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Sesame and
Lilies^Bh^
f?1
JOHN RUSKIN
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“If read in connection with ‘Unto
thia JLast’ it (thia booK) contains the
chief truths I have endeavoured through
all my past life to display, and which
I am chiefly thankful to have learnt
and taught.”—The Author.
LONDON: A. C. FIFIELD
44 FLEET STREET, E.C. 1907
�®A curious and decidedly interesting story.”—The Examiner.
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‘ Some seven or eight years ago the teachings of Tolstoy had considerable I
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settlements” on the lines of Tolstoy’s Work while ye have the Ueht. in I J
different parts of England. A number of Tolstoy’s exiled Russian friends I '
and followers, political refugees, also settled in England about the same time I [
and became connected with these attempts at a new life, adding to the 1 1
interest, freshness and complexity of an already extremely novel and inter- 1 '
esting existence.
The author of this book, a sister of the well-known I !
novelists, was personally acquainted with the greater part of the members of 1 |
these colonies and watched their life closely with sympathetic interest for 1 j
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SESAME AND LILIES
�First published, June 215/, 1865.
NOTE
When publishing a new edition of these lectures in 1882
Ruskin stated that he reprinted them “ without change of
a word" from the first edition—probably meaning he had
no alteration of any moment to make, since, as a matter of
fact, numerous small verbal changes, which cannot be re
produced here, were made. It is satisfactory, however, to
know that so far from considering the first edition “ dis
carded! he could speak of it as reproduced “ without
change." The first edition, indeed, is free of a blemish
which must often have puzzled readers of a later and
current edition, in which Ruskin is made to say: “ those
who hold that man can be saved by thinking rightly instead
of doing rightly, by work instead of act . . . these are the
true fog childreit "; work, of course, being a misprint for
word (page 2 7/ As for the book itself, the most popular
of all Ruskin's works, it was written, the author said,
while “ my energies were still unbroken and my temper
unfretted"; and 11 if read in connection with Unto this
Last, it contains the chief truths I have endeavoured
through all my past life to display!
A. C. F.
Uniform with this edition:
UNTO THIS LAST. By John Ruskin.
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�SESAME AND LILIES
LECTURE I.—SESAME
OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
BELIEVE, ladies and gentlemen, that my first duty
this evening is to ask your pardon for the ambiguity
of title under which the subject of lecture has been
announced; and for having endeavoured, as you may
ultimately think, to obtain your audience under false
pretences. For indeed I am not going to talk of kings,
known as regnant, nor of treasuries, understood to
contain wealth ; but of quite another order of royalty,
and another material of riches, than those usually
acknowledged. And I had even intended to ask your
attention for a little while on trust, and (as some
times one contrives in taking a friend to see a favourite
piece of scenery) to hide what I wanted most to show,
with such imperfect cunning as I might, until we un
expectedly reached the best point of view by winding
paths. But since my good plainspoken friend, Canon
Anson, has already partly anticipated my reserved
“trot for the avenue” in his first advertised title of
subject, “How and what to Read,”—and as also I have
heard it said, by men practised in public address, that
hearers are never so much fatigued as by the endeavour
to follow a speaker who gives them no clue to his pur
pose, I will take the slight mask off at once, and tell
you plainly that I want to speak to you about books ;
I
�6
SESAME AND LILIES
and about the way we read them, and could or should
read them. A grave subject, you will say ; and a wide
one ! Yes; so wide that I shall make no effort to touch
the compass of it. I will try only to bring before you
a few simple thoughts about reading, which press them
selves upon me every day more deeply, as I "watch the
course of the public mind with respect to our daily en
larging means of education, and the answeringly wider
spreading, on the levels, of the irrigation of literature.
It happens that I have practically some connection
with schools for different classes of youth; and I
receive many letters from parents respecting the
education of their children. In the mass of these
letters, I am always struck by the precedence which
the idea of a “ position in life ” takes above all other
thoughts in the parents’ — more especially in the
mothers’—minds. “ The education befitting such and
such a station in life”—this is the phrase, this the
object, always. They never seek, as far as I can make
out, an education good in itself: the conception of
abstract rightness in training rarely seems reached by
the writers. But an education “ which shall keep a
good coat on my son’s back;—which shall enable him
to ring with confidence the visitor’s bell at double
belled doors ; education which shall result ultimately in
establishment of a double-belled door to his own
house ;—in a word, which shall lead to advancement in
life.” It never seems to occur to the parents that
there may be an education which, in itself, is advance
ment in Life;—that any other than that may perhaps
be advancement in Death; and that this essential
education might be more easily got, or given, than they
fancy, if they set about it in the right way; while it is
for no price, and by no favour, to be got, if they set
about it in the wrong.
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
7
Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and effective
in the mind of this busiest of countries, I suppose the
first—at least that which is confessed with the greatest
frankness, and put forward as the fittest stimulus to
youthful exertion—is this of “Advancement in life.”
My main purpose this evening, is to determine, with
you, what this idea practically includes, and what it
should include.
Practically, then, at present, “ advancement in life ”
means—becoming conspicuous in life ; obtaining a posi
tion which shall be acknowledged by others to be
respectable or honourable. We do not understand by
this advancement, in general, the mere making of
money, but the being known to have made it; not the
accomplishment of any great aim, but the being seen
to have accomplished it. In a word, we mean the
gratification of our thirst for applause. That thirst, if
the last infirmity of noble minds, is also the first in
firmity of weak ones; and, on the whole, the strongest
impulsive influence of average humanity: the greatest
efforts of the race have always been traceable to the
love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love
of pleasure.
I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I
want you only to feel how it lies at the root of effort;
especially of all modern effort. It is the gratification
of vanity which is, with us, the stimulus of toil, and
balm of repose; so closely does it touch the very
springs of life that the wounding of our vanity is
always spoken of (and truly) as in its measure mortal;
we call it “ mortification,” using the same expression
which we should apply to a gangrenous and incurable
bodily hurt. And although a few of us may be
physicians enough to recognise the various effect of
this passion upon health and energy, I believe most
�8
SESAME AND LILIES
honest men know, and would at once acknowledge, its
leading power with them as a motive. The seaman
does not commonly desire to be made captain only
because he knows he can manage the ship better than
any other sailor on board. He wants to be made
captain that he may be called captain. The clergyman
does not usually want to be made a bishop only because
he believes that no other hand can, as firmly as his,
direct the diocese through its difficulties. He wants
to be made bishop primarily that he may be called
“My Lord.” And a prince does not usually desire to
enlarge, or a subject to gain, a kingdom, because he
believes that no one else can as well serve the state
upon the throne; but, briefly, because he wishes to be
addressed as “Your Majesty,” by as many lips as may
be brought to such utterance.
This, then, being the main idea of advancement in
life, the force of it applies, for all of us, according to
our station, particularly to that secondary result of
such advancement which we call “getting into good
society.” We want to get into good society, not that
we may have it, but that we may be seen in it; and
our notion of its goodness depends primarily on its
conspicuousness.
Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put
what I fear you may think an impertinent question ?
I never can go on with an address unless I feel, or
know, that my audience are either with me or against
me (I do not care much which, in beginning); but I
must know where they are; and I would fain find out,
at this instant, whether you think I am putting the
motives of popular action too low. I am resolved, to
night, to state them low enough to be admitted as
probable; for whenever, in my writings on Political
Economy, I assume that a little honesty, or generosity,
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
9
—or what used to be called “ virtue ”—may be calcu
lated upon as a human motive of action, people always
answer me, saying, “You must not calculate on that:
that is not in human nature : you must not assume any
thing to be common to men but acquisitiveness and
jealousy; no other feeling ever has influence on them,
except accidentally, and in matters out of the way or
business.” I begin, accordingly, to-night low in the
scale of motives; but I must know if you think me
right in doing so. Therefore, let me ask those who
admit the love of praise to be usually the strongest
motive in men’s minds in seeking advancement, and
the honest desire of doing any kind of duty to be an
entirely secondary one, to hold up their hands. (About
a dozen of hands held up—the audience partly not being
sure the lecturer is serious, and partly shy of expressing
opinion.') I am quite serious—I really do want to know
what you think; however, I can judge by putting the
reverse question. Will those who think that duty is
generally the first, and love of praise the second,
motive, hold up their hands? (One hand reported to
have been held up, behind the lecturer.) Very good: I see
you are with me, and that you think I have not begun
too near the ground. Now, without teasing you by
putting farther question, I venture to assume that you
will admit duty as at least a secondary or tertiary
motive. You think that the desire of doing something
useful, or obtaining some real good, is indeed an ex
istent collateral idea, though a secondary one, in most
men’s desire of advancement. You will grant that
moderately honest men desire place and office, at least
in some measure, for the sake of their beneficent
power; and would wish to associate rather with
sensible and well informed persons than with fools and
ignorant persons, whether they are seen in the comA 2
�10
SESAME AND LILIES
pany of the sensible ones or not. And finally, without
being troubled by repetition of any common truisms
about the preciousness of friends, and the influence of
companions, you will admit, doubtless, that according
to the sincerity of our desire that our friends may be
true, and our companions wise,—and in proportion to
the earnestness and discretion with which we choose
both, will be the general chances of our happiness and
usefulness.
But granting that we had both the will and the sense
to choose our friends well, how few of us have the
power ! or, at least, how limited, for most, is the sphere
of choice ! Nearly all our associations are determined
by chance, or necessity ; and restricted within a narrow
circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those
whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we
most need them. All the higher circles of human
intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily
and partially open. We may, by good fortune, obtain
a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the sound of his
voice; or put a question to a man of science, and be
answered good-humouredly. We may intrude ten
minutes’ talk on a cabinet minister, answered probably
with words worse than silence, being deceptive; or
snatch, once or twice in our lives, the privilege of
throwing a bouquet in the path of a Princess, or arrest
ing the kind glance of a Queen. And yet these
momentary chances we covet; and spend our years,
and passions, and powers in pursuit of little more than
these; while, meantime, there is a society continually
open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we
like, whatever our rank or occupation;—talk to us in
the best words they can choose, and with thanks if we
listen to them. And this society, because it is so
numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting round
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
ii
us all day long, not to grant audience, but to gain it—
kings and statesmen lingering patiently, in those
plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase
shelves,—we make no account of that company,—per
haps never listen to a word they would say, all day long !
You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves,
that the apathy with which we regard this company of
the noble, who are praying us to listen to them, and
the passion with which we pursue the company, prob
ably of the ignoble, who despise us, or who have noth
ing to teach us, are grounded in this,—that we can see
the faces of the living men, and it is themselves, and
not their sayings, with which we desire to become
familiar. But it is not so. Suppose you never were to
see their faces:—suppose you could be put behind a
screen in the statesman’s cabinet, or the prince’s
chamber, would you not be glad to listen to their
words, though you were forbidden to advance beyond
the screen ? And when the screen is only a little less,
folded in two instead of four, and you can be hidden
behind the cover of the two boards that bind a book,
and listen all day long, not to the casual talk, but to
the studied, determined, chosen addresses of the
wisest of men;—this station of audience, and honour
able privy council, you despise !
But perhaps you will say that it is because the living
people talk of things that are passing, and are of im
mediate interest to you, that you desire to hear them.
Nay; that cannot be so, for the living people will
themselves tell you about passing matters, much better
in their writings than in their careless talk. But I
admit that this motive does influence you, so far as you
prefer those rapid and ephemeral writings to slow and
enduring writings—books, properly so called. For all
books are divisible into two classes, the books of the
�12
SESAME AND LILIES
hour, and the books of all time. Mark this distinction
—it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the
bad book that does not last, and the good one that
does. It is a distinction of species. There are good
books for the hour, and good ones for all time; bad
books for the hour, and bad ones for all time. I must
define the two kinds before I go farther.
The good book of the hour, then,—I do not speak of
the bad ones—is simply the useful or pleasant talk of
some person whom you cannot otherwise converse with,
printed for you. Very useful often, telling you what
you need to know; very pleasant often, as a sensible
friend’s present talk would be. These bright accounts of
travels; good-humoured and witty discussions of ques
tion ; lively or pathetic story-telling in the form of
novel; firm fact-telling, by the real agents concerned
in the events of passing history;—all these books of
the hour, multiplying among us as education becomes
more general, are a peculiar characteristic and posses
sion of the present age : we ought to be entirely thank
ful for them, and entirely ashamed of ourselves if we
make no good use of them. But we make the worst
possible use, if we allow them to usurp the place of
true books: for, strictly speaking, they are not books
at all, but merely letters or newspapers in good print.
Our friend’s letter may be delightful, or necessary, to
day: whether worth keeping or not, is to be considered.
The newspaper may be entirely proper at breakfast
time, but assuredly it is not reading for all day. So,
though bound up in a volume, the long letter which
gives you so pleasant an account of the inns, and
roads, and weather last year at such a place, or which
tells you that amusing story, or gives you the real
circumstances of such and such events, however valu
able for occasional reference, may not be, in the real
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
13
sense of the word, a “book” at all, nor, in the real
sense, to be “ read.” A book is essentially not a talked
thing, but a written thing; and written, not with a
view of mere communication, but of permanence. The
book of talk is printed only because its author cannot
speak to thousands of people at once; if he could, he
would—the volume is mere multiplication of his voice.
You cannot talk to your friend in India; if you could,
you would ; you write instead : that is mere conveyance
of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply the
voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to preserve
it. The author has something to say which he per
ceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So
far as he knows, no one has yet said it; so far as he
knows, no one else can say it. He is bound to say it,
clearly and melodiously if he may; clearly, at all
events. In the sum of his life he finds this to be the
thing, or group of things, manifest to him; this the
piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his share of
sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. He
would fain set it down for ever; engrave it on rock,
if he could; saying, “ This is the best of me; for the
rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like
another; my life was as the vapour, and is not; but
this I saw and knew : this, if anything of mine, is
worth your memory.” That is his “writing”; it is,
in his small human way, and with whatever degree of
true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture.
That is a “ Book.”
Perhaps you think no books were ever so written ?
But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in honesty,
or at all in kindness ? or do you think there is never
any honesty or benevolence in wise people ? None
of us, I hope, are so unhappy as to think that. Well,
whatever bit of a wise man’s work is honestly and bene
�14
SESAME AND LILIES
volently done, that bit is his book, or his piece of art.
It is mixed always with evil fragments—ill-done, re
dundant, affected work. But if you read rightly, you
will easily discover the true bits, and those are the book.
Now books of this kind have been written in all
ages by their greatest men:—by great leaders, great
statesmen, and great thinkers. These are all at your
choice; and life is short. You have heard as much
before; yet, have you measured and mapped out this
short life and its possibilities ? Do you know, if you
read this, that you cannot read that—that what you
lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow ? Will you go
and gossip with your housemaid, or your stable-boy,
when you may talk with queens and kings; or flatter
yourselves that it is with any worthy consciousness of
your own claims to respect that you jostle with the
hungry and common crowd for entree here, and audi
ence there, when all the while this eternal court is
open to you, with its society wide as the world, multi
tudinous as its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of
every place and time ? Into that you may enter
always; in that you may take fellowship and rank
according to your wish; from that, once entered into
it, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by
your aristocracy of companionship there, your own
inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the
motives with which you strive to take high place in the
society of the living, measured, as to all the truth and
sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to
take in this company of the Dead.
"The place you desire,” and the place you jit your
selffor, I must also say; because, observe, this court of
the past differs from all living aristocracy in this:—it
is open to labour and to merit, but to nothing else.
No wealth will bribe, no name overawe, no artifice
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
15
deceive, the guardian of those Elysian gates. In the
deep sense, no vile or vulgar person ever enters there.
At the portieres of that silent Faubourg St. Germain,
there is but brief question : “Do you deserve to enter?
Pass. Do you ask to be the companion of nobles?
Make yourself noble, and you shall be. Do you long
for the conversation of the wise ? Learn to understand
it, and you shall hear it. But on other terms?—no.
If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you. The
living lord may assume courtesy, the living philosopher
explain his thought to you with considerate pain; but
here we neither feign nor interpret; you must rise to
the level of our thoughts if you would be gladdened by
them, and share our feelings if you would recognise
our presence.”
This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit that
it is much. You must, in a word, love these people, if
you are to be among them. No ambition is of any use.
They scorn your ambition. You must love them, and
show your love in these two following ways.
I. First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and
to enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, ob
serve ; not to find your own expressed by them. If
the person who wrote the book is not wiser than you,
you need not read it; if he be, he will think differ
ently from you in many respects.
Very ready we are to say of a book, “ How good
this is—that’s exactly what I think ! ” But the right
feeling is, “ How strange that is ! I never thought of
that before, and yet I see it is true; or if I do not
now, I hope I shall, some day.” But whether thus
submissively or not, at least be sure that you go to the
author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. Judge
it afterwards if you think yourself qualified to do so;
but ascertain it first. And be sure also, if the author
�i6
SESAME AND LILIES
is worth anything, that you will not get at his meaning
all at once;—nay, that at his whole meaning you will
not for a long time arrive in any wise. Not that he
does not say what he means, and in strong words too;
but he cannot say it all; and what is more strange, will
not, but in a hidden way and in parables, in order that
he may be sure you want it.
I cannot quite see the reason of this, noi’ analyse
that cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men which
makes them always hide their deeper thought. They
do not give it you by way of help, but of reward; and
will make themselves sure that you deserve it before
they allow you to reach it. But it is the same with
the physical type of wisdom, gold. There seems, to
you and me, no reason why the electric forces of the
earth should not carry whatever there is of gold within
it at once to the mountain tops, so that kings and
people might know that all the gold they could get
was there; and without any trouble of digging, or
anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, and
coin as much as they needed. But Nature does not
manage it so. She puts it in little fissures in the earth,
nobody knows where : you may dig long and find
none ; you must dig painfully to find any.
And it is just the same with men’s best wisdom.
When you come to a good book, you must ask yourself,
“ Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would ?
Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I
in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow,
and my breath good, and my temper ? ” And, keeping
the figure a little longer, even at cost of tiresomeness,
for it is a thoroughly useful one, the metal you are in
search of being the author’s mind or meaning, his
words are as the rock which you have to crush and
smelt in order to get at it. And your pickaxes are
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
i7
your own care; wit; and learning; your smelting
furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to
get at any good author’s meaning without those tools
and that fire; often you will need sharpest; finest
chiselling, and patientest fusing, before you can gather
one grain of the metal.
And, therefore; first of all; I tell you earnestly and
authoritatively; (I know I am right in this,) you must
get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and
assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable
—nay, letter by letter. For though it is only by
reason of the opposition of letters in the function of
signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the study
of books is called “ literature,” and that a man versed
in it is called, by the consent of nations, a man of
letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you
may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature
this real principle :—that you might read all the books
in the British Museum (if you could live long enough),
and remain an utterly “ illiterate,” uneducated person;
but that if you read ten pages of a good book, letter
by letter,—that is to say, with real accuracy,—you are
<Hbr evermore in some measure an educated person.
The entire difference between education and non
education (as regards the merely intellectual part of
it), consists in this accuracy. A well-educated gentle
man may not know many languages,—may not be able
to speak any but his own,—may have read very few
books. But whatever language he knows, he knows
precisely ; whatever word he pronounces he pronounces
rightly; above all, he is learned in the peerage of
words; knows the words of true descent and ancient
blood, at a glance, from words of modern canaille;
remembers all their ancestry—their intermarriages,
distant relationships, and the extent to which they
�18
SESAME AND LILIES
were admitted, and offices they held, among the
national noblesse of words at any time, and in any
country. But an uneducated person may know by
memory any number of languages, and talk them all,
and yet truly know not a word of any,—not a word
even of his own. An ordinarily clever and sensible
seaman will be able to make his way ashore at most
ports; yet he has only to speak a sentence of any
language to be known for an illiterate person; so also
the accent, or turn of expression of a single sentence,
will at once mark a scholar. And this is so strongly
felt, so conclusively admitted, by educated persons,
that a false accent or a mistaken syllable is enough,
in the parliament of any civilized nation, to assign to
a man a certain degree of inferior standing for ever.
And this is right; but it is a pity that the accuracy
insisted on is not greater, and required to a serious
purpose. It is right that a false Latin quantity should
excite a smile in the House of Commons; but it is
wrong that a false English meaning should not excite a
frown there. Let the accent of words be watched, by
all means, but let their meaning be watched more
closely still, and fewer will do the work. A few words
well chosen and distinguished, will do work that a
thousand cannot, when every one is acting, equivocally,
in the function of another. Yes; and words, if they
are not watched, will do deadly work sometimes.
There are masked words droning and skulking about
us in Europe just now,—(there never were so many,
owing to the spread of a shallow, blotching, blunder
ing, infectious "information,” or rather deformation,
everywhere, and to the teaching of catechisms and
phrases at schools instead of human meanings)—there
are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody under
stands, but which everybody uses, and most people will
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
19
also fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they
mean this or that, or the other, of things dear to
them : for such words wear chamaeleon cloaks —■
“groundlion” cloaks, of the colour of the ground of
any man’s fancy : on that ground they lie in wait, and
rend him with a spring from it. There never were
creatures of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists so
cunning, never poisoners so deadly, as these masked
words> they are the unjust stewards of all men’s ideas :
whatever fancy or favourite instinct a man most
cherishes, he gives to his favourite masked word to
take care of for him; the word at last comes to have
an infinite power over him,—you cannot get at him
but by its ministry.
And in languages so mongrel in breed as the
English, there is a fatal power of equivocation put into
men’s hands, almost whether they will or no, in being
able to use Greek or Latin forms for a word when
they want it to be respectable; and Saxon or other
wise common forms when they want to discredit it.
What a singular and salutary effect, for instance, would
be produced on the minds of people who are in the
habit of taking the Form of the Words they live by,
for the power of which those Words tell them, if we
always either retained, or refused, the Greek form
“biblos,”or “biblion,” as the right expression for “book”
—instead of employing it only in the one instance in
which we wish to give dignity to the idea, and translat
ing it everywhere else. How wholesome it would be
for the many simple persons, who worship the Letter of
God’s Word instead of its Spirit, (just as other idolaters
worship His picture instead of His presence,) if, in
such places (for instance) as Acts xix. 19, we retained
the Greek expression, instead of translating it, and
they had to read—“ Many of them also which used
�20
SESAME AND LILIES
curious arts, brought their Bibles together, and burnt
them before all men; and they counted the price of
them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver”!
Or if, on the other hand, we translated instead of
retaining it, and always spoke of “the Holy Book,”
instead of “ Holy Bible,” it might come into more
heads than it does at present, that the Word of God,
by which the heavens were of old, and by which they
are now kept in store, cannot be made a present of
*
to anybody in morocco binding ; nor sown on any way
side by help either of steam plough or steam press;
but is nevertheless being offered to us daily, and by us
with contumely refused : < and sown in us daily, and by
us as instantly as may be, choked.
So, again, consider what effect has been produced on
the English vulgar mind by the use of the sonorous Latin
form “ damno, in translating the Greek Ka.Ta.Kpi.va>,
when people charitably wish to make it forcible; and
the substitution of the temperate “ condemn ” for it,
when they choose to keep it gentle ; and what notable
sermons have been preached by illiterate clergymen on
—“ He that believeth not shall be damned ; ” though
they would shrink with horror from translating Heb.
xi. 7, “The saving of his house, by which he damned
the world,” or John viii. 10-11, “Woman, hath no
man damned thee ? She saith, No man, Lord. Jesus
answered her, Neither do I damn thee : go, and sin no
more.” And divisions in the mind of Europe, which
have cost seas of blood, and in the defence of which
the noblest souls of men have been cast away in frantic
desolation, countless as forest-leaves—though, in the
heart of them, founded on deeper causes—have never
theless been rendered practically possible, mainly, by
the European adoption of the Greek word for a public
* 2 Peter iii. 5—7.
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
21
meeting, to give peculiar respectability to such meet
ings, when held for religious purposes; and other
collateral equivocations, such as the vulgar English
one of using the word “ priest ” as a contraction for
“ presbyter.”
Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the
habit you must form. Nearly every word in your
language has been first a word of some other language
—of Saxon, German, French, Latin, or Greek; (not to
speak of eastern and primitive dialects). And many
words have been all these ;—that is to say, have been
Greek first, Latin next, French or German next, and
English last: undergoing a certain change of sense and
use on the lips of each nation; but retaining a deep
vital meaning which all good scholars feel in employing
them, even at this day. If you do not know the Greek
alphabet, learn it; young or old—girl or boy—who
ever you may be, if you think of reading seriously
(which, of course, implies that you have some leisure at
command,) learn your Greek alphabet; then get good
dictionaries of all these languages, and whenever you
are in doubt about a word, hunt it down patiently.
Read Max Muller’s lectures thoroughly, to begin with ;
and, after that, never let a word escape you that looks
suspicious. It is severe work ; but you will find it,
even at first, interesting, and at last, endlessly amus
ing. And the general gain to your character, in
power and precision, will be quite incalculable.
Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to
know, Greek, or Latin, or French. It takes a whole
life to learn any language perfectly. But you can
easily ascertain the meanings through which the Eng
lish word has passed; and those which in a good
writer’s work it must still bear.
And now, merely for example’s sake, I will, with
�22
SESAME AND LILIES
your permission, read a few lines of a true book with
you, carefully; and see what will come out of them.
I will take a book perfectly known to you all. No
English words are more familiar to us, yet nothing
perhaps has been less read with sincerity. I will take
these few following lines of Lycidas :—
“ Last came, and last did so,
The pilot of the Galilean lake;
Two massy keys he bore of metals twain.
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain,')
He shook his mitred locks, and stem bespake,
‘ How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,
Enow of such as for their bellies’ sake
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold !
Of other care they little reckoning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearers’ feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest;
Blind mouths 1 that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook, or have learn’d aught else, the least
That to the faithful herdman’s art belongs !
What recks it them ? What need they ? They are sped ;
And when they list, their lean and fashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched strain.
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread ;
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said.”’
Let us think over this passage, and examine its words.
First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to
St. Peter, not only his full episcopal function, but the
very types of it which Protestants usually refuse most
passionately? His “mitred” locks’ Milton was no
Bishop-lover; how comes St. Peter to be “mitred”?
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
23
“Two massy keys he bore.” Is this, then, the power
of the keys claimed by the Bishops of Rome, and is it
acknowledged here by Milton only in a poetical licence,
for the sake of its picturesqueness, that he may get the
gleam of the golden keys to help his effect ?
Do not think it. Great men do not play stage
tricks with the doctrines of life and death: only little
men do that. Milton means what he says ; and means
it with his might too—is going to put the whole
strength of his spirit presently into the saying of it.
For though not a lover of false bishops, he was a lover
of true ones; and the Lake-pilot is here, in his
thoughts, the type and head of true episcopal power.
For Milton reads that text, “ I will give unto thee the
keys of the kingdom of Heaven” quite honestly.
Puritan though he be, he would not blot it out of the
book because there have been bad bishops ; nay, in
order to understand him, we must understand that
verse first; it will not do to eye it askance, or whisper
it under our breath, as if it were a weapon of an
adverse sect. It is a solemn, universal assertion,
deeply to be kept in mind by all sects. But perhaps
we shall be better able to reason on it if we go on a
little farther, and come back to it. For clearly this
marked insistence on the power of the true episcopate
is to make us feel more weightily what is to be charged
against the false claimants of episcopate ; or generally,
against false claimants of power and rank in the body
of the clergy: they who, “ for their bellies sake, creep,
and intrude, and climb into the fold.’
Do not think Milton uses those three words to fill
up his verse, as a loose writer would. He needs all
the three;—specially those three, and no more than
those—“creep,” and “intrude,” and “climb ; no
other words would or could serve the turn, and no
�24
SESAME AND LILIES
more could be added. For they exhaustively com
prehend the three classes, correspondent to the three
characters, of men who dishonestly seek ecclesiastical
power. First, those who “creep" into the fold; who
do not care for office, nor name, but for secret in
fluence, and do all things occultly and cunningly, con
senting to any servility of office or conduct, so only
that they may intimately discern, and unawares
direct, the minds of men. Then those who “in
trude ” (thrust, that is) themselves into the fold, who
by natural insolence of heart, and stout eloquence
of tongue, and fearlessly perseverant self-assertion,
obtain hearing and authority with the common crowd.
Lastly, those who c' climb,” who, by labour and learn
ing, both stout and sound, but selfishly exerted in the
cause of their own ambition, gain high dignities and
authorities, and become “lords over the heritage,”
though not “ ensamples to the flock.”
Now go on :—
“ Of other care they little rechoning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast.
Blind mouths----- ”
I pause again, for this is a strange expression: a
broken metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly.
Not so; its very audacity and pithiness are intended
to make us look close at the phrase and remember it.
Those two monosyllables express the precisely accu
rate contraries of right character, in the two great
offices of the Church—those of bishop and pastor.
A Bishop means a person who sees.
A Pastor means a person who feeds.
The most unbishoply character a man can have is
therefore to be Blind.
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
25
The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want
to be fed,—to be a Mouth.
Take the two reverses together, and you have
“blind mouths.” We may advisably follow out this
idea a little. Nearly all the evils in the Church have
arisen from bishops desiring power more than ZzgAt
They want authority, not outlook. Whereas their real
office is not to rule; though it may be vigorously to
exhort and rebuke; it is the king s office to rule ; the
bishop’s office is to oversee the flock; to number it,
sheep by sheep; to be ready always to give full
account of it. Now, it is clear he cannot give account
of the souls, if he has not so much as numbered the
bodies of his flock. The first thing, therefore, that a
bishop has to do is at least to put himself in a position
in which, at any moment, he can obtain the history,
from childhood, of every living soul in his diocese, and
of its present state. Down in that back street, Bill,
and Nancy, knocking each other’s teeth out!—Does
the bishop know all about it ? Has he his eye upon
them? Had he had his eye upon them? Can he
circumstantially explain to us how Bill got into the
habit of beating Nancy about the head ? If he cannot
he is no bishop, though he had a mitre as high as
Salisbury steeple; he is no bishop,—he has sought to
be at the helm instead of the masthead; he has no
sight of things. “Nay,” you say, “it is not his duty
to look after Bill in the back street.” What! the fat
sheep that have full fleeces—you think it is only those
he should look after, while (go back to your Milton)
“the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, besides
what the grim wolf, with privy paw” (bishops knowing
nothing about it) “daily devours apace, and nothing
said ” ?
“But that’s not our idea of a bishop.” Perhaps
�26
SESAME AND LILIES
not; but it was St. Paul’s ; and it was Milton’s. They
may be right, or we may be; but we must not think
we are reading either one or the other by putting our
meaning into their words.
I go on.
“ But, swollen 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 con
traction 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 “ex
pire.” 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 decom
position. 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
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
27
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 them
selves 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 putre
scent 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
�28
SESAME AND LILIES
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
o
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 wordby-word examination of your author which is rightly
called "reading”; watching every accent and ex
pression, and putting ourselves always in the author’s
place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to
enter into his, so as to he able assuredly to say, " Thus
Milton thought,” not "Thus I thought, in mis-reading
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;—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 busi
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
39
ness, 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 the 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 covetous
ness 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, govern
ments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on the whole,
you can know nothing,—judge nothing ; that the best
you can do, even though you may be a well-educated
person, is to be silent, and strive 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 /^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 his full meaning;
�30
SESAME AND LILIES
but with the greater men, you cannot fathom their
meaning; they do not even wholly measure it them
selves,—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 of
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’ etemo esilio ” ; or of him whom Dante
stood beside, “come ’1 frate che confessa lo perfido
assassin ” ? Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men
better than most of us, I presume 1 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
that 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 pesti
lent 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,
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
3i
tc Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among
thorns.”
II. 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 sen
sation 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, with
out 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
�<J2
SESAME AND LILIES
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 sensa
tion, 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
recognize 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 Righteous. 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,
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
33
in the front of danger, the source of the great river
beyond the sand,—the place of the great continent
beyond the sea ;—a nobler curiosity still, which ques
tions 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 I it is the narrowness, selfish
ness, 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, woman by woman, child by child, with
out 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 a passion 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,
B
�34
SESAME AND LILIES
measured, and continuous. A great nation, for in
stance, 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 nowise 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 circum
stances 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 (see note at end); 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 frostpinched 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
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
35
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.
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
nevei 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
�36
SESAME AND LILIES
true cause for battle; and are still true in affection to
our own flesh, to the death, as the sea-monstei s 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 instinc
tive, 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 exist
ence,—go on despising literature, despising science,
despising art, despising nature, despising compassion,
and consecrating 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 oui
horses? If a man spend lavishly on his library, you
call him mad—a bibliomaniac. But you never call
any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves
every day by their horses, and you do not hear
of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to
go lower still, how much do 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 KINGS’ TREASURIES
37
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
*
cheapei 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 as costly
as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what
bracelets do, even foolish men and women might some
times suspect there was good in reading, as well as
in munching and sparkling; whereas the very cheap
ness 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 weapons 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, and is
not the whole world giddy by reason, or unreason, of
our inventions?” Yes, but do you suppose that is
�38
SESAME AND LILIES
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 dis
covery among his brother squires may perhaps be some
i/wcredit 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 king
dom of unknown living creatures being announced by
that fossil). This collection, of which the mere market
worth, among private buyers, would probably have been
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
39
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 * 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 fifty millions. Now £700 is to £50,000,000,
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 foot
men 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 four-pence for them, if
you will be answerable for the extra three-pence your
self, till next year ! ”
III. I say you have despised Art! "What!” you
* I state this fact without Professor Owen’s permis
sion : which of course he could not with propriety have
granted, had I asked it; but I consider it so im
portant that the public should be aware of the fact,
that I do what seems to me right, though rude
�40
SESAME AND LILIES
again answer, “have we not Art exhibitions, miles
long? and do not we pay thousands of pounds for
single pictures? and have we not Art Schools 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; not being able to
do that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thorough
fares of the world, like Ludgate apprentices, scream
ing 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 vol
canic 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 wall for the bills to be read,—
never for the pictures to be seen. You do not know
what pictures you have (by repute) in 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—(and, in Venice, with the Aus
trian guns deliberately pointed at the palaces contain
ing them), and if you heard that all the Titians in
Europe were made sandbags 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 cathe
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
4i
drals of France; you have made racecourses 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. You have put a rail
road-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—nor any foreign city in
which the spread of your presence is not marked
among its fair old streets and happy gardens by a con
suming 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-satisfac
tion. 1 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
b2
�42
SESAME AND LILIES
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; 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”; and there is a pretty piece of modern political
economy besides, worth preserving note of, I think, so
I print it in the note below.
*
But my business is with
the main paragraph, relating one of such facts as
happen now daily, which, by chance, has 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 miserablelooking woman, said that she lived with the deceased
* It is announced that an arrangement has been
concluded between the Ministry of Finance and the
Bank of Credit for the payment of the eleven millions
which the State has to pay to the National Bank by
the 14th inst. This sum will be raised as follows:—The eleven commercial members of the Bank of Credit
will each borrow a million of florins for three months of
this bank, which will accept their bills, which again
will be discounted by the National Bank. By this
arrangement the National Bank will itself furnish the
funds mill which it will be paid.
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
43
and his son in a room at 2, Cobb’s Court, Christ
Church. Deceased was a “translator” of boots. Wit
ness 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 (2s. 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.” Wit
ness therefore took two pairs of translated boots to sell
at the shop, but she could only^ get 14d. for the
two pairs, for the people at the shop said, “We
must have our profit.” Witness got 141b. 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 10s. profit in the week. They then
always saved towards the next week, which was gener
ally 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
�44
SESAME AND LILIES
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 41b. loaf, and told him if he came again he
should get the "stones.”* That disgusted deceased,
* I do not know what this means. It is curiously
coincident in verbal form, with a certain passage which
some of us may remember. It may perhaps be well to
preserve beside this paragraph, another cutting out of
my store-drawer, from the Morning Post, of about a
parallel date, Friday, March 10th,^1865 :—"The salons
of Mme. C----- , who did the honours with clever
imitative grace and elegance, were crowded with
princes, dukes, marquises, and counts—in fact, with the
same male company as one meets at the parties of the
Princess Metternich and Madame Drouyn de Lhuys.
Some English peers and members of Parliament were
present, and appeared to enjoy the animated and
dazzling improper scene. On the second floor the
supper tables were loaded with every delicacy of the
season. That your readers may form some idea of the
dainty fare of the Parisian demi-monde, I copy the
menu of the supper, which was served to all the guests
(about 200) seated at four o’clock. Choice Yquem,
Johannisberg, Laffitte, Tokay, and champagne of the
finest vintages were served most lavishly throughout
the morning. After supper dancing was resumed with
increased animation, and the ball terminated with a
chame diabolique and a cancan d’enfcr at seven in the
morning. (Morning service—‘ Ere the fresh lawns
appeared, under the opening eyelids of the Mom.’)
Here is the menu :—‘ Consomme de volaille a la Bagra
tion : 16 hors-d’oeuvres varies. Bouchees a la Talley
rand. Saumons froids, sauce Ravigote. Filets de boeuf
en Bellevue, timbales milanaises, chaudfroid de gibier.
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
45
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 halfpenny to buy a candle.
Deceased then lay down on the straw, and said he
could not live till morning.—A juror : “ You are dying
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 painlul nature of the case, the jury
returned the following verdict, “That deceased died
from exhaustion from the 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 every one who takes a pension from Govern
ment goes into the workhouse on a grand scale; 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
Dindes truffees. Pates de foies gras, buissons d’ecrevisses, salades venetiennes, gelees blanches aux fruits,
gateaux mancini, parisiens et parisiennes. Fromages
glaces. Ananas. Dessert.’ ”
�46
SESAME AND LILIES
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 it.
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 wdiat 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.
*
“ Christian ” did Isay? Alas, if we
* I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the “ Pall
Mall Gazette” established; for the power of the press
in the hands of highly-educated men, in independent
position, and of honest purpose, may indeed become all
that it has been hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its editor
will therefore, I doubt not, pardon me, in that, by
very reason of my respect for the journal, I do not let
pass unnoticed an article in its third number, page 5,
which was wrong in every word of it, with the intense
wrongness which only an honest man can achieve who
has taken a false turn of thought in the outset, and is
following it, regardless of consequences. It contained
at the end this notable passage : —
“ The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction
-—aye, and the bedstead and blankets of affliction, are
the very utmost that the law ought to give to outcasts
merely as outcasts.” I merely put beside this expression
of the gentlemanly mind of England in 1865, a part of
the message which Isaiah was ordered to “ lift up his
voice like a trumpet ” in declaring to the gentlemen of
his day: “ Ye fast for strife, and to smite with the fist
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
47
were but wholesomely wn-Christian, it would be im
possible ; 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 back
ground 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 gaslighted, and gas-inspired, Christianity, we are triumof wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have chosen,
to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring
the poor that are cast out (margin, ‘afflicted’) to thy
house ? ” The falsehood on which the writer had men
tally founded himself, as previously stated by him, was
this : “ To confound the functions of the dispensers
of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers of a
charitable institution is a great and pernicious error.”
This sentence is so accurately and exquisitely wrong,
that its substance must be thus reversed in our minds
before we can deal with any existing problem of
national distress. “ To understand that the dispensers
of the poor-rates are the almoners of the nation, and
should distribute its alms with a gentleness and free
dom of hand as much greater and franker than that
possible to individual charity, as the collective national
wisdom and power may be supposed greater than those
of any single person, is the foundation of all law re
specting pauperism.”
�48
SESAME AND LILIES
phant 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 hor e 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 mind and purpose are
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
49
only to be amused ; our National religion, the perform
ance of church ceremonies, and preaching of soporific
truths (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, dis
solute, merciless.
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
�50
SESAME AND LILIES
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 1 ” 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 oui- 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 selfish
ness, not dulness of brain, which we have to lament;
but an unreachable schoolboy’s recklessness, only differ
ing 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 church
yard, 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
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
Si
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
themwhich, 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 ? Sup
pose 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
�52
SESAME AND LILIES
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 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, with real jewels
instead of tinsel—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 govern
ments 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 con
stant and proper title of all monarchs; and enlargement
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
53
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 bandmastered 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, " Covaz,” 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
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SESAME AND LILIES
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 trea
sures for the moth; and the Rust-kings, who are to
their people’s strength as rust to armour, lay up trea
sures 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 more fair in the weaving, by Athena’s shuttle ;
an armour, forged in divine fire by Vulcanian force; a
gold only to be mined in the 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, if
we would, with their winged power, and guide us, with
their inescapable 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 be
lieved 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 I—organize,
drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
55
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 civilized 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 makes
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
f 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 in
�SESAME AND LILIES
56
capable 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 sup
pose, 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 consider
able 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 Constitu
tion, which has fallen dropsical of late, and has an evil
thirst, and evil hunger, and wants healthier feeding.
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
57
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.
Friends, the treasuries of true kings are the streets
of their cities; and the gold they gather which for
others is as the mire of the streets, changes itself for
them and their people, into a crystalline pavement for
evermore.
Note to page 34—See the evidence in the Medical
Officer’s report to the Privy Council, just published.
There are suggestions in its preface which will make
some stir among us, I fancy, respecting which let me
note these points following
There are two theories on the subject of land now
abroad, and in contention ; both false.
The first is that by Heavenly law, there have always
existed, and must continue to exist, a certain number of
hereditarily sacred persons to whom the earth, air, and
water of the world belong, as personal property; of
which earth, air, and water, these persons may, at
their pleasure, permit, or forbid, the rest of the human
race to eat, to breathe or to drink. This theory is not
for many years longer tenable. The adverse theory is
that a division of the land of the world among the
mob of the world would immediately elevate the said
mob into sacred personages; that houses would then
build themselves, and corn grow of itself; and that
everybody would be able to live, without doing any
work for his living. This theory would also be found
highly untenable in practice.
It will, however, require some rough experiments,
and rougher catastrophes, before the generality of per
�58
SESAME AND LILIES
sons will be convinced that no law concerning anything
—least of all concerning land, for either holding or
dividing it, or renting it high, or renting it low—would
be of the smallest ultimate use to the people, so long as
the general contest for life, and for the means of life,
remains one of mere brutal competition. That contest,
in an unprincipled nation, will take one deadly form
or another, whatever laws you make against it. For
instance, it would be an entirely wholesome law for
England, if it could be carried, that maximum limits
should be assigned to incomes, according to classes;
and that every nobleman’s income should be paid to
him as a fixed salary or pension by the nation ; and not
squeezed by him in a variable sum, at discretion, out of
the tenants of his land. But if you could get such a
law passed to-morrow, and if, which would be farther
necessary, you could fix the value of the assigned in
comes by making a given weight of pure wheat-flour
legal tender for a given sum, a twelvemonth would not
pass before another currency would have been tacitly
established, and the power of accumulated wealth
would have re-asserted itself in some other article, or
some other imaginary sign. Forbid men to buy each
other’s lives for sovereigns, and they will for shells, or
slates. There is only one cure for public distress—and
that is public education, directed to make men thought
ful, merciful, and just. There are, indeed, many
laws conceivable which would gradually better and
strengthen the national temper: but, for the most
part, they are such as the national temper must be
much bettered before it would bear. A nation in its
youth may be helped by laws, as a weak child by backboards, but when it is old it cannot that way strengthen
its crooked spine.
And besides; the problem of land, at its worst, is a
�OF KINGS’ TREASURIES
59
bye one; distribute the earth as you will, the principal
question remains inexorable,—Who is to dig it? Which
of us, in brief word, is to do the hard and dirty
work for the rest—and for what pay ? Who is to do
the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay ? Who
is to do no work, and for what pay ? And there
are curious moral and religious questions connected
with these. How far is it lawful to suck a portion of
the soul out of a great many persons, in order to put
the abstracted psychical quantities together and make
one very beautiful or ideal soul ? If we had to deal
with mere blood, instead of spirit, and the thing might
literally be done—(as it has been done with infants
before now)—so that it were possible, by taking a cer
tain quantity of blood from the arms of a given number
of the mob, and putting it all into one person, to make
a more azure-blooded gentleman of him, the thing
would of course be managed; but secretly, 1 should
conceive. But now, because it is brain and soul that
we abstract, not visible blood, it can be done quite
openly; and we live, we gentlemen, on delicatest prey,
after the manner of weasels; that is to say, we keep a
certain number of clowns digging and ditching, and
generally stupefied, in order that we, being fed gratis,
may have all the thinking and feeling to ourselves.
Yet there is a great deal to be said for this. A highlybred and trained English, French, Austrian, or Italian
gentleman (much more a lady), is a great production ;
a better production than most statues; being beauti
fully coloured as well as shaped, and plus all the
brains; a glorious thing to look at, a wonderful thing
to talk to; and you cannot have it, any more than
a pyramid or a church, but by sacrifice of much con
tributed life. And it is, perhaps, better to build a
beautiful human creature than a beautiful dome or
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SESAME AND LILIES
steeple; and more delightful to look up reverently
to a creature far above us, than to a wall; only the
beautiful human creature will have some duties to do
in return duties of living belfry and rampart—of
which presently.
LECTURE II.—LILIES
OF QUEENS’ GARDENS
T 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 advantage 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 read
ing lead to the possession of a power over the illguided and illiterate, which is, according to the measure
of it, in the truest sense, lnngly; conferring indeed the
purest kingship that can exist among men : too many
other kingships (however distinguished by visible in
signia or material power) being either spectral, or
tyrannousSpectral—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
I
�OF QUEENS’ GARDENS
61
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 our
selves, 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
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SESAME AND LILIES
remains among many of us yet quite undecided, in
spite of its infinite importance.
W e 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 measured 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 rela
tions, 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
�OF QUEENS’ GARDENS
63
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 con
ception 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 only one
entirely heroic figure in all his plays, except the slight
sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated for the pur
poses 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—Caesar—Antony stand in
flawed strength, and fall by their vanities ;—Hamlet is
indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeo an im
patient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly sub
missive 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
�<54
SESAME AND LILIES
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 im
patient 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 erroc
K Oh, murderous
coxcomb 1 What should such a foo± do with so good a
wife?”
In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and entirely 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 im
perilled 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
injustice of the judges, and the corrupt 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
�OF QUEENS’ GARDENS
65
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 "un
lessoned girl,” who appears among the helplessness,
the blindness, and the vindictive passions of men, as a
gentle angel, to save merely by her presence, and
defeat the worst intensities of crime by her smile ?
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 follow's. 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 foi' 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,—incorruptly 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.
c
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SESAME AND LILIES
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—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 playthings of fan
tastic fortune, and only by aid (or accident) of that
fortune, survive, not vanquish, the trials they involun
tarily 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 concep
tions of men. Whereas in his imaginations of women,
— in the characters of Ellen Douglas, of Flora Maclvor,
Rose Bradwrardine, Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon,
Lilias Redgauntlet, Alice Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and
Jeanie Deans,—with endless varieties of grace, tender
ness, and intellectual power, we find in all a quite
infallible and inevitable 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,
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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 and deeper
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 through
out 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
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 fall,
Accepted for the servant of thy mile.
Without almost, I am all rapturous,
Since thus my will was set
To serve, thou flower ofjoy, thine excellence:
Nor ever seems it anything could rouse
A pain or a regret.
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SESAME AND LILIES
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 modest 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
woman 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 kind
ness and simple princess - life of happy Nausicaa;
the housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with its
watch upon the sea; the ever patient, fearless, hope
lessly devoted piety of the sister and daughter, in
Antigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb-like
and silent; and, finally, the expectation of the resur
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rection, made clear to the souls 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 rela
tions 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 idea of
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SESAME AND LILIES
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 dis
cretion, 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
jTschylus, Dante and Homer, merely dressing dolls for
us; or, worse than dolls, unnatural visions, the realiza
tion of which, were it possible, w’ould bring anarchy
into all households and ruin into all affections ? Nay,
if you could 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 imagin
ation, 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 neces
sary 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 wavward and
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wicked passion must be; and that in this rapturous
obedience to the single love of his youth, is the sancti
fication 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 know
ledge 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 spoil’d the bread and spill’d the wine,
Which, spent with due respective thrift,
Had made brutes men, and men divine / ” *
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
* Coventry Patmore.
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SESAME AND LILIES
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 partially and dis
tantly 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 tem
porary 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 deter
mining, function. Let me try to show you briefly how
these powers seem to be rightly distinguishable.
We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speak
ing 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 inven
tion ; his energy for adventure, for war, and for con
quest wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary.
But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle,—
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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 con
test. By her office, and place, she is protected from
all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough
work in the open world, must encounter all peril and
trial:—to him, therefore, must be the failure, the
offence, 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 inconsistentlyminded, 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
c2
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SESAME AND LILIES
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 ver
milion, 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 e mobile,” not “ Qual pium’ al vento” ; no, nor
yet “ Variable as the shade, by the light quivering
aspen made”; but variable as the light, manifold in
fair and serene division, that it may take the colour
of all that it falls upon, and exalt it.
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
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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 impulsey 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,—
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SESAME AND LILIES
‘Her virgin bosom swell.
‘ Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
‘ While she and I together live,
‘Here in this happy dell.’ ”
“ Vital feeling of delight,” observe. There are
deadly feelings of delight; but the natural ones are
vital, necessary to very life.
And they must be feelings of delight, if they are to
be vital. Do not think you can make a girl lovely, if
you do not make her happy. There is not one re
straint 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
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—it is eternal youth.
Thus, then, you have first to mould her physical
frame, and then, as the strength she gains will permit
yc’U, to fill and temper her mind with all knowledge
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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 how many names of celebrated persons—■
it is not the object of education to turn a 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 dark
ness, of the fateful threads of woven fire that connect
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SESAME AND LILIES
error with its 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 deter
mined, 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 pre
sence 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, what
ever arrogance, petulance, or blind incomprehensive
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ness, into one bitter bundle of consecrated myrrh.
Strange in creatures born to be Love visible, that
where they can know least, they will condemn first,
and think to recommend themselves to their Master,
by scrambling up the steps of His judgment-throne, to
divide it with Him. Most strange, 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, lesb
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 ac
complished 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 fitted 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, obs rve, with ^exquisite accuracy as far as she
reaches. There is a wide difference between elemen
tary knowledge and superficial knowledge—between a
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SESAME AND LILIES
firm beginning, and a feeble smattering. A woman
may always help her husband by what she knows, how
ever 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 bad
ness of a novel that we should dread, so much as its
overwrought 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
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it. But I attach little weight to this function: they
are hardly ever read with earnestness enough to per
mit 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 vivid
ness, a human truth which we had before dimly con
ceived ; but the temptation to picturesqueness of state
ment 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 what is out of them, but for what is in them. 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
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SESAME AND LILIES
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 the narcissus does, 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
the field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better
than you; and the good ones too, and will eat some
bitter and prickly ones, good for it, which you had not
the slightest thought were good.
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
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yet more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl’s educa
tion be as serious as a boy’s. You bring up your girls
as if they were meant foi- 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 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 undei- 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 ?
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SESAME AND LILIES
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 intel
lectual, 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 draw
ing-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 accord
ing to the present standard; was ineffably grand,
according to a purer philosophical 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
Domr6my was on the brink of a boundless forest; and
it was haunted to that degree by fairies, that the parish
priest (cure) was obliged to read mass there once a year,
in order to keep them in decent bounds. . . .
“ But the forests of Domrdmy—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,—
f 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
�OF QUEENS’ GARDENS
85
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.” *
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 quad
ruple 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 think 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
* “Joan of Arc: in reference to M. Michelet’s
‘History of France.’ ”—De Quincey’s Works, vol. iii.,
p. 217.
�86
SESAME AND LILIES
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 Snow
don is your Parnassus ; but where are its Muses ? That
Holyhead mountain is your Island of zEgina; 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.”
Oh, ye women of England! from the Princess of
that Wales to the simplest of you, do not think your
own children can be brought into their true fold of
rest, while these are scattered on the hills, as sheep
�OF QUEENS’ GARDENS
87
having no shepherd. And do not think your daughters
can be trained to the truth of their own human beauty,
while the pleasant places, which God made at once for
their school-room and their play-ground, lie desolate
and defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly in those
inch-deep fonts of yours, unless you baptize them also
in the sweet waters which the great Lawgiver strikes
forth for ever from the rocks of your native land—
waters which a Pagan would have worshipped in their
purity, and you worship only with pollution. You
cannot lead your children faithfully to those narrow
axe-hewn church altars of yours, while the dark azure
altars in heaven — the mountains that sustain your
island throne,—mountains on which a Pagan would
have seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed
cloud—remain for you without inscription ; altars built,
not to, but by, an Unknown God.
III. Thus far, then, of the nature, thus far of the
teaching, of woman, and thus of her household office,
and queenliness. We come now to our last, our widest
question,—What is her queenly office with respect to
the state ?
Generally, we are under an impression that a man’s
duties are public, and a woman’s private. But this is
not altogether so. A man has a personal work or duty,
relating to his own home, and a public work or duty,
which is the expansion of the other, relating to the
state. So a woman has a personal work or duty, re
lating to her own home, and a public work or duty,
which is also the expansion of that.
Now, the man’s work for his own home is, as has
been said, to secure its maintenance, progress, and
defence; the woman’s to secure its order, comfort, and
loveliness.
Expand both these functions. The man’s duty, as a
�88
SESAME AND LILIES
member of a commonwealth, is to assist in the main
tenance, in the advance, in the defence of the state.
The woman’s duty, as a member of the commonwealth
is to assist in the ordering, in the comforting, and in
the beautiful adornment of the state.
What the man is at his own gate, defending it, if
need be, against insult and spoil, that also, not in a
less, but in a more devoted measure, he is to be at the
gate of his country, leaving his home, if need be, even
to the spoiler, to do his more incumbent work there.
And, in like manner, what the woman is to be within
her gates, as the centre of order, the balm of distress,
and the mirror of beauty: that she is also to be without
her gates, where order is more difficult, distress more
imminent, loveliness more rare.
And as within the human heart there is always set
an instinct for all its real duties,—an instinct which
you cannot quench, but only warp and corrupt if you
withdraw it from its true purpose:—as there is the
intense instinct of love, which, rightly disciplined,
maintains all the sanctities of life, and, misdirected,
undermines them; and must do either the one or the
other; so there is in the human heart an inextinguish
able instinct, the love of power, which, rightly directed,
maintains all the majesty of law and life, and mis
directed, wrecks them.
Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart of
man, and of the heart of woman, God set it there, and
God keeps it there. Vainly, as falsely, you blame or
rebuke the desire of power !—For Heaven’s sake, and
for Man’s sake, desire it all you can. But what power ?
That is all the question. Power to destroy ? the lion’s
limb, and the dragon’s breath ? Not so. Power to
heal, to redeem, to guide, and to guard. Power of the
sceptre and shield; the power of the royal hand that
�OF QUEENS’ GARDENS
89
heals in touching,—that binds the fiend, and looses the
captive; the throne that is founded on the rock of
Justice, and descended from only by steps of Mercy.
Will you not covet such power as this, and seek such
throne as this, and be no more housewives, but queens?
It is now long since the women of England arrogated,
universally, a title which once belonged to nobility
only; and, having once been in the habit of accepting
the simple title of gentlewoman, as correspondent to
that of gentleman, insisted on the privilege of assum
ing the title of “ Lady,” * which properly corresponds
only to the title of “ Lord.”
I do not blame them for this ; but only for their
narrow motive in this. I would have them desire and
claim the title of Lady, provided they claim, not merely
the title, but the office and duty signified by it. Lady
means “ bread-giver ” or “ loaf-giver,” and Lord means
“maintainer of laws,” and both titles have reference,
not to the law which is maintained in the house, nor to
the bread which is given to the household ; but to law
maintained for the multitude, and to bread broken
among the multitude. So that a Lord has legal claim
only to his title in so far as he is the maintainer of the
justice of the Lord of Lords; and a Lady has legal
* I wish there were a truer order of chivalry in
stituted for our English youth of certain ranks, in which
both boy and girl should receive, at a given age, their
knighthood and ladyh'ood by true title; attainable
only by certain probation and trial both of character
and accomplishment; and to be forfeited, on conviction,
by their peers, of any dishonourable act. Such an
institution would be entirely, and with all noble results,
possible, in a nation which loved honour. That it
would not be possible among us, is not to the discredit
of the scheme.
�90
SESAME AND LILIES
claim to her title, only so far as she communicates that
help to the poor representatives of her Master, which
women once, ministering to him of their substance,
were permitted to extend to that Master Himself; and
when she is known, as He Himself once was, in break
ing of bread.
And this beneficent and legal dominion, this power of
the Dominus, or House-Lord, and of the Domina, or
House-Lady, is great and venerable, not in the number
of those through whom it has lineally descended, but in
the number of those whom it grasps within its sway ; it
is always regarded with reverent worship wherever its
dynasty is founded on its duty, and its ambition correla
tive with its beneficence. Your fancy is pleased with the
thought of being noble ladies, with a train of vassals ?
Be it so ; you cannot be too noble, and your train cannot
be too great; but see to it that your train is of vassals
whom you serie and feed, not merely of slaves who serve
and feed you ; and that the multitude which obeys you
is of those whom you have comforted, not oppressed,_
whom you have redeemed, not led into captivity.
And this, which is true of the lower or household
dominion, is equally true of the queenly dominion;_
that highest dignity is open to you, if you will also
accept that highest duty. Rex et Regina_ Roi et
Reine—“ Right-doers ” ; they differ but from the Lady
and Lord, in that their power is supreme over the mind
as over the person—that they not only feed and clothe,
but direct and teach. And whether consciously or not,
you must be, in many a heart, enthroned : there is no
putting by that crown; queens you must always be ;
queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and
your sons; queens of higher mystery to the world
beyond, which bows itself, and will for ever bow, before
the myrtle crown, and the stainless sceptre, of woman
�OF QUEENS’ GARDENS
91
hood. But, alas ! you are too often idle and careless
queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while
you abdicate it in the greatest; and leaving misrule and
violence to work their will among men, in defiance of
the power, which, holding straight in gift from the
Prince of all Peace, the wicked among you betray, and
the good forget.
“ Prince of Peace.” Note that name. When kings
rule in that name, and nobles, and the judges of the
earth, they also, in their narrow place, and mortal
measure, receive the power of it. There are no other
rulers than they : other rule than theirs is but misrule;
they who govern verily “Dei gratia” are all princes,
yes, or princesses, of Peace. There is not a war in the
world, no, nor an injustice, but you women are answer
able for it; not in that you have provoked, but in that
you have not hindered. Men, by their nature, are
prone to fight; they will fight for any cause, or for
none. It is for you to choose their cause for them,
and to forbid them when there is no cause. There is
no suffering, no injustice, no misery in the earth, but
the guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear the sight
of it, but you should not be able to bear it. Men may
tread it down without sympathy in their own struggle;
but men are feeble in sympathy, and contracted in
hope; it is you only who can feel the depths of pain,
and conceive the way of its healing. Instead of try
ing to do this, you turn away from it; you shut your
selves within your park walls and garden gates; and
you are content to know that there is beyond them a
whole world in wilderness—a world of secrets which
you dare not penetrate, and of suffering which you
dare not conceive.
I tell you that this is to me quite the most amazing
among the phenomena of humanity. I am surprised
�92
SESAME AND LILIES
at no depths to which, when once warped from its
honour, that humanity can be degraded. I do not
wonder at the miser’s death, with his hands, as they
relax, dropping gold. I do not wonder at the sen
sualist s life, with the shroud wrapped about his feet.
I do not wonder at the single-handed murder of a
single victim, done by the assassin in the darkness of
the railway, or reed-shadow of the marsh. I do not
even wonder at the myriad-handed murder of multi
tudes, done boastfully in the daylight, by the frenzy of
nations, and the immeasurable, unimaginable guilt,
heaped up from hell to heaven, of their priests, and
kings. But this is wonderful to me—oh, how wonder
ful .'—to see the tender and delicate woman among
you, with her child at her breast, and a power, if she
would wield it, over it, and over its father, purer than
the air of heaven, and stronger than the seas of earth
—nay, a magnitude of blessing which her husband
would not part with for all that earth itself, though it
were made of one entire and perfect chrysolite:—to
see her abdicate this majesty to play at precedence
with her next-door neighbour! This is wonderful—
oh, wonderful!—to see her, with every innocent feeling
fresh within her, go out in the morning into her garden
to play with the fringes of its guarded flowers, and lift
their heads when they are drooping, with her happy
smile upon her face, and no cloud upon her brow,
because there is a little wall around her place of peace ;
and yet she knows, in her heart, if she would only look
for its knowledge, that, outside of that little rosecovered wall, the wild grass, to the horizon, is torn up
by the agony of men, and beat level by the drift of
their life-blood.
Have you ever considered what a deep under mean
ing there lies, or at least may be read, if we choose, in
�OF QUEENS’ GARDENS
93
our custom of strewing flowers before those whom we
think most happy ? Do you suppose it is merely to
deceive them into the hope that happiness is always to
fall thus in showers at their feet ?—that wherever they
pass they will tread on herbs of sweet scent, and that
the rough ground will be made smooth for them by
depth of roses ? So surely as they believe that, they
will have, instead, to walk on bitter herbs and thorns;
and the only softness to their feet will be of snow.
But it is not thus intended they should believe; there
is a better meaning in that old custom. The path of
a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers ; but they
rise behind her steps, not before them. “ Her feet have
touched the meadows, and left the daisies rosy.”
You think that only a lover’s fancy ;—false and vain !
How if it could be true ? You think this also, perhaps,
only a poet’s fancy—
“ Even the light harebell raised its head
Elastic from her airy tread.”
But it is little to say of a woman, that she only does
not destroy where she passes. She should revive; the
harebells should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You
think I am rushing into wild hyperbole? Pardon me,
not a whit—I mean what I say in calm English, spoken
in resolute truth. You have heard it said—(and I
believe there is more than fancy even in that saying,
but let it pass for a fanciful one)—that flowers only
flourish rightly in the garden of some one who loves
them. I know you would like that to be true; you
would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your
flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them :
nay, more, if your look had the power, not only to
cheer, but to guard them;—if you could bid the black
blight turn away, and the knotted caterpillar spare—if
you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought,
�94
SESAME AND LILIES
and say to the south wind, in frost—“ Come, thou south,
and breathe upon my garden, that the spices of it may
flow out.” This you would think a great thing. And
do you think it not a greater thing, that all this, (and
how much more than this!) you can do, for fairer flowers
than these—flowers that could bless you for having
blessed them, and will love you for having loved them;
•—flowers that have eyes like yours, and thoughts like
yours, and lives like yours; which, once saved, you
save for ever ? Is this only a little power? Far among
the moorlands and the rocks,—far in the darkness of
the terrible streets,—these feeble florets are lying, with
all their fresh leaves torn, and their stems broken—
will you never go down to them, nor set them in order
in their little fragrant beds, nor fence them in their
shuddering from the fierce wind ? Shall morning
follow morning, for you, but not for them; and the
dawn rise to ■watch, far away, those frantic Dances of
Death; but no dawn rise to breathe upon these living
banks of wild violet, and woodbine, and rose ; nor call
to you, through your casement,—call (not giving you
the name of the English poet’s lady, but the name of
Dante’s great Matilda, who on the edge of happy
Lethe, stood, wreathing flowers with flowers), saying,—
“ Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad
And the musk of the roses blown” ?
Will you not go down among them ?—among those
sweet living things, whose new courage, sprung from
the earth with the deep colour of heaven upon it, is
starting up in strength of goodly spire ; and whose
purity, washed from the dust, is opening, bud by bud,
into the flower of promise ;—and still they turn to you,
and for you, “The Larkspur listens—I hear, I hear!
And the Lily whispers—I wait.”
�OF QUEEN’S GARDENS
95
Did you notice that I missed twe lines when I read
you that first stanza; and think that I had forgotten
them ? Hear them now :—
“ Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown.
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate, alone.”
Who is it, think yon, who stands at the gate of this
sweeter garden, alone, waiting for you ? Did you ever
hear, not of a Maud, but a Madeleine, who went down
to her garden in the dawn, and found One waiting at
the gate, whom she supposed to be the gardener ?
Have you not sought Him often ;—sought Him in vain,
all through the night;—sought Him in vain at the gate
of that old garden where the fiery sword is set ? He
is never there; but at the gate of this garden He is
waiting always—waiting to take your hand—ready to
go dowrn to see the fruits of the valley, to see whether
the vine has flourished, and the pomegranate budded.
There you shall see with Him the little tendrils of the
vines that His hand is guiding—there you shall see the
pomegranate springing where His hand cast the
sanguine seed ;—more: you shall see the troops of the
angel keepers that, with their wings, wave away the
hungry birds from the pathsides where He has sown,
and call to each other betwreen the vineyard rows,
“Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the
vines, for our vines have tender grapes.” Oh—you
queens—you queens ! among the hills and happy
greenwood of this land of yours, shall the foxes have
holes, and the birds of the air have nests ; and, in your
cities, shall the stones cry out against you, that they are
the only pillows where the Son of Man can lay His head?
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With
Five Photographs.
“Offer a valuable practical contribution towards the solution of the
*
problem of small holdings « • • and should be carefully studied by all who
have at heart the creation in our land of a class of small tenant farmers.”
“A little book compact of genuine experience ... of pre-eminent value.”
The Outlook.
w. “Here is a book that everyone interested in the ‘back to the land’
movement should read.”—-Agricultural Economist.
“ Altogether, this little book makes one hopeful, and encourages no idle
dreams."—West Sussex Gazette. I
“Should be carefully read by everyone who drinks of setting up as •
small farmer,”—Manchester City News.
“Not only interesting but extremely valuable.”—Daily News.
6d.nett.
Postfree^d.
\ Cloth < top.
Tostfree, \s. id.
THE REASONABLE
LIFE
BEING HINTS TO MEN AND WOMEN
By ARNOLD BENNETT,
Author of “ Savoir Vivre Papers.”
M A capital little book.”—Manchester Guardian. “Mr. Bennett, early
Bg
presented by the gods with a pen at once rapid, picturesque, romantic, and
■fcy .precise, is one of the very few writers of our day who have the power of
simultaneously delighting the man in the street and the critic in the study;
i
and this little brochure . . . has qualities of acute and vivid thought and
. nimble and precise expression which no really superior person could remark
MH? without much pleasure."—Liverpool ‘Daily Courier.
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Sesame and lilies : two lectures delivered in Manchester in 1864
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ruskin, John [1819-1900]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 95, [1] p. ; 17 cm.
Notes: "Popular edition. Unabridged." First published June 21st, 1865. Publisher's advertisements inside front cover, verso facing t.p., unnumbered page at end, inside and on back cover. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
A.C. Fifield
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1907
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
N566
Subject
The topic of the resource
Women
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Sesame and lilies : two lectures delivered in Manchester in 1864), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Books and Reading
Conduct of life
NSS
Sex Role
Women