In the Dozy Hours, and Other Papers

In his descriptions of eating and drinking, Scott stands midway between the snug, coarse, hearty enjoyment of Dickens, and the frank epicureanism of Thackeray, and he easily surpasses them both. With Dickens, the pleasure of the meal springs from the honest appetites which meet it—appetites sharpened often by the pinching pains of hunger. With Thackeray, it is the excellence of the entertainment itself which merits approbation. With Scott, it is the spirit of genial good-fellowship which turns a venison pasty into a bond of brotherhood, and strengthens, with a runlet of canary, the human tie which binds us man to man. Dickens tries to do this, but does not often succeed, just because he tries. A conscious purpose is an irresistible temptation to oratory, and we do not want to be preached to over a roast goose, nor lectured at through the medium of pork and greens. Scott never turns a table into a pulpit; it is his own far-reaching sympathy which touches the secret springs that move us to kind thoughts. Quentin Durward’s breakfast at the inn is worthy of Thackeray. Quentin Durward’s appetite is worthy of Dickens. But Quentin Durward’s host—the cruel and perfidious Louis—ah! no one but Scott would have dared to paint him with such fine, unhostile art, and no one but Scott would have succeeded.

In point of detail, however, Dickens defies competition. Before his vast and accurate knowledge the puny efforts of modern realism shrink into triviality and nothingness. What is the occasional dinner at a third-class New York restaurant, the roast chicken and mashed potatoes and cranberry tart, eaten with such ostentatious veracity, when compared to that unerring observation which penetrated into every English larder, which lifted the lid of every pipkin, and divined the contents of every mysterious and forbidding meat pie! Dickens knew when the Micawbers supped on lamb’s fry, and when on breaded chops; he knew the contents of Mrs. Bardell’s little saucepan simmering by the fire; he knew just how many pigeons lurked under the crust of John Browdie’s pasty; he knew every ingredient—and there are nearly a dozen of them—in the Jolly Sandboys’ stew. There was not a muffin, nor a bit of toasted cheese, nor a slab of pease-pudding from the cook-shop, nor a rasher of bacon, nor a slice of cucumber, nor a dish of pettitoes eaten without his knowledge and consent. And, as it cost him no apparent effort to remember and tell all these things, it costs us no labor to read them. We are naturally pleased to hear that Mr. Vincent Crummles has ordered a hot beefsteak-pudding and potatoes at nine, and we hardly need to be reminded—even by the author—of the excellence of Mr. Swiveller’s purl. The advantage of unconscious realism over the premeditated article is a lack of stress on the author’s part, and a corresponding lack of fatigue on ours.

Thackeray reaches the climax of really good cooking, and, with the art of a great novelist, he restrains his gastronomic details, and keeps them within proper bounds. Beyond his limits it is not wise to stray, lest we arrive at the land of gilded puppets, where Disraeli’s dukes and duchesses feast forever on ortolans, and pompetones of larks, and lobster sandwiches; where young spendthrifts breakfast at five o’clock in the afternoon on soup and claret; and where the enamored Lothair feeds Miss Arundel “with cates as delicate as her lips, and dainty beverages which would not outrage their purity.” The “pies and preparations of many lands” which adorn the table of that distinguished dinner-giver, Mr. Brancepeth, fill us with vague but lamentable doubts. “Royalty,” we are assured, “had consecrated his banquets” and tasted of those pies; but it is the province of royalty, as Mr. Ruskin reminds us, to dare brave deeds which commoners may be excused from attempting. Hugo Bohun, at the Duke’s banquet, fired with the splendid courage of his crusading ancestry, dislodges the ortolans from their stronghold of aspic jelly, and gives to the entertainment that air of glittering unreality which was Disraeli’s finest prerogative, and which has been copied with facile fidelity by Mr. Oscar Wilde. “I see it is time for supper,” observes the æsthetic Gilbert of the dialogues. “After we have discussed some Chambertin and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the question of the critic, considered in the light of the interpreter.” And when we read these lines, our lingering doubts as to whether Gilbert be a man or a mere mouthpiece for beautiful words, “a reed cut short and notched by the great god Pan for the production of flute-melodies at intervals,” fade into dejected certainty. That touch about the ortolans is so like Disraeli, that all Gilbert’s surpassing modern cleverness can no longer convince us of his vitality. He needs but a golden plate to fit him for the ducal dining-table, where royalty, and rose-colored tapestry, and “splendid nonchalance” complete the dazzling illusion. After which, we may sober ourselves with a parting glance at the breakfast-room of Tillietudlem, and at the fare which Lady Margaret Bellenden has prepared for Graham of Claverhouse and his troopers. “No tea, no coffee, no variety of rolls, but solid and substantial viands—the priestly ham, the knightly surloin, the noble baron of beef, the princely venison pasty.” Here in truth is a vigorous and an honorable company, and here is a banquet for men.

IN BEHALF OF PARENTS.

It is a thankless task to be a parent in these exacting days, and I wonder now and then at the temerity which prompts man or woman to assume such hazardous duties. Time was, indeed, when parents lifted their heads loftily in the world; when they were held to be, in the main, useful and responsible persons; when their authority, if unheeded, was at least unquestioned; and when one of the ten commandments was considered to indicate that especial reverence was their due. These simple and primitive convictions lingered on so long that some of us can perhaps remember when they were a part of our youthful creed, and when, in life and in literature, the lesson commonly taught was that the province of the parent is to direct and control, the privilege of the child is to obey, and to be exempt from the painful sense of responsibility which overtakes him in later years. In very old-fashioned books, this point of view is strained to embrace some rather difficult conclusions. The attitude of Evelina to her worthless father, of Clarissa Harlowe to her tyrannical parents, seemed right and reasonable to the generations which first read these novels, while we of the present day are amazed at such unnatural submissiveness and loyalty. “It is hard,” says Clarissa’s mother, in answer to her daughter’s despairing appeals, “if a father and mother, and uncles and aunts, all conjoined, cannot be allowed to direct your choice;” an argument to which the unhappy victim replies only with her tears. How one longs to offer Mrs. Harlowe some of these little manuals of advice which prove to us now so conclusively that even a young child is deeply wronged by subjection. “Looked at from the highest standpoint,” says one of our modern mentors, “we have no more right to interfere with individual choice in our children than we have to interfere with the choice of friends;” a statement which, applied as it is, not to marriageable young women, but to small boys and girls, defines matters explicitly, and does away at once and forever with all superannuated theories of obedience.

A short perusal of these text-books of training would lead the uninitiated to conclude that the children of to-day are a down-trodden race, deprived of their natural rights by the ruthless despotism of parents. It is also indicated with painful and humiliating distinctness that adults have no rights—at least none that children are bound to respect—and that we have hardened ourselves into selfishness by looking at things from a grown-up, and consequently erroneous, point of view. For example, to many of us it is an annoyance when a child wantonly destroys our property. This is ungenerous. “With anointed eyes we might often see in such a tendency a great power of analysis, that needs only to be understood to secure grand results;”—which reflection should make us prompt to welcome the somewhat disastrous results already secured. I once knew a little boy who, having been taken on a visit to some relatives, succeeded within half an hour in purloining the pendulums of three old family clocks, a passion for analysis which ought to have made him one of the first mechanics of his age, had not his genius, like that of the political agitator, stopped short at the portals of reconstruction.

It is hard to attune our minds to a correct appreciation of such incidents, when the clocks belong to us, and the child doesn’t. It is hard to be told that our pendulums are a necessary element, which we do wrong to begrudge, in the training of a boy’s observation. All modern writers upon children unite in denouncing the word “don’t,” as implying upon every occasion a censure which is often unmerited. But this protest reminds me of the little girl who, being told by her father she must not say “I won’t,” innocently inquired: “But, papa, what am I to say when I mean ‘I won’t’?” In the same spirit of uncertainty I would like to know what I am to say when I mean “don’t.” Auretta Roys Aldrich, who has written a book on “Children—Their Models and Critics,” in which she is rather severe upon adults, tells us a harrowing tale of a mother and a five-year-old boy who sat near her one day on a railway train. The child thrust his head out of the window, whereupon the mother said tersely: “Johnnie, stop putting your head out of the window!” That was all. No word of explanation or entreaty softened this ruthless command. Whether Johnnie obeyed or not is unrevealed, being a matter of no importance; but, “as they left the car,” comments the author, “they left also an aching in my heart. I longed to clasp the mother in my arms, for she, too, had been the victim of misunderstanding; and show her, before it was too late, how she was missing the pure gold of life for herself and her little boy.” Happily, before long, another mother entered, and her child also put his head as far as he could out of that troublesome window, which nobody seemed to have the sense to shut. Observing this, his wise parent sat down by his side, “made some pleasant remark about the outlook,” and then gradually and persuasively revealed to him his danger, discussing the matter with “much candor and interest,” until he was finally won over to her point of view, and consented of his own free will, and as a rational human being, to draw in his little head.

I think this double experience worth repeating, because it contrasts so pleasantly with the venerable anecdote which found its way into all the reading books when I was a small child, and illustrated the then popular theory of education. It was the story of a mother who sees her boy running rapidly down a steep hill, and knows that, almost at his feet, lies an abandoned quarry, half hidden by underbrush and weeds. Sure of his obedience, she calls sharply, “Stop, Willie!” and the child, with a violent effort, stays his steps at the very mouth of the pit. Had it been necessary to convince him first that her apprehensions were well grounded, he would have broken his neck meanwhile, and our school-books would have had one tale less to tell.

Still more astounding to the uninitiated is another little narrative, told with enviable gravity by Mrs. Aldrich, and designed to show how easily and deeply we wound a child’s inborn sense of justice. “A beautiful boy of four whose parents were unusually wise in dealing with him”—it is seldom that a parent wins this degree of approbation—possessed a wheelbarrow of his own, in which he carried the letters daily to and from the post-office. One morning he was tardy in returning, “for there was the world to be explored” on the way; and his mother, growing anxious, or perhaps desiring her mail, followed him to know what was the matter. She met him at the post-office door, and seeing in the barrow an envelope directed to herself, she rashly picked it up and opened it. Edwin promptly “raised a vehement cry of protest.” That letter, like all the rest, had been given to him to carry, and no one else was privileged to touch it. Swiftly and repentantly his mother returned the unfortunate missive, but in vain. “The wound was too deep, and he continued to cry ‘Mamma, you ought not to have done it!’ over and over again between his sobs.” In fact he “refused to be comforted,”—comforted!—“and so was taken home as best he could be, and laid tenderly and lovingly in bed. After sleeping away the sharpness of sorrow and disappointment, and consequent exhaustion, the matter could be talked over; but while he was so tired, and keenly smarting under the sense of injustice done him, every word added fuel to the flame.... His possessions had been taken away from him by sheer force, before which he was helpless. That his indignation was not appeased by putting the letter back into his keeping, showed that he was contending for a principle, and not for possession or any selfish interest.”

Readers of George Eliot may be pleasantly reminded of that scene in the “Mill on the Floss” where Tom Tulliver unthinkingly withdraws a rattle with which he has been amusing baby Moss, “whereupon she, being a baby that knew her own mind with remarkable clearness, instantaneously expressed her sentiments in a piercing yell, and was not to be appeased even by the restoration of the rattle, feeling apparently that the original wrong of having it taken away from her remained in all its force.” But to some of us the anecdote of Edwin and his wheelbarrow is more disheartening than droll. The revelation of such admirable motives underlying such inexcusable behavior puzzles and alarms us. If this four-year-old prig “contending for a principle and not for possession” be a real boy, what has become of all the dear, naughty, fighting, obstinate, self-willed, precious children whom we used to know; the children who contended joyously, not for principle, but for precedence, and to whom we could say “don’t” a dozen times a day with ample justification. Little boys ought to be the most delightful things in the world, with the exception of little girls. It is as easy to love them when they are bad as to tolerate them when they are good. But what can we do with conscientious infants to whom misbehavior is a moral obligation, and who scream in the public streets from an exalted sense of justice?

Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin, that ardent champion of Froebel, has also given to the world a book bearing the somewhat ominous title, “Children’s Rights,” but which is for the most part as interesting as it is sane. Setting aside the question of kindergartens, concerning which there are at present many conflicting opinions, it is impossible not to agree with Mrs. Wiggin in much that she states so deftly, and maintains so vivaciously. There is little doubt that the rights of the parent do infringe occasionally on the rights of the child, and that, in the absence of any standard, the child becomes a creature of circumstance. He can be fed unwholesomely, kept up late at night, dressed like Lord Fauntleroy, dosed with pernicious drugs, and humored into selfish petulance at the discretion of his mother. Worse still, he can be suffered to waste away in fever pain and die, because his parents chance to be fanatics who reject the aid of medicines to trust exclusively in prayer. But granting all this, fathers and mothers have still their places in the world, and until we can fill these places with something better, it is worth while to call attention now and then to the useful part they play. It is perhaps a significant fact that mothers, simply because they are mothers, succeed better, as a rule, in bringing up their children than other women, equally loving and sensible, who are compelled to assume their duties. That old-fashioned plea “I know what is best for my child” may be derided as a relic of darkness; but there is an illuminating background to its gloom. I am not even sure that parents stand in absolute need of all the good advice they receive. I am quite sure that many trifles are not worth the serious counsels expended upon them. Reading or telling a story, for instance, has become as grave a matter as choosing a laureate, and many a mother must stand aghast at the conflicting admonitions bestowed upon her: Read fairy tales. Don’t read fairy tales. Read about elves. Don’t read about ogres. Read of heroic deeds. Don’t read of bloody battles. Avoid too much instruction. Be as subtly instructive as you can. Make your stories long. Make your stories short. Work the moral in. Leave the moral out. Try and please the older children. Try and charm the younger ones. Study the tastes of boys. Follow the fancies of girls. By degrees the harassed parent who endeavors to obey these instructions will cease telling stories at all, confident that the task, which once seemed so simple and easy, must lie far beyond her limited intelligence.

All that Mrs. Wiggin has to say about children’s books and playthings is both opportune and true. I wish indeed she would not speak of restoring toys “to their place in education,” which has a dismal sound, though she does not mean it to be taken dismally. Toys are toys to her, not traps to erudition, and the costly inanities of our modern nurseries fill her with well-warranted aversion. We are doing our best to stunt the imaginations of children by overloading them with illustrated story-books and elaborate playthings. Little John Ruskin, whose sole earthly possessions were a cart, a ball, and two boxes of wooden bricks, was infinitely better off than the small boy of to-day whose real engine drags a train of real cars over a miniature elevated railway, almost as ghastly as reality, and whose well-dressed soldiers cannot fight until they are wound up with a key. “The law was that I should find my own amusement,” says Ruskin; and he found it readily enough in the untrammeled use of his observation, his intelligence, and his fancy. I have known children to whom a dozen spools had a dozen distinct individualities; soldiers, priests, nuns, and prisoners of war; and to whom every chair in the nursery was a well-tried steed, familiar alike with the race-course and the Holy Land, having its own name, and requiring to be carefully stabled at night after the heroic exertions of the day. The romances and dramas of infancy need no more setting than a Chinese play, and in that limitless dreamland the transformations are as easy as they are brilliant. But no child can successfully “make believe,” when he is encumbered on every side by mechanical toys so odiously complete that they leave nothing for the imagination to supply.

In the matter of books, Mrs. Wiggin displays the same admirable conservatism, her modern instincts being checked and held in sway by the recollection of those few dear old volumes which little girls used to read over and over again, until they knew them by heart. Yet I hardly think that “naughty” is a kind word to apply to Miss Edgeworth’s Rosamond, who is not very wise, I admit, and under no circumstances a prig, but always docile and charming and good. And why should the “red morocco housewife,” which Rosamond, in one of her rare moments of discretion, chooses instead of a stone plum, be stigmatized as “hideous but useful.” It may have been an exceedingly neat and pretty possession. We are told nothing to the contrary, and I had a brown one stamped with gold when I was a little girl, which, to my infant eyes represented supreme artistic excellence. It also hurts my feelings very much to hear Casabianca dubbed an “inspired idiot,” who lacked the sense to escape. Unless the Roman sentries found dead at their posts in Pompeii were also inspired idiots, there should be some kinder word for the blind heroism which subordinates reason to obedience. And I am by no means sure that this form of relentless nineteenth-century criticism does not do more to vulgarize a child’s mind by destroying his simple ideals, than do the frank old games which Mrs. Wiggin considers so boorish, and which fill her with “unspeakable shrinking and moral disgust.” The coarseness of “Here come two ducks a-roving,” which was once the blithest of pastorals, and of that curious relic of antiquity, “Green Gravel,” is not of a hurtful kind, and some of these plays have a keen attraction for highly imaginative children. For my part, I do not believe that all the kindergarten games in Christendom, all the gentle joy of pretending you were a swallow and had your little baby swallows cuddled under your wing, can compare for an instant with the lost delight of playing “London Bridge” in the dusk of a summer evening, or in the dimly-lit schoolroom at bedtime. There was a mysterious fascination in the words whose meaning no one understood, and no one sought to understand:—

And then the sudden grasp of four strong little arms, and a pleasing thrill of terror at a danger which was no danger,—only a shadow and a remembrance of some dim horror in the past, living for generations in the unbroken traditions of play.

I have wandered unduly from the wrongs of parents to the rights of children, an easy and agreeable step to take. But the children have many powerful advocates, and need no help from me. The parents stand undefended, and suffer grievous things in the way of counsel and reproach. It must surprise some of them occasionally to be warned so often against undue severity. It must amaze them to hear that their lazy little boys and girls are suffering from overwork, and in danger of mental exhaustion. It must amuse them—if they have any sense of humor—to be told in the columns of a weekly paper “How to Reprove a Child,” just as they are told “How to Make an Apple Pudding,” and “How to Remove Grease Spots from Clothing.” As for the discipline of the nursery, that has become a matter of supreme importance to all whom it does not concern, and the suggestions offered, the methods urged, are so varied and conflicting that the modern mother can be sure of one thing only,—all that she does is wrong. The most popular theory appears to be that whenever a child is naughty it is his parent’s fault, and she owes him prompt atonement for his misbehavior. “We should be astonished, if not appalled,” says Mrs. Aldrich, “if we could see in figures the number of times the average child is unnecessarily censured during the first seven years of life.” Punishment is altogether out of favor. Its-apparent necessity arises from the ill-judged course of the father or mother in refusing to a child control over his own actions. This doctrine was expounded to us some years ago by Helen Hunt, who reasoned wisely that “needless denials” were responsible for most youthful naughtiness, and who was probably right. It would not perhaps be too much to say that if we could have what we wanted and do what we wanted all through life, we should, even as adults, be saved from a great deal of fretfulness and bad behavior.

Miss Nora Smith, who is Mrs. Wiggin’s clever collaborateur, allows, however, what she terms “natural punishment,” or “natural retribution,” which appears to be something like the far-famed justice of the Mikado, and is represented as being absolutely satisfactory to the child. This is a gain over the old methods which the child, as a rule, disliked; and it is also a gain over the long-drawn tests so urgently commended by Helen Hunt, whose model mother shut herself up for two whole days with her four-year-old boy, until she succeeded, by moral suasion, in inducing him to say G. During these two days the model mother’s equally model husband was content to eat his meals alone, and to spend his evenings in solitude, unless he went to his club, and all her social and domestic duties were cheerfully abandoned. Her principle was, not to enforce obedience, but to persuade the child to overcome his own reluctance, to conquer his own will. With this view, she pretended for forty-eight hours that he could not pronounce the letter, and that she was there to help him to do it. The boy, baby though he was, knew better. He knew he was simply obstinate, and, with the delicious clear-sightedness of children, which ought to put all sentimental theorists to shame, he actually proposed to his parent that she should shut him in a closet and see if that would not “make him good!” Of course the unhallowed suggestion was not adopted; but what a tale it tells of childish acumen, and of that humorous grasp of a situation which is the endowment of infancy. The dear little sensible, open-eyed creatures! See them dealing out swift justice to their erring dolls, and you will learn their views upon the subject of retribution. I once knew a father who defended himself for frequently thrashing an only and idolized son—who amply merited each chastisement—by saying that Jack would think him an idiot if he didn’t. That father was lamentably ignorant of much that it behooves a father now to acquire. He had probably never read a single book designed for the instruction and humiliation of parents. He was in a state of barbaric darkness concerning the latest theories of education. But he knew one thing perfectly, and that one thing, says Sir Francis Doyle, is slipping fast from the minds of men; namely, “The intention of the Almighty that there should exist for a certain time between childhood and manhood, the natural production known as a boy.”

AUT CÆSAR AUT NIHIL.

Here is precisely the sentiment which Dr. Johnson embodied, more trenchantly, in his famous criticism of female preaching. “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” It is a sentiment which, in one form or another, prevailed throughout the last century, and lapped over into the middle of our own. Miss Mitford is merely echoing, with cheerful humor, the opinions of the very clever and distinguished men whom it was her good fortune to know, and who were all the more generous to her and to her sister toilers, because it did not occur to them for a moment that women claimed, or were ever going to claim, a serious place by their sides. There is nothing clearer, in reading the courteous and often flattering estimate of woman’s work which the critics of fifty years ago delighted in giving to the world, than the under-current of amusement that such things should be going on. Christopher North, who has only censure and contempt for the really great poets of his day, is pleased to lavish kind words on Mrs. Hemans and Joanna Baillie, praising them as adults occasionally praise clever and good children. That, neither he nor his boon companions of the “Noctes” are disposed to take the matter seriously, is sufficiently proved by North’s gallant but controvertible statement that all female poets are handsome. “No truly ugly woman ever yet wrote a truly beautiful poem the length of her little finger.” The same satiric enjoyment of the situation is apparent in Thackeray’s description of Barnes Newcome’s lecture on “Mrs. Hemans, and the Poetry of the Affections,” as delivered before the appreciative audience of the Newcome Athenæum. The distinction which the lecturer draws between man’s poetry and woman’s poetry, the high-flown civility with which he treats the latter, the platitudes about the Christian singer appealing to the affections, and decorating the homely threshold, and wreathing flowers around the domestic hearth;—all these graceful and generous nothings are the tributes laid without stint at the feet of that fragile creature known to our great-grandfathers as the female muse.

It may as well be admitted at once that this tone of combined diversion and patronage has changed. Men, having come in the course of years to understand that women desire to work, and need to work, honestly and well, have made room for them with simple sincerity, and stand ready to compete with them for the coveted prizes of life. This is all that can in fairness be demanded; and, if we are not equipped for the struggle, we must expect to be beaten, until we are taught, as Napoleon taught the Allies, how to fight. We gain nothing by doing for ourselves what man has ceased to do for us,—setting up little standards of our own, and rapturously applauding one another when the easy goal is reached. We gain nothing by withdrawing ourselves from the keenest competition, because we know we shall be outdone. We gain nothing by posing as “women workers,” instead of simply “workers;” or by separating our productions, good or bad, from the productions, good or bad, of men. As for exacting any special consideration on the score of sex, that is not merely an admission of failure in the present, but of hopelessness for the future. If we are ever to accomplish anything admirable, it must be by a frank admission of severe tests. There is no royal road for woman’s feet to follow.

As we stand now, our greatest temptation to mediocrity lies in our misleading content; and this content is fostered by our incorrigible habit of considering ourselves a little aside from the grand march of human events. Why should a new magazine be entitled “Woman’s Progress,” as if the progress of woman were one thing, and the progress of man another? If we are two friendly sexes working hand in hand, how is it possible for either to progress alone? Why should I be asked to take part in a very animated discussion on “What constitutes the success of woman?” Woman succeeds just as man succeeds, through force of character. She has no minor tests, or, if she has, they are worthless. Above all, why should we have repeated the pitiful mistake of putting woman’s work apart at the World’s Fair, as though its interest lay in its makers rather than in itself. Philadelphia did this seventeen years ago, but in seventeen years women should have better learned their own worth. Miss Mitford’s sentence, with its italicized “considering,” might have been written around the main gallery of the Woman’s Building, instead of that curious jumble of female names with its extraordinary suggestion of perspective,—Mme. de Staël and Mrs. Potter Palmer, Pocahontas and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. The erection of such a building was a tacit acknowledgment of inferior standards, and therein lies our danger. All that was good and valuable beneath its roof should have been placed elsewhere, standing side by side with the similar work of men. All that was unworthy of such competition should have been excluded, as beneath our dignity, as well as beneath the dignity of the Exposition. Patchwork quilts in fifteen thousand pieces, paper flowers, nicely stitched aprons, and badly painted little memorandum-books do not properly represent the attitude of the ability of women. We are not begging for consideration and applause; we are striving to do our share of the world’s work, and to do it as well as men.

Shall we ever succeed? It is not worth while to ask ourselves a question which none can answer. Reasoning by analogy, we never shall. Hoping in the splendid possibilities of an unknown future, we may. But idle contention over what has been done already is not precisely the best method of advance. To wrangle for months over the simple and obvious statement that there have been no great women poets, is a lamentable waste of energy, and leads to no lasting good. To examine with fervent self-consciousness the exact result of every little step we take, the precise attitude of the world toward us, while we take it, is a retarding and unwholesome process. Why should an indefatigable philanthropist, like Miss Frances Power Cobbe, have paused in her noble labor to write such a fretful sentence as this?

“It is a difficult thing to keep in mind the true dignity of womanhood, in face of the deep, underlying contempt wherewith all but the most generous of men regard us.”

Perhaps they do, though the revelation is a startling one, and the last thing we had ever suspected. Nevertheless, the sincere and single-minded worker is not asking herself anxious questions anent man’s contempt, but is preserving “the true dignity of womanhood” by going steadfastly on her appointed road, and doing her daily work as well as in her lies. Neither does she consider the conversion of man to a less scornful frame of mind as the just reward of her labors. She has other and broader interests at stake. For my own part, I have a liking for those few writers who are admirably explicit in their contempt for women, and I find them more interesting and more stimulating than the “generous” men who stand forth as the champions of our sex, and are insufferably patronizing in their championship. When Schopenhauer says distinctly that women are merely grown-up babies, short-sighted, frivolous, and occupying an intermediate stage between children and men; when he protests vigorously against the absurd social laws which permit them to share the rank and titles of their husbands, and insists that all they require is to be well fed and clothed, I feel a sincere respect for this honest statement of unpopular and somewhat antiquated views. Lord Byron, it will be remembered, professed the same opinions, but his ingenuousness is by no means so apparent. Edward Fitzgerald’s distaste for women writers is almost winning in its gentle candor. Ruskin, despite his passionate chivalry, reiterates with tireless persistence his belief that woman is man’s helpmate, and no more. Theoretically, he is persuasive and convincing. Practically, he is untouched by the obtrusive fact that many thousands of women are never called on to be the helpmates of any men, fathers, brothers, or husbands, but must stand or fall alone. Upon their learning to stand depends much of the material comfort, as well as the finer morality, of the future.

And surely, the first and most needful lesson for them to acquire is to take themselves and their work with simplicity, to be a little less self-conscious, and a little more sincere. In all walks of life, in all kinds of labor, this is the beginning of excellence, and proficiency follows in its wake. We talk so much about thoroughness of training, and so little about singleness of purpose. We give to every girl in our public schools the arithmetical knowledge which enables her to stand behind a counter and cast up her accounts. That there is something else which we do not give her is sufficiently proven by her immediate adoption of that dismal word, “saleslady,” with its pitiful assumption of what is not, its pitiful disregard of dignity and worth. I own I am dispirited when I watch the more ambitious girls who attend our great schools of manual training and industrial art. They are being taught on generous and noble lines. The elements of beauty and appropriateness enter into their hourly work. And yet—their tawdry finery, the nodding flower-gardens on their hats, the gilt ornaments in their hair, the soiled kid gloves too tight for their broad young hands, the crude colors they combine so pitilessly in their attire, their sweeping and bedraggled skirts, their shrill, unmodulated voices, their giggles and ill-controlled restlessness—are these the outward and visible results of a training avowedly refining and artistic? Are these the pupils whose future work is to raise the standard of beauty and harmonious development? Something is surely lacking which no technical skill can supply. Now, as in the past, character is the base upon which all true advancement rests secure.

Higher in the social and intellectual scale, and infinitely more serious in their ambitions, are the girl students of our various colleges. As their numbers increase, and their superior training becomes less and less a matter of theory, and more and more a matter of course, these students will combine at least a portion of their present earnestness with the healthy commonplace rationality of college men. At present they are laboring under the disadvantage of being the exceptions instead of the rule. The novelty of their position dazes them a little; and, like the realistic story-tellers and the impressionist painters, they are perhaps more occupied with their points of view than with the things they are viewing. This is not incompatible with a very winning simplicity of demeanor, and the common jest which represents the college girl as prickly with the asperities of knowledge, is a fabric of man’s jocund and inexhaustible imagination. Mr. Barrie, it is true, tells a very amusing story of being invited, as a mere lad, to meet some young women students at an Edinburgh party, and of being frightened out of his scanty self-possession when one of them asked him severely whether he did not consider that Berkeley’s immaterialism was founded on an ontological misconception. But even Mr. Barrie has a fertile fancy, and perhaps the experience was not quite so bad as it sounds. There is more reason in the complaint I have heard many times from mothers, that college gives their daughters a distaste for social life, and a rather ungracious disregard for its amenities and obligations. But college does not give men a distaste for social life. On the contrary, it is the best possible training for that bigger, broader field in which the ceaseless contact with their fellow-creatures rounds and perfects the many-sidedness of manhood. If college girls are disposed to overestimate the importance of lectures, and to underestimate the importance of balls, this is merely a transient phase of criticism, and has no lasting significance. Lectures and balls are both very old. They have played their parts in the history of the world for some thousands of years; they will go on playing them to the end. Let us not exaggerate personal preference, however contagious it may appear, into a symbol of approaching revolution.

For our great hope is this: As university training becomes less and less exceptional for girls, they will insensibly acquire broader and simpler views; they will easily understand that life is too big a thing to be judged by college codes. As the number of women doctors and women architects increases with every year, they will take themselves, and be taken by the world, with more simplicity and candor. They will also do much better work when we have ceased writing papers, and making speeches, to signify our wonder and delight that they should be able to work at all; when we have ceased patting and praising them as so many infant prodigies. Perhaps the time may even come when women, mixing freely in political life, will abandon that injured and aggressive air which distinguishes the present advocate of female suffrage. Perhaps, oh, joyous thought! the hour may arrive when women having learned a few elementary facts of physiology, will not deem it an imperative duty to embody them at once in an unwholesome novel. These unrestrained disclosures which are thrust upon us with such curious zest, are the ominous fruits of a crude and hasty mental development; but there are some sins which even ignorance can only partially excuse. Things seen in the light of ampler knowledge have a different aspect, and bear a different significance; but the “fine and delicate moderation” which Mme. de Souza declared to be woman’s natural gift, should preserve her, even when semi-instructed, from all gross offences against good taste. Moreover “whatever emancipates our minds without giving us the mastery of ourselves is destructive,” and if the intellectual freedom of woman is to be a noble freedom it must not degenerate into the privilege of thinking whatever she likes, and saying whatever she pleases. That instinctive refinement which she has acquired in centuries of self-repression is not a quality to be undervalued, or lightly thrust aside. If she loses “the strength that lies in delicacy,” she is weaker in her social emancipation than in her social bondage.

The word “Virago,” in the Renaissance, meant a woman of culture, character, and charm; a “man-like maiden” who combined the finer qualities of both sexes. The gradual debasement of a word into a term of reproach is sometimes a species of scandal. It is wilfully perverted in the course of years, and made to tell a different tale,—a false tale, probably,—which generations receive as true. On the other hand, it sometimes marks the swift degeneracy of a lofty ideal. In either case, the shame and pity are the same. Happily, as we are past the day when men looked askance upon women’s sincere efforts at advancement, so we are past the day when women deemed it profitable to ape distinctly masculine traits. We have outgrown the first rude period of abortive and misdirected energy, but it does not follow that the millennium has been reached. Mr. Arnold has ventured to say that the best spiritual fruit of culture is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing, yet no one recognized more clearly than he the ungracious nature of the task. What people really like to be told is that they are doing all things well, and have nothing to learn from anybody. This is the reiterated message from the gods of which the daily press delivers itself so sapiently, and by which it maintains its popularity and power. This is the tone of all the nice little papers about woman’s progress, and woman’s work, and woman’s influence, and woman’s recent successes in literature, science, and art. “I gain nothing by being with such as myself,” sighed Charles Lamb, with noble discontent. “We encourage one another in mediocrity.” This is what we women are doing with such apparent satisfaction; we are encouraging one another in mediocrity. We are putting up easy standards of our own, in place of the best standards of men. We are sating our vanity with small and ignoble triumphs, instead of struggling on, defeated, routed, but unconquered still, with hopes high set upon the dazzling mountain-tops which we may never reach.

A NOTE ON MIRRORS.

Heinrich Heine, who had a particularly nice and discriminating taste in ghosts, and who studied with such delicate pleasure the darkly woven fancies of German superstition, frankly admitted that to see his own face by moonlight in a mirror thrilled him with indefinable horror. Most of us who are blessed, or burdened, with imaginations have shared at moments in this curious fear of that smooth, shining sheet of glass, which seems to hold within itself some power mysterious and malign. By daytime it is commonplace enough, and lends itself with facile ease to the cheerful and homely nature of its surroundings. But at dusk, at night, by lamplight, or under the white, insinuating moonbeams, the mirror assumes a distinctive and uncanny character of its own. Then it is that it reflects that which we shrink from seeing. Then it is that our own eyes meet us with an unnatural stare and a piercing intelligence, as if another soul were watching us from their depths with furtive, startled inquiry. Then it is that the invisible something in the room, from which the merciful dullness of mortality has hitherto saved us, may at any instant take sudden shape, and be seen, not in its own form, but reflected in the treacherous glass, which, like the treacherous water, has the power of betraying things that the air, man’s friendly element, refuses to reveal.

This wise mistrust of the ghostly mirror is so old and so far spread that we meet with it in the folk lore of every land. An English tradition warns us that the new moon, which brings us such good fortune when we look at it in the calm evening sky, carries a message of evil to those who see it first reflected in a looking-glass. For such unlucky mortals the lunar virus distils slow poison and corroding care. The child who is suffered to see his own image in a mirror before he is a year old is marked out for trouble and many disappointments. The friends who glance at their reflections standing side by side are doomed to quick dissension. The Swedish girl who looks into her glass by candlelight risks the loss of her lover. A universal superstition, which has found its way even to our own prosaic time and country, forbids a bride to see herself in a mirror after her toilet is completed. If she be discreet, she turns away from that fair picture which pleases her so well, and then draws on her glove, or has some tiny ribbon, flower, or jewel fastened to her gown, that the sour Fates may be appeased, and evil averted from her threshold. In Warwickshire and other parts of rural England it was long the custom to cover all the looking-glasses in a house of death, lest some affrighted mortal should behold in one the pale and shrouded corpse standing by his side. There is a ghastly story of a servant maid who, on leaving the chamber where her dead master lay, glanced in the uncovered mirror, and saw the sheeted figure on the bed beckoning her rigidly to its side.

Some such tale as this must have been told me in my infancy, for in no other way can I account for the secret terror I felt for the little oval mirror which hung by my bed at school. Every night I turned it carefully with its face to the wall, lest by some evil chance I should arise and look in it. Every night I was tormented with the same haunting notion that I had not remembered to turn it; and then, shivering with cold and fright, I would creep out of bed, and, with averted head and tightly shut eyes, feel my way to the wretched thing, and assure myself of what I knew already, that its harmless back alone confronted me. I never asked myself what it was I feared to see;—some face that was not mine, some apparition born of the darkness and of my own childish terror. Nor can I truly say that this apprehension, inconvenient though it seemed on chilly winter nights, did not carry with it a vague, sweet pleasure of its own. Little girls of eleven may be no better nor wiser for the scraps of terrifying folk lore which formed part of my earliest education, yet in one respect, at least, I triumphed by their aid. Even the somewhat spiritless monotony of a convent school was not without its vivifying moments for a child who carried to bed with her each night a horde of goblin fears to keep her imagination lively.

Superstitions of a less ghostly character cluster around the mirror, and are familiar to us all. To break one is everywhere an evil omen. “Seven years’ trouble, but no want,” follow fast upon such a mishap in Yorkshire, while in Scotland, the cracking of a looking-glass, like the falling of the doomed man’s picture from the wall, is a presage of approaching death. Such portents as these, however,—though no one who is truly wise presumes to treat them with levity,—are powerless to thrill us with that indefinable and subtle horror which springs from causeless emotions. Scott, in his prologue to “Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,” has well defined the peculiar fear which is without reason and without cure. The old lady who makes her servant maid draw a curtain over the glass before she enters her bedroom, “so that she” (the maid) “may have the first shock of the apparition, if there be any to be seen,” is of far too practical a turn to trouble herself about the rationality of her sensations. “Like many other honest folk,” she does not like to look at her own reflection by candlelight, because it is an eerie thing to do. Yet the tale she tells of the Paduan doctor and his magic mirror is, on the other hand, neither interesting nor alarming. It has all the dreary qualities of a psychical research report which cannot even provoke us to a disbelief.

In fact, divining-crystals, when known as such professionally, are tame, hard-working, almost respectable institutions. In the good old days of necromancy, magicians had no need of such mechanical appliances. Any reflecting surface would serve their turn, and a bowl of clear water was enough to reveal to them all that they wanted to know. It was of more importance, says Brand, “to make choice of a young maid to discern therein those images or visions which a person defiled cannot see.” Even the famous mirror, through whose agency Dr. Dee and his seer, Kelly, were said to have discovered the Gunpowder Plot, was in reality nothing more than a black polished stone, closely resembling coal.