Ruskin on Home

John Ruskin · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages carrying paragraph 68 of the same lecture, "Lilies: Of Queens' Gardens," from the third edition of Sesame and Lilies (1871). A footnote points to the full text in the site's Down to Earth Series.

The passage begins by contrasting two kinds of power as Ruskin conceived them. Man's power is called active, progressive and defensive — the doer, creator, discoverer and defender, his intellect for speculation and invention and his energy for adventure and conquest. Woman's power is described as being for rule rather than battle, her intellect not for invention but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision, seeing the qualities of things and their claims and their places; her great function is named as Praise, entering into no contest but judging its crown. From this Ruskin derives the definition the file is named for. The man in his rough work in the open world must meet all peril and trial, must often be wounded or misled and is always hardened; he guards the woman from this, so that within a house ruled by her no danger, temptation or cause of offence need enter. That, he says, is the true nature of home — the place of Peace, the shelter not only from injury but from all terror, doubt and division. The definition is then made conditional in the sharpest sentence of the passage: in so far as it is not this, it is not home, and once the anxieties of the outer life penetrate it, or hostile society is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home and becomes merely a part of the outer world roofed over with a fire lit in it. What redeems it is being a sacred place, a vestal temple watched over by household gods, where roof and fire are types of a nobler shade and light — shade as of the rock in a weary land, light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea.

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