BEING now fifty-one years old, and little likely to change my mind
hereafter on any important subject of thought (unless through weakness of
age), I wish to publish a connected series of such parts of my works as
now seem to me right, and likely to be of permanent use. In doing so I
shall omit much, but not attempt to mend what I think worth reprinting.
A young man necessarily writes otherwise than an old one, and it would be
worse than wasted time to try to recast the juvenile language: nor is it
to be thought that I am ashamed even of what I cancel; for great part of
my earlier work was rapidly written for temporary purposes, and is now
unnecessary, though true, even to truism. What I wrote about religion,
was, on the contrary, painstaking, and, I think, forcible, as compared
with most religious writing; especially in its frankness and
fearlessness: but it was wholly mistaken: for I had been educated in the
doctrines of a narrow sect, and had read history as obliquely as
sectarians necessarily must.
Mingled among these either unnecessary or erroneous statements, I find,
indeed, some that might be still of value; but these, in my earlier
books, disfigured by affected language, partly through the desire to be
thought a fine writer, and partly, as in the second volume of ‘Modern
Painters,’ in the notion of returning as far as I could to what I thought
the better style of old English literature, especially to that of my then
favourite, in prose, Richard Hooker.
For these reasons,—though, as respects either art, policy, or morality,
as distinct from religion, I not only still hold, but would even wish
strongly to re-affirm the substance of what I said in my earliest
books,—I shall reprint scarcely anything in this series out of the first
and second volumes of ‘Modern Painters’; and shall omit much of the
‘Seven Lamps’ and ‘Stones of Venice’; but all my books written within the
last fifteen years will be republished without change, as new editions of
them are called for, with here and there perhaps an additional note, and
having their text divided, for convenient reference, into paragraphs,
consecutive through each volume. I shall also throw together the shorter
fragments that bear on each other, and fill in with such unprinted
lectures or studies as seem to me worth preserving, so as to keep the
volumes, on an average, composed of about a hundred leaves each.
The first book of which a new edition is required chances to be ‘Sesame
and Lilies,’ from which I now detach the whole preface, about the Alps,
for use elsewhere; and to I which I add a lecture given in Ireland on a
subject closely connected with that of the book itself. I am glad that
it should be the first of the complete series, for many reasons; though
in now looking over these two lectures, I am painfully struck by the
waste of good work in them. They cost me much thought, and much strong
emotion; but it was foolish to suppose that I could rouse my audiences in
a little while to any sympathy with the temper into which I had brought
myself by years of thinking over subjects full of pain; while, if I
missed my purpose at the time, it was little to be hoped I could attain
it afterwards; since phrases written for oral delivery become ineffective
when quietly read. Yet I should only take away what good is in them if I
tried to translate them into the language of books; nor, indeed, could I
at all have done so at the time of their delivery, my thoughts then
habitually and impatiently putting themselves into forms fit only for
emphatic speech; and thus I am startled, in my review of them, to find
that, though there is much, (forgive me the impertinence) which seems to
me accurately and energetically said, there is scarcely anything put in a
form to be generally convincing, or even easily intelligible: and I can
well imagine a reader laying down the book without being at all moved by
it, still less guided, to any definite course of action.
I think, however, if I now say briefly and clearly what I meant my
hearers to understand, and what I wanted, and still would fain have, them
to do, there may afterwards be found some better service in the
passionately written text.
The first lecture says, or tries to say, that, life being very short, and
the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading
valueless books; and that valuable books should, in a civilized country,
be within the reach of every one, printed in excellent form, for a just
price; but not in any vile, vulgar, or, by reason of smallness of type,
physically injurious form, at a vile price. For we none of us need many
books, and those which we need ought to be clearly printed, on the best
paper, and strongly bound. And though we are, indeed, now, a wretched
and poverty-struck nation, and hardly able to keep soul and body
together, still, as no person in decent circumstances would put on his
table confessedly bad wine, or bad meat, without being ashamed, so he
need not have on his shelves ill-printed or loosely and
wretchedly-stitched books; for though few can be rich, yet every man who
honestly exerts himself may, I think, still provide, for himself and his
family, good shoes, good gloves, strong harness for his cart or carriage
horses, and stout leather binding for his books. And I would urge upon
every young man, as the beginning of his due and wise provision for his
household, to obtain as soon as he can, by the severest economy, a
restricted, serviceable, and steadily—however slowly—increasing, series
of books for use through life; making his little library, of all the
furniture in his room, the most studied and decorative piece; every
volume having its assigned place, like a little statue in its niche, and
one of the earliest and strictest lessons to the children of the house
being how to turn the pages of their own literary possessions lightly and
deliberately, with no chance of tearing or dog’s ears.
That is my notion of the founding of Kings’ Treasuries; and the first
lecture is intended to show somewhat the use and preciousness of their
treasures: but the two following ones have wider scope, being written in
the hope of awakening the youth of England, so far as my poor words might
have any power with them, to take some thought of the purposes of the
life into which they are entering, and the nature of the world they have
to conquer.
These two lectures are fragmentary and ill-arranged, but not, I think,
diffuse or much compressible. The entire gist and conclusion of them,
however, is in the last six paragraphs of the third lecture, which I
would beg the reader to look over not once nor twice, (rather than any
other part of the book,) for they contain the best expression I have yet
been able to put in words of what, so far as is within my power, I mean
henceforward both to do myself, and to plead with all over whom I have
any influence, to do also according to their means: the letters begun on
the first day of this year, to the workmen of England, having the object
of originating, if possible, this movement among them, in true alliance
with whatever trustworthy element of help they can find in the higher
classes. After these paragraphs, let me ask you to read, by the fiery
light of recent events, the fable at p. 170 {1}, and then paragraphs
129–131 {2}; and observe, my statement respecting the famine at Orissa is
not rhetorical, but certified by official documents as within the truth.
Five hundred thousand persons, _at least_, died by starvation in our
British dominions, wholly in consequence of carelessness and want of
forethought. Keep that well in your memory; and note it as the best
possible illustration of modern political economy in true practice, and
of the relations it has accomplished between Supply and Demand. Then
begin the second lecture, and all will read clear enough, I think, to the
end; only, since that second lecture was written, questions have arisen
respecting the education and claims of women which have greatly troubled
simple minds and excited restless ones. I am sometimes asked my thoughts
on this matter, and I suppose that some girl readers of the second
lecture may at the end of it desire to be told summarily what I would
have them do and desire in the present state of things. This, then, is
what I would say to any girl who had confidence enough in me to believe
what I told her, or to do what I asked her.
First, be quite sure of one thing, that, however much you may know, and
whatever advantages you may possess, and however good you may be, you
have not been singled out, by the God who made you, from all the other
girls in the world, to be especially informed respecting His own nature
and character. You have not been born in a luminous point upon the
surface of the globe, where a perfect theology might be expounded to you
from your youth up, and where everything you were taught would be true,
and everything that was enforced upon you, right. Of all the insolent,
all the foolish persuasions that by any chance could enter and hold your
empty little heart, this is the proudest and foolishest,—that you have
been so much the darling of the Heavens, and favourite of the Fates, as
to be born in the very nick of time, and in the punctual place, when and
where pure Divine truth had been sifted from the errors of the Nations;
and that your papa had been providentially disposed to buy a house in the
convenient neighbourhood of the steeple under which that Immaculate and
final verity would be beautifully proclaimed. Do not think it, child; it
is not so. This, on the contrary, is the fact,—unpleasant you may think
it; pleasant, it seems to _me_,—that you, with all your pretty dresses,
and dainty looks, and kindly thoughts, and saintly aspirations, are not
one whit more thought of or loved by the great Maker and Master than any
poor little red, black, or blue savage, running wild in the pestilent
woods, or naked on the hot sands of the earth: and that, of the two, you
probably know less about God than she does; the only difference being
that she thinks little of Him that is right, and you much that is wrong.
That, then, is the first thing to make sure of;—that you are not yet
perfectly well informed on the most abstruse of all possible subjects,
and that if you care to behave with modesty or propriety, you had better
be silent about it.
The second thing which you may make sure of is, that however good you may
be, you have faults; that however dull you may be, you can find out what
some of them are; and that however slight they may be, you had better
make some—not too painful, but patient—effort to get quit of them. And
so far as you have confidence in me at all, trust me for this, that how
many soever you may find or fancy your faults to be, there are only two
that are of real consequence,—Idleness and Cruelty. Perhaps you may be
proud. Well, we can get much good out of pride, if only it be not
religious. Perhaps you may be vain; it is highly probable; and very
pleasant for the people who like to praise you. Perhaps you are a little
envious: that is really very shocking; but then—so is everybody else.
Perhaps, also, you are a little malicious, which I am truly concerned to
hear, but should probably only the more, if I knew you, enjoy your
conversation. But whatever else you may be, you must not be useless, and
you must not be cruel. If there is any one point which, in six thousand
years of thinking about right and wrong, wise and good men have agreed
upon, or successively by experience discovered, it is that God dislikes
idle and cruel people more than any others:—that His first order is,
“Work while you have light;” and His second, “Be merciful while you have
mercy.”
“Work while you have light,” especially while you have the light of
morning. There are few things more wonderful to me than that old people
never tell young ones how precious their youth is. They sometimes
sentimentally regret their own earlier days; sometimes prudently forget
them; often foolishly rebuke the young, often more foolishly indulge,
often most foolishly thwart and restrain; but scarcely ever warn or watch
them. Remember, then, that I, at least, have warned _you_, that the
happiness of your life, and its power, and its part and rank in earth or
in heaven, depend on the way you pass your days now. They are not to be
sad days: far from that, the first duty of young people is to be
delighted and delightful; but they are to be in the deepest sense solemn
days. There is no solemnity so deep, to a rightly-thinking creature, as
that of dawn. But not only in that beautiful sense, but in all their
character and method, they are to be solemn days. Take your Latin
dictionary, and look out “solennis,” and fix the sense of the word well
in your mind, and remember that every day of your early life is ordaining
irrevocably, for good or evil, the custom and practice of your soul;
ordaining either sacred customs of dear and lovely recurrence, or
trenching deeper and deeper the furrows for seed of sorrow. Now,
therefore, see that no day passes in which you do not make yourself a
somewhat better creature: and in order to do that, find out, first, what
you are now. Do not think vaguely about it; take pen and paper, and
write down as accurate a description of yourself as you can, with the
date to it. If you dare not do so, find out why you dare not, and try to
get strength of heart enough to look yourself fairly in the face in mind
as well as body. I do not doubt but that the mind is a less pleasant
thing to look at than the face, and for that very reason it needs more
looking at; so always have two mirrors on your toilet table, and see that
with proper care you dress body and mind before them daily. After the
dressing is once over for the day, think no more about it: as your hair
will blow about your ears, so your temper and thoughts will get ruffled
with the day’s work, and may need, sometimes, twice dressing; but I don’t
want you to carry about a mental pocket-comb; only to be smooth braided
always in the morning.
Write down then, frankly, what you are, or, at least, what you think
yourself, not dwelling upon those inevitable faults which I have just
told you are of little consequence, and which the action of a right life
will shake or smooth away; but that you may determine to the best of your
intelligence what you are good for and can be made into. You will find
that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help
other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve
yourself. Thus, from the beginning, consider all your accomplishments as
means of assistance to others; read attentively, in this volume,
paragraphs 74, 75, 19, and 79, {3} and you will understand what I mean,
with respect to languages and music. In music especially you will soon
find what personal benefit there is in being serviceable: it is probable
that, however limited your powers, you have voice and ear enough to
sustain a note of moderate compass in a concerted piece;—that, then, is
the first thing to make sure you can do. Get your voice disciplined and
clear, and think only of accuracy; never of effect or expression: if you
have any soul worth expressing, it will show itself in your singing; but
most likely there are very few feelings in you, at present, needing any
particular expression; and the one thing you have to do is to make a
clear-voiced little instrument of yourself, which other people can
entirely depend upon for the note wanted. So, in drawing, as soon as you
can set down the right shape of anything, and thereby explain its
character to another person, or make the look of it clear and interesting
to a child, you will begin to enjoy the art vividly for its own sake, and
all your habits of mind and powers of memory will gain precision: but if
you only try to make showy drawings for praise, or pretty ones for
amusement, your drawing will have little of real interest for you, and no
educational power whatever.
Then, besides this more delicate work, resolve to do every day some that
is useful in the vulgar sense. Learn first thoroughly the economy of the
kitchen; the good and bad qualities of every common article of food, and
the simplest and best modes of their preparation: when you have time, go
and help in the cooking of poorer families, and show them how to make as
much of everything as possible, and how to make little, nice; coaxing and
tempting them into tidy and pretty ways, and pleading for well-folded
table-cloths, however coarse, and for a flower or two out of the garden
to strew on them. If you manage to get a clean table-cloth, bright
plates on it, and a good dish in the middle, of your own cooking, you may
ask leave to say a short grace; and let your religious ministries be
confined to that much for the present.
Again, let a certain part of your day (as little as you choose, but not
to be broken in upon) be set apart for making strong and pretty dresses
for the poor. Learn the sound qualities of all useful stuffs, and make
everything of the best you can get, whatever its price. I have many
reasons for desiring you to do this,—too many to be told just now,—trust
me, and be sure you get everything as good as can be: and if, in the
villainous state of modern trade, you cannot get it good at any price,
buy its raw material, and set some of the poor women about you to spin
and weave, till you have got stuff that can be trusted: and then, every
day, make some little piece of useful clothing, sewn with your own
fingers as strongly as it can be stitched; and embroider it or otherwise
beautify it moderately with fine needlework, such as a girl may be proud
of having done. And accumulate these things by you until you hear of
some honest persons in need of clothing, which may often too sorrowfully
be; and, even though you should be deceived, and give them to the
dishonest, and hear of their being at once taken to the pawnbroker’s,
never mind that, for the pawnbroker must sell them to some one who has
need of them. That is no business of yours; what concerns you is only
that when you see a half-naked child, you should have good and fresh
clothes to give it, if its parents will let it be taught to wear them.
If they will not, consider how they came to be of such a mind, which it
will be wholesome for you beyond most subjects of inquiry to ascertain.
And after you have gone on doing this a little while, you will begin to
understand the meaning of at least one chapter of your Bible, Proverbs
xxxi., without need of any laboured comment, sermon, or meditation.
In these, then (and of course in all minor ways besides, that you can
discover in your own household), you must be to the best of your strength
usefully employed during the greater part of the day, so that you may be
able at the end of it to say, as proudly as any peasant, that you have
not eaten the bread of idleness.
Then, secondly, I said, you are not to be cruel. Perhaps you think there
is no chance of your being so; and indeed I hope it is not likely that
you should be deliberately unkind to any creature; but unless you are
deliberately kind to every creature, you will often be cruel to many.
Cruel, partly through want of imagination, (a far rarer and weaker
faculty in women than men,) and yet more, at the present day, through the
subtle encouragement of your selfishness by the religious doctrine that
all which we now suppose to be evil will be brought to a good end;
doctrine practically issuing, not in less earnest efforts that the
immediate unpleasantness may be averted from ourselves, but in our
remaining satisfied in the contemplation of its ultimate objects, when it
is inflicted on others.
It is not likely that the more accurate methods of recent mental
education will now long permit young people to grow up in the persuasion
that, in any danger or distress, they may expect to be themselves saved
by the Providence of God, while those around them are lost by His
improvidence: but they may be yet long restrained from rightly kind
action, and long accustomed to endure both their own pain occasionally,
and the pain of others always, with an unwise patience, by misconception
of the eternal and incurable nature of real evil. Observe, therefore,
carefully in this matter; there are degrees of pain, as degrees of
faultfulness, which are altogether conquerable, and which seem to be
merely forms of wholesome trial or discipline. Your fingers tingle when
you go out on a frosty morning, and are all the warmer afterwards; your
limbs are weary with wholesome work, and lie down in the pleasanter rest;
you are tried for a little while by having to wait for some promised
good, and it is all the sweeter when it comes. But you cannot carry the
trial past a certain point. Let the cold fasten on your hand in an
extreme degree, and your fingers will moulder from their sockets.
Fatigue yourself, but once, to utter exhaustion, and to the end of life
you shall not recover the former vigour of your frame. Let
heart-sickness pass beyond a certain bitter point, and the heart loses
its life for ever.
Now, the very definition of evil is in this irremediableness. It means
sorrow, or sin, which ends in death; and assuredly, as far as we know, or
can conceive, there are many conditions both of pain and sin which cannot
but so end. Of course we are ignorant and blind creatures, and we cannot
know what seeds of good may be in present suffering, or present crime;
but with what we cannot know we are not concerned. It is conceivable
that murderers and liars may in some distant world be exalted into a
higher humanity than they could have reached without homicide or
falsehood; but the contingency is not one by which our actions should be
guided. There is, indeed, a better hope that the beggar, who lies at our
gates in misery, may, within gates of pearl, be comforted; but the
Master, whose words are our only authority for thinking so, never Himself
inflicted disease as a blessing, nor sent away the hungry unfed, or the
wounded unhealed.
Believe me then, the only right principle of action here, is to consider
good and evil as defined by our natural sense of both; and to strive to
promote the one, and to conquer the other, with as hearty endeavour as if
there were, indeed, no other world than this. Above all, get quit of the
absurd idea that Heaven will interfere to correct great errors, while
allowing its laws to take their course in punishing small ones. If you
prepare a dish of food carelessly, you do not expect Providence to make
it palatable; neither if, through years of folly, you misguide your own
life, need you expect Divine interference to bring round everything at
last for the best. I tell you, positively, the world is not so
constituted: the consequences of great mistakes are just as sure as those
of small ones, and the happiness of your whole life, and of all the lives
over which you have power, depend as literally on your own common sense
and discretion as the excellence and order of the feast of a day.
Think carefully and bravely over these things, and you will find them
true: having found them so, think also carefully over your own position
in life. I assume that you belong to the middle or upper classes, and
that you would shrink from descending into a lower sphere. You may fancy
you would not: nay, if you are very good, strong-hearted, and romantic,
perhaps you really would not; but it is not wrong that you should. You
have, then, I suppose, good food, pretty rooms to live in, pretty dresses
to wear, power of obtaining every rational and wholesome pleasure; you
are, moreover, probably gentle and grateful, and in the habit of every
day thanking God for these things. But why do you thank Him? Is it
because, in these matters, as well as in your religious knowledge, you
think He has made a favourite of you? Is the essential meaning of your
thanksgiving, “Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other girls are, not
in that I fast twice in the week while they feast, but in that I feast
seven times a week while they fast,” and are you quite sure this is a
pleasing form of thanksgiving to your Heavenly Father? Suppose you saw
one of your own true earthly sisters, Lucy or Emily, cast out of your
mortal father’s house, starving, helpless, heartbroken; and that every
morning when you went into your father’s room, you said to him, “How good
you are, father, to give me what you don’t give Lucy,” are you sure that,
whatever anger your parent might have just cause for, against your
sister, he would be pleased by that thanksgiving, or flattered by that
praise? Nay, are you even sure that you _are_ so much the
favourite?—suppose that, all this while, he loves poor Lucy just as well
as you, and is only trying you through her pain, and perhaps not angry
with her in anywise, but deeply angry with you, and all the more for your
thanksgivings? Would it not be well that you should think, and earnestly
too, over this standing of yours; and all the more if you wish to believe
that text, which clergymen so much dislike preaching on, “How hardly
shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God”? You do not
believe it now, or you would be less complacent in your state; and you
cannot believe it at all, until you know that the Kingdom of God
means,—“not meat and drink, but justice, peace, and joy in the Holy
Ghost,” nor until you know also that such joy is not by any means,
necessarily, in going to church, or in singing hymns; but may be joy in a
dance, or joy in a jest, or joy in anything you have deserved to possess,
or that you are willing to give; but joy in nothing that separates you,
as by any strange favour, from your fellow-creatures, that exalts you
through their degradation—exempts you from their toil—or indulges you in
time of their distress.
Think, then, and some day, I believe, you will feel also,—no morbid
passion of pity such as would turn you into a black Sister of Charity,
but the steady fire of perpetual kindness which will make you a bright
one. I speak in no disparagement of them; I know well how good the
Sisters of Charity are, and how much we owe to them; but all these
professional pieties (except so far as distinction or association may be
necessary for effectiveness of work) are in their spirit wrong, and in
practice merely plaster the sores of disease that ought never to have
been permitted to exist; encouraging at the same time the herd of less
excellent women in frivolity, by leading them to think that they must
either be good up to the black standard, or cannot be good for anything.
Wear a costume, by all means, if you like; but let it be a cheerful and
becoming one; and be in your heart a Sister of Charity always, without
either veiled or voluble declaration of it.
As I pause, before ending my preface—thinking of one or two more points
that are difficult to write of—I find a letter in ‘The Times,’ from a
French lady, which says all I want so beautifully, that I will print it
just as it stands:—
SIR,—It is often said that one example is worth many sermons. Shall
I be judged presumptuous if I point out one, which seems to me so
striking just now, that, however painful, I cannot help dwelling upon
it?
It is the share, the sad and large share, that French society and its
recent habits of luxury, of expenses, of dress, of indulgence in
every kind of extravagant dissipation, has to lay to its own door in
its actual crisis of ruin, misery, and humiliation. If our
_ménagères_ can be cited as an example to English housewives, so,
alas! can other classes of our society be set up as an example—_not_
to be followed.
Bitter must be the feelings of many a French woman whose days of
luxury and expensive habits are at an end, and whose bills of bygone
splendour lie with a heavy weight on her conscience, if not on her
purse!
With us the evil has spread high and low. Everywhere have the
examples given by the highest ladies in the land been followed but
too successfully.
Every year did dress become more extravagant, entertainments more
costly, expenses of every kind more considerable. Lower and lower
became the tone of society, its good breeding, its delicacy. More
and more were _monde_ and _demi-monde_ associated in newspaper
accounts of fashionable doings, in scandalous gossip, on racecourses,
in _premières représentations_, in imitation of each other’s
costumes, _mobiliers_ and slang.
Living beyond one’s means became habitual—almost necessary—for every
one to keep up with, if not to go beyond, every one else.
What the result of all this has been we now see in the wreck of our
prosperity, in the downfall of all that seemed brightest and highest.
Deeply and fearfully impressed by what my own country has incurred
and is suffering, I cannot help feeling sorrowful when I see in
England signs of our besetting sins appearing also. Paint and
chignons, slang and vaudevilles, knowing “Anonymas” by name, and
reading doubtfully moral novels, are in themselves small offences,
although not many years ago they would have appeared very heinous
ones, yet they are quick and tempting conveyances on a very dangerous
high-road.
I would that all Englishwomen knew how they are looked up to from
abroad—what a high opinion, what honour and reverence we foreigners
have for their principles, their truthfulness, the fresh and pure
innocence of their daughters, the healthy youthfulness of their
lovely children.
May I illustrate this by a short example which happened very near me?
During the days of the _émeutes_ of 1848, all the houses in Paris
were being searched for firearms by the mob. The one I was living in
contained none, as the master of the house repeatedly assured the
furious and incredulous Republicans. They were going to lay violent
hands on him when his wife, an English lady, hearing the loud
discussion, came bravely forward and assured them that no arms were
concealed. “Vous êtes anglaise, nous vous croyons; les anglaises
disent toujours la vérité,” was the immediate answer, and the rioters
quietly left.
Now, Sir, shall I be accused of unjustified criticism if, loving and
admiring your country, as these lines will prove, certain new
features strike me as painful discrepancies in English life?
Far be it from me to preach the contempt of all that can make life
lovable and wholesomely pleasant. I love nothing better than to see
a woman nice, neat, elegant, looking her best in the prettiest dress
that her taste and purse can afford, or your bright, fresh young
girls fearlessly and perfectly sitting their horses, or adorning
their houses as pretty [sic; it is not quite grammar, but it is
better than if it were;] as care, trouble, and refinement can make
them.
It is the degree _beyond_ that which to us has proved so fatal, and
that I would our example could warn you from as a small repayment for
your hospitality and friendliness to us in our days of trouble.
May Englishwomen accept this in a kindly spirit as a New-year’s wish
from