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The Ethics of the Dust

by John Ruskin · English · Gutenberg #4701 · 307,021 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Ethics of the Dust

Author: John Ruskin


        
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                Most recently updated: October 27, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ETHICS OF THE DUST ***
THE ETHICS OF THE DUST

TEN LECTURES TO LITTLE HOUSEWIVES

ON THE ELEMENTS OF CRYSTALLIZATION

BY JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.,

HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND SLADE PROFESSOR OF FINE ART





DEDICATION.


TO THE REAL LITTLE HOUSEWIVES, WHOSE GENTLE LISTENING AND
THOUGHTFUL QUESTIONING ENABLED THE WRITER TO WRITE THIS BOOK, IT
IS DEDICATED WITH HIS LOVE.

CHRISTMAS, 1875.





CONTENTS.


LECTURE

   I. THE VALLEY OF DIAMONDS
  II. THE PYRAMID BUILDERS
 III. THE CRYSTAL LIFE
  IV. THE CRYSTAL ORDERS
   V. CRYSTAL VIRTUES
  VI. CRYSTAL QUARRELS
 VII. HOME VIRTUES
VIII. CRYSTAL CAPRICE
  IX. CRYSTAL SORROWS
   X. THE CRYSTAL REST
      NOTES





PERSONAE


OLD LECTURER (of incalculable age).

FLORRIE,
   on astronomical evidence presumed to be aged 9.

ISABEL ..................................... "  11.

MAY ........................................ "  11.

LILY ....................................... "  12.

KATHLEEN.................................... "  14.

LUCILLA..................................... "  15.

VIOLET ..................................... "  16.

DORA (who has the keys and is housekeeper)... " 17.

EGYPT (so called from her dark eyes) ....... "  17.

JESSIE (who somehow always makes the room
look brighter when she is in it) ........... "  18.

MARY (of whom everybody, including the Old
Lecturer, is in great awe) ................. "  20.





PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.


I have seldom been more disappointed by the result of my best
pains given to any of my books, than by the earnest request of my
publisher, after the opinion of the public had been taken on the
"Ethics of the Dust," that I would "write no more in dialogue!"
However, I bowed to public judgment in this matter at once
(knowing also my inventive powers to be of the feeblest); but in
reprinting the book (at the prevailing request of my kind friend,
Mr. Henry Willett), I would pray the readers whom it may at first
offend by its disconnected method, to examine, nevertheless, with
care, the passages in which the principal speaker sums the
conclusions of any dialogue: for these summaries were written as
introductions, for young people, to all that I have said on the
same matters in my larger books; and, on re-reading them, they
satisfy me better, and seem to me calculated to be more generally
useful, than anything else I have done of the kind.





PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.


The summary of the contents of the whole book, beginning, "You may
at least earnestly believe," at p. 215, is thus the clearest
exposition I have ever yet given of the general conditions under
which the Personal Creative Power manifests itself in the forms of
matter; and the analysis of heathen conceptions of Deity,
beginning at p. 217, and closing at p. 229, not only prefaces, but
very nearly supersedes, all that in more lengthy terms I have
since asserted, or pleaded for, in "Aratra Pentelici," and the
"Queen of the Air."

And thus, however the book may fail in its intention of suggesting
new occupations or interests to its younger readers, I think it
worth reprinting, in the way I have also reprinted "Unto this
Last,"--page for page; that the students of my more advanced works
may be able to refer to these as the original documents of them;
of which the most essential in this book are these following.

I. The explanation of the baseness of the avaricious functions of
the Lower Pthah, p. 54, with his beetle-gospel, p. 59, "that a
nation can stand on its vices better than on its virtues,"
explains the main motive of all my books on Political Economy.

II. The examination of the connection between stupidity and crime,
pp. 87-96, anticipated all that I have had to urge in Fors
Clavigera against the commonly alleged excuse for public
wickedness,--"They don't mean it--they don't know any better."

III. The examination of the roots of Moral Power, pp. 145-149, is
a summary of what is afterwards developed with utmost care in my
inaugural lecture at Oxford on the relation of Art to Morals;
compare in that lecture, sections 83-85, with the sentence in p.
147 of this book, "Nothing is ever done so as really to please our
Father, unless we would also have done it, though we had had no
Father to know of it."

This sentence, however, it must be observed, regards only the
general conditions of action in the children of God, in
consequence of which it is foretold of them by Christ that they
will say at the Judgment, "When saw we thee?" It does not refer to
the distinct cases in which virtue consists in faith given to
command, appearing to foolish human judgment inconsistent with the
Moral Law, as in the sacrifice of Isaac; nor to those in which any
directly-given command requires nothing more of virtue than
obedience.

IV. The subsequent pages, 149-158, were written especially to
check the dangerous impulses natural to the minds of many amiable
young women, in the direction of narrow and selfish religious
sentiment: and they contain, therefore, nearly everything which I
believe it necessary that young people should be made to observe,
respecting the errors of monastic life. But they in nowise enter
on the reverse, or favorable side: of which indeed I did not, and
as yet do not, feel myself able to speak with any decisiveness;
the evidence on that side, as stated in the text, having "never
yet been dispassionately examined."

V. The dialogue with Lucilla, beginning at p. 96, is, to my own
fancy, the best bit of conversation in the book; and the issue of
it, at p. 103, the most practically and immediately useful. For on
the idea of the inevitable weakness and corruption of human
nature, has logically followed, in our daily life, the horrible
creed of modern "Social science," that all social action must be
scientifically founded on vicious impulses. But on the habit of
measuring and reverencing our powers and talents that we may
kindly use them, will be founded a true Social science,
developing, by the employment of them, all the real powers and
honorable feelings of the race.

VI. Finally, the account given in the second and third lectures,
of the real nature and marvelousness of the laws of
crystallization, is necessary to the understanding of what farther
teaching of the beauty of inorganic form I may be able to give,
either in "Deucalion," or in my "Elements of Drawing." I wish
however that the second lecture had been made the beginning of the
book; and would fain now cancel the first altogether, which I
perceive to be both obscure and dull. It was meant for a
metaphorical description of the pleasures and dangers in the
kingdom of Mammon, or of worldly wealth; its waters mixed with
blood, its fruits entangled in thickets of trouble, and poisonous
when gathered; and the final captivity of its inhabitants within
frozen walls of cruelty and disdain. But the imagery is stupid and
ineffective throughout; and I retain this chapter only because I
am resolved to leave no room for any one to say that I have
withdrawn, as erroneous in principle, so much as a single sentence
of any of my books written since 1860.

One license taken in this book, however, though often permitted to
essay-writers for the relief of their dullness, I never mean to
take more,--the relation of composed metaphor as of actual dream,
pp. 27 and 171. I assumed, it is true, that in these places the
supposed dream would be easily seen to be an invention; but must
not any more, even under so transparent disguise, pretend to any
share in the real powers of Vision possessed by great poets and
true painters.

BRANTWOOD:

10th October, 1877.





PREFACE.


The following lectures were really given, in substance, at a
girls' school (far in the country); which, in the course of
various experiments on the possibility of introducing some better
practice of drawing into the modern scheme of female education, I
visited frequently enough to enable the children to regard me as a
friend. The Lectures always fell more or less into the form of
fragmentary answers to questions; and they are allowed to retain
that form, as, on the whole, likely to be more interesting than
the symmetries of a continuous treatise. Many children (for the
school was large) took part, at different times, in the
conversations; but I have endeavored, without confusedly
multiplying the number of imaginary speakers, to represent, as far
as I could, the general tone of comment and inquiry among young
people.

[Footnote: I do not mean, in saying "imaginary," that I have not
permitted to myself, in several instances, the affectionate
discourtesy of some reminiscence of personal character; for which
I must hope to be forgiven by my old pupils and their friends, as
I could not otherwise have written the book at all. But only two
sentences in all the dialogues, and the anecdote of "Dotty," are
literally "historical."]

It will be at once seen that these Lectures were not intended for
an introduction to mineralogy. Their purpose was merely to awaken
in the minds of young girls, who were ready to work earnestly and
systematically, a vital interest in the subject of their study. No
science can be learned in play; but it is often possible, in play,
to bring good fruit out of past labor, or show sufficient reasons
for the labor of the future.

The narrowness of this aim does not, indeed, justify the absence
of all reference to many important principles of structure, and
many of the most interesting orders of minerals; but I felt it
impossible to go far into detail without illustrations; and if
readers find this book useful, I may, perhaps, endeavor to
supplement it by illustrated notes of the more interesting
phenomena in separate groups of familiar minerals;--flints of the
chalk;--agates of the basalts;--and the fantastic and exquisitely
beautiful varieties of the vein-ores of the two commonest metals,
lead and iron. But I have always found that the less we speak of
our intentions, the more chance there is of our realizing them;
and this poor little book will sufficiently have done its work,
for the present, if it engages any of its young readers in study
which may enable them to despise it for its shortcomings.

DENMARK HILL: Christmas, 1865.





LECTURE 1.

THE VALLEY OF DIAMONDS


A very idle talk, by the dining-room fire, after raisin-and-almond
time.

OLD LECTURER; FLORRIE, ISABEL, MAY, LILY, and SIBYL.

OLD LECTURER (L.). Come here, Isabel, and tell me what the make-
believe was, this afternoon.

ISABEL (arranging herself very primly on the foot-stool). Such a
dreadful one! Florrie and I were lost in the Valley of Diamonds.

L. What! Sindbad's, which nobody could get out of? ISABEL. Yes;
but Florrie and I got out of it.

L. So I see. At least, I see you did; but are you sure Florrie
did?

ISABEL. Quite sure.

FLORRIE (putting her head round from behind L.'s sofa-cushion).
Quite sure. (Disappears again.)

L. I think I could be made to feel surer about it.

(FLORRIE reappears, gives L. a kiss, and again exit.)

L. I suppose it's all right; but how did you manage it?

ISABEL. Well, you know, the eagle that took up Sindbad was very
large--very, very large--the largest of all the eagles.

L. How large were the others?

ISABEL. I don't quite know--they were so far off. But this one
was, oh, so big! and it had great wings, as wide as--twice over
the ceiling. So, when it was picking up Sindbad, Florrie and I
thought it wouldn't know if we got on its back too: so I got up
first, and then I pulled up Florrie, and we put our arms round its
neck, and away it flew.

L. But why did you want to get out of the valley? and why haven't
you brought me some diamonds?

ISABEL. It was because of the serpents. I couldn't pick up even
the least little bit of a diamond, I was so frightened.

L. You should not have minded the serpents.

ISABEL. Oh, but suppose that they had minded me?

L. We all of us mind you a little too much, Isabel, I'm afraid.

ISABEL. No--no--no, indeed.

L. I tell you what, Isabel--I don't believe either Sindbad, or
Florrie, or you, ever were in the Valley of Diamonds.

ISABEL. You naughty! when I tell you we were!

L. Because you say you were frightened at the serpents.

ISABEL. And wouldn't you have been?

L. Not at those serpents. Nobody who really goes into the valley
is ever frightened at them--they are so beautiful.

ISABEL (suddenly serious). But there's no real Valley of Diamonds,
is there?

L. Yes, Isabel; very real indeed.

FLORRIE (reappearing). Oh, where? Tell me about it.

L. I cannot tell you a great deal about it; only I know it is very
different from Sindbad's. In his valley, there was only a diamond
lying here and there; but, in the real valley, there are diamonds
covering the grass in showers every morning, instead of dew: and
there are clusters of trees, which look like lilac trees; but, in
spring, all their blossoms are of amethyst.

FLORRIE. But there can't be any serpents there, then?

L. Why not?

FLORRIE. Because they don't come into such beautiful places.

L. I never said it was a beautiful place.

FLORRIE. What! not with diamonds strewed about it like dew?

L. That's according to your fancy, Florrie. For myself, I like dew
better.

ISABEL. Oh, but the dew won't stay; it all dries!

L. Yes; and it would be much nicer if the diamonds dried too, for
the people in the valley have to sweep them off the grass, in
heaps, whenever they want to walk on it; and then the heaps
glitter so, they hurt one's eyes.

FLORRIE. Now you're just playing, you know.

L. So are you, you know.

FLORRIE. Yes, but you mustn't play.

L. That's very hard, Florrie; why mustn't I, if you may?

FLORRIE. Oh, I may, because I'm little, but you mustn't, because
you're--(hesitates for a delicate expression of magnitude).

L. (rudely taking the first that comes). Because I'm big? No;
that's not the way of it at all, Florrie. Because you're little,
you should have very little play; and because I'm big I should
have a great deal.

ISABEL and FLORRIE (both). No--no--no--no. That isn't it at all.
(ISABEL sola, quoting Miss Ingelow.) "The lambs play always--they
know no better." (Putting her head very much on one side.) Ah, now
--please--please--tell us true; we want to know.

L. But why do you want me to tell you true, any more than the man
who wrote the "Arabian Nights"?

ISABEL. Because--because we like to know about real things; and
you can tell us, and we can't ask the man who wrote the stories.

L. What do you call real things?

ISABEL. Now, you know! Things that really are.

L. Whether you can see them or not?

ISABEL. Yes, if somebody else saw them.

L. But if nobody has ever seen them?

ISABEL. (evading the point). Well, but, you know, if there were a
real Valley of Diamonds, somebody MUST have seen it.

L. You cannot be so sure of that, Isabel. Many people go to real
places, and never see them; and many people pass through this
valley, and never see it.

FLORRIE. What stupid people they must be!

L. No, Florrie. They are much wiser than the people who do see it.

MAY. I think I know where it is.

ISABEL. Tell us more about it, and then we'll guess.

L. Well. There's a great broad road, by a river-side, leading up
into it.

MAY (gravely cunning, with emphasis on the last word). Does the
road really go UP?

L. You think it should go down into a valley? No, it goes up; this
is a valley among the hills, and it is as high as the clouds, and
is often full of them; so that even the people who most want to
see it, cannot, always.

ISABEL. And what is the river beside the road like?

L. It ought to be very beautiful, because it flows over diamond
sand--only the water is thick and red.

ISABEL. Red water?

L. It isn't all water.

MAY. Oh, please never mind that, Isabel, just now; I want to hear
about the valley.

L. So the entrance to it is very wide, under a steep rock; only
such numbers of people are always trying to get in, that they keep
jostling each other, and manage it but slowly. Some weak ones are
pushed back, and never get in at all; and make great moaning as
they go away: but perhaps they are none the worse in the end.

MAY. And when one gets in, what is it like?

L. It is up and down, broken kind of ground: the road stops
directly; and there are great dark rocks, covered all over with
wild gourds and wild vines; the gourds, if you cut them, are red,
with black seeds, like water-melons, and look ever so nice; and
the people of the place make a red pottage of them: but you must
take care not to eat any if you ever want to leave the valley
(though I believe putting plenty of meal in it makes it
wholesome). Then the wild vines have clusters of the color of
amber; and the people of the country say they are the grape of
Eshcol; and sweeter than honey: but, indeed, if anybody else
tastes them, they are like gall. Then there are thickets of
bramble, so thorny that they would be cut away directly, anywhere
else; but here they are covered with little cinque-foiled blossoms
of pure silver; and, for berries, they have clusters of rubies.
Dark rubies, which you only see are red after gathering them. But
you may fancy what blackberry parties the children have! Only they
get their frocks and hands sadly torn.

LILY. But rubies can't spot one's frocks, as blackberries do?

L. No; but I'll tell you what spots them--the mulberries. There
are great forests of them, all up the hills, covered with silk-
worms, some munching the leaves so loud that it is like mills at
work; and some spinning. But the berries are the blackest you ever
saw; and, wherever they fall, they stain a deep red; and nothing
ever washes it out again. And it is their juice, soaking through
the grass, which makes the river so red, because all its springs
are in this wood. And the boughs of the trees are twisted, as if
in pain, like old olive branches; and their leaves are dark. And
it is in these forests that the serpents are; but nobody is afraid
of them. They have fine crimson crests, and they are wreathed
about the wild branches, one in every tree, nearly; and they are
singing serpents, for the serpents are, in this forest, what birds
are in ours.

FLORRIE. Oh, I don't want to go there at all, now.

L. You would like it very much indeed, Florrie, if you were there.
The serpents would not bite you; the only fear would be of your
turning into one!

FLORRIE. Oh, dear, but that's worse.

L. You wouldn't think so if you really were turned into one,
Florrie; you would be very proud of your crest. And as long as you
were yourself (not that you could get there if you remained quite
the little Florrie you are now), you would like to hear the
serpents sing. They hiss a little through it, like the cicadas in
Italy; but they keep good time, and sing delightful melodies; and
most of them have seven heads, with throats which each take a note
of the octave; so that they can sing chords--it is very fine
indeed. And the fireflies fly round the edge of the forests all
the night long; you wade in fireflies, they make the fields look
like a lake trembling with reflection of stars; but you must take
care not to touch them, for they are not like Italian fireflies,
but burn, like real sparks.

FLORRIE. I don't like it at all; I'll never go there.

L. I hope not, Florrie; or at least that you will get out again if
you do. And it is very difficult to get out, for beyond these
serpent forests there are great cliffs of dead gold, which form a
labyrinth, winding always higher and higher, till the gold is all
split asunder by wedges of ice; and glaciers, welded, half of ice
seven times frozen, and half of gold seven times frozen, hang down
from them, and fall in thunder, cleaving into deadly splinters,
like the Cretan arrowheads; and into a mixed dust of snow and
gold, ponderous, yet which the mountain whirlwinds are able to
lift and drive in wreaths and pillars, hiding the paths with a
burial cloud, fatal at once with wintry chill, and weight of
golden ashes. So the wanderers in the labyrinth fall, one by one,
and are buried there:--yet, over the drifted graves, those who are
spared climb to the last, through coil on coil of the path;--for
at the end of it they see the king of the valley, sitting on his
throne: and beside him (but it is only a false vision), spectra of
creatures like themselves, sit on thrones, from which they seem to
look down on all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.
And on the canopy of his throne there is an inscription in fiery
letters, which they strive to read, but cannot; for it is written
in words which are like the words of all languages, and yet are of
none. Men say it is more like their own tongue to the English than
it is to any other nation; but the only record of it is by an
Italian, who heard the king himself cry it as a war cry, "Pape
Satan, Pape Satan Aleppe." [Footnote: Dante, Inf. 7, I.]

SIBYL. But do they all perish there? You said there was a way
through the valley, and out of it.

L. Yes; but few find it. If any of them keep to the grass paths,
where the diamonds are swept aside; and hold their hands over
their eyes so as not to be dazzled, the grass paths lead forward
gradually to a place where one sees a little opening in the golden
rocks. You were at Chamouni last year, Sibyl; did your guide
chance to show you the pierced rock of the Aiguille du Midi?

SIBYL. No, indeed, we only got up from Geneva on Monday night; and
it rained all Tuesday; and we had to be back at Geneva again,
early on Wednesday morning.

L. Of course. That is the way to see a country in a Sibylline
manner, by inner consciousness: but you might have seen the
pierced rock in your drive up, or down, if the clouds broke: not
that there is much to see in it; one of the crags of the aiguille-
edge, on the southern slope of it, is struck sharply through, as
by an awl, into a little eyelet hole; which you may see, seven
thousand feet above the valley (as the clouds flit past behind it,
or leave the sky), first white, and then dark blue. Well, there's
just such an eyelet hole in one of the upper crags of the Diamond
Valley; and, from a distance, you think that it is no bigger than
the eye of a needle. But if you get up to it, they say you may
drive a loaded camel through it, and that there are fine things on
the other side, but I have never spoken with anybody who had been
through.

SIBYL. I think we understand it now. We will try to write it down,
and think of it.

L. Meantime, Florrie, though all that I have been telling you is
very true, yet you must not think the sort of diamonds that people
wear in rings and necklaces are found lying about on the grass.
Would you like to see how they really are found?

FLORRIE. Oh, yes--yes.

L. Isabel--or Lily--run up to my room and fetch me the little box
with a glass lid, out of the top drawer of the chest of drawers.
(Race between LILY and ISABEL.)

(Re-enter ISABEL with the box, very much out of breath. LILY
behind.)

L. Why, you never can beat Lily in a race on the stairs, can you,
Isabel?

ISABEL (panting). Lily--beat me--ever so far--but she gave me--the
box--to carry in.

L. Take off the lid, then; gently.

FLORRIE (after peeping in, disappointed). There's only a great
ugly brown stone!

L. Not much more than that, certainly, Florrie, if people were
wise. But look, it is not a single stone; but a knot of pebbles
fastened together by gravel: and in the gravel, or compressed
sand, if you look close, you will see grains of gold glittering
everywhere, all through; and then, do you see these two white
beads, which shine, as if they had been covered with grease?

FLORRIE. May I touch them?

L. Yes; you will find they are not greasy, only very smooth. Well,
those are the fatal jewels; native here in their dust with gold,
so that you may see, cradled here together, the two great enemies
of mankind,--the strongest of all malignant physical powers that
have tormented our race.

SIBYL. Is that really so? I know they do great harm; but do they
not also do great good?

L. My dear child, what good? Was any woman, do you suppose, ever
the better for possessing diamonds? but how many have been made
base, frivolous, and miserable by desiring them? Was ever man the
better for having coffers full of gold? But who shall measure the
guilt that is incurred to fill them? Look into the history of any
civilized nations; analyze, with reference to this one cause of
crime and misery, the lives and thoughts of their nobles, priests,
merchants, and men of luxurious life. Every other temptation is at
last concentrated into this: pride, and lust, and envy, and anger
all give up their strength to avarice. The sin of the whole world
is essentially the sin of Judas. Men do not disbelieve their
Christ; but they sell Him.

SIBYL. But surely that is the fault of human nature? it is not
caused by the accident, as it were, of there being a pretty metal,
like gold, to be found by digging. If people could not find that,
would they not find something else, and quarrel for it instead?

L. No. Wherever legislators have succeeded in excluding, for a
time, jewels and precious metals from among national possessions,
the national spirit has remained healthy. Covetousness is not
natural to man--generosity is; but covetousness must be excited by
a special cause, as a given disease by a given miasma; and the
essential nature of a material for the excitement of covetousness
is, that it shall be a beautiful thing which can be retained
without a use. The moment we can use our possessions to any good
purpose ourselves, the instinct of communicating that use to
others rises side by side with our power. If you can read a book
rightly, you will want others to hear it; if you can enjoy a
picture rightly, you will want others to see it: learn how to
manage a horse, a plough, or a ship, and you will desire to make
your subordinates good horsemen, ploughmen, or sailors; you will
never be able to see the fine instrument you are master of,
abused; but, once fix your desire on anything useless, and all the
purest pride and folly in your heart will mix with the desire, and
make you at last wholly inhuman, a mere ugly lump of stomach and
suckers, like a cuttle-fish.

SIBYL. But surely, these two beautiful things, gold and diamonds,
must have been appointed to some good purpose?

L. Quite conceivably so, my dear: as also earthquakes and
pestilences; but of such ultimate purposes we can have no sight.
The practical, immediate office of the earthquake and pestilence
is to slay us, like moths; and, as moths, we shall be wise to live
out of their way. So, the practical, immediate office of gold and
diamonds is the multiplied destruction of souls (in whatever sense
you have been taught to understand that phrase); and the paralysis
of wholesome human effort and thought on the face of God's earth:
and a wise nation will live out of the way of them. The money
which the English habitually spend in cutting diamonds would, in
ten years, if it were applied to cutting rocks instead, leave no
dangerous reef nor difficult harbor round the whole island coast.
Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting, indeed, a true
piece of regalia. (Leaves this to their thoughts for a little
while.) Then, also, we poor mineralogists might sometimes have the
chance of seeing a fine crystal of diamond unhacked by the
jeweler.

SIBYL. Would it be more beautiful uncut?

L. No; but of infinite interest. We might even come to know
something about the making of diamonds.

SIBYL. I thought the chemists could make them already?

L. In very small black crystals, yes; but no one knows how they
are formed where they are found; or if indeed they are formed
there at all. These, in my hand, look as if they had been swept
down with the gravel and gold; only we can trace the gravel and
gold to their native rocks, but not the diamonds. Read the account
given of the diamond in any good work on mineralogy;--you will
find nothing but lists of localities of gravel, or conglomerate
rock (which is only an old indurated gravel). Some say it was once
a vegetable gum; but it may have been charred wood; but what one
would like to know is, mainly, why charcoal should make itself
into diamonds in India, and only into black lead in Borrowdale.

SIBYL. Are they wholly the same, then?

L. There is a little iron mixed with our black lead; but nothing
to hinder its crystallization. Your pencils in fact are all
pointed with formless diamond, though they would be H H H pencils
to purpose, if it crystallized.

SIBYL. But what IS crystallization?

L. A pleasant question, when one's half asleep, and it has been
tea-time these two hours. What thoughtless things girls are!

SYBIL. Yes, we are; but we want to know, for all that.

L. My dear, it would take a week to tell you.

SIBYL. Well, take it, and tell us.

L. But nobody knows anything about it.

SIBYL. Then tell us something that nobody knows.

L. Get along with you, and tell Dora to make tea.

(The house rises; but of course the LECTURER wanted to be forced
to lecture again, and was.)





LECTURE 2.

THE PYRAMID BUILDERS


In the large Schoolroom, to which everybody has been summoned by
ringing of the great bell.

L. So you have all actually come to hear about crystallization! I
cannot conceive why unless the little ones think that the
discussion may involve some reference to sugar-candy.

(Symptoms of high displeasure among the younger members of
council. ISABEL frowns severely at L., and shakes her head
violently.)

My dear children, if you knew it, you are yourselves, at this
moment, as you sit in your ranks, nothing, in the eye of a
mineralogist, but a lovely group of rosy sugar-candy, arranged by
atomic forces. And even admitting you to be something more, you
have certainly been crystallizing without knowing it. Did not I
hear a great hurrying and whispering ten minutes ago, when you
were late in from the playground; and thought you would not all be
quietly seated by the time I was ready:--besides some discussion
about places--something about "it's not being fair that the little
ones should always be nearest?" Well, you were then all being
crystallized. When you ran in from the garden, and against one
another in the passages, you were in what mineralogists would call
a state of solution, and gradual confluence; when you got seated
in those orderly rows, each in her proper place, you became
crystalline. That is just what the atoms of a mineral do, if they
can, whenever they get disordered: they get into order again as
soon as may be.

I hope you feel inclined to interrupt me, and say, "But we know
our places; how do the atoms know theirs? And sometimes we dispute
about our places; do the atoms--(and, besides, we don't like being
compared to atoms at all)--never dispute about theirs?" Two wise
questions these, if you had a mind to put them! it was long before
I asked them myself, of myself. And I will not call you atoms any
more. May I call you--let me see--"primary molecules?" (General
dissent indicated in subdued but decisive murmurs.) No! not even,
in familiar Saxon, "dust"?

(Pause, with expression on faces of sorrowful doubt; LILY gives
voice to the general sentiment in a timid "Please don't.")

No, children, I won't call you that; and mind, as you grow up,
that you do not get into an idle and wicked habit of calling
yourselves that. You are something better than dust, and have
other duties to do than ever dust can do; and the bonds of
affection you will enter into are better than merely "getting in
to order." But see to it, on the other hand, that you always
behave at least as well as "dust;" remember, it is only on
compulsion, and while it has no free permission to do as it likes,
that IT ever gets out of order; but sometimes, with some of us,
the compulsion has to be the other way--hasn't it? (Remonstratory
whispers, expressive of opinion that the LECTURER is becoming too
personal.) I'm not looking at anybody in particular--indeed I am
not. Nay, if you blush so, Kathleen, how can one help looking?
We'll go back to the atoms.

"How do they know their places?" you asked, or should have asked.
Yes, and they have to do much more than know them: they have to
find their way to them, and that quietly and at once, without
running against each other.

We may, indeed, state it briefly thus:--Suppose you have to build
a castle, with towers and roofs and buttresses, out of bricks of a
given shape, and that these bricks are all lying in a huge heap at
the bottom, in utter confusion, upset out of carts at random. You
would have to draw a great many plans, and count all your bricks,
and be sure you had enough for this and that tower, before you
began, and then you would have to lay your foundation, and add
layer by layer, in order, slowly.

But how would you be astonished, in these melancholy days, when
children don't read children's books, nor believe any more in
fairies, if suddenly a real benevolent fairy, in a bright brick-
red gown, were to rise in the midst of the red bricks, and to tap
the heap of them with her wand, and say, "Bricks, bricks, to your
places!" and then you saw in an instant the whole heap rise in the
air, like a swarm of red bees, and--you have been used to see bees
make a honeycomb, and to think that strange enough, but now you
would see the honeycomb make itself!--You want to ask something,
Florrie, by the look of your eyes.

FLORRIE. Are they turned into real bees, with stings?

L. No, Florrie; you are only to fancy flying bricks, as you saw
the slates flying from the roof the other day in the storm; only
those slates didn't seem to know where they were going, and,
besides, were going where they had no business: but my spell-bound
bricks, though they have no wings, and what is worse, no heads and
no eyes, yet find their way in the air just where they should
settle, into towers and roofs, each flying to his place and
fastening there at the right moment, so that every other one shall
fit to him in his turn.

LILY. But who are the fairies, then, who build the crystals?

L. There is one great fairy, Lily, who builds much more than
crystals; but she builds these also. I dreamed that I saw her
building a pyramid, the other day, as she used to do, for the
Pharaohs.

ISABEL. But that was only a dream?

L. Some dreams are truer than some wakings, Isabel; but I won't
tell it you unless you like.

ISABEL. Oh, please, please.

L. You are all such wise children, there's no talking to you; you
won't believe anything.

LILY. No, we are not wise, and we will believe anything, when you
say we ought.

L. Well, it came about this way. Sibyl, do you recollect that
evening when we had been looking at your old cave by Cumae, and
wondering why you didn't live there still: and then we wondered
how old you were; and Egypt said you wouldn't tell, and nobody
else could tell but she; and you laughed--I thought very gayly for
a Sibyl--and said you would harness a flock of cranes for us, and
we might fly over to Egypt if we liked, and see.

SIBYL. Yes, and you went, and couldn't find out after all!

L. Why, you know, Egypt had been just doubling that third pyramid
of hers; [Footnote: Note i.] and making a new entrance into it;
and a fine entrance it was! First, we had to go through an ante-
room, which had both its doors blocked up with stones; and then we
had three granite portcullises to pull up, one after another; and
the moment we had got under them, Egypt signed to somebody above;
and down they came again behind us, with a roar like thunder, only
louder; then we got into a passage fit for nobody but rats, and
Egypt wouldn't go any further herself, but said we might go on if
we liked; and so we came to a hole in the pavement, and then to a
granite trap-door--and then we thought we had gone quite far
enough, and came back, and Egypt laughed at us.

EGYPT. You would not have had me take my crown off, and stoop all
the way down a passage fit only for rats?

L. It was not the crown, Egypt--you know that very well. It was
the flounces that would not let you go any further. I suppose,
however, you wear them as typical of the inundation of the Nile,
so it is all right.

ISABEL. Why didn't you take me with you? Where rats can go, mice
can. I wouldn't have come back.

L. No, mousie; you would have gone on by yourself, and you might
have waked one of Pasht's cats,[Footnote: Note iii] and it would
have eaten you. I was very glad you were not there. But after all
this, I suppose the imagination of the heavy granite blocks and
the underground ways had troubled me, and dreams are often shaped
in a strange opposition to the impressions that have caused them;
and from all that we had been reading in Bunsen about stones that
couldn't be lifted with levers, I began to dream about stones that
lifted themselves with wings.

SIBYL. Now you must just tell us all about it.

L. I dreamed that I was standing beside the lake, out of whose
clay the bricks were made for the great pyramid of Asychis.
[Footnote: Note ii] They had just been all finished, and were
lying by the lake margin, in long ridges, like waves. It was near
evening; and as I looked towards the sunset, I saw a thing like a
dark pillar standing where the rock of the desert stoops to the
Nile valley. I did not know there was a pillar there, and wondered
at it; and it grew larger, and glided nearer, becoming like the
form of a man, but vast, and it did not move its feet, but glided,
like a pillar of sand. And as it drew nearer, I looked by chance
past it, towards the sun; and saw a silver cloud, which was of all
the clouds closest to the sun (and in one place crossed it), draw
itself back from the sun, suddenly. And it turned, and shot
towards the dark pillar; leaping in an arch, like an arrow out of
a bow. And I thought it was lightning; but when it came near the
shadowy pillar, it sank slowly down beside it, and changed into
the shape of a woman, very beautiful, and with a strength of deep
calm in her blue eyes. She was robed to the feet with a white
robe; and above that, to her knees, by the cloud which I had seen
across the sun; but all the golden ripples of it had become
plumes, so that it had changed into two bright wings like those of
a vulture, which wrapped round her to her knees. She had a
weaver's shuttle hanging over her shoulder, by the thread of it,
and in her left hand, arrows, tipped with fire.

ISABEL (clapping her hands). Oh! it was Neith, it was Neith! I
know now.

L. Yes; it was Neith herself; and as the two great spirits came
nearer to me, I saw they were the Brother and Sister--the pillared
shadow was the Greater Pthah.[Footnote: Note iii] And I heard them
speak, and the sound of their words was like a distant singing. I
could not understand the words one by one; yet their sense came to
me; and so I knew that Neith had come down to see her brother's
work, and the work that he had put into the mind of the king to
make his servants do. And she was displeased at it; because she
saw only pieces of dark clay; and no porphyry, nor marble, nor any
fair stone that men might engrave the figures of the gods upon.
And she blamed her brother, and said, "Oh, Lord of truth! is this
then thy will, that men should mold only foursquare pieces of
clay: and the forms of the gods no more?" Then the Lord of truth
sighed, and said, "Oh! sister, in truth they do not love us; why
should they set up our images? Let them do what they may, and not
lie--let them make their clay foursquare; and labor; and perish."

Then Neith's dark blue eyes grew darker, and she said, "Oh, Lord
of truth! why should they love us? their love is vain; or fear us?
for their fear is base. Yet let them testify of us, that they knew
we lived forever."

But the Lord of truth answered, "They know, and yet they know not.
Let them keep silence; for their silence only is truth."

But Neith answered, "Brother, wilt thou also make league with
Death, because Death is true? Oh! thou potter, who hast cast these
human things from thy wheel, many to dishonor, and few to honor;
wilt thou not let them so much as see my face; but slay them in
slavery?"

But Pthah only answered, "Let them build, sister, let them build."

And Neith answered, "What shall they build, if I build not with
them?"

And Pthah drew with his measuring rod upon the sand. And I saw
suddenly, drawn on the sand, the outlines of great cities, and of
vaults, and domes, and aqueducts, and bastions, and towers,
greater than obelisks, covered with black clouds. And the wind
blew ripples of sand amidst the lines that Pthah drew, and the
moving sand was like the marching of men. But I saw that wherever
Neith looked at the lines, they faded, and were effaced.

"Oh, Brother!" she said at last, "what is this vanity? If I, who
am Lady of wisdom, do not mock the children of men, why shouldst
thou mock them, who art Lord of truth?" But Pthah answered, "They
thought to bind me; and they shall be bound. They shall labor in
the fire for vanity."

And Neith said, looking at the sand, "Brother, there is no true
labor here--there is only weary life and wasteful death."

And Pthah answered, "Is it not truer labor, sister, than thy
sculpture of dreams?" Then Neith smiled; and stopped suddenly.

She looked to the sun; its edge touched the horizon-edge of the
desert. Then she looked to the long heaps of pieces of clay, that
lay, each with its blue shadow, by the lake shore.

"Brother," she said, "how long will this pyramid of thine be in
building?"

"Thoth will have sealed the scroll of the years ten times, before
the summit is laid."

"Brother, thou knowest not how to teach thy children to labor,"
answered Neith. "Look! I must follow Phre beyond Atlas; shall I
build your pyramid for you before he goes down?" And Pthah
answered, "Yea, sister, if thou canst put thy winged shoulders to
such work." And Neith drew herself to her height; and I heard a
clashing pass through the plumes of her wings, and the asp stood
up on her helmet, and fire gathered in her eyes. And she took one
of the flaming arrows out of the sheaf in her left hand, and
stretched it out over the heaps of clay. And they rose up like
flights of locusts, and spread themselves in the air, so that it
grew dark in a moment. Then Neith designed them places with her
arrow point; and they drew into ranks, like dark clouds laid level
at morning. Then Neith pointed with her arrow to the north, and to
the south, and to the east, and to the west, and the flying motes
of earth drew asunder into four great ranked crowds; and stood,
one in the north, and one in the south, and one in the east, and
one in the west--one against another. Then Neith spread her wings
wide for an instant, and closed them with a sound like the sound
of a rushing sea; and waved her hand towards the foundation of the
pyramid, where it was laid on the brow of the desert. And the four
flocks drew together and sank down, like sea-birds settling to a
level rock, and when they met, there was a sudden flame, as broad
as the pyramid, and as high as the clouds; and it dazzled me; and
I closed my eyes for an instant; and when I looked again, the
pyramid stood on its rock, perfect; and purple with the light from
the edge of the sinking sun.

THE YOUNGER CHILDREN (variously pleased). I'm so glad! How nice!
But what did Pthah say?

L. Neith did not wait to hear what he would say. When I turned
back to look at her, she was gone; and I only saw the level white
cloud form itself again, close to the arch of the sun as it sank.
And as the last edge of the sun disappeared, the form of Pthah
faded into a mighty shadow, and so passed away.

EGYPT. And was Neith's pyramid left?

L. Yes; but you could not think, Egypt, what a strange feeling of
utter loneliness came over me when the presence of the two gods
passed away. It seemed as if I had never known what it was to be
alone before; and the unbroken line of the desert was terrible.

EGYPT. I used to feel that, when I was queen: sometimes I had to
carve gods, for company, all over my palace. I would fain have
seen real ones, if I could.

L. But listen a moment yet, for that was not quite all my dream.
The twilight drew swiftly to the dark, and I could hardly see the
great pyramid; when there came a heavy murmuring sound in the air;
and a horned beetle, with terrible claws, fell on the sand at my
feet, with a blow like the beat of a hammer. Then it stood up on
its hind claws, and waved its pincers at me: and its fore claws
became strong arms, and hands; one grasping real iron pincers, and
the other a huge hammer; and it had a helmet on its head, without
any eyelet holes, that I could see. And its two hind claws became
strong crooked legs, with feet bent inwards. And so there stood by
me a dwarf, in glossy black armor, ribbed and embossed like a
beetle's back, leaning on his hammer. And I could not speak for
wonder; but he spoke with a murmur like the dying away of a beat
upon a bell. He said, "I will make Neith's great pyramid small. I
am the lower Pthah; and have power over fire. I can wither the
strong things, and strengthen the weak; and everything that is
great I can make small, and everything that is little I can make
great." Then he turned to the angle of the pyramid and limped
towards it. And the pyramid grew deep purple; and then red like
blood, and then pale rose-color, like fire. And I saw that it
glowed with fire from within. And the lower Pthah touched it with
the hand that held the pincers; and it sank down like the sand in
an hour-glass,--then drew itself together, and sank, still, and
became nothing, it seemed to me; but the armed dwarf stooped down,
and took it into his hand, and brought it to me, saying,
"Everything that is great I can make like this pyramid; and give
into men's hands to destroy." And I saw that he had a little
pyramid in his hand, with as many courses in it as the large one;
and built like that,--only so small. And because it glowed still,
I was afraid to touch it; but Pthah said, "Touch it--for I have
bound the fire within it, so that it cannot burn." So I touched
it, and took it into my own hand; and it was cold; only red, like
a ruby. And Pthah laughed, and became like a beetle again, and
buried himself in the sand, fiercely; throwing it back over his
shoulders. And it seemed to me as if he would draw me down with
him into the sand; and I started back, and woke, holding the
little pyramid so fast in my hand that it hurt me.

EGYPT. Holding WHAT in your hand?

L. The little pyramid.

EGYPT. Neith's pyramid?

L. Neith's, I believe; though not built for Asychis. I know only
that it is a little rosy transparent pyramid, built of more
courses of bricks than I can count, it being made so small. You
don't believe me, of course, Egyptian infidel; but there it is.
(Giving crystal of rose Fluor.)

(Confused examination by crowded audience, over each other's
shoulders and under each other's arms. Disappointment begins to
manifest itself.)

SIBYL. (not quite knowing why she and others are disappointed).
But you showed us this the other day!

L. Yes; but you would not look at it the other day.

SIBYL. But was all that fine dream only about this?

L. What finer thing could a dream be about than this? It is small,
if you will; but when you begin to think of things rightly, the
ideas of smallness and largeness pass away. The making of this
pyramid was in reality just as wonderful as the dream I have been
telling you, and just as incomprehensible. It was not, I suppose,
as swift, but quite as grand things are done as swiftly. When
Neith makes crystals of snow, it needs a great deal more
marshaling of the atoms, by her flaming arrows, than it does to
make crystals like this one; and that is done in a moment.

EGYPT. But how you DO puzzle us! Why do you say Neith does it? You
don't mean that she is a real spirit, do you?

L. What _I_ mean, is of little consequence. What the Egyptians
meant, who called her "Neith,"--or Homer, who called her
"Athena,"--or Solomon, who called her by a word which the Greeks
render as "Sophia," you must judge for yourselves. But her
testimony is always the same, and all nations have received it: "I
was by Him as one brought up with Him, and I was daily His
delight; rejoicing in the habitable parts of the earth, and my
delights were with the sons of men."

MARY. But is not that only a personification?

L. If it be, what will you gain by unpersonifying it, or what
right have you to do so? Cannot you accept the image given you, in
its life; and listen, like children, to the words which chiefly
belong to you as children: "I love them that love me, and those
that seek me early shall find me"?

(They are all quiet for a minute or two; questions begin to appear
in their eyes.)

I cannot talk to you any more to-day. Take that rose-crystal away
with you, and think.





LECTURE 3.

THE CRYSTAL LIFE


A very dull Lecture, willfully brought upon themselves by the
elder children. Some of the young ones have, however, managed to
get in by mistake. SCENE, the Schoolroom.

L. So I am to stand up here merely to be asked questions, to-day,
Miss Mary, am I?

MARY. Yes; and you must answer them plainly; without telling us
any more stories. You are quite spoiling the children: the poor
little things' heads are turning round like kaleidoscopes: and
they don't know in the least what you mean. Nor do we old ones,
either, for that matter: to-day you must really tell us nothing
but facts.

L. I am sworn; but you won't like it, a bit.

MARY. Now, first of all, what do you mean by "bricks"?--Are the
smallest particles of minerals all of some accurate shape, like
bricks?

L. I do not know. Miss Mary; I do not even know if anybody knows.
The smallest atoms which are visibly and practically put together
to make large crystals, may better be described as "limited in
fixed directions" than as "of fixed forms." But I can tell you
nothing clear about ultimate atoms: you will find the idea of
little bricks, or, perhaps, of little spheres, available for all
the uses you will have to put it to.

MARY. Well, it's very provoking; one seems always to be stopped
just when one is coming to the very thing one wants to know.

L. No, Mary, for we should not wish to know anything but what is
easily and assuredly knowable. There's no end to it. If I could
show you, or myself, a group of ultimate atoms, quite clearly, in
this magnifying glass, we should both be presently vexed, because
we could not break them in two pieces, and see their insides.

MARY. Well then, next, what do you mean by the flying of the
bricks? What is it the atoms do, that is like flying?

L. When they are dissolved, or uncrystallized, they are really
separated from each other, like a swarm of gnats in the air, or
like a shoal of fish in the sea;--generally at about equal
distances. In currents of solutions, or at different depths of
them, one part may be more full of the dissolved atoms than
another; but on the whole, you may think of them as equidistant,
like the spots in the print of your gown. If they are separated by
force of heat only, the substance is said to be melted; if they
are separated by any other substance, as particles of sugar by
water, they are said to be "dissolved." Note this distinction
carefully, all of you.

DORA. I will be very particular. When next you tell me there isn't
sugar enough in your tea, I will say, "It is not yet dissolved,
sir."

L. I tell you what shall be dissolved, Miss Dora; and that's the
present parliament, if the members get too saucy.

(DORA folds her hands and casts down her eyes.)

L. (proceeds in state). Now, Miss Mary, you know already, I
believe, that nearly everything will melt, under a sufficient
heat, like wax. Limestone melts (under pressure); sand melts;
granite melts; the lava of a volcano is a mixed mass of many kinds
of rocks, melted: and any melted substance nearly always, if not
always, crystallizes as it cools; the more slowly the more
perfectly. Water melts at what we call the freezing, but might
just as wisely, though not as conveniently, call the melting,
point; and radiates as it cools into the most beautiful of all
known crystals. Glass melts at a greater heat, and will
crystallize, if you let it cool slowly enough, in stars, much like
snow. Gold needs more heat to melt it, but crystallizes also
exquisitely, as I will presently show you. Arsenic and sulphur
crystallize from their vapors. Now in any of these cases, either
of melted, dissolved, or vaporous bodies, the particles are
usually separated from each other, either by heat, or by an
intermediate substance; and in crystallizing they are both brought
nearer to each other, and packed, so as to fit as closely as
possible: the essential part of the business being not the
bringing together, but the packing. Who packed your trunk for you,
last holidays, Isabel?

ISABEL. Lily does, always.

L. And how much can you allow for Lily's good packing, in guessing
what will go into the trunk?

ISABEL. Oh! I bring twice as much as the trunk holds. Lily always
gets everything in.

LILY. Ah! but, Isey, if you only knew what a time it takes! and
since you've had those great hard buttons on your frocks, I can't
do anything with them. Buttons won't go anywhere, you know.

L. Yes, Lily, it would be well if she only knew what a time it
takes; and I wish any of us knew what a time crystallization
takes, for that is consummately fine packing. The particles of the
rock are thrown down, just as Isabel brings her things--in a heap;
and innumerable Lilies, not of the valley, but of the rock, come
to pack them. But it takes such a time!

However, the best--out and out the best--way of understanding the
thing, is to crystallize yourselves.

THE AUDIENCE. Ourselves!

L. Yes; not merely as you did the other day, carelessly on the
schoolroom forms; but carefully and finely, out in the playground.
You can play at crystallization there as much as you please.

KATHLEEN and JESSIE. Oh! how?--how?

L. First, you must put yourselves together, as close as you can,
in the middle of the grass, and form, for first practice, any
figure you like.

JESSIE. Any dancing figure, do you mean?

L. No; I mean a square, or a cross, or a diamond. Any figure you
like, standing close together. You had better outline it first on
the turf, with sticks, or pebbles, so as to see that it is rightly
drawn; then get into it and enlarge or diminish it at one side,
till you are all quite in it, and no empty space left.

DORA. Crinoline and all?

L. The crinoline may stand eventually for rough crystalline
surface, unless you pin it in; and then you may make a polished
crystal of yourselves.

LILY. Oh, we'll pin it in--we'll pin it in!

L. Then, when you are all in the figure, let every one note her
place, and who is next her on each side; and let the outsiders
count how many places they stand from the corners.

KATHLEEN. Yes, yes,--and then?

L. Then you must scatter all over the playground--right over it
from side to side, and end to end; and put yourselves all at equal
distances from each other, everywhere. You needn't mind doing it
very accurately, but so as to be nearly equidistant; not less than
about three yards apart from each other, on every side.

JESSIE. We can easily cut pieces of string of equal length, to
hold. And then? L. Then, at a given signal, let everybody walk, at
the same rate, towards the outlined figure in the middle. You had
better sing as you walk; that will keep you in good time. And as
you close in towards it, let each take her place, and the next
comers fit themselves in beside the first ones, till you are all
in the figure again.

KATHLEEN. Oh! how we shall run against each other. What fun it
will be!

L. No, no, Miss Katie; I can't allow any running against each
other. The atoms never do that, whatever human creatures do. You
must all know your places, and find your way to them without
jostling.

LILY. But how ever shall we do that?

ISABEL. Mustn't the ones in the middle be the nearest, and the
outside ones farther off--when we go away to scatter, I mean?

L. Yes; you must be very careful to keep your order; you will soon
find out how to do it; it is only like soldiers forming square,
except that each must stand still in her place as she reaches it,
and the others come round her; and you will have much more
complicated figures, afterwards, to form, than squares.

ISABEL. I'll put a stone at my place: then I shall know it.

L. You might each nail a bit of paper to the turf, at your place,
with your name upon it: but it would be of no use, for if you
don't know your places, you will make a fine piece of business of
it, while you are looking for your names. And, Isabel, if with a
little head, and eyes, and a brain (all of them very good and
serviceable of their kind, as such things go), you think you
cannot know your place without a stone at it, after examining it
well,--how do you think each atom knows its place, when it never
was there before, and there's no stone at it?

ISABEL. But does every atom know its place?

L. How else could it get there?

MARY. Are they not attracted into their places?

L. Cover a piece of paper with spots, at equal intervals; and then
imagine any kind of attraction you choose, or any law of
attraction, to exist between the spots, and try how, on that
permitted supposition, you can attract them into the figure of a
Maltese cross, in the middle of the paper.

MARY (having tried it). Yes; I see that I cannot:--one would need
all kinds of attractions, in different ways, at different places.
But you do not mean that the atoms are alive?

L. What is it to be alive?

DORA. There now; you're going to be provoking, I know.

L. I do not see why it should be provoking to be asked what it is
to be alive. Do you think you don't know whether you are alive or
not?

(ISABEL skips to the end of the room and back.)

L. Yes, Isabel, that's all very fine; and you and I may call that
being alive: but a modern philosopher calls it being in a "mode of
motion." It requires a certain quantity of heat to take you to the
sideboard; and exactly the same quantity to bring you back again.
That's all.

ISABEL. No, it isn't. And besides, I'm not hot.

L. I am, sometimes, at the way they talk. However, you know,
Isabel, you might have been a particle of a mineral, and yet have
been carried round the room, or anywhere else, by chemical forces,
in the liveliest way.

ISABEL. Yes; but I wasn't carried: I carried myself.

L. The fact is, mousie, the difficulty is not so much to say what
makes a thing alive, as what makes it a Self. As soon as you are
shut off from the rest of the universe into a Self, you begin to
be alive.

VIOLET (indignant). Oh, surely--surely that cannot be so. Is not
all the life of the soul in communion, not separation?

L. There can be no communion where there is no distinction. But we
shall be in an abyss of metaphysics presently, if we don't look
out; and besides, we must not be too grand, to-day, for the
younger children. We'll be grand, some day, by ourselves, if we
must. (The younger children are not pleased, and prepare to
remonstrate; but, knowing by experience, that all conversations in
which the word "communion" occurs, are unintelligible, think
better of it.) Meantime, for broad answer about the atoms. I do
not think we should use the word "life," of any energy which does
not belong to a given form. A seed, or an egg, or a young animal,
are properly called "alive" with respect to the force belonging to
those forms, which consistently develops that form, and no other.
But the force which crystallizes a mineral appears to be chiefly
external, and it does not produce an entirely determinate and
individual form, limited in size, but only an aggregation, in
which some limiting laws must be observed.

MARY. But I do not see much difference, that way, between a
crystal and a tree.

L. Add, then, that the mode of the energy in a living thing
implies a continual change in its elements; and a period for its
end. So you may define life by its attached negative, death; and
still more by its attached positive, birth. But I won't be plagued
any more about this, just now; if you choose to think the crystals
alive, do, and welcome. Rocks have always been called "living" in
their native place.

MARY. There's one question more; then I've done.

L. Only one?

MARY. Only one.

L. But if it is answered, won't it turn into two?

MARY. No; I think it will remain single, and be comfortable.

L. Let me hear it.

MARY. You know, we are to crystallize ourselves out of the whole
playground. Now, what playground have the minerals! Where are they
scattered before they are crystallized; and where are the crystals
generally made?

L. That sounds to me more like three questions than one, Mary. If
it is only one, it is a wide one.

MARY. I did not say anything about the width of it.

L. Well, I must keep it within the best compass I can. When rocks
either dry from a moist state, or cool from a heated state, they
necessarily alter in bulk; and cracks, or open spaces, form in
them in all directions. These cracks must be filled up with solid
matter, or the rock would eventually become a ruinous heap. So,
sometimes by water, sometimes by vapor, sometimes nobody knows
how, crystallizable matter is brought from somewhere, and fastens
itself in these open spaces, so as to bind the rock together again
with crystal cement. A vast quantity of hollows are formed in
lavas by bubbles of gas, just as the holes are left in bread well
baked. In process of time these cavities are generally filled with
various crystals.

MARY. But where does the crystallizing substance come from?

L. Sometimes out of the rock itself; sometimes from below or
above, through the veins. The entire substance of the contracting
rock may be filled with liquid, pressed into it so as to fill
every pore;--or with mineral vapor;--or it may be so charged at
one place, and empty at another. There's no end to the "may be's."
But all that you need fancy, for our present purpose, is that
hollows in the rocks, like the caves in Derbyshire, are traversed
by liquids or vapor containing certain elements in a more or less
free or separate state, which crystallize on the cave walls.

SIBYL. There now;--Mary has had all her questions answered: it's
my turn to have mine.

L. Ah, there's a conspiracy among you, I see. I might have guessed
as much.

DORA. I'm sure you ask us questions enough! How can you have the
heart, when you dislike so to be asked them yourself?

L. My dear child, if people do not answer questions, it does not
matter how many they are asked, because they've no trouble with
them. Now, when I ask you questions, I never expect to be
answered; but when you ask me, you always do; and it's not fair.

DORA. Very well, we shall understand, next time.

SIBYL. No, but seriously, we all want to ask one thing more, quite
dreadfully.

L. And I don't want to be asked it, quite dreadfully; but you'll
have your own way, of course.

SIBYL. We none of us understand about the lower Pthah. It was not
merely yesterday; but in all we have read about him in Wilkinson,
or in any book, we cannot understand what the Egyptians put their
god into that ugly little deformed shape for.

L. Well, I'm glad it's that sort of question; because I can answer
anything I like to that.

EGYPT. Anything you like will do quite well for us; we shall be
pleased with the answer, if you are.

L. I am not so sure of that, most gracious queen; for I must begin
by the statement that queens seem to have disliked all sorts of
work, in those days, as much as some queens dislike sewing to-day.

EGYPT. Now, it's too bad! and just when I was trying to say the
civillest thing I could!

L. But, Egypt, why did you tell me you disliked sewing so?

EGYPT. Did not I show you how the thread cuts my fingers? and I
always get cramp, somehow, in my neck, if I sew long.

L. Well, I suppose the Egyptian queens thought everybody got cramp
in their neck, if they sewed long; and that thread always cut
people's fingers. At all events, every kind of manual labor was
despised both by them, and the Greeks; and, while they owned the
real good and fruit of it, they yet held it a degradation to all
who practiced it. Also, knowing the laws of life thoroughly, they
perceived that the special practice necessary to bring any manual
art to perfection strengthened the body distortedly; one energy or
member gaining at the expense of the rest. They especially dreaded
and despised any kind of work that had to be done near fire: yet,
feeling what they owed to it in metal-work, as the basis of all
other work, they expressed this mixed reverence and scorn in the
varied types of the lame Hephaestus, and the lower Pthah.

SIBYL. But what did you mean by making him say "Everything great I
can make small, and everything small great"?

L. I had my own separate meaning in that. We have seen in modern
times the power of the lower Pthah developed in a separate way,
which no Greek nor Egyptian could have conceived. It is the
character of pure and eyeless manual labor to conceive everything
as subjected to it: and, in reality, to disgrace and diminish all
that is so subjected, aggrandizing itself, and the thought of
itself, at the expense of all noble things. I heard an orator, and
a good one too, at the Working Men's College, the other day, make
a great point in a description of our railroads; saying, with
grandly conducted emphasis, "They have made man greater, and the
world less." His working audience were mightily pleased; they
thought it so very fine a thing to be made bigger themselves; and
all the rest of the world less. I should have enjoyed asking them
(but it would have been a pity--they were so pleased), how much
less they would like to have the world made;--and whether, at
present, those of them really felt the biggest men, who lived in
the least houses.

SIBYL. But then, why did you make Pthah say that he could make
weak things strong, and small things great?

L. My dear, he is a boaster and self-assertor, by nature; but it
is so far true. For instance, we used to have a fair in our
neighborhood--a very fine fair we thought it. You never saw such
an one; but if you look at the engraving of Turner's "St.
Catherine's Hill," you will see what it was like. There were
curious booths, carried on poles; and peep-shows; and music, with
plenty of drums and cymbals; and much barley-sugar and
gingerbread, and the like: and in the alleys of this fair the
London populace would enjoy themselves, after their fashion, very
thoroughly. Well, the little Pthah set to work upon it one day; he
made the wooden poles into iron ones, and put them across, like
his own crooked legs, so that you always fall over them if you
don't look where you are going; and he turned all the canvas into
panes of glass, and put it up on his iron cross-poles; and made
all the little booths into one great booth;--and people said it
was very fine, and a new style of architecture; and Mr. Dickens
said nothing was ever like it in Fairy-land, which was very true.
And then the little Pthah set to work to put fine fairings in it;
and he painted the Nineveh bulls afresh, with the blackest eyes he
could paint (because he had none himself), and he got the angels
down from Lincoln choir, and gilded their wings like his
gingerbread of old times; and he sent for everything else he could
think of, and put it in his booth. There are the casts of Niobe
and her children; and the Chimpanzee; and the wooden Caffres and
New-Zealanders; and the Shakespeare House; and Le Grand Blondin,
and Le Petit Blondin; and Handel; and Mozart; and no end of shops,
and buns, and beer; and all the little-Pthah-worshippers say,
never was anything so sublime!

SIBYL. Now, do you mean to say you never go to these Crystal
Palace concerts? they're as good as good can be.

L. I don't go to the thundering things with a million of bad
voices in them. When I want a song, I get Julia Mannering and Lucy
Bertram and Counselor Pleydell to sing "We be three poor Mariners"
to me; then I've no headache next morning. But I do go to the
smaller concerts, when I can; for they are very good, as you say,
Sibyl: and I always get a reserved seat somewhere near the
orchestra, where I am sure I can see the kettle-drummer drum.

SIBYL. Now DO be serious, for one minute.

L. I am serious--never was more so. You know one can't see the
modulation of violinists' fingers, but one can see the vibration
of the drummer's hand; and it's lovely.

SIBYL. But fancy going to a concert, not to hear, but to see!

L. Yes, it is very absurd. The quite right thing, I believe, is to
go there to talk. I confess, however, that in most music, when
very well done, the doing of it is to me the chiefly interesting
part of the business. I'm always thinking how good it would be for
the fat, supercilious people, who care so little for their half-
crown's worth, to be set to try and do a half-crown's worth of
anything like it.

MARY. But surely that Crystal Palace is a great good and help to
the people of London?

L. The fresh air of the Norwood hills is, or was, my dear; but
they are spoiling that with smoke as fast as they can. And the
palace (as they call it) is a better place for them, by much, than
the old fair; and it is always there, instead of for three days
only; and it shuts up at proper hours of night. And good use may
be made of the things in it, if you know how: but as for its
teaching the people, it will teach them nothing but the lowest of
the lower Pthah's work--nothing but hammer and tongs. I saw a
wonderful piece, of his doing, in the place, only the other day.
Some unhappy metal-worker--I am not sure if it was not a metal-
working firm--had taken three years to make a Golden eagle.

SIBYL. Of real gold?

L. No; of bronze, or copper, or some of their foul patent metals--
it is no matter what. I meant a model of our chief British eagle.
Every feather was made separately; and every filament of every
feather separately, and so joined on; and all the quills modeled
of the right length and right section, and at last the whole
cluster of them fastened together. You know, children, I don't
think much of my own drawing; but take my proud word for once,
that when I go to the Zoological Gardens, and happen to have a bit
of chalk in my pocket, and the Gray Harpy will sit, without
screwing his head round, for thirty seconds,--I can do a better
thing of him in that time than the three years' work of this
industrious firm. For, during the thirty seconds, the eagle is my
object,--not myself; and during the three years, the firm's
object, in every fiber of bronze it made, was itself, and not the
eagle. That is the true meaning of the little Pthah's having no
eyes--he can see only himself. The Egyptian beetle was not quite
the full type of him; our northern ground beetle is a truer one.
It is beautiful to see it at work, gathering its treasures (such
as they are) into little round balls; and pushing them home with
the strong wrong end of it,--head downmost all the way,--like a
modern political economist with his ball of capital, declaring
that a nation can stand on its vices better than on its virtues.
But away with you, children, now, for I'm getting cross.

DORA. I'm going downstairs; I shall take care, at any rate, that
there are no little Pthahs in the kitchen cupboards.





LECTURE 4.

THE CRYSTAL ORDERS


A working Lecture in the large Schoolroom; with experimental
Interludes. The great bell has rung unexpectedly.

KATHLEEN (entering disconsolate, though first at the summons). Oh
dear, oh dear, what a day! Was ever anything so provoking! just
when we wanted to crystallize ourselves;--and I'm sure it's going
to rain all day long.

L. So am I, Kate. The sky has quite an Irish way with it. But I
don't see why Irish girls should also look so dismal. Fancy that
you don't want to crystallize yourselves: you didn't, the day
before yesterday, and you were not unhappy when it rained then.

FLORRIE. Ah! but we do want to-day; and the rain's so tiresome.

L. That is to say, children, that because you are all the richer
by the expectation of playing at a new game, you choose to make
yourselves unhappier than when you had nothing to look forward to,
but the old ones.

ISABEL. But then, to have to wait--wait--wait; and before we've
tried it;--and perhaps it will rain to-morrow, too!

L. It may also rain the day after to-morrow. We can make ourselves
uncomfortable to any extent with perhapses, Isabel. You may stick
perhapses into your little minds, like pins, till you are as
uncomfortable as the Lilliputians made Gulliver with their arrows,
when he would not lie quiet.

ISABEL. But what ARE we to do to-day?

L. To be quiet, for one thing, like Gulliver when he saw there was
nothing better to be done. And to practice patience. I can tell
you, children, THAT requires nearly as much practicing as music;
and we are continually losing our lessons when the master comes.
Now, to-day, here's a nice, little adagio lesson for us, if we
play it properly.

ISABEL. But I don't like that sort of lesson. I can't play it
properly.

L. Can you play a Mozart sonata yet, Isabel? The more need to
practice. All one's life is a music, if one touches the notes
rightly, and in time. But there must be no hurry.

KATHLEEN. I'm sure there's no music in stopping in on a rainy day.

L. There's no music in a "rest," Katie, that I know of: but
there's the making of music in it. And people are always missing
that part of the life-melody; and scrambling on without counting--
not that it's easy to count; but nothing on which so much depends
ever IS easy. People are always talking of perseverance, and
courage, and fortitude; but patience is the finest and worthiest
part of fortitude,--and the rarest, too. I know twenty persevering
girls for one patient one: but it is only that twenty-first who
can do her work, out and out, or enjoy it. For patience lies at
the root of all pleasures, as well as of all powers. Hope herself
ceases to be happiness, when Impatience companions her.

(ISABEL and LILY sit down on the floor, and fold their hands. The
others follow their example.)

Good children! but that's not quite the way of it, neither. Folded
hands are not necessarily resigned ones. The Patience who really
smiles at grief usually stands, or walks, or even runs: she seldom
sits; though she may sometimes have to do it, for many a day, poor
thing, by monuments; or like Chaucer's, "with face pale, upon a
hill of sand." But we are not reduced to that to-day. Suppose we
use this calamitous fore-noon to choose the shapes we are to
crystallize into? we know nothing about them yet.

(The pictures of resignation rise from the floor not in the
patientest manner. General applause.)

MARY (with one or two others). The very thing we wanted to ask you
about!

LILY. We looked at the books about crystals, but they are so
dreadful.

L. Well, Lily, we must go through a little dreadfulness, that's a
fact: no road to any good knowledge is wholly among the lilies and
the grass; there is rough climbing to be done always. But the
crystal-books are a little TOO dreadful, most of them, I admit;
and we shall have to be content with very little of their help.
You know, as you cannot stand on each other's heads, you can only
make yourselves into the sections of crystals,--the figures they
show when they are cut through; and we will choose some that will
be quite easy. You shall make diamonds of yourselves--

ISABEL. Oh, no, no! we won't be diamonds, please.

L, Yes, you shall, Isabel; they are very pretty things, if the
jewelers, and the kings and queens, would only let them alone. You
shall make diamonds of yourselves, and rubies of yourselves, and
emeralds; and Irish diamonds; two of those--with Lily in the
middle of one, which will be very orderly, of course; and Kathleen
in the middle of the other, for which we will hope the best; and
you shall make Derbyshire spar of yourselves, and Iceland spar,
and gold, and silver, and--Quicksilver there's enough of in you,
without any making.

MARY. Now you know, the children will be getting quite wild we
must really get pencils and paper, and begin properly.

L. Wait a minute, Miss Mary, I think as we the schoolroom clear
to-day, I'll try to give you some notion of the three great orders
or ranks of crystals, into which all the others seem more or less
to fall. We shall only want one figure a day, in the playground,
and that can be drawn in a minute: but the general ideas had
better be fastened first. I must show you a great many minerals;
so let me have three tables wheeled into the three windows, that
we may keep our specimens separate;--we will keep the three orders
of crystals on separate tables.

(First Interlude of pushing and pulling, and spreading of baize
covers. VIOLET, not particularly minding what she is about, gets
herself jammed into a corner, and bid to stand out of the way; on
which she devotes herself to meditation.)

VIOLET (after interval of meditation). How strange it is that
everything seems to divide into threes!

L. Everything doesn't divide into threes. Ivy won't, though
shamrock will, and daisies won't though lilies will.

VIOLET. But all the nicest things seem to divide into threes.

L. Violets won't.

VIOLET. No; I should think not, indeed! But I mean the great
things.

L. I've always heard the globe had four quarters.

ISABEL. Well; but you know you said it hadn't any quarters at all.
So mayn't it really be divided into three?

L. If it were divided into no more than three, on the outside of
it, Isabel, it would be a fine world to live in; and if it were
divided into three in the inside of it, it would soon be no world
to live in at all.

DORA. We shall never get to the crystals, at this rate. (Aside to
MARY.) He will get off into political economy before we know where
we are. (Aloud.) But the crystals are divided into three, then?

L. No; but there are three general notions by which we may best
get hold of them. Then between these notions there are other
notions.

LILY (alarmed). A great many? And shall we have to learn them all?

L. More than a great many--a quite infinite many. So you cannot
learn them all.

LILY (greatly relieved). Then may we only learn the three?

L. Certainly; unless, when you have got those three notions, you
want to have some more notions;--which would not surprise me. But
we'll try for the three, first. Katie, you broke your coral
necklace this morning?

KATHLEEN. Oh! who told you? It was in jumping. I'm so sorry!

L. I'm very glad. Can you fetch me the beads of it?

KATHLEEN. I've lost some; here are the rest in my pocket, if I can
only get them out.

L. You mean to get them out some day, I suppose; so try now. I
want them.

(KATHLEEN empties her pocket on the floor. The beads disperse. The
School disperses also. Second Interlude--hunting piece.)

L. (after waiting patiently for a quarter of an hour, to ISABEL,
who comes up from under the table with her hair all about her ears
and the last findable beads in her hand.) Mice are useful little
things sometimes. Now, mousie, I want all those beads
crystallized. How many ways are there of putting them in order?

ISABEL. Well, first one would string them, I suppose?

L. Yes, that's the first way. You cannot string ultimate atoms;
but you can put them in a row, and then they fasten themselves
together, somehow, into a long rod or needle. We will call these
"NEEDLE-crystals." What would be the next way?

ISABEL. I suppose, as we are to get together in the playground,
when it stops raining, in different shapes?

L. Yes; put the beads together, then, in the simplest form you
can, to begin with. Put them into a square, and pack them close.

ISABEL (after careful endeavor). I can't get them closer.

L. That will do. Now you may see, beforehand, that if you try to
throw yourselves into square in this confused way, you will never
know your places; so you had better consider every square as made
of rods, put side by side. Take four beads of equal size, first,
Isabel; put them into a little square. That, you may consider as
made up of two rods of two beads each. Then you can make a square
a size larger, out of three rods of three. Then the next square
may be a size larger. How many rods, Lily?

LILY. Four rods of four beads each, I suppose.

L. Yes, and then five rods of five, and so on. But now, look here;
make another square of four beads again. You see they leave a
little opening in the center.

ISABEL (pushing two opposite ones closer together). Now they
don't.

L. No; but now it isn't a square; and by pushing the two together
you have pushed the two others farther apart.

ISABEL. And yet, somehow, they all seem closer than they were!

L. Yes; for before, each of them only touched two of the others,
but now each of the two in the middle touches the other three.
Take away one of the outsiders, Isabel: now you have three in a
triangle--the smallest triangle you can make out of the beads. Now
put a rod of three beads on at one side. So, you have a triangle
of six beads; but just the shape of the first one. Next a rod of
four on the side of that; and you have a triangle of ten beads:
then a rod of five on the side of that; and you have a triangle of
fifteen. Thus you have a square with five beads on the side, and a
triangle with five beads on the side; equal-sided, therefore, like
the square. So, however few or many you may be, you may soon learn
how to crystallize quickly into these two figures, which are the
foundation of form in the commonest, and therefore actually the
most important, as well as in the rarest, and therefore, by our
esteem, the most important, minerals of the world. Look at this in
my hand.

VIOLET. Why, it is leaf gold!

L. Yes; but beaten by no man's hammer; or rather, not beaten at
all, but woven. Besides, feel the weight of it. There is gold
enough there to gild the walls and ceiling, if it were beaten
thin.

VIOLET. How beautiful! And it glitters like a leaf covered with
frost.

L. You only think it so beautiful because you know it is gold. It
is not prettier, in reality, than a bit of brass for it is
Transylvanian gold; and they say there is a foolish gnome in the
mines there, who is always wanting to live in the moon, and so
alloys all the gold with a little silver. I don't know how that
may be, but the silver always IS in the gold, and if he does it,
it's very provoking of him, for no gold is woven so fine anywhere
else.

MARY (who has been looking through her magnifying glass). But this
is not woven. This is all made of little triangles.

L. Say "patched," then, if you must be so particular. But if you
fancy all those triangles, small as they are (and many of them are
infinitely small), made up again of rods, and those of grains, as
we built our great triangle of the beads, what word will you take
for the manufacture?

MAY. There's no word--it is beyond words.

L. Yes, and that would matter little, were it not beyond thoughts
too. But, at all events, this yellow leaf of dead gold, shed, not
from the ruined woodlands, but the ruined rocks, will help you to
remember the second kind of crystals, LEAF-crystals, or FOLIATED
crystals, though I show you the form in gold first only to make a
strong impression on you, for gold is not generally or
characteristically, crystallized in leaves; the real type of
foliated crystals is this thing, Mica; which if you once feel well
and break well, you will always know again; and you will often
have occasion to know it, for you will find it everywhere nearly,
in hill countries.

KATHLEEN. If we break it well! May we break it?

L. To powder, if you like.

(Surrenders plate of brown mica to public investigation. Third
Interlude. It sustains severely philosophic al treatment at all
hands.)

FLORRIE (to whom the last fragments have descended). Always
leaves, and leaves, and nothing but leaves, or white dust?

L. That dust itself is nothing but finer leaves.

(Shows them to FLORRIE through magnifying glass.)

ISABEL (peeping over FLORRIE'S shoulder). But then this bit under
the glass looks like that bit out of the glass! If we could break
this bit under the glass, what would it be like?

L. It would be all leaves still.

ISABEL. And then if we broke those again?

L. All less leaves still.

ISABEL (impatient). And if we broke them again, and again, and
again, and again, and again?

L. Well, I suppose you would come to a limit, if you could only
see it. Notice that the little flakes already differ somewhat from
the large ones: because I can bend them up and down, and they stay
bent; while the large flake, though it bent easily a little way,
sprang back when you let it go, and broke when you tried to bend
it far. And a large mass would not bend at all.

MARY. Would that leaf gold separate into finer leaves, in the same
way?

L. No; and therefore, as I told you, it is not a characteristic
specimen of a foliated crystallization. The little triangles are
portions of solid crystals, and so they are in this, which looks
like a black mica; but you see it is made up of triangles like the
gold, and stands, almost accurately, as an intermediate link, in
crystals, between mica and gold. Yet this is the commonest, as
gold the rarest, of metals.

MARY. Is it iron? I never saw iron so bright.

L. It is rust of iron, finely crystallized: from its resemblance
to mica, it is often called micaceous iron.

KATHLEEN. May we break this, too?

L. No, for I could not easily get such another crystal; besides,
it would not break like the mica; it is much harder. But take the
glass again, and look at the fineness of the jagged edges of the
triangles where they lap over each other. The gold has the same:
but you see them better here, terrace above terrace, countless,
and, in successive angles, like superb fortified bastions.

MAY. But all foliated crystals are not made of triangles?

L. Far from it; mica is occasionally so. but usually of hexagons;
and here is a foliated crystal made of squares, which will show
you that the leaves of the rock-land have their summer green, as
well as their autumnal gold.

FLORRIE. Oh! oh! oh! (jumps for joy).

L. Did you never see a bit of green leaf before, Florrie?

FLORRIE. Yes, but never so bright as that, and not in a stone.

L. If you will look at the leaves of the trees in sunshine after a
shower, you will find they are much brighter than that; and surely
they are none the worse for being on stalks instead of in stones?

FLORRIE. Yes, but then there are so many of them, one never looks,
I suppose.

L. Now you have it, Florrie.

VIOLET (sighing). There are so many beautiful things we never see!

L. You need not sigh for that, Violet; but I will tell you what we
should all sigh for--that there are so many ugly things we never
see.

VIOLET. But we don't want to see ugly things!

L. You had better say, "We don't want to suffer them." You ought
to be glad in thinking how much more beauty God has made, than
human eyes can ever see; but not glad in thinking how much more
evil man has made, than his own soul can ever conceive, much more
than his hands can ever heal.

VIOLET. I don't understand;--how is that like the leaves?

L. The same law holds in our neglect of multiplied pain, as in our
neglect of multiplied beauty. Florrie jumps for joy at sight of
half an inch of a green leaf in a brown stone, and takes more
notice of it than of all the green in the wood, and you, or I, or
any of us, would be unhappy if any single human creature beside us
were in sharp pain; but we can read, at breakfast, day after day,
of men being killed, and of women and children dying of hunger,
faster than the leaves strew the brooks in Vallombrosa;--and then
go out to play croquet, as if nothing had happened.

MAY. But we do not see the people being killed or dying.

L. You did not see your brother, when you got the telegram the
other day, saying he was ill, May; but you cried for him; and
played no croquet. But we cannot talk of these things now; and
what is more, you must let me talk straight on, for a little
while; and ask no questions till I've done: for we branch
("exfoliate," I should say, mineralogically) always into something
else,--though that's my fault more than yours; but I must go
straight on now. You have got a distinct notion, I hope, of leaf-
crystals; and you see the sort of look they have: you can easily
remember that "folium" is Latin for a leaf, and that the separate
flakes of mica, or any other such stones, are called "folia;" but,
because mica is the most characteristic of these stones, other
things that are like it in structure are called "micas;" thus we
have Uran-mica, which is the green leaf I showed you; and Copper-
mica, which is another like it, made chiefly of copper; and this
foliated iron is called "micaceous iron." You have then these two
great orders, Needle-crystals, made (probably) of grains in rows;
and Leaf-crystals, made (probably) of needles interwoven; now,
lastly, there are crystals of a third order, in heaps, or knots,
or masses, which may be made either of leaves laid one upon
another, or of needles bound like Roman fasces; and mica itself,
when it is well crystallized, puts itself into such masses, as if
to show us how others are made. Here is a brown six-sided crystal,
quite as beautifully chiseled at the sides as any castle tower;
but you see it is entirely built of folia of mica, one laid above
another, which break away the moment I touch the edge with my
knife. Now, here is another hexagonal tower, of just the same size
and color, which I want you to compare with the mica carefully;
but as I cannot wait for you to do it just now, I must tell you
quickly what main differences to look for. First, you will feel it
far heavier than the mica. Then, though its surface looks quite
micaceous in the folia of it when you try them with the knife, you
will find you cannot break them away--

KATHLEEN. May I try?

L. Yes, you mistrusting Katie. Here's my strong knife for you.
(Experimental pause. KATHLEEN doing her best.) You'll have that
knife shutting on your finger presently, Kate; and I don't know a
girl who would like less to have her hand tied up for a week.

KATHLEEN (who also does not like to be beaten--giving up the knife
despondently.). What CAN the nasty hard thing be?

L. It is nothing but indurated clay, Kate: very hard set
certainly, yet not so hard as it might be. If it were thoroughly
well crystallized, you would see none of those micaceous
fractures; and the stone would be quite red and clear, all
through.

KATHLEEN. Oh, cannot you show us one?

L. Egypt can, if you ask her; she has a beautiful one in the clasp
of her favorite bracelet.

KATHLEEN. Why, that's a ruby!

L. Well, so is that thing you've been scratching at.

KATHLEEN. My goodness! (Takes up the stone again, very delicately;
and drops it. General consternation.)

L. Never mind, Katie, you might drop it from the top of the house,
and do it no harm. But though you really are a very good girl, and
as good-natured as anybody can possibly be, remember, you have
your faults, like other people, and, if I were you, the next time
I wanted to assert anything energetically, I would assert it by
"my badness," not "my goodness."

KATHLEEN. Ah, now, it's too bad of you!

L. Well, then, I'll invoke, on occasion, my "too-badness." But you
may as well pick up the ruby, now you have dropped it; and look
carefully at the beautiful hexagonal lines which gleam on its
surface, and here is a pretty white sapphire (essentially the same
stone as the ruby), in which you will see the same lovely
structure, like the threads of the finest white cobweb. I do not
know what is the exact method of a ruby's construction, but you
see by these lines, what fine construction there is, even in this
hardest of stones (after the diamond), which usually appears as a
massive lump or knot. There is therefore no real mineralogical
distinction between needle crystals and knotted crystals, but,
practically, crystallized masses throw themselves into one of the
three groups we have been examining to-day; and appear either as
Needles, as Folia, or as Knots; when they are in needles (or
fibers), they make the stones or rocks formed out of them
"FIBROUS;" when they are in folia, they make them "FOLIATED;" when
they are in knots (or grains), "GRANULAR." Fibrous rocks are
comparatively rare, in mass; but fibrous minerals are innumerable;
and it is often a question which really no one but a young lady
could possibly settle, whether one should call the fibers
composing them "threads" or "needles." Here is amianthus, for
instance, which is quite as fine and soft as any cotton thread you
ever sewed with; and here is sulphide of bismuth, with sharper
points and brighter luster than your finest needles have; and
fastened in white webs of quartz more delicate than your finest
lace; and here is sulphide of antimony, which looks like mere
purple wool, but it is all of purple needle crystals; and here is
red oxide of copper (you must not breathe on it as you look, or
you may blow some of the films of it off the stone), which is
simply a woven tissue of scarlet silk. However, these finer
thread-forms are comparatively rare, while the bolder and needle-
like crystals occur constantly; so that, I believe, "Needle-
crystal" is the best word (the grand one is, "Acicular crystal,"
but Sibyl will tell you it is all the same, only less easily
understood; and therefore more scientific). Then the Leaf-
crystals, as I said, form an immense mass of foliated rocks; and
the Granular crystals, which are of many kinds, form essentially
granular, or granitic and porphyritic rocks; and it is always a
point of more interest to me (and I think will ultimately be to
you), to consider the causes which force a given mineral to take
any one of these three general forms, than what the peculiar
geometrical limitations are, belonging to its own crystals.
[Footnote: Note iv.] It is more interesting to me, for instance,
to try and find out why the red oxide of copper, usually
crystallizing in cubes or octahedrons, makes itself exquisitely,
out of its cubes, into this red silk in one particular Cornish
mine, than what are the absolutely necessary angles of the
octahedron, which is its common form. At all events, that
mathematical part of crystallography is quite beyond girls'
strength; but these questions of the various tempers and manners
of crystals are not only comprehensible by you, but full of the
most curious teaching for you. For in the fulfillment, to the best
of their power, of their adopted form under given circumstances,
there are conditions entirely resembling those of human virtue;
and indeed expressible under no term so proper as that of the
Virtue, or Courage of crystals;--which, if you are not afraid of
the crystals making you ashamed of yourselves, we will by to get
some notion of, to-morrow. But it will be a bye-lecture, and more
about yourselves than the minerals. Don't come unless you like.

MARY. I'm sure the crystals will make us ashamed of ourselves; but
we'll come, for all that.

L. Meantime, look well and quietly over these needle, or thread
crystals, and those on the other two tables, with magnifying
glasses; and see what thoughts will come into your little heads
about them. For the best thoughts are generally those which come
without being forced, one does not know how. And so I hope you
will get through your wet day patiently.





LECTURE 5.

CRYSTAL VIRTUES


A quiet talk, in the afternoon, by the sunniest window of the
Drawing-room. Present: FLORRIE, ISABEL, MAY, LUCILLA, KATHLEEN,
DORA, MARY, and some others, who have saved time for the bye-
Lecture.

L. So you have really come, like good girls, to be made ashamed of
yourselves?

DORA (very meekly). No, we needn't be made so; we always are.

L. Well, I believe that's truer than most pretty speeches: but you
know, you saucy girl, some people have more reason to be so than
others. Are you sure everybody is, as well as you?

THE GENERAL VOICE. Yes, yes; everybody.

L. What! Florrie ashamed of herself?

(FLORRIE hides behind the curtain.)

L. And Isabel?

(ISABEL hides under the table.)

L. And Mary?

(MARY runs into the corner behind the piano.)

L. And Lucilla?

(LUCILLA hides her face in her hands.)

L. Dear, dear; but this will never do. I shall have to tell you of
the faults of the crystals, instead of virtues, to put you in
heart again.

MAY (coming out of her corner). Oh! have the crystals faults, like
us?

L. Certainly, May. Their best virtues are shown in fighting their
faults; and some have a great many faults; and some are very
naughty crystals indeed.

FLORRIE (from behind her curtain). As naughty as me?

ISABEL (peeping out from under the table-cloth). Or me?

L. Well, I don't know. They never forget their syntax, children,
when once they've been taught it. But I think some of them are, on
the whole, worse than any of you. Not that it's amiable of you to
look so radiant, all in a minute, on that account.

DORA. Oh! but it's so much more comfortable.

(Everybody seems to recover their spirits. Eclipse of FLORRIE and
ISABEL terminates.)

L. What kindly creatures girls are, after all, to their neighbors'
failings! I think you may be ashamed of yourselves indeed, now,
children! I can tell you, you shall hear of the highest
crystalline merits that I can think of, to-day: and I wish there
were more of them; but crystals have a limited, though a stern,
code of morals; and their essential virtues are but two;--the
first is to be pure, and the second to be well shaped.

MARY. Pure! Does that mean clear--transparent?

L. No; unless in the case of a transparent substance. You cannot
have a transparent crystal of gold; but you may have a perfectly
pure one.

ISABEL. But you said it was the shape that made things be
crystals; therefore, oughtn't their shape to be their first
virtue, not their second?

L. Right, you troublesome mousie. But I call their shape only
their second virtue, because it depends on time and accident, and
things which the crystal cannot help. If it is cooled too quickly,
or shaken, it must take what shape it can; but it seems as if,
even then, it had in itself the power of rejecting impurity, if it
has crystalline life enough. Here is a crystal of quartz, well
enough shaped in its way; but it seems to have been languid and
sick at heart; and some white milky substance has got into it, and
mixed itself up with it, all through. It makes the quartz quite
yellow, if you hold it up to the light, and milky blue on the
surface. Here is another, broken into a thousand separate facets
and out of all traceable shape; but as pure as a mountain spring.
I like this one best.

THE AUDIENCE. So do I--and I--and I.

MARY. Would a crystallographer?

L. I think so. He would find many more laws curiously exemplified
in the irregularly grouped but pure crystal. But it is a futile
question, this of first or second. Purity is in most cases a
prior, if not a nobler, virtue; at all events it is most
convenient to think about it first.

MARY. But what ought we to think about it? Is there much to be
thought--I mean, much to puzzle one?

L. I don't know what you call "much." It is a long time since I
met with anything in which there was little. There's not much in
this, perhaps. The crystal must be either dirty or clean,--and
there's an end. So it is with one's hands, and with one's heart--
only you can wash your hands without changing them, but not
hearts, nor crystals. On the whole, while you are young, it will
be as well to take care that your hearts don't want much washing;
for they may perhaps need wringing also, when they do.

(Audience doubtful and uncomfortable. LUCILLA at last takes
courage.)

LUCILLA. Oh! but surely, sir, we cannot make our hearts clean?

L. Not easily, Lucilla; so you had better keep them so, when they
are.

LUCILLA. When they are! But, sir--

L. Well?

LUCILLA. Sir--surely--are we not told that they are all evil?

L. Wait a little, Lucilla; that is difficult ground you are
getting upon; and we must keep to our crystals, till at least we
understand what THEIR good and evil consist in; they may help us
afterwards to some useful hints about our own. I said that their
goodness consisted chiefly in purity of substance, and perfectness
of form: but those are rather the EFFECTS of their goodness, than
the goodness itself. The inherent virtues of the crystals,
resulting in these outer conditions, might really seem to be best
described in the words we should use respecting living creatures--
"force of heart" and "steadiness of purpose." There seem to be in
some crystals, from the beginning, an unconquerable purity of
vital power, and strength of crystal spirit. Whatever dead
substance, unacceptant of this energy, comes in their way, is
either rejected, or forced to take some beautiful subordinate
form; the purity of the crystal remains unsullied, and every atom
of it bright with coherent energy. Then the second condition is,
that from the beginning of its whole structure, a fine crystal
seems to have determined that it will be of a certain size and of
a certain shape; it persists in this plan, and completes it. Here
is a perfect crystal of quartz for you. It is of an unusual form,
and one which it might seem very difficult to build--a pyramid
with convex sides, composed of other minor pyramids. But there is
not a flaw in its contour throughout; not one of its myriads of
component sides but is as bright as a jeweler's faceted work (and
far finer, if you saw it close). The crystal points are as sharp
as javelins; their edges will cut glass with a touch. Anything
more resolute, consummate, determinate in form, cannot be
conceived. Here, on the other hand, is a crystal of the same
substance, in a perfectly simple type of form--a plain six-sided
prism; but from its base to its point,--and it is nine inches
long,--it has never for one instant made up its mind what
thickness it will have. It seems to have begun by making itself as
thick as it thought possible with the quantity of material at
command. Still not being as thick as it would like to be, it has
clumsily glued on more substance at one of its sides. Then it has
thinned itself, in a panic of economy; then puffed itself out
again; then starved one side to enlarge another; then warped
itself quite out of its first line. Opaque, rough-surfaced, jagged
on the edge, distorted in the spine, it exhibits a quite human
image of decrepitude and dishonor; but the worst of all the signs
of its decay and helplessness is that half-way up a parasite
crystal, smaller, but just as sickly, has rooted itself in the
side of the larger one, eating out a cavity round its root, and
then growing backwards, or downwards contrary to the direction of
the main crystal. Yet I cannot trace the least difference in
purity of substance between the first most noble stone, and this
ignoble and dissolute one. The impurity of the last is in its
will, or want of will.

MARY. Oh, if we could but understand the meaning of it all!

L. We can understand all that is good for us. It is just as true
for us as for the crystal, that the nobleness of life depends on
its consistency,--clearness of purpose--quiet and ceaseless
energy. All doubt and repenting, and botching and re-touching and
wondering what will it be best to do next, are vice, as well as
misery.

MARY (much wondering). But must not one repent when one does
wrong, and hesitate when one can't see one's way?

L. You have no business at all to do wrong, nor to get into any
way that you cannot see. Your intelligence should always be far in
advance of your act. Whenever you do not know what you are about,
you are sure to be doing wrong.

KATHLEEN. Oh, dear, but I never know what I am about!

L. Very true, Katie, but it is a great deal to know, if you know
that. And you find that you have done wrong afterwards; and
perhaps some day you may begin to know, or at least, think, what
you are about.

ISABEL. But surely people can't do very wrong if they don't know,
can they? I mean, they can't be very naughty. They can be wrong,
like Kathleen or me, when we make mistakes; but not wrong in the
dreadful way. I can't express what I mean; but there are two sorts
of wrong, are there not?

L. Yes, Isabel; but you will find that the great difference is
between kind and unkind wrongs, not between meant and unmeant
wrong. Very few people really mean to do wrong,--in a deep sense,
none. They only don't know what they are about. Cain did not mean
to do wrong when he killed Abel.

(ISABEL draws a deep breath, and opens her eyes very wide.)

L. No, Isabel; and there are countless Cains among us now, who
kill their brothers by the score a day, not only for less
provocation than Cain had, but for NO provocation,--and merely for
what they can make of their bones,--yet do not think they are
doing wrong in the least. Then sometimes you have the business
reversed, as over in America these last years, where you have seen
Abel resolutely killing Cain, and not thinking he is doing wrong
The great difficulty is always to open people's eyes: to touch
their feelings and break their hearts, is easy, the difficult
thing is to break their heads. What does it matter as long as they
remain stupid, whether you change their feelings or not? You
cannot be always at their elbow to tell them what is right and
they may just do as wrong as before or worse, and their best
intentions merely make the road smooth for them,--you know where,
children. For it is not the place itself that is paved with them
as people say so often. You can't pave the bottomless pit, but you
may the road to it

MAY. Well, but if people do as well as they can see how, surely
that is the right for them, isn't it?

L. No, May, not a bit of it right is right, and wrong is wrong. It
is only the fool who does wrong, and says he "did it for the
best." And if there's one sort of person in the world that the
Bible speaks harder of than another, it is fools. Their particular
and chief way of saying "There is no God" is this of declaring
that whatever their "public opinion" may be is right and that
God's opinion is of no consequence.

MAY. But surely nobody can always know what is right?

L. Yes, you always can, for to-day; and if you do what you see of
it to-day, you will see more of it, and more clearly, to-morrow.
Here for instance, you children are at school, and have to learn
French, and arithmetic, and music, and several other such things.
That is your "right" for the present; the "right" for us, your
teachers, is to see that you learn as much as you can, without
spoiling your dinner, your sleep, or your play; and that what you
do learn, you learn well. You all know when you learn with a will,
and when you dawdle. There's no doubt of conscience about that, I
suppose?

VIOLET. No; but if one wants to read an amusing book, instead of
learning one's lesson?

L. You don't call that a "question," seriously, Violet? You are
then merely deciding whether you will resolutely do wrong or not.

MARY. But, in after life, how many fearful difficulties may arise,
however one tries to know or to do what is right!

L. You are much too sensible a girl, Mary, to have felt that,
whatever you may have seen. A great many of young ladies'
difficulties arise from their falling in love with a wrong person;
but they have no business to let themselves fall in love, till
they know he is the right one.

DORA. How many thousands ought he to have a year?

L. (disdaining reply). There are, of course, certain crises of
fortune when one has to take care of oneself, and mind shrewdly
what one is about. There is never any real doubt about the path,
but you may have to walk very slowly.

MARY. And if one is forced to do a wrong thing by some one who has
authority over you?

L. My dear, no one can be forced to do a wrong thing, for the
guilt is in the will: but you may any day be forced to do a fatal
thing, as you might be forced to take poison; the remarkable law
of nature in such cases being, that it is always unfortunate YOU
who are poisoned, and not the person who gives you the dose. It is
a very strange law, but it IS a law. Nature merely sees to the
carrying out of the normal operation of arsenic. She never
troubles herself to ask who gave it you. So also you may be
starved to death, morally as well as physically, by other people's
faults. You are, on the whole, very good children sitting here to-
day; do you think that your goodness comes all by your own
contriving? or that you are gentle and kind because your
dispositions are naturally more angelic than those of the poor
girls who are playing, with wild eyes, on the dust-heaps in the
alleys of our great towns; and who will one day fill their
prisons,--or, better, their graves? Heaven only knows where they,
and we who have cast them there shall stand at last But the main
judgment question will be, I suppose, for all of us, "Did you keep
a good heart through it? What you were, others may answer for,--
what you tried to be, you must answer for yourself. Was the heart
pure and true--tell us that?

And so we come back to your sorrowful question, Lucilla, which I
put aside a little ago. You would be afraid to answer that your
heart WAS pure and true, would not you?

LUCILLA. Yes, indeed, sir.

L. Because you have been taught that it is all evil--"only evil
continually." Somehow, often as people say that, they never seem,
to me, to believe it. Do you really believe it?

LUCILLA. Yes, sir, I hope so.

L. That you have an entirely bad heart?

LUCILLA (a little uncomfortable at the substitution of the
monosyllable for the dissyllable, nevertheless persisting in her
orthodoxy). Yes, sir.

L. Florrie, I am sure you are tired; I never like you to stay when
you are tired; but, you know, you must not play with the kitten
while we're talking.

FLORRIE. Oh! but I'm not tired, and I'm only nursing her. She'll
be asleep in my lap, directly.

L. Stop! that puts me in mind of something I had to show you,
about minerals that are like hair I want a hair out of Tittie's
tail.

FLORRIE. (quite rude in her surprise, even to the point of
repeating expressions). Out of Tittie's tail!

L. Yes, a brown one Lucilla, you can get at the tip of it nicely,
under Florrie's arm, just pull one out for me.

LUCILLA. Oh! but, sir, it will hurt her so!

L. Never mind, she can't scratch you while Florrie is holding her.
Now that I think of it you had better pull out two.

LUCILLA. But then she may scratch Florrie! and it will hurt her so
sir! if you only want brown hairs, wouldn't two of mine do?

L. Would you really rather pull out your own than Tittie's?

LUCILLA. Oh, of course, if mine will do.

L. But that's very wicked, Lucilla!

LUCILLA. Wicked, sir?

L. Yes, if your heart was not so bad, you would much rather pull
all the cat's hairs out, than one of your own.

LUCILLA. Oh! but, sir, I didn't mean bad like that.

L. I believe, if the truth were told, Lucilla, you would like to
tie a kettle to Tittie's tail, and hunt her round the playground.

LUCILLA. Indeed, I should not, sir.

L. That's not true, Lucilla; you know it cannot be.

LUCILLA. Sir?

L. Certainly it is not;--how can you possibly speak any truth out
of such a heart as you have? It is wholly deceitful.

LUCILLA. Oh! no, no; I don't mean that way; I don't mean that it
makes me tell lies, quite out.

L. Only that it tells lies within you?

LUCILLA. Yes.

L. Then, outside of it, you know what is true, and say so; and I
may trust the outside of your heart; but within, it is all foul
and false. Is that the way?

LUCILLA. I suppose so: I don't understand it quite.

L. There is no occasion for understanding it; but do you feel it?
Are you sure that your heart is deceitful above all things, and
desperately wicked?

LUCILLA (much relieved by finding herself among phrases with which
she is acquainted). Yes, sir. I'm sure of that.

L. (pensively). I'm sorry for it, Lucilla.

LUCILLA. So am I, indeed.

L. What are you sorry with, Lucilla?

LUCILLA. Sorry with, sir?

L. Yes; I mean, where do you feel sorry; in your feet?

LUCILLA (laughing a little). No, sir, of course.

L. In your shoulders, then?

LUCILLA. No, sir.

L. You are sure of that? Because, I fear, sorrow in the shoulders
would not be worth much.

LUCILLA. I suppose I feel it in my heart, if I really am sorry.

L. If you really are! Do you mean to say that you are sure you are
utterly wicked, and yet do not care?

LUCILLA. No, indeed; I have cried about it often.

L. Well, then, you are sorry in your heart?

LUCILLA. Yes, when the sorrow is worth anything.

L. Even if it be not, it cannot be anywhere else but there. It is
not the crystalline lens of your eyes which is sorry, when you
cry?

LUCILLA. No, sir, of course.

L. Then, have you two hearts; one of which is wicked, and the
other grieved? or is one side of it sorry for the other side?

LUCILLA. (weary of cross-examination, and a little vexed). Indeed,
sir, you know I can't understand it; but you know how it is
written--"another law in my members, warring against the law of my
mind."

L. Yes, Lucilla, I know how it is written; but I do not see that
it will help us to know that, if we neither understand what is
written, nor feel it. And you will not get nearer to the meaning
of one verse, if, as soon as you are puzzled by it, you escape to
another, introducing three new words--"law," "members," and
"mind"; not one of which you at present know the meaning of; and
respecting which, you probably never will be much wiser; since men
like Montesquieu and Locke have spent great part of their lives in
endeavoring to explain two of them.

LUCILLA. Oh! please, sir, ask somebody else.

L. If I thought any one else could answer better than you,
Lucilla, I would: but suppose I try, instead, myself, to explain
your feelings to you?

LUCILLA. Oh, yes; please do.

L. Mind, I say your "feelings," not your "belief." For I cannot
undertake to explain anybody's beliefs. Still I must try a little,
first, to explain the belief also, because I want to draw it to
some issue. As far as I understand what you say, or any one else,
taught as you have been taught, says, on this matter,--you think
that there is an external goodness, a whited-sepulcher kind of
goodness, which appears beautiful outwardly, but is within full of
uncleanness: a deep secret guilt, of which we ourselves are not
sensible; and which can only be seen by the Maker of us all.
(Approving murmurs from audience.)

L. Is it not so with the body as well as the soul?

(Looked notes of interrogation.)

L. A skull, for instance, is not a beautiful thing? (Grave faces,
signifying "Certainly not," and "What next?")

L. And if you all could see in each other, with clear eyes,
whatever God sees beneath those fair faces of yours, you would not
like it?

(Murmured No's.)

L. Nor would it be good for you?

(Silence.)

L. The probability being that what God does not allow you to see,
He does not wish you to see; nor even to think of?

(Silence prolonged.)

L. It would not at all be good for you, for instance, whenever you
were washing your faces, and braiding your hair, to be thinking of
the shapes of the jawbones, and of the cartilage of the nose, and
of the jagged sutures of the scalp?

(Resolutely whispered No's.)

L. Still less, to see through a clear glass the daily processes of
nourishment and decay?

(No.)

L. Still less if instead of merely inferior and preparatory
conditions of structure, as in the skeleton,--or inferior offices
of structure, as in operations of life and death,--there were
actual disease in the body, ghastly and dreadful. You would try to
cure it; but having taken such measures as were necessary, you
would not think the cure likely to be promoted by perpetually
watching the wounds, or thinking of them. On the contrary, you
would be thankful for every moment of forgetfulness: as, in daily
health, you must be thankful that your Maker has veiled whatever
is fearful in your frame under a sweet and manifest beauty; and
has made it your duty, and your only safety, to rejoice in that,
both in yourself and in others;--not indeed concealing, or
refusing to believe in sickness, if it come; but never dwelling on
it.

Now, your wisdom and duty touching soul-sickness are just the
same. Ascertain clearly what is wrong with you; and so far as you
know any means of mending it, take those means, and have done;
when you are examining yourself, never call yourself merely a
"sinner," that is very cheap abuse; and utterly useless. You may
even get to like it, and be proud of it. But call yourself a liar,
a coward, a sluggard, a glutton, or an evil-eyed, jealous wretch,
if you indeed find yourself to be in any wise any of these. Take
steady means to check yourself in whatever fault you have
ascertained, and justly accused yourself of. And as soon as you
are in active way of mending, you will be no more inclined to moan
over an undefined corruption. For the rest, you will find it less
easy to uproot faults, than to choke them by gaining virtues. Do
not think of your faults; still less of others' faults: in every
person who comes near you, look for what is good and strong: honor
that; rejoice in it; and, as you can, try to imitate it: and your
faults will drop off like dead leaves, when their time comes. If,
on looking back, your whole life should seem rugged as a palm-tree
stem; still, never mind, so long as it has been growing; and has
its grand green shade of leaves, and weight of honeyed fruit, at
top. And even if you cannot find much good in yourself at last,
think that it does not much matter to the universe either what you
were, or are; think how many people are noble, if you cannot be;
and rejoice in THEIR nobleness. An immense quantity of modern
confession of sin, even when honest, is merely a sickly egotism;
which will rather gloat over its own evil, than lose the
centralization of its interest in itself.

MARY. But then, if we ought to forget ourselves so much, how did
the old Greek proverb "Know thyself" come to be so highly
esteemed?

L. My dear, it is the proverb of proverbs; Apollo's proverb, and
the sun's--but do you think you can know yourself by looking INTO
yourself? Never. You can know what you are, only by looking OUT of
yourself. Measure your own powers with those of others; compare
your own interests with those of others; try to understand what
you appear to them, as well as what they appear to you; and judge
of yourselves, in all things, relatively and subordinately; not
positively: starting always with a wholesome conviction of the
probability that there is nothing particular about you. For
instance, some of you perhaps think you can write poetry. Dwell on
your own feelings; and doings:--and you will soon think yourselves
Tenth Muses; but forget your own feeling; and try, instead, to
understand a line or two of Chaucer or Dante: and you will soon
begin to feel yourselves very foolish girls--which is much like
the fact.

So, something which befalls you may seem a great misfortune,--you
meditate over its effects on you personally: and begin to think
that it is a chastisement, or a warning, or a this or that or the
other of profound significance; and that all the angels in heaven
have left their business for a little while, that they may watch
its effects on your mind. But give up this egotistic indulgence of
your fancy; examine a little what misfortunes, greater a thousand-
fold, are happening, every second, to twenty times worthier
persons: and your self-consciousness will change into pity and
humility; and you will know yourself so far as to understand that
"there hath nothing taken thee but what is common to man."

Now, Lucilla, these are the practical conclusions which any person
of sense would arrive at, supposing the texts which relate to the
inner evil of the heart were as many, and as prominent, as they
are often supposed to be by careless readers. But the way in which
common people read their Bibles is just like the way that the old
monks thought hedgehogs ate grapes. They rolled themselves (it was
said), over and over, where the grapes lay on the ground. What
fruit stuck to their spines, they carried off, and ate. So your
hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and
declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture, and
that nothing else is. But you can only get the skins of the texts
that way. If you want their juice, you must press them in cluster.
Now, the clustered texts about the human heart, insist, as a body,
not on any inherent corruption in all hearts, but on the terrific
distinction between the bad and the good ones. "A good man, out of
the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth that which is good;
and an evil man, out of the evil treasure, bringeth forth that
which is evil." "They on the rock are they which, in an honest and
good heart, having heard the word, keep it." "Delight thyself in
the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart." "The
wicked have bent their bow, that they may privily shoot at him
that is upright in heart." And so on; they are countless, to the
same effect. And, for all of us, the question is not at all to
ascertain how much or how little corruption there is in human
nature; but to ascertain whether, out of all the mass of that
nature, we are of the sheep or the goat breed; whether we are
people of upright heart, being shot at, or people of crooked
heart, shooting. And, of all the texts bearing on the subject,
this, which is a quite simple and practical order, is the one you
have chiefly to hold in mind. "Keep thy heart with all diligence,
for out of it are the issues of life."

LUCILLA. And yet, how inconsistent the texts seem!

L. Nonsense, Lucilla! do you think the universe is bound to look
consistent to a girl of fifteen? Look up at your own room window;
--you can just see it from where you sit. I'm glad that it is left
open, as it ought to be, in so fine a day. But do you see what a
black spot it looks, in the sunlighted wall?

LUCILLA. Yes, it looks as black as ink.

L. Yet you know it is a very bright room when you are inside of
it; quite as bright as there is any occasion for it to be, that
its little lady may see to keep it tidy. Well, it is very
probable, also, that if you could look into your heart from the
sun's point of view, it might appear a very black hole indeed:
nay, the sun may sometimes think good to tell you that it looks so
to Him; but He will come into it, and make it very cheerful for
you, for all that, if you don't put the shutters up. And the one
question for YOU, remember, is not "dark or light?" but "tidy or
untidy?" Look well to your sweeping and garnishing; and be sure it
is only the banished spirit, or some of the seven wickeder ones at
his back, who will still whisper to you that it is all black.





LECTURE 6.

CRYSTAL QUARRELS


Full conclave, in Schoolroom. There has been a game of
crystallization in the morning, of which various account has to be
rendered. In particular, everybody has to explain why they were
always where they were not intended to be.

L. (having received and considered the report). You have got on
pretty well children: but you know these were easy figures you
have been trying. Wait till I have drawn you out the plans of some
crystals of snow!

MARY. I don't think those will be the most difficult:--they are so
beautiful that we shall remember our places better; and then they
are all regular, and in stars: it is those twisty oblique ones we
are afraid of.

L. Read Carlyle's account of the battle of Leuthen, and learn
Friedrich's "oblique order." You will "get it done for once, I
think, provided you CAN march as a pair of compasses would." But
remember, when you can construct the most difficult single
figures, you have only learned half the game--nothing so much as
the half, indeed, as the crystals themselves play it.

MARY. Indeed; what else is there?

L. It is seldom that any mineral crystallizes alone. Usually two
or three, under quite different crystalline laws, form together.
They do this absolutely without flaw or fault, when they are in
fine temper: and observe what this signifies. It signifies that
the two, or more, minerals of different natures agree, somehow,
between themselves how much space each will want;--agree which of
them shall give way to the other at their junction; or in what
measure each will accommodate itself to the other's shape! And
then each takes its permitted shape, and allotted share of space;
yielding, or being yielded to, as it builds till each crystal has
fitted itself perfectly and gracefully to its differently-natured
neighbor. So that, in order to practice this, in even the simplest
terms, you must divide into two parties, wearing different colors;
each must choose a different figure to construct; and you must
form one of these figures through the other, both going on at the
same time.

MARY. I think WE may, perhaps, manage it; but I cannot at all
understand how the crystals do. It seems to imply so much
preconcerting of plan, and so much giving way to each other, as if
they really were living.

L. Yes, it implies both the concurrence and compromise, regulating
all wilfulness of design: and, more curious still, the crystals do
NOT always give way to each other. They show exactly the same
varieties of temper that human creatures might. Sometimes they
yield the required place with perfect grace and courtesy; forming
fantastic, but exquisitely finished groups: and sometimes they
will not yield at all; but fight furiously for their places,
losing all shape and honor, and even their own likeness, in the
contest.

MARY. But is not that wholly wonderful? How is it that one never
sees it spoken of in books?

L. The scientific men are all busy in determining the constant
laws under which the struggle takes place; these indefinite humors
of the elements are of no interest to them. And unscientific
people rarely give themselves the trouble of thinking at all, when
they look at stones. Not that it is of much use to think; the more
one thinks, the more one is puzzled.

MARY. Surely it is more wonderful than anything in botany?

L. Everything has its own wonders; but, given the nature of the
plant, it is easier to understand what a flower will do, and why
it does it, than, given anything we as yet know of stone-nature,
to understand what a crystal will do, and why it does it. You at
once admit a kind of volition and choice, in the flower; but we
are not accustomed to attribute anything of the kind to the
crystal. Yet there is, in reality, more likeness to some
conditions of human feeling among stones than among plants. There
is a far greater difference between kindly-tempered and ill-
tempered crystals of the same mineral, than between any two
specimens of the same flower: and the friendships and wars of
crystals depend more definitely and curiously on their varieties
of disposition, than any associations of flowers. Here, for
instance, is a good garnet, living with good mica; one rich red,
and the other silver white; the mica leaves exactly room enough
for the garnet to crystallize comfortably in; and the garnet lives
happily in its little white house; fitted to it, like a pholas in
its cell. But here are wicked garnets living with wicked mica. See
what ruin they make of each other! You cannot tell which is which;
the garnets look like dull red stains on the crumbling stone. By
the way, I never could understand, if St. Gothard is a real saint,
why he can't keep his garnets in better order. These are all under
his care; but I suppose there are too many of them for him to look
after. The streets of Airolo are paved with them.

MAY. Paved with garnets?

L. With mica-slate and garnets; I broke this bit out of a paving
stone. Now garnets and mica are natural friends, and generally
fond of each other; but you see how they quarrel when they are ill
brought up. So it is always. Good crystals are friendly with
almost all other good crystals, however little they chance to see
of each other, or however opposite their habits may be; while
wicked crystals quarrel with one another, though they may be
exactly alike in habits, and see each other continually. And of
course the wicked crystals quarrel with the good ones.

ISABEL. Then do the good ones get angry?

L. No, never: they attend to their own work and life; and live it
as well as they can, though they are always the sufferers. Here,
for instance, is a rock crystal of the purest race and finest
temper, who was born, unhappily for him, in a bad neighborhood,
near Beaufort in Savoy; and he has had to fight with vile
calcareous mud all his life. See here, when he was but a child, it
came down on him, and nearly buried him; a weaker crystal would
have died in despair; but he only gathered himself together, like
Hercules against the serpents, and threw a layer of crystal over
the clay; conquered it,--imprisoned it,--and lived on. Then, when
he was a little older, came more clay; and poured itself upon him
here, at the side; and he has laid crystal over that, and lived
on, in his purity. Then the clay came on at his angles, and tried
to cover them, and round them away; but upon that he threw out
buttress-crystals at his angles, all as true to his own central
line as chapels round a cathedral apse; and clustered them round
the clay; and conquered it again. At last the clay came on at his
summit, and tried to blunt his summit; but he could not endure
that for an instant; and left his flanks all rough, but pure; and
fought the clay at his crest, and built crest over crest and peak
over peak, till the clay surrendered at last, and here is his
summit, smooth and pure, terminating a pyramid of alternate clay
and crystal, half a foot high!

LILY. Oh, how nice of him! What a dear, brave crystal! But I can't
bear to see his flanks all broken, and the clay within them.

L. Yes; it was an evil chance for him, the being born to such
contention; there are some enemies so base that even to hold them
captive is a kind of dishonor. But look, here has been quite a
different kind of struggle: the adverse power has been more
orderly, and has fought the pure crystal in ranks as firm as its
own. This is not mere rage and impediment of crowded evil: here is
a disciplined hostility; army against army.

LILY. Oh, but this is much more beautiful!

L. Yes, for both the elements have true virtue in them, it is a
pity they are at war, but they war grandly.

MARY. But is this the same clay as in the other crystal?

L. I used the word clay for shortness. In both, the enemy is
really limestone; but in the first, disordered, and mixed with
true clay; while, here, it is nearly pure, and crystallizes into
its own primitive form, the oblique six-sided one, which you know:
and out of these it makes regiments; and then squares of the
regiments, and so charges the rock crystal, literally in square
against column.

ISABEL. Please, please, let me see. And what does the rock crystal
do?

L. The rock crystal seems able to do nothing. The calcite cuts it
through at every charge. Look here,--and here! The loveliest
crystal in the whole group is hewn fairly into two pieces.

ISABEL. Oh, dear; but is the calcite harder than the crystal then?

L. No, softer. Very much softer.

MARY. But then, how can it possibly cut the crystal?

L. It did not really cut it, though it passes through it. The two
were formed together, as I told you but no one knows how. Still,
it is strange that this hard quartz has in all cases a good-
natured way with it, of yielding to everything else. All sorts of
soft things make nests for themselves in it; and it never makes a
nest for itself in anything. It has all the rough outside work;
and every sort of cowardly and weak mineral can shelter itself
within it. Look; these are hexagonal plates of mica; if they were
outside of this crystal they would break, like burnt paper; but
they are inside of it,--nothing can hurt them,--the crystal has
taken them into its very heart, keeping all their delicate edges
as sharp as if they were under water, instead of bathed in rock.
Here is a piece of branched silver: you can bend it with a touch
of your finger, but the stamp of its every fiber is on the rock in
which it lay, as if the quartz had been as soft as wool.

LILY. Oh, the good, good quartz! But does it never get inside of
anything?

L. As it is a little Irish girl who asks, I may perhaps answer,
without being laughed at, that it gets inside of itself sometimes.
But I don't remember seeing quartz make a nest for itself in
anything else.

ISABEL. Please, there as something I heard you talking about, last
time, with Miss Mary. I was at my lessons, but I heard something
about nests; and I thought it was birds' nests; and I couldn't
help listening; and then, I remember, it was about "nests of
quartz in granite." I remember, because I was so disappointed!

L. Yes, mousie, you remember quite rightly; but I can't tell you
about those nests to-day, nor perhaps to-morrow: but there's no
contradiction between my saying then, and now; I will show you
that there is not, some day. Will you trust me meanwhile?

ISABEL. Won't I!

L. Well, then, look, lastly, at this piece of courtesy in quartz;
it is on a small scale, but wonderfully pretty. Here is nobly born
quartz living with a green mineral, called epidote; and they are
immense friends. Now, you see, a comparatively large and strong
quartz-crystal, and a very weak and slender little one of epidote,
have begun to grow, close by each other, and sloping unluckily
towards each other, so that at last they meet. They cannot go on
growing together; the quartz crystal is five times as thick, and
more than twenty times as strong[Footnote: Quartz is not much
harder than epidote; the strength is only supposed to be in some
proportion to the squares of the diameters.], as the epidote; but
he stops at once, just in the very crowning moment of his life,
when he is building his own summit! He lets the pale little film
of epidote grow right past him; stopping his own summit for it;
and he never himself grows any more.

LILY (after some silence of wonder). But is the quartz NEVER
wicked then?

L. Yes, but the wickedest quartz seems good-natured, compared to
other things. Here are two very characteristic examples; one is
good quartz, living with good pearl-spar, and the other, wicked
quartz, living with wicked pearl spar. In both, the quartz yields
to the soft carbonate of iron: but, in the first place, the iron
takes only what it needs of room; and is inserted into the planes
of the rock crystal with such precision that you must break it
away before you can tell whether it really penetrates the quartz
or not; while the crystals of iron are perfectly formed, and have
a lovely bloom on their surface besides. But here, when the two
minerals quarrel, the unhappy quartz has all its surfaces jagged
and torn to pieces; and there is not a single iron crystal whose
shape you can completely trace. But the quartz has the worst of
it, in both instances.

VIOLET. Might we look at that piece of broken quartz again, with
the weak little film across it? it seems such a strange lovely
thing, like the self-sacrifice of a human being.

L. The self-sacrifice of a human being is not a lovely thing,
Violet. It is often a necessary and noble thing; but no form nor
degree of suicide can be ever lovely.

VIOLET. But self-sacrifice is not suicide!

L. What is it then?

VIOLET. Giving up one's self for another.

L. Well; and what do you mean by "giving up one's self"?

VIOLET. Giving up one's tastes, one's feelings, one's time, one's
happiness, and so on, to make others happy.

L. I hope you will never marry anybody, Violet, who expects you to
make him happy in that way.

VIOLET (hesitating). In what way?

L. By giving up your tastes, and sacrificing your feelings, and
happiness.

VIOLET. No, no, I don't mean that; but you know, for other people,
one must.

L. For people who don't love you, and whom you know nothing about?
Be it so; but how does this "giving up" differ from suicide then?

VIOLET. Why, giving up one's pleasures is not killing one's self?

L. Giving up wrong pleasure is not; neither is it self-sacrifice,
but self-culture. But giving up right pleasure is. If you
surrender the pleasure of walking, your foot will wither: you may
as well cut it off: if you surrender the pleasure of seeing, your
eyes will soon be unable to bear the light; you may as well pluck
them out. And to maim yourself is partly to kill yourself. Do but
go on maiming, and you will soon slay.

VIOLET. But why do you make me think of that verse then, about the
foot and the eye?

L. You are indeed commanded to cut off and to pluck out, if foot
or eye offend you; but why SHOULD they offend you?

VIOLET. I don't know; I never quite understood that.

L. Yet it is a sharp order; one needing to be well understood if
it is to be well obeyed! When Helen sprained her ankle the other
day, you saw how strongly it had to be bandaged; that is to say,
prevented from all work, to recover it. But the bandage was not
"lovely."

VIOLET. No, indeed.

L. And if her foot had been crushed, or diseased, or snake-bitten,
instead of sprained, it might have been needful to cut it off. But
the amputation would not have been "lovely."

VIOLET. No.

L. Well, if eye and foot are dead already, and betray you,--if the
light that is in you be darkness, and your feet run into mischief,
or are taken in the snare,--it is indeed time to pluck out, and
cut off, I think: but, so crippled, you can never be what you
might have been otherwise. You enter into life, at best, halt or
maimed; and the sacrifice is not beautiful, though necessary.

VIOLET (after a pause). But when one sacrifices one's self for
others?

L. Why not rather others for you?

VIOLET. Oh! but I couldn't bear that.

L. Then why should they bear it?

DORA (bursting in, indignant). And Thermopylae, and Protesilaus,
and Marcus Curtius, and Arnold de Winkelried, and Iphigenia, and
Jephthah's daughter?

L. (sustaining the indignation unmoved). And the Samaritan woman's
son?

DORA. Which Samaritan woman's?

L. Read 2 Kings vi. 29.

DORA (obeys). How horrid! As if we meant anything like that!

L. You don't seem to me to know in the least what you do mean,
children. What practical difference is there between "that," and
what you are talking about? The Samaritan children had no voice of
their own in the business, it is true; but neither had Iphigenia:
the Greek girl was certainly neither boiled, nor eaten; but that
only makes a difference in the dramatic effect; not in the
principle.

DORA (biting her lip). Well, then, tell us what we ought to mean.
As if you didn't teach it all to us, and mean it yourself, at this
moment, more than we do, if you wouldn't be tiresome!

L. I mean, and always have meant, simply this, Dora;--that the
will of God respecting us is that we shall live by each other's
happiness, and life; not by each other's misery, or death. I made
you read that verse which so shocked you just now, because the
relations of parent and child are typical of all beautiful human
help. A child may have to die for its parents; but the purpose of
Heaven is that it shall rather live for them;--that, not by its
sacrifice, but by its strength, its joy, its force of being, it
shall be to them renewal of strength; and as the arrow in the hand
of the giant. So it is in all other right relations. Men help each
other by their joy, not by their sorrow. They are not intended to
slay themselves for each other, but to strengthen themselves for
each other. And among the many apparently beautiful things which
turn, through mistaken use, to utter evil, I am not sure but that
the thoughtlessly meek and self-sacrificing spirit of good men
must be named as one of the fatalest. They have so often been
taught that there is a virtue in mere suffering, as such; and
foolishly to hope that good may be brought by Heaven out of all on
which Heaven itself has set the stamp of evil, that we may avoid
it,--that they accept pain and defeat as if these were their
appointed portion; never understanding that their defeat is not
the less to be mourned because it is more fatal to their enemies
than to them. The one thing that a good man has to do, and to see
done, is justice; he is neither to slay himself nor others
causelessly: so far from denying himself, since he is pleased by
good, he is to do his utmost to get his pleasure accomplished. And
I only wish there were strength, fidelity, and sense enough, among
the good Englishmen of this day, to render it possible for them to
band together in a vowed brotherhood, to enforce, by strength of
heart and hand, the doing of human justice among all who came
within their sphere. And finally, for your own teaching, observe,
although there may be need for much self-sacrifice and self-denial
in the correction of faults of character, the moment the character
is formed, the self-denial ceases. Nothing is really well done,
which it costs you pain to do.

VIOLET. But surely, sir, you are always pleased with us when we
try to please others, and not ourselves?

L. My dear child, in the daily course and discipline of right
life, we must continually and reciprocally submit and surrender in
all kind and courteous and affectionate ways: and these
submissions and ministries to each other, of which you all know
(none better) the practice and the preciousness, are as good for
the yielder as the receiver: they strengthen and perfect as much
as they soften and refine. But the real sacrifice of all our
strength, or life, or happiness to others (though it may be
needed, and though all brave creatures hold their lives in their
hand, to be given, when such need comes, as frankly as a soldier
gives his life in battle), is yet always a mournful and momentary
necessity; not the fulfillment of the continuous law of being.
Self-sacrifice which is sought after, and triumphed in, is usually
foolish; and calamitous in its issue: and by the sentimental
proclamation and pursuit of it, good people have not only made
most of their own lives useless, but the whole framework of their
religion so hollow, that at this moment, while the English nation,
with its lips, pretends to teach every man to "love his neighbor
as himself," with its hands and feet it clutches and tramples like
a wild beast; and practically lives, every soul of it that can, on
other people's labor. Briefly, the constant duty of every man to
his fellows is to ascertain his own powers and special gifts; and
to strengthen them for the help of others. Do you think Titian
would have helped the world better by denying himself, and not
painting; or Casella by denying himself, and not singing! The real
virtue is to be ready to sing the moment people ask us; as he was,
even in purgatory. The very word "virtue" means not "conduct" but
"strength," vital energy in the heart. Were not you reading about
that group of words beginning with V,--vital, virtuous, vigorous,
and so on,--in Max Muller, the other day, Sibyl? Can't you tell
the others about it?

SIBYL. No, I can't; will you tell us, please?

L. Not now, it is too late. Come to me some idle time to-morrow,
and I'll tell you about it, if all's well. But the gist of it is,
children, that you should at least know two Latin words; recollect
that "mors" means death and delaying; and "vita" means life and
growing: and try always, not to mortify yourselves, but to vivify
yourselves.

VIOLET. But, then, are we not to mortify our earthly affections?
and surely we are to sacrifice ourselves, at least in God's
service, if not in man's?

L. Really, Violet, we are getting too serious. I've given you
enough ethics for one talk, I think! Do let us have a little play.
Lily, what were you so busy about, at the ant-hill in the wood,
this morning?

LILY. Oh, it was the ants who were busy, not I; I was only trying
to help them a little.

L. And they wouldn't be helped, I suppose?

LILY. No, indeed. I can't think why ants are always so tiresome,
when one tries to help them! They were carrying bits of stick, as
fast as they could, through a piece of grass; and pulling and
pushing, SO hard; and tumbling over and over,--it made one quite
pity them; so I took some of the bits of stick, and carried them
forward a little, where I thought they wanted to put them; but
instead of being pleased, they left them directly, and ran about
looking quite angry and frightened; and at last ever so many of
them got up my sleeves, and bit me all over, and I had to come
away.

L. I couldn't think what you were about. I saw your French grammar
lying on the grass behind you, and thought perhaps you had gone to
ask the ants to hear you a French verb.

ISABEL. Ah! but you didn't, though!

L. Why not, Isabel? I knew, well enough, Lily couldn't learn that
verb by herself.

ISABEL. No; but the ants couldn't help her.

L. Are you sure the ants could not have helped you, Lily?

LILY (thinking). I ought to have learned something from them,
perhaps.

L. But none of them left their sticks to help you through the
irregular verb?

LILY. No, indeed. (Laughing, with some others.)

L. What are you laughing at, children? I cannot see why the ants
should not have left their tasks to help Lily in hers,--since here
is Violet thinking she ought to leave HER tasks, to help God in
his. Perhaps, however, she takes Lily's more modest view, and
thinks only that "He ought to learn something from her."

(Tears in VIOLET'S eyes.)

DORA (scarlet). It's too bad--it's a shame:--poor Violet!

L. My dear children, there's no reason why one should be so red,
and the other so pale, merely because you are made for a moment to
feel the absurdity of a phrase which you have been taught to use,
in common with half the religious world. There is but one way in
which man can ever help God--that is, by letting God help him: and
there is no way in which His name is more guiltily taken in vain,
than by calling the abandonment of our own work, the performance
of His.

God is a kind Father. He sets us all in the places where He wishes
us to be employed; and that employment is truly "our Father's
business." He chooses work for every creature which will be
delightful to them, if they do it simply and humbly. He gives us
always strength enough, and sense enough, for what He wants us to
do; if we either tire ourselves or puzzle ourselves, it is
ourselves, it is our own fault. And we may always be sure,
whatever we are doing, that we cannot be pleasing Him, if we are
not happy ourselves. Now, away with you, children; and be as happy
as you can. And when you cannot, at least don't plume yourselves
upon pouting.





LECTURE 7.

HOME VIRTUES


By the fireside, in the Drawing-room. Evening.

DORA. Now, the curtains are drawn, and the fire's bright, and
here's your arm-chair--and you're to tell us all about what you
promised.

L. All about what?

DORA. All about virtue.

KATHLEEN. Yes, and about the words that begin with V.

L. I heard you singing about a word that begins with V, in the
playground, this morning, Miss Katie.

KATHLEEN. Me singing!

MAY. Oh tell us--tell us.

L. "Vilikens and his--"

KATHLEEN (stopping his mouth). Oh! please don't. Where were you?

ISABEL. I'm sure I wish I had known where he was! We lost him
among the rhododendrons, and I don't know where he got to; oh, you
naughty--naughty--(climbs on his knee).

DORA. Now, Isabel, we really want to talk.

L. _I_ don't.

DORA. Oh, but you must. You promised, you know.

L. Yes, if all was well; but all's ill. I'm tired and cross; and I
won't.

DORA. You're not a bit tired, and you're not crosser than two
sticks; and we'll make you talk, if you were crosser than six.
Come here, Egypt; and get on the other side of him.

(EGYPT takes up a commanding position near the hearth-brush.)

DORA (reviewing her forces). Now, Lily, come and sit on the rug in
front.

(LILY does as she is bid.)

L. (seeing he has no chance against the odds). Well, well; but I'm
really tired. Go and dance a little, first; and let me think.

DORA. No; you mustn't think. You will be wanting to make us think
next; that will be tiresome.

L. Well, go and dance first, to get quit of thinking: and then
I'll talk as long as you like.

DORA. Oh, but we can't dance to-night. There isn't time; and we
want to hear about virtue.

L. Let me see a little of it first. Dancing is the first of girls'
virtues.

EGYPT. Indeed! And the second?

L. Dressing.

EGYPT. Now, you needn't say that! I mended that tear the first
thing before breakfast this morning.

L. I cannot otherwise express the ethical principle, Egypt;
whether you have mended your gown or not.

DORA. Now don't be tiresome. We really must hear about virtue,
please; seriously.

L. Well. I'm telling you about it, as fast as I can.

DORA. What! the first of girls' virtues is dancing?

L. More accurately, it is wishing to dance, and not wishing to
tease, nor hear about virtue.

DORA (to EGYPT). Isn't he cross?

EGYPT. How many balls must we go to in the season, to be perfectly
virtuous?

L. As many as you can without losing your color. But I did not say
you should wish to go to balls. I said you should be always
wanting to dance.

EGYPT. So we do; but everybody says it is very wrong.

L. Why, Egypt, I thought--

    "There was a lady once,
    That would not be a queen,--that would she not,
    For all the mud in Egypt."

You were complaining the other day of having to go out a great
deal oftener than you liked.

EGYPT. Yes, so I was; but then, it isn't to dance. There's no room
to dance: it's--(Pausing to consider what it is for).

L. It is only to be seen, I suppose. Well, there's no harm in
that. Girls ought to like to be seen.

DORA (her eyes flashing). Now, you don't mean that; and you're too
provoking; and we won't dance again, for a month.

L. It will answer every purpose of revenge, Dora, if you only
banish me to the library; and dance by yourselves; but I don't
think Jessie and Lily will agree to that. You like me to see you
dancing, don't you, Lily?

LILY. Yes, certainly,--when we do it rightly.

L. And besides, Miss Dora, if young ladies really do not want to
be seen, they should take care not to let their eyes flash when
they dislike what people say: and, more than that, it is all
nonsense from beginning to end, about not wanting to be seen. I
don't know any more tiresome flower in the borders than your
especially "modest" snowdrop; which one always has to stoop down
and take all sorts of tiresome trouble with, and nearly break its
poor little head off, before you can see it; and then, half of it
is not worth seeing. Girls should be like daisies, nice and white,
with an edge of red, if you look close, making the ground bright
wherever they are, knowing simply and quietly that they do it, and
are meant to do it and that it would be very wrong if they didn't
do it. Not want to be seen, indeed! How long were you in doing up
your back hair, this afternoon Jessie?

(JESSIE not immediately answering, DORA comes to her assistance)

DORA. Not above three-quarters of an hour, I think, Jess?

JESSIE (putting her finger up). Now, Dorothy, you needn't talk,
you know!

L. I know she needn't, Jessie, I shall ask her about those dark
plaits presently. (DORA looks round to see if there is any way
open for retreat) But never mind, it was worth the time, whatever
it was, and nobody will ever mistake that golden wreath for a
chignon: but if you don't want it to be seen you had better wear a
cap.

JESSIE. Ah, now, are you really going to do nothing but play? And
we all have been thinking, and thinking, all day, and hoping you
would tell us things, and now--!

L. And now I am telling you things, and true things, and things
good for you, and you won't believe me. You might as well have let
me go to sleep at once, as I wanted to. (Endeavors again to make
himself comfortable.)

ISABEL. Oh, no, no, you sha'n't go to sleep, you naughty!--
Kathleen, come here.

L. (knowing what he has to expect if KATHLEEN comes). Get away,
Isabel, you're too heavy. (Sitting up.) What have I been saying?

DORA. I do believe he has been asleep all the time! You never
heard anything like the things you've been saying.

L. Perhaps not. If you have heard them, and anything like them, it
is all I want.

EGYPT. Yes, but we don't understand, and you know we don't; and we
want to.

L. What did I say first?

DORA. That the first virtue of girls was wanting to go to balls.

L. I said nothing of the kind.

JESSIE. "Always wanting to dance," you said.

L. Yes, and that's true. Their first virtue is to be intensely
happy;--so happy that they don't know what to do with themselves
for happiness,--and dance, instead of walking. Don't you recollect
"Louisa,"

    "No fountain from a rocky cave
    E'er tripped with foot so free;
    She seemed as happy as a wave
    That dances on the sea."

A girl is always like that, when everything's right with her.

VIOLET. But, surely, one must be sad sometimes?

L. Yes, Violet and dull sometimes and stupid sometimes, and cross
sometimes. What must be, must; but it is always either our own
fault, or somebody else's. The last and worst thing that can be
said of a nation is, that it has made its young girls sad, and
weary.

MAY. But I am sure I have heard a great many good people speak
against dancing?

L. Yes, May, but it does not follow they were wise as well as
good. I suppose they think Jeremiah liked better to have to write
Lamentations for his people, than to have to write that promise
for them, which everybody seems to hurry past, that they may get
on quickly to the verse about Rachel weeping for her children,
though the verse they pass is the counter blessing to that one:
"Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance; and both young men
and old together, and I will turn their mourning into joy."

(The children get very serious, but look at each other, as if
pleased.)

MARY. They understand now: but, do you know what you said next?

L. Yes, I was not more than half asleep. I said their second
virtue was dressing.

MARY. Well! what did you mean by that?

L. What do YOU mean by dressing?

MARY. Wearing fine clothes.

L. Ah! there's the mistake. _I_ mean wearing plain ones.

MARY. Yes, I daresay I but that's not what girls understand by
dressing, you know.

L. I can't help that. If they understand by dressing, buying
dresses, perhaps they also understand by drawing, buying pictures.
But when I hear them say they can draw, I understand that they can
make a drawing; and when I hear them say they can dress, I
understand that they can make a dress and--which is quite as
difficult--wear one.

DORA. I'm not sure about the making; for the wearing, we can all
wear them--out, before anybody expects it.

EGYPT (aside to L., piteously). Indeed I have mended that torn
flounce quite neatly; look if I haven't!

L. (aside, to EGYPT). All right; don't be afraid. (Aloud to DORA.)
Yes, doubtless; but you know that is only a slow way of
UNdressing.

DORA. Then, we are all to learn dress-making, are we?

L. Yes; and always to dress yourselves beautifully--not finely,
unless on occasion; but then very finely and beautifully, too.
Also, you are to dress as many other people as you can; and to
teach them how to dress, if they don't know; and to consider every
ill-dressed woman or child whom you see anywhere, as a personal
disgrace; and to get at them, somehow, until everybody is as
beautifully dressed as birds.

(Silence; the children drawing their breaths hard, as if they had
come from under a shower bath.)

L. (seeing objections begin to express themselves in the eyes).
Now you needn't say you can't; for you can, and it's what you were
meant to do, always; and to dress your houses, and your gardens,
too; and to do very little else, I believe, except singing; and
dancing, as we said, of course and--one thing more.

DORA. Our third and last virtue, I suppose?

L. Yes; on Violet's system of triplicities.

DORA. Well, we are prepared for anything now. What is it?

L. Cooking.

DORA. Cardinal, indeed! If only Beatrice were here with her seven
handmaids, that she might see what a fine eighth we had found for
her!

MARY. And the interpretation? What does "cooking" mean?

L. It means the knowledge of Medea, and of Circe, and of Calypso,
and of Helen, and of Rebekah, and of the Queen of Sheba. It means
the knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and balms, and spices; and
of all that is healing and sweet in fields and groves, and savory
in meats, it means carefulness, and inventiveness, and
watchfulness, and willingness, and readiness of appliance, it
means the economy of your great-grandmothers, and the science of
modern chemists; it means much tasting, and no wasting, it means
English thoroughness, and French art, and Arabian hospitality, and
it means, in fine, that you are to be perfectly and always
"ladies"--"loaf-givers;" and, as you are to see, imperatively,
that everybody has something pretty to put on,--so you are to see,
yet more imperatively, that everybody has something nice to eat.

(Another pause, and long drawn breath.)

DORA (slowly recovering herself) to EGYPT. We had better have let
him go to sleep, I think, after all!

L. You had better let the younger ones go to sleep now: for I
haven't half done.

ISABEL (panic-struck). Oh! please, please! just one quarter of an
hour.

L. No, Isabel, I cannot say what I've got to say in a quarter of
an hour; and it is too hard for you, besides:--you would be lying
awake, and trying to make it out, half the night. That will never
do.

ISABEL. Oh, please!

L. It would please me exceedingly, mousie: but there are times
when we must both be displeased; more's the pity. Lily may stay
for half an hour, if she likes.

LILY. I can't, because Isey never goes to sleep, if she is waiting
for me to come.

ISABEL. Oh, yes, Lily, I'll go to sleep to-night. I will, indeed.

LILY. Yes, it's very likely, Isey, with those fine round eyes! (To
L.) You'll tell me something of what you we been saying, to-
morrow, won't you?

L. No, I won't, Lily. You must choose. It's only in Miss
Edgeworth's novels that one can do right, and have one's cake and
sugar afterwards as well (not that I consider the dilemma, to-
night, so grave).

(LILY, sighing, takes ISABEL'S hand.)

Yes, Lily dear, it will be better, in the outcome of it, so, than
if you were to hear all the talks that eer were talked, and all
the stories that ever were told. Good-night.

(The door leading to the condemned cells of the Dormitory closes
on LILY, ISABEL, FLORRIE, and other diminutive and submissive
victims.)

JESSIE (after a pause). Why, I thought you were so fond of Miss
Edgeworth.

L. So I am, and so you ought all to be. I can read her over and
over again, without ever tiring; there's no one whose every page
is so full, and so delightful, no one who brings you into the
company of pleasanter or wiser people; no one who tells you more
truly how to do right. And it is very nice, in the midst of a wild
world, to have the very ideal of poetical justice done always to
one's hand:--to have everybody found out, who tells lies; and
everybody decorated with a red riband, who doesn't; and to see the
good Laura, who gave away her half sovereign, receiving a grand
ovation from an entire dinner party disturbed for the purpose; and
poor, dear, little Rosamond, who chooses purple jars instead of
new shoes, left at last without either her shoes or her bottle.
But it isn't life: and, in the way children might easily
understand it, it isn't morals.

JESSIE. How do you mean we might understand it?

L. You might think Miss Edgeworth meant that the right was to be
done mainly because one was always rewarded for doing it. It is an
injustice to her to say that: her heroines always do right simply
for its own sake, as they should; and her examples of conduct and
motive are wholly admirable. But her representation of events is
false and misleading. Her good characters never are brought into
the deadly trial of goodness,--the doing right, and suffering for
it, quite finally. And that is life, as God arranges it. "Taking
up one's cross" does not at all mean having ovations at dinner
parties, and being put over everybody else's head.

DORA. But what does it mean then? That is just what we couldn't
understand, when you were telling us about not sacrificing
ourselves, yesterday.

L. My dear, it means simply that you are to go the road which you
see to be the straight one; carrying whatever you find is given
you to carry, as well and stoutly as you can; without making
faces, or calling people to come and look at you. Above all, you
are neither to load, nor unload, yourself; nor cut your cross to
your own liking. Some people think it would be better for them to
have it large; and many, that they could carry it much faster if
it were small; and even those who like it largest are usually very
particular about its being ornamental, and made of the best ebony.
But all that you have really to do is to keep your back as
straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it--above
all, not to boast of what is upon it. The real and essential
meaning of "virtue" is in that straightness of back. Yes; you may
laugh, children, but it is. You know I was to tell you about the
words that began with V. Sibyl, what does "virtue" mean literally?

SIBYL. Does it mean courage?

L. Yes; but a particular kind of courage. It means courage of the
nerve; vital courage. That first syllable of it, if you look in
Max Muller, you will find really means "nerve," and from it come
"vis," and "vir," and "virgin" (through vireo), and the connected
word "virga"--"a rod;"--the green rod, or springing bough of a
tree, being the type of perfect human strength, both in the use
of. it in the Mosaic story, when it becomes a serpent, or strikes
the rock; or when Aaron's bears its almonds; and in the
metaphorical expressions, the "Rod out of the stem of Jesse," and
the "Man whose name is the Branch," and so on. And the essential
idea of real virtue is that of a vital human strength, which
instinctively, constantly, and without motive, does what is right.
You must train men to this by habit, as you would the branch of a
tree; and give them instincts and manners (or morals) of purity,
justice, kindness, and courage. Once rightly trained, they act as
they should, irrespectively of all motive, of fear, or of reward.
It is the blackest sign of putrescence in a national religion,
when men speak as if it were the only safeguard of conduct; and
assume that, but for the fear of being burned, or for the hope of
being rewarded, everybody would pass their lives in lying,
stealing, and murdering. I think quite one of the notablest
historical events of this century (perhaps the very notablest),
was that council of clergymen, horror-struck at the idea of any
diminution in our dread of hell, at which the last of English
clergymen whom one would have expected to see in such a function,
rose as the devil's advocate; to tell us how impossible it was we
could get on without him.

VIOLET (after a pause). But, surely, if people weren't afraid--
(hesitates again).

L. They should be afraid of doing wrong, and of that only, my
dear. Otherwise, if they only don't do wrong for fear of being
punished, they HAVE done wrong in their hearts already.

VIOLET. Well, but surely, at least one ought to be afraid of
displeasing God; and one's desire to please Him should be one's
first motive?

L. He never would be pleased with us, if it were, my dear. When a
father sends his son out into the world--suppose as an apprentice
--fancy the boy's coming home at night, and saying, "Father, I
could have robbed the till to-day; but I didn't, because I thought
you wouldn't like it." Do you think the father would be
particularly pleased?

(VIOLET is silent.)

He would answer, would he not, if he were wise and good, "My boy,
though you had no father, you must not rob tills"? And nothing is
ever done so as really to please our Great Father, unless we would
also have done it, though we had had no Father to know of it.

VIOLET (after long pause). But, then, what continual threatenings,
and promises of reward there are!

L. And how vain both! with the Jews, and with all of us. But the
fact is, that the threat and promise are simply statements of the
Divine law, and of its consequences. The fact is truly told you,--
make what use you may of it: and as collateral warning, or
encouragement, or comfort, the knowledge of future consequences
may often be helpful to us; but helpful chiefly to the better
state when we can act without reference to them. And there's no
measuring the poisoned influence of that notion of future reward
on the mind of Christian Europe, in the early ages. Half the
monastic system rose out of that, acting on the occult pride and
ambition of good people (as the other half of it came of their
follies and misfortunes). There is always a considerable quantity
of pride, to begin with, in what is called "giving one's self to
God." As if one had ever belonged to anybody else!

DORA. But, surely, great good has come out of the monastic system
--our books,--our sciences--all saved by the monks?

L. Saved from what, my dear? From the abyss of misery and ruin
which that false Christianity allowed the whole active world to
live in. When it had become the principal amusement, and the most
admired art of Christian men, to cut one another's throats, and
burn one another's towns; of course the few feeble or reasonable
persons left, who desired quiet, safety, and kind fellowship, got
into cloisters; and the gentlest, thoughtfullest, noblest men and
women shut themselves up, precisely where they could be of least
use. They are very fine things, for us painters, now--the towers
and white arches upon the tops of the rocks; always in places
where it takes a day's climbing to get at them; but the intense
tragi-comedy of the thing, when one thinks of it, is unspeakable.
All the good people of the world getting themselves hung up out of
the way of mischief, like Bailie Nicol Jarvie;--poor little lambs,
as it were, dangling there for the sign of the Golden Fleece; or
like Socrates in his basket in the "Clouds"! (I must read you that
bit of Aristophanes again, by the way.) And believe me, children,
I am no warped witness, as far as regards monasteries; or if I am,
it is in their favor. I have always had a strong leaning that way;
and have pensively shivered with Augustines at St. Bernard; and
happily made hay with Franciscans at Fesole; and sat silent with
Carthusians in their little gardens, south of Florence; and
mourned through many a day-dream, at Melrose and Bolton. But the
wonder is always to me, not how much, but how little, the monks
have, on the whole, done, with all that leisure, and all that
good-will! What nonsense monks characteristically wrote;--what
little progress they made in the sciences to which they devoted
themselves as a duty,--medicine especially;--and, last and worst,
what depths of degradation they can sometimes see one another, and
the population round them, sink into; without either doubting
their system, or reforming it!

(Seeing questions rising to lips.) Hold your little tongues,
children; it's very late, and you'll make me forget what I've to
say. Fancy yourselves in pews, for five minutes. There's one point
of possible good in the conventual system, which is always
attractive to young girls; and the idea is a very dangerous one;--
0the notion of a merit, or exalting virtue, consisting in a habit
of meditation on the "things above," or things of the next world.
Now it is quite true, that a person of beautiful mind, dwelling on
whatever appears to them most desirable and lovely in a possible
future, will not only pass their time pleasantly, but will even
acquire, at last, a vague and wildly gentle charm of manner and
feature, which will give them an air of peculiar sanctity in the
eyes of others. Whatever real or apparent good there may be in
this result, I want you to observe, children, that we have no real
authority for the reveries to which it is owing. We are told
nothing distinctly of the heavenly world; except that it will be
free from sorrow, and pure from sin. What is said of pearl gates,
golden floors, and the like, is accepted as merely figurative by
religious enthusiasts themselves; and whatever they pass their
time in conceiving, whether of the happiness of risen souls, of
their intercourse, or of the appearance and employment of the
heavenly powers, is entirely the product of their own imagination;
and as completely and distinctly a work of fiction, or romantic
invention, as any novel of Sir Walter Scott's. That the romance is
founded on religious theory or doctrine;--that no disagreeable or
wicked persons are admitted into the story;--and that the inventor
fervently hopes that some portion of it may hereafter come true,
does not in the least alter the real nature of the effort or
enjoyment.

Now, whatever indulgence may be granted to amiable people for
pleasing themselves in this innocent way, it is beyond question,
that to seclude themselves from the rough duties of life, merely
to write religious romances, or, as in most cases, merely to dream
them, without taking so much trouble as is implied in writing,
ought not to be received as an act of heroic virtue. But, observe,
even in admitting thus much, I have assumed that the fancies are
just and beautiful, though fictitious. Now, what right have any of
us to assume that our own fancies will assuredly be either the one
or the other? That they delight us, and appear lovely to us, is no
real proof of its not being wasted time to form them: and we may
surely be led somewhat to distrust our judgment of them by
observing what ignoble imaginations have sometimes sufficiently,
or even enthusiastically, occupied the hearts of others. The
principal source of the spirit of religious contemplation is the
East; now I have here in my hand a Byzantine image of Christ,
which, if you will look at it seriously, may, I think, at once and
forever render you cautious in the indulgence of a merely
contemplative habit of mind. Observe, it is the fashion to look at
such a thing only as a piece of barbarous art; that is the
smallest part of its interest. What I want you to see, is the
baseness and falseness of a religious state of enthusiasm, in
which such a work could be dwelt upon with pious pleasure. That a
figure, with two small round black beads for eyes; a gilded face,
deep cut into horrible wrinkles; an open gash for a mouth, and a
distorted skeleton for a body, wrapped about, to make it fine,
with striped enamel of blue and gold;--that such a figure, I say,
should ever have been thought helpful towards the conception of a
Redeeming Deity, may make you, I think, very doubtful, even of the
Divine approval,--much more of the Divine inspiration,--of
religious reverie in general. You feel, doubtless, that your own
idea of Christ would be something very different from this; but in
what does the difference consist? Not in any more divine authority
in your imagination; but in the intellectual work of six
intervening centuries; which, simply, by artistic discipline, has
refined this crude conception for you, and filled you, partly with
an innate sensation, partly with an acquired knowledge, of higher
forms,--which render this Byzantine crucifix as horrible to you,
as it was pleasing to its maker. More is required to excite your
fancy; but your fancy is of no more authority than his was: and a
point of national art-skill is quite conceivable, in which the
best we can do now will be as offensive to the religious dreamers
of the more highly cultivated time, as this Byzantine crucifix is
to you.

MARY. But surely, Angelico will always retain his power over
everybody?

L. Yes, I should think, always; as the gentle words of a child
will: but you would be much surprised, Mary, if you thoroughly
took the pains to analyze, and had the perfect means of analyzing,
that power of Angelico,--to discover its real sources. Of course
it is natural, at first, to attribute it to the pure religious
fervor by which he was inspired; but do you suppose Angelico was
really the only monk, in all the Christian world of the middle
ages, who labored, in art, with a sincere religious enthusiasm?

MARY. No, certainly not.

L. Anything more frightful, more destructive of all religious
faith whatever, than such a supposition, could not be. And yet,
what other monk ever produced such work? I have myself examined
carefully upwards of two thousand illuminated missals, with
especial view to the discovery of any evidence of a similar result
upon the art, from the monkish devotion; and utterly in vain.

MARY. But then, was not Fra Angelico a man of entirely separate
and exalted genius?

L. Unquestionably; and granting him to be that, the peculiar
phenomenon in his art is, to me, not its loveliness, but its
weakness. The effect of "inspiration," had it been real, on a man
of consummate genius, should have been, one would have thought, to
make everything that he did faultless and strong, no less than
lovely. But of all men, deserving to be called "great," Fra
Angelico permits to himself the least pardonable faults, and the
most palpable follies. There is evidently within him a sense of
grace, and power of invention, as great as Ghiberti's:--we are in
the habit of attributing those high qualities to his religious
enthusiasm; but, if they were produced by that enthusiasm in him,
they ought to be produced by the same feelings in others; and we
see they are not. Whereas, comparing him with contemporary great
artists, of equal grace and invention, one peculiar character
remains notable in him,--which, logically, we ought therefore to
attribute to the religious fervor;--and that distinctive character
is, the contented indulgence of his own weaknesses, and
perseverance in his own ignorances.

MARY. But that's dreadful! And what is the source of the peculiar
charm which we all feel in his work?

L. There are many sources of it, Mary; united and seeming like
one. You would never feel that charm but in the work of an
entirely good man; be sure of that; but the goodness is only the
recipient and modifying element, not the creative one. Consider
carefully what delights you in any original picture of Angelico's.
You will find, for one minor thing, an exquisite variety and
brightness of ornamental work. That is not Angelico's inspiration.
It is the final result of the labor and thought of millions of
artists, of all nations; from the earliest Egyptian potters
downwards--Greeks, Byzantines, Hindoos, Arabs, Gauls, and
Northmen--all joining in the toil; and consummating it in
Florence, in that century, with such embroidery of robe and
inlaying of armor as had never been seen till then; nor probably,
ever will be seen more. Angelico merely takes his share of this
inheritance, and applies it in the tenderest way to subjects which
are peculiarly acceptant of it. But the inspiration, if it exist
anywhere, flashes on the knight's shield quite as radiantly as on
the monk's picture. Examining farther into the sources of your
emotion in the Angelico work, you will find much of the impression
of sanctity dependent on a singular repose and grace of gesture,
consummating itself in the floating, flying, and above all, in the
dancing groups. That is not Angelico's inspiration. It is only a
peculiarly tender use of systems of grouping which had been long
before developed by Giotto, Memmi, and Orcagna; and the real root
of it all is simply--What do you think, children? The beautiful
dancing of the Florentine maidens!

DORA (indignant again). Now, I wonder what next! Why not say it
all depended on Herodias' daughter, at once?

L. Yes; it is certainly a great argument against singing that
there were once sirens.

DORA. Well, it may be all very fine and philosophical, but
shouldn't I just like to read you the end of the second volume of
"Modern Painters"!

L. My dear, do you think any teacher could be worth your listening
to, or anybody else's listening to, who had learned nothing, and
altered his mind in nothing, from seven and twenty to seven and
forty? But that second volume is very good for you as far as it
goes. It is a great advance, and a thoroughly straight and swift
one, to be led, as it is the main business of that second volume
to lead you, from Dutch cattle-pieces, and ruffian-pieces, to Fra
Angelico. And it is right for you also, as you grow older, to be
strengthened in the general sense and judgment which may enable
you to distinguish the weaknesses from the virtues of what you
love, else you might come to love both alike; or even the
weaknesses without the virtues. You might end by liking Overbeck
and Cornelius as well as Angelico. However, I have perhaps been
leaning a little too much to the merely practical side of things,
in to-night's talk; and you are always to remember, children, that
I do not deny, though I cannot affirm, the spiritual advantages
resulting, in certain cases, from enthusiastic religious reverie,
and from the other practices of saints and anchorites. The
evidence respecting them has never yet been honestly collected,
much less dispassionately examined: but assuredly, there is in
that direction a probability, and more than a probability, of
dangerous error, while there is none whatever in the practice of
an active, cheerful, and benevolent life. The hope of attaining a
higher religious position, which induces us to encounter, for its
exalted alternative, the risk of unhealthy error, is often, as I
said, founded more on pride than piety; and those who, in modest
usefulness, have accepted what seemed to them here the lowliest
place in the kingdom of their Father, are not, I believe, the
least likely to receive hereafter the command, then unmistakable,
"Friend, go up higher."





LECTURE 8.

CRYSTAL CAPRICE


Formal Lecture in Schoolroom, after some practical examination of
minerals.

L. We have seen enough, children, though very little of what might
be seen if we had more time, of mineral structures produced by
visible opposition, or contest among elements; structures of which
the variety, however great, need not surprise us: for we quarrel,
ourselves, for many and slight causes,--much more, one should
think, may crystals, who can only feel the antagonism, not argue
about it. But there is a yet more singular mimicry of our human
ways in the varieties of form which appear owing to no
antagonistic force; but merely to the variable humor and caprice
of the crystals themselves: and I have asked you all to come into
the schoolroom to-day, because, of course, this is a part of the
crystal mind which must be peculiarly interesting to a feminine
audience. (Great symptoms of disapproval on the part of said
audience.) Now, you need not pretend that it will not interest
you; why should it not? It is true that we men are never
capricious; but that only makes us the more dull and disagreeable.
You, who are crystalline in brightness, as well as in caprice,
charm infinitely, by infinitude of change. (Audible murmurs of
"Worse and worse!" "As if we could be got over that way!" Etc. The
LECTURER, however, observing the expression of the features to be
more complacent, proceeds.) And the most curious mimicry, if not
of your changes of fashion, at least of your various modes (in
healthy periods) of national costume, takes place among the
crystals of different countries. With a little experience, it is
quite possible to say at a glance, in what districts certain
crystals have been found; and although, if we had knowledge
extended and accurate enough, we might of course ascertain the
laws and circumstances which have necessarily produced the form
peculiar to each locality, this would be just as true of the
fancies of the human mind. If we could know the exact
circumstances which affect it, we could foretell what now seems to
us only caprice of thought, as well as what now seems to us only
caprice of crystal: nay, so far as our knowledge reaches, it is on
the whole easier to find some reason why the peasant girls of
Berne should wear their caps in the shape of butterflies; and the
peasant girls of Munich theirs in the shape of shells, than to say
why the rock-crystals of Dauphine should all have their summits of
the shape of lip-pieces of flageolets, while those of St. Gothard
are symmetrical, or why the fluor of Chamouni is rose-colored, and
in octahedrons, while the fluor of Weardale is green, and in
cubes. Still farther removed is the hope, at present, of
accounting for minor differences in modes of grouping and
construction. Take, for instance, the caprices of this single
mineral, quart;--variations upon a single theme. It has many
forms; but see what it will make out of this ONE, the six-sided
prism. For shortness' sake, I shall call the body of the prism its
"column," and the pyramid at the extremities its "cap." Now, here,
first you have a straight column as long and thin as a stalk of
asparagus, with two little caps at the ends; and here you have a
short thick column, as solid as a haystack, with two fat caps at
the ends; and here you have two caps fastened together, and no
column at all between them! Then here is a crystal with its column
fat in the middle, and tapering to a little cap; and here is one
stalked like a mushroom, with a huge cap put on the top of a
slender column! Then here is a column built wholly out of little
caps, with a large smooth cap at the top. And here is a column
built of columns and caps; the caps all truncated about half-way
to their points. And in both these last, the little crystals are
set anyhow, and build the large one in a disorderly way; but here
is a crystal made of columns and truncated caps, set in regular
terraces all the way up.

MARY. But are not these groups of crystals, rather than one
crystal?

L. What do you mean by a group, and what by one crystal?

DORA (audibly aside, to MARY, who is brought to pause). You know
you are never expected to answer, Mary.

L. I'm sure this is easy enough. What do you mean by a group of
people?

MARY. Three or four together, or a good many together, like the
caps in these crystals.

L. But when a great many persons get together they don't take the
shape of one person?

(MARY still at pause.)

ISABEL. No, because they can't; but you know the crystals can; so
why shouldn't they?

L. Well, they don't; that is to say, they don't always, nor even
often. Look here, Isabel.

ISABEL. What a nasty ugly thing!

L. I'm glad you think it so ugly. Yet it is made of beautiful
crystals; they are a little gray and cold in color, but most of
them are clear.

ISABEL. But they're in such horrid, horrid disorder!

L. Yes; all disorder is horrid, when it is among things that are
naturally orderly. Some little girls' rooms are naturally orderly,
I suppose; or I don't know how they could live in them, if they
cry out so when they only see quartz crystals in confusion.

ISABEL. Oh! but how come they to be like that?

L. You may well ask. And yet you will always hear people talking,
as if they thought order more wonderful than disorder! It is
wonderful--as we have seen; but to me, as to you, child, the
supremely wonderful thing is that nature should ever be ruinous or
wasteful, or deathful! I look at this wild piece of
crystallization with endless astonishment.

MARY. Where does it come from?

L. The Tete Noire of Chamonix. What makes it more strange is that
it should be in a vein of fine quartz. If it were in a mouldering
rock, it would be natural enough; but in the midst of so fine
substance, here are the crystals tossed in a heap; some large,
myriads small (almost as small as dust), tumbling over each other
like a terrified crowd, and glued together by the sides, and
edges, and backs, and heads; some warped, and some pushed out and
in, and all spoiled, and each spoiling the rest.

MARY. And how flat they all are!

L. Yes; that's the fashion at the Tete Noire.

MARY. But surely this is ruin, not caprice?

L. I believe it is in great part misfortune; and we will examine
these crystal troubles in next lecture. But if you want to see the
gracefullest and happiest caprices of which dust is capable, you
must go to the Hartz; not that I ever mean to go there myself, for
I want to retain the romantic feeling about the name; and I have
done myself some harm already by seeing the monotonous and heavy
form of the Brocken from the suburbs of Brunswick. But whether the
mountains be picturesque or not, the tricks which the goblins (as
I am told) teach the crystals in them, are incomparably pretty.
They work chiefly on the mind of a docile, bluish-colored,
carbonate of lime; which comes out of a gray limestone. The
goblins take the greatest possible care of its education, and see
that nothing happens to it to hurt its temper; and when it may be
supposed to have arrived at the crisis which is to a well brought
up mineral, what presentation at court is to a young lady--after
which it is expected to set fashions--there's no end to its pretty
ways of behaving. First it will make itself into pointed darts as
fine as hoarfrost; here, it is changed into a white fur as fine as
silk; here into little crowns and circlets, as bright as silver;
as if for the gnome princesses to wear; here it is in beautiful
little plates, for them to eat off; presently it is in towers
which they might be imprisoned in; presently in caves and cells,
where they may make nun-gnomes of themselves, and no gnome ever
hear of them more; here is some of it in sheaves, like corn; here,
some in drifts, like snow; here, some in rays, like stars: and,
though these are, all of them, necessarily, shapes that the
mineral takes in other places, they are all taken here with such a
grace that you recognize the high caste and breeding of the
crystals wherever you meet them, and know at once they are Hartz-
born.

Of course, such fine things as these are only done by crystals
which are perfectly good, and good-humored; and of course, also,
there are ill-humored crystals who torment each other, and annoy
quieter crystals, yet without coming to anything like serious war.
Here (for once) is some ill-disposed quartz, tormenting a
peaceable octahedron of fluor, in mere caprice. I looked at it the
other night so long, and so wonderingly, just before putting my
candle out, that I fell into another strange dream. But you don't
care about dreams.

DORA. No; we didn't, yesterday; but you know we are made up of
caprice; so we do, to-day: and you must tell it us directly.

L. Well, you see, Neith and her work were still much in my mind;
and then, I had been looking over these Hartz things for you, and
thinking of the sort of grotesque sympathy there seemed to be in
them with the beautiful fringe and pinnacle work of Northern
architecture. So, when I fell asleep, I thought I saw Neith and
St. Barbara talking together.

DORA. But what had St. Barbara to do with it?

L. My dear, I am quite sure St. Barbara is the patroness of good
architects; not St. Thomas, whatever the old builders thought. It
might be very fine, according to the monks' notions, in St.
Thomas, to give all his employer's money away to the poor: but
breaches of contract are bad foundations; and I believe, it was
not he, but St. Barbara, who overlooked the work in all the
buildings you and I care about. However that may be, it was
certainly she whom I saw in my dream with Neith. Neith was sitting
weaving, and I thought she looked sad, and threw her shuttle
slowly; and St. Barbara was standing at her side, in a stiff
little gown, all ins and outs, and angles; but so bright with
embroidery that it dazzled me whenever she moved; the train of it
was just like a heap of broken jewels, it was so stiff, and full
of corners, and so many-colored and bright. Her hair fell over her
shoulders in long, delicate waves, from under a little three
pinnacled crown, like a tower. She was asking Neith about the laws
of architecture in Egypt and Greece; and when Neith told her the
measures of the pyramids, St. Barbara said she thought they would
have been better three-cornered and when Neith told her the
measures of the Parthenon, St. Barbara said she thought it ought
to have had two transepts. But she was pleased when Neith told her
of the temple of the dew, and of the Caryan maidens bearing its
frieze: and then she thought that perhaps Neith would like to hear
what sort of temples she was building herself, in the French
valleys, and on the crags of the Rhine. So she began gossiping,
just as one of you might to an old lady: and certainly she talked
in the sweetest way in the world to Neith; and explained to her
all about crockets and pinnacles: and Neith sat, looking very
grave; and always graver as St. Barbara went on; till at last, I'm
sorry to say, St. Barbara lost her temper a little.

MARY (very grave herself). "St. Barbara"?

L. Yes, Mary. Why shouldn't she? It was very tiresome of Neith to
sit looking like that.

MAY. But, then, St. Barbara was a saint!

L. What's that, May?

MAY. A saint! A saint is--I am sure you know!

L. If I did, it would not make me sure that you knew too, May: but
I don't.

VIOLET (expressing the incredulity of the audience). Oh,--sir!

L. That is to say, I know that people are called saints who are
supposed to be better than others: but I don't know how much
better they must be, in order to be saints; nor how nearly anybody
may be a saint, and yet not be quite one; nor whether everybody
who is called a saint was one; nor whether everybody who isn't
called a saint, isn't one.

(General silence; the audience feeling themselves on the verge of
the Infinities--and a little shocked--and much puzzled by so many
questions at once.)

L. Besides, did you never hear that verse about being--called to
be "saints"?

MAY (repeats Rom. i. 7).

L. Quite right, May. Well, then, who are called to be that? People
in Rome only?

MAY. Everybody, I suppose, whom God loves.

L. What! little girls as well as other people?

MAY. All grown-up people, I mean.

L. Why not little girls? Are they wickeder when they are little?

MAY. Oh, I hope not.

L Why not little girls, then? (Pause)

LILY. Because, you know we can't be worth anything if we're ever
so good,--I mean, if we try to be ever so good and we can't do
difficult things--like saints.

L I am afraid, my dear that old people are not more able or
willing for their difficulties than you children are for yours.
All I can say is, that if ever I see any of you, when you are
seven or eight and twenty, knitting your brows over any work you
want to do or to understand as I saw you Lily knitting your brows
over your slate this morning I should think you very noble women.
But--to come back to my dream--St Barbara did lose her temper a
little, and I was not surprised. For you can't think how provoking
Neith looked, sitting there just like a statue of sandstone, only
going on weaving like a machine and never quickening the cast of
her shuttle, while St Barbara was telling her so eagerly all about
the most beautiful things and chattering away, as fast as bells
ring on Christmas Eve, till she saw that Neilh didn't care, and
then St Barbara got as red as a rose, and stopped just in time,--
or I think she would really have said something naughty.

ISABEL Oh please, but didn't Neith say anything then?

L. Yes. She said, quite quietly, "It may be very pretty, my love;
but it is all nonsense."

ISABEL. Oh dear, oh dear; and then?

L. Well; then I was a little angry myself, and hoped St. Barbara
would be quite angry; but she wasn't. She bit her lips first; and
then gave a great sigh--such a wild, sweet sigh--and then she
knelt down and hid her face on Neith's knees. Then Neith smiled a
little, and was moved.

ISABEL. Oh, I am so glad!

L. And she touched St. Barbara's forehead with a flower of white
lotus; and St. Barbara sobbed once or twice, and then said: "If
you only could see how beautiful it is, and how much it makes
people feel what is good and lovely; and if you could only hear
the children singing in the Lady chapels!" And Neith smiled,--but
still sadly,--and said, "How do you know what I have seen, or
heard, my love? Do you think all those vaults and towers of yours
have been built without me? There was not a pillar in your
Giotto's Santa Maria del Fiore which I did not set true by my
spear-shaft as it rose. But this pinnacle and flame work which has
set your little heart on fire, is all vanity; and you will see
what it will come to, and that soon; and none will grieve for it
more than I. And then every one will disbelieve your pretty
symbols and types. Men must be spoken simply to, my dear, if you
would guide them kindly, and long." But St. Barbara answered,
that, "Indeed she thought every one liked her work," and that "the
people of different towns were as eager about their cathedral
towers as about their privileges or their markets;" and then she
asked Neith to come and build something with her, wall against
tower; and "see whether the people will be as much pleased with
your building as with mine." But Neith answered, "I will not
contend with you, my dear. I strive not with those who love me;
and for those who hate me, it is not well to strive with me, as
weaver Arachne knows. And remember, child, that nothing is ever
done beautifully, which is done in rivalship; nor nobly, which is
done in pride."

Then St. Barbara hung her head quite down, and said she was very
sorry she had been so foolish; and kissed Neith; and stood
thinking a minute: and then her eyes got bright again, and she
said, she would go directly and build a chapel with five windows
in it; four for the four cardinal virtues, and one for humility,
in the middle, bigger than the rest. And Neith very nearly laughed
quite out, I thought; certainly her beautiful lips lost all their
sternness for an instant; then she said, "Well, love, build it,
but do not put so many colors into your windows as you usually do;
else no one will be able to see to read, inside: and when it is
built, let a poor village priest consecrate it, and not an
archbishop." St. Barbara started a little, I thought, and turned
as if to say something; but changed her mind, and gathered up her
train, and went out. And Neith bent herself again to her loom, in
which she was weaving a web of strange dark colors, I thought; but
perhaps it was only after the glittering of St. Barbara's
embroidered train: and I tried to make out the figures in Neith's
web, and confused myself among them, as one always does in dreams;
and then the dream changed altogether, and I found myself, all at
once, among a crowd of little Gothic and Egyptian spirits, who
were quarreling: at least the Gothic ones were trying to quarrel;
for the Egyptian ones only sat with their hands on their knees,
and their aprons sticking out very stiffly; and stared. And after
a while I began to understand what the matter was. It seemed that
some of the troublesome building imps, who meddle and make
continually, even in the best Gothic work, had been listening to
St. Barbara's talk with Neith; and had made up their minds that
Neith had no workpeople who could build against them. They were
but dull imps, as you may fancy by their thinking that; and never
had done much, except disturbing the great Gothic building angels
at their work, and playing tricks to each other; indeed, of late
they had been living years and years, like bats, up under the
cornices of Strasbourg and Cologne cathedrals, with nothing to do
but to make mouths at the people below. However, they thought they
knew everything about tower building; and those who had heard what
Neith said, told the rest; and they all flew down directly,
chattering in German, like jackdaws, to show Neith's people what
they could do. And they had found some of Neith's old workpeople
somewhere near Sais, sitting in the sun, with their hands on their
knees; and abused them heartily: and Neith's people did not mind
at first, but, after a while, they seemed to get tired of the
noise; and one or two rose up slowly, and laid hold of their
measuring rods, and said, "If St. Barbara's people liked to build
with them, tower against pyramid, they would show them how to lay
stones."

Then the Gothic little spirits threw a great many double
somersaults for joy; and put the tips of their tongues out slyly
to each other, on one side; and I heard the Egyptians say, "they
must be some new kind of frog--they didn't think there was much
building in them." However, the stiff old workers took their rods,
as I said, and measured out a square space of sand; but as soon as
the German spirits saw that, they declared they wanted exactly
that bit of ground to build on, themselves. Then the Egyptian
builders offered to go farther off and the German ones said, "Ja
wohl." But as soon as the Egyptians had measured out another
square, the little Germans said they must have some of that too.
Then Neith's people laughed; and said, "they might take as much as
they liked, but they would not move the plan of their pyramid
again." Then the little Germans took three pieces, and began to
build three spires directly; one large, and two little. And when
the Egyptians saw they had fairly begun, they laid their
foundation all round, of large square stones: and began to build,
so steadily that they had like to have swallowed up the three
little German spires. So when the Gothic spirits saw that, they
built their spires leaning, like the tower of Pisa, that they
might stick out at the side of the pyramid. And Neith's people
stared at them; and thought it very clever, but very wrong; and on
they went, in their own way, and said nothing. Then the little
Gothic spirits were terribly provoked because they could not spoil
the shape of the pyramid; and they sat down all along the ledges
of it to make faces; but that did no good. Then they ran to the
corners, and put their elbows on their knees, and stuck themselves
out as far as they could, and made more faces; but that did no
good, neither. Then they looked up to the sky, and opened their
mouths wide, and gobbled, and said it was too hot for work, and
wondered when it would rain; but that did no good, neither. And
all the while the Egyptian spirits were laying step above step
patiently. But when the Gothic ones looked, and saw how big they
had got, they said, "Ach, Himmel!" and flew down in a great black
cluster to the bottom; and swept out a level spot in the sand with
their wings, in no time, and began building a tower straight up,
as fast as they could. And the Egyptians stood still again to
stare a

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