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.]
Youths and maidens, you are in the heyday of vigorous, joyous life!
Your delight is, like the springtime, rich in hope and promise. Your
laugh rings true; your voices mingle in frolic glee, or in quiet tones
of kind regard. Now join hands in the glad though earnest work of
life,--not life's drudgery, not its toils. No! for the cheer of your
spirits, the courage which looks despair full in the face, and crushes
it with lively endeavor,--these will permit no drudgery; these will
make out of the most desolate moorland a very garden of life!
You can do _all_! Now make the earth renew its vigor; now make
health and courage come again in the world; now restore the reign of
cheer; now break the bonds of vice; now bring back an earthly Paradise!
With your strong bodies, your glad hearts, your vigorous minds, your
imperial sway over the hearts of one another, your persuasive control
over the feelings of your elders, it is for you to make the future
what you will. Oh, make it the dawn of that civilization, of that
Christianity, when again "the morning stars shall sing together!"
Only you can restore virtue; only you can cast out corruption; only
you can drive the fiends of intemperance, of fraud, of oppression,
of despair, of craftiness, of selfishness, from the land!
Girls, in the great work of the future, in the reformation of the
present, can you not do most? When woman was thrust out of Paradise,
man followed her. When she shall return again, and the gates shall
swing open on noiseless hinges at the approach of her pure feet, man
shall be seen, not following, but walking by her side.
Raphael and Guido have painted the angel Michael with a beautiful
maiden's face, though his body is muscular, and his wings are tipped
with strength, while, firm as a Hercules, he stands upon the writhing
coils of Satan. The Devil but turns his coward head to look with
vanquished strength upon the clear, calm smile of the angel. Maidenly
love of what is pure, of what is brave, of what is manly, will crush
the evil in youths who are tempted; yes, and make from an Adam of mere
muscle and intelligence a very god of virtue.