Believing that all literature and all education are only useful so far as
they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, and _therefore_ kingly,
power—first, over ourselves, and, through ourselves, over all around
us,—I am now going to ask you to consider with me farther, what special
portion or kind of this royal authority, arising out of noble education,
may rightly be possessed by women; and how far they also are called to a
true queenly power,—not in their households merely, but over all within
their sphere.  And in what sense, if they rightly understood and
exercised this royal or gracious influence, the order and beauty induced
by such benignant power would justify us in speaking of the territories
over which each of them reigned, as “Queens’ Gardens.”

And here, in the very outset, we are met by a far deeper question,
which—strange though this may seem—remains among many of us yet quite
undecided in spite of its infinite importance.

We cannot determine what the queenly power of women should be, until we
are agreed what their ordinary power should be.  We cannot consider how
education may fit them for any widely extending duty, until we are agreed
what is their true constant duty.  And there never was a time when wilder
words were spoken, or more vain imagination permitted, respecting this
question—quite vital to all social happiness.  The relations of the
womanly to the manly nature, their different capacities of intellect or
of virtue, seem never to have been yet estimated with entire consent.  We
hear of the “mission” and of the “rights” of Woman, as if these could
ever be separate from the mission and the rights of Man—as if she and her
lord were creatures of independent kind, and of irreconcilable claim.
This, at least, is wrong.  And not less wrong—perhaps even more foolishly
wrong (for I will anticipate thus far what I hope to prove)—is the idea
that woman is only the shadow and attendant image of her lord, owing him
a thoughtless and servile obedience, and supported altogether in her
weakness by the pre-eminence of his fortitude.

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respecting her who was
made to be the helpmate of man.  As if he could be helped effectively by
a shadow, or worthily by a slave!

Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some clear and harmonious idea
(it must be harmonious if it is true) of what womanly mind and virtue are
in power and office, with respect to man’s; and how their relations,
rightly accepted, aid and increase the vigour and honour and authority of
both.

And now I must repeat one thing I said in the last lecture: namely, that
the first use of education was to enable us to consult with the wisest
and the greatest men on all points of earnest difficulty.  That to use
books rightly, was to go to them for help: to appeal to them, when our
own knowledge and power of thought failed: to be led by them into wider
sight,—purer conception,—than our own, and receive from them the united
sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and
unstable opinion.

Let us do this now.  Let us see whether the greatest, the wisest, the
purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in any wise on this point: let us
hear the testimony they have left respecting what they held to be the
true dignity of woman, and her mode of help to man.

And first let us take Shakespeare.

Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes;—he has only
heroines.  There is not one entirely heroic figure in all his plays,
except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated for the purposes
of the stage; and the still slighter Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of
Verona.  In his laboured and perfect plays you have no hero.  Othello
would have been one, if his simplicity had not been so great as to leave
him the prey of every base practice round him; but he is the only example
even approximating to the heroic type.  Coriolanus—Cæsar—Antony stand in
flawed strength, and fall by their vanities;—Hamlet is indolent, and
drowsily speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice
languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely
noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of true use at the
critical time, and he sinks into the office of a servant only.  Orlando,
no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted,
saved by Rosalind.  Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect
woman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and errorless purpose: Cordelia,
Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia,
Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are
all faultless; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity.

Then observe, secondly,

The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a
man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a
woman, and, failing that, there is none.  The catastrophe of King Lear is
owing to his own want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his
misunderstanding of his children; the virtue of his one true daughter
would have saved him from all the injuries of the others, unless he had
cast her away from him; as it is, she all but saves him.

Of Othello I need not trace the tale;—nor the one weakness of his so
mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to that even
of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia who dies in wild
testimony against his error:—

    “Oh, murderous coxcomb! what should such a fool
    Do with so good a wife?”

In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and brave stratagem of the wife is brought
to ruinous issue by the reckless impatience of her husband.  In Winter’s
Tale, and in Cymbeline, the happiness and existence of two princely
households, lost through long years, and imperilled to the death by the
folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at last by the queenly
patience and wisdom of the wives.  In Measure for Measure, the foul
injustice of the judge, and the foul cowardice of the brother, are
opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine purity of a woman.  In
Coriolanus, the mother’s counsel, acted upon in time, would have saved
her son from all evil; his momentary forgetfulness of it is his ruin; her
prayer, at last granted, saves him—not, indeed, from death, but from the
curse of living as the destroyer of his country.

And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickleness of a lover
who is a mere wicked child?—of Helena, against the petulance and insult
of a careless youth?—of the patience of Hero, the passion of Beatrice,
and the calmly devoted wisdom of the “unlessoned girl,” who appears among
the helplessness, the blindness, and the vindictive passions of men, as a
gentle angel, bringing courage and safety by her presence, and defeating
the worst malignities of crime by what women are fancied most to fail
in,—precision and accuracy of thought.

Observe, further, among all the principal figures in Shakespeare’s plays,
there is only one weak woman—Ophelia; and it is because she fails Hamlet
at the critical moment, and is not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide
to him when he needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows.
Finally, though there are three wicked women among the principal
figures—Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril—they are felt at once to be
frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of life; fatal in their
influence also, in proportion to the power for good which they have
abandoned.

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare’s testimony to the position and
character of women in human life.  He represents them as infallibly
faithful and wise counsellors,—incorruptibly just and pure
examples—strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save.

Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge of the nature of man,—still
less in his understanding of the causes and courses of fate,—but only as
the writer who has given us the broadest view of the conditions and modes
of ordinary thought in modern society, I ask you next to receive the
witness of Walter Scott.

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no value, and though
the early romantic poetry is very beautiful, its testimony is of no
weight, other than that of a boy’s ideal.  But his true works, studied
from Scottish life, bear a true witness; and in the whole range of these,
there are but three men who reach the heroic type {23}—Dandie Dinmont,
Rob Roy, and Claverhouse; of these, one is a border farmer; another a
freebooter; the third a soldier in a bad cause.  And these touch the
ideal of heroism only in their courage and faith, together with a strong,
but uncultivated, or mistakenly applied, intellectual power; while his
younger men are the gentlemanly play-things of fantastic fortune, and
only by aid (or accident) of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the
trials they involuntarily sustain.  Of any disciplined, or consistent
character, earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing with forms
of hostile evil, definitely challenged and resolutely subdued, there is
no trace in his conceptions of young men.  Whereas in his imaginations of
women,—in the characters of Ellen Douglas, of Flora MacIvor, Rose
Bradwardine, Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, Alice
Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans,—with endless varieties of
grace, tenderness, and intellectual power, we find in all a quite
infallible sense of dignity and justice; a fearless, instant, and
untiring self-sacrifice, to even the appearance of duty, much more to its
real claims; and, finally, a patient wisdom of deeply-restrained
affection, which does infinitely more than protect its objects from a
momentary error; it gradually forms, animates, and exalts the characters
of the unworthy lovers, until, at the close of the tale, we are just
able, and no more, to take patience in hearing of their unmerited
success.

So that, in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it is the woman
who watches over, teaches, and guides the youth; it is never, by any
chance, the youth who watches over, or educates, his mistress.

Next take, though more briefly, graver testimony—that of the great
Italians and Greeks.  You know well the plan of Dante’s great poem—that
it is a love-poem to his dead lady; a song of praise for her watch over
his soul.  Stooping only to pity, never to love, she yet saves him from
destruction—saves him from hell.  He is going eternally astray in
despair; she comes down from heaven to his help, and throughout the
ascents of Paradise is his teacher, interpreting for him the most
difficult truths, divine and human; and leading him, with rebuke upon
rebuke, from star to star.

I do not insist upon Dante’s conception; if I began I could not cease:
besides, you might think this a wild imagination of one poet’s heart.  So
I will rather read to you a few verses of the deliberate writing of a
knight of Pisa to his living lady, wholly characteristic of the feeling
of all the noblest men of the thirteenth, or early fourteenth, century,
preserved among many other such records of knightly honour and love,
which Dante Rossetti has gathered for us from among the early Italian
poets.

             “For lo! thy law is passed
    That this my love should manifestly be
             To serve and honour thee:
    And so I do; and my delight is full,
    Accepted for the servant of thy rule.

    “Without almost, I am all rapturous,
             Since thus my will was set
    To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence:
    Nor ever seems it anything could rouse
             A pain or a regret.
    But on thee dwells my every thought and sense;
    Considering that from thee all virtues spread
             As from a fountain head,—
    _That in thy gift is wisdom’s best avail_,
             _And honour without fail_,
    With whom each sovereign good dwells separate,
    Fulfilling the perfection of thy state.

             “Lady, since I conceived
    Thy pleasurable aspect in my heart,
             _My life has been apart_
    _In shining brightness and the place of truth_;
             Which till that time, good sooth,
    Groped among shadows in a darken’d place,
             Where many hours and days
    It hardly ever had remember’d good.
             But now my servitude
    Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest.
             A man from a wild beast
    Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived.”

You may think perhaps a Greek knight would have had a lower estimate of
women than this Christian lover.  His spiritual subjection to them was
indeed not so absolute; but as regards their own personal character, it
was only because you could not have followed me so easily, that I did not
take the Greek women instead of Shakespeare’s; and instance, for chief
ideal types of human beauty and faith, the simple mother’s and wife’s
heart of Andromache; the divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra; the
playful kindness and simple princess-life of happy Nausicaa; the
housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with its watch upon the sea; the
ever patient, fearless, hopelessly devoted piety of the sister, and
daughter, in Antigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb-like and
silent; and finally, the expectation of the resurrection, made clear to
the soul of the Greeks in the return from her grave of that Alcestis,
who, to save her husband, had passed calmly through the bitterness of
death.

Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind upon you if I had
time.  I would take Chaucer, and show you why he wrote a Legend of Good
Women; but no Legend of Good Men.  I would take Spenser, and show you how
all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and sometimes vanquished;
but the soul of Una is never darkened, and the spear of Britomart is
never broken.  Nay, I could go back into the mythical teaching of the
most ancient times, and show you how the great people,—by one of whose
princesses it was appointed that the Lawgiver of all the earth should be
educated, rather than by his own kindred;—how that great Egyptian people,
wisest then of nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a
Woman; and into her hand, for a symbol, the weaver’s shuttle; and how the
name and the form of that spirit, adopted, believed, and obeyed by the
Greeks, became that Athena of the olive-helm, and cloudy shield, to faith
in whom you owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most precious in
art, in literature, or in types of national virtue.

But I will not wander into this distant and mythical element; I will only
ask you to give its legitimate value to the testimony of these great
poets and men of the world,—consistent, as you see it is, on this head.
I will ask you whether it can be supposed that these men, in the main
work of their lives, are amusing themselves with a fictitious and idle
view of the relations between man and woman;—nay, worse than fictitious
or idle; for a thing may be imaginary, yet desirable, if it were
possible: but this, their ideal of woman, is, according to our common
idea of the marriage relation, wholly undesirable.  The woman, we say, is
not to guide, nor even to think for herself.  The man is always to be the
wiser; he is to be the thinker, the ruler, the superior in knowledge and
discretion, as in power.

Is it not somewhat important to make up our minds on this matter?  Are
all these great men mistaken, or are we?  Are Shakespeare and Æschylus,
Dante and Homer, merely dressing dolls for us; or, worse than dolls,
unnatural visions, the realization of which, were it possible, would
bring anarchy into all households and ruin into all affections?  Nay, if
you can suppose this, take lastly the evidence of facts, given by the
human heart itself.  In all Christian ages which have been remarkable for
their purity or progress, there has been absolute yielding of obedient
devotion, by the lover, to his mistress.  I say _obedient_;—not merely
enthusiastic and worshipping in imagination, but entirely subject,
receiving from the beloved woman, however young, not only the
encouragement, the praise, and the reward of all toil, but, so far as any
choice is open, or any question difficult of decision, the _direction_ of
all toil.  That chivalry, to the abuse and dishonour of which are
attributable primarily whatever is cruel in war, unjust in peace, or
corrupt and ignoble in domestic relations; and to the original purity and
power of which we owe the defence alike of faith, of law, and of love;
that chivalry, I say, in its very first conception of honourable life,
assumes the subjection of the young knight to the command—should it even
be the command in caprice—of his lady.  It assumes this, because its
masters knew that the first and necessary impulse of every truly taught
and knightly heart is this of blind service to its lady: that where that
true faith and captivity are not, all wayward and wicked passion must be;
and that in this rapturous obedience to the single love of his youth, is
the sanctification of all man’s strength, and the continuance of all his
purposes.  And this, not because such obedience would be safe, or
honourable, were it ever rendered to the unworthy; but because it ought
to be impossible for every noble youth—it _is_ impossible for every one
rightly trained—to love any one whose gentle counsel he cannot trust, or
whose prayerful command he can hesitate to obey.

I do not insist by any farther argument on this, for I think it should
commend itself at once to your knowledge of what has been and to your
feeling of what should be.  You cannot think that the buckling on of the
knight’s armour by his lady’s hand was a mere caprice of romantic
fashion.  It is the type of an eternal truth—that the soul’s armour is
never well set to the heart unless a woman’s hand has braced it; and it
is only when she braces it loosely that the honour of manhood fails.
Know you not those lovely lines—I would they were learned by all youthful
ladies of England:—

    “Ah, wasteful woman!—she who may
    On her sweet self set her own price,
    Knowing he cannot choose but pay—
    How has she cheapen’d Paradise!
    How given for nought her priceless gift,
    How spoiled the bread and spill’d the wine,
    Which, spent with due respective thrift,
    Had made brutes men, and men divine!” {24}

Thus much, then, respecting the relations of lovers I believe you will
accept.  But what we too often doubt is the fitness of the continuance of
such a relation throughout the whole of human life.  We think it right in
the lover and mistress, not in the husband and wife.  That is to say, we
think that a reverent and tender duty is due to one whose affection we
still doubt, and whose character we as yet do but partially and distantly
discern; and that this reverence and duty are to be withdrawn when the
affection has become wholly and limitlessly our own, and the character
has been so sifted and tried that we fear not to entrust it with the
happiness of our lives.  Do you not see how ignoble this is, as well as
how unreasonable?  Do you not feel that marriage,—when it is marriage at
all,—is only the seal which marks the vowed transition of temporary into
untiring service, and of fitful into eternal love?

But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guiding function of the woman
reconcilable with a true wifely subjection?  Simply in that it is a
_guiding_, not a determining, function.  Let me try to show you briefly
how these powers seem to be rightly distinguishable.

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the
“superiority” of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in
similar things.  Each has what the other has not: each completes the
other, and is completed by the other: they are in nothing alike, and the
happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving
from the other what the other only can give.

Now their separate characters are briefly these.  The man’s power is
active, progressive, defensive.  He is eminently the doer, the creator,
the discoverer, the defender.  His intellect is for speculation and
invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever
war is just, wherever conquest necessary.  But the woman’s power is for
rule, not for battle,—and her intellect is not for invention or creation,
but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision.  She sees the
qualities of things, their claims, and their places.  Her great function
is Praise; she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown
of contest.  By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger
and temptation.  The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter
all peril and trial;—to him, therefore, must be the failure, the offence,
the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued; often misled;
and _always_ hardened.  But he guards the woman from all this; within his
house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no
danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence.  This is the true
nature of home—it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all
injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.  In so far as it is not
this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate
into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile
society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross
the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that outer
world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in.  But so far as it
is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over
by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they
can receive with love,—so far as it is this, and roof and fire are types
only of a nobler shade and light,—shade as of the rock in a weary land,
and light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea;—so far it vindicates the
name, and fulfils the praise, of Home.

And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her.  The stars
only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night-cold grass may be
the only fire at her foot; but home is yet wherever she is; and for a
noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar, or
painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who else
were homeless.

This, then, I believe to be,—will you not admit it to be,—the woman’s
true place and power?  But do not you see that, to fulfil this, she
must—as far as one can use such terms of a human creature—be incapable of
error?  So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is.  She must
be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise—wise,
not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she
may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his
side: wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but
with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because
infinitely applicable, modesty of service—the true changefulness of
woman.  In that great sense—“La donna è mobile,” not “Qual piúm’ al
vento”; no, nor yet “Variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen
made”; but variable as the _light_, manifold in fair and serene division,
that it may take the colour of all that it falls upon, and exalt it.

(II.)  I have been trying, thus far, to show you what should be the
place, and what the power of woman.  Now, secondly, we ask, What kind of
education is to fit her for these?

And if you indeed think this a true conception of her office and dignity,
it will not be difficult to trace the course of education which would fit
her for the one, and raise her to the other.

The first of our duties to her—no thoughtful persons now doubt this,—is
to secure for her such physical training and exercise as may confirm her
health, and perfect her beauty; the highest refinement of that beauty
being unattainable without splendour of activity and of delicate
strength.  To perfect her beauty, I say, and increase its power; it
cannot be too powerful, nor shed its sacred light too far: only remember
that all physical freedom is vain to produce beauty without a
corresponding freedom of heart.  There are two passages of that poet who
is distinguished, it seems to me, from all others—not by power, but by
exquisite _rightness_—which point you to the source, and describe to you,
in a few syllables, the completion of womanly beauty.  I will read the
introductory stanzas, but the last is the one I wish you specially to
notice:–

    “Three years she grew in sun and shower,
    Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower
          On earth was never sown;
    This child I to myself will take;
    She shall be mine, and I will make
          A lady of my own.’

    ‘Myself will to my darling be
    Both law and impulse; and with me
          The girl, in rock and plain,
    In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
    Shall feel an overseeing power
          To kindle, or restrain.’

    ‘The floating clouds their state shall lend
    To her, for her the willow bend;
          Nor shall she fail to see,
    Even in the motions of the storm,
    Grace that shall mould the maiden’s form
          By silent sympathy.’

    ‘And _vital feelings of delight_
    Shall rear her form to stately height,—
          Her virgin bosom swell.
    Such thoughts to Lucy I will give,
    While she and I together live,
          Here in this happy dell.’” {25}

“_Vital_ feelings of delight,” observe.  There are deadly feelings of
delight; but the natural ones are vital, necessary to very life.

And they must be feelings of delight, if they are to be vital.  Do not
think you can make a girl lovely, if you do not make her happy.  There is
not one restraint you put on a good girl’s nature—there is not one check
you give to her instincts of affection or of effort—which will not be
indelibly written on her features, with a hardness which is all the more
painful because it takes away the brightness from the eyes of innocence,
and the charm from the brow of virtue.

This for the means: now note the end.

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

    “A countenance in which did meet
    Sweet records, promises as sweet.”

The perfect loveliness of a woman’s countenance can only consist in that
majestic peace, which is founded in the memory of happy and useful
years,—full of sweet records; and from the joining of this with that yet
more majestic childishness, which is still full of change and
promise;—opening always—modest at once, and bright, with hope of better
things to be won, and to be bestowed.  There is no old age where there is
still that promise.

Thus, then, you have first to mould her physical frame, and then, as the
strength she gains will permit you, to fill and temper her mind with all
knowledge and thoughts which tend to confirm its natural instincts of
justice, and refine its natural tact of love.

All such knowledge should be given her as may enable her to understand,
and even to aid, the work of men: and yet it should be given, not as
knowledge,—not as if it were, or could be, for her an object to know; but
only to feel, and to judge.  It is of no moment, as a matter of pride or
perfectness in herself, whether she knows many languages or one; but it
is of the utmost, that she should be able to show kindness to a stranger,
and to understand the sweetness of a stranger’s tongue.  It is of no
moment to her own worth or dignity that she should be acquainted with
this science or that; but it is of the highest that she should be trained
in habits of accurate thought; that she should understand the meaning,
the inevitableness, and the loveliness of natural laws; and follow at
least some one path of scientific attainment, as far as to the threshold
of that bitter Valley of Humiliation, into which only the wisest and
bravest of men can descend, owning themselves for ever children,
gathering pebbles on a boundless shore.  It is of little consequence how
many positions of cities she knows, or how many dates of events, or names
of celebrated persons—it is not the object of education to turn the woman
into a dictionary; but it is deeply necessary that she should be taught
to enter with her whole personality into the history she reads; to
picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagination; to
apprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic circumstances and
dramatic relations, which the historian too often only eclipses by his
reasoning, and disconnects by his arrangement: it is for her to trace the
hidden equities of divine reward, and catch sight, through the darkness,
of the fateful threads of woven fire that connect error with retribution.
But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend the limits of her
sympathy with respect to that history which is being for ever determined
as the moments pass in which she draws her peaceful breath; and to the
contemporary calamity, which, were it but rightly mourned by her, would
recur no more hereafter.  She is to exercise herself in imagining what
would be the effects upon her mind and conduct, if she were daily brought
into the presence of the suffering which is not the less real because
shut from her sight.  She is to be taught somewhat to understand the
nothingness of the proportion which that little world in which she lives
and loves, bears to the world in which God lives and loves;—and solemnly
she is to be taught to strive that her thoughts of piety may not be
feeble in proportion to the number they embrace, nor her prayer more
languid than it is for the momentary relief from pain of her husband or
her child, when it is uttered for the multitudes of those who have none
to love them,—and is “for all who are desolate and oppressed.”

Thus far, I think, I have had your concurrence; perhaps you will not be
with me in what I believe is most needful for me to say.  There _is_ one
dangerous science for women—one which they must indeed beware how they
profanely touch—that of theology.  Strange, and miserably strange, that
while they are modest enough to doubt their powers, and pause at the
threshold of sciences where every step is demonstrable and sure, they
will plunge headlong, and without one thought of incompetency, into that
science in which the greatest men have trembled, and the wisest erred.
Strange, that they will complacently and pridefully bind up whatever vice
or folly there is in them, whatever arrogance, petulance, or blind
incomprehensiveness, into one bitter bundle of consecrated myrrh.
Strange, in creatures born to be Love visible, that where they can know
least, they will condemn, first, and think to recommend themselves to
their Master, by crawling up the steps of His judgment-throne to divide
it with Him.  Strangest of all that they should think they were led by
the Spirit of the Comforter into habits of mind which have become in them
the unmixed elements of home discomfort; and that they dare to turn the
Household Gods of Christianity into ugly idols of their own;—spiritual
dolls, for them to dress according to their caprice; and from which their
husbands must turn away in grieved contempt, lest they should be shrieked
at for breaking them.

I believe, then, with this exception, that a girl’s education should be
nearly, in its course and material of study, the same as a boy’s; but
quite differently directed.  A woman, in any rank of life, ought to know
whatever her husband is likely to know, but to know it in a different
way.  His command of it should be foundational and progressive; hers,
general and accomplished for daily and helpful use.  Not but that it
would often be wiser in men to learn things in a womanly sort of way, for
present use, and to seek for the discipline and training of their mental
powers in such branches of study as will be afterwards fittest for social
service; but, speaking broadly, a man ought to know any language or
science he learns, thoroughly—while a woman ought to know the same
language, or science, only so far as may enable her to sympathise in her
husband’s pleasures, and in those of his best friends.

Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy as far as she reaches.  There is a
wide difference between elementary knowledge and superficial
knowledge—between a firm beginning, and an infirm attempt at compassing.
A woman may always help her husband by what she knows, however little; by
what she half-knows, or mis-knows, she will only tease him.

And indeed, if there were to be any difference between a girl’s education
and a boy’s, I should say that of the two the girl should be earlier led,
as her intellect ripens faster, into deep and serious subjects: and that
her range of literature should be, not more, but less frivolous;
calculated to add the qualities of patience and seriousness to her
natural poignancy of thought and quickness of wit; and also to keep her
in a lofty and pure element of thought.  I enter not now into any
question of choice of books; only let us be sure that her books are not
heaped up in her lap as they fall out of the package of the circulating
library, wet with the last and lightest spray of the fountain of folly.

Or even of the fountain of wit; for with respect to the sore temptation
of novel reading, it is not the badness of a novel that we should dread,
so much as its over-wrought interest.  The weakest romance is not so
stupefying as the lower forms of religious exciting literature, and the
worst romance is not so corrupting as false history, false philosophy, or
false political essays.  But the best romance becomes dangerous, if, by
its excitement, it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting, and
increases the morbid thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in which
we shall never be called upon to act.

I speak therefore of good novels only; and our modern literature is
particularly rich in types of such.  Well read, indeed, these books have
serious use, being nothing less than treatises on moral anatomy and
chemistry; studies of human nature in the elements of it.  But I attach
little weight to this function: they are hardly ever read with
earnestness enough to permit them to fulfil it.  The utmost they usually
do is to enlarge somewhat the charity of a kind reader, or the bitterness
of a malicious one; for each will gather, from the novel, food for her
own disposition.  Those who are naturally proud and envious will learn
from Thackeray to despise humanity; those who are naturally gentle, to
pity it; those who are naturally shallow, to laugh at it.  So, also,
there might be a serviceable power in novels to bring before us, in
vividness, a human truth which we had before dimly conceived; but the
temptation to picturesqueness of statement is so great, that often the
best writers of fiction cannot resist it; and our views are rendered so
violent and one-sided, that their vitality is rather a harm than good.

Without, however, venturing here on any attempt at decision how much
novel reading should be allowed, let me at least clearly assert
this,—that whether novels, or poetry, or history be read, they should be
chosen, not for their freedom from evil, but for their possession of
good.  The chance and scattered evil that may here and there haunt, or
hide itself in, a powerful book, never does any harm to a noble girl; but
the emptiness of an author oppresses her, and his amiable folly degrades
her.  And if she can have access to a good library of old and classical
books, there need be no choosing at all.  Keep the modern magazine and
novel out of your girl’s way: turn her loose into the old library every
wet day, and let her alone.  She will find what is good for her; you
cannot: for there is just this difference between the making of a girl’s
character and a boy’s—you may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a
rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a
piece of bronze.  But you cannot hammer a girl into anything.  She grows
as a flower does,—she will wither without sun; she will decay in her
sheath, as a narcissus will, if you do not give her air enough; she may
fall, and defile her head in dust, if you leave her without help at some
moments of her life; but you cannot fetter her; she must take her own
fair form and way, if she take any, and in mind as in body, must have
always

    “Her household motions light and free
    And steps of virgin liberty.”

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn in a field.  It
knows the bad weeds twenty times better than you; and the good ones too,
and will eat some bitter and prickly ones, good for it, which you had not
the slightest thought would have been so.

Then, in art, keep the finest models before her, and let her practice in
all accomplishments be accurate and thorough, so as to enable her to
understand more than she accomplishes.  I say the finest models—that is
to say, the truest, simplest, usefullest.  Note those epithets: they will
range through all the arts.  Try them in music, where you might think
them the least applicable.  I say the truest, that in which the notes
most closely and faithfully express the meaning of the words, or the
character of intended emotion; again, the simplest, that in which the
meaning and melody are attained with the fewest and most significant
notes possible; and, finally, the usefullest, that music which makes the
best words most beautiful, which enchants them in our memories each with
its own glory of sound, and which applies them closest to the heart at
the moment we need them.

And not only in the material and in the course, but yet more earnestly in
the spirit of it, let a girl’s education be as serious as a boy’s.  You
bring up your girls as if they were meant for sideboard ornaments, and
then complain of their frivolity.  Give them the same advantages that you
give their brothers—appeal to the same grand instincts of virtue in them;
teach _them_, also, that courage and truth are the pillars of their
being:—do you think that they would not answer that appeal, brave and
true as they are even now, when you know that there is hardly a girls’
school in this Christian kingdom where the children’s courage or
sincerity would be thought of half so much importance as their way of
coming in at a door; and when the whole system of society, as respects
the mode of establishing them in life, is one rotten plague of cowardice
and imposture—cowardice, in not daring to let them live, or love, except
as their neighbours choose; and imposture, in bringing, for the purposes
of our own pride, the full glow of the world’s worst vanity upon a girl’s
eyes, at the very period when the whole happiness of her future existence
depends upon her remaining undazzled?

And give them, lastly, not only noble teachings, but noble teachers.  You
consider somewhat before you send your boy to school, what kind of a man
the master is;—whatsoever kind of a man he is, you at least give him full
authority over your son, and show some respect to him yourself;—if he
comes to dine with you, you do not put him at a side table: you know also
that, at college, your child’s immediate tutor will be under the
direction of some still higher tutor,—for whom you have absolute
reverence.  You do not treat the Dean of Christ Church or the Master of
Trinity as your inferiors.

But what teachers do you give your girls, and what reverence do you show
to the teachers you have chosen?  Is a girl likely to think her own
conduct, or her own intellect, of much importance, when you trust the
entire formation of her character, moral and intellectual, to a person
whom you let your servants treat with less respect than they do your
housekeeper (as if the soul of your child were a less charge than jams
and groceries), and whom you yourself think you confer an honour upon by
letting her sometimes sit in the drawing-room in the evening?

Thus, then, of literature as her help, and thus of art.  There is one
more help which she cannot do without—one which, alone, has sometimes
done more than all other influences besides,—the help of wild and fair
nature.  Hear this of the education of Joan of Arc:—

    “The education of this poor girl was mean, according to the present
    standard; was ineffably grand, according to a purer philosophic
    standard; and only not good for our age, because for us it would be
    unattainable.

    “Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most to the advantages
    of her situation.  The fountain of Domrémy was on the brink of a
    boundless forest; and it was haunted to that degree by fairies, that
    the parish priest (_curé_) was obliged to read mass there once a
    year, in order to keep them in decent bounds.

    “But the forests of Domrémy—those were the glories of the land; for
    in them abode mysterious powers and ancient secrets that towered into
    tragic strength.  Abbeys there were, and abbey windows,—‘like Moorish
    temples of the Hindoos,’ that exercised even princely power both in
    Touraine and in the German Diets.  These had their sweet bells that
    pierced the forests for many a league at matins or vespers, and each
    its own dreamy legend.  Few enough, and scattered enough, were these
    abbeys, so as in no degree to disturb the deep solitude of the
    region; yet many enough to spread a network or awning of Christian
    sanctity over what else might have seemed a heathen wilderness.” {26}

Now, you cannot, indeed, have here in England, woods eighteen miles deep
to the centre; but you can, perhaps, keep a fairy or two for your
children yet, if you wish to keep them.  But _do_ you wish it?  Suppose
you had each, at the back of your houses, a garden, large enough for your
children to play in, with just as much lawn as would give them room to
run,—no more—and that you could not change your abode; but that, if you
chose, you could double your income, or quadruple it, by digging a coal
shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the flower-beds into heaps
of coke.  Would you do it?  I hope not.  I can tell you, you would be
wrong if you did, though it gave you income sixty-fold instead of
four-fold.

Yet this is what you are doing with all England.  The whole country is
but a little garden, not more than enough for your children to run on the
lawns of, if you would let them all run there.  And this little garden
you will turn into furnace ground, and fill with heaps of cinders, if you
can; and those children of yours, not you, will suffer for it.  For the
fairies will not be all banished; there are fairies of the furnace as of
the wood, and their first gifts seem to be “sharp arrows of the mighty;”
but their last gifts are “coals of juniper.”

And yet I cannot—though there is no part of my subject that I feel
more—press this upon you; for we made so little use of the power of
nature while we had it that we shall hardly feel what we have lost.  Just
on the other side of the Mersey you have your Snowdon, and your Menai
Straits, and that mighty granite rock beyond the moors of Anglesea,
splendid in its heathery crest, and foot planted in the deep sea, once
thought of as sacred—a divine promontory, looking westward; the Holy Head
or Headland, still not without awe when its red light glares first
through storm.  These are the hills, and these the bays and blue inlets,
which, among the Greeks, would have been always loved, always fateful in
influence on the national mind.  That Snowdon is your Parnassus; but
where are its Muses?  That Holyhead mountain is your Island of Ægina; but
where is its Temple to Minerva?

Shall I read you what the Christian Minerva had achieved under the shadow
of our Parnassus up to the year 1848?—Here is a little account of a Welsh
school, from page 261 of the Report on Wales, published by the Committee
of Council on Education.  This is a school close to a town containing
5,000 persons:—

    “I then called up a larger class, most of whom had recently come to
    the school.  Three girls repeatedly declared they had never heard of
    Christ, and two that they had never heard of God.  Two out of six
    thought Christ was on earth now” (they might have had a worse thought
    perhaps), “three knew nothing about the Crucifixion.  Four out of
    seven did not know the names of the months nor the number of days in
    a year.  They had no notion of addition beyond two and two, or three
    and three; their minds were perfect blanks.”

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 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 schoolroom and their playground, 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 now come 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, relating 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 member of a
commonwealth, is to assist in the maintenance, in the advance, in the
defence of the state.  The woman’s duty, as a member of the 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
inextinguishable instinct, the love of power, which, rightly directed,
maintains all the majesty of law and life, and, misdirected, 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 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 assuming the title of “Lady,”
{27} 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 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 breaking 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 correlative with its beneficence.  Your fancy is pleased
with the thought of being noble ladies, with a train of vassals.  Be it
so; you cannot be too noble, and your train cannot be too great; but see
to it that your train is of vassals whom you serve and feed, not merely
of slaves who serve and feed 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 womanhood.  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 _mis_rule; they who govern
verily “Dei Gratiâ” are all princes, yes, or princesses of Peace.  There
is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women are
answerable for it; not in that you 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
trying to do this, you turn away from it; you shut yourselves within your
park walls and garden gates; and you are content to know that there is
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 at no depths to which, when once warped from
its honour, that humanity can be degraded.  I do not wonder at the
miser’s death, with his hands, as they relax, dropping gold.  I do not
wonder at the sensualist’s life, with the shroud wrapped about 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 multitudes, 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 wonderful!—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 rose-covered 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 meaning there lies, or at
least may be read, if we choose, in 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 depths
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;—if you could
bid the black blight turn away, and the knotted caterpillar spare—if you
could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south
wind, in frost—“Come, thou south, and breathe upon my garden, that the
spices 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 thoughts like yours, and lives like yours; and
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
trembling, 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; {28} 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.”

Did you notice that I missed two 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 you, who stands at the gate of this sweeter garden
alone, waiting for you?  Did you ever hear, not of a Maud, but a
Madeleine, who went down to her garden in the dawn, and found One waiting
at the gate, whom she supposed to be 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 down to see the fruits of the valley, to see
whether the vine has flourished, and the pomegranate budded.  There you
shall see with Him the little tendrils of the vines that His hand is
guiding—there you shall see the 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 path-sides
where He has sown, and call to each other between 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?

Lecture III.
The Mystery of Life and its Arts

_Lecture delivered in the theatre of the Royal College of Science_,
_Dublin_, 1868.

WHEN I accepted the privilege of addressing you to-day, I was not aware
of a restriction with respect to the topics of discussion which may be
brought before this Society {29}—a restriction which, though entirely
wise and right under the circumstances contemplated in its introduction,
would necessarily have disabled me, thinking as I think, from preparing
any lecture for you on the subject of art in a form which might be
permanently useful.  Pardon me, therefore, in so far as I must transgress
such limitation; for indeed my infringement will be of the letter—not of
the spirit—of your commands.  In whatever I may say touching the religion
which has been the foundation of art, or the policy which has contributed
to its power, if I offend one, I shall offend all; for I shall take no
note of any separations in creeds, or antagonisms in parties: neither do
I fear that ultimately I shall offend any, by proving—or at least stating
as capable of positive proof—the connection of all that is best in the
crafts and arts of man, with the simplicity of his faith, and the
sincerity of his patriotism.

But I speak to you under another disadvantage, by which I am checked in
frankness of utterance, not here only, but everywhere: namely, that I am
never fully aware how far my audiences are disposed to give me credit for
real knowledge of my subject, or how far they grant me attention only
because I have been sometimes thought an ingenious or pleasant essayist
upon it.  For I have had what, in many respects, I boldly call the
misfortune, to set my words sometimes prettily together; not without a
foolish vanity in the poor knack that I had of doing so: until I was
heavily punished for this pride, by finding that many people thought of
the words only, and cared nothing for their meaning.  Happily, therefore,
the power of using such pleasant language—if indeed it ever were mine—is
passing away from me; and whatever I am now able to say at all, I find
myself forced to say with great plainness.  For my thoughts have changed
also, as my words have; and whereas in earlier life, what little
influence I obtained was due perhaps chiefly to the enthusiasm with which
I was able to dwell on the beauty of the physical clouds, and of their
colours in the sky; so all the influence I now desire to retain must be
due to the earnestness with which I am endeavouring to trace the form and
beauty of another kind of cloud than those; the bright cloud of which it
is written—“What is your life?  It is even as a vapour that appeareth for
a little time, and then vanisheth away.”

I suppose few people reach the middle or latter period of their age,
without having, at some moment of change or disappointment, felt the
truth of those bitter words; and been startled by the fading of the
sunshine from the cloud of their life into the sudden agony of the
knowledge that the fabric of it was as fragile as a dream, and the
endurance of it as transient as the dew.  But it is not always that, even
at such times of melancholy surprise, we can enter into any true
perception that this human life shares in the nature of it, not only the
evanescence, but the mystery of the cloud; that its avenues are wreathed
in darkness, and its forms and courses no less fantastic, than spectral
and obscure; so that not only in the vanity which we cannot grasp, but in
the shadow which we cannot pierce, it is true of this cloudy life of
ours, that “man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in
vain.”

And least of all, whatever may have been the eagerness of our passions,
or the height of our pride, are we able to understand in its depth the
third and most solemn character in which our life is like those clouds of
heaven; that to it belongs not only their transcience, not only their
mystery, but also their power; that in the cloud of the human soul there
is a fire stronger than the lightning, and a grace more precious than the
rain; and that though of the good and evil it shall one day be said
alike, that the place that knew them knows them no more, there is an
infinite separation between those whose brief presence had there been a
blessing, like the mist of Eden that went up from the earth to water the
garden, and those whose place knew them only as a drifting and changeful
shade, of whom the heavenly sentence is, that they are “wells without
water; clouds that are carried with a tempest, to whom the mist of
darkness is reserved for ever.”

To those among us, however, who have lived long enough to form some just
estimate of the rate of the changes which are, hour by hour in
accelerating catastrophe, manifesting themselves in the laws, the arts,
and the creeds of men, it seems to me, that now at least, if never at any
former time, the thoughts of the true nature of our life, and of its
powers and responsibilities, should present themselves with absolute
sadness and sternness.  And although I know that this feeling is much
deepened in my own mind by disappointment, which, by chance, has attended
the greater number of my cherished purposes, I do not for that reason
distrust the feeling itself, though I am on my guard against an
exaggerated degree of it: nay, I rather believe that in periods of new
effort and violent change, disappointment is a wholesome medicine; and
that in the secret of it, as in the twilight so beloved by Titian, we may
see the colours of things with deeper truth than in the most dazzling
sunshine.  And because these truths about the works of men, which I want
to bring to-day before you, are most of them sad ones, though at the same
time helpful; and because also I believe that your kind Irish hearts will
answer more gladly to the truthful expression of a personal feeling, than
to the exposition of an abstract principle, I will permit myself so much
unreserved speaking of my own causes of regret, as may enable you to make
just allowance for what, according to your sympathies, you will call
either the bitterness, or the insight, of a mind which has surrendered
its best hopes, and been foiled in its favourite aims.

I spent the ten strongest years of my life, (from twenty to thirty,) in
endeavouring to show the excellence of the work of the man whom I
believed, and rightly believed, to be the greatest painter of the schools
of England since Reynolds.  I had then perfect faith in the power of
every great truth of beauty to prevail ultimately, and take its right
place in usefulness and honour; and I strove to bring the painter’s work
into this due place, while the painter was yet alive.  But he knew,
better than I, the uselessness of talking about what people could not see
for themselves.  He always discouraged me scornfully, even when he
thanked me—and he died before even the superficial effect of my work was
visible.  I went on, however, thinking I could at least be of use to the
public, if not to him, in proving his power.  My books got talked about a
little.  The prices of modern pictures, generally, rose, and I was
beginning to take some pleasure in a sense of gradual victory, when,
fortunately or unfortunately, an opportunity of perfect trial undeceived
me at once, and for ever.  The Trustees of the National Gallery
commissioned me to arrange the Turner drawings there, and permitted me to
prepare three hundred examples of his studies from nature, for exhibition
at Kensington.  At Kensington they were, and are, placed for exhibition;
but they are not exhibited, for the room in which they hang is always
empty.

Well—this showed me at once, that those ten years of my life had been, in
their chief purpose, lost.  For that, I did not so much care; I had, at
least, learned my own business thoroughly, and should be able, as I
fondly supposed, after such a lesson, now to use my knowledge with better
effect.  But what I did care for was the—to me frightful—discovery, that
the most splendid genius in the arts might be permitted by Providence to
labour and perish uselessly; that in the very fineness of it there might
be something rendering it invisible to ordinary eyes; but that, with this
strange excellence, faults might be mingled which would be as deadly as
its virtues were vain; that the glory of it was perishable, as well as
invisible, and the gift and grace of it might be to us as snow in summer
and as rain in harvest.

That was the first mystery of life to me.  But, while my best energy was
given to the study of painting, I had put collateral effort, more prudent
if less enthusiastic, into that of architecture; and in this I could not
complain of meeting with no sympathy.  Among several personal reasons
which caused me to desire that I might give this, my closing lecture on
the subject of art here, in Ireland, one of the chief was, that in
reading it, I should stand near the beautiful building,—the engineer’s
school of your college,—which was the first realization I had the joy to
see, of the principles I had, until then, been endeavouring to teach! but
which, alas, is now, to me, no more than the richly canopied monument of
one of the most earnest souls that ever gave itself to the arts, and one
of my truest and most loving friends, Benjamin Woodward.  Nor was it here
in Ireland only that I received the help of Irish sympathy and genius.
When to another friend, Sir Thomas Deane, with Mr. Woodward, was
entrusted the building of the museum at Oxford, the best details of the
work were executed by sculptors who had been born and trained here; and
the first window of the façade of the building, in which was inaugurated
the study of natural science in England, in true fellowship with
literature, was carved from my design by an Irish sculptor.

You may perhaps think that no man ought to speak of disappointment, to
whom, even in one branch of labour, so much success was granted.  Had Mr.
Woodward now been beside me, I had not so spoken; but his gentle and
passionate spirit was cut off from the fulfilment of its purposes, and
the work we did together is now become vain.  It may not be so in future;
but the architecture we endeavoured to introduce is inconsistent alike
with the reckless luxury, the deforming mechanism, and the squalid misery
of modern cities; among the formative fashions of the day, aided,
especially in England, by ecclesiastical sentiment, it indeed obtained
notoriety; and sometimes behind an engine furnace, or a railroad bank,
you may detect the pathetic discord of its momentary grace, and, with
toil, decipher its floral carvings choked with soot.  I felt answerable
to the schools I loved, only for their injury.  I perceived that this new
portion of my strength had also been spent in vain; and from amidst
streets of iron, and palaces of crystal, shrank back at last to the
carving of the mountain and colour of the flower.

And still I could tell of failure, and failure repeated, as years went
on; but I have trespassed enough on your patience to show you, in part,
the causes of my discouragement.  Now let me more deliberately tell you
its results.  You know there is a tendency in the minds of many men, when
they are heavily disappointed in the main purposes of their life, to
feel, and perhaps in warning, perhaps in mockery, to declare, that life
itself is a vanity.  Because it has disappointed them, they think its
nature is of disappointment always, or at best, of pleasure that can be
grasped by imagination only; that the cloud of it has no strength nor
fire within; but is a painted cloud only, to be delighted in, yet
despised.  You know how beautifully Pope has expressed this particular
phase of thought:—

    “Meanwhile opinion gilds, with varying rays,
    These painted clouds that beautify our days;
    Each want of happiness by hope supplied,
    And each vacuity of sense, by pride.
    Hope builds as fast as Knowledge can destroy;
    In Folly’s cup, still laughs the bubble joy.
    One pleasure past, another still we gain,
    And not a vanity is given in vain.”

But the effect of failure upon my own mind has been just the reverse of
this.  The more that my life disappointed me, the more solemn and
wonderful it became to me.  It seemed, contrarily to Pope’s saying, that
the vanity of it _was_ indeed given in vain; but that there was something
behind the veil of it, which was not vanity.  It became to me not a
painted cloud, but a terrible and impenetrable one: not a mirage, which
vanished as I drew near, but a pillar of darkness, to which I was
forbidden to draw near.  For I saw that both my own failure, and such
success in petty things as in its poor triumph seemed to me worse than
failure, came from the want of sufficiently earnest effort to understand
the whole law and meaning of existence, and to bring it to noble and due
end; as, on the other hand, I saw more and more clearly that all enduring
success in the arts, or in any other occupation, had come from the ruling
of lower purposes, not by a conviction of their nothingness, but by a
solemn faith in the advancing power of human nature, or in the promise,
however dimly apprehended, that the mortal part of it would one day be
swallowed up in immortality; and that, indeed, the arts themselves never
had reached any vital strength or honour, but in the effort to proclaim
this immortality, and in the service either of great and just religion,
or of some unselfish patriotism, and law of such national life as must be
the foundation of religion.

Nothing that I have ever said is more true or necessary—nothing has been
more misunderstood or misapplied—than my strong assertion that the arts
can never be right themselves, unless their motive is right.  It is
misunderstood this way: weak painters, who have never learned their
business, and cannot lay a true line, continually come to me, crying
out—“Look at this picture of mine; it _must_ be good, I had such a lovely
motive.  I have put my whole heart into it, and taken years to think over
its treatment.”  Well, the only answer for these people is—if one had the
cruelty to make it—“Sir, you cannot think over _any_thing in any number
of years,—you haven’t the head to do it; and though you had fine motives,
strong enough to make you burn yourself in a slow fire, if only first you
could paint a picture, you can’t paint one, nor half an inch of one; you
haven’t the hand to do it.”

But, far more decisively we have to say to the men who _do_ know their
business, or may know it if they choose—“Sir, you have this gift, and a
mighty one; see that you serve your nation faithfully with it.  It is a
greater trust than ships and armies: you might cast _them_ away, if you
were their captain, with less treason to your people than in casting your
own glorious power away, and serving the devil with it instead of men.
Ships and armies you may replace if they are lost, but a great intellect,
once abused, is a curse to the earth for ever.”

This, then, I meant by saying that the arts must have noble motive.  This
also I said respecting them, that they never had prospered, nor could
prosper, but when they had such true purpose, and were devoted to the
proclamation of divine truth or law.  And yet I saw also that they had
always failed in this proclamation—that poetry, and sculpture, and
painting, though only great when they strove to teach us something about
the gods, never had taught us anything trustworthy about the gods, but
had always betrayed their trust in the crisis of it, and, with their
powers at the full reach, became ministers to pride and to lust.  And I
felt also, with increasing amazement, the unconquerable apathy in
ourselves and hearers, no less than in these the teachers; and that while
the wisdom and rightness of every act and art of life could only be
consistent with a right understanding of the ends of life, we were all
plunged as in a languid dream—our hearts fat, and our eyes heavy, and our
ears closed, lest the inspiration of hand or voice should reach us—lest
we should see with our eyes, and understand with our hearts, and be
healed.

This intense apathy in all of us is the first great mystery of life; it
stands in the way of every perception, every virtue.  There is no making
ourselves feel enough astonishment at it.  That the occupations or
pastimes of life should have no motive, is understandable; but—That life
itself should have no motive—that we neither care to find out what it may
lead to, nor to guard against its being for ever taken away from us—here
is a mystery indeed.  For just suppose I were able to call at this moment
to any one in this audience by name, and to tell him positively that I
knew a large estate had been lately left to him on some curious
conditions; but that though I knew it was large, I did not know how
large, nor even where it was—whether in the East Indies or the West, or
in England, or at the Antipodes.  I only knew it was a vast estate, and
that there was a chance of his losing it altogether if he did not soon
find out on what terms it had been left to him.  Suppose I were able to
say this positively to any single man in this audience, and he knew that
I did not speak without warrant, do you think that he would rest content
with that vague knowledge, if it were anywise possible to obtain more?
Would he not give every energy to find some trace of the facts, and never
rest till he had ascertained where this place was, and what it was like?
And suppose he were a young man, and all he could discover by his best
endeavour was that the estate was never to be his at all, unless he
persevered, during certain years of probation, in an orderly and
industrious life; but that, according to the rightness of his conduct,
the portion of the estate assigned to him would be greater or less, so
that it literally depended on his behaviour from day to day whether he
got ten thousand a year, or thirty thousand a year, or nothing
whatever—would you not think it strange if the youth never troubled
himself to satisfy the conditions in any way, nor even to know what was
required of him, but lived exactly as he chose, and never inquired
whether his chances of the estate were increasing or passing away?  Well,
you know that this is actually and literally so with the greater number
of the educated persons now living in Christian countries.  Nearly every
man and woman in any company such as this, outwardly professes to
believe—and a large number unquestionably think they believe—much more
than this; not only that a quite unlimited estate is in prospect for them
if they please the Holder of it, but that the infinite contrary of such a
possession—an estate of perpetual misery—is in store for them if they
displease this great Land-Holder, this great Heaven-Holder.  And yet
there is not one in a thousand of these human souls that cares to think,
for ten minutes of the day, where this estate is or how beautiful it is,
or what kind of life they are to lead in it, or what kind of life they
must lead to obtain it.

You fancy that you care to know this: so little do you care that,
probably, at this moment many of you are displeased with me for talking
of the matter!  You came to hear about the Art of this world, not about
the Life of the next, and you are provoked with me for talking of what
you can hear any Sunday in church.  But do not be afraid.  I will tell
you something before you go about pictures, and carvings, and pottery,
and what else you would like better to hear of than the other world.
Nay, perhaps you say, “We want you to talk of pictures and pottery,
because we are sure that you know something of them, and you know nothing
of the other world.”  Well—I don’t.  That is quite true.  But the very
strangeness and mystery of which I urge you to take notice, is in
this—that I do not;—nor you either.  Can you answer a single bold
question unflinchingly about that other world?—Are you sure there is a
heaven?  Sure there is a hell?  Sure that men are dropping before your
faces through the pavements of these streets into eternal fire, or sure
that they are not?  Sure that at your own death you are going to be
delivered from all sorrow, to be endowed with all virtue, to be gifted
with all felicity, and raised into perpetual companionship with a King,
compared to whom the kings of the earth are as grass-hoppers, and the
nations as the dust of His feet?  Are you sure of this? or, if not sure,
do any of us so much as care to make it sure? and, if not, how can
anything that we do be right—how can anything we think be wise? what
honour can there be in the arts that amuse us, or what profit in the
possessions that please?

Is not this a mystery of life?

But farther, you may, perhaps, think it a beneficent ordinance for the
generality of men that they do not, with earnestness or anxiety, dwell on
such questions of the future because the business of the day could not be
done if this kind of thought were taken by all of us for the morrow.  Be
it so: but at least we might anticipate that the greatest and wisest of
us, who were evidently the appointed teachers of the rest, would set
themselves apart to seek out whatever could be surely known of the future
destinies of their race; and to teach this in no rhetorical or ambiguous
manner, but in the plainest and most severely earnest words.

Now, the highest representatives of men who have thus endeavoured, during
the Christian era, to search out these deep things, and relate them, are
Dante and Milton.  There are none who for earnestness of thought, for
mastery of word, can be classed with these.  I am not at present, mind
you, speaking of persons set apart in any priestly or pastoral office, to
deliver creeds to us, or doctrines; but of men who try to discover and
set forth, as far as by human intellect is possible, the facts of the
other world.  Divines may perhaps teach us how to arrive there, but only
these two poets have in any powerful manner striven to discover, or in
any definite words professed to tell, what we shall see and become there;
or how those upper and nether worlds are, and have been, inhabited.

And what have they told us?  Milton’s account of the most important event
in his whole system of the universe, the fall of the angels, is evidently
unbelievable to himself; and the more so, that it is wholly founded on,
and in a great part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod’s account of the
decisive war of the younger gods with the Titans.  The rest of his poem
is a picturesque drama, in which every artifice of invention is visibly
and consciously employed; not a single fact being, for an instant,
conceived as tenable by any living faith.  Dante’s conception is far more
intense, and, by himself, for the time, not to be escaped from; it is
indeed a vision, but a vision only, and that one of the wildest that ever
entranced a soul—a dream in which every grotesque type or phantasy of
heathen tradition is renewed, and adorned; and the destinies of the
Christian Church, under their most sacred symbols, become literally
subordinate to the praise, and are only to be understood by the aid, of
one dear Florentine maiden.

I tell you truly that, as I strive more with this strange lethargy and
trance in myself, and awake to the meaning and power of life, it seems
daily more amazing to me that men such as these should dare to play with
the most precious truths, (or the most deadly untruths,) by which the
whole human race listening to them could be informed, or deceived;—all
the world their audiences for ever, with pleased ear, and passionate
heart;—and yet, to this submissive infinitude of souls, and evermore
succeeding and succeeding multitude, hungry for bread of life, they do
but play upon sweetly modulated pipes; with pompous nomenclature adorn
the councils of hell; touch a troubadour’s guitar to the courses of the
suns; and fill the openings of eternity, before which prophets have
veiled their faces, and which angels desire to look into, with idle
puppets of their scholastic imagination, and melancholy lights of frantic
faith in their lost mortal love.

Is not this a mystery of life?

But more.  We have to remember that these two great teachers were both of
them warped in their temper, and thwarted in their search for truth.
They were men of intellectual war, unable, through darkness of
controversy, or stress of personal grief, to discern where their own
ambition modified their utterances of the moral law; or their own agony
mingled with their anger at its violation.  But greater men than these
have been—innocent-hearted—too great for contest.  Men, like Homer and
Shakespeare, of so unrecognised personality, that it disappears in future
ages, and becomes ghostly, like the tradition of a lost heathen god.
Men, therefore, to whose unoffended, uncondemning sight, the whole of
human nature reveals itself in a pathetic weakness, with which they will
not strive; or in mournful and transitory strength, which they dare not
praise.  And all Pagan and Christian Civilization thus becomes subject to
them.  It does not matter how little, or how much, any of us have read,
either of Homer or Shakespeare; everything round us, in substance, or in
thought, has been moulded by them.  All Greek gentlemen were educated
under Homer.  All Roman gentlemen, by Greek literature.  All Italian, and
French, and English gentlemen, by Roman literature, and by its
principles.  Of the scope of Shakespeare, I will say only, that the
intellectual measure of every man since born, in the domains of creative
thought, may be assigned to him, according to the degree in which he has
been taught by Shakespeare.  Well, what do these two men, centres of
mortal intelligence, deliver to us of conviction respecting what it most
behoves that intelligence to grasp?  What is their hope—their crown of
rejoicing? what manner of exhortation have they for us, or of rebuke?
what lies next their own hearts, and dictates their undying words?  Have
they any peace to promise to our unrest—any redemption to our misery?

Take Homer first, and think if there is any sadder image of human fate
than the great Homeric story.  The main features in the character of
Achilles are its intense desire of justice, and its tenderness of
affection.  And in that bitter song of the Iliad, this man, though aided
continually by the wisest of the gods, and burning with the desire of
justice in his heart, becomes yet, through ill-governed passion, the most
unjust of men: and, full of the deepest tenderness in his heart, becomes
yet, through ill-governed passion, the most cruel of men.  Intense alike
in love and in friendship, he loses, first his mistress, and then his
friend; for the sake of the one, he surrenders to death the armies of his
own land; for the sake of the other, he surrenders all.  Will a man lay
down his life for his friend?  Yea—even for his _dead_ friend, this
Achilles, though goddess-born, and goddess-taught, gives up his kingdom,
his country, and his life—casts alike the innocent and guilty, with
himself, into one gulf of slaughter, and dies at last by the hand of the
basest of his adversaries.

Is not this a mystery of life?

But what, then, is the message to us of our own poet, and searcher of
hearts, after fifteen hundred years of Christian faith have been numbered
over the graves of men?  Are his words more cheerful than the
Heathen’s—is his hope more near—his trust more sure—his reading of fate
more happy?  Ah, no!  He differs from the Heathen poet chiefly in
this—that he recognizes, for deliverance, no gods nigh at hand; and that,
by petty chance—by momentary folly—by broken message—by fool’s tyranny—or
traitor’s snare, the strongest and most righteous are brought to their
ruin, and perish without word of hope.  He indeed, as part of his
rendering of character, ascribes the power and modesty of habitual
devotion to the gentle and the just.  The death-bed of Katharine is
bright with visions of angels; and the great soldier-king, standing by
his few dead, acknowledges the presence of the Hand that can save alike
by many or by few.  But observe that from those who with deepest spirit,
meditate, and with deepest passion, mourn, there are no such words as
these; nor in their hearts are any such consolations.  Instead of the
perpetual sense of the helpful presence of the Deity, which, through all
heathen tradition, is the source of heroic strength, in battle, in exile,
and in the valley of the shadow of death, we find only in the great
Christian poet, the consciousness of a moral law, through which “the gods
are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to scourge us;” and
of the resolved arbitration of the destinies, that conclude into
precision of doom what we feebly and blindly began; and force us, when
our indiscretion serves us, and our deepest plots do pall, to the
confession, that “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them
how we will.”

Is not this a mystery of life?

Be it so, then.  About this human life that is to be, or that is, the
wise religious men tell us nothing that we can trust; and the wise
contemplative men, nothing that can give us peace.  But there is yet a
third class, to whom we may turn—the wise practical men.  We have sat at
the feet of the poets who sang of heaven, and they have told us their
dreams.  We have listened to the poets who sang of earth, and they have
chanted to us dirges and words of despair.  But there is one class of men
more:—men, not capable of vision, nor sensitive to sorrow, but firm of
purpose—practised in business; learned in all that can be, (by handling,)
known.  Men, whose hearts and hopes are wholly in this present world,
from whom, therefore, we may surely learn, at least, how, at present,
conveniently to live in it.  What will _they_ say to us, or show us by
example?  These kings—these councillors—these statesmen and builders of
kingdoms—these capitalists and men of business, who weigh the earth, and
the dust of it, in a balance.  They know the world, surely; and what is
the mystery of life to us, is none to them.  They can surely show us how
to live, while we live, and to gather out of the present world what is
best.

I think I can best tell you their answer, by telling you a dream I had
once.  For though I am no poet, I have dreams sometimes:—I dreamed I was
at a child’s Mayday party, in which every means of entertainment had been
provided for them, by a wise and kind host.  It was in a stately house,
with beautiful gardens attached to it; and the children had been set free
in the rooms and gardens, with no care whatever but how to pass their
afternoon rejoicingly.  They did not, indeed, know much about what was to
happen next day; and some of them, I thought, were a little frightened,
because there was a chance of their being sent to a new school where
there were examinations; but they kept the thoughts of that out of their
heads as well as they could, and resolved to enjoy themselves.  The
house, I said, was in a beautiful garden, and in the garden were all
kinds of flowers; sweet, grassy banks for rest; and smooth lawns for
play; and pleasant streams and woods; and rocky places for climbing.  And
the children were happy for a little while, but presently they separated
themselves into parties; and then each party declared it would have a
piece of the garden for its own, and that none of the others should have
anything to do with that piece.  Next, they quarrelled violently which
pieces they would have; and at last the boys took up the thing, as boys
should do, “practically,” and fought in the flower-beds till there was
hardly a flower left standing; then they trampled down each other’s bits
of the garden out of spite; and the girls cried till they could cry no
more; and so they all lay down at last breathless in the ruin, and waited
for the time when they were to be taken home in the evening. {30}

Meanwhile, the children in the house had been making themselves happy
also in their manner.  For them, there had been provided every kind of
indoor pleasure: there was music for them to dance to; and the library
was open, with all manner of amusing books; and there was a museum full
of the most curious shells, and animals, and birds; and there was a
workshop, with lathes and carpenter’s tools, for the ingenious boys; and
there were pretty fantastic dresses, for the girls to dress in; and there
were microscopes, and kaleidoscopes; and whatever toys a child could
fancy; and a table, in the dining-room, loaded with everything nice to
eat.

But, in the midst of all this, it struck two or three of the more
“practical” children, that they would like some of the brass-headed nails
that studded the chairs; and so they set to work to pull them out.
Presently, the others, who were reading, or looking at shells, took a
fancy to do the like; and, in a little while, all the children, nearly,
were spraining their fingers, in pulling out brass-headed nails.  With
all that they could pull out, they were not satisfied; and then,
everybody wanted some of somebody else’s.  And at last, the really
practical and sensible ones declared, that nothing was of any real
consequence, that afternoon, except to get plenty of brass-headed nails;
and that the books, and the cakes, and the microscopes were of no use at
all in themselves, but only, if they could be exchanged for nail-heads.
And at last they began to fight for nail-heads, as the others fought for
the bits of garden.  Only here and there, a despised one shrank away into
a corner, and tried to get a little quiet with a book, in the midst of
the noise; but all the practical ones thought of nothing else but
counting nail-heads all the afternoon—even though they knew they would
not be allowed to carry so much as one brass knob away with them.  But
no—it was—“Who has most nails?  I have a hundred, and you have fifty; or,
I have a thousand, and you have two.  I must have as many as you before I
leave the house, or I cannot possibly go home in peace.”  At last, they
made so much noise that I awoke, and thought to myself, “What a false
dream that is, of _children_!”  The child is the father of the man; and
wiser.  Children never do such foolish things.  Only men do.

But there is yet one last class of persons to be interrogated.  The wise
religious men we have asked in vain; the wise contemplative men, in vain;
the wise worldly men, in vain.  But there is another group yet.  In the
midst of this vanity of empty religion—of tragic contemplation—of
wrathful and wretched ambition, and dispute for dust, there is yet one
great group of persons, by whom all these disputers live—the persons who
have determined, or have had it by a beneficent Providence determined for
them, that they will do something useful; that whatever may be prepared
for them hereafter, or happen to them here, they will, at least, deserve
the food that God gives them by winning it honourably: and that, however
fallen from the purity, or far from the peace, of Eden, they will carry
out the duty of human dominion, though they have lost its felicity; and
dress and keep the wilderness, though they no more can dress or keep the
garden.

These,—hewers of wood, and drawers of water,—these, bent under burdens,
or torn of scourges—these, that dig and weave—that plant and build;
workers in wood, and in marble, and in iron—by whom all food, clothing,
habitation, furniture, and means of delight are produced, for themselves,
and for all men beside; men, whose deeds are good, though their words may
be few; men, whose lives are serviceable, be they never so short, and
worthy of honour, be they never so humble;—from these, surely, at least,
we may receive some clear message of teaching; and pierce, for an
instant, into the mystery of life, and of its arts.

Yes; from these, at last, we do receive a lesson.  But I grieve to say,
or rather—for that is the deeper truth of the matter—I rejoice to
say—this message of theirs can only be received by joining them—not by
thinking about them.

You sent for me to talk to you of art; and I have obeyed you in coming.
But the main thing I have to tell you is,—that art must not be talked
about.  The fact that there is talk about it at all, signifies that it is
ill done, or cannot be done.  No true painter ever speaks, or ever has
spoken, much of his art.  The greatest speak nothing.  Even Reynolds is
no exception, for he wrote of all that he could not himself do, and was
utterly silent respecting all that he himself did.

The moment a man can really do his work he becomes speechless about it.
All words become idle to him—all theories.

Does a bird need to theorize about building its nest, or boast of it when
built?  All good work is essentially done that way—without hesitation,
without difficulty, without boasting; and in the doers of the best, there
is an inner and involuntary power which approximates literally to the
instinct of an animal—nay, I am certain that in the most perfect human
artists, reason does _not_ supersede instinct, but is added to an
instinct as much more divine than that of the lower animals as the human
body is more beautiful than theirs; that a great singer sings not with
less instinct than the nightingale, but with more—only more various,
applicable, and governable; that a great architect does not build with
less instinct than the beaver or the bee, but with more—with an innate
cunning of proportion that embraces all beauty, and a divine ingenuity of
skill that improvises all construction.  But be that as it may—be the
instinct less or more than that of inferior animals—like or unlike
theirs, still the human art is dependent on that first, and then upon an
amount of practice, of science,—and of imagination disciplined by
thought, which the true possessor of it knows to be incommunicable, and
the true critic of it, inexplicable, except through long process of
laborious’ years.  That journey of life’s conquest, in which hills over
hills, and Alps on Alps arose, and sank,—do you think you can make
another trace it painlessly, by talking?  Why, you cannot even carry us
up an Alp, by talking.  You can guide us up it, step by step, no
otherwise—even so, best silently.  You girls, who have been among the
hills, know how the bad guide chatters and gesticulates, and it is “Put
your foot here;” and “Mind how you balance yourself there;” but the good
guide walks on quietly, without a word, only with his eyes on you when
need is, and his arm like an iron bar, if need be.

In that slow way, also, art can be taught—if you have faith in your
guide, and will let his arm be to you as an iron bar when need is.  But
in what teacher of art have you such faith?  Certainly not in me; for, as
I told you at first, I know well enough it is only because you think I
can talk, not because you think I know my business, that you let me speak
to you at all.  If I were to tell you anything that seemed to you strange
you would not believe it, and yet it would only be in telling you strange
things that I could be of use to you.  I could be of great use to
you—infinite use—with brief saying, if you would believe it; but you
would not, just because the thing that would be of real use would
displease you.  You are all wild, for instance, with admiration of
Gustave Doré.  Well, suppose I were to tell you, in the strongest terms I
could use, that Gustave Doré’s art was bad—bad, not in weakness,—not in
failure,—but bad with dreadful power—the power of the Furies and the
Harpies mingled, enraging, and polluting; that so long as you looked at
it, no perception of pure or beautiful art was possible for you.  Suppose
I were to tell you that!  What would be the use?  Would you look at
Gustave Doré less?  Rather, more, I fancy.  On the other hand, I could
soon put you into good humour with me, if I chose.  I know well enough
what you like, and how to praise it to your better liking.  I could talk
to you about moonlight, and twilight, and spring flowers, and autumn
leaves, and the Madonnas of Raphael—how motherly! and the Sibyls of
Michael Angelo—how majestic! and the Saints of Angelico—how pious! and
the Cherubs of Correggio—how delicious!  Old as I am, I could play you a
tune on the harp yet, that you would dance to.  But neither you nor I
should be a bit the better or wiser; or, if we were, our increased wisdom
could be of no practical effect.  For, indeed, the arts, as regards
teachableness, differ from the sciences also in this, that their power is
founded not merely on facts which can be communicated, but on
dispositions which require to be created.  Art is neither to be achieved
by effort of thinking, nor explained by accuracy of speaking.  It is the
instinctive and necessary result of power, which can only be developed
through the mind of successive generations, and which finally burst into
life under social conditions as slow of growth as the faculties they
regulate.  Whole æras of mighty history are summed, and the passions of
dead myriads are concentrated, in the existence of a noble art, and if
that noble art were among us, we should feel it and rejoice; not caring
in the least to hear lectures on it; and since it is not among us, be
assured we have to go back to the root of it, or, at least, to the place
where the stock of it is yet alive, and the branches began to die.

And now, may I have your pardon for pointing out, partly with reference
to matters which are at this time of greater moment than the arts—that if
we undertook such recession to the vital germ of national arts that have
decayed, we should find a more singular arrest of their power in Ireland
than in any other European country?  For in the eighth century Ireland
possessed a school of art in her manuscripts and sculpture, which, in
many of its qualities—apparently in all essential qualities of decorative
invention—was quite without rival; seeming as if it might have advanced
to the highest triumphs in architecture and in painting.  But there was
one fatal flaw in its nature, by which it was stayed, and stayed with a
conspicuousness of pause to which there is no parallel: so that, long
ago, in tracing the progress of European schools from infancy to
strength, I chose for the students of Kensington, in a lecture since
published, two characteristic examples of early art, of equal skill; but
in the one case, skill which was progressive—in the other, skill which
was at pause.  In the one case, it was work receptive of
correction—hungry for correction; and in the other, work which inherently
rejected correction.  I chose for them a corrigible Eve, and an
incorrigible Angel, and I grieve to say that the incorrigible Angel was
also an Irish Angel! {31}

And the fatal difference lay wholly in this.  In both pieces of art there
was an equal falling short of the needs of fact; but the Lombardic Eve
knew she was in the wrong, and the Irish Angel thought himself all right.
The eager Lombardic sculptor, though firmly insisting on his childish
idea, yet showed in the irregular broken touches of the features, and the
imperfect struggle for softer lines in the form, a perception of beauty
and law that he could not render; there was the strain of effort, under
conscious imperfection, in every line.  But the Irish missal-painter had
drawn his angel with no sense of failure, in happy complacency, and put
red dots into the palm of each hand, and rounded the eyes into perfect
circles, and, I regret to say, left the mouth out altogether, with
perfect satisfaction to himself.

May I without offence ask you to consider whether this mode of arrest in
ancient Irish art may not be indicative of points of character which even
yet, in some measure, arrest your national power?  I have seen much of
Irish character, and have watched it closely, for I have also much loved
it.  And I think the form of failure to which it is most liable is
this,—that being generous-hearted, and wholly intending always to do
right, it does not attend to the external laws of right, but thinks it
must necessarily do right because it means to do so, and therefore does
wrong without finding it out; and then, when the consequences of its
wrong come upon it, or upon others connected with it, it cannot conceive
that the wrong is in anywise of its causing or of its doing, but flies
into wrath, and a strange agony of desire for justice, as feeling itself
wholly innocent, which leads it farther astray, until there is nothing
that it is not capable of doing with a good conscience.

But mind, I do not mean to say that, in past or present relations between
Ireland and England, you have been wrong, and we right.  Far from that, I
believe that in all great questions of principle, and in all details of
administration of law, you have been usually right, and we wrong;
sometimes in misunderstanding you, sometimes in resolute iniquity to you.
Nevertheless, in all disputes between states, though the stronger is
nearly always mainly in the wrong, the weaker is often so in a minor
degree; and I think we sometimes admit the possibility of our being in
error, and you never do.

And now, returning to the broader question, what these arts and labours
of life have to teach us of its mystery, this is the first of their
lessons—that the more beautiful the art, the more it is essentially the
work of people who _feel themselves wrong_;—who are striving for the
fulfilment of a law, and the grasp of a loveliness, which they have not
yet attained, which they feel even farther and farther from attaining the
more they strive for it.  And yet, in still deeper sense, it is the work
of people who know also that they are right.  The very sense of
inevitable error from their purpose marks the perfectness of that
purpose, and the continued sense of failure arises from the continued
opening of the eyes more clearly to all the sacredest laws of truth.

This is one lesson.  The second is a very plain, and greatly precious
one: namely—that whenever the arts and labours of life are fulfilled in
this spirit of striving against misrule, and doing whatever we have to
do, honourably and perfectly, they invariably bring happiness, as much as
seems possible to the nature of man.  In all other paths by which that
happiness is pursued there is disappointment, or destruction: for
ambition and for passion there is no rest—no fruition; the fairest
pleasures of youth perish in a darkness greater than their past light:
and the loftiest and purest love too often does but inflame the cloud of
life with endless fire of pain.  But, ascending from lowest to highest,
through every scale of human industry, that industry worthily followed,
gives peace.  Ask the labourer in the field, at the forge, or in the
mine; ask the patient, delicate-fingered artisan, or the strong-armed,
fiery-hearted worker in bronze, and in marble, and with the colours of
light; and none of these, who are true workmen, will ever tell you, that
they have found the law of heaven an unkind one—that in the sweat of
their face they should eat bread, till they return to the ground; nor
that they ever found it an unrewarded obedience, if, indeed, it was
rendered faithfully to the command—“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do—do
it with thy might.”

These are the two great and constant lessons which our labourers teach us
of the mystery of life.  But there is another, and a sadder one, which
they cannot teach us, which we must read on their tombstones.

“Do it with thy might.”  There have been myriads upon myriads of human
creatures who have obeyed this law—who have put every breath and nerve of
their being into its toil—who have devoted every hour, and exhausted
every faculty—who have bequeathed their unaccomplished thoughts at
death—who, being dead, have yet spoken, by majesty of memory, and
strength of example.  And, at last, what has all this “Might” of humanity
accomplished, in six thousand years of labour and sorrow?  What has it
_done_?  Take the three chief occupations and arts of men, one by one,
and count their achievements.  Begin with the first—the lord of them
all—Agriculture.  Six thousand years have passed since we were set to
till the ground, from which we were taken.  How much of it is tilled?
How much of that which is, wisely or well?  In the very centre and chief
garden of Europe—where the two forms of parent Christianity have had
their fortresses—where the noble Catholics of the Forest Cantons, and the
noble Protestants of the Vaudois valleys, have maintained, for dateless
ages, their faiths and liberties—there the unchecked Alpine rivers yet
run wild in devastation; and the marshes, which a few hundred men could
redeem with a year’s labour, still blast their helpless inhabitants into
fevered idiotism.  That is so, in the centre of Europe!  While, on the
near coast of Africa, once the Garden of the Hesperides, an Arab woman,
but a few sunsets since, ate her child, for famine.  And, with all the
treasures of the East at our feet, we, in our own dominion, could not
find a few grains of rice, for a people that asked of us no more; but
stood by, and saw five hundred thousand of them perish of hunger.

Then, after agriculture, the art of kings, take the next head of human
arts—Weaving; the art of queens, honoured of all noble Heathen women, in
the person of their virgin goddess—honoured of all Hebrew women, by the
word of their wisest king—“She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her
hands hold the distaff; she stretcheth out her hand to the poor.  She is
not afraid of the snow for her household, for all her household are
clothed with scarlet.  She maketh herself covering of tapestry; her
clothing is silk and purple.  She maketh fine linen, and selleth it, and
delivereth girdles to the merchant.”  What have we done in all these
thousands of years with this bright art of Greek maid and Christian
matron?  Six thousand years of weaving, and have we learned to weave?
Might not every naked wall have been purple with tapestry, and every
feeble breast fenced with sweet colours from the cold?  What have we
done?  Our fingers are too few, it seems, to twist together some poor
covering for our bodies.  We set our streams to work for us, and choke
the air with fire, to turn our spinning-wheels—and,—_are we yet clothed_?
Are not the streets of the capitals of Europe foul with sale of cast
clouts and rotten rags?  Is not the beauty of your sweet children left in
wretchedness of disgrace, while, with better honour, nature clothes the
brood of the bird in its nest, and the suckling of the wolf in her den?
And does not every winter’s snow robe what you have not robed, and shroud
what you have not shrouded; and every winter’s wind bear up to heaven its
wasted souls, to witness against you hereafter, by the voice of their
Christ,—“I was naked, and ye clothed me not”?

Lastly—take the Art of Building—the strongest—proudest—most orderly—most
enduring of the arts of man; that of which the produce is in the surest
manner accumulative, and need not perish, or be replaced; but if once
well done, will stand more strongly than the unbalanced rocks—more
prevalently than the crumbling hills.  The art which is associated with
all civic pride and sacred principle; with which men record their
power—satisfy their enthusiasm—make sure their defence—define and make
dear their habitation.  And in six thousand years of building, what have
we done?  Of the greater part of all that skill and strength, _no_
vestige is left, but fallen stones, that encumber the fields and impede
the streams.  But, from this waste of disorder, and of time, and of rage,
what _is_ left to us?  Constructive and progressive creatures, that we
are, with ruling brains, and forming hands, capable of fellowship, and
thirsting for fame, can we not contend, in comfort, with the insects of
the forest, or, in achievement, with the worm of the sea?  The white surf
rages in vain against the ramparts built by poor atoms of scarcely
nascent life; but only ridges of formless ruin mark the places where once
dwelt our noblest multitudes.  The ant and the moth have cells for each
of their young, but our little ones lie in festering heaps, in homes that
consume them like graves; and night by night, from the corners of our
streets, rises up the cry of the homeless—“I was a stranger, and ye took
me not in.”

Must it be always thus?  Is our life for ever to be without
profit—without possession?  Shall the strength of its generations be as
barren as death; or cast away their labour, as the wild fig-tree casts
her untimely figs?  Is it all a dream then—the desire of the eyes and the
pride of life—or, if it be, might we not live in nobler dream than this?
The poets and prophets, the wise men, and the scribes, though they have
told us nothing about a life to come, have told us much about the life
that is now.  They have had—they also,—their dreams, and we have laughed
at them.  They have dreamed of mercy, and of justice; they have dreamed
of peace and good-will; they have dreamed of labour undisappointed, and
of rest undisturbed; they have dreamed of fulness in harvest, and
overflowing in store; they have dreamed of wisdom in council, and of
providence in law; of gladness of parents, and strength of children, and
glory of grey hairs.  And at these visions of theirs we have mocked, and
held them for idle and vain, unreal and unaccomplishable.  What have we
accomplished with our realities?  Is this what has come of our worldly
wisdom, tried against their folly? this, our mightiest possible, against
their impotent ideal? or, have we only wandered among the spectra of a
baser felicity, and chased phantoms of the tombs, instead of visions of
the Almighty; and walked after the imaginations of our evil hearts,
instead of after the counsels of Eternity, until our lives—not in the
likeness of the cloud of heaven, but of the smoke of hell—have become “as
a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away”?

_Does_ it vanish then?  Are you sure of that?—sure, that the nothingness
of the grave will be a rest from this troubled nothingness; and that the
coiling shadow, which disquiets itself in vain, cannot change into the
smoke of the torment that ascends for ever?  Will any answer that they
_are_ sure of it, and that there is no fear, nor hope, nor desire, nor
labour, whither they go?  Be it so: will you not, then, make as sure of
the Life that now is, as you are of the Death that is to come?  Your
hearts are wholly in this world—will you not give them to it wisely, as
well as perfectly?  And see, first of all, that you _have_ hearts, and
sound hearts, too, to give.  Because you have no heaven to look for, is
that any reason that you should remain ignorant of this wonderful and
infinite earth, which is firmly and instantly given you in possession?
Although your days are numbered, and the following darkness sure, is it
necessary that you should share the degradation of the brute, because you
are condemned to its mortality; or live the life of the moth, and of the
worm, because you are to companion them in the dust?  Not so; we may have
but a few thousands of days to spend, perhaps hundreds only—perhaps tens;
nay, the longest of our time and best, looked back on, will be but as a
moment, as the twinkling of an eye; still we are men, not insects; we are
living spirits, not passing clouds.  “He maketh the winds His messengers;
the momentary fire, His minister;” and shall we do less than _these_?
Let us do the work of men while we bear the form of them; and, as we
snatch our narrow portion of time out of Eternity, snatch also our narrow
inheritance of passion out of Immortality—even though our lives _be_ as a
vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.

But there are some of you who believe not this—who think this cloud of
life has no such close—that it is to float, revealed and illumined, upon
the floor of heaven, in the day when He cometh with clouds, and every eye
shall see Him.  Some day, you believe, within these five, or ten, or
twenty years, for every one of us the judgment will be set, and the books
opened.  If that be true, far more than that must be true.  Is there but
one day of judgment?  Why, for us every day is a day of judgment—every
day is a Dies Iræ, and writes its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its
West.  Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are
opened?  It waits at the doors of your houses—it waits at the corners of
your streets; we are in the midst of judgment—the insects that we crush
are our judges—the moments we fret away are our judges—the elements that
feed us, judge, as they minister—and the pleasures that deceive us,
judge, as they indulge.  Let us, for our lives, do the work of Men while
we bear the form of them, if indeed those lives are _Not_ as a vapour,
and do _Not_ vanish away.

“The work of men”—and what is that?  Well, we may any of us know very
quickly, on the condition of being wholly ready to do it.  But many of us
are for the most part thinking, not of what we are to do, but of what we
are to get; and the best of us are sunk into the sin of Ananias, and it
is a mortal one—we want to keep back part of the price; and we
continually talk of taking up our cross, as if the only harm in a cross
was the _weight_ of it—as if it was only a thing to be carried, instead
of to be—crucified upon.  “They that are His have crucified the flesh,
with the affections and lusts.”  Does that mean, think you, that in time
of national distress, of religious trial, of crisis for every interest
and hope of humanity—none of us will cease jesting, none cease idling,
none put themselves to any wholesome work, none take so much as a tag of
lace off their footmen’s coats, to save the world?  Or does it rather
mean, that they are ready to leave houses, lands, and kindreds—yes, and
life, if need be?  Life!—some of us are ready enough to throw that away,
joyless as we have made it.  But “_station_ in Life”—how many of us are
ready to quit _that_?  Is it not always the great objection, where there
is question of finding something useful to do—“We cannot leave our
stations in Life”?

Those of us who really cannot—that is to say, who can only maintain
themselves by continuing in some business or salaried office, have
already something to do; and all that they have to see to is, that they
do it honestly and with all their might.  But with most people who use
that apology, “remaining in the station of life to which Providence has
called them” means keeping all the carriages, and all the footmen and
large houses they can possibly pay for; and, once for all, I say that if
ever Providence _did_ put them into stations of that sort—which is not at
all a matter of certainty—Providence is just now very distinctly calling
them out again.  Levi’s station in life was the receipt of custom; and
Peter’s, the shore of Galilee; and Paul’s, the antechambers of the High
Priest,—which “station in life” each had to leave, with brief notice.

And, whatever our station in life may be, at this crisis, those of us who
mean to fulfil our duty ought first to live on as little as we can; and,
secondly, to do all the wholesome work for it we can, and to spend all we
can spare in doing all the sure good we can.

And sure good is, first in feeding people, then in dressing people, then
in lodging people, and lastly in rightly pleasing people, with arts, or
sciences, or any other subject of thought.

I say first in feeding; and, once for all, do not let yourselves be
deceived by any of the common talk of “indiscriminate charity.”  The
order to us is not to feed the deserving hungry, nor the industrious
hungry, nor the amiable and well-intentioned hungry, but simply to feed
the hungry.  It is quite true, infallibly true, that if any man will not
work, neither should he eat—think of that, and every time you sit down to
your dinner, ladies and gentlemen, say solemnly, before you ask a
blessing, “How much work have I done to-day for my dinner?”  But the
proper way to enforce that order on those below you, as well as on
yourselves, is not to leave vagabonds and honest people to starve
together, but very distinctly to discern and seize your vagabond; and
shut your vagabond up out of honest people’s way, and very sternly then
see that, until he has worked, he does _not_ eat.  But the first thing is
to be sure you have the food to give; and, therefore, to enforce the
organization of vast activities in agriculture and in commerce, for the
production of the wholesomest food, and proper storing and distribution
of it, so that no famine shall any more be possible among civilized
beings.  There is plenty of work in this business alone, and at once, for
any number of people who like to engage in it.

Secondly, dressing people—that is to say, urging every one, within reach
of your influence to be always neat and clean, and giving them means of
being so.  In so far as they absolutely refuse, you must give up the
effort with respect to them, only taking care that no children within
your sphere of influence shall any more be brought up with such habits;
and that every person who is willing to dress with propriety shall have
encouragement to do so.  And the first absolutely necessary step towards
this is the gradual adoption of a consistent dress for different ranks of
persons, so that their rank shall be known by their dress; and the
restriction of the changes of fashion within certain limits.  All which
appears for the present quite impossible; but it is only so far even
difficult as it is difficult to conquer our vanity, frivolity, and desire
to appear what we are not.  And it is not, nor ever shall be, creed of
mine, that these mean and shallow vices are unconquerable by Christian
women.

And then, thirdly, lodging people, which you may think should have been
put first, but I put it third, because we must feed and clothe people
where we find them, and lodge them afterwards.  And providing lodgment
for them means a great deal of vigorous legislature, and cutting down of
vested interests that stand in the way, and after that, or before that,
so far as we can get it, thorough sanitary and remedial action in the
houses that we have; and then the building of more, strongly,
beautifully, and in groups of limited extent, kept in proportion to their
streams, and walled round, so that there may be no festering and wretched
suburb anywhere, but clean and busy street within, and the open country
without, with a belt of beautiful garden and orchard round the walls, so
that from any part of the city perfectly fresh air and grass, and sight
of far horizon, might be reachable in a few minutes’ walk.  This the
final aim; but in immediate action every minor and possible good to be
instantly done, when, and as, we can; roofs mended that have holes in
them—fences patched that have gaps in them—walls’ buttressed that
totter—and floors propped that shake; cleanliness and order enforced with
our own hands and eyes, till we are breathless, every day.  And all the
fine arts will healthily follow.  I myself have washed a flight of stone
stairs all down, with bucket and broom, in a Savoy inn, where they hadn’t
washed their stairs since they first went up them; and I never made a
better sketch than that afternoon.

These, then, are the three first needs of civilized life; and the law for
every Christian man and woman is, that they shall be in direct service
towards one of these three needs, as far as is consistent with their own
special occupation, and if they have no special business, then wholly in
one of these services.  And out of such exertion in plain duty all other
good will come; for in this direct contention with material evil, you
will find out the real nature of all evil; you will discern by the
various kinds of resistance, what is really the fault and main antagonism
to good; also you will find the most unexpected helps and profound
lessons given, and truths will come thus down to us which the speculation
of all our lives would never have raised us up to.  You will find nearly
every educational problem solved, as soon as you truly want to do
something; everybody will become of use in their own fittest way, and
will learn what is best for them to know in that use.  Competitive
examination will then, and not till then, be wholesome, because it will
be daily, and calm, and in practice; and on these familiar arts, and
minute, but certain and serviceable knowledges, will be surely edified
and sustained the greater arts and splendid theoretical sciences.

But much more than this.  On such holy and simple practice will be
founded, indeed, at last, an infallible religion.  The greatest of all
the mysteries of life, and the most terrible, is the corruption of even
the sincerest religion, which is not daily founded on rational,
effective, humble, and helpful action.  Helpful action, observe! for
there is just one law, which, obeyed, keeps all religions pure—forgotten,
makes them all false.  Whenever in any religious faith, dark or bright,
we allow our minds to dwell upon the points in which we differ from other
people, we are wrong, and in the devil’s power.  That is the essence of
the Pharisee’s thanksgiving—“Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other
men are.”  At every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out,
not in what we differ from other people, but in what we agree with them;
and the moment we find we can agree as to anything that should be done,
kind or good, (and who but fools couldn’t?) then do it; push at it
together: you can’t quarrel in a side-by-side push; but the moment that
even the best men stop pushing, and begin talking, they mistake their
pugnacity for piety, and it’s all over.  I will not speak of the crimes
which in past times have been committed in the name of Christ, nor of the
follies which are at this hour held to be consistent with obedience to
Him; but I _will_ speak of the morbid corruption and waste of vital power
in religious sentiment, by which the pure strength of that which should
be the guiding soul of every nation, the splendour of its youthful
manhood, and spotless light of its maidenhood, is averted or cast away.
You may see continually girls who have never been taught to do a single
useful thing thoroughly; who cannot sew, who cannot cook, who cannot cast
an account, nor prepare a medicine, whose whole life has been passed
either in play or in pride; you will find girls like these, when they are
earnest-hearted, cast all their innate passion of religious spirit, which
was meant by God to support them through the irksomeness of daily toil,
into grievous and vain meditation over the meaning of the great Book, of
which no syllable was ever yet to be understood but through a deed; all
the instinctive wisdom and mercy of their womanhood made vain, and the
glory of their pure consciences warped into fruitless agony concerning
questions which the laws of common serviceable life would have either
solved for them in an instant, or kept out of their way.  Give such a
girl any true work that will make her active in the dawn, and weary at
night, with the consciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed been
the better for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will
transform itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace.

So with our youths.  We once taught them to make Latin verses, and called
them educated; now we teach them to leap and to row, to hit a ball with a
bat, and call them educated.  Can they plough, can they sow, can they