THE INFLUENCE OF SISTERS
Hitherto I have dealt exclusively with the moral training of boys and
young men, but I am aware that I have left out one of the great shaping
influences of a boy's life, which certainly comes next to the mother's
where it exists--the influence of sisters. The childish hand that he
clasps in his is the hand that unconsciously moulds him to higher ends
or the reverse. For if the man is the director, the ruler, and defender,
"the builder of the house" as he is called in the grand old word
husband,[31] the woman is the shaping and moulding influence of life;
and if God has placed her in the power of the man, both through the
weakness of her frame and the strength of her affections, on the other
hand He has given into her hands the keys of his being, and according as
he fulfils or abuses his trust towards her, she opens or closes the door
of higher life to him.[32]
I often wonder whether we women sufficiently realize this truth for
ourselves or our girls. Walter Bagehot used to say in his blind,
masculine way, "It's a horrid scrape to be a woman,"--a sentiment which,
I fear, will find some echo in the hearts of a good many women
themselves. But is it so? If to the man chiefly belongs power in all its
forms, does not the woman wield as her portion that far more potent but
wholly silent, and often unnoticed thing, influence? Not the storm, or
the earthquake, or the strong wind, but the still, small voice: the
benediction of dews and gentle rains, the mute beatitudes of still
waters flowing through sun-parched lands and transforming them into
"fruitful fields that the Lord hath blest"; the silent but irresistible
influence of the sunlight, which in the baby palm of a little leaf
becomes a golden key to unlock the secret treasures of the air and build
up great oaks out of its invisible elements; the still, small voice of
the moral sense, so still, so small, so powerless to enforce its
dictates, but before which all the forces of the man do bow and obey,
choosing death rather than disobedience--are not all these silent
influences emblems of the supreme, shaping, moulding influence that is
given to the woman as the "mother of all living," coming without
observation, but making far more strongly than any external power for
the kingdom of love and light? Truly we have a goodly heritage if only
we had eyes to see it. Alas! that we should have made so little
comparative use of it in these great moral questions. Alas! that we
should have to acknowledge the truth and justice of the poet's words:
Ah, wasteful woman! she who may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing he cannot choose but pay--
How has she cheapen'd Paradise,
How given for nought her priceless gift,
How spoiled the bread and spilt the wine,
Which, spent with due respective thrift,
Had made brutes men, and men divine!"[33]
But even here is there not place for a hopeful thought, that if women
have made so little comparative use of their well-nigh irresistible
influence in setting a high standard and shaping men to a diviner and
less animal type, it has been, as I have already said, chiefly owing to
ignorance? The whole of one of the darkest sides of life has been
sedulously kept from us. Educated mothers, till lately, have been
profoundly ignorant of the moral evils of schools, and have never dreamt
that that young, frank, fresh-faced lad of theirs had any temptations of
the kind. Their moral influence, which the poet blames them so strongly
for misusing, has been largely, at least with good women, not so much a
misused as an undirected force, and we know not, therefore, what that
force may accomplish when a larger and truer knowledge enables it to be
persistently directed to a conscious aim. This fact, at least, has been
stamped into my inmost being, that men will rise to any moral standard
which women choose to set them.
I ask, therefore, cannot we get our girls to help us here more than we
do, without being crippled by the fear of initiating them too much in
the evil of the world or destroying that unconscious virginal purity
which is, even as things are, so strong and pathetic an influence for
good over young men?
In the addresses that I have given to large numbers of educated girls, I
used often to begin by quoting a passage from the Jewish Prayer-Book. In
a general thanksgiving for the mercies of life, the men say: "We thank
Thee, O Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast not made us a woman."
One a little wonders how the poor women could join in this thanksgiving.
But in one corner of the page there is a little rubric in very small
print which directs, "Here shall the women say: 'We thank Thee, O Lord
of heaven and earth, that Thou hast made us according unto Thy will!'"
And, looking upon that bed of spring flowers before me, I used to tell
them that it made me feel what a fair and gracious and beautiful thing
it was to be made according unto God's will, to be made a woman.
Now, in the first place, could we not get them to realize this great
truth a little more than they do, and not in their heart of hearts to
wish that they were men? Could we not get them to realize a little more
the divine possibilities of their womanhood, and instead of making it
their ambition to figure as a weaker form of man, and become lawyers,
stockbrokers, and other queer things the modern woman is striving after,
to make it their ambition to become stronger and truer women?
But how is this to be done? I remember on one occasion, when I was going
in the evening to address a mass meeting of working-class girls, a
stout, middle-aged lady bustling up to me in a morning conference we
were holding, and exclaiming: "And what are you going to say to them?
What can you say to them, except to tell them to take care of themselves
and keep the men at arm's length?"
Now, this old-fashioned method, which we have adopted in dealing with
the girls of the poor, I contend traverses the central and most
fundamental facts of a woman's being. A woman will never find salvation
in being told to take care of herself, and least of all for the purpose
of keeping the man, for whom she was created to be a helpmate, at arm's
length. Gospels of self-culture may take seeming root here and there in
the exotic woman; but even in her, at some moment of swift passion or
strong emotion, they will crumple up and fall off from her like a
withered leaf. James Hinton knew a woman's nature but too well when he
said that she would respond to the appeal "Lay down your life" more
readily and more surely than to the appeal "Take up your rights." She
certainly has a most divine power of flinging herself away, whether
nobly or ignobly, which forms both her strength and her weakness. But I
have never yet known a woman who would not, at any rate to some degree,
respond to an appeal to save, not herself, but another: "Do not let him
do this wrong thing, for his sake. You can do anything you like with a
man who loves you. God has given him body and soul into your hands, and
you can lift him up into something of His image and make a true man of
him; or you can let his love for you sink him into a selfish beast of
prey. Do not let him do anything that will for ever lower his manhood,
but use your power over him to keep him true to all that is best and
highest in him." I have never yet known the woman who will not be moved
by such an appeal as this. In other words, the central motive force of a
woman's nature, the key of her whole being, is, and must ever be, the
mother in her, that divine motherhood which is at the heart of every
woman worthy of the name, married or unmarried. It is this divine
motherhood, which all evolution, the whole "process of the suns," has
gone to strengthen, and which Christianity has enshrined at her very
heart--it is this that makes her for ever the Christ factor in the
world, the supreme expression of the redeeming Love--that care of the
strong for the weak which even in Nature comes trembling into existence
beneath the tender wing of the nesting bird, or forces itself into
notice in the fierce lioness's care for her whelps, and which we
believe will work out the ultimate consummation of the "whole creation
that groaneth and travaileth in pain until now." And I contend that if
we are to have in the future such women as Lady Augusta Stanley, round
whose lifeless form were united in one common sorrow the Queen on her
throne and the poorest of the poor, such women as Browning's wife and
Browning's mother, of whom he used to say, with a slight tremor in his
voice, "She was a divine woman," it will be by strengthening and
appealing to this element of divine motherhood in a woman's nature.
What I would, therefore, teach the girls is this: that they have got to
mother the boys, that they are the guardians of all that is best and
highest in them, of all that makes for the chivalrous American
gentleman, and that their womanhood should therefore be to them a
fountain of fine manners, of high thoughts, and noble actions. I would
rub into their very bones, if I could, the old saw I have already
quoted: "A man is what a woman makes him"; that if there were more high
womanhood there would be less low manhood; and that if the boys are rude
and rough and slangy, and loutish in their manner to women, the blame
lies with their sisters who, in their foolish fondness and indulgence,
or in their boyish camaraderie, have allowed them to slouch up into a
slovenly manhood. The man at most is the fine prose of life, but the
woman ought to be its poetry and inspiration. It is her hand that sets
its key, whether
"To feed the high tradition of the world,"
or add to its low discords. Surely Ruskin's noble words apply here: "It
is the type of an eternal truth that the soul's armor is never well set
to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when
she has braced it loosely that the honor of manhood fails"; or those
other still stronger and nobler words of Frederick Robertson's: "There
are two rocks in a man's life on which he must either anchor or split:
God and Woman."
And could we not appeal to our girls to make their womanhood a rock
which bears a light to all in peril on the rough sea of life--a light to
save from moral shipwreck and lead to the safe haven beneath the Rock of
Ages? Surely we might appeal to them, in the name of their own brothers
and others with whom they are intimately thrown, to work out these
higher possibilities of their own womanhood; not to lower it by picking
up slang words from their brothers--a woman ought to be above coarsening
and vulgarizing God's great gift of speech--not to engage in games or
romps that involve a rude rough-and-tumble with boys, which may develop
a healthy hoyden, but is utterly destructive of the gracious dignity of
the true woman; not to adopt fast ways of either dress or bearing which
lead to young men making remarks behind their backs which they ought
not to make on any woman; above all, never in girlish flightiness, or,
worse still, in order to boast of the number of offers they have
received, to flirt or trifle in any way with a man's affections; but to
remember that to every man they have to make a woman only the other name
for truth and constancy. God only knows the number of young men who have
received their first downward bent from what to a young girl, in the
wilfulness of her high spirits and her ignorance of life, has been only
a bit of fun, but which to the young man has been the first fatal break
in his faith in woman--that faith which in his soul dwells so hard by
his faith in the Divine that in making shipwreck of the one is only too
likely to make shipwreck of the other.
As to the mothers who send out their young girls into society the
victims of their fashionable dressmakers, to be a fountain, not of high,
pure thoughts to young men, but a spring of low temptations and impure
suggestions, I do not blame the young girls here; but surely the
severest blame is due to the criminal folly, or worse, of their mothers,
who must know what the consequences of immodest dressing necessarily are
to the inflammable mind of youth.
But that that unlovely phenomenon "the girl of the period," is also
deeply to blame for the lowered traditions of English society, and
consequently of English manhood, I have only too sorrowfully to
acknowledge. I remember Mrs. Herbert of Vauxhall telling a very
fashionable audience how on one occasion she had to rebuke a young man
moving in the first London society for using some contemptuous
expression with regard to women, and was led to appeal very earnestly to
him to reverence all women for his mother's sake. He turned upon her
with a sort of divine rage and said: "I long to reverence women, but the
girls I meet with in society won't let me. They like me to make free
with them; they like me to talk to them about doubtful subjects, and
they make me"--and he ground his teeth as he said it--"what I just hate
myself for being." Alas! alas! can sadder words knell in a woman's ears
than these?
But side by side with this desecrating womanhood there rises up before
me the vision of a young girl, not English, nor American, but
French--now a mature woman, with girls and boys of her own, but who in
her young days was the very embodiment of all that I have been urging
that our girls might become to their brothers. She was a daughter of the
great French preacher, Frederick Monod, and had an only brother who was
all in all to her. She knew enough of the evil of the world to know that
a medical student in Paris was exposed to great temptations; and she was
resolved, so far as she could, to make her womanhood a crystal shield
between him and them. She entered into all his pursuits; she took an
interest in all his friends and companions; she had always leisure for
sympathy and counsel in his difficulties and troubles. She had a little
room of her own to which she used to get him to come every evening and
talk over the day with her, so that she might keep herself heart to
heart with him in all that concerned him. She even overcame her girlish
reserve, and would get him to kneel down by her side and pour out her
sweet girlish heart in prayer that God would guide him in all his ways,
and keep him unspotted from the world. Years after, when he was a
married man, with boys of his own, he said to her: "You little know all
that you were to me as a young man. My temptations were so maddening
that I used sometimes to think that I must yield to them and do as other
young men did all round me. But then a vision of you used to rise up
before me, and I used to say to myself: 'No; if I do this thing, I can
never go and sit with her in her own little room; I can never look into
her dear face again.'" And the thought of that young girl, the angel of
her presence in the midst of the furnace, kept that young man unspotted
from the world through all the gutters of Paris life. Could not our
sweet English and American girls be to their brothers what that young
French girl was to hers?
But perhaps some pessimistic mother will exclaim, "What is the use of
making these old-fashioned appeals to our modern girls? They are so
taken up with the delights of their freedom, so absorbed in the pleasure
of cycling and athletic games, so full of manly ambitions, so persuaded
that the proper cultivated attitude is to be an agnostic, and to look at
God and the universe through a sceptical and somewhat supercilious
eyeglass, that if we did make an appeal to them such as you suggest they
would only laugh at such old-fashioned notions." I can only say that I
have not found it so. I can bear the highest testimony at least to our
English girls, of whom I have addressed thousands, all over the three
kingdoms. Occasionally it has happened that maturer women have left me
stranded, stretching out hands of vain appeal to them; but my girls, my
dear girls, never once failed me. Not only could I see by the expression
of their faces how deeply they responded to my appeal to work out the
latent possibilities of their womanhood, and be the uplifting influence
to their brothers, and other young men with whom they were thrown, that
a true woman can be; but they came forward in troops to take up the
position I assigned to them in our woman's movement towards a higher and
purer life. Nobly did those young girls respond, joining a movement for
opening club-rooms and classes for working girls, a movement initiated
not by me, but by educated girls like themselves, and which has since
spread all over England and Scotland.
And if this is true of our English girls, still more would it be true
of the American girl, who has a unique position and influence of her
own, and is dowered with that peculiar capacity and graciousness which
seem to belong by divine right to the American woman.
I cannot but think that if we were to teach our girls less in religious
phraseology and more from the great realities of life; if they were
taught that Christianity is only human life rightly seen and divinely
ordered, that the Cross is only the uncovering of what is going on all
round us, though hidden to a careless gaze,--the sin, the pain, the
misery, which are forever crucifying and forever calling forth that
great passion of redeeming Love to which, through the motherhood that is
in us, "one touch of nature makes us kin"; and that the central truth of
Christianity is not, as we have too often taught, saving our own souls,
but a life poured out for the good of others, and personal salvation as
a means for having a life to pour forth--I cannot but think that much
fashionable girlish agnosticism would disappear, and the true woman
would reach forth to that divine humanity to which she belongs.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 31: Husband is derived from two words--"house" and the Saxon
word to "build," German _bauen_.]
[Footnote 32: See a little White Cross paper called _My Little Sister_,
which I wish mothers would get into the hands of their sons just
entering into manhood to read, mark, learn, digest. (Wells Gardner,
Darton and Co.)]
[Footnote 33: Coventry Patmore.]