Sesame and Lilies
by John Ruskin
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

by

John Ruskin

Contents:

Lecture I--Sesame
Lecture II--Lilies
Preface to the Later Editions
Lecture III--The Mystery of Life and its Arts

LECTURE I--SESAME. OF KING'S TREASURIES

"You shall each have a cake of sesame,--and ten pound."
Lucian: The Fisherman.

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 I am not going to talk of kings, known as regnant, nor of
treasuries, understood to contain wealth; but of quite another order
of royalty, and another material of riches, than those usually
acknowledged. I 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 make no effort
to touch the compass of it. I will try only to bring before you a
few simple thoughts about reading, which press themselves 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.

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'--minds. "The education befitting
such and such a STATION IN LIFE"--this is the phrase, this the
object, always. They never seek, as far as I can make out, an
education good in itself; 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 double-belled
doors; which shall result ultimately in establishment of a double-
belled door to his own house;--in a word, which shall lead to
advancement in life;--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 favour, to be got, if they set about it in the
wrong.

Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and effective in the mind of
this busiest of countries, I suppose the first--at least that which
is confessed with the greatest frankness, and put forward as the
fittest stimulus to youthful exertion--is this of "Advancement in
life."  May I ask you to consider with me, what this idea
practically 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 gratification of our thirst for applause. 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.

I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I want you only to
feel how it lies at the root of effort; especially of all modern
effort. It is the gratification of vanity which is, with us, the
stimulus of toil and balm of repose; so closely does it touch the
very springs of life that the wounding of our vanity is always
spoken of (and truly) as in its measure MORTAL; we call it
"mortification," using the same expression which we should apply to
a gangrenous and incurable bodily hurt. And although a few of us
may be physicians enough to recognise the various effect of this
passion upon health and energy, I believe most honest men know, and
would at once acknowledge, its leading power with them as a motive.
The seaman does not commonly desire to be made captain only because
he knows he can manage the ship better than any other sailor on
board. He wants to be made captain that he may be CALLED captain.
The clergyman does not usually want to be made a bishop only because
he believes that no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct the
diocese through its difficulties. He wants to be made bishop
primarily that he may be called "My Lord."  And a prince does not
usually desire to enlarge, or a subject to gain, a kingdom, because
he believes 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.

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
accidentally, and in matters out of the way of business."  I begin,
accordingly, tonight low in the scale of motives; but I must know if
you think me right in doing so. Therefore, let me ask those who
admit the love of praise to be usually the strongest motive in men's
minds in seeking advancement, and the honest desire of doing any
kind of duty to be an entirely secondary one, to hold up their
hands. (About a dozen hands held up--the audience, partly, not
being sure the lecturer is serious, and, partly, shy of expressing
opinion.)  I am quite serious--I really do want to know what you
think; however, I can judge by putting the reverse question. Will
those who think that duty is generally the first, and love of praise
the second, motive, hold up their hands? (One hand reported to have
been held up behind the lecturer.)  Very good: I see you are with
me, and that you think I have not begun too near the ground. Now,
without teasing you by putting farther question, I venture to assume
that you will admit duty as at least a secondary or tertiary motive.
You think that the desire of doing something useful, or obtaining
some real good, is indeed an 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 would 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 preciousness of friends,
and the influence of companions, you will admit, doubtless, that
according to the sincerity of our desire that our friends may be
true, and our companions wise,--and in proportion to the earnestness
and discretion with which we choose both,--will be the general
chances of our happiness and usefulness.

But, granting that we had both the will and the sense to choose our
friends well, how few of us have the power! or, at least, how
limited, for most, is the sphere of choice! Nearly all our
associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted
within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those
whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them.
All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath,
only momentarily and partially open. We may, by good fortune,
obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the sound of his voice;
or put a question to a man of science, and be answered good-
humouredly. We may intrude ten minutes' talk on a cabinet minister,
answered probably with words worse than silence, being deceptive; or
snatch, once or twice in our lives, the privilege of throwing a
bouquet in the path of a princess, or arresting the kind glance of a
queen. And yet these momentary chances we covet; and spend our
years, and passions, and powers, in pursuit of little more than
these; while, meantime, there is a society continually open to us,
of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank
or occupation;--talk to us in the best words they can choose, and 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 grant
audience, but to gain it!--in those plainly furnished and narrow
ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves,--we make no account of that
company,--perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day
long!

You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves, that the
apathy with which we regard this company of the noble, who are
praying us to listen to them; and the passion with which we pursue
the company, probably of the ignoble, who despise us, or who have
nothing to teach us, are grounded in this,--that we can see the
faces of the living men, and it is themselves, and not their
sayings, with which we desire to become familiar. But it is not so.
Suppose you never were to see their faces;--suppose you could be put
behind a screen in the statesman's cabinet, or the prince's chamber,
would you not be glad to listen to their words, though you were
forbidden to advance beyond the screen? And when the screen is only
a little less, folded in two instead of four, and you can be hidden
behind the cover of the two boards that bind a book, and listen all
day long, not to the casual talk, but to the studied, determined,
chosen addresses of the wisest of men;--this station of audience,
and honourable privy council, you despise!

But perhaps you will say that it is because the living people talk
of things that are passing, and are of immediate interest to you,
that you desire to hear them. Nay; that cannot be so, for the
living people will themselves tell you about passing matters much
better in their writings than in their careless talk. Yet I admit
that this motive does influence you, so far as you prefer those
rapid and ephemeral writings to slow and enduring writings--books,
properly so called. For all books are divisible into two classes,
the books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this
distinction--it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the
bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. It is a
distinction of species. There are good books for the hour, and good
ones for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all
time. I must define the two kinds before I go farther.

The good book of the hour, then,--I do not speak of the bad ones,--
is simply the useful or pleasant talk of some person whom you cannot
otherwise converse with, printed for you. Very useful often,
telling you what you need to know; very pleasant often, as a
sensible friend's present talk would be. These bright accounts of
travels; good-humoured and witty discussions of 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 worst
possible use if we allow them to usurp the place of true books:
for, strictly speaking, they are not books at all, but merely
letters or newspapers in good print. Our friend's letter may be
delightful, or necessary, to-day: whether worth keeping or not, is
to be considered. The newspaper may be entirely proper at breakfast
time, but assuredly it is not reading for all day. So, though bound
up in a volume, the long letter which gives you so pleasant an
account of the inns, and roads, and weather, last year at such a
place, or which tells you that amusing story, or gives you the real
circumstances of such and such events, however 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 talking thing, but a written thing; and written,
not with a view of mere communication, but of permanence. The book
of talk is printed only because its author cannot speak to thousands
of people at once; if he could, he would--the volume is mere
MULTIPLICATION of his voice. You cannot talk to your friend in
India; if you could, you would; you write instead: that is mere
CONVEYANCE of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply the
voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate it. The
author has something to say which he perceives to be true and
useful, or helpfully beautiful. So far as he knows, no one has yet
said it; so far as he knows, no one else can say it. He is bound to
say it, clearly and melodiously if he may; clearly at all events.
In the sum of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of
things, manifest to him;--this, the piece of true knowledge, or
sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to
seize. He would fain set it down for ever; engrave it on rock, if
he could; saying, "This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and
drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like another; my life was as the
vapour, and is not; but this I saw and knew: this, if anything of
mine, is worth your memory."  That is his "writing;" it is, in his
small human way, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is in
him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a "Book."

Perhaps you think no books were ever so written?

But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in honesty, or at all
in kindness, or do you think there is never any honesty or
benevolence in wise people? None of us, I hope, are so unhappy as
to think that. Well, whatever bit of a wise man's work is honestly
and benevolently done, that bit is his book or his piece of art. {5}
It is mixed always with evil fragments--ill-done, redundant,
affected work. But if you read rightly, you will easily discover
the true bits, and those ARE the book.

Now books of this kind have been written in all ages by their
greatest men:- by great readers, great statesmen, and great
thinkers. These are all at your choice; and Life is short. You
have heard as much before;--yet have you measured and mapped out
this short life and its possibilities? Do you know, if you read
this, that you cannot read that--that what you lose to-day you
cannot gain to-morrow? Will you go and gossip with your housemaid,
or your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and kings; or
flatter yourself that it is with any worthy consciousness of your
own claims to respect, that you jostle with the hungry and common
crowd for ENTREE here, and audience there, when all the while this
eternal court is open to you, with its society, wide as the world,
multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of every
place and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you may
take fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, once
entered into it, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by
your aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherent
aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you
strive to take high place in the society of the living, measured, as
to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place you
desire to take in this company of the Dead.

"The place you desire," and the place you FIT YOURSELF FOR, I must
also say; because, observe, this court of the past differs from all
living aristocracy in this:- it is open to labour and to merit, but
to nothing else. No wealth will bribe, no name overawe, no artifice
deceive, the guardian of those Elysian gates. In the deep sense, no
vile or vulgar person ever enters there. At the portieres of that
silent Faubourg St. Germain, there is but brief question:- "Do you
deserve to enter? Pass. Do you ask to be the companion of nobles?
Make yourself noble, and you shall be. Do you long for the
conversation of the wise? Learn to understand it, and you shall
hear it. But on other terms?--no. If you will not rise to us, we
cannot stoop to you. The living lord may assume courtesy, the
living philosopher explain his thought to you with considerate pain;
but here we neither feign nor interpret; you must rise to the level
of our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, and share our
feelings, if you would recognise our presence."

This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit that it is much.
You must, in a word, love these people, if you are to be among them.
No ambition is of any use. They scorn your ambition. You must love
them, and show your love in these two following ways.

(1)  First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and to enter into
their thoughts. To enter into theirs, observe; not to find your own
expressed by them. If the person who wrote the book is not wiser
than you, you need not read it; if he be, he will think differently
from you in many respects.

(2)  Very ready we are to say of a book, "How good this is--that's
exactly what I think!"  But the right feeling is, "How strange that
is! I never thought of that before, and yet I see it is true; or if
I do not now, I hope I shall, some day."  But whether thus
submissively or not, at least be sure that you go to the author to
get at HIS meaning, not to find yours. Judge it afterwards if you
think yourself qualified to do so; but ascertain it first. And be
sure, also, if the author is worth anything, that you will not get
at his meaning all at once;--nay, that at his whole meaning you will
not for a long time arrive in any wise. Not that he does not say
what he means, and in strong words too; but he cannot say it all;
and what is more strange, will not, but in a hidden way and in
parables, in order that he may be sure you want it. I cannot quite
see the reason of this, nor analyse that cruel reticence in the
breasts of wise men which makes them always hide their deeper
thought. They do not give it you by way of help, but of reward; and
will make themselves sure that you deserve it before they allow you
to reach it. But it is the same with the physical type of wisdom,
gold. There seems, to you and me, no reason why the electric forces
of the earth should not carry whatever there is of gold within it at
once to the mountain tops, so that kings and people might know that
all the gold they could get was there; and without any trouble of
digging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, and
coin as much as they needed. But Nature does not manage it so. She
puts it in little fissures in the earth, nobody knows where: you
may dig long and find none; you must dig painfully to find any.

And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. When you come to a
good book, you must ask yourself, "Am I inclined to work as an
Australian miner would? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order,
and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and
my breath good, and my temper?"  And, keeping the figure a little
longer, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly useful
one, the metal you are in search of being the author's mind or
meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt
in order to get at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit,
and learning; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do
not hope to get at any good author's meaning without those tools and
that fire; often you will need sharpest, finest chiselling, and
patientest fusing, before you can gather one grain of the metal.

And, therefore, first of all, I tell you earnestly and
authoritatively (I KNOW I am right in this), you must get into the
habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their
meaning, syllable by syllable--nay, letter by letter. For though it
is only by reason of the opposition of letters in the function of
signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the study of books
is called "literature," and that a man versed in it is called, by
the consent of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books,
or of words, you may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature
this real fact:- that you might read all the books in the British
Museum (if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly
"illiterate," uneducated person; but that if you read ten pages of a
good book, letter by letter,--that is to say, with real accuracy,--
you are for evermore in some measure an educated person. The entire
difference between education and non-education (as regards the
merely intellectual part of it), consists in this accuracy. A well-
educated gentleman may not know many languages,--may not be able to
speak any but his own,--may have read very few books. But whatever
language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces,
he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the PEERAGE of
words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood, at a
glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry,
their intermarriages, distant relationships, and the extent to which
they were admitted, and offices they held, among the national
noblesse of words at any time, and in any country. But an
uneducated person may know, by memory, many languages, and talk them
all, and yet truly know not a word of any,--not a word even of his
own. An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able to make
his way ashore at most ports; yet he has only to speak a sentence of
any language to be known for an illiterate person: so also the
accent, or turn of expression of a single sentence, will at once
mark a scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so conclusively
admitted, by educated persons, that a false accent or a mistaken
syllable is enough, in the parliament of any civilized nation, to
assign to a man a certain degree of inferior standing for ever.

And this is right; but it is a pity that the accuracy insisted on is
not greater, and required to a serious purpose. It is right that a
false Latin quantity should excite a smile in the House of Commons;
but it is wrong that a false English MEANING should NOT excite a
frown there. Let the accent of words be watched; and closely: let
their meaning be watched more closely still, and fewer will do the
work. A few words well chosen, and distinguished, will do work that
a thousand cannot, when every one is acting, equivocally, in the
function of another. Yes; and words, if they are not watched, will
do deadly work sometimes. There are masked words droning and
skulking about us in Europe just now,--(there never were so many,
owing to the spread of a shallow, blotching, blundering, infectious
"information," or rather deformation, everywhere, and to the
teaching of catechisms and phrases at school instead of human
meanings)--there are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody
understands, but which everybody uses, and most people will also
fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this or
that, or the other, of things dear to them: for such words wear
chameleon cloaks--"ground-lion" cloaks, of the colour of the ground
of any man's fancy: on that ground they lie in wait, and rend them
with a spring from it. There never were creatures of prey so
mischievous, never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so
deadly, as these masked words; they are the unjust stewards of all
men's ideas: whatever fancy or favourite instinct a man most
cherishes, he gives to his favourite masked word to take care of for
him; the word at last comes to have an infinite power over him,--you
cannot get at him but by its ministry.

And in languages so mongrel in breed as the English, there is a
fatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, almost whether
they will or no, in being able to use Greek or Latin words for an
idea when they want it to be awful; and Saxon or otherwise common
words when they want it to be vulgar. What a singular and salutary
effect, for instance, would be produced on the minds of people who
are in the habit of taking the Form of the "Word" they live by, for
the Power of which that Word tells them, if we always either
retained, or refused, the Greek form "biblos," or "biblion," as the
right expression for "book"--instead of employing it only in the one
instance in which we wish to give dignity to the idea, and
translating it into English everywhere else. How wholesome it would
be for many simple persons if, in such places (for instance) as Acts
xix. 19, we retained the Greek expression, instead of translating
it, and they had to read--"Many of them also which used curious
arts, brought their bibles together, and burnt them before all men;
and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand
pieces of silver"! Or if, on the other hand, we translated where we
retain it, and always spoke of "The Holy Book," instead of "Holy
Bible," it might come into more heads than it does at present, that
the Word of God, by which the heavens were, of old, and by which
they are now kept in store, {6} cannot be made a present of to
anybody in morocco binding; nor sown on any wayside by help either
of steam plough or steam press; but is nevertheless being offered to
us daily, and by us with contumely refused; and sown in us daily,
and by us, as instantly as may be, choked.

So, again, consider what effect has been produced on the English
vulgar mind by the use of the sonorous Latin form "damno," in
translating the Greek [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], when
people charitably wish to make it forcible; and the substitution of
the temperate "condemn" for it, when they choose to keep it gentle;
and what notable sermons have been preached by illiterate clergymen
on--"He that believeth not shall be damned;" though they would
shrink with horror from translating Heb. xi. 7, "The saving of his
house, by which he damned the world," or John viii. 10-11, "Woman,
hath no man damned thee? She saith, No man, Lord. Jesus answered
her, Neither do I damn thee: go and sin no more."  And divisions in
the mind of Europe, which have cost seas of blood, and in the
defence of which the noblest souls of men have been cast away in
frantic desolation, countless as forest-leaves--though, in the heart
of them, founded on deeper causes--have nevertheless been rendered
practically possible, mainly, by the European adoption of the Greek
word for a public meeting, "ecclesia," to give peculiar
respectability to such meetings, when held for religious purposes;
and other collateral equivocations, such as the vulgar English one
of using the word "Priest" as a contraction for "presbyter."

Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the habit you must
form. Nearly every word in your language has been first a word of
some other language--of Saxon, German, French, Latin, or Greek; (not
to speak of eastern and primitive dialects). And many words have
been all these--that is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next,
French or German next, and English last: undergoing a certain
change of sense and use on the lips of each nation; but retaining a
deep vital meaning, which all good scholars feel in employing them,
even at this day. If you do not know the Greek alphabet, learn it;
young or old--girl or boy--whoever you may be, if you think of
reading seriously (which, of course, implies that you have some
leisure at command), learn your Greek alphabet; then get good
dictionaries of all these languages, and whenever you are in doubt
about a word, hunt it down patiently. Read Max Muller's lectures
thoroughly, to begin with; and, after that, never let a word escape
you that looks suspicious. It is severe work; but you will find it,
even at first, interesting, and at last endlessly amusing. And the
general gain to your character, in power and precision, will be
quite incalculable.

Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to know, Greek or
Latin, or French. It takes a whole life to learn any language
perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the meanings through which
the English word has passed; and those which in a good writer's work
it must still bear.

And now, merely for example's sake, I will, with your permission,
read a few lines of a true book with you, carefully; and see what
will come out of them. I will take a book perfectly known to you
all. No English words are more familiar to us, yet few perhaps have
been read with less sincerity. I will take these few following
lines of Lycidas:-

"Last came, and last did go,
The pilot of the Galilean lake.
Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain,)
He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake,
'How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,
Enow of such as for their bellies' sake
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold!
Of other care they little reckoning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest;
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else, the least
That to the faithful herdman's art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said.'"

Let us think over this passage, and examine its words.

First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to St. Peter, not
only his full episcopal function, but the very types of it which
Protestants usually refuse most passionately? His "mitred" locks!
Milton was no Bishop-lover; how comes St. Peter to be "mitred"?
"Two massy keys he bore."  Is this, then, the power of the keys
claimed by the Bishops of Rome? and is it acknowledged here by
Milton only in a poetical licence, for the sake of its
picturesqueness, that he may get the gleam of the golden keys to
help his effect?

Do not think it. Great men do not play stage tricks with the
doctrines of life and death: only little men do that. Milton means
what he says; and means it with his might too--is going to put the
whole strength of his spirit presently into the saying of it. For
though not a lover of false bishops, he WAS a lover of true ones;
and the Lake-pilot is here, in his thoughts, the type and head of
true episcopal power. For Milton reads that text, "I will give unto
thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven," quite honestly. Puritan
though he be, he would not blot it out of the book because there
have been bad bishops; nay, in order to understand HIM, we must
understand that verse first; it will not do to eye it askance, or
whisper it under our breath, as if it were a weapon of an adverse
sect. It is a solemn, universal assertion, deeply to be kept in
mind by all sects. But perhaps we shall be better able to reason on
it if we go on a little farther, and come back to it. For clearly
this marked insistence on the power of the true episcopate is to
make us feel more weightily what is to be charged against the false
claimants of episcopate; or generally, against false claimants of
power and rank in the body of the clergy; they who, "for their
bellies' sake, creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold."

Never think Milton uses those three words to fill up his verse, as a
loose writer would. He needs all the three;--especially those
three, and no more than those--"creep," and "intrude," and "climb;"
no other words would or could serve the turn, and no more could be
added. For they exhaustively comprehend the three classes,
correspondent to the three characters, of men who dishonestly seek
ecclesiastical power. First, those who "CREEP" into the fold; who
do not care for office, nor name, but for secret influence, and do
all things occultly and cunningly, consenting to any servility of
office or conduct, so only that they may intimately discern, and
unawares direct, the minds of men. Then those who "intrude"
(thrust, that is) themselves into the fold, who by natural insolence
of heart, and stout eloquence of tongue, and fearlessly perseverant
self-assertion, obtain hearing and authority with the common crowd.
Lastly, those who "climb," who, by labour and learning, both stout
and sound, but selfishly exerted in the cause of their own ambition,
gain high dignities and authorities, and become "lords over the
heritage," though not "ensamples to the flock."

Now go on:-

"Of other care they little reckoning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast.
BLIND MOUTHS--"

I pause again, for this is a strange expression; a broken metaphor,
one might think, careless and unscholarly.

Not so: its very audacity and pithiness are intended to make us
look close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllables
express the precisely accurate contraries of right character, in the
two great offices of the Church--those of bishop and pastor.

A "Bishop" means "a person who sees."

A "Pastor" means "a person who feeds."

The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be
Blind.

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed,--to
be a Mouth.

Take the two reverses together, and you have "blind mouths."  We may
advisably follow out this idea a little. Nearly all the evils in
the Church have arisen from bishops desiring POWER more than LIGHT.
They want authority, not outlook. Whereas their real office is not
to rule; though it may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke: it is
the king's office to rule; the bishop's office is to OVERSEE the
flock; to number it, sheep by sheep; to be ready always to give full
account of it. Now it is clear he cannot give account of the souls,
if he has not so much as numbered the bodies, of his flock. The
first thing, therefore, that a bishop has to do is at least to put
himself in a position in which, at any moment, he can obtain the
history, from childhood, of every living soul in his diocese, and of
its present state. Down in that back street, Bill, and Nancy,
knocking each other's teeth out!--Does the bishop know all about it?
Has he his eye upon them? Has he HAD his eye upon them? Can he
circumstantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit of
beating Nancy about the head? If he cannot, he is no bishop, though
he had a mitre as high as Salisbury steeple; he is no bishop,--he
has sought to be at the helm instead of the masthead; he has no
sight of things. "Nay," you say, "it is not his duty to look after
Bill in the back street."  What! the fat sheep that have full
fleeces--you think it is only those he should look after while (go
back to your Milton) "the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw" (bishops knowing nothing
about it), "daily devours apace, and nothing said"?

"But that's not our idea of a bishop." {7} Perhaps not; but it was
St. Paul's; and it was Milton's. They may be right, or we may be;
but we must not think we are reading either one or the other by
putting our meaning into their words.

I go on.

"But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw."

This is to meet the vulgar answer that "if the poor are not looked
after in their bodies, they are in their souls; they have spiritual
food."

And Milton says, "They have no such thing as spiritual food; they
are only swollen with wind."  At first you may think that is a
coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, it is a quite literally
accurate one. Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries, and find
out the meaning of "Spirit."  It is only a contraction of the Latin
word "breath," and an indistinct translation of the Greek word for
"wind."  The same word is used in writing, "The wind bloweth where
it listeth;" and in writing, "So is every one that is born of the
Spirit;" born of the BREATH, that is; for it means the breath of
God, in soul and body. We have the true sense of it in our words
"inspiration" and "expire."  Now, there are two kinds of breath with
which the flock may be filled,--God's breath, and man's. The breath
of God is health, and life, and peace to them, as the air of heaven
is to the flocks on the hills; but man's breath--the word which HE
calls spiritual,--is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of
the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a
dead body by the vapours of its own decomposition. This is
literally true of all false religious teaching; the first and last,
and fatalest sign of it, is that "puffing up."  Your converted
children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, who
teach honest men; your converted dunces, who, having lived in
cretinous stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awaking to the
fact of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiar
people and messengers; your sectarians of every species, small and
great, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as
they think themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong;
and, pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can be
saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word instead
of act, and wish instead of work;--these are the true fog children--
clouds, these, without water; bodies, these, of putrescent vapour
and skin, without blood or flesh: blown bag-pipes for the fiends to
pipe with--corrupt, and corrupting,--" Swollen with wind, and the
rank mist they draw."

Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power of the keys,
for now we can understand them. Note the difference between Milton
and Dante in their interpretation of this power: for once, the
latter is weaker in thought; he supposes BOTH the keys to be of the
gate of heaven; one is of gold, the other of silver: they are given
by St. Peter to the sentinel angel; and it is not easy to determine
the meaning either of the substances of the three steps of the gate,
or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, the key of
heaven; the other, of iron, the key of the prison in which the
wicked teachers are to be bound who "have taken away the key of
knowledge, yet entered not in themselves."

We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to see, and
feed; and of all who do so it is said, "He that watereth, shall be
watered also himself."  But the reverse is truth also. He that
watereth not, shall be WITHERED himself; and he that seeth not,
shall himself be shut out of sight--shut into the perpetual prison-
house. And that prison opens here, as well as hereafter: he who is
to be bound in heaven must first be bound on earth. That command to
the strong angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, "Take
him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast him out," issues, in its
measure, against the teacher, for every help withheld, and for every
truth refused, and for every falsehood enforced; so that he is more
strictly fettered the more he fetters, and farther outcast as he
more and more misleads, till at last the bars of the iron cage close
upon him, and as "the golden opes, the iron shuts amain."

We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much more is
yet to be found in them; but we have done enough by way of example
of the kind of word-by-word examination of your author which is
rightly called "reading;" watching every accent and expression, and
putting ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our own
personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able
assuredly to say, "Thus Milton thought," not "Thus I thought, in
misreading Milton."  And by this process you will gradually come to
attach less weight to your own "Thus I thought" at other times. You
will begin to perceive that what YOU thought was a matter of no
serious importance;--that your thoughts on any subject are not
perhaps the clearest and wisest that could be arrived at thereupon:-
in fact, that unless you are a very singular person, you cannot be
said to have any "thoughts" at all; that you have no materials for
them, in any serious matters; {8}--no right to "think," but only to
try to learn more of the facts. Nay, most probably all your life
(unless, as I said, you are a singular person) you will have no
legitimate right to an "opinion" on any business, except that
instantly under your hand. What must of necessity be done, you can
always find out, beyond question, how to do. Have you a house to
keep in order, a commodity to sell, a field to plough, a ditch to
cleanse? There need be no two opinions about these proceedings; it
is at your peril if you have not much more than an "opinion" on the
way to manage such matters. And also, outside of your own business,
there are one or two subjects on which you are bound to have but one
opinion. That roguery and lying are objectionable, and are
instantly to be flogged out of the way whenever discovered;--that
covetousness and love of quarrelling are dangerous dispositions even
in children, and deadly dispositions in men and nations;--that, in
the end, the God of heaven and earth loves active, modest, and kind
people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones;--on these
general facts you are bound to have but one, and that a very strong,
opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, governments, sciences,
arts, you will find that, on the whole, you can know NOTHING,--judge
nothing; that the best you can do, even though you may be a well-
educated person, is to be silent, and strive to be wiser every day,
and to understand a little more of the thoughts of others, which so
soon as you try to do honestly, you will discover that the thoughts
even of the wisest are very little more than pertinent questions.
To put the difficulty into a clear shape, and exhibit to you the
grounds for INdecision, that is all they can generally do for you!--
and well for them and for us, if indeed they are able "to mix the
music with our thoughts and sadden us with heavenly doubts."  This
writer, from whom I have been reading to you, is not among the first
or wisest: he sees shrewdly as far as he sees, and therefore it is
easy to find out its full meaning; but with the greater men, you
cannot fathom their meaning; they do not even wholly measure it
themselves,--it is so wide. Suppose I had asked you, for instance,
to seek for Shakespeare's opinion, instead of Milton's on this
matter of Church authority?--or for Dante's? Have any of you, at
this instant, the least idea what either thought about it? Have you
ever balanced the scene with the bishops in 'Richard III.' against
the character of Cranmer? the description of St. Francis and St.
Dominic against that of him who made Virgil wonder to gaze upon
him,--"disteso, tanto vilmente, nell' eterno esilio;" or of him whom
Dante stood beside, "come 'l frate che confessa lo perfido
assassin?" {9}  Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men better than most
of us, I presume! They were both in the midst of the main struggle
between the temporal and spiritual powers. They had an opinion, we
may guess. But where is it? Bring it into court! Put
Shakespeare's or Dante's creed into articles, and send IT up for
trial by the Ecclesiastical Courts!

You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and many a day, to
come at the real purposes and teaching of these great men; but a
very little honest study of them will enable you to perceive that
what you took for your own "judgment" was mere chance prejudice, and
drifted, helpless, entangled weed of castaway thought; nay, you will
see that most men's minds are indeed little better than rough heath
wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, partly overgrown
with pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind-sown herbage of evil
surmise; that the first thing you have to do for them, and yourself,
is eagerly and scornfully to set fire to THIS; burn all the jungle
into wholesome ash-heaps, and then plough and sow. All the true
literary work before you, for life, must begin with obedience to
that order, "Break up your fallow ground, and SOW NOT AMONG THORNS."

II. {10} Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers,
that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this higher
advance to make;--you have to enter into their Hearts. As you go to
them first for clear sight, so you must stay with them, that you may
share at last their just and mighty Passion. Passion, or
"sensation."  I am not afraid of the word; still less of the thing.
You have heard many outcries against sensation lately; but, I can
tell you, it is not less sensation we want, but more. The ennobling
difference between one man and another,--between one animal and
another,--is precisely in this, that one feels more than another.
If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not be easily got for
us; if we were earth-worms, liable at every instant to be cut in two
by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us.
But being human creatures, IT IS good for us; nay, we are only human
in so far as we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely in
proportion to our passion.

You know I said of that great and pure society of the Dead, that it
would allow "no vain or vulgar person to enter there."  What do you
think I meant by a "vulgar" person? What do you yourselves mean by
"vulgarity"? You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but,
briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation.
Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped
bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a
dreadful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every
sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure,
without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the
dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that
men become vulgar; they are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportion
as they are incapable of sympathy,--of quick understanding,--of all
that, in deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may
be called the "tact" or "touch-faculty," of body and soul: that
tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above
all creatures;--fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason;--
the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but determine
what is true:- it is the God-given passion of humanity which alone
can recognise what God has made good.

We come then to that great concourse of the Dead, not merely to know
from them what is True, but chiefly to feel with them what is just.
Now, to feel with them, we must be like them; and none of us can
become that without pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and
tested knowledge,--not the first thought that comes, so the true
passion is disciplined and tested passion,--not the first passion
that comes. The first that come are the vain, the false, the
treacherous; if you yield to them they will lead you wildly and far,
in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true purpose
and no true passion left. Not that any feeling possible to humanity
is in itself wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined. Its nobility
is in its force and justice; it is wrong when it is weak, and felt
for paltry cause. There is a mean wonder, as of a child who sees a
juggler tossing golden balls; and this is base, if you will. But do
you think that the wonder is ignoble, or the sensation less, with
which every human soul is called to watch the golden balls of heaven
tossed through the night by the Hand that made them? There is a
mean curiosity, as of a child opening a forbidden door, or a servant
prying into her master's business;--and a noble curiosity,
questioning, in the front of danger, the source of the great river
beyond the sand,--the place of the great continents beyond the sea;-
-a nobler curiosity still, which questions of the source of the
River of Life, and of the space of the Continent of Heaven,--things
which "the angels desire to look into."  So the anxiety is ignoble,
with which you linger over the course and catastrophe of an idle
tale; but do you think the anxiety is less, or greater, with which
you watch, or OUGHT to watch, the dealings of fate and destiny with
the life of an agonized nation? Alas! it is the narrowness,
selfishness, minuteness, of your sensation that you have to deplore
in England at this day;--sensation which spends itself in bouquets
and speeches: in revellings and junketings; in sham fights and gay
puppet shows, while you can look on and see noble nations murdered,
man by man, without an effort or a tear.

I said "minuteness" and "selfishness" of sensation, but it would
have been enough to have said "injustice" or "unrighteousness" of
sensation. For as in nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned
from a vulgar person, so in nothing is a gentle nation (such nations
have been) better to be discerned from a mob, than in this,--that
their feelings are constant and just, results of due contemplation,
and of equal thought. You can talk a mob into anything; its
feelings may be--usually are--on the whole, generous and right; but
it has no foundation for them, no hold of them; you may tease or
tickle it into any, at your pleasure; it thinks by infection, for
the most part, catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing
so little that it will not roar itself wild about, when the fit is
on;--nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, when the fit is
past. But a gentleman's, or a gentle nation's, passions are just,
measured, and continuous. A great nation, for instance, does not
spend its entire national wits for a couple of months in weighing
evidence of a single ruffian's having done a single murder; and for
a couple of years see its own children murder each other by their
thousands or tens of thousands a day, considering only what the
effect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and caring no wise to
determine which side of battle is in the wrong. Neither does a
great nation send its poor little boys to jail for stealing six
walnuts; and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds of
thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor men's savings,
to close their doors "under circumstances over which they have no
control," with a "by your leave;" and large landed estates to be
bought by men who have made their money by going with armed steamers
up and down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth, and
altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the common
highwayman's demand of "your money OR your life," into that of "your
money AND your life."  Neither does a great nation allow the lives
of its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, and
rotted out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a
life extra per week to its landlords; {11} and then debate, with
drivelling tears, and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought not
piously to save, and nursingly cherish, the lives of its murderers.
Also, a great nation having made up its mind that hanging is quite
the wholesomest process for its homicides in general, can yet with
mercy distinguish between the degrees of guilt in homicides; and
does not yelp like a pack of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood-
track of an unhappy crazed boy, or grey-haired clodpate Othello,
"perplexed i' the extreme," at the very moment that it is sending a
Minister of the Crown to make polite speeches to a man who is
bayoneting young girls in their fathers' sight, and killing noble
youths in cool blood, faster than a country butcher kills lambs in
spring. And, lastly, a great nation does not mock Heaven and its
Powers, by pretending belief in a revelation which asserts the love
of money to be the root of ALL evil, and declaring, at the same
time, that it is actuated, and intends to be actuated, in all chief
national deeds and measures, by no other love. {12}

My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk about reading.
We want some sharper discipline than that of reading; but, at all
events, be assured, we cannot read. No reading is possible for a
people with its mind in this state. No sentence of any great writer
is intelligible to them. It is simply and sternly impossible for
the English public, at this moment, to understand any thoughtful
writing,--so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of
avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse than this
incapacity of thought; it is not corruption of the inner nature; we
ring true still, when anything strikes home to us; and though the
idea that everything should "pay" has infected our every purpose so
deeply, that even when we would play the good Samaritan, we never
take out our two pence and give them to the host, without saying,
"When I come again, thou shalt give me fourpence," there is a
capacity of noble passion left in our hearts' core. We show it in
our work--in our war,--even in those unjust domestic affections
which make us furious at a small private wrong, while we are polite
to a boundless public one: we are still industrious to the last
hour of the day, though we add the gambler's fury to the labourer's
patience; we are still brave to the death, though incapable of
discerning true cause for battle; and are still true in affection to
our own flesh, to the death, as the sea-monsters are, and the rock-
eagles. And there is hope for a nation while this can be still said
of it. As long as it holds its life in its hand, ready to give it
for its honour (though a foolish honour), for its love (though a
selfish love), and for its business (though a base business), there
is hope for it. But hope only; for this instinctive, reckless
virtue cannot last. No nation can last, which has made a mob of
itself, however generous at heart. It must discipline its passions,
and direct them, or they will discipline it, one day, with scorpion
whips. Above all, a nation cannot last as a money-making mob: it
cannot with impunity,--it cannot with existence,--go on despising
literature, despising science, despising art, despising nature,
despising compassion, and concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you
think these are harsh or wild words? Have patience with me but a
little longer. I will prove their truth to you, clause by clause.

(I.)  I say first we have despised literature. What do we, as a
nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether
on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend
on our horses? If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call
him mad--a bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horsemaniac,
though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not
hear of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower
still, how much do you think the contents of the book-shelves of the
United Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared with
the contents of its wine-cellars? What position would its
expenditure on literature take, as compared with its expenditure on
luxurious eating? We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the
body: now a good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it is a
provision for life, and for the best part of us; yet how long most
people would look at the best book before they would give the price
of a large turbot for it? Though there have been men who have
pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose
libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than most men's
dinners are. We are few of us put to such trial, and more the pity;
for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more precious to us if it
has been won by work or economy; and if public libraries were half
so costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what
bracelets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspect
there was good in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling:
whereas the very cheapness of literature is making even wise people
forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book
is worth anything which is not worth MUCH; nor is it serviceable,
until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and
marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it, as a
soldier can seize the weapon he needs in an armoury, or a housewife
bring the spice she needs from her store. Bread of flour is good;
but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good
book; and the family must be poor indeed, which, once in their
lives, cannot, for, such multipliable barley-loaves, pay their
baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthy
and foolish enough to thumb each other's books out of circulating
libraries!

(II.)  I say we have despised science. "What!" you exclaim, "are we
not foremost in all discovery, {13} and is not the whole world giddy
by reason, or unreason, of our inventions?"  Yes; but do you suppose
that is national work? That work is all done IN SPITE OF the
nation; by private people's zeal and money. We are glad enough,
indeed, to make our profit of science; we snap up anything in the
way of a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly enough; but if
the scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to US, that is
another story. What have we publicly done for science? We are
obliged to know what o'clock it is, for the safety of our ships, and
therefore we pay for an observatory; and we allow ourselves, in the
person of our Parliament, to be annually tormented into doing
something, in a slovenly way, for the British Museum; sullenly
apprehending that to be a place for keeping stuffed birds in, to
amuse our children. If anybody will pay for their own telescope,
and resolve another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it
were our own; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires suddenly
perceives that the earth was indeed made to be something else than a
portion for foxes, and burrows in it himself, and tells us where the
gold is, and where the coals, we understand that there is some use
in that; and very properly knight him: but is the accident of his
having found out how to employ himself usefully any credit to US?
(The negation of such discovery among his brother squires may
perhaps be some discredit to us, if we would consider of it.)  But
if you doubt these generalities, here is one fact for us all to
meditate upon, illustrative of our love of science. Two years ago
there was a collection of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in
Bavaria; the best in existence, containing many specimens unique for
perfectness, and one unique as an example of a species (a whole
kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by that fossil).
This collection, of which the mere market worth, among private
buyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve hundred
pounds, was offered to the English nation for seven hundred: but we
would not give seven hundred, and the whole series would have been
in the Munich Museum at this moment, if Professor Owen {14} had not,
with loss of his own time, and patient tormenting of the British
public in person of its representatives, got leave to give four
hundred pounds at once, and himself become answerable for the other
three! which the said public will doubtless pay him eventually, but
sulkily, and caring nothing about the matter all the while; only
always ready to cackle if any credit comes of it. Consider, I beg
of you, arithmetically, what this fact means. Your annual
expenditure for public purposes, (a third of it for military
apparatus,) is at least 50 millions. Now 700L. is to 50,000,000L.
roughly, as seven pence to two thousand pounds. Suppose, then, a
gentleman of unknown income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured
from the fact that he spent two thousand a year on his park-walls
and footmen only, professes himself fond of science; and that one of
his servants comes eagerly to tell him that an unique collection of
fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to be had for the
sum of seven pence sterling; and that the gentleman who is fond of
science, and spends two thousand a year on his park, answers, after
keeping his servant waiting several months, "Well! I'll give you
fourpence for them, if you will be answerable for the extra
threepence yourself, till next year!"

(III.)  I say you have despised Art! "What!" you again answer,
"have we not Art exhibitions, miles long? and do we not pay
thousands of pounds for single pictures? and have we not Art schools
and institutions,--more than ever nation had before?"  Yes, truly,
but all that is for the sake of the shop. You would fain sell
canvas as well as coals, and crockery as well as iron; you would
take every other nation's bread out of its mouth if you could; {15}
not being able to do that, your ideal of life is to stand in the
thoroughfares of the world, like Ludgate apprentices, screaming to
every passer-by, "What d'ye lack?"  You know nothing of your own
faculties or circumstances; you fancy that, among your damp, flat,
fat fields of clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as the Frenchman
among his bronzed vines, or the Italian under his volcanic cliffs;--
that Art may be learned, as book-keeping is, and when learned, will
give you more books to keep. You care for pictures, absolutely, no
more than you do for the bills pasted on your dead walls. There is
always room on the walls for the bills to be read,--never for the
pictures to be seen. You do not know what pictures you have (by
repute) in the country, nor whether they are false or true, nor
whether they are taken care of or not; in foreign countries, you
calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the world rotting in
abandoned wreck--(in Venice you saw the Austrian guns deliberately
pointed at the palaces containing them), and if you heard that all
the fine pictures in Europe were made into sand-bags to-morrow on
the Austrian forts, it would not trouble you so much as the chance
of a brace or two of game less in your own bags, in a day's
shooting. That is your national love of Art.

(IV.)  You have despised Nature; that is to say, all the deep and
sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revolutionists
made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made race-courses
of the cathedrals of the earth. Your ONE conception of pleasure is
to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their
altars. {16} You have put a railroad-bridge over the falls of
Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's
chapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva;
there is not a quiet valley in England that you have not filled with
bellowing fire; there is no particle left of English land which you
have not trampled coal ashes into {17}--nor any foreign city in
which the spread of your presence is not marked among its fair old
streets and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new hotels
and perfumers' shops: the Alps themselves, which your own poets
used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-
garden, which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again, with
"shrieks of delight."  When you are past shrieking, having no human
articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of
their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with
cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough
of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrowfullest
spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the deep inner
significance of them, are the English mobs in the valley of
Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty howitzers; and the
Swiss vintagers of Zurich expressing their Christian thanks for the
gift of the vine, by assembling in knots in the "towers of the
vineyards," and slowly loading and firing horse-pistols from morning
till evening. It is pitiful, to have dim conceptions of duty; more
pitiful, it seems to me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth.

Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no need of words of mine
for proof of this. I will merely print one of the newspaper
paragraphs which I am in the habit of cutting out and throwing into
my store-drawer; here is one from a 'Daily Telegraph' of an early
date this year (1867); (date which, though by me carelessly left
unmarked, is easily discoverable; for on the back of the slip there
is the announcement that "yesterday the seventh of the special
services of this year was performed by the Bishop of Ripon in St.
Paul's";) it relates only one of such facts as happen now daily;
this by chance having taken a form in which it came before the
coroner. I will print the paragraph in red. Be sure, the facts
themselves are written in that colour, in a book which we shall all
OF us, literate or illiterate, have to read our page of, some day.

An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy coroner, at
the White Horse Tavern, Christ Church, Spitalfields, respecting the
death of Michael Collins, aged 58 years. Mary Collins, a miserable-
looking woman, said that she lived with the deceased and his son in
a room at 2, Cobb's Court, Christ Church. Deceased was a
"translator" of boots. Witness went out and bought old boots;
deceased and his son made them into good ones, and then witness sold
them for what she could get at the shops, which was very little
indeed. Deceased and his son used to work night and day to try and
get a little bread and tea, and pay for the room (2S. a week), so as
to keep the home together. On Friday-night-week deceased got up
from his bench and began to shiver. He threw down the boots,
saying, "Somebody else must finish them when I am gone, for I can do
no more."  There was no fire, and he said, "I would be better if I
was warm."  Witness therefore took two pairs of translated boots
{18} to sell at the shop, but she could only get 14D. for the two
pairs, for the people at the shop said, "We must have our profit."
Witness got 14lb. of coal, and a little tea and bread. Her son sat
up the whole night to make the "translations," to get money, but
deceased died on Saturday morning. The family never had enough to
eat.--Coroner: "It seems to me deplorable that you did not go into
the workhouse."  Witness: "We wanted the comforts of our little
home."  A juror asked what the comforts were, for he only saw a
little straw in the corner of the room, the windows of which were
broken. The witness began to cry, and said that they had a quilt
and other little things. The deceased said he never would go into
the workhouse. In summer, when the season was good, they sometimes
made as much as 10S. profit in the week. They then always saved
towards the next week, which was generally a bad one. In winter
they made not half so much. For three years they had been getting
from bad to worse.--Cornelius Collins said that he had assisted his
father since 1847. They used to work so far into the night that
both nearly lost their eyesight. Witness now had a film over his
eyes. Five years ago deceased applied to the parish for aid. The
relieving officer gave him a 4lb. loaf, and told him if he came
again he should "get the stones." {19}  That disgusted deceased, and
he would have nothing to do with them since. They got worse and
worse until last Friday week, when they had not even a half-penny to
buy a candle. Deceased then lay down on the straw, and said he
could not live till morning.--A juror: "You are dying of starvation
yourself, and you ought to go into the house until the summer."--
Witness: "If we went in we should die. When we come out in the
summer we should be like people dropped from the sky. No one would
know us, and we would not have even a room. I could work now if I
had food, for my sight would get better."  Dr. G. P. Walker said
deceased died from syncope, from exhaustion from want of food. The
deceased had had no bedclothes. For four months he had had nothing
but bread to eat. There was not a particle of fat in the body.
There was no disease, but, if there had been medical attendance, he
might have survived the syncope or fainting. The Coroner having
remarked upon the painful nature of the case, the jury returned the
following verdict: "That deceased died from exhaustion from want of
food and the common necessaries of life; also through want of
medical aid."

"Why would witness not go into the workhouse?" you ask. Well, the
poor seem to have a prejudice against the workhouse which the rich
have not; for of course everyone who takes a pension from Government
goes into the workhouse on a grand scale: {20} only the workhouses
for the rich do not involve the idea of work, and should be called
play-houses. But the poor like to die independently, it appears;
perhaps if we made the play-houses for them pretty and pleasant
enough, or gave them their pensions at home, and allowed them a
little introductory peculation with the public money, their minds
might be reconciled to the conditions. Meantime, here are the
facts: we make our relief either so insulting to them, or so
painful, that they rather die than take it at our hands; or, for
third alternative, we leave them so untaught and foolish that they
starve like brute creatures, wild and dumb, not knowing what to do,
or what to ask. I say, you despise compassion; if you did not, such
a newspaper paragraph would be as impossible in a Christian country
as a deliberate assassination permitted in its public streets. {21}
"Christian," did I say? Alas! if we were but wholesomely UN-
Christian, it would be impossible: it is our imaginary Christianity
that helps us to commit these crimes, for we revel and luxuriate in
our faith, for the lewd sensation of it; dressing IT up, like
everything else, in fiction. The dramatic Christianity of the organ
and aisle, of dawn-service and twilight-revival--the Christianity,
which we do not fear to mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our
play about the devil, in our Satanellas,--Roberts,--Fausts; chanting
hymns through traceried windows for background effect, and
artistically modulating the "Dio" through variation on variation of
mimicked prayer: (while we distribute tracts, next day, for the
benefit of uncultivated swearers, upon what we suppose to be the
signification of the Third Commandment;-) this gas-lighted, and gas-
inspired Christianity, we are triumphant in, and draw back the hem
of our robes from the touch of the heretics who dispute it. But to
do a piece of common Christian righteousness in a plain English word
or deed; to make Christian law any rule of life, and found one
National act or hope thereon,--we know too well what our faith comes
to for that! You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke
than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
You had better get rid of the smoke, and the organ pipes, both:
leave them, and the Gothic windows, and the painted glass, to the
property man; give up your carburetted hydrogen ghost in one healthy
expiration, and look after Lazarus at the doorstep. For there is a
true Church wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and that is
the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall be.

All these pleasures then, and all these virtues, I repeat, you
nationally despise. You have, indeed, men among you who do not; by
whose work, by whose strength, by whose life, by whose death, you
live, and never thank them. Your wealth, your amusement, your
pride, would all be alike impossible, but for those whom you scorn
or forget. The policeman, who is walking up and down the black lane
all night to watch the guilt you have created there; and may have
his brains beaten out, and be maimed for life, at any moment, and
never be thanked; the sailor wrestling with the sea's rage; the
quiet student poring over his book or his vial; the common worker,
without praise, and nearly without bread, fulfilling his task as
your horses drag your carts, hopeless, and spurned of all: these
are the men by whom England lives; but they are not the nation; they
are only the body and nervous force of it, acting still from old
habit in a convulsive perseverance, while the mind is gone. Our
National wish and purpose are only to be amused; our National
religion is the performance of church ceremonies, and preaching of
soporific truth (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work, while
we amuse ourselves; and the necessity for this amusement is
fastening on us, as a feverous disease of parched throat and
wandering eyes--senseless, dissolute, merciless. How literally that
word DIS-Ease, the Negation and impossibility of Ease, expresses the
entire moral state of our English Industry and its Amusements!

When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their
work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower;--when they are
faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become
steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural
pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour our
whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and
having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for
us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but
guiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous Jews with their pictures on
cavern walls, which men had to dig to detect. The justice we do not
execute, we mimic in the novel and on the stage; for the beauty we
destroy in nature, we substitute the metamorphosis of the pantomime,
and (the human nature of us imperatively requiring awe and sorrow of
SOME kind) for the noble grief we should have borne with our
fellows, and the pure tears we should have wept with them, we gloat
over the pathos of the police court, and gather the night-dew of the
grave.

It is difficult to estimate the true significance of these things;
the facts are frightful enough;--the measure of national fault
involved in them is perhaps not as great as it would at first seem.
We permit, or cause, thousands of deaths daily, but we mean no harm;
we set fire to houses, and ravage peasants' fields, yet we should be
sorry to find we had injured anybody. We are still kind at heart;
still capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, at the
end of his long life, having had much power with the public, being
plagued in some serious matter by a reference to "public opinion,"
uttered the impatient exclamation, "The public is just a great
baby!"  And the reason that I have allowed all these graver subjects
of thought to mix themselves up with an inquiry into methods of
reading, is that, the more I see of our national faults or miseries,
the more they resolve themselves into conditions of childish
illiterateness and want of education in the most ordinary habits of
thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, not dulness of
brain, which we have to lament; but an unreachable schoolboy's
recklessness, only differing from the true schoolboy's in its
incapacity of being helped, because it acknowledges no master.

There is a curious type of us given in one of the lovely, neglected
works of the last of our great painters. It is a drawing of Kirkby
Lonsdale churchyard, and of its brook, and valley, and hills, and
folded morning sky beyond. And unmindful alike of these, and of the
dead who have left these for other valleys and for other skies, a
group of schoolboys have piled their little books upon a grave, to
strike them off with stones. So, also, we play with the words of
the dead that would teach us, and strike them far from us with our
bitter, reckless will; little thinking that those leaves which the
wind scatters had been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon
the seal of an enchanted vault--nay, the gate of a great city of
sleeping kings, who would awake for us and walk with us, if we knew
but how to call them by their names. How often, even if we lift the
marble entrance gate, do we but wander among those old kings in
their repose, and finger the robes they lie in, and stir the crowns
on their foreheads; and still they are silent to us, and seem but a
dusty imagery; because we know not the incantation of the heart that
would wake them;--which, if they once heard, they would start up to
meet us in their power of long ago, narrowly to look upon us, and
consider us; and, as the fallen kings of Hades meet the newly
fallen, saying, "Art thou also become weak as we--art thou also
become one of us?" so would these kings, with their undimmed,
unshaken diadems, meet us, saying, "Art thou also become pure and
mighty of heart as we--art thou also become one of us?"

Mighty of heart, mighty of mind--"magnanimous"--to be this, is
indeed to be great in life; to become this increasingly, is, indeed,
to "advance in life,"--in life itself--not in the trappings of it.
My friends, do you remember that old Scythian custom, when the head
of a house died? How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set in
his chariot, and carried about to his friends' houses; and each of
them placed him at his table's head, and all feasted in his
presence? Suppose it were offered to you in plain words, as it IS
offered to you in dire facts, that you should gain this Scythian
honour, gradually, while you yet thought yourself alive. Suppose
the offer were this: You shall die slowly; your blood shall daily
grow cold, your flesh petrify, your heart beat at last only as a
rusted group of iron valves. Your life shall fade from you, and
sink through the earth into the ice of Caina; but, day by day, your
body shall be dressed more gaily, and set in higher chariots, and
have more orders on its breast--crowns on its head, if you will.
Men shall bow before it, stare and shout round it, crowd after it up
and down the streets; build palaces for it, feast with it at their
tables' heads all the night long; your soul shall stay enough within
it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the golden dress on
its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the skull;--no
more. Would you take the offer, verbally made by the death-angel?
Would the meanest among us take it, think you? Yet practically and
verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure; many of us
grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts it, who
desires to advance in life without knowing what life is; who means
only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, and more
fortune, and more public honour, and--NOT more personal soul. He
only is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose
blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into
Living {22} peace. And the men who have this life in them are the
true lords or kings of the earth--they, and they only. All other
kingships, so far as they are true, are only the practical issue and
expression of