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Lecture II. - LiliesPart I. - Lilies: Of Queens` Gardens
Part I. - Lilies: Of Queens` Gardens
[Footnote 1: This lecture was given December 14, 1864, at the Town Hall,
Manchester, in aid of the St. Andrew`s Schools.]
"Be thou glad, oh thirsting Desert; let the desert be made cheerful, and
bloom as the lily; and the barren places of Jordan shall run wild with wood."
- Isaiah xxxv, I. (Septuagint.)
It will, perhaps, be well, as this Lecture is the sequel of one
previously given, that I should shortly state to you my general intention in
both. The questions specially proposed to you in the first, namely, How and
What to Read, rose out of a far deeper one, which it was my endeavor to make
you propose earnestly to yourselves, namely, Why to Read. I want you to feel,
with me, that whatever advantages we possess in the present day in the
diffusion of education and of literature, can only be rightly used by any of
us when we have apprehended clearly what education is to lead to, and
literature to teach. I wish yvu to see that both well-directed moral training
and well-chosen reading lead to the possession of a power over the ill-guided
and illiterate, which is, according to the measure of it, in the truest sense,
kingly; conferring indeed the purest kingship that can exist among men: too
many other kingships (however distinguished by visible insignia or material
power) being either spectral or tyrannous; - spectral - that is to say,
aspects and shows only of royalty, hollow as death, and which only the
"likeness of a kingly crown have on"; or else tyrannous - that is to say,
substituting their own will for the law of justice and love by which all true
kings rule.
52. There is, then, I repeat - and as I want to leave this idea with you,
I begin with it, and shall end with it - only one pure kind of kingship; an
inevitable and external kind, crowned or not: the kingship, namely, which
consists in a stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state, than that of
others; enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to raise them. Observe that word
"State"; we have got into a loose way of using it. It means literally the
standing and stability of a thing; and you have the full force of it in the
derived word "statue" - "the immovable thing." A king`s majesty or "state,"
then, and the right of his kingdom to be called a state, depends on the
movelessness of both: - without tremor, without quiver of balance; established
and enthroned upon a foundation of eternal law which nothing can alter, nor
overthrow.
53. 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."
54. And here, in the very outset, we are met by a far deeper question,
which - strange though this may seem - remains among many of us yet quite
undecided, in spite of its infinite importance.
We cannot determine what the queenly power of 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 preeminence 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!
55. I. - 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 vigor, and honor, 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.
56. 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
labored and perfect plays you have no hero. Othello would have been one, if
his simplicity had not been so great as to leave him the prey of every base
practice round him; but he is the only example even approximating to the
heroic type. Coriolanus - Caesar - Antony, stand in flawed strength, and fall
by their vanities; - Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeo an
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 Katherine, Perdita,
Silvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia,
are all faultless: conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity.
57. Then observed, 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 imperiled 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.
58. 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 ot, 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 counselors, - incorruptibly just and pure examples - strong always to
sanctify, even when they cannot save.
59. 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 ^2 - Dandie Dinmont, Rob Roy, and
Claverhouse; of these, one is a border farmer; another a freebooter; the third
a soldier in a bad cause. And these touch the ideal of heroism only in their
courage and faith, together with a strong, but uncultivated, or mistakenly
applied, intellectual power; while his younger men are the gentlemanly
playthings of 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 and
inevitable sense of dignity and justice; a fearless, instant, and untiring
self-sacrifice to even the appearance of duty, much more to its real claims;
and, finally, a patient wisdom of deeply restrained affection, which does
infinitely more than protect its objects from a momentary error; it gradually
forms, animates, and exalts the characters of the unworthy lovers, until, at
the close of the tale, we are just able, and no more, to take patience in
hearing of their unmerited success.
[Footnote 2: I ought, in order to make this assertion fully understood, to
have noted the various weaknesses which lower the ideal of other great
characters of men in the Waverley novels - the selfishness and narrowness of
thought in Redgauntlet, the weak religious enthusiasm in Edward Glendinning,
and the like; and I ought to have noticed that there are several quite perfect
characters sketched sometimes in the backgrounds; three - let us accept
joyously this courtesy to England and her soldiers - are English officers:
Colonel Gardiner, Colonel Talbot, and Colonel Mannering.]
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.
60. 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 honor 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 honor 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 regret,
But on thee dwells mine 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 honor without fail;
With whom each sovereign good dwells separate,
Fulfilling the perfection of thy state.
"Lady, since I conceived
That 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."
61. You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight would have had a lower
estimate of women than this Christian lover. His spiritual subjection to them
was, indeed, not so absolute; but as regards their own personal character, it
was only because 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,
lamblike 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.
62. Now, I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind upon you if I
had time. I would take Chaucer, and show you why he wrote a Legend 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.
63. 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.
64. 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 Aeschylus, 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 could suppose this,
take lastly the evidence of facts, given by the human heart itself. In all
Christian ages which have been remarkable for their purity or progress, there
has been absolute yielding of obedient devotion, by the lover, to his
mistress. I say obedient; - not merely enthusiastic and worshiping 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 dishonor 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 defense alike of faith, of law, and of love; that chivalry, I
say, in its very first conception of honorable 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 passions 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 honorable, 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.
65. I do not insist by any farther argument on this, for I think it
should commend itself at once to your knowledge of what has been and to your
feelings of what should be. You cannot think that the buckling on of the
knight`s armor by his lady`s hand was a mere caprice of romantic fashion. It
is the type of an eternal truth - that the soul`s armor 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 honor of manhood fails. Know you not those lovely lines -
I would they were learned by all youthful ladies of England: -
"Ah, wasteful woman! - show 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!" ^3
[Footnote 3: Coventry Patmore. You cannot read him too often or too carefully;
as far as I know he is the only living poet who always strengthens and
purifies; the others sometimes darken, and nearly always depress and
discourage, the imagination they deeply seize.]
66. Thus much, then, respecting the relations of lovers I believe you
will accept. But what we too often doubt is the fitness of the continuance of
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?
67. 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.
68. 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 was 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 judges 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 offense, 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 offense. 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 thee 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 fulfills 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.
69. 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 fulfill this, she
must - as far as one can use such terms of a human creature - be incapable of
error? So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be
enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise - wise, not for
self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set
herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side: wise,
not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with the
passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely
applicable, modesty of service - the true changefulness of woman. In that
great sense - "La donna e mobile," not "Qual pium al vento": no, nor yet
"Variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made"; but variable as
the light, manifold in fair and serene division, that it may take the color of
all that it falls upon, and exalt it.
70. 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 is 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 splendor 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.`" ^4
[Footnote 4: Observe, it is "Nature" who is speaking throughout, and who says,
"While she and I together live."]
"Vital feelings of delight," observe. There are deadly feelings of
delight; but the natural ones are vital, necessary to every 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.
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