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.”

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 accurate one.

Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries, 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

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 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

fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a dead body

by the vapours of its own decomposition. This is literally true of all

false religious teaching; the first and last, and fatalest sign of it, is

that “puffing up.” Your converted children, who teach their parents;

your converted convicts, who teach honest men; your converted dunces,

who, having lived in cretinous stupefaction half their lives, suddenly

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 in 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,

without water; bodies, these, of putrescent vapour and skin, without

blood or flesh: blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with—corrupt, and

corrupting,—“ Swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw.”

Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting 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 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 other, of iron, the key

of the prison in which the wicked teachers are to be bound who “have

taken 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.” 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 perpetual prison-house. And that prison opens here,

as well as hereafter: he who is to be bound in heaven must first be bound

on earth. That command 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 withheld, and

for every truth refused, and for every falsehood enforced; so that he is

more strictly fettered 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, the iron shuts amain.”

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 author 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,” not “Thus _I_ thought, in misreading Milton.” And by

this process you will gradually come to attach 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 importance;—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 for them, in any serious matters; {8}—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

legitimate right to an “opinion” on any business, except 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 these proceedings; it is at your peril if you have

not much more than an “opinion” on the way to manage 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 roguery and lying are

objectionable, and are instantly to be flogged out of the way whenever

discovered;—that covetousness and love of quarrelling are dangerous

dispositions even in children, and deadly dispositions in men and

nations;—that, in the end, the God of heaven and earth loves active,

modest, 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, opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, governments,

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 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 clear shape, and exhibit to you the grounds for

_in_decision, 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 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 its full

meaning; but with the greater men, you cannot fathom their meaning; they

do not even wholly measure it themselves,—it is so wide. Suppose I had

asked you, for instance, to seek for Shakespeare’s opinion, instead of

Milton’s on this matter of Church authority?—or for Dante’s? Have any of

you, at this instant, the least idea what either thought about it? Have

you ever balanced the 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,

tanto vilmente, nell’ eterno esilio;” or of him whom Dante stood beside,

“come ’l frate che confessa lo perfido assassin?” {9} Shakespeare and

Alighieri knew men better than most of us, I presume! They were both in

the midst of the main struggle between 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 Ecclesiastical Courts!

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 mere chance prejudice, and drifted, helpless,

entangled weed of castaway thought; nay, you will see that most men’s

minds are indeed little better than rough heath wilderness, neglected and

stubborn, partly barren, partly overgrown with pestilent 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 literary work before you, for life, must begin

with obedience to that order, “Break up your fallow ground, and _sow not

among thorns_.”

II. {10} Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers, that you

may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this higher advance to

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. 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 between one man and another,—between

one animal and another,—is precisely in this, that one 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 instant to be cut in two

by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us. But

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

passion.

You know I said of that great and pure society 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 essence

of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent

vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and

mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a dreadful callousness,

which, in extremity, becomes capable of 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, that 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,” of body and

soul: that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has

above all creatures;—fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond

reason;—the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but

determine what is true:—it is the God-given passion of humanity which

alone can recognise what God has made good.

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, 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 passion is

disciplined and tested passion,—not the first passion that comes. The

first that come are the vain, the false, the treacherous; if you yield to

them they will lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hollow

enthusiasm, till you have no true purpose and no true passion left. Not

that any feeling possible to humanity is in itself wrong, but only wrong

when undisciplined. Its nobility is in its 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 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 prying into her master’s business;—and a noble curiosity,

questioning, in the front of danger, the source of the great river beyond

the sand,—the place of the great continents beyond the sea;—a nobler

curiosity still, which questions of the source of the River of Life, and

of the space of the Continent of 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 dealings

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

deplore in England at this day;—sensation which spends itself in bouquets

and speeches: in revellings and junketings; in sham fights and gay puppet

shows, while you can look on and see noble nations murdered, man by man,

without an effort or a tear.

I said “minuteness” and “selfishness” of sensation, but it would have

been enough to have said “injustice” or “unrighteousness” of sensation.

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 feelings are

constant and just, results of due contemplation, 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 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 the fit

is past. But a gentleman’s, or a gentle nation’s, passions are just,

measured, and continuous. A great nation, for instance, does not spend

its entire national wits for a couple of months in weighing evidence of a

single ruffian’s having done a 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 caring no wise to determine which side of battle is

in the wrong. Neither does a great nation send its poor little boys to

jail for stealing six walnuts; and allow its bankrupts to steal their

hundreds of thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor men’s

savings, to close their doors “under circumstances over which they have

no control,” with a “by your leave;” and large landed estates to be

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 _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

dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra per week to its

landlords; {11} and then debate, with drivelling 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 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

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 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 pretending

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. {12}

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 possible for a people with its

mind in this state. No sentence of any great writer is intelligible to

them. It is simply and sternly impossible for the English public, at

this moment, to understand any thoughtful writing,—so incapable of

thought has it become in its insanity of avarice. Happily, our disease

is, 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 would play the good

Samaritan, we never take out our two pence 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 our war,—even in those unjust domestic affections which make

us furious at a small private wrong, 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 incapable of discerning true cause for battle; and

are 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 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. 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 existence,—go on despising literature, despising

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.

(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 on his library, you call him mad—a

bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horsemaniac, 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

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 eating? 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 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 such trial, and more the pity; for,

indeed, a precious thing is all the more precious to us if it has been

won by work or economy; and if public libraries were half so costly as

public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets do, even

foolish men and women might sometimes suspect there was good in reading,

as well as in munching and sparkling: whereas the very cheapness of

literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth

reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not

worth _much_; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-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 housewife bring the spice she needs from her store. Bread

of flour is good; but there 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 multipliable barley-loaves, pay their baker’s

bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthy and foolish

enough to thumb each other’s books out of circulating libraries!

(II.) I say we have despised science. “What!” you exclaim, “are we not

foremost in all discovery, {13} and is not the whole world giddy by

reason, or unreason, of our inventions?” Yes; but do you suppose that is

national work? That work is all done _in 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 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 _us_, 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, and therefore we pay for an observatory; and we

allow ourselves, in the person of our Parliament, to be annually

tormented into doing something, in a slovenly way, for the British

Museum; sullenly apprehending that to be a place for keeping stuffed

birds in, to amuse our children. If anybody will 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, 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_? (The

negation of such discovery among his brother squires may perhaps be some

discredit to us, if we would consider of it.) But if you doubt these

generalities, here is one fact for us all to meditate upon, illustrative

of our love of science. Two years ago there was a collection of the

fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria; the best in existence,

containing many specimens unique for perfectness, and one unique as an

example of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being

announced 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 hundred, and the whole series would

have been in the Munich Museum at this moment, if Professor Owen {14} had

not, with loss of his own time, and patient tormenting of the British

public 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 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 it for military apparatus,) is at least 50

millions. Now 700_l._ is to 50,000,000_l._ roughly, as seven pence to

two thousand pounds. Suppose, then, a gentleman of unknown income, but

whose wealth was to be conjectured from the fact that he spent two

thousand a year on his park-walls and footmen only, professes himself

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 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 fourpence for them, if you will be answerable for the extra

threepence yourself, till next year!”

(III.) I say you have despised Art! “What!” you again answer, “have we

not Art exhibitions, miles long? and do we not pay thousands of pounds

for single pictures? and have we not Art schools and institutions,—more

than ever nation had before?” 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 could; {15} 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, 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 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

walls for the bills to be read,—never for the pictures to be seen. You

do not know what pictures you have (by repute) in 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 pictures

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, 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.

(IV.) You have despised Nature; that is to 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 _one_ conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad

carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars. {16} You have put

a railroad-bridge over the falls of Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled the

cliffs of Lucerne by Tell’s chapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore

of the Lake of Geneva; there is not a quiet valley in England that you

have not filled with bellowing fire; there is no particle left of English

land which you have not trampled coal ashes into {17}—nor any foreign

city in which the spread 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

love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, which

you set yourselves to climb 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 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 sorrowfullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity,

taking 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 Christian thanks for the

gift of the vine, by assembling in knots in the “towers of the

vineyards,” and slowly loading and firing horse-pistols from morning till

evening. It is pitiful, to have dim conceptions of duty; more pitiful,

it seems to me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth.

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 throwing into my store-drawer; here

is one from a ‘Daily Telegraph’ of an early date this year (1867); (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 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 which it came before the

coroner. I will print the paragraph in red. Be sure, the facts

themselves are written in that colour, in a book which we shall all _of_

us, literate or illiterate, have to read our page of, some day.

An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy coroner, at the

White Horse Tavern, Christ Church, Spitalfields, respecting the death

of Michael Collins, aged 58 years. Mary Collins, a miserable-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 “translator” of

boots. Witness went out and bought old boots; deceased and his son

made them into good ones, and then witness sold them for what she

could get at the shops, which was very little indeed. Deceased and

his son used to work night and day to try and get a little bread and

tea, and pay for the room (2_s._ a week), so as to keep the home

together. On Friday-night-week deceased got up from his bench and

began to shiver. He threw down the boots, saying, “Somebody else

must finish them when I am gone, for I can do no more.” There was no

fire, and he said, “I would be better if I was warm.” Witness

therefore took two pairs of translated boots {18} to sell at the

shop, but she could only get 14_d._ for the two pairs, for the people

at the shop said, “We must have our profit.” Witness got 14lb. of

coal, and a little tea and bread. Her son sat up the whole night to

make the “translations,” to get money, but deceased died on Saturday

morning. The family never had enough to eat.—Coroner: “It 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

comforts were, for he only saw a 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 and other little things. The deceased

said he never would go into the workhouse. In summer, when the

season was good, they sometimes made as much as 10_s._ profit in the

week. They then always saved towards the next week, which was

generally a bad one. In winter they made not half so much. For

three years they had been getting from bad to worse.—Cornelius

Collins said that he had assisted his father since 1847. They used

to work so far into the night that both nearly lost their eyesight.

Witness now had a film over his eyes. Five years ago deceased

applied to the parish for aid. The relieving officer gave him a 4lb.

loaf, and told him if he came again he should “get the stones.” {19}

That disgusted deceased, and he would have nothing to do with them

since. They got worse and worse until last Friday week, when they

had not even a half-penny to buy a candle. Deceased then lay down on

the straw, and said he could not live till morning.—A juror: “You are

dying of starvation yourself, and you ought to go into the house

until the summer.”—Witness: “If we went in we should die. When we

come out in the summer 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 if I had food, for my sight would get better.” Dr. G. P.

Walker said deceased died from syncope, from exhaustion from want of

food. The deceased had had no bedclothes. For four months he had

had nothing but bread to eat. There was not a particle of fat in the

body. There was no disease, but, if there had been medical

attendance, he might have survived the syncope or fainting. The

Coroner having remarked upon the painful nature of the case, the jury

returned the following verdict: “That deceased died from exhaustion

from want of food and the common necessaries of life; also through

want of medical aid.”

“Why would witness not go into the workhouse?” you ask. Well, the poor

seem to have a prejudice against the workhouse which the rich have not;

for of course everyone who takes a pension from Government goes into the

workhouse on a grand scale: {20} only the workhouses for the rich do not

involve the idea of work, and should be called play-houses. But the poor

like to die independently, it appears; perhaps if we made the play-houses

for them pretty and pleasant enough, or gave them their pensions at home,

and allowed them a little introductory peculation with the public money,

their minds might be reconciled to the conditions. 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 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 ask.

I say, you despise compassion; if you did not, such a newspaper paragraph

would be as impossible in a Christian country as a deliberate

assassination permitted in its public streets. {21} “Christian,” did I

say? Alas! if we were but wholesomely _un_-Christian, it would be

impossible: it is our imaginary Christianity that helps us to commit

these crimes, for we revel and luxuriate in our faith, for the lewd

sensation of it; dressing _it_ up, like everything 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 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 benefit of uncultivated swearers, upon what we suppose

to be the signification of the Third Commandment;—) this gas-lighted, and

gas-inspired Christianity, we are triumphant in, and draw back the hem of

our robes from the touch of the heretics who 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 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 religion. You had better get rid of

the smoke, and 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 one hand meets another

helpfully, and that is the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or

ever shall be.

All these pleasures then, and all these virtues, I repeat, you nationally

despise. You have, indeed, 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

impossible, but for those whom you scorn or forget. The 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; 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 not the nation; they are

only the body and nervous force of it, acting still from old habit in a

convulsive perseverance, while the mind is gone. Our National wish and

purpose are only to be amused; our National religion is the performance

of church ceremonies, and preaching of soporific truth (or untruths) to

keep the mob quietly at work, while we amuse ourselves; and the necessity

for this amusement is fastening on us, as a feverous disease of parched

throat and wandering eyes—senseless, dissolute, merciless. How literally

that word _Dis_-Ease, the Negation and impossibility of Ease, expresses

the entire moral state of our English Industry and its Amusements!

When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work,

as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower;—when they are faithfully

helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep,

perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body.

But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine 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 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 nature, we substitute the metamorphosis of the

pantomime, and (the human nature of us imperatively requiring awe and

sorrow of _some_ kind) for the noble 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.

It is difficult to estimate the true significance of these things; the

facts are frightful enough;—the measure of national fault involved in

them is perhaps 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 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 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 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 education in the most

ordinary habits of thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness,

not dulness of brain, which we have to lament; but an unreachable

schoolboy’s recklessness, only differing from the true schoolboy’s in its

incapacity of being helped, because it acknowledges no master.

There is a curious type of us given in one of the lovely, neglected works

of the last of our great 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 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, 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 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

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, narrowly 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, saying, “Art thou also

become pure and mighty of heart as we—art thou also become one of us?”

Mighty of heart, mighty of mind—“magnanimous”—to be this, is indeed to be

great in life; to become this increasingly, is, indeed, to “advance 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? 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 offered to you in

plain words, as it _is_ offered to you 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 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 head, if you 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 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 grasp at it, every one of

us, in a measure; many of us grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every

man accepts it, who desires to advance in life without knowing what life

is; who means only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, and

more 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 {22}

peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or

kings of the earth—they, and they only. All other kingships, so far as

they are true, are 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, instead 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, “Visible governments are the toys of some

nations, the diseases of others, the harness of some, the burdens of

more.”

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

personal 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 of all monarchs; and

the enlargement of a king’s dominion meant the same thing as the increase

of a private man’s estate! Kings who think so, however powerful, can no

more be the true kings of the nation than gadflies are the kings of a

horse; they suck it, and may drive it wild, but do not guide it. They,

and their courts, and their armies are, if one could see clearly, only a

large species of marsh mosquito, with bayonet proboscis and melodious,

band-mastered trumpeting, in the summer air; the twilight being, perhaps,

sometimes fairer, but hardly more wholesome, for its glittering mists of

midge companies. The true kings, meanwhile, rule quietly, if at all, and

hate ruling; too many of them make “il gran rifiuto;” and if they do not,

the mob, as soon as they are likely to become useful to it, is pretty

sure to make _its_ “gran rifiuto” of _them_.

Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some day, if ever day comes

when he will estimate his dominion by the _force_ of it,—not the

geographical boundaries. It matters very little whether Trent cuts you a

cantel out here, or Rhine rounds you a castle less there. But it does

matter to you, king of men, whether you can verily say to this man, “Go,”

and he goeth; and to another, “Come,” and he cometh. Whether you can

turn your people, as you can Trent—and where it is that you bid them

come, and where go. It matters to you, king of men, whether your people

hate you, and die by you, or love you, and live by you. You may measure

your dominion by multitudes, better than by miles; and count degrees of

love-latitude, not from, but to, a wonderfully warm and infinite equator.

Measure!—nay, you cannot measure. Who shall measure the difference

between the power of those who “do and teach,” and who are greatest in

the kingdoms of earth, as of heaven—and the power of those who undo, and

consume—whose power, at the fullest, is only the power of the moth and

the rust? Strange! to think how the Moth-kings lay up treasures for the

moth; and the Rust-kings, who are to their peoples’ strength as rust to

armour, lay up treasures for the rust; and the Robber-kings, treasures

for the robber; but how few kings have ever laid up treasures that needed

no guarding—treasures of which, the more thieves there were, the better!

Broidered robe, only to be rent; helm and sword, only to be dimmed; jewel

and gold, only to be scattered;—there have been three kinds of kings who

have gathered these. Suppose there ever should arise a Fourth order of

kings, who had read, in some obscure writing of long ago, that there was

a Fourth kind of treasure, which the jewel and gold could not equal,

neither should it be valued with pure gold. A web made fair in the

weaving, by Athena’s shuttle; an armour, forged in divine fire by

Vulcanian force; a gold to be mined in the very sun’s red heart, where he

sets over the Delphian cliffs;—deep-pictured tissue;—impenetrable

armour;—potable gold!—the three great Angels of Conduct, Toil, and

Thought, still calling to us, and waiting at the posts of our doors, to

lead us, with their winged power, and guide us, with their unerring eyes,

by the path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture’s eye has not

seen! Suppose kings should ever arise, who heard and believed this word,

and at last gathered and brought forth treasures of—Wisdom—for their

people?

Think what an amazing business _that_ would be! How inconceivable, in

the state of our present national wisdom! That we should bring up our

peasants to a book exercise instead of a bayonet exercise!—organise,

drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers,

instead of armies of stabbers!—find national amusement in reading-rooms

as well as rifle-grounds; give prizes for a fair shot at a fact, as well

as for a leaden splash on a target. What an absurd idea it seems, put

fairly in words, that the wealth of the capitalists of civilised nations

should ever come to support literature instead of war!

Have yet patience with me, while I read you a single sentence out of the

only book, properly to be called a book, that I have yet written myself,

the one that will stand (if anything stand), surest and longest of all

work of mine.

“It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in Europe that

it is entirely capitalists’ wealth which supports unjust wars. Just

wars do not need so much money to support them; for most of the men

who wage such, wage them gratis; but for an unjust war, men’s bodies

and souls have both to be bought; and the best tools of war for them

besides, which make such war costly to the maximum; not to speak of

the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations which

have not grace nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to buy an

hour’s peace of mind with; as, at present, France and England,

purchasing of each other ten millions sterling worth of

consternation, annually (a remarkably light crop, half thorns and

half aspen leaves, sown, reaped, and granaried by the ‘science’ of

the modern political economist, teaching covetousness instead of

truth). And, all unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage of

the enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these loans are repaid by

subsequent taxation of the people, who appear to have no will in the

matter, the capitalists’ will being the primary root of the war; but

its real root is the covetousness of the whole nation, rendering it

incapable of faith, frankness, or justice, and bringing about,

therefore, in due time, his own separate loss and punishment to each

person.”

France and England literally, observe, buy _panic_ of each other; they

pay, each of them, for ten thousand-thousand-pounds’-worth of terror, a

year. Now suppose, instead of buying these ten millions’ worth of panic

annually, they made up their minds to be at peace with each other, and

buy ten millions’ worth of knowledge annually; and that each nation spent

its ten thousand thousand pounds a year in founding royal libraries,

royal art galleries, royal museums, royal gardens, and places of rest.

Might it not be better somewhat for both French and English?

It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. Nevertheless, I hope it

will not be long before royal or national libraries will be founded in

every considerable city, with a royal series of books in them; the same

series in every one of them, chosen books, the best in every kind,

prepared for that national series in the most perfect way possible; their

text printed all on leaves of equal size, broad of margin, and divided

into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, beautiful, and strong, and

thorough as examples of binders’ work; and that these great libraries

will be accessible to all clean and orderly persons at all times of the

day and evening; strict law being enforced for this cleanliness and

quietness.

I could shape for you other plans, for art-galleries, and for natural

history galleries, and for many precious—many, it seems to me,

needful—things; but this book plan is the easiest and needfullest, and

would prove a considerable tonic to what we call our British

constitution, which has fallen dropsical of late, and has an evil thirst,

and evil hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You have got its corn laws

repealed for it; try if you cannot get corn laws established for it,

dealing in a better bread;—bread made of that old enchanted Arabian

grain, the Sesame, which opens doors;—doors not of robbers’, but of

Kings’ Treasuries.

Lecture II.

Lilies.

Of Queens’ Gardens

“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. (Septuagint.)

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, 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 advantages we possess

in the present day in the diffusion of education and of literature, can

only be rightly used by any of us when we have apprehended clearly what

education is to lead to, and literature to teach. I wish you to see that

both well-directed moral training and well-chosen reading 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 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, substituting

their own will for the law of justice and love by which all true kings

rule.

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

inevitable and eternal kind, crowned or not; the kingship, 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 a loose way of using it. It

means literally the standing and stability of a thing; and you have the

full force of it in the derived word “statue”—“the immovable thing.” A

king’s majesty or “state,” then, and the right of his kingdom to be

called a state, 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.

Believing that all literature and all education 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 consider with me farther, what special

portion or kind of this royal authority, arising out of noble education,

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 understood and

exercised this royal or gracious influence, the order and beauty induced

by such benignant power would justify us in speaking of the territories

over which each of them reigned, as “Queens’ Gardens.”

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 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

words were spoken, or more vain imagination permitted, respecting this

question—quite vital to all social happiness. The relations of the

womanly to the manly nature, their different capacities of intellect or

of virtue, seem never to have been yet estimated with entire consent. We

hear of the “mission” 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 creatures of independent kind, and of irreconcilable claim.

This, at least, is wrong. And not less wrong—perhaps even more foolishly

wrong (for I will anticipate thus far what I hope to prove)—is the idea

that woman is only the shadow and attendant image of her lord, owing him

a thoughtless and servile obedience, and supported altogether in her

weakness by the pre-eminence of his fortitude.

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respecting 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!

Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some clear and harmonious idea

(it must be harmonious 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 authority 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. 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 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 testimony they have left respecting what they held to be the

true dignity of woman, and her mode of help to man.

And first let us take Shakespeare.

Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no 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 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 of every base practice round him; but he is the only example

even approximating to the heroic type. Coriolanus—Cæsar—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 adverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely

noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of true use at the

critical time, and he sinks into the office of a servant only. Orlando,

no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted,

saved by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect

woman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and errorless purpose: Cordelia,

Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia,

Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are

all faultless; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity.

Then observe, secondly,

The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a

man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a

woman, and, failing that, there is none. The catastrophe of King Lear is

owing to his own want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his

misunderstanding of his children; the virtue of his one true daughter

would have saved him from all the injuries of the others, unless he had

cast her away from him; 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 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 wise and brave stratagem of the wife is brought

to ruinous issue by the reckless impatience of her husband. In Winter’s

Tale, and in Cymbeline, the happiness and existence of two princely

households, lost through long years, and imperilled to the death by the

folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed 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, 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 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 careless youth?—of the patience of Hero, the passion of Beatrice,

and the calmly devoted wisdom of the “unlessoned girl,” who appears among

the helplessness, the blindness, and the vindictive passions of men, as a

gentle angel, bringing courage 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.

Observe, further, among all the principal figures in Shakespeare’s plays,

there is only one weak woman—Ophelia; and it is because she fails Hamlet

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.

Finally, though there are three wicked women among the principal

figures—Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril—they are felt at once to be

frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of life; fatal in their

influence also, in proportion to the power for good which they have

abandoned.

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare’s testimony to the position and

character of women in human life. He represents them as infallibly

faithful and wise counsellors,—incorruptibly just and pure

examples—strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save.

Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge of the nature of man,—still

less in his understanding 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 receive 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 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 {23}—Dandie Dinmont,

Rob Roy, and Claverhouse; of these, one is a border farmer; another a

freebooter; the third a soldier in a bad cause. And these touch the

ideal of heroism only in their courage and faith, together with a strong,

but uncultivated, or mistakenly applied, intellectual power; while his

younger men are the gentlemanly play-things of fantastic fortune, and

only by aid (or accident) of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the

trials they involuntarily sustain. Of any disciplined, or consistent

character, earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing with forms

of hostile evil, definitely challenged and resolutely subdued, there is

no trace in his conceptions of young men. Whereas in his imaginations of

women,—in the characters of Ellen Douglas, of Flora MacIvor, Rose

Bradwardine, Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, 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 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 gradually forms, animates, and exalts the characters

of the unworthy lovers, until, at the close of the tale, we are just

able, and no more, to take patience in hearing of their unmerited

success.

So that, in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it is the woman

who watches over, teaches, and guides the youth; it is never, by any

chance, the youth who watches over, or educates, his mistress.

Next take, though more briefly, graver testimony—that of the great

Italians 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, 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 truths, divine and human; and leading him, with rebuke upon

rebuke, from star to star.

I do not insist upon Dante’s conception; if I began I could not cease:

besides, you might think this a wild imagination of one poet’s heart. So

I 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,

preserved among many other such records of knightly honour and love,

which Dante Rossetti has gathered 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:

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:

Nor ever seems it anything could rouse

A pain or a regret.

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_,

_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,

_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

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.”

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 you could not have followed me so easily, that I did not

take the Greek women instead of Shakespeare’s; and instance, for chief

ideal types of human beauty and faith, the simple mother’s and wife’s

heart of Andromache; the divine, yet rejected 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 devoted piety of the sister, and

daughter, in Antigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb-like and

silent; and finally, the expectation of the resurrection, made clear to

the soul of the Greeks in the return from her grave of that Alcestis,

who, to save her husband, had passed calmly through the bitterness of

death.

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 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 sometimes vanquished;

but the soul of Una is never darkened, and the spear of Britomart is

never 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;—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

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.

But I will not wander into this distant and mythical element; I will only

ask you to give its 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 of their lives, are amusing themselves with a fictitious 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, according 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 in power.

Is it not somewhat important to make up our minds on this matter? Are

all these great men mistaken, or are we? Are Shakespeare and Æschylus,

Dante and Homer, merely dressing dolls for us; or, worse than dolls,

unnatural visions, the realization 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 evidence of facts, given by the

human heart itself. In all Christian ages which have been remarkable for

their purity or 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 subject,

receiving from the beloved woman, however young, not only the

encouragement, the praise, and the reward of all toil, but, so far as any

choice is open, or any question difficult of decision, the _direction_ of

all toil. That chivalry, to the abuse and dishonour of which are

attributable primarily whatever is cruel in war, unjust in peace, or

corrupt and 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,

assumes the subjection of the young knight to the command—should it even

be the command in caprice—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 and captivity are not, all wayward and wicked passion 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 would be safe, or

honourable, were it ever rendered to the unworthy; but because it ought

to be impossible 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 command he can hesitate to obey.

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

feeling of what should be. You cannot think that the buckling on of the

knight’s armour by his lady’s 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 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 England:—

“Ah, wasteful woman!—she who may

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 spoiled the bread and spill’d the wine,

Which, spent with due respective thrift,

Had made brutes men, and men divine!” {24}

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

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 affection we

still doubt, and whose character we as yet do but partially and distantly

discern; and that this reverence and duty are to be withdrawn when 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 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?

But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guiding function of the woman

reconcilable with a true wifely subjection? Simply in that it is a

_guiding_, not a determining, function. Let me try to show you briefly

how these powers seem to be rightly distinguishable.

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in 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 perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving

from the other what the other only can give.

Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man’s power is

active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator,

the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and

invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever

war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman’s power is for

rule, not for battle,—and her intellect is not for invention or creation,

but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees the

qualities of things, their claims, and their places. Her great function

is Praise; she enters into no contest, but 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 open world, must encounter

all peril and trial;—to him, therefore, must be the failure, the offence,

the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued; often misled;

and _always_ 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 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, 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 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 of a nobler shade and light,—shade as of the rock in a weary land,

and light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea;—so far it vindicates the

name, and fulfils 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 be

the only fire at her foot; but home is yet wherever 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.

This, then, I believe to be,—will you not admit 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 creature—be incapable of

error? So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must

be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly 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 his

side: wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but

with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because

infinitely applicable, modesty of service—the true changefulness of

woman. In that great sense—“La donna è mobile,” not “Qual piúm’ 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.

(II.) I have been trying, thus far, to show you 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 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 persons now doubt this,—is

to secure for her such physical training and exercise as may confirm her

health, and perfect her beauty; the highest refinement of that beauty

being unattainable without splendour of activity and of delicate

strength. To perfect her beauty, I say, and increase its power; it

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 others—not by power, but by

exquisite _rightness_—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:–

“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 I will make

A lady of my own.’

‘Myself will to my darling be

Both law and impulse; and with me

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

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.’

‘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,

Here in this happy dell.’” {25}

“_Vital_ feelings 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 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 affection or of effort—which will not be

indelibly written 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.

This for the means: now note the end.

Take from the same poet, in two lines, a perfect description of womanly

beauty—

“A countenance in which did meet

Sweet records, promises as sweet.”

The perfect loveliness of a woman’s countenance can only consist in that

majestic peace, which is founded in the memory of happy and useful

years,—full of sweet records; and from the joining of this with 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.

Thus, then, you have first to mould her physical 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 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

knowledge,—not as if it were, or could be, for her an 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 the sweetness of a stranger’s tongue. It is of no

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 inevitableness, 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 Humiliation, into which only the wisest and

bravest of men can descend, owning themselves for ever 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 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

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 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 being for ever determined

as the moments pass in which she draws her peaceful breath; and to the

contemporary calamity, which, were it but rightly 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 suffering which is not the less real because

shut from her sight. She is to be taught somewhat to understand 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 solemnly

she is to be taught to strive that her thoughts of piety may not be

feeble in proportion to the number they embrace, nor her prayer more

languid than it is for the momentary relief from pain of her husband or

her child, when it is uttered for the multitudes of those who have none

to love them,—and is “for all who are desolate and oppressed.”

Thus far, I think, I have had your concurrence; perhaps you will not be

with me in what I believe is most needful for me to say. There _is_ one

dangerous science for women—one which they must indeed beware how they

profanely touch—that of theology. Strange, and miserably strange, that

while they are modest enough to doubt their powers, and pause at the

threshold of sciences where every step is demonstrable and sure, they

will plunge headlong, and without one thought of incompetency, into that

science in which the greatest men have trembled, and the wisest erred.

Strange, that they will complacently and pridefully bind up whatever vice

or folly there is in them, whatever arrogance, petulance, or blind

incomprehensiveness, 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 Master, by crawling up the steps of His judgment-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 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.

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 know, but to know it in a different

way. His command of it should be foundational and progressive; hers,

general and accomplished for daily and helpful use. Not but that it

would often be wiser in men to learn things in a womanly sort of way, for

present use, and to seek for the discipline and training of their mental

powers in such branches of study as will be afterwards fittest for social

service; but, speaking broadly, a man ought to know any language or

science he learns, thoroughly—while a woman ought to know the same

language, or science, only so far as may enable her to sympathise in her

husband’s pleasures, and in those of his best friends.

Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy as far 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

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,

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 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 and lightest spray of the fountain of folly.

Or even of the fountain of wit; for with respect to the sore temptation

of novel reading, it is not the badness of a novel that we should dread,

so much as its over-wrought interest. The weakest romance is not so

stupefying as the lower forms of religious exciting literature, and the

worst romance is not so corrupting as false history, false philosophy, or

false political essays. But the best romance becomes dangerous, if, by

its excitement, it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting, and

increases the morbid thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in which

we shall never be called upon to act.

I speak therefore of good novels only; and our modern literature is

particularly rich in types of such. Well read, indeed, these books have

serious 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

earnestness enough to permit them to fulfil it. The utmost they usually

do is to enlarge somewhat the charity of a kind reader, or the bitterness

of a malicious one; for each will gather, from the novel, food for her

own disposition. Those who are naturally proud and envious will learn

from Thackeray 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 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.

Without, however, venturing here on any attempt 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, 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 oppresses her, and his amiable folly degrades

her. 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 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 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 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

And steps of virgin liberty.”

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn in a 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 been so.

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

understand more than she accomplishes. I say the 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 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 the

best words most beautiful, which enchants them in our memories each with

its own glory of sound, and which applies them closest to the heart at

the moment we need them.

And not only in the material and in the course, but yet more earnestly in

the spirit of it, let a girl’s education be as serious as a boy’s. You

bring up your girls as if they were meant for sideboard ornaments, and

then complain of their frivolity. Give them the same advantages that you

give their brothers—appeal to the same grand instincts 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 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 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; and imposture, in bringing, for the purposes

of our own pride, the full glow of the world’s worst vanity upon a girl’s

eyes, at the very period when the whole happiness of her future existence

depends upon her remaining undazzled?

And give them, lastly, not only noble teachings, but noble teachers. You

consider somewhat before you send your boy to school, what kind of a man

the master is;—whatsoever kind of a 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 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 absolute

reverence. You do not treat the Dean of Christ Church or the Master of

Trinity as your inferiors.

But what teachers do you give your girls, and what reverence do you show

to the teachers you have chosen? Is a girl likely to think her own

conduct, or her own intellect, of much importance, when you trust the

entire formation of her character, moral and intellectual, to a person

whom you 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-room in the evening?

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 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 philosophic

standard; and only not good for 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 Domrémy was on the brink of a

boundless forest; and it was haunted to that degree by fairies, that

the parish priest (_curé_) was obliged to read mass there once a

year, in order to keep them in decent bounds.

“But the forests of Domrémy—those were the glories of the land; for

in them abode mysterious powers and ancient secrets that towered into

tragic strength. Abbeys 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 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; yet many enough to spread a network or awning of Christian

sanctity over what else might have seemed a heathen wilderness.” {26}

Now, you cannot, indeed, have here in England, woods eighteen miles deep

to the centre; but you 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 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 digging a coal

shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the flower-beds into heaps

of coke. Would 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.

Yet this is what you are doing with all England. The whole country is

but a little garden, not 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 the

fairies will not be all banished; there are fairies of the furnace as of

the wood, and their first gifts seem to be “sharp arrows of the mighty;”

but their last gifts are “coals of juniper.”

And yet I cannot—though there is no part of my subject that I feel

more—press this upon you; for we made so little use of the power of

nature 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, 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 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 Muses? That Holyhead mountain is your Island of Ægina; but

where is its Temple to Minerva?

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 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 containing

5,000 persons:—

“I then called up a larger class, most of whom had recently come to

the school. Three girls repeatedly declared 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. Four out of

seven did not know the names of the months nor the number of days in

a year. They had no notion of addition beyond two and two, or three

and three; their minds were perfect blanks.”