“THE BEST IS YET TO BE.”
Why should women regret the golden period of youth? There are things finer
and more precious than inexperience and a fair face. When a friend of
Petrarch bemoaned the age revealed in his white temples, he replied: “Nay,
be sorry rather that ever I was young, to be a fool.” Joyous and lovely as
youth is--and it always seems a pity to be old in the springtime when
everything else is young--how many of us would be willing to be again in
the bonds of crudities, the embarrassments, the unreasoning agonies, and
to the false values youth ever sets upon life? Youth longs for and cries
out after happiness; it would wrest it from the world as its divine
birthright; it does not understand itself or anybody else; and the pity of
it all is that youth is gone before it has grasped the fact that its chief
concern is not to be loved but to be lovely.
Age is content with comfort. “Content,” did I say? Nay, old folks are
always wanting more and more comfort, until they seem out of harmony with
surrounding objects and circumstances. I think it is Ruskin who says that
there are “much sadder days than the early ones; not sadder in a noble,
deep way, but in a dim, wearied way--the way of _ennui_ and jaded
intellect. The Romans had their life interwoven with white and purple;
the life of the aged is one seamless stuff of brown.” And this is true, so
far as beauty of existence is expressed by variety.
Perhaps there are few periods of keener suffering to any one than when he
first realizes that he is growing old. This experience is none the less
sharp for being universal; but it comes with peculiar poignancy to a
woman, because of the fictitious estimate that has always been placed upon
her good looks. They are her highest stock in the market, not through her
own valuation but by man’s. If she has never had beauty, still less can
she afford to lose any charm which youth alone confers. This pain of loss
with the majority of women is not an expression of mere vanity, but--as
with a man--it arises from a fear of waning power, the dread of inability
any longer to be a factor in the world’s value; from the horror of having
no longer an aptness to attract, of being no more desired, of filling no
true place in life--any or all of which is enough to make a soul cry out
for death.
That there is something wrong with our social structure is not more surely
indicated than by the present demand in all fields of labor for only the
young man or woman. The span of life is perceptibly lengthening for most
civilized peoples; yet, with increase of days, old age is set forward
instead of being proportionally postponed. Thirty years ago it was
considered that a man must make his success by fifty years of age, if he
made it at all; now it is said that unless a man has made his mark at
thirty he is already written down “a back number.” No profession to-day,
perhaps, chronicles so many tragedies as that of the teacher; for school
and college give the preference to the young applicant who has yet to
prove if he have the making of a teacher in him, while rejected experience
dies of a broken heart. Not long since, it was stated in _The Outlook_, in
reference to the ministry, that a man over forty years old was not wanted
to fill important charges. Last year I heard a conversation between a
young missionary from China and a woman of superior attainments, a wide
knowledge of life, high spiritual culture, and who was not yet old; who,
moreover, was one of the sort who never grow old. They talked of the
advisability of older women entering the foreign mission field. The
missionary advised that the other make application to the Board, but
frankly stated that the missionaries abroad did not wish anybody of her
age because she would have established opinions which might conflict with
the younger members’ control of the mission. The church no doubt can well
account for its preference for young people; but it has seemed to me
rather hard on the heathen that they must be the subjects of untested
enthusiasm, however “consecrated” and zealous it may be.
The tendency to fasten old age prematurely on our people by the rejection
of practical knowledge for the brawn of youth, seems to find an
explanation mainly in the all-prevailing commercialism of the day. The
herding of productive industries in syndicates and trusts has destroyed
the individual in the industrial world: it is not the man who is employed,
but “the hand”--so many hands in the office, so many at the machine; and
these are “put on or knocked off” according to the sum totals of the
ledger. Manhood is the football of the dividend, and grows less and less
as the latter grows more and more. Everywhere it is the same; the young
with few ties and responsibilities are most plastic to the interests of
the business; pawns have widest range of movement, and whoever can cover
the most ground for the least money is the person in demand.
“Trade! is thy heart all dead, all dead?
And hast thou nothing but a head?----
O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!
The time needs heart--’tis tired of head.”
It is more than shocking to think of the effects on the English-speaking
people--ever inclined to sadness--of saddening them still more by pushing
into the background those who have passed the first flush of youthful
vigor. It is even worse to reflect upon the over-confidence, the
over-consciousness and the irreverence of youth increased by a preference
which does not point to intrinsic value. Whoever has lost his reverence is
already degenerate; that soul which has lost hope and courage is dead to
achievement, and is unproductive for himself and his country. Let us give
to youth all its due for its keen curiosity, its vivid expectation, its
unreflecting daring, its joy of pure existence, its all-the-world-is-mine
spirit, and let us give it opportunity and ever growing privilege; but, as
we value reverence, as we honor knowledge, as we cherish a well-tried
faith, as we trust a noble courage born of proof, let our customs teach
that “Youth ended--what survives is gold.”
While so much that is beautiful and attractive inheres in youth, it is
maturity that possesses perfect charm. Women should remember this and
begin early to cultivate faith in their power to grow. They should
endeavor to learn to live along a line of steady development; to keep
themselves in the forefront of thought and endeavor; to repudiate old age
as more a matter of want of will than of necessity--and so abjure a
statement I have recently heard from a young physician--that the only
disease for which there is no remedy is old age. There is a remedy in
living _en rapport_ with the subtle forces of growth. Learn the laws of
life and dwell in them; persevere in helping one’s self instead of being
helped, and it will astonish the world how long one may live with “natural
force unabated”--yes, and with beauty and power. It is unnatural to grow
old and die; though everybody seems to do it, the bitter protest against
it is a proof that it is against nature. There must be a better way out
than by failure and decay. Live as an immortal here and now, and in
fulness of time the fetters of the flesh will simply drop off, like the
shell of a locust, and life will go on--from glory to glory.
I have grown old myself, but I could have kept younger if my attention had
early enough been turned that way. All that I can do now is to tell other
women to be wiser than I have been--and I wish to tell them, for:
“The best things any mortal hath
Are those which every mortal shares.”
Perhaps all women do not know that the menopause of life is not a signal
for old age. Released from her child-bearing functions, a new lease of
life is taken out; intellectual power is greatly increased; women should
then, in the ripeness of experience, the mellowness of judgment and the
opportunity for comparison which the years have conferred, do their best
brain-work; besides, there is usually an added beauty of person, a renewal
of vigor of every kind. At the same time--just as then the look of some
ancestor we have not before been thought to resemble begins to crop out in
our faces--is there a tendency toward the return of natural defects of
character; faults of youth long deemed dead rise up and defy us. As never
before should women be aware that now their charms must be those of an
inner grace, a spiritual beauty; as they have received during all the long
past, so now must they give out fully, freely--keeping back not one jot or
tittle of life’s riches for self; so will they get very close to the other
world before they get in it.
Women have always interested me. I have studied them deeply. They have
virtues and foibles which are equally a surprise--“and still the wonder
grows.” After a long lifetime of comparison, however, I am persuaded that
men and women are by nature neither better nor worse the one than the
other. How often do we find some boy to be the sweetest-souled child in
the house and the timidest, while his sister is the strongest, most
unmanageable, and the leading spirit. We are our father’s daughters and
our mother’s sons; and superiority of either--in mind, person or
morals--is as it happens and not by reason of sex. Many differences are
but the results of education and would disappear should the two sexes be
treated under identical influences. Many so-called virtues of women and
vices of men are but the fruits of environment and of the tone of the
public thought.
The shielded, subject position of woman has originated as many weaknesses
in her as excellences. She is the victim of her own devotion, as well as
of her necessity to please the one on whom she and her children are
dependent. If she is illogical, as is claimed, it is only because her
deductions have not generally been made the rule of action in private or
public. It were futile to run down a proposition to its legitimate
conclusion when somebody else’s conclusions are to be in force. A man’s
deductions have to stand the test of actual practice, and not only he but
all dependent on him must sink or swim by their correctness. The logic of
the condition is simply that of the trained and the untrained--as may be
proven by the fact that proportionally as many women as men who have been
thrown into business or professional life succeed. If women are not frank,
as is sometimes charged, let me ask how any one can cultivate the high
grace of ingenuousness who in all the ages past had to gain her ends by
indirection, and who may utter not her own thought and opinion and will
but that which shall be pleasing to another? The irresponsibility of her
position in great things has created a corresponding irresponsibility in
other scarcely less serious matters; for instance, in a freedom of
expression about persons that a man would not dare to indulge in, because
he knows he must be prepared to defend, with his life, if need be, the
accuracy of his statement. I have sometimes thought the two most
irresponsible of creatures in speech are a college boy and a woman; and
for the same reason--that both hold a position of minority which never
involves a strict accountability.
A distinguished physician once lavished upon a lady, both of them my
guests at the time, such a superfluity of flattery that I afterward
expostulated with him. “Oh, madam,” he answered, “I give her compliments
as I would give a beggar a dime. It is what she baits and angles for, so I
hand her out what she wants!” It is a human merit to desire to please; it
is equally human to like to hear when we have succeeded; but excess of
merit ceases to be meritorious. I have often wondered if woman’s
subjection has developed such a slavish spirit in her as sometimes
deserves the contempt conveyed in the above incident?
On the other hand the chief vices of a man are the result of his ruling
attitude as head of the race. Where there is absolute power there is
always abuse of power. The tyrant must be the chief sufferer for his
tyranny. His absolutism has caused him to fix in law and custom the
expression of his own desires and ideals without due regard to the
interests of the rest of humanity--womanhood and childhood. Thereby, great
vices inhere in social life of which man is the direct victim. He has not
given himself a proper chance to develop into his best, because in the
exercise of his unfettered rights he has fastened upon the social organism
institutions, temptations and habits which start him out handicapped, and
even with congenital obstructions to his legitimate evolution. This will
be the case so long as it is considered proper that the little boy at his
mother’s knee may hear and see and do things which it is wrong that his
little sister may not hear and see and do.
But slowly, slowly, this misinterpretation for the race is correcting. We
are told that in 1827 (while I was yet in my infancy) “Von Baer discovered
the ovule--the reproductive cell of the maternal organism--and
demonstrated that its protoplasm contributed at least one half to the
embryo child. Before this time man was said to be ‘the seed and woman the
soil.’ The establishment of equal physical responsibility opened the
question of the extent of the mother’s mental and moral
responsibility.”--Like as the vegetable and animal kingdom are
indistinguishable in their lower orders, so boys and girls differ little
in their natural characteristics until they enter upon the period which
marks their differentiation in function. There is nothing rudimentary in
the formation of the female body; it possesses two entire organs--the
uterus and the breast--which are wanting or rudimentary in the male. These
organs, according to Webster, are “the seat of the passions, the
affections and operations of the mind.” Their functions constitute woman’s
special domain, her exclusive kingdom, where man cannot intrude, which he
may not share.
Nature recognizes the importance of the mother by restricting the exercise
of her peculiar office to the meridian of life--her ripest maturity--in
order that the race may be protected in full vigor. Other parts of her
being, which may have lain dormant or in partial disuse through
over-estimated activity in other directions, now awake, and late in years
women may perform wonders in an intellectual and business way. I recently
heard a wise and brilliant speaker--a man--say, “I never try to make a man
over forty years old grasp new ideas of action. He cannot. There’s
something the matter with him--whether pride of opinion or rigidity of
brain I know not; but I do know that it is different with a woman. She
seems to be always receptive.”
The twentieth century begins with a reconstructed mental state toward the
race. It does not believe in woman’s natural inferiority, nor in man’s
exclusive ideals. It recognizes that the wellbeing of both man and woman
consists in a whole humanity, and that there can be no whole humanity with
anything less than perfect freedom for both halves of it. The right to
freedom of thought and liberty of speech is established for a woman nearly
as fully as for a man; but the past stretches out a ghastly finger, and
looking back to precedent, delays full freedom of action; hereditary
inertia, the chains of ancient prejudice and the strength of present
customs are obstacles to be reckoned with in the rapidity of future
development. But women and men are now both thinking, are both educating
for the battle of life, are beginning to tramp side by side in the march
of ideas and endeavor. Mothers realize intensely that if they had known
how better to rear their sons there would already be a better race; but
they have been so held down during all the ages that they have not
understood how to make a free, noble son, and a daughter fit to mate with
him.
Sometimes the way seems long and devious, and human apprehension is so
dull that our hearts faint. There is so much to correct in creatures as
well as in conditions that we wonder why even Divine patience does not
despair. But there is to me logical encouragement in the reflection that
actually up to the date of my own birth, girls were admitted into the
public schools of Boston only during the summer months when there were not
boys enough in attendance to fill the desks; science and all but
rudimentary mathematics were considered beyond their faculties. Not only
high schools but the chief colleges of the world are now open to women,
and co-education is a growing determination. Women are now admitted--as
reported by the Commissioner of Education--to one hundred and fifty
colleges and universities in America. Of these one hundred and five are
denominational--notwithstanding that the liberty wherewith Christ maketh
free has been the root of woman’s emancipation. To-day all the professions
except the ministry are open to women; yet there are many women
evangelists, and others who have taken the course in theological schools.
Woman has learned the power of organization, and her full political
liberty is now in sight. Some persons are afraid that the activity in
woman’s interests exhibited during the last quarter of a century will
experience a reaction. Well, religious revivals, like showers on earth,
are always followed by a dry spell. Still--let us have rain! We should
not be disheartened because history always moves in spirals, and not by
direct ascent.
The new century begins with a radiant idea which now seems a new-born
impulse of the present day; yet nineteen hundred years ago it haunted the
heart of the divine Judean philosopher and prophet. This hoary new idea is
that love alone can
“Follow Time’s dying melodies through,
And never lose the old in the new,--
And ever solve the discords true.”
The true keynote of human harmonies is struck at last. Little by little
the ages have caught the vibration until the listening heart can already
discern the great anthem of the future--the “Hallelujah Chorus” of
Equality, Brotherhood. Standing as we do midway between two centuries,
to-day the music of the past and of the future is ringing in our souls. A
new world looms into view. Along its bright and shining way we see a
humanity ennobled because well-born, of a free and willing mother and a
self-controlled, justice-loving father, and because in all its systems and
customs it is “Thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” If I did not believe
this I could not have written out my little life-story. Now in the sunset
of my days I wish to sound out to all women full and clear the note of
hope that is growing every day in sweetness and power in my own spirit:
“_It is daybreak everywhere_.”
As a last word I know no more heartening comfort than Rabbi Ben Ezra’s:
“Grow old along me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which the first was made;
Youth shows but half; trust God;
See all, nor be afraid.
* * * * *
Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last.”
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's Old Times in Dixie Land, by Caroline E. Merrick