful! — to see her, with every innocent feel- ing fresh within her, go out in the morning into her garden to play with the fringes of its guarded flowers, and lift their heads when they are droop- 5 ing, with her happy smile upon her face, and no cloud upon her brow, because there is a little wall around her place of peace; and yet she knows, in her heart, if she would only look for its knowledge, that, outside of that little rose-covered wall, the 10 wild grass, to the horizon, is torn up by the agony of men, and beat level by the drift of their life- blood. 93. Have you ever considered what a deep under meaning there lies, or at least may be read, if we 15 choose, in our custom of strewing flowers before those whom we think most happy? Do you sup- pose it is merely to deceive them into the hope that happiness is always to fall thus in showers at their feet? — that wherever they pass they will tread on 20 herbs of sweet scent, and that the rough ground will be made smooth for them by depth of roses? So surely as they believe that, they will have, in- stead, to walk on bitter herbs and thorns; and the only softness to their feet will be of snow. But it 25 is not thus intended they should believe; there is a better meaning in that old custom. The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers ; but they rise behind her steps, not before them. '' Her feet have touched the meadows, and left the daisies ^o rosy." OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 1 07 94. You think that only a lover's fancy; — false and vain! How if it could be true? You think this also, perhaps, only a poet's fancy — " Even the light harebell raised its head 5 Elastic from her airy tread." But it is little to say of a woman, that she only does not destroy where she passes. She should revive; the harebells should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You think I am rushing into wild hyperbole? Par- 10 don me, not a whit — I mean what I say in calm English, spoken in resolute truth. You have heard it said — (and I believe there is more than fancy even in that saying, but let it pass for a fanciful one) — that flowers only flourish rightly in the garden 15 of some one who loves them. I know you would like that to be true; you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them: nay, more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer, but to 20 guard; — if you could bid the black blight turn away, and the knotted caterpillar spare — if you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, in frost — '* Come, thou south, and breathe upon my garden, that the spices 25 of it may flow out." This you would think a great thing? And do you think it not a greater thing, that all this, (and how much more than this!) you can do, for fairer flowers than these — flowers that could bless you for having blessed them, and will 30 love you for having loved them ; — flowers that have io8 SESAME AND LILIES. thoughts Hke yours, and Hves Hke yours; and which, once saved, you save for ever? Is this only a httle power? Far among the moorlands and the rocks, — far in the darkness of the terrible streets, — these feeble florets are lying, with all their fresh 5 leaves torn, and their stems broken — will you never go down to them, nor set them in order in their little fragrant beds, nor fence them, in their trem- bling, from the fierce wind? Shall morning follow morning, for you, but not for them; and the dawn 10 rise to watch, far away, those frantic Dances of Death ; "^ but no dawn rise to breathe upon these living banks of wild violet, and woodbine, and rose; nor call to you, through your casement, — call (not giving you the name of the English poet's lady, 15 but the name of Dante's great Matilda, who on the edge of happy Lethe, stood, wreathing flowers with flowers), saying, — " Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, 20 And the woodbine spices are w-afted abroad And the musk of the roses blown " ? Will you not go down among them? — among those sweet living things, whose new courage, sprung from the earth with the deep colour of 25 heaven upon it, is starting up in strength of goodly spire; and whose purity, washed from the dust, is opening, bud by bud, into the flower of promise; — and still they turn to you and for you, " The *See note, p. 48, 30 OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 109 Larkspur listens— I hear, I hear! And the Lily whispers — I wait." 95. Did you notice that I missed two lines when I read you that first stanza; and think that I had 5 forgotten them? Hear them now:— " Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown. Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate, alone." 10 Who is it, think you, who stands at the gate of this sweeter garden, alone, waiting for you? Did you ever hear, not of a Maud, but a Madeleine, who went down to her garden in the dawn, and found One waiting at the gate, whom she supposed to be 15 the gardener? Have you not sought Him often; sought Him in vain, all through the night; sought Him in vain at the gate of that old garden where the fiery sword is set? He is never there; but at the gate of this garden He is waiting always— wait- 20 ing to take your hand — ready to go down to see the fruits of the valley, to see whether the vine has flourished, and the pomegranate budded. There you shall see with Him the little tendrils of the vines that His hand is guiding— there you shall see the 25 pomegranate springing where His hand cast the sanguine seed; — more: you shall see the troops of the angel keepers that, with their wings, wave away the hungry birds from the pathsides where He has sown, and call to each other between the vineyard 30 rows, " Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil no SESAME AND LILIES. the vines, for our vines have tender grapes." Oh — you queens — you queens; among the hills and happy greenwood of this land of yours, shall the foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests ; and in your cities shall the stones cry out against you, that they are the only pillows where the Son of Man can lay His head? NOTES. SESAME. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. I : Title. — Sesame. , 'Open Sesame' is the magic pass-word which opens the treasure-cave in the story of The Forty Thieves in the Arabian Nights. For its significance as the title of the lec- ture cf. 62 : 22. The sesame is an Arabian plant, of which the seeds are used for food. I : Title. — Kings' Treasuries. In Ezra 5 : 17 we find the phrase 'king's treasure-house ' used for the archives in which the records of Darius' kingdom are kept. 1 : Motto. — Lucian. A Greek essay-writer and satirist of the second century A.D. The Fisher matt is a dialogue between Lucian and the great philosophers of Greece in which philosophy itself becomes the object of satire. At the end of the satire Lucian baits his hook with a fig and a gold coin, and, seated on the wall of the Acropolis, fishes for the gluttons of the city. Hence the title. {Encyc. Brit., s. v, Lucian.) 2: 12. — Some connection with schools. Because of his father's generosity Ruskin had been made life-governor of various schools, among them the famous Christ's Hospital in London. In 1854 he was interested in the founding of the Working Men's College in London, where he gave instruction in drawing. He was not made professor at Oxford till 1870. 2 : 27. — Double-belled doors. With two bells, one for visitors, one for business callers. Ill 112 NOTES. [3:27 3 : 27. — The last infirmity of noble minds. Milton, Lycidas 71 : Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights and live laborious days. Ruskin's quotation is slightly inaccurate. ' Last infirmity means that the desire for fame is the weakness hardest for wise men to put off. 4 : 24. — My Lord. Bishops of the Cnurch of England have the rank of barons with a seat in the House of Lords, and are addressed as * my lord.' 5: 18. — My writings on Political Economy. See Introduction. II : 30. — Note. The paragraph referred to is as follows: ' First of the foundation of art in moral character. Of course art-gift and amiability of disposition are two different things. A good man is not necessarily a painter, nor does an eye for color necessarily imply an honest mind. But great art implies the union of both powers: it is the expression, by an art-gift, of a pure soul. If the gift is not there, we can have no art at all ; and if the soul — and a right soul too — is not there, the art is bad, how- ever dexterous.' This doctrine, which is of the greatest importance, not only for the understanding of this passage, but for an understanding of Ruskin's whole work, is further expanded in The Queen of the Air, § 102 : ' The faults of a work of art are the faults of its workman, and its virtues his virtues. ' Great art is the expression of the mind of a great man, and mean art, that of the want of mind of a weak man. A foolish per- son builds foolishly, and a wise one, sensibly ; a virtuous one, beautifully ; and a vicious one, basely. If stone work is well put together, it means that a thoughtful man planned it, and a careful man cut it, and an honest man cemented it. If it has too much ornament, it means that its carver was too greedy of pleasure ; if too little, that he was rude, or insensitive, or stupid, and the like. So that when once you have learned how to spell these most pre- cious of all legends, — pictures and buildings, — you may read the characters of men, and of nations, in their art, as in a mirror; — nay. 14 : I3-] NOTES. II3 as in a microscope, and magnified a hundredfold ; for the character becomes passionate in the art, and intensifies itself in alHts noblest or meanest delights. Nay, not only as in a microscope, but as under a scalpel, and in dissection ; for a man may hide himself to you, every other way ; but he cannot in his work : there, be sure, you have him to the inmost. All that he likes, all that he sees,— all that he can do, — his imagination, his affections, his perseverance, his impatience, his clumsiness, cleverness, everything is there. If the work is a cobweb, you know it was made by a spider ; if a honeycomb, by a bee ; a worm-cast is thrown up by a worm, and a nest wreathed by a bird ; and a house built by a man, worthily, if he is worthy, and ignobly, if he is ignoble. 'And always, from the least to the greatest, as the made thing is good or bad. so is the maker of it.* 12: 31.— Elysian gates. Elysium was the region of Hades in- habited by the souls of the great and good — philosophers, poets, heroes. Cf. 55 : 25. 12 : 31. — No vile or vulgar person ever enters there. Cf. Car- lyle's similar thought : * A thoroughly immoral man could not know anything at all ! To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathize with it : that is be virtuously related to it. If he have not the justice to put down his selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he know ? ' Heroes and Hero- Worship, The Hero as Poet, p. 122, ed. Macmechan. 13 : 2. — Faubourg St. Germain. The old aristocratic quarter of Paris, on the left bank of the Seine. 14 : 13.— That cruel reticence. This doctrine of the intentional reserve of great artists is given at greater length in The Queen of the Air, § 17. Speaking of the Iliad, Ruskin says : 'All pieces of such art are didactic in the purest way, indirectly and occultly, so that, first, you shall only be bettered by them if you are already hard at work in bettering yourself ; and when you are bettered by them, it shall be partly with a general acceptance of their influence, so constant and subtle that you shall be no more conscious of it than of the healthy digestion of food ; and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you shall only find by slow 114 NOTES. [i6 : 12. mining for it; — which is withheld on purpose, and close-locked, that you may not get it till you have forged the key of it in a furnace of your own heating. And this withholding of their mean- ing is continual, and confessed, in the great poets. Thus Pindar says of himself : "There is many an arrow in my quiver, full of speech to the wise, but, for the many, they need interpreters." And neither Pindar, nor ^schylus, nor Hesiod, nor Homer, nor any of the greater poets or teachers of any nation or time, ever spoke but with intentional reservation : nay, beyond this, there is often a meaning which they themselves cannot interpret, — which it may be for ages long after them to interpret, — in what they said, so far as it recorded true imaginative vision.' On the other side of the question we might adduce the fact that Browning, obscurest of modern poets, declared that he wrote as clearly as he could. 16 : 12. — The peerage of words. A discriminating taste in liter- ary matters is, then, possible only to him who has some acquaint- ance with the history of the language. Why the word 'peerage'? 17 : 14. — Masked words. Words which appear to bear a mean- ing they do not possess, or words capable of two interpretations. Such are the catch phrases of the campaign orator — * imperialism,' 'freedom of the press,' etc. 17 : 25. — Chamaeleon cloaks. Ruskin is giving free play to his fancy and indulging in an etymological pun. Chamaeleon (Greek Xccfxai, on the ground, + Xeoov;^ lion), means literally ' ground- lion.' The chamaeleon is a species of lizard which changes its color with the color of surrounding objects. These equivocal words wear a cloak or mask which changes color according to each man's fancy, and have the deadly power of a lion. 17 : 31. — Unjust stewards. Luke 16 : 1-8. 18 : 6. — Languages so mongrel in breed. Cf. 20 : 9. 18 : 14. — The Form of the ' Word.' Cf. Aratra Pentelici, § 64. ' The second elementary cause of the loss of our nobly imagina- tive faculty, is the worship of the Letter, instead of the Spirit, in what we chiefly accept as the ordinance and teaching of Deity; and the apprehension of a healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book whose primal commands we refuse to obey. ' No feather idol of Polynesia was ever sign of a more shameful 20 : 6.] J^OT£S. 1I5 idolatry than the modern notion in the minds of certainly the majority of English religious persons, that the Word of God, by which the heavens were of old, and the earth, standing out of the water and in the water. — the Word of God which came to the prophets, and comes still for ever to all who will hear it, (and to many who will forbear); and which, called Faithful and True, is to lead forth, in the judgment, the armies of heaven, — that this "Word of God" may yet be bound at our pleasure in morocco, and carried about in a young lady's pocket, with tasselled ribands to mark the passages she most approves of.' 19 : 5. — Sown on any wayside. The language here and in the following lines is colored by memories of the parable of the sower, Matthew 13 : 3-8. 19: 12. — Damno. Latin condemno — con -{- damno. English damn is used by Shakespeare in the sense of condemn : He shall not live; look with a spot I damn him. Julius C^ ''^^ «•• • /% 0^ cO"'* '^O <0 o "^ Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. , ■ * \ Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide '_J* ^^ Treatment Date; May 2009 ■ *'o,.** 0^ '^"^^^'a PreservationTechnologles > S ^0 c '>""'* O ^ ••■ A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION < •y ^ •;!eSS^»*^* ^ W ♦*tffVJ 111 Thomson Park Drive 111 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 1 6066 (724)779-2111 /.^I'^^^V o°*.'^:''^°o .^-^.^I'^'/V '"^^.J" ♦ 0^ WERT Crdntvlllf- P., /% «