Mr. Z., a man of thirty-five, of a refined, intellectual, but rather cold nature, married his ward, an amiable, immature girl of fifteen. Her attraction for him lay in her youthful affection and her healthy, handsome, physical characteristics. She had in her the “makings” of a thoughtful, self-reliant woman; but development in natural order was arrested by her being placed in so false a position—a wife at scarcely fifteen.
Very soon after the marriage she found herself pregnant. Meanwhile, Mr. Z. for love of her and for the sake of companionship, earnestly endeavored to awaken in her some intellectual tastes. He read to her, explaining and illustrating as he went along, many of the standard English poets and essayists. She listened, received, and grew en rapport with him.
Under these favorable auspices their first child was born. She was the child of the father, and wore his features, toned to greater delicacy of outline and purer colors. Her mind as she grew to womanhood was of a quite superior order, but wanted the breadth and generosity which more warmth in the father, and greater ripeness in the mother, would have secured to her.
This infant once in the mother’s arms there could be no further leisure for literary or poetic culture. And as it was not possible for intellectual habits to be formed in the short space of twelve months, the young girl naturally slid back to her former plane of life. This was the more inevitable as their pecuniary circumstances made it necessary for Mrs. Z. to take sole charge of her little one.
Two years from this time another child was born to them—a girl also; but in whom Mrs. Z.’s mental calibre was represented, while her fine physical traits were omitted.
With the more all-engrossing cares of the young wife, the daily life of herself and husband grew insensibly apart. And now a new personage appeared on the scene—a lady of a brilliant, comprehensive, and highly cultivated mind, to which was added a keen and comprehensive interest in the most important reform movement of the day, for which Mr. Z. had signally failed to enlist his wife’s sympathy.
Now it was but natural that Mrs. Z., observing the eagerness with which her husband became engrossed in conversation with his guest, argument following argument, constant reference made at breakfast, dinner, supper to events and personages of which she was wholly ignorant, should grow uncomfortable, depressed, jealous. The talented lady was oblivious to the impression she was making, but she had too noble a nature to willingly make trouble between man and wife.
The new year came, and the fascinating guest departed. The husband, reviewing the past months, charged himself with gross neglect of his wife, and sought, by the most delicate and considerate attention, to atone for his neglect. Mrs. Z. was now nearing her twentieth year, and was enciente with her third child. She was overjoyed to have her husband all to herself again, and expressed that satisfaction in responding passionately to the almost nightly embrace. In due time a son was born—a handsome animal he proved to be. “What a pity that excellent people like the Z.’s should be cursed with so vile a son!” was the common remark when the young man’s reputation as a libertine had become fully established.
ILL EFFECTS OF MORAL COWARDICE.
The common, ideal woman is a weak, disingenuous, cowardly creature. She has no earnest convictions, no purpose, no sincerities within her. Happily, this worthless ideal is breaking up, or is treasured only by weak-kneed clerks in city stores, and lads still in their teens. Rosa Hosmer had a dozen of this kind calling on her. Their self-love was gratified by the slight contrast between their weak-mindedness and hers. The vanity of an obtuse, illiterate man is piqued by the superiority of a woman, while a large-natured, chivalrous man feels honored in her regard. “How weak-minded must a woman be to meet with your approbation!” said a lady in a stage coach of some fellow-passengers who were inveighing against strong-minded women. They looked at one another perplexed, and slightly ashamed of the absurdity of their position, and one of the number who recovered his senses before the others, replied: “I believe you’ve got the best of us, ma’am. I guess none of us would want a particularly silly wife.”
I met once, in New York, a young man of very remarkable acquirements, with great decision of character and large self-esteem. “If I ever marry,” he remarked, “my wife will always have to yield implicit obedience to my commands, or there will be open warfare in the house.”
“Your children will be a stalwart set, then,” I replied, “with their mother a mere mush of concession.”
He did not see what she had to do with it. The children would be his children, and being his, would do him credit. He was not wanting in clear reasoning powers, and having great family pride—pride of race, I should say—after considerable argument, was honest enough to admit that there must be truth on my side.
UNIMPRESSIBILITY.
There are some cold, narrow, positive women so impervious to the influence of others, so insensitive that the husband, if he is superior, can hardly ever represent himself in his children.
I am acquainted with a gentleman conspicuous among his fellows for grace of soul and nobility of nature. He has the tenderness of a woman combined with masculine heroism. Of his six children not one equals the father. The mother, self-willed and external in character (though, of course, violently opposed to woman’s rights and strong-minded women), had children much alike, and all like herself. A very faulty, but sympathetic woman, has often finer children than those frigidly virtuous mothers who are never stirred to the depths by any event or consideration.
An artist of no mean powers took to wife a gentle, characterless girl. He did not wish his wife to be intellectual, and decidedly she was not. They had children “fast,” and it was not long before her amiability changed to fretfulness. She flung all her cares on her husband, had a doctor in the house continually, and at thirty was a faded, complaining, old woman. At thirty-four her seventh child was laid in her arms. The father, despairing of the others, stuck a paint brush in the tiny fist of the latest born, and vowed he should be a painter. In vain,—this son, it is true, dabbled in paints, but had no more genius than the others, notwithstanding that he was a seventh child.
ASKING FOR MONEY.
Mrs. Myrtle was a lovely young woman, lovely in mind and body, but for one defect—viz., a want of firmness and self-esteem. She was surrounded by all the comforts and elegancies that wealth could procure, and was yet the abject slave of a gentlemanly tyrant. She could not receive or pay visits, go shopping, or to a matinée without first obtaining permission from her master. And she was always giving an account of herself in a pacificatory manner. When she suffered humiliation, she blamed her husband, and not the standard she had given him. Mrs. M. had three boys, and they were the most inveterate liars. How could it be otherwise, when their mother spent half her time in eluding inspection, and half in making confession, while she regularly searched Mr. M.’s pockets for coins that could be spent without explaining “what for.”
I could draw another picture where the husband, as soon as his means permitted, placed money in the bank in his wife’s name, that she might feel the interest was more really hers to spend as she pleased without any sense of obligation.
REPRESSED EXTERNAL ACTIVITIES.
A very remarkably superior woman, but without quick, external perceptive faculties to give her insight into character, mistook a handsome, unprincipled brute for a man and gentleman. What she endured for six months after her marriage could not be written. When she found herself enciente, for the sake of the child she sought refuge with an humble friend at a distance from her unhappy home. Being pinched for means, she earned money by her needle, endeavoring, at the same time, to banish from her memory the recollection of her late cruel experience.
Day after day this regal woman sat sewing with Elizabeth Browning’s poems open on a chair beside her committing to memory the most interior of those religious strains as she stitched, stitched in the solitude of the low-roofed cottage by the river. No exhilarating rides on horseback, such as had been her wont, no genial, social company, no brisk walks and happy communion with nature, were possible in her peculiar circumstances. She must forego the healthy, harmonious, external life of her past, and live solely within the inmost chambers of her soul.
At two years old the little girl born of these untoward conditions was lovely, large-eyed, thoughtful, considerate, and tender in her ways as any lady. “Where are your wings, Mary?” said a gentleman who noticed the radiant face at the mother’s garden gate. For these seemed only necessary to prove her a seraph.
Alas! to her mother’s infinite sorrow, she very soon departed to more blissful realms. The constantly repressed emotions of her mother, and her sedentary life, had caused an imperfect action of the lungs, and a low vital tone generally. Grief shortens the breathing as joy expands the lungs. Little Mary was extremely narrow-chested, with sloping shoulders, and hence quite unable to supply sufficient sustenance for so very large a brain, whose weight she bent under, and died, shortly after completing her second year, of acute hydrocephalus.
BEAUTY.
Beauty of form and feature should not be, as it is now, exceptional. It should be the rule. And there will come a time when parents will be held as much responsible for an ill-favored, ungainly child, as they are beginning to be for their dishonest or vicious children.
The English nobility are celebrated the world over for personal beauty and elegant manners. What cause or causes lie back of this significant fact?
So far as manners are concerned, we know that they are the result of generations of culture, confirmed by generations of use. They suppose leisure and good manners for company, as Emerson has suggested. The bustle and hurry of the work-a-day-world afford no room for polished manners, and only when co-operation shall have taken the place of our present wasteful and cruel competition, shall we have time for graceful living. Hard labor and worry will in time wear out the most charming and inbred politeness.
With regard to the personal beauty of the class alluded to, let us turn to its past—the past of this hereditary nobility. The blood which held courage, self-respect, and the ability to control others, deserved in a sense the deference and admiration it commanded. Then, as these qualities, in themselves and their retroactive effects, favored the production of the more masculine and striking forms of beauty, that type was repeated through successive generations until in the later times it has been modified by the increasing deference to human rights, and refined by intellectual and moral culture. The hereditary transmission of superior personal traits was the more certain because the wife of the lord was a lady, and the wife of the duke a duchess, and as lady and duchess, they believed that the very marrow in their bones excelled in worth that of every man and woman ranking below them in the social scale. And this saved them from the belittling consciousness so debasing to their children, that, as women, they were inferior to men.
We have learned in these days that blood runs out as well as in (on the very principle I am seeking to prove), and the nobleman and woman of genius appear quite as often outside the charmed circle of hereditary distinction as within it. Still, the law is inflexible, and never evaded. Beauty is not born of cowardice, subserviency, or grief. The more culture, the more the blood is worked over, the finer the types, provided we grow more related to humanity, and less to a class.
Pure, unselfish love is in very fact the mother of beauty, as happiness is the mother of song. And what can awaken gladness in a wife so certainly as the ever-watchful kindness of her husband?
DAISY B——.
I was at one time intimate with a couple who were noticeably plain and angular in appearance. He, from ill-health, had an irritable disposition. She was easily excited. But they were truly mated, and whatever of these peculiarities appeared in society, they disappeared before the door-step of the home was reached. A perfect confidence existed between them, and the unvarying respect and courtesy shown by the husband toward his wife did honor to them both.
It was a late marriage, and one daughter alone came to bless them. A child lovely from her birth, bearing scarce any resemblance to either parent. A delicate, oval face, creamy complexion, soft, intelligent black eyes, a sweet mouth, and a shower of golden curls; not an angle about her, simply a beauty from babyhood to womanhood.
“You think it unaccountable,” said the father to me, “that my wife and I, who are both so plain, should have so pretty a child as Daisy. But I have studied it out, and I settle it this way. My great-grandmother was a famous beauty and a noted belle in her day, and it is her features that have cropped out in Daisy.”
“And let me tell you,” I answered, with equally impressive gesture of the forefinger. “Let me tell you that both of your great-grandmothers might have been as handsome as the Venus de Medici and the Venus of Milo in one, but if you had not bestowed the most chivalrous attention on your excellent wife while she was bearing Daisy—if you had not made her so thoroughly happy by your loving words and thoughtful care, there would have been no cropping out of beauty in the little daughter. Sweet and lovely thoughts resolve themselves into symmetry of form and face. Mental and physical traits do undoubtedly reappear in the same family after a longer or shorter period, but never without the right conditions for their re-incarnation. You may take at least half the credit of Daisy’s good looks to yourself, and the other half belongs to her good mother.”