|
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
meaning of great books is hidden and requires mining and smelting: Do not hope to get at any good author s meaning without those tools and that re; often you will need sharpest nest chiselling, and patientest fusing, before you can gather one grain of the metal (WR, , ). Towards the end of Of Kings Treasuries, Ruskin states that one comes to great books not merely to know from them what is True, but chie y to feel with them what is just (WR, , ). It is this quality of feeling with, of sympathy, that connects kingship to Ruskin s ideal of queenship as he expresses it in the second lecture, Lilies: Of Queens Gardens. For sympathy is what the pure woman has above all creatures; neness and fullness of sensation, beyond reason; the guide and sancti er of reason itself. Reason can but determine what is true: it Romanticism, aesthetics, and nationalism is the God-given passion of humanity which alone can recognise what God has made good (WR, , ). In stressing sympathy as the central role of woman, Ruskin expresses one of the central ideas asso- ciated with Victorian domestic ideology. According to this ideology, the role of woman was to provide moral guidance to man through sympathy and the maintenance of a domestic haven from the public world. Sarah Stickney Ellis well-known domestic manual The Women of England ( ) expresses this idea of the separation between the spheres and duties of men and women, with men furthering their worldly aggrandizement in the public sphere, and women guarding the re- side comforts of his distant home . . . clothed in moral beauty. Victorian domestic ideology has its most famous literary expression in Coventry Patmore s poems on the theme of the angel in the house, and indeed Ruskin approvingly quotes lines from Patmore in the course of the Queens Gardens lecture. Ruskin re ects many of the com- monplace ideas of Victorian domestic ideology, but expresses them through the context of the relationship between culture and the state. In Of Queens Gardens, Ruskin turns to the idea of the state and the di erent roles of the sexes in relation to it. He rst considers the connection between the concepts of kingship and the state: There is, then, I repeat and as I want to leave this idea with you, I begin with it, and shall end with it only one pure kind of kingship; an inevitable and eternal kind, crowned or not; the kingship, namely, which consists in a stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state, than that of others; enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to raise them. Observe that word State ; we have got into a loose way of using it. It means literally the standing and stability of a thing; and you have the full force of it in the derived word statue the immovable thing. A king s majesty or state, then, and the right of his kingdom to be called a state, depends on the movelessness of both: without tremor, without quiver of balance; established and enthroned upon a founda- tion of eternal law which nothing can alter, nor overthrow. WR, , Like Arnold, Ruskin connects the right to lead with one s place in the ladder of moral cultivation: kingship is correlated with a stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state. And like Arnold, the word state for Ruskin denotes both an advanced mental state of cultivation in individuals and the political entity instituted and guided by the individ- uals who possess such advanced cultivation. Ruskin proceeds to distinguish by gender the processes of cultivation that lead to the state. Since he has identi ed great books with the kingly power, the question arises of the role of the queenly power: what Ruskin on the state and the home special position or kind of this royal authority, arising out of noble education, may rightly be possessed by women? (WR, , ). Ruskin argues that the role of women in the process of cultivation leading to the perfection of the state is in maintaining the domestic sphere, the Queens Gardens of the title of the lecture. He seeks to illustrate the role of women in maintaining the stability of the state by a review of exemplary women in literature. He asserts that Shakespeare has no heroes; he has only heroines, (WR, , ) and reviews the heroines of the plays. He then considers the heroines in the Scottish novels of Sir Walter Scott, before nally revealing his guiding model in the depictions of knightly honour and love (WR, , ) in Dante and the courtly love poets. Adopting this model of knightly chivalry, Ruskin calls for the spiritual submission (WR, , ) of men to women, asserting that in all Christian ages which have been remark- able for their purity or progress, there has been absolute yielding of obedient devotion, by the lover, to his mistress (WR, , ). Ruskin s initial assertions of the authority of woman are prolonged and emphatic: I say obedient; not merely enthusiastic and worshipping in imagination, but entirely subject, receiving from the beloved woman, however young, not only encouragement, the praise and reward of all toil, but, so far as any choice is open, or any question di cult of decision, the direction of all toil (WR, , ). But it eventually becomes clear that Ruskin is not proposing that women actually govern the state. For, Ruskin draws a distinction between determining and guiding func- tions. The former is associated with man, whose power is active, progressive, defensive. Man is eminently the doer, the creator, the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
Podobne
|