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011 - Of Queens' Gardens Part 1 · Sesame and Lilies

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  Speaker 1: Section eleven of Sesame and Lili's revised and enlarged edition
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  Speaker 1: by John Ruskin. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Oxen Handler of Queen's Gardens, Part one, Lecture
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  Speaker 1: two Lilies of Queen's Gardens. Quote be thou glad o
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  Speaker 1: thirsting desert. Let the desert be made cheerful and bloom
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  Speaker 1: as the lily and the barren places of Jordan shall
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  Speaker 1: run wild with wood. Unquote Isaiah thirty five I septuagint.
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  Speaker 1: It will perhaps be well, as this lecture is the
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  Speaker 1: sequel of one previously given, that I should shortly state
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  Speaker 1: to you my general intention in both the questions specially
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  Speaker 1: proposed to you in the first, namely how and what
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  Speaker 1: to read, rose out of a far deeper one which
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  Speaker 1: it was my endeavor to make you propose earnestly to yourselves,
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  Speaker 1: namely why to read. I want you to feel with
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  Speaker 1: me that whatever advantages we possess in the present day
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  Speaker 1: in the diffusion of education and of literature, can only
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  Speaker 1: be rightly used by any of us when we have
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  Speaker 1: apprehended clearly what education is to lead to and literature
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  Speaker 1: to teach. I wish you to see that both well
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  Speaker 1: directed moral training and well chosen reading lead to the
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  Speaker 1: possession of a power over the ill guided and illiterate,
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  Speaker 1: which is, according to the measure of it, in the
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  Speaker 1: truest sense, kingly, conferring indeed the purest kingship that can
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  Speaker 1: exist among men. Too many other kingships, however, distinguished by
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  Speaker 1: visible insignia or material power, being either spectral or tyrannous,
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  Speaker 1: spectral that is to say, aspects and shadows only of royalty,
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  Speaker 1: hollow as death, and which only the quote likeness of
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  Speaker 1: a kingly crown have on unquote, or else tyrannus, that
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  Speaker 1: is to say, substituting their own will for the law
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  Speaker 1: of justice and love, by which all true king's rule
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  Speaker 1: there is. Then, I repeat, and as I want to
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  Speaker 1: leave this idea with you, I begin with it and
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  Speaker 1: shall end with it. Only one pure kind of kingship,
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  Speaker 1: an inevitable and eternal kind, crowned or not, the kingship, namely,
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  Speaker 1: which consists in a stronger moral state and a truer
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  Speaker 1: thoughtful state than that of others, enabling you therefore to
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  Speaker 1: guide or to raise them observe that word quote state unquote.
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  Speaker 1: We have got into a loose way of using it.
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  Speaker 1: It means literally the standing and stability of a thing,
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  Speaker 1: and you have the full force of it in the
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  Speaker 1: derived word quote statue unquote quote the immovable thing unquote
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  Speaker 1: a king's majesty or quote state unquote, then at the
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  Speaker 1: right of his kingdom to be called a state, depends
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  Speaker 1: on the movelessness of both without tremor without quiver of balance,
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  Speaker 1: established and enthroned upon a foundation of eternal law which
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  Speaker 1: nothing can alter nor overthrow. Believing that all literature and
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  Speaker 1: all education are only useful so far as they tend
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  Speaker 1: to confirm this calm, beneficent, and therefore kingly power first
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  Speaker 1: over ourselves and through ourselves over all around us, I
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  Speaker 1: am now going to ask you to consider with me farther,
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  Speaker 1: what special portion or kind of this royal authority arising
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  Speaker 1: out of noble education, may rightly be possessed by women,
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  Speaker 1: and how far they also are called to a true
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  Speaker 1: queenly power, not in their households merely, but over all
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  Speaker 1: within their sphere. And in what sense if they rightly
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  Speaker 1: understood and exercised this royal or gracious influence, the order
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  Speaker 1: and beauty induced by such benignant power would justify us
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  Speaker 1: in speaking of the territories over which each of them reigned,
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  Speaker 1: as quote Queen's gardens. And here in the very outset
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  Speaker 1: we are met by a far deeper question, which, strange
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  Speaker 1: though this may seem, remains among many of us yet
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  Speaker 1: quite undecided, in spite of its infinite importance. We cannot
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  Speaker 1: determine what the queenly power of women should be until
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  Speaker 1: we are agreed what their ordinary power should be. We
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  Speaker 1: cannot consider how education may fit them for any widely
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  Speaker 1: extending duty until we are agreed what is their true
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  Speaker 1: constant duty. And there never was a time when wilder
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  Speaker 1: words were spoken, or more vain imagination permitted respecting this question,
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  Speaker 1: quite vital to all social happiness. The relations of the
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  Speaker 1: womanly to the manly nature, their different capacities of intellect
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  Speaker 1: or of virtue, seem never to have been yet measured
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  Speaker 1: with entire consent. We hear of the mission and the
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  Speaker 1: rights of women, as if these could ever be separate
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  Speaker 1: from the mission and the rights of man, as if
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  Speaker 1: she and her Lord were creatures of independent kind and
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  Speaker 1: of irreconcilable claim. This at least is wrong, and not
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  Speaker 1: less wrong, perhaps even more foolishly wrong, for I will
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  Speaker 1: anticipate thus far. What I hope to prove is the
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  Speaker 1: idea that woman is only the shadow and attendant image
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  Speaker 1: of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile obedience,
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  Speaker 1: and support it altogether in her weakness by the pre
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  Speaker 1: eminence of his fortitude. This, I say, is the most
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  Speaker 1: foolish of all errors, respecting her, who was made to
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  Speaker 1: be the helpmate of man, as if he could be
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  Speaker 1: helped effectively by a shadow or worthily by a slave.
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  Speaker 1: Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some
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  Speaker 1: clear and harmonious idea. It must be harmonious if it
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  Speaker 1: is true of what womanly mind and virtue are in
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  Speaker 1: power and office with respect to man's, and how there
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  Speaker 1: is relations rightly accepted aid and increase the vigor and
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  Speaker 1: honor and authority of both. And now I must repeat
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  Speaker 1: one thing I said in the last lecture, namely that
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  Speaker 1: the first use of education was to enable us to
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  Speaker 1: consult with the wisest and the greatest men on all
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  Speaker 1: points of earnest difficulty. That to use books rightly was
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  Speaker 1: to go to them for help, to appeal to them
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  Speaker 1: when our knowledge and power of thought failed to be
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  Speaker 1: led by them. Into wider sight, purer conception than our own,
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  Speaker 1: and receive from them the united sentence of the judges
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  Speaker 1: and counsels of all time against our solitary and unstable opinion.
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  Speaker 1: Let us do this now. Let us see whether the greatest,
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  Speaker 1: the wisest, the purest hearted of all ages are agreed
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  Speaker 1: in any wise on this point. Let us hear the
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  Speaker 1: testimony they have left respecting what they held to be
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  Speaker 1: the true dignity of women and her mode of help
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  Speaker 1: to man. And first, let us take shakespeare note broadly
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  Speaker 1: in the outset. Shakespeare has no heroes. He has only heroines.
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  Speaker 1: There is not one entirely heroic figure in all his plays,
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  Speaker 1: except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth exaggerated for
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  Speaker 1: the purposes of the stage, and the still slighter Valentine
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  Speaker 1: in the Two Gentlemen of Verona. In his labored and
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  Speaker 1: perfect plays, you have no hero Othello would have been one,
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  Speaker 1: if his simplicity had not been so great as to
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  Speaker 1: leave him the prey of every base practice round him.
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  Speaker 1: But he is the only example even approximating to the
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  Speaker 1: heroic type. Coriolanus, Caesar, Anthony stand in flawed strength and
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  Speaker 1: fall by their vanities. Hamlet is indolent and drowsily speculative,
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  Speaker 1: Romeo an impatient boy, the merchant of Venice, languidly submissive
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  Speaker 1: to adverse fortune. Kent in king Lear is entirely noble
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  Speaker 1: at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of
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  Speaker 1: true use at the critical time, and he sinks into
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  Speaker 1: the office of a servant. Only Orlando, no less noble,
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  Speaker 1: is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed comforted saved
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  Speaker 1: by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has
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  Speaker 1: not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope
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  Speaker 1: and errorless purpose. Cordelia Desdemona, Isabella, Hermion, Imogen, Queen, Catharine, Perdita,
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  Speaker 1: Sylvia Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia
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  Speaker 1: are all faultless conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity.
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  Speaker 1: Then observed secondly, the catastrophe of every play is caused
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  Speaker 1: always by the folly or fault of a man. The redemption,
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  Speaker 1: if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue
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  Speaker 1: of a woman, and failing that there is none, the
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  Speaker 1: catastrophe of kingly is owing to his own want of judgment,
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  Speaker 1: his impatient vanity, his misunderstanding of his children. The virtue
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  Speaker 1: of his one true daughter would have saved him from
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  Speaker 1: all the injuries of the others, unless he had cast
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  Speaker 1: her away from him. As it is, she all but
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  Speaker 1: saves him of Othello. I need not trace the tale,
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  Speaker 1: nor the one weakness of his so mighty love, nor
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  Speaker 1: the inferiority of his perceptive intellect, to that even of
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  Speaker 1: the second woman character in the play the Emilia, who
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  Speaker 1: dies in wild testimony against his error quote o murderous Coxcomb,
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  Speaker 1: What should such a fool do with so good a wife?
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  Speaker 1: In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and entirely brave stratagem
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  Speaker 1: of the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the
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  Speaker 1: reckless impatience of her husband. In Winter's Tale and in Cymbeline,
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  Speaker 1: the happiness and existence of two princely households, lost through
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  Speaker 1: long years and imperiled to the death by the folly
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  Speaker 1: and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at last by
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  Speaker 1: the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. In measure
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  Speaker 1: for measure, the injustice of the judges and the corrupt
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  Speaker 1: cowardice of the brother are opposed to the victorious truth
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  Speaker 1: and adamantine purity of a woman. In Coriolanus, the mother's counsel,
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  Speaker 1: acted upon in time, would have saved her son from
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  Speaker 1: all evil. His momentary forgetfulness of it is his ruin.
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  Speaker 1: Her prayer, at last granted, saves him, not indeed from death,
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  Speaker 1: but from the curse of living as the destroyer of
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  Speaker 1: his country. And what shall I say of Julia Constant
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  Speaker 1: against the fickleness of a lover who is a mere,
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  Speaker 1: wicked child of Helena, against the petulance and insult of
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  Speaker 1: a careless youth, of the patience of Hero, the passion
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  Speaker 1: of Beatrice, and the calmly devoted wisdom of the quote
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  Speaker 1: unlessened girl en quote, who appears among the helplessness, the blindness,
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  Speaker 1: and the vindictive of men as a gentle angel, to
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  Speaker 1: save merely by her presence and defeat the worst intensities
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  Speaker 1: of crime by her smile. Observed Further, among all the
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  Speaker 1: principal figures in Shakespeare's plays, there is only one weak woman, Ophelia,
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  Speaker 1: and it is because she fails Hamlet at the critical moment,
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  Speaker 1: and is not, and cannot, in her nature, be a
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  Speaker 1: guide to him when he needs her most that all
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  Speaker 1: the bitter catastrophe follows. Finally, though there are three wicked
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  Speaker 1: women among the principal figures, Lady Macbeth, Reagan and Goneril,
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  Speaker 1: they are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to
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  Speaker 1: the ordinary laws of life, fatal in their influence, also
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  Speaker 1: in proportion to the power for good which they have abandoned.
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  Speaker 1: Such in broad light is Shakespeare's testimony to the position
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  Speaker 1: and character of women in human life. He represents them
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  Speaker 1: as infallibly faithful and wise, counselors, incorruptibly just and pure examples,
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  Speaker 1: strong always to sanctify even when they cannot save, not
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  Speaker 1: as in any wise comparable in knowledge of the nature
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  Speaker 1: of man, still less in his understanding of the causes
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  Speaker 1: and courses of fate, but only as the writer who
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  Speaker 1: has given us the broadest view of the conditions and
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  Speaker 1: modes of ordinary thought in modern society. I ask you
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  Speaker 1: next to receive the witness of Walter Scott. I put
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  Speaker 1: aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no value.
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  Speaker 1: And though the early Romantic poetry is very beautiful, its
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  Speaker 1: testimony is of no weight other than that of a
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  Speaker 1: boy's ideal. But his true works studied from Scottish life
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  Speaker 1: bear a true witness. And in the whole range of
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  Speaker 1: these there are but three men who reach the heroic type. Footnote.
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  Speaker 1: I ought, in order to make this assertion fully understood,
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  Speaker 1: to have noted the various weaknesses which lower the ideal
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  Speaker 1: of other great characters of men in the Waverley novels,
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  Speaker 1: the selfishness and narrowness of thought in Red Gauntlet, the
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  Speaker 1: weak religious enthusiasm in Edward Glendening and the like. And
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  Speaker 1: I ought to have noticed that there are several quite
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  Speaker 1: perfect characters sketched sometimes in the backgrounds. Three let us
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  Speaker 1: accept joyously this courtesy to England and her soldiers, are
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  Speaker 1: English officers Colonel Gardiner, Colonel Talbot, and Colonel Mannering, and
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  Speaker 1: a footnote Dandie, Dinmont, rob Roy and Claverhouse. Of these,
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  Speaker 1: one is a boarder farmer, another a free booter, the
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  Speaker 1: third a soldier in a bad cause. And these touch
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  Speaker 1: the ideal of heroism only in their courage and faith,
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  Speaker 1: together with a strong but uncultivated or mistakenly applied intellectual power.
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  Speaker 1: While his younger men are the gentlemanly playthings of fantastic fortune,
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  Speaker 1: and only by aid or accident of that fortune, survive,
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  Speaker 1: not vanquish the trials they involuntarily sustain. Of any disciplined
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  Speaker 1: or consistent character, earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or
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  Speaker 1: dealing with forms of hostile evil, definitely challenged and resolutely subdued.
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  Speaker 1: There is no trace in his conceptions of men, whereas
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  Speaker 1: in his imaginations of women, in the characters of Allan Douglas,
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  Speaker 1: of Flora mac Ivor, Rose, Bradwardine, Catharine, Satan, Diana Vernon,
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  Speaker 1: Lilias Regauntlet, Alice Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Genie Deanes, with
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  Speaker 1: endless varieties of grace, tenderness, and intellectual power. We find
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  Speaker 1: in all a quite infallible and inevitable sense of dignity
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  Speaker 1: and justice, a fearless, instant and untiring self sacrifice to
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  Speaker 1: even the appearance of duty, much more to its real claims,
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  Speaker 1: And finally, a patient wisdom of deeply restrained affection, which
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  Speaker 1: does infinitely more than protect its objects from a momentary error.
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  Speaker 1: It gradually forms, animates, and exalts the characters of the
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  Speaker 1: unworthy lovers, until at the close of the tale we
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  Speaker 1: are just able and no more to take patience in
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  Speaker 1: hearing of their unmerited success, so that in all cases
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  Speaker 1: with Scott, as with Shakespeare, it is the woman who
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  Speaker 1: watches over, teaches and guides the youth. It is never,
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  Speaker 1: by any chance, the youth who watches over or educates
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  Speaker 1: his mistress. Next take, though more briefly, graver and deeper
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  Speaker 1: testimony that of the great Italians and Greeks. You know
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  Speaker 1: well the plan of Dante's great poem, that it is
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  Speaker 1: a love poem to his dead lady, a song of
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  Speaker 1: praise for her watch over his soul. Stooping only to pity,
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  Speaker 1: never to love. She yet saves him from destruction, saves
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  Speaker 1: him from hell. He is going eternally astray in despair.
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  Speaker 1: She comes down from heaven to his help, and throughout
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  Speaker 1: the assense of Paradise is his teacher, interpreting for him
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  Speaker 1: the most difficult truths, divine and human, and leading him
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  Speaker 1: with rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star. End of
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  Speaker 1: Section eleven.