Ah, how beautiful it is to be dreaming about a future, though it may never come true!—to be floating on the sunset tide of Venice; to be journeying over the passes of the Alps in summer, and always approaching Mount Blanc; to be resting by the fountain in Alhambra's Court of Lions; to be gazing at the Sistine Madonna in Dresden, or at the Ascension in the Vatican; to be dosing in an orange grove in southern California; to be awed by the deep canons of the Colorado, or to be filled with the sublimity of the Yosemite!
How glorious to be dreaming of what we will do when we are women with wills and purses all our own!—with long rows of books in our libraries, elegant pictures in our drawing-rooms, and oh! such beautiful boudoirs, all, all of our own; or, at least, a room which shall be a sanctum sanctorum, where the fire on the hearth never smoulders, and where loving friends, beautiful mementos, and peaceful thoughts make us always happy. How fine to fancy longings achieved, and present desires gratified!
All dreams, yes; but they do sometimes come out better than true. The only thing wiser than dreaming is doing,—working in such a way as to bring the distant near, and getting out of the veriest commonplaces the joy we fancied lay only in the future, in other lands, or only in dreams.
Build castles and dwellings out of the commonplace, and you shall see them shine with splendor, and glow with beauties which can never be exhausted. She alone is rich who has estates in her soul.
VIII.
MOODS.
Blues, dumps, megrims, odd spells,—do they ever visit you? Drive them out of doors; chase them down the yard, over the fence, up the tree, till they go riding off on their own broomsticks, or vanish in thin air! If ever they come tapping on your window-pane again, don't open the casement; but turn your backs, stop up your ears, laugh as loud as you can, then seize the first piece of work which waits to be done. These demons are afraid of a laugh; and when they have the least suspicion that a smile wreathes the lips of a mortal, they will slink away and coil up in remote corners. They are equally alarmed by work, because it puts an armor of steel all over their opponents. This coat of mail is absolutely impenetrable, though blue imps should hurl their arrows of torture forever.
But, beware! Do not stop to think work and good cheer will put these creatures to flight. Sing your song, laugh your laugh, and make work, if none is at hand. Then only will these poor miserable prowlers shrivel up and crawl under ground.
What are gloomy moods good for? What are they not bad for? Why are we always making excuse for entertaining such company? If we are ashamed of them, let's send them packing, as we would any disreputable visitors, such as cheats, biting dogs, or poisonous insects.
How weak is our apology for enduring moods, when we blame some person, long since dead, for handing down to us an inheritance of megrims! We need not accept such a legacy, though of course we must fight very hard to resist its allurements. It may be convenient enough to censure inheritance for this or that oddity. Our grandmothers had strange moods,—spoke to people on some days and did not speak on other days,—so we have diligently doubled our bequest, and have spells odder yet,—find our friends quite delightful for a week or more, and then as distasteful for a still longer time.
The patrimony of evil can be, and will be, shamefully increased with every new generation, if good sense, sound principles, and a cheerful heart do not constantly defend the right and strive to annihilate inheritance. I am not going to discuss this matter of inheritance, girls, for there is much in it not well for us to consider at present. We are simply to remember to preserve and increase the good left us, and fight to the utmost all evil that may have come from ancestry. Every girl has peculiar forms of temptation; and what is hard for one to resist is easy for another to repel, because to the latter it is no temptation. If moods, grim moods, are worth any thing to us, they are simply worth conquering,—merely valuable for the strength we get from their defeat.
Plainly, it is our selfishness, our indulgence, our idleness, our vanity, which make us allow such wretched company within our walls.
See what wily creatures the blues are!—full of conceit! They grow powerful while looking at us. They are like those little wood creatures which can take the hue of the tree on which they rest, so that for a long time we do not perceive them. They sit beside us by hundreds when we fancy we are alone; and change their colors and their wheedling tones to suit our inclinations, while they pour into our ears deceitful whisperings that the world is all wrong, and we are all right,—the vile flatterers! They paint all our surroundings with dark colors, make all our pictures Mater Dolorosas or St. Sebastians, turn all our music into requiems, and all our books into Stygian epics.
I cannot think there is any thing much more destructive to human happiness than the blues. I wonder how they ever came by their name? It must have arisen from the weirdness of the tempest, from the changing hues of the snake's skin and the lizard's back, from the blue of sharp steel, from lighted brimstone, and from driving sleet.
Now, girls, why do you, of all people in the world, allow yourselves to be mastered by freaks? Do you not have troubles? Of course you do,—real troubles, which are full of pain and discouragement. Your feelings are so acute, you are so susceptible, I do not see why a sorrow should not be deep with you. But with your vigor, your pure affection, your generous impulses, with all the future before you in which to keep on trying, I cannot understand why you should hug such a phantom as a mood. Just think again how dangerous gloomy moods are,—how bold! Why, with the least hint at an invitation, they will come in, not for a call, nor for one meal, but to stay and stay,—the impudent creatures! And such despoilers as they are while they remain! They eat you out of house and home, they even take away your own appetite,—the harpies! They make you cross,—yes, ugly. They bring frowns, tears, and age into your faces, and they banish all loveliness to the ends of the earth. Oh, do not let them in!
When you come home tired out, your energy all gone, your patience exhausted, why,—rest. Do not think you are desolate, that everybody has deserted you, and that fate, destiny, grim despair, are all after you. You are tired and need to go to bed, or to engage in some light talk which will rest you but at the same time occupy you. Read the newspaper, build aircastles, hope with all the combined powers of your fancy. If the clouds of misfortune pile up, and it pours bad luck,—mother scolds because you did not sweep your room carefully; father threatens because of an approach to familiarity with the new young man over the way; brother frets because his stockings are not well darned; lessons all went wrong in the morning; your best friend said a careless word to you; you have broken the main-spring of your watch, and spilt coffee on your new dress,—why, these are all trifles! I know a good many bad trifles coming together are worse than a misfortune; but the best way to prevent them from bringing on dejection is to let in such a flood of light and determined cheerfulness as to drown out despair.
Mr. Emerson, in an essay on "Behavior," tells a capital story about a man who was so bent on being cheerful he put to shame the torments of hell itself. "It is related of the monk Basle, that, being excommunicated by the Pope, he was, at his death, sent in charge of an angel to find a fit place of suffering in hell; but, such was the eloquence and good humor of the monk, that wherever he went he was received gladly, and civilly treated, even by the most uncivil angels; and, when he came to discourse with them, instead of contradicting or forcing him, they took his part, and adopted his manners, and even good angels came from far to see him, and take up their abode with him. The angel that was sent to find a place of torment for him attempted to remove him to a worse pit, but with no better success; for such was the contented spirit of the monk, that he found something to praise in every place and company, though in hell, and made a kind of heaven of it. At last the escorting angel returned with his prisoner to them that sent him, saying that no phlegethon could be found that would burn him; for that, in whatever condition, Basle remained incorrigibly Basle. The legend says his sentence was remitted, and he was allowed to go into heaven, and was canonized as a saint."
Do not give away one day to despair: better lose it in idleness. When friends seem careless of you, when poverty encroaches, when suffering ensues from wrongs others have done, when sickness or any kind of calamity besets you, and when you are hunted to the verge of gloom, cling to the ropes which hope suspends about you, and they will surely pull you back from the abyss. These trials all have their uses.
And, pray, be mindful of the way you look at things. Do not try to see evil: have on your kind eyes, magnify every dot of goodness. "In all things throughout the world, the men who, look for the crooked will see the crooked, and the men who look for the straight will see the straight." [Footnote: Ruskin.] Try especially to see what is good in your own lot. If you have not fine carpets, luxurious chairs, fresh bouquets every morning, remember you can better appreciate a cane- seated rocker when you are tired, a well-swept floor which has a rug or two, and a single flower purchased with well-earned money.
As I suggested in the beginning, work is as sure a cure for dejection as cheerfulness is. Why, I have seen one hour's solid labor eat up all the blue tribe which had been hatching and hatching by millions. Sometime will you read from Carlyle's "Past and Present" his chapters on work, particularly that on "Labor and Reward"? Mr. Carlyle has written much that is unintelligible to most readers. He has a very grotesque, volcanic style not good to imitate. He is often sad and hopeless about the human race, but he knew from hard experience what work could do against despair. So, in spite of his ravings, notwithstanding his eruptive style, and his sorrow for what is, he has given us, in a masterly piece of prose, this noble "Gospel of Work."
His sentences, alive with enthusiasm, and terrible in their seriousness, contain great reaches of thought, poetry, prophecy, like that of the ancients; and all are full of the praises and rewards of labor. "Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every man; but he bends himself with free valor against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of labor in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright, blessed flame!" "Doubt of any kind can be ended by action alone."
What makes us blame the weather so much for our moods, girls? The day is gray everywhere,—in the skies, on the trees, in the air, on the ground,—and gray in us therefore. Ah! but these gray colors are beautiful, even in November and December. In their variety they are soft and shimmering on the tree branches, a slightly ruddy gray on the branchlets, and a serener gray on the tree trunks. Overhead, even when a storm is gathering in the sky, there are the colors of the moonstone tinting into silver, and shading into pearl and blue. On the ground are delicate wood-colors,—umbers, siennas, greens toned down to gray. The atmosphere, from its lack of sunlight, only sets off the more visibly beautiful forms of trees and branches.
No, the day is not moody: we are. We are not in harmony with her, but have arrayed our-selves against her. "When we are at one with Nature we have great peace; when fretted and unmindful of her presence, we are irritated, and out of our true element." In our megrims we have found something whose defenceless condition we think ought to bear the burden of our misery.
Well for you the weather affords a chance for an excuse; for a moody girl on a bright June morning, when all Nature is radiant with beauty, is the veriest parody on life,—worse than that, a sad mockery.
If you are very sensitive, do not censure yourselves too severely, nor foster distrust; for the latter is worse for you than self-conceit.
Be sure to make the blues as dangerous as possible; be always mindful of their direful attacks.
Some one asks me, just here, if she is never to feel serious? Of course she is to have very thoughtful hours! The merely gay, happy-go-lucky kind of a girl is not the most helpful, nor the most valuable. There is very deep happiness sometimes in thoughtfulness,—do you not know it? What makes you quiet when you row in and out of the shadow-filled coves along the river-border, or when you drift among the islands purple with sunset light? What makes you want to shut your eyes, and to throw away the mask of seeming, when some one sings the song you love? and what makes you feel a kind of dead, low, dreadful pause, when the reader's voice ceases, and the story conies to an end? Are you moody? No; only resting. Your being is suspended in thought,—thought so serious yet so delicate, so subtle, you cannot weave it into words. Sometimes, to be sure, a girl who is determined to be morbid will distort such serene feelings into moodiness; but, then, these sudden spells of dejection are only distantly related to the real blue urchins.
Perhaps, girls, it will be better for you if you make up your minds early in life that your lot will probably be about like that of the average girl,—that trouble must come, and even a skeleton must hang and gibber behind your door; but that, be the skeleton what it may, you will nail the door back on the unsightly thing, clothe it in some decent garments, and make it as respectable as possible in its niche, since it must stay with you. Events, decrees, circumstances, will not change for just you and me; but we can change ourselves, and so defeat them. Do not mind untoward circumstances. "Seize hold of God's hand, and look full in the face of His creation, and there is nothing He will not enable you to achieve." A crust with contentment is better than a pudding with the bitter sauce of discontent.
Oh, I know, girls, it sounds very much like dull preaching. But, really, do we enjoy moods? Do we have any respect for ourselves while in them? Aren't we always trying to blame some one else? Shocking business, hunting up scape-goats!
Just see how you look when you have given place to these evils. You respect beauty: you would resent any criticism on your personal appearance at a party; but if one should truly describe how careless, how unmindful of beauty in looks or beauty in disposition, how ugly you are, when in this deplorably moody state, you would shun your very self, and want to get out of your body somehow. You watch a girl who has an attack of the megrims. She seems to hang from her shoulders, or thereabouts; her nimbleness is gone; her muscles seem flabby; she reels more than she walks; she picks up a book to let it fall down; she will not look her neighbor in the face; the meaning has all gone out of her eyes; her mouth is the only expressive feature; her lips are either tightly pressed or curled in scorn; there is a don't-care look all over her, and it lurks in the folds of her dress, in her slouching hat, her unbuttoned coat, and in her shambling gait.
Sometimes the picture is quite the reverse. The muscles seem tense and powerful. The eye is set and firm, ferocious in fullness. The step is quick and heavy. The strength is doubled, and every object has to yield to the ugliness which attacks it. The form appears to gather passion more and more with each hour, till, at last, full of violence, the human frame sways, heaves, and the girl breaks her mood into a flood of scalding tears. The contest is fierce while it lasts. It is dreadful to see beauty put on such deformity, but let us be thankful it is soon over. If the lightning does not strike anywhere, perhaps all will be clearer after the storm.
These violent squalls are not to be compared with those periods of long, low mutterings, nor with those seasons of painful silence, hours of uncertainty, which at times cloud so many girls. Why, the moods of some persons are like yellow days, dark days, and judgment days. A girl shuts herself up for an afternoon, for a day, for two days A stone sepulchre is all about her, and she only reaches out of it when she wants bread and water. She, herself, does not seem to be in her body: she is a ghost. When we pass by her tomb-like body, perhaps a head will nod to us, or lips will mutter monosyllables. If our dress touches her garments we feel like begging pardon, A kind of horror and at the same time a sort of pity invade us, yet we are paralyzed and cannot help her. I hardly think the word is employed by lexicographers with this meaning, and I apologize for using the expression; but this kind of an odd spell is what I call smudging.
It seems so strange that a girl can use her will so powerfully about controlling others, and yet remain herself the dupe of an unkind mood. To be sure, there are causes for ill-humor arising nearly every day,— ill-health, poverty, sorrow, cares that haunt and harrow, unaccomplished desires, ungratified longings; but the indulgence of dejection, the lack of resistance to a mood, only increase hardship. How is the doctor to help your body, if you do not help your spirits? How are your surroundings to be improved, if you do not go to work? How are you to get work, if you do not seek it, and try with all your might to find it? How is trouble to be lessened or endured, if from it we do not reach to higher, nobler living? The way out of trouble is not through despair. Hope unlocks the temple doors, Despair rusts the keys. Each must know her own anxieties best; but the trials of all, we shall sometime see, are but bitter on the outside, sweet and nourishing within. Believe in the sometime.
IX.
WOMANLINESS.
There is something in woman fascinating to woman herself, and something in a girl irresistibly attractive to a girl herself. Mere words being unsufficient to express the emotion caused by this charm, a girl makes use of a large force of ejaculations, utters her indescribable "Oh's!" and "Ah's!" in every variety of crescendo and diminuendo, and emphasizes her pitch with gestures that point her meaning, till not the slightest doubt exists that she has been impressed by something wonderful. She does not know, indeed, just what it is that makes Sallie Henderson so delightful; but "Oh, she is per-fect-ly lovely!—too sweet for any thing!" Now I think the quality which so attracts is womanliness, the most desirable of all the gifts a girl is permitted to cultivate. All the littlenesses in the social customs of girls; all their raw, untrained, ungenerous acts, their indulgences, their prejudices, are the weak and despised signs of unwomanliness.
Womanliness is not primness, let me be understood. The straight, smooth hair, the folded hands, the demure face and exact deportment from ten years of age to eighty, do not always indicate womanliness; nor does the attempt to turn young girls into elderly women produce it. So many patchwork quilts, so many hand-stitched shirt-bosoms, so many worsted stockings, made before a girl is fourteen, are so many quilts, bosoms, and stockings more than she will make when she is forty. Hours for sewing, for helping in the home, for studying, are necessary to even children, because industry, patience, application, and system must be encouraged in earliest years; but the hours girls spend in the house doing things neatly and in order, as their grandmothers did before them, ought to be balanced by hearty exercise in the fresh air, by seasons of mirth, and by freedom from restraint. The out-of-door exercise, the gayety, the deliverance from tasks, are quite as necessary for older girls as for younger ones.
There is a value to be placed on the very trappings of girlhood which do not in the least interfere with womanliness. At sixteen or eighteen, perhaps at twenty, a girl can toss a jaunty little felt hat upon her head, pin it in a twinkling above her wayward hair, tie on a bit of blue or red somewhere about her blouse, tuck in her handkerchief in a pardonable way, brush her short walking-skirt into becoming folds, tie up her tennis shoes, and there she is in five minutes, prettier, fresher, more becomingly dressed than all the older women of the household, who have been standing before the mirror trying this effect and that for the last hour. Ask a girl how she does it, how she manages to make her hat bend down and up, and in and out, in all kinds of alluring ways, and she does not know,—it belongs to girls to do such things. Of course it does! Whatever they do must be bewilderingly charming sometimes, because they are girls. You know, when we buy choice roses from the gardener, we are always particular to select those just approaching blossom. A delicacy, and yet a richness of color and fragrance are upon them; a brightness and yet a tenderness in tone,—the bloom is there more soft and beautiful than in the fully opened rose. That bloom and color, that tenderness and dreamy softness, that richness and freshness, are yours, dear girls.
Yes, indeed! there is something charming in a girl simply because she is a girl. It is in the ring of her laugh, in her irony, in her frankness or her coyness, in the way she does the commonest things,— puts on her scarf, or catches hold of your arm,—things that only too soon disappear in conventionalities, ceremonies, and proprieties. But there is no need of this change as concerns much that is now called only girlish. The womanly element is the main quality to be nourished into greater perfection, but only the weakness of girlishness is to be excluded from character. Girls are to grow wiser, and to avoid what must bring harm, but still to keep the attractive freshness of maidenhood. Some of the most delightful women we meet are those who can be girls with girls, and women with women. The young do not lose their respect for them because they appreciate them, nor do elders lessen their regard for these women because they have kept the loveliness of girlhood.
Girls, I am not trying to defend you: your girlhood needs no such effort; but I do want to make you all feel that the very sweetness of your natures, the loveliness of your lives and conduct, your attractive grace, which ought to strengthen with years and become something more than beautiful,—become divine,—is womanliness.
God did not make all the girls beautiful, strong, or intellectual; but He did make them all capable of becoming womanly. You may well doubt this ability the next time you see an intelligent and pretty girl avoid the glance of a former friend who is now miserable and weak; and you may question its very existence in the wretched and outcast one. Ah! but who can judge, or even know, the inner life of one's past acquaintances? It is not for you, nor for me, to slight, to scorn, to condemn the fallen. Of this we are sure,—that no beauty, no intelligence, can compare with womanliness; and that no girl, weak and wicked as she may be, is utterly lost to a return to womanliness. May I here appeal to you, dear girls, to hasten this return? May I urge you not to slight even the sinful? As you are girls with most precious endowments, remember to encourage the growth of these gifts in other girls. Then will womanhood seem even more blessed than now,— when girls defend it and purify it. A girl may have all the privileges that a boy has; a woman, all the rights that a man now has in excess,—pray, do not let us stand in the way of such favors!—but the fact remains that "woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse"; and the one thing she owes to the world, to herself, to her Maker, is a reverence for her own sex. Girls, I repeat, you cannot sufficiently realize your obligations to your own kind. Because you are girls and not boys, women and not men, oh, try to be loyal to girls and women! Pay homage to womanhood; adorn it, place sacrifices upon its altars, rejoice in unceasing service to it, exalt it by every worthy endeavor!
This reverence for woman is the first and truest step towards womanliness. When this has not been taken, and a girl is therefore unkind to her social inferiors out of fear of what rumor will say,—"the fume of little hearts,"—I blush for an indecent girlhood, and I grieve for an unpromising, unchristian womanhood. We know that encouragement, not intimacy, the gentle rebuke of a bow or a greeting, are more helpful to arouse the sparks of womanliness than the cold stare or averted head. Next to the respect of woman for woman, comes the regard of woman for man,—a deference (when physical, mental, or spiritual strength in man demand) that is due from her who, constituted differently, has greater power to pay respect and gratitude, to honor and love. Gentlemanly boys and men have a right to expect you to be refined, courteous, agreeable towards them in all the ways of ladyhood,—not that they are your superiors, but your helpers: made after a different pattern, but still your sincere friends.
The womanly in girls implies the lady, no doubt, more than the manly in man indicates the gentleman. We ought always to find in girls that gentleness and delicacy of manner, that minute attention to the comforts of others, that visible respect towards others, so agreeable and so refining in all circles. Marguerite de Valois wrote, "Gentleness, cheerfulness, and urbanity are the Three Graces of manners." I believe they bear a close relation to ladylike deportment.
All can acquire these habits of politeness and attention to others, though they come not with ease to those of us whom unfavorable surroundings continually influence. A woman in an almshouse, a girl serving a ship's crew, can be a lady and not cost her masters more, though her efforts cost her much.
But, valuing all that constitutes a lady, believing that these gentle graces are necessary to every girl, I believe the ladylike is but a part of true womanliness,—that infinitely precious, indescribable something in woman that makes her royal by birth, queen of herself, and fit to occupy the throne that is placed beside the king's throne,— not higher, not lower, but beside it; not his, but like his; her own, from which, with equal though with differing eye, she looks in blessing on the world.
Oh, how, girls, shall we get this womanliness into our characters, or, rather, how shall we make it shine out of them? If we stop to think once in a while what it is, if we remember that it is unassuming as it is beautiful, and only waits for our acquaintance, we shall the sooner embrace it. And then, if we are reminded that it does not despise common things, lowly homes, simple pleasures, any more than it does benevolent acts, patient lives, and ordinary toils, we shall oftener be found cherishing it. Let us remember that womanliness is in our elders,—women like Susan Winstanley, of whom "Elia" tells in "Modern Gallantry." You know she was cold toward her lover, and when asked why, she replied she was perfectly willing to receive his compliments and devotion, as was her right; but that, just before he came to pay his regards, she had overheard him roughly rating a young woman who had not been quite prompt with his cravats, and she thought what a simple change of place might have caused, and said, "I was determined not to accept any fine speeches to the compromise of that sex the belonging to which was, after all, my strongest claim and title to them."
Let us remember that womanliness is in all the motherliness we see in our mothers; that it is in all the sacrifices and noble deeds of silent women, as well as in those of celebrated women, like Elizabeth Fry or Mrs. Browning; that it is in the acts of all those who make the ordinary home "like the shadow of a rock in a weary land," and a "light as of a Pharos in the stormy sea." If we are impressed with the remembrance that womanliness is in such and such characters, we shall try harder to imitate them; we shall be more thankful we are women, and more grateful that it belongs to us especially to impart what man lacks, and what he must depend on us to supply.
Here, again, I want to emphasize the fact that womanliness does not require a girl to abandon merriment, vigorous exercise of the body, or brain, or heart, freedom in sports, and "a jolly good time." But let us have every thing in its place. Kid-gloved hands in a huckleberry pasture, or on a row-boat, would be as unbecoming to a girl, you will agree, as a soiled collar in the school-room, or a dusty jacket in church. We do not object to boys sitting astride a fence: it is rather manly than otherwise, if they do not concoct a plan to tear their clothes; but it does seem a bit out of the womanly way for a girl. To be sure, there is not much difference between climbing fences and many of the gymnastic performances for girls; but time and place must be regarded. I should not frown if I heard a girl whistling, under two conditions,—she must be a good whistler, and confine her musical exercise to the woods. I think it is fine to see a girl go over a fence without sticking between the bars, and it really is too bad to have to be pulled through by an "I told you so!" It is fine to see a girl play ball or tennis; to see her row or ride, or climb a tree when there is need. But all this climbing, and striding, and shouting, womanly enough at times, become most unwomanly under certain circumstances, especially in the home.
Such indications go far to pronounce us loose in manner, immodest in deportment, coarse and vulgar, where we are not understood. No girl can afford to wilfully bring upon herself the criticism of bad manners. She can afford to do right when she feels the world is wrong; but she is accountable for her example, and the influence she exerts upon those not as strong as she is. Beyond this lies the fact that womanliness is opposed to mannishness, and that unwomanliness grows faster than its virtuous opposite. "Ill weeds grow apace," says a German proverb. One plantain in a garden will eat out not only the flowers in the plats, but the very grass in the borders. Any thing that takes away from modesty, refinement, gentleness, takes away from womanliness. Says Beaconsfield, "The girl of the period,—she sets up to be natural, and is only rude; mistakes insolence for innocence; says every thing that comes first to her lips, and thinks she is gay when she is only giddy."
I sometimes think, girls, it is the motherliness in some of you that often makes you womanly; not altogether the quality that makes little folks hug their dolls,—not altogether that,—though, in their gentle cares, their tender caresses and assumed anxieties, they are little women in themselves; but I mean, too, the motherliness that makes girls careful of others. It is an all-sheltering fondness; it is a delicate superintendence over the comforts of another; it is a brooding thought about the nestlings of one's heart, hearth, or associations; it is a cultivated instinct that smooths out difficulties, and steps right along beside purity and loveliness.
This characteristic of womanliness is not that weak, unsubstantial quality which we sometimes associate with effeminacy.
I would not imply that womanliness does not exist in those women whom superior talents have raised above the average man. A great lecturer, after holding her audience long by her eloquent appeals for reforms, stepped down into the crowd slowly departing, and earnestly inquired after this sick friend, that poor one, and the prosperity of another. The marvel of her womanliness was even more striking than the power of her oratory.
As I said at first, girls, girlishness, while inferior to womanliness, is no hindrance to it. It is most proper for girls to discuss tucks and ruffles, gloves and boots, bangs and twists. They think about these things properly enough, too, or they would not make such good use of them. They are in no danger of becoming less worthy women, provided they do not exclude thoughts on higher things. But girlishness, construed to mean just a love of dress and finery, does not make womanliness. If it did, every well-clothed girl on the street would be virtuous. I confess, however, that it would require a good deal of persuasion to make me believe that untidy skirts, buttons clinging by a thread, or utter inattention to style, to neatness and wholeness, were traits in a womanly woman.
We are told that true manliness and true womanliness are one and the same. At some points, these qualities meet and mingle. In the strongest parts of character, men and women are the same. In trying moments, in hours of great interest, in times of rare experience, men and women do the same work in the same way, and then the high quality which ennobles their characters is human kindness. It is well that great artists have painted the face of Christ so that it is as womanly as it is manly. It is a beautiful way some persons have of thinking of God as father and mother too.
But with all these resemblances of manliness to womanliness, there is a difference which all may recognize if they will. Allow a boy to stretch out his legs, climb spouts, jump gutters,—he is still perfectly manly; but a girl cannot do these things in a community without censure, unless necessity requires. I know that the custom which demands different decorum for a girl is arbitrary, and not of divine origin. To go unveiled is not allowed in some countries. But conformity is surely enjoined upon us; and that, so far as it is reasonably observed, is a really womanly trait. I cannot help thinking that girls are made of finer material than boys, but of stuff that will wear just as well as the stockier goods in boys. Inasmuch as a girl has more confided to her keeping than a boy has, she ought to be so much the more watchful. A girl ought to guard purity, modesty, patience, hope, trust, because she has had these things given her in large measure.
What can there be more beautiful than womanliness! The next time you see the Sistine Madonna, look behind all the mother in the lovely face for the woman in it. Then see if you do not remark the same in Raphael's St. Cecilia, and in the Venus de Milo, Wherever masters have succeeded in painting the Virgin, notice, aside from the holy look,—if any thing can be aside from that,—the womanly look. What is it which makes us love some women's faces the moment we see them? Sometimes it is because the loveliness of their character beautifies most ordinary features. Sometimes it is because we expect them to do some very womanly deed,—to heal us of diseases, to right wrongs, to defend causes, to uplift the fallen. Girls are not all weak and uncertain, because they are girls. No; they are strong and brave, and reliable in danger. The boiler of a steam-yacht exploded; several girls were on board; the crew were busy saving themselves; the girls, with an electric shock of mother-care, jumped to save one another. They neither fainted nor screamed, with one exception, which was a somewhat feeble serving-girl, who was stoutly shaken and told to faint if she dared.
Perhaps you think that refinement and good education produce greater womanliness than ignorance and low surroundings. So they do; but the worst of circumstances, as we have already shown, cannot crush it. There is much to be feared from over-refinement, or, rather, superficial cultivation, which breeds selfishness, vitiates strength, encourages false pride, enervates the whole life of a girl. Look at the girl half clad, sleeping in the lazy sun that falls across her narrow doorway, droning out life; now and then, in an hour of wakefulness, muttering some coarse word. And then regard the over-cultured, the wrongly-bred girl; the peevish, dictatorial, selfish, haughty miss of a certain other door-way,—a parlor-way. The womanliness in both would not amount to so much as is in one bright gleam from the eye of an Evangeline.
We cannot tell so much what womanliness is in girls as what it does. It lies mostly in the little acts they perform,—those things which are so often done that we neglect to speak of their worth, and yet should feel most sad without them. The humblest deeds, the oft-repeated ones, form the beauty of characters and faces. They put beautiful lights into girls' eyes, softness into their cheeks, and winsomeness into the whole face. Then, too, deference to the feelings and notions of others has much to do with the sweetness of womanhood. It cannot be wrong to read a letter on the street, to shout to one's friend on the opposite side of the way, to whistle to a horse-car driver; but, so long as these offend preconceived notions of good manners, deference to the opinions of others should forbid such habits.
Now let us see, just once more, what we mean by a womanly girl. Exact attention to points of etiquette, gracefulness, accomplishments, proper subservience to the will of others, do not of themselves make womanliness; many more than these characteristics, and greater, are needful. First of all, a girl must feel she is a woman, with a heart to cultivate in its affections, restrain in its desires, curb in its selfishness; with a mind to enrich by such means as shall promote its best peculiarities, and supply its needs; with a soul to enlarge into more generous impulses, and into the performance of more worthy deeds. Such a girl looks practically, but at the same time cheerfully, on life. She is willing to make the best and most of her lot, and, though out of patience with it sometimes, is not always battling against circumstances.
Discontent, to be sure, is as unmanly as it is unwomanly; but I fear it is an ill more widely spread among girls than among boys. It is an evil seed, and brings forth nothing but choking weeds and noxious plants. No position, nothing that a girl can do, harms her, provided she be womanly; therefore, choice of position cannot help, unless she is sure she has power to do better in another place. Some servants are more womanly than the women who employ them. We are all servants to one another: each holds the mastery. Surely we must be novices before we can be superiors. In one sense, servitude is an ornament; for politeness is but a visible sign, of glad service. Surely, politeness is a real property of womanliness.
A truly womanly girl is genuine in what she says and does. Avoiding the bombast, the occasional coarseness of rougher natures, the self- esteem, and the dictatorial manner, she yet says no, when she means no. If that causes hurt, she is not slow to express her sympathy and show her sorrow. She does not do things for effect, nor to arouse unjust indignation.
If we were to study the points of character that have made women celebrated, we should find them within the power of any earnest girl to obtain through great strength of womanhood. I mean those women who have been the bravest, truest, tenderest, most loved by the world. Philippa pleading with bended knee before Edward III. to spare the lives of the men of Calais, Catherine urging her suit before Henry VIII., Madame de Stael supplicating Bonaparte for her father's liberty, Marie Antoinette ascending the steps of the scaffold, are but few of the women of history who furnish us examples of highest womanhood. Literature supplies as great illustrations: Antigone going to bury her brother's ashes in spite of the king's threat to take her life; Zenobia in chains in the midst of a great Roman triumph,—a woman still, with firm though downcast eyes; Rebecca, in "Ivanhoe," standing on the tower ready to give the fatal spring the moment Bois Guilbert should approach with dishonorable purpose,—all furnish vivid pictures of what strength of womanliness can accomplish. Simple traits caused their noblest actions,—love, sympathy, tenderness, purity, bravery, resolution, endurance; but these qualities, grown almost to their utmost, make these women dear to us. It was not intellect, it was not pride, it was not position; but it was the womanhood perfected in them that enabled them to do their work, and enables us to love and follow them.
We are under the strongest obligations, girls, to our sex, ourselves, and the world.
X.
GIRLS AND THEIR FRIENDS.
My dear girls, do not fancy that I am going to preach on friendship: so wide a theme is beyond the scope of these little talks with you. I simply wish to express a few old-fashioned opinions about girls and their friends.
Though now and then I may seem to be talking about that which is less than friendship, or that which means more, please understand I fully recognize the fact that, though acquaintance, friendship, love, often merge into one another by advancing steps of familiarity, they are really three distinct qualities.—One's acquaintances are many, one's friends comparatively few, one's lovers fewer yet,—or they ought to be. Do you know, girls, you do suggest the most delightful subjects for a talk! There is no such thing as resisting your attractive traits! But I am going to say a few very plain things about what may not be charming in you.
Girls feel very quickly. They are not in the least slow to comprehend with the heart; in fact, it often seems as though that organ were constructed with as much delicacy as is the Aeolian harp, which quivers and utters sounds when the air just stirs about it. The most of you are very emotional; and that quality of emotion, when it is pure, is your blessing, and a part of the womanhood in you: it is the necessary expression of your soul. I know the word emotional has not a pleasant sound, and, in common use, implies lack of reason and want of control; but it is a good word, and what it truly means is good. Feeling, or the product of feeling, which is emotion, does for us what reason cannot do,—it frequently causes faith where reason would destroy it. Do not boast you are not emotional, and have no care nor sympathy for fine sentiment; for this boasting is not laudable in a woman. The girl who reasons more than she feels will make a calm philosopher, but a very poor friend.
Though we are not to speak so much about God's highest gift to us,— the power of loving,—I would like to show you just what feeling is capable of doing. You know most girls have an affection for somebody or something, and if that love is not bestowed on a friend, it will be on a cause, an ambition, an absorbing desire. Hypatia, Joan of Arc, Charlotte Corday, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Hosmer, Rosa Bonheur, Mrs. Siddons, represent as much love for the causes they lived or live for as did Vittoria Colonna for her husband, Hester and Vanessa for Swift, Heloise for Abelard, Marguerite for Faust, Ophelia for Hamlet, Desdemona for Othello, or Juliet for Romeo. These last, I repeat, were bound in the cause of love not less than the former; and they all owed their endeavors—their success, if they gained it—to the feelings and emotions of their natures.
But the trouble is, girls, you do lack judgment in the management of your feelings. It has been suggested by an able philosopher that persons differ from one another principally in the amount of judgment they possess. Really, you do not always bestow your friendship worthily, but too often let your emotions master instead of guide you; then your eyes become blind to every thing that is best for yourselves and your friends: you get selfish, passionate, and demoralized.
Hold the reins of feeling in obedience to what is good and right, no matter what the suffering is which follows. Do you remember how Irma loved the king in that grand struggle for character which Auerbach paints "On the Heights," where the full, rich nature of Irma, so capable of loving, so prone to err, yearns for the fulfilment of her longing, yet will not yield an inch of conscience when once she knows it is wrong for her to love? You know she dies struggling, but it is on the heights, where, Goethe tells us, "lies repose." There are many and many women martyrs who go to their graves unknown, suffering no pangs of the Inquisition, the gallows, or the guillotine, but tortured by unrequited affections,—by a love which it was not possible to gratify without a loss of principle or a sacrifice of conscience. Is it not better to break one's heart than to break one's soul?
My dear girls,—I would not say it were I not obliged to do so,—you seem the least conscientious in making friends, rarely thinking how grave and yet how sweet a joy a friendship is. In the first place, you seize upon a friendship as though it were something to be worn already made, like a new bonnet which pleases you. No matter what the girl is, she suits your present whims; so your swear an eternal friendship with her, when you do not begin to realize that real friendship depends upon time and growth,—that it consists largely in a mutual finding out of two persons.
Then, again, you frequently choose friends for some material advantage to yourselves. Do you think you ought to do that? You see something in a girl which you believe will promote your interests: perhaps she is in society a good deal; maybe she is very bright and sharp at repartee; possibly she is stylish, and absorbed in dress; perhaps her father has money, or she has an eligible brother,—at any rate, she can advance your purposes in one way or another, so you presume to make her your friend. Now you know you ought to value friendship for just its sake alone. If you are to make a friend, do so because you cannot honestly help it, and no strong reason exists why you should help it.
Naturally, like chooses like: some point of beauty, some mark of excellence, some trait of character, will draw us to another, because these things exist in ourselves, though undeveloped, or because we wish them to so exist; so friendship will spring up and flourish till it ripens into love. This is the best and most loyal way of making friends; and, if this be called choice, indulge in it, though not from any material profit you are to get, but simply because you are fond of one who is worthy of the best you can give her.
Then you will see that, if a girl and her traits were lovable when she and you were school-mates, they deserve to be loved still: then a year after graduation you will know the girl when you meet her on the street, and recognize her as you did in school. Girls and boys do not change so completely after leaving school. Eleanor, though in plain clothes washing up the kitchen-floor, is Eleanor still; and Frank, though only patching fences, is still Frank. Changes in circumstances and in ourselves sometimes prevent the keeping of a friend, and we no longer find friendship in the places where we used to seek for it; but inconstancy in ourselves is a greater enemy to the holding of a friendship than any external circumstance.
One great reason why certain girls of good parts remain in the same position in which their ancestors had lived—struggling with poverty, with bad tempers, with an indifferent lot, and wrestling with a savage discontent—is because they are not encouraged to any thing better when they get out of school. The free institutions of learning in the United States begin a noble work of co-education and co-friendship; but, when these are passed, there remains nothing to continue the work. A black pall falls between the past and the future, and strives to cover the very memory of bygone school years. Money, influence, position, make havoc, striving in the freest land to set up classes and aristocracies separated from what is common by impassable barriers,—as though there were any other aristocracy than that of character and personal worth!
Ought girls to have intimate friends? How carelessly we use that word "intimate." Well, this is a very trying question, and needs a careful answer. Says Mr. Alger, "School-girl friendships are a proverb in all mouths. They form one of the largest classes of those human attachments whose idealizing power and sympathetic interfusions glorify the world, and sweeten existence. With what quick trust and ardor, what eager relish, these susceptible creatures, before whom heavenly illusions float, surrender themselves to each other, taste all the raptures of confidential conversation, lift veil after veil, till every secret is bare, and, hand in hand, with glowing feet, tread the paths of Paradise!" But what do you mean by "intimate"? If you understand by that word entire confidence in another under all circumstances; an unbosoming of every thought and feeling; a complete surrender to your friend, or mastery over her; a slavish adoration of her, and hearty concordance in all she does,—do not, then, indulge in an intimate friendship. The majority of women who have passed middle life will utter, out of their own experience, the truth that such confidence, such intercourse and familiarity, cause regret; and that such friendships are seriously detrimental to human happiness, wearing the mind, grieving the spirit; they cannot continue for many years. Our elders go even beyond that, and say that woman cannot love woman as woman can love man. Why is it that the friendships of boys usually last longer than those of girls? I cannot believe it is because girls are less constant or less friendly: I know they are not. Can it be because boys are less sensitive, and more sufficient for themselves? or is it because they are less intense, less confidential, and move along more slowly and suspiciously? Does it ever come from peculiarity of temperament in the case of both boys and girls, there being girl-boys and boy-girls? I am inclined to think that, because a boy is a boy, and a girl is a girl, the characteristics of both are required to make a perfect friendship. Of course there are broad exceptions to this opinion.
Can you have more than one intimate friend among the girls? That depends, too, on the nature and degree of closeness in the friendship. It requires a large amount of generosity on the part of several when two persons are close friends of a third. That blissful "solitude a deux" becomes misery a trois. The world is indeed beautiful, and the best part of it all is the people in it. We are to love as many of them as we can, but are called upon to reveal our inmost selves to few, very few, friends.
Valuing friendship more than any other earthly blessing, I think it wrong for girls to encourage that moodiness which flatters them they can do without friends, especially of their own sex. Nothing can conduce more to happiness: nothing is brighter, more charming, more helpful than the interchange of friendship among young women. Who wouldn't be a girl always if she could be sure all the other girls would stay so too, and go on in that delightful exchange of affection and fine feeling which is the very ecstacy of living?
Now, what does a girl prize most in another girl whose friendship she enjoys? or, rather, what should she value in her most? In the first place, constancy,—a knowledge that her friend will always be hers; and then honesty,—a feeling that, if she says, "Now, don't you tell," the friend won't tell. By the way, this binding to secrecy is a very bad practice, however delightful. It places too great a responsibility on one's friend, leads her into temptation, makes her curious, and, in nine times out of ten, one has no right to tell one's self, or one would not be so cautious.
Honesty implies more than this, however: it demands that your friend shall not herald abroad your mistakes or improprieties, though she may disapprove of them. It means that she shall treat you with the same kindness on all occasions, and that she shall resent wrong done you by another.
You like a girl who does not criticise unjustly, nor gossip about her friends. Marcus Aurelius, in his meditations, says, "A man must learn a great deal to enable him to pass a correct judgment on another man's acts." And Arthur Helps, in his essay, "On the Art of Living with Others," exclaims, "If you would be loved as a companion, avoid unnecessary criticism upon those with whom you live." Gossip is a most dangerous kind of criticism.
You prize a girl, too, who can like you even when she is not fond of your surroundings. An honest friendship does away with all jealousy, and makes each proud of the other's acquirements. "I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtue." [Footnote: Emerson.]
Girls are not sufficiently inclined to help girls. Think of the shadows which cross your path which some dear girl's hand could chase away. You would not drive the bird from your window-sill when he daily comes for crumbs, nor let a kitten stand mewing in the cold. Do not withhold the charity of your friendship from the hungry, dreary girl who waits. When the helping hands and generous hearts of such benefactors as every city knows,—women whose names are familiar to us as synonyms of charity, wisdom, rightness, but whose names we here repress because publicity would detract from the modesty of their conduct,—when such women stretch out hands of benefaction to their poor, ignorant, wicked sisters in our great towns, sparing something from their purses, from their minds, from their comforts, we wonder what must be the gift of their friendship to their more immediate friends. Here and there we meet humbler women, girls of fair intelligence and generous hearts, who give of their leisure, when they have no money, to help all objects of moral or spiritual wealth to woman. What must their friendship be to their friends! Something of immense value. Would there were more such engaged in a like work for the spreading of this broad friendship among women as women.
When a girl finds something of friendliness to give, the objects of her favor find much to receive. A blessing increases most rapidly while passing from possessor to recipient. The highest endowments should not, and do not, shut out a real need of reciprocal friendship in the hearts of girls. The larger your natures are, the greater will be your demand for friends. Do not be afraid you have not the talent of being friendly, even to the most gifted. A woman's greatest need, if she will confess it, is large-hearted sympathy,—is friendship. That one who withholds it, who seeks not friends, is fighting against herself, is lonely and dreary, notwithstanding the fact that she has great capabilities; for one of the most essential elements of her nature is being starved. The mightiest cannot stand alone. Mme. Swetchine, Marian Evans, Mme. De Stael felt, even more than most women, the absolute need of a friend. I can imagine nothing drearier than to be so far superior, in mind or in position, to one's associates as to feel no friendship for them. Milton, sitting with his daughters, yet not comprehended, is to me one of the saddest pictures of a great mental endowment and an unsatisfied heart. Would not Elizabeth have given years of her life and reign for the possession of one true friend? It is an extremely rare thing to hear of a woman hermit, or recluse. Girls give themselves up to nunneries, and believe they shut out the world; but they are either seeking the friendship of a cause supremely, or are hugging the closer an earthly, though a disappointed, love.
It is not weak, as Grace Aguilar suggests, for women to love women, girls to love girls. "It is the fashion to deride female friendship, to look with scorn on those who profess it. There is always, to me, a doubt of the warmth, the strength, and purity of her feelings, when a girl merges into womanhood, looking down on female friendship as romance and folly."
It makes no difference who you are, girls, you need friends among all classes and ages of persons. Sometimes it is the little child who can give friendship best; sometimes it is the woman bowed with years; often it is she whose years, surpassing yours by ten or twelve, have brought her into the midst of that experience on which you are just entering. Surely you must always need the sweet exchange of feeling which takes place between girls and girls.
We remark the countless friends we have in Nature; but beautiful, ennobling and comforting as the trees, the streams, and long green meadows are, you cannot afford to give up flesh and blood friends for them. Nature can improve you, but you cannot help her; but the true value of friendship is the mutual benefit to be derived from it.
In the highest sense, this benefit relates not only to the heart, but to the mind and soul. It is indeed possible for the ignorant, the unambitious, the unrefined to be firm friends. We hear of true and lasting friendships existing in peasant life. The rough, barren mountain-ways of the Scotch Highlands, the coast villages of France, the vinelands of Germany, the low flats of Holland, the desert of Africa, the vast plains of America, have furnished the most pathetic examples of sincere friendship, even though found among the most uncivilized. Surely, when refinement is added, the blessing should increase and not diminish, as it so often seems to do. The wigwam of the Indian is a truer protection for friendship than the gilded walls of many a drawing-room.
Oh, girls, this is what hurts and soils your characters,—this drawing- room insincerity, this falseness, this seeming! You can be polite and honest too; agreeable, and faithful as well. Significant glances, unfair advantages, uncivil pretensions in the parlor, make you not only insincere, but suspicious that you, also, are being ogled and scanned by others. Girls have contributed to make society false when they might have made it true. That society is insincere to you you will hardly deny, if poverty, sickness, or any misfortune thrust you from it. But society we must have. Why not, then, do your part to make it nobler, friendlier, truer? Much depends on the effort every girl makes to improve the social condition of the community.
Though you are so often indiscreet, fickle, ungenerous in your friendships, girls, I believe in them. When I see a party of you come together, so glad to be with one another again, giving and taking, after the most lavish fashion, I want to say, "Yes, indeed!" to Mr. Alger's remarks about school-girls; though I would leave off the word school, and make his expressions apply to girls everywhere. "Probably no chapter of sentiment in modern fashionable life is so intense and rich as that which comes to the experience of budding maidens at school. In their mental caresses, spiritual nuptials, their thoughts kiss each, other, and more than all the blessedness the world will ever give them is foreshadowed."
To sustain this friendship, I repeat, there are very necessary demands upon your patience, your charity, and your constancy. "The only way to have a friend is to be one," issues from the oracular lips of the Concord seer. "Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them, or bear with them," is an appeal which has been handed down the ages from the wisdom of that great "seeker after God," Marcus Aurelius.
Next to constancy in our fondness for others should come forbearance and conformity. We ought to forbear inflicting the discomfort of our peculiarities on our friends, or of requiring too much love for what we give,—too much intelligence to meet our mental acquirements. We should forbear asking for a change of opinion, or an unsettling of conviction, and certainly should refrain from making a bad use of our intimacy with one another. Be deaf and dumb and blind to all attempts to draw from you the secrets which another has committed to your charge. Conformity is no less important than forbearance. We should adapt ourselves more to the tastes, habits, and dispositions of our friends. Of course, we are not to comply with what will work them and us harm. Girls agree to certain customs in the main; dress as their mates do; and, if this or that fashion prevails, follow it, when it is not too ridiculous,—perhaps some do even when it is absurd. When the majority of girls wear bangs and bangles, you wear them; and when the most wear skirts somewhat less than two yards around, why, I suppose you do, don't you? That is all right; but let it never be forgotten that, in conforming to general usage, you may still preserve your own personality. When bustles and French heels jostle with your individuality, let them go, but save yourselves.
How is it we so easily follow after fashion and custom, suffer physical and mental pangs on account of them, and yet find it so hard to conform with the notions and individual traits of our friends? Just here, however, we are reminded that we are not to so agree with our friends, even, as to lose ourselves. Says Arthur Helps on this point, "If it were not for some singular people who persist in thinking for themselves, in seeing for themselves, and in being comfortable, we should all collapse into a hideous uniformity…. In all things, a man must beware of so conforming himself as to crush his nature, and forego the purpose of his being." And Emerson might have added to that thought, "Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo."
Conformity enjoins compromise. Fewer would be the great national calamities of war, famine, hard times; fewer the domestic trials; fewer the broken hearts, were there more of compromise in the world,—were there less cultivation and indulgence of certain national or personal peculiarities.
Girls ought never to be so familiar with one another as to forget to be polite in their intercourse. Courtesy, the last best gift of chivalry, the one bright star of the Middle Ages, leads out a long array of thoughts; but we cannot stop to marshal them here. Politeness is never superfluous. It needs to become so much a part of the costume of character as never to be laid aside except for renewal. Surely we should show its brightest ornaments, and the durability of its fabric, to our friends and acquaintances.
Let us seek friends, not wait for them to come to us. Let us search for them, not with boldness and indiscrimination, but with a hearty good-will to help them and enjoy them, as we, in return, expect them to do us good, and be glad of us. It is a duty on our part to seek and to keep friends, and no occupation should be so absolutely engrossing as to prevent the performance of this duty.
XI.
YOUTHS AND MAIDENS.
I have discovered an incompleteness, girls, in my talk with you about your friends, and I feel very depressing qualms of conscience on account of my discovery. Why, I haven't said one word about the friendships of boys and girls. Do pardon me! There really is an excuse. The fact is,—shall I speak it right out loud? No, it might be too dreadful. Come close, girls, and I will whisper it in your ears,—I am an old maid! Isn't that deplorable? I have lost one-half the pleasure there is in friendship, and, perhaps, you think, all there is in love. Yes, 'tis true: I am one of the superfluous sixty thousand women who are usurping the population in a small state. I had better go to the far West, and settle in the gold diggings, hadn't I?
So, girls, you do not suppose that, in a condition of such positive ignorance, I am able to talk with you about the boys? Well, I will be very discreet, and only suppose, gently suppose, that such a thing as friendship exists among boys and girls. But if I should venture on the subject of marriage, which, I am told, often ensues from something akin to friendship, you will please pardon me, and remember that, if I am too old to be talking about it, you are too young to be listening.
In such a peculiar civilization as ours, you cannot be really getting married at eighteen. But you may be thinking about marriage. Oh, yes! girls think a great deal about it at that age. Perhaps I did when I was eighteen; but that was so long ago, so very long ago! Still, for present purposes, we will imagine I was once a girl, and thought more or less about the boys, and liked them, too, just as you do now.
Oh, do not be so sure, you very bashful or very independent few, that you do not care a fig for the boys, and never shall! If you feel a kind of indifference now, or cannot see what boys are for, unless to try their sisters, and act conceited and foolish with the other girls, you may be on the verge of discovering that they are extremely good for loving.
Isn't it remarkable how boys change? Why, you are so suddenly impressed that Tom Sydney is not half as rude as he used to be! Indeed, he has grown very polite,—he lifts his hat in such a deferential way; he speaks with so manly a tone; he has a touch of such gentlemanly, half- alluring kindness when he helps you over the crossing! Strange, one's neighbors do alter so! Yes, it is a little remarkable; but it is on both sides of the street,—girls as well as boys.
It is not the freshman year in college, nor the first month in business, nor the first term at an evening dancing-school, which produce the change in the boys. It is not graduation, nor parties, nor house-keeping responsibilities, which make such a change in girls. No; but it is a very beautiful unfolding of the decrees of God which makes boys and girls love one another.
But, girls, even if your mind is set on celibacy, and you feel able to set off by contrasting charms the bliss of matrimony, encourage the friendship of the boys. You need their friendliness just as they need yours. You require their steadiness of purpose, their decision, their frankness, their slower judgment, their more robust endeavor, their courage and hardihood. They need your keener perception of right and wrong, your forbearance, your refinement of feeling, your encouragement, your sympathy, your patience and endurance, your tact, your gentleness and grace. The boys, you see, have the advantage of giving you more than you can give them; and you have the advantage of imparting to them more than they can impart to you. And, pray, what is friendship but a mutual giving and taking of the best parts of character? And how, indeed, can boys and girls grow in character without friends? Do not fancy the boys like in you qualities differing from those the girls are most fond of. Very young boys may, or very unworthy men. A twelve-year-old thinks girls are "no good,"—can't fly a kite without letting go the string, and can't play ball without hitting him on the head with a bat. A fifteen-year-old thinks girls will do for some occasions, especially if the girls are his sisters. They can fasten neck-ties very well, and save a fellow a good deal of embarrassment at dancing-school. He wishes they wouldn't be such tell- tales, though. But an eighteen-year-old, or a youth of twenty, cannot conceive any thing more adorable than the winning ways of girlhood.
A boy likes a girl sometimes, just as you girls too often like each other, because she is pretty, or bright, or pert. He is fond of a girl at other times because the beauty of her character reveals itself in all kinds of womanly acts. If he marries, he usually meets the deserts of whatever fondness he cherishes. He may be happy for a while in association with a pretty face, a saucy tongue, and a becoming costume; but not for long,—not for long.
While you are never to forget that you are young women, and that you owe large tributes to girls everywhere, do not exact consideration from the boys merely because you are girls. The boys never think of asking you to favor them. Though you are privileged to demand courtesy, that should not prevent you from engaging in honest toil with boys, or from associating with them in harmless pleasures. A boy appreciates it when a girl takes hold and helps to row, to rake, or to add accounts.
I think it is extremely commendable when a boy and girl can study together, work in the factory at the same bench, drive or walk with one another, and are not foolishly conscious that he is a boy and she is a girl. It is a pleasure to see a girl look at a boy without blushing, and to observe a boy look into a girl's eyes without immediately lowering his lashes.
Why is this susceptibility? It is not because boys and girls are always to fall in love when they meet. Every girl has a work to do for the boys,—some traits in their characters to discountenance, some features to encourage. How can she do this, if she is always thinking, Maybe he loves me? Work with the boys she must: join in merry-making and in whimsical enjoyments, why should she not? but in her gayest moment let her be mindful, not of a difference in sex, but of the fact that both a boy and a girl owe deference to each other, courtesy, kindness, and conformity, as of friend with friend.
It is quite possible for young women to have friends among the young men without this friendship developing into a strong affection. You do not know, girls, how valiantly you are defended by the boys. Boys are usually such uncommunicative creatures! But touch their friendship, and they will throw a volley of rhetoric right in among a crowd of gossipers. Slow to receive favors from you, as they sometimes seem, they never forget a kindness done by you.
Now suppose your association with boys does sometime grow into a love for a young man,—just suppose the case. Ought you to marry him? Of course I don't know: I am not capable of advising, on account of my singularity. I might tremblingly suggest, however, that love, health, and virtue having been seriously contemplated, there should be few, if any, hindrances to marriage; for out of this trinity will spring patience, courage, industry, joy, and all that is needful to united lives.
If you think my suggestion lacks the significance of experience, why, hunt up some of the best authorities on the subject. William Penn was a very moral kind of a man, and experienced in the art of living; and, like a true Quaker, he put a negative wherever one was needed. He said, "Never marry but for love, but see thou lovest what is lovely." Only two conditions, you note; but on them hangs the destiny of all the future. It is certainly right for you to think of marriage, to regard it joyfully, yet so as with a serious joy. But girls, dear girls, do not inflame your hearts with the visions of married life which are so frequently delineated in the prevalent fiction of the day. You will be happier without all that extravagance of romantic affection which fills circulating libraries. Do not read the trash: it will make you expect too much; it will make real life seem insignificant; it will cause you to be more and more susceptible in the presence of young men; it will blot leaves in your book of life which ought to be all white; it will make truth fictitious; it will lead to temptation,—to death. Says Miss Yonge, "If every modest woman or girl would abstain from such books as poison, and never order or read one which makes crime and impurity prominent, or tampers with dilemmas about the marriage vow, there would be fewer written and published, and less wildfire would be spread abroad." Shun the romances which centre all in a false, unnatural affection. Oh, that they were all sunk in the ocean, the food for obscene sharks! And, oh, that only such pure and beautiful romances remained as picture the lives of a Hermann and a Dorothea, or a Gabriel and an Evangeline!
But, girls, how some of you do treat the boys! No wonder they grow conceited: you allow them to become so. Here is a girl only eighteen years old who has an impression, such a strong impression, there is but one praise-worthy act for a girl to do, and that is to get married. Each new birthday will frighten her, and she will dread to be alive and single at twenty-five. She seizes every matrimonial opportunity, and haunts a young man like a conviction of conscience.
Here is another girl quite absorbed in the thought that a live man pays her certain attentions, and she takes his conceit for grave wisdom, and his kindness for infinite tenderness. She looks upon him as an importation from the priesthood of the Grand Llama,—perhaps he is the Grand Llama himself; certainly the inhabitant of a land where young men do not grow humanly. He is a rara avis, a glorious phenomenon, a marked consideration in the world, a being to be devoutly gazed at to come to some appreciation of him.
I feel you are berating me, girls, so far as your natures will allow; but, then, do I not speak the truth? Could I not unfold pitiful stories about girls who marry fine wedding receptions and the servitude of reverses? about young women who are vain enough to think there can be no union of hearts without union of intellects, and so lay snares for college students? Could I not picture to you the mariage de convenance in America? And could I not describe the marriage of a jilt?
I cannot too earnestly repeat that marriage is the common and acceptable destiny of both boys and girls; but I must complain because girls do not regard it sufficiently before they enter into it. In the distress which follows their hastiness, in the despair which sometimes hardens their hearts, women call marriage a lottery, and man faithless.
I must think that marriage is not only a very natural, but a very beautiful, way of increasing love.
"Love is the burden of all Nature's odes,—the song of the birds an epithalamium, a hymeneal. The marriage of the flowers spots the meadows, and fringes the hedges with pearls and diamonds. In the deep waters, in the high air, in woods and pastures, and the bowels of the earth, this is the employment and condition of all things." [Footnote: Thoreau.]
"God has set the type of marriage everywhere throughout the creation. Each creature seeks its perfection in another. The very heavens and earth picture it to us." [Footnote: Luther.]