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LECTURE I.— SESAME. OF KINGS TREASURIES. " You shall each have a cake of sesame, — and ten pound." — LuciAN : The Fisherman. 1. My first duty this evening is to ask your pardon for the ambiguity of title under which the subject of lecture has been announced : for indeed 1 am not going to talk of kings, known as regnant, nor of treasuries, understood to contain wealth ; but of quite another order of royalty, and another material of riches, than those usually acknowledged. T had even intended to ask your attention for a little while on trust, and (as sometimes one contrives, in taking a friend to see a favourite piece of scenery) to hide what I wanted most to show, with such imperfect cunning as I might, until we unexpectedly reached the best point of view by winding paths. But — and as also I have heard it said, by men practised in public address, that hearers are never so much fatigued as by the endeavour to follow a speaker who gives them no clue to his purpose, — I will take the slight mask off at once, and tell you plainly that I want to speak to you about the treasures hidden in books ; and about the way we find them, and the way we lose them. A grave subject, you will say ; and a wide one ! Yes ; so wide that I shall 4 SESAME AND LILIES. make no effort to touch the compass of it. I will try only to bring before you a few simple thoughts about readinij, which press them- selves upon me every day more deeply, as I watch the course of the public mind with respect to our daily enlarging means of education ; and the answeringly wider spreading on the levels, of the irrigation of literature. 2. It happens that I have practically some connexion with schools for different classes of youth ; and I receive many letters from parents respecting the education of their children. In the mass of these letters I am always struck by the precedence which the idea of a " position in life" takes above all other thoughts in the parents' — more especially in the mothers'— minda. "The education befitting such and such a station in life " — this is the phrase, this is the object, always. They never seek, as far as I can make out, an education good in itself ; even the conception of abstract rightness in training rarely seems reached by the writers. But, an education " which shall keep a good coat on my son's back; — which shall enable him to ring with confidence the visitors' bell at doubled-belled doors ; which shall result ultimately in establish- ment of a doubled-belled door to his own house ; — in a word, which shall lead to 'advancement in life;' — this we pray for on bent knees — and this is all we pray for." It never seems to occur to the parents that there may be an education which, in itself, is advancement in Life ; — that any other than that may perhaps be advancement in Death ; and that this essential education might be more easily got, or given, than they fancy, if they set about it in the right way ; while it is for no price, and by no favor, to be got, if they set about it in the wrong. 3. Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and effective in the mind of this busiest of countries, I suppose the first — at least that OF kings' TREASURIKS. 5 ^\hich is confessed with th3 greatest frankness, and put forward as the fittest stimulus to youthful exertion— is this of "Advancement in life." May I ask you to consider with me what this ide.v practi- cally includes, and what it should include. Practically, then, at present, ''advancement in life" means, becoming conspicuous in life ;— obtaining a position which shall be acknowledged by others to be respectable or honourable. We do not understand by this advancement, in general, the mere making of money, but the being known to have made it ; not the accomplishment of any great aim, but the being seen to have accomplished it. In a word, we mean the gratificati(jn of our thirst for applasue. That thirst, if the last infirmity of noble minds, is also the first infirmity of weak ones ; and, on the whole, the strongest impulsive influence of average humanity : the greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure. 4. I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I want you only to feel how it lies at the root of effort ; especially of all modern effort. It is the gratification of vanity which is, with us, the stimulus of toil, and balm of repose ; so closely does it touch the very springs of life that the wounding of our vanity is always spoken of (and truly) as in its measure mortal; we call it " morti- fication," using the sanie expression which we should apply to a gangrenous and incurable bodily hurt. And although few of us may be physicians enough to recognize the various effect of this passion upon health and energy, I believe most honest men know and would at once acknowledge, its leading power with them as a motive. The seaman does not commonly desire to be made captain only because he knows he can manage a ship better than any other sailor on board. He wants to be made captain that he n.ay be 6 SESAME AND LILIES. called capain. The clergyman does not usually want to be made a bishop only because he believes no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct the diocese through its difficulties. He wants to be made bishop primarily that he may be called " My Lord." And a prince does nut usually desire to enlarge, or a subject to gain, a kingdom, because he believes that no one else can as well serve the State, upon its throne ; but, briefly, because he wishes to be addressed as "Your Majesty," by as many lips as may be brought to such utterance. 5. This then, being the main idea of "advancement in life," the force of it applies, for all of us, according to our station, particularly to that secondary result of such advancement which we call "getting into good society." We want to get into good society not that we may have it, but that we may be seen in it ; and our notion of its goodness depends primarily on its conspicuousness. Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put what I fear you may think an impertinent question ? I never can go on with an address unless I feel, or know, that my audience are either with me or against me : I do not much care which, in beginning ; but I must know where they are ; and I would fain find out, at this instant, whether you think I am putting the motives of popular action too low. I am resolved, to-night, to state them low enough to be admitted as probable ; for whenever in my writings on Political Economy, I assume that a little honesty, or generosity, — or what used to be called "virtue" — may be calculated upon as a human motive of action, people always answer me, saying, "You must not calculate on that : that is not in human nature : you must not assume anything to be common to men but acquisitiveness and jealousy ; no other feeling ever has influence on them, except acci- dentally, and iu matters out of the way of business. ' I begin, r>o' OF KINCJS TKEASUIUKS. accordingly, to-night low in the scale of n\oti^ cs ; hut T must know if you think nio right in doing eo. Therefore, let me ask those who admit the love of praise to bo usually the strongest motive in men's minds in seeking advancement, and the honest desire of doing any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary one, to liuld up their hands. (About a dozen of hmuh held h/j — the audience, parti ij, not being sure the lecturer is serioiiit, ami parthj, aliij of erprensing opinion.) I am quite serious — I really do want to kn»)W what you think ; however, I can judge by putting the reverse (juestion. Will those who think that duty is generally the first, and love of praise the second, motive, hold up their hands ? One hand reported to have been held np, behind the lecturer.) Very good ; I see you are with me, and that you think I have not begun too near the ground. Now, without teasing you by putting farther (question, I venture to assume that you will admit duty as at least a secondary or tertiary motive. You think that the desire of doing something useful, or obtaining some real good, is indeed an existent collateral idea, though a secondary one, in most men's desire of advancement. You will grant that moderately honest men desire place and office, at least in some measure, for the sake of beneficent power ; and wi)uld wish to associate rather with sensible and well-informed persons than with fools and ignorant persons, whether they are seen in the company of the sensible ones or not. And finally, without being troubled by repetition of any common truisms about the preciuus- ness of friends, and the influence of companions, you will admit, doubtless, that according to the sincerity of our desire that our friends may be true, and our companions wise, — and in proportion to the earnestness and discretion with which we choose both, will be the general chances of our happiness and usefulness. G. But, granting that we had both the will and the sense to 8 SESAME AND LILIES. choose our friends well, how few of us have the power ' or, at least, how limited, for most, is the sphere of choice ! Nearly all our associations are determined by chance, or necessity ; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would ; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open. We may, by good fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the sound of his voice ; or put a question to a man of science, and be answered good-humouredly. We may intrude ten minutes' talk on a cabinet minister, answered probably with words worse than silence, being deceptive ; or snatch, once or twice in our lives, the privilege of throwing a bouquet in the path of a Princess, or arresting the kind glance of a Queen. And yet these momentary chances w; covet ; and spend our years and passions, and powers in pursuit of little more than these ; while, meantime, there is a society continu- ally open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation ; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society^ because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting round us all day long, —kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grart audience, but to gain it ! — in those plainly furnished and narrow anterooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long ! 7. You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves, that the apathy with which we regard this company of the noble, who are praying us to listen to them ; and the passion with which we pursue the company, probably of the ignoble, who despise us, or who have nothing to teach us, are grounded in this, — that we can ■i OP KINC.a THKA8URIK8. i .^ see the faces of the living men, and it is themselves, and not their sayings, with which we desire to become familiar. Hut it is not bo. Suppose you never were to see their faces ; suppose you could be put behind a screen in the statesman's cabinet, or the prince's cham- ber, would you not be glad to listen to their words, thoui?h you were forbidden to advance beyond the screen ? And when the screen is only a little less, folded in two instead of four, and you can be hidden behind the cover of the two boards that bind abcmk, and listen all day long, not to the casual talk, but to the studied, determined, chc: i addresses of the wisest of men ; — this station of audience, and h ^nourable privy council, you despise ! 8. But pei.iHps you vili say that it is because the living people ta^k of things th^kt ice passing, and are of immediate interest to you, that you desire to hear them. Nay ; that cannot bo so, for the liv- ing people will themselves tell you about passing matters, much better in their writings than in their careless talk. But I admit that this motive does influence you, so f;»r as you prefer those rapid and ephemeral writings to slow and enduring writings— books, pro- perly so called. For all books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this distinction — it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. ^ ' is a distinction of species. There are good books for the hour, and good ones for all time ; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time. I must define the two kinds before I go farther. 9. The good book of the hour, then, — I do not speak of the bad ones — is simply the useful or pleasant talk of some person whom you cannot otherwise converse with, printed for you. Very useful often, telling you What you need to know ; very pleasant often, aB a sensible friend's present talk would be. These bright accounts of 10 SESAME AND LILItS. travels ; good-humoured and witty discussions of question ; lively or pathetic story-telling in the form of novel ; firm fact-telling by the real agents concerned in the events of passing history ; — all these books of the hour, multiplying among us as education becomes more general, are a peculiar possession of the present age ; we ought to be entirely thankful for them, and entirely ashamed of ourselves if we make no good use of them. But we make the wornt possible use if we allow them to usurp the place of true books ; for, strictly speaking, they are not books at all, but merely letters or newspapers in good print. Our friend's letter may be delightful, or necessary, to-day ; whether worth keeping or not, is to be considered. The newspaper may be entirely proper at breakfast time, but assuredly it is not reading for all day. So, though bound up in a volume, the long letter which gives you so pleasant an account of the inns, and roads, and weather last year at such a place, or which tells you that amusing story, or gives you the real circumstances of such and such events, however valuable for occasional reference, may not be, in the real sense of the word, a " book" at all, nor, in the real sense, to be "read." A book is essentially not a talked thing, but a written thing ; and written, not with the view of mere communi- cation, but of permanence. The book of talk is printed only because its author cannot speak to thousands of people at once ; if he could, he would — the volume is mere multiplication of his voice. You cannot talk to your friend in India ; if you could you would ; you write instead : that is mere conveyance of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate it. The author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. {*io far as he knows, no one has yet said it ; so far as he knows, no one else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melodiously if he LECTURE II.— LILIES. OF QUEKNS' GARDENS. - "Be thou glad, oh thirsting Desert; let the desert be made cheerful, and bloom as the lily; and the barren places of Jordan shall run wild with wood." — Isaiah 35, i. (Septuagint.) 51. It will, perhaps, be well, as this Lacture is the sequel of one previously given, that I should shortly state to you my general intention in both. The questions specially proposed to you in the first, namely, How and What to Read, rose out of a far deeper one, which it was my endeavour to make you propose earnestly to your- selves, namely, WJuj to Read. I want you to feel, with me, that whatever advantages we possess in the present day in the diffusion of education and of literature, can only be rightly used by any of us when we have apprehended clearly what education is to lead to, and literature to teach. I wish you to see that both well-directed moral training and well-chosen reading lead to the possession of a power over the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, according to the measure of it, in the truest sense, kingly; conferring indeed the purest kingship that can exist among men : too many other king- ships (however distinguished by visible insignia or material power) being either spectral, or tyrannous ; — Spectral — that is to say, aspects and shadows only of royalty, hollow as death, and which only the " Likeness of a kingly crown have on ; " or else tyrannous — that is to say, substituting their own will for the law of justice and love by which all true kings rule. 62. 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 12 SESAME AND LILIES. kind of kingship ; an inevitable and eternal kind, crowned or not ; the kingship, namely, which consists in a stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state, than that of others ; enabling you, there- fore, 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 "statute" — "the immoveable 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. 63. 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 our- selves, 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 aniong 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 ex- tending duty, until we are agreed what is their true constant duty. t'u OF QUEEN S GAIIDEXS. 1 And there never was a time when wilder words were spoken, or more vain imagination permitted, respecting this c[uestion— 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 irreconcileable 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. 55. 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 to receive from the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinion. u SESAME AND LILIES. 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 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 — Cjesar — 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, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless : conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity. 57. 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 »-' OF QUEEN S GARDENS. 15 # I 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 ho 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 hus- band. 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, and 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 petu- lance 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 appeared among the helplessness, the blind* 16 SESAME AND LILIES. ness, 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 Shake- speare'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 pro- portion 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. 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 testi- mony 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 th9 OF QUEENS GARDENS. 17 heroic type* — Daiidie Dininont, Rob Roy, and ClaverhouBe ; 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 char- acter, earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing with forms of hostile evil, d&anitely 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 Maclvor, 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 aft'ection, which does infinitely more than protect its objects from a momen- tary error ; it gradually forms, animates, and exalts the characters of the unworthy lovers, until, at the close of the tale, we are just * I ought, in order to make this assertion fully understood, to have uoted the various weaknesses which lower the ideal of other great characters of men in the Waverley Novels — the selfishness and uarrownesa 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 ofl&cers: Colonel Gardner, Colonel Talbot, and Colonel Mannering. HgH 18 SESAME AND LILIES. 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. 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.