heart for ten long years, made up his mind one day to ask her to allow him
to kiss her, and who fervently said grace both before and after the
operation. He was a philosopher! To possess a grateful spirit is to
increase the happiness of life. Nature is so liberal with her good gifts
that we take them too much as a matter of course. "How blessings brighten
as they take their flight!" If sudden blindness were to fall upon us we
should then find out too late how many pleasures come to us through the
eyes.
[Sidenote: Appreciating everyday pleasures.]
"Must our cedars fall around us ere we see the light behind?" It is good
to teach young people to appreciate the infinite, everyday pleasures that
surround them. It adds immensely to their happiness, and their natural
animal spirits will not be apt to disappear with youth as they too often
do. There is a sort of cultivation for them in appreciation of the
pleasures of art and science, apart from the mere knowledge they pick up.
They can see the sunlight through the cedars and the moonlight through the
waving branches of the pines. And what a feast life may be for the young
in these days, when literature, art, and science are all brought within
reach of the people. To hear one of Sir Robert Ball's lectures on
astronomy is an introduction to a new world, a world that is immeasurable
by any mere mortal thought. Pictures, sculpture, and the modern marvels of
photography "come not in single spies, but in battalions." The heirs of
all the ages are wealthy indeed. They can never count their riches, and
usually neglect them because they cost nothing. Free libraries and public
picture galleries all over the land are caviare to the general, though
some find manna and nectar in them, and human working bees find honey.
[Sidenote: Another secret of happiness.]
Another secret of happiness in daily life is the appreciation of the
friendship and affection which we are inclined to hold but lightly until
we are threatened with their loss. To awake to a full sense of its value
is to learn to appreciate it as we never did before. The young mother
with her children about her is apt to let small worries cloud over the
happiest time of her life. When she looks back at it, when the young ones
have all grown up and gone from her, she wonders at herself for having
ignored home joys. Children are troublesome, no doubt, and they are noisy
little creatures and anxieties to boot. "A child in a house is a
wellspring of pleasure," says Martin Farquhar Tupper, a writer already
forgotten, but one who said many a true thing. A child in a house is also
a wellspring of worry, many a mother might add, but would she be without
it? Not for worlds. She is happier far than she knows. If she would only
realise it she would be less likely to be sharp-tempered to the little
troublesome darlings that crowd about her when she is busy, a sharpness
that brings sometimes a sting of terrible remorse in its train.
"If we knew the baby fingers,
Pressed against the window pane,
Would be cold and stiff to-morrow--
Never trouble us again--
Would the bright eyes of our darling
Catch the frown upon our brow?--
Would the prints of rosy fingers
Vex us then as they do now?"
[Sidenote: The sunny side.]
And with friends we have little estrangements that are not in the least
worth while, if we would only realise it. Life is so short that there
should be no room for squabbles! To walk on the sunny side of the way is
wisdom, but how many of us are wise? There are some who diligently gather
up the thorns and fix their gaze upon the clouds. Far better store the
sunbeams and enjoy the roses!
"Strange we never prize the music
Till the sweet-voiced bird has flown;
Strange that we should slight the violets
Till the lovely flowers are gone.
Strange that summer skies and sunshine
Never seem one-half so fair,
As when winter's snowy pinions
Shake their white down in the air!"
_DEADLY DULNESS._
"We sit with our feet in a muddy pool, and every day of it we grow
more fond."--RUSSIAN POET.
[Sidenote: The apathetic majority.]
Ninety out of every hundred women bury their minds alive. They do not
live, they merely exist. After girlhood, with its fun and laughter and
lightheartedness, they settle down into a sort of mental apathy, and
satisfy themselves, as best they can, with superficialities--dress, for
instance. There are thousands of women who live for dress. Without it the
world for them would be an empty, barren place. Dress fills their
thoughts, is dearer to them than their children; yes, even dearer than
their pet dogs! What could heaven itself offer to such a woman? She would
be miserable where there were no shops, no chiffons. The shining raiment
of the spiritual world would not attract her, for she could not
differentiate her own from that of others. And when beauty goes, and the
prime of life with its capacity for enjoyment is long over, what remains
to her? Nothing but deadly dulness, the miserable apathy that seizes on
the mind neglected.
[Sidenote: Mental neglect.]
For it is pure neglect! To every one of us has been given what would
suffice to us of spiritual life, but most of us bury it in the body,
swathe it round with wrappings of sloth and indolence, and live the narrow
life of the surface only. Scratching like hens, instead of digging and
delving like real men and women, our true life becomes a shadow in a
dream. Look at the stolid faces, the empty expression, the dull eyes, the
heavy figures of all such! Do they not tell the tale of deadly dulness
with its sickly narrative of murdered powers, buried talents, aspirations
nipped in the bud, longings for better things suffocated under the weight
of the earthly life?
[Sidenote: Merely domestic.]
We were never meant to narrow down to the circle of the home, in our
thoughts at least. Yet this is what most of us do. To be domestic is right
and good, but to be domestic only is a sinful waste of good material.
Remember, oh massive matron! the days of girlish outlook into what seemed
a rosy world. Think back to the days when it thrilled you to hear of high
and noble deeds, when your cheeks flushed and your eyes brightened in
reading of Sir Galahad and his quest, of the peerless Arthur and the olden
days of chivalry, when deeds of "derring-do" on battlefield or in the
humble arena of life set the pulses throbbing with quick appreciation.
[Sidenote: The way out.]
Is it all lost? All gone? Dead and buried? Is the spirit for ever
outweighed by its fleshly envelope, the body? The earthly part of us is
apt to grow overwhelming as the years roll on. But it can be fought
against. We need not limit ourselves, as we so often do, to the daily
round, the common task. There are wings somewhere about us, but if we
never use them we shall soon forget we have them. What dwindled souls we
have after a long life, some of us! "Whom the gods love die young," with
all their splendid possibilities undamaged by the weight of the flesh. But
we can avert the awful apathy of the spirit if we will. We can live full
lives, if only sloth will let us. Indolence is the enemy who steals our
best and brightest part, and opens the door to the dulness that settles
down upon us, brooding over the middle-aged, and suffocating the mental
life.
[Sidenote: Cultivating wider sympathies.]
How many of us women read the newspapers, for instance? The great world
and its doings go on unheeded by us, in our absorption in matters
infinitesimally small. We fish for minnows and neglect our coral reefs.
"We deem the cackle of our burg the murmur of the world." It fills our
ears to the exclusion of what is beyond. And yet the news of the
universe, the latest discoveries in science, the newest tales of
searchings among the stars, to say nothing of the doings of our own fellow
creatures in the life of every day, should be of interest. But we think
more of the party over the way, and the wedding round the corner. Is it
not true, oh sisters?
[Sidenote: A fatal error.]
The more we stay at home, the less desire we have to go out and about, to
freshen our thoughts, enlarge the borders of our experiences, and widen
our sympathies. It is fatal. We sink deeper daily in the slough of dire
despond. But it should be struggled against. There are lives in which the
duly recurrent meal-times are absolutely the chief events. Think of it! Is
such a life ignoble? At least, it contains no element of the noble, the
high, the exalted.
"My sheathed emotions in me rust,
And lie disused in endless dust."
So sings a poet of the day, and he expresses for us what we must all feel
in moments of partial emancipation from the corroding dulness that
threatens to make us all body, with no animating spirit.
To associate freely with our fellow creatures may not be a complete
panacea for this dreaded ill, but it at least will take us out of our
narrow selves to some degree.
"A body's sel's the sairest weicht," when it is unillumined by a bright
spirit. And every spirit would be bright with use if we but gave it a fair
chance.
"Thou didst create me swift and bright,
Of hearing exquisite, and sight.
Look on Thy creature muffled, furled,
That sees no glory in Thy world."
[Sidenote: Provincialism.]
Perhaps we are too comfortable in our apathy and ignorance, in our cosy
homes and pretty rooms, by our bright fires, and surrounded by the endless
trivialities of life, to look beyond. We are "provincial" in our thoughts,
circumscribed, cabined, cribbed, confined, for want of being thrust forth
to achieve our own seed time and harvest, that inner garnering with the
real labour of which no stranger intermeddleth, save to encourage from
without, or the deeper to enslave the mind in deadly dulness.
[Sidenote: "Comfortable couples."]
There are "comfortable couples" who live together for half their lives,
and in mutual sympathy help to deaden in each other every wish for higher
things. An unhappy marriage is better than this accord in common things,
this levelling down of the spirit to the commonplaces of existence.
[Sidenote: Novel-reading.]
Novel-reading is a considerable factor in flattening and deadening the
mind. Fiction, to those who do not misuse it, is the most delightful
recreation, an escape from the material to the airy realms of fantasy.
But there are girls and women who spend hours of every day in reading
novels. "Three a week," one girl confessed to not long since. The mind
soon gets clogged with overmuch fiction for food. It should never be
allowed to supersede general reading. In this case it is idleness, nothing
more, and tends to the encouragement of that mental indolence which soon
enslaves the soul.
[Sidenote: Remedies worse than the disease.]
[Sidenote: The penalty of cowardice.]
[Sidenote: Possibilities.]
Women who have the command of money, and who might turn it to such noble
uses in a world of suffering and sadness, spend enormous sums in playing
games of chance or backing horses to win. When they lose, their
irritability is a source of discomfort to all around them--and they
generally lose! Others play cards, risking high sums of money, and
endeavour to create by this means, some interest in life. They little know
what stores they have within them, lying ignored and neglected--almost
forgotten. The more numerous our sources of pleasure the fuller and wider
will be our lives. Even pain and suffering play their part in life, in
living, and it is cowardice to shirk our full development for fear that it
may entail some sorrow and deep-felt pang of sympathy that is helpless to
assuage the sadness of a troubled world. Anything is better than deadly
dulness, which rusts our faculties, benumbs our feeling, dulls our
appreciativeness of all that is above and beyond us, and lowers us to the
level of inanimate creation. Who would choose the existence of a cabbage
when she might disperse her thoughts among the stars? Who would be content
with the comfortable hearthrug-life of a pet dog or tame cat when she
might explore the recesses of science in company with masterminds, soar to
heaven's gate in spirit, and expand in intelligence until she felt herself
a part of infinity? Contentment is ignominious, when it deprives us of our
birthright. Let us, rather, be disconsolate till we attain it. Till then,
Divine is Discontent.
_THE PLEASURES OF MIDDLE AGE._
[Sidenote: Youth and middle age.]
In some lives middle age is far happier than youth, with its tumults, its
restlessness, its perpetual effervescence, its endless emotions. Youth
looked back upon from the vantage ground of middle age is as a railway
journey compared with a summer day's boating on a broad, calm river. There
was more excitement and enjoyment attached to the railway journey, but the
serene and peaceful quiet of the pleasant drifting and the gentle rowing
are by no means to be despised.
[Sidenote: Crossing the half-way ground.]
When youth first departs a poignant regret is felt. So much that is
delightful goes with it, especially for a woman. About thirty years of
age, an unmarried woman feels that she has outlived her social _raison
d'etre_, and the feeling is a bitter one, bringing with it almost a sense
of shame, even guilt. But ten years later, this, in its turn, has passed,
and a fresh phase of experience is entered on. One has become hardened to
the gradual waning of youth, and the loss of whatever meed of
attractiveness may have accompanied it. New interests spring up,
especially for the married woman, with home and husband and children. The
girls are marrying and settling down in their new homes, and the sons are
taking to themselves wives, or establishing themselves in bachelor
quarters, where they may live their own lives according to their own plan.
[Sidenote: The period of adjustment.]
The loss of the young ones is acutely felt at first, but after a while the
fresh voices and gay laughter are less missed in the home, and the sense
of loneliness begins to pass away. The sons who called or wrote so
frequently at first, missing the father's companionship and the mother's
tenderness, begin to fall off a little in their attentions, and are
sometimes not seen for weeks at a time. The daughters become more and more
absorbed in their own home lives, and though they seldom fall off in duty
to the father and mother as sons do, their heart is less and less in the
matter. It is inevitable! There is sadness in it, but no deep grief, as a
rule. As the ties slacken, one by one, to be only now and then pulled
taut, when occasion for sympathy in joy or sorrow arises, the process is
so gradual and so natural that it is robbed of suffering. And as one of
Nature's decrees is that which causes us to adjust ourselves to altered
surroundings after change or loss, we accept the altered circumstances,
and allow our thoughts and feelings to grow round what is left to us.
[Sidenote: The aftermath.]
[Sidenote: Compensations.]
And then comes a strange and beautiful aftermath, when there is a harvest
of intellectual pleasures and the revival of a joy in life. Many and many
a project, formed in younger days, but forgotten or submerged in the
fulness of existence during intermediate years, is carried out during this
late Indian summer, when health and spirits, energy and capacity, seemed
to have renewed themselves like the eagle. Music, long neglected, begins
again to play a happy part in the lives of some. In others, the brush is
taken up after long years of abstinence, and the alchemy of art transforms
into beautiful fruitfulness what else might have been a barren desert, now
blossoming like a rose; or, journeys into far lands, longed for all
through life, are at last undertaken, with an eagerness of delighted
anticipation that would not disgrace youth itself. This wonderful world is
explored with keenest curiosity, with results of strange and unexpected
enrichment of heart and brain. Is it not true that the more we see of
human nature the more lovable we find it? Contrast the broad views and
generous charity of those who have travelled far and wide with the
censorious and critical attitude of the women who measure themselves by
themselves and compare themselves with themselves. A wider outlook and a
broader grasp of circumstances are among the consequences of living a
fuller life.
[Sidenote: Insular natures.]
There are, it is true, women who, though they may stay at home through all
their lives, are incapable of the carping criticism, the inexhaustible
reprobation, and the endless hard judgments in which so many of the
members of our sex indulge when youth is past and they begin to be
embittered. Even these might be cured of lack of charity by a more
comprehensive knowledge of the world and its inhabitants; by freeing
themselves from insular prejudices and a sort of provincialism of opinion
that is the outcome of narrow and limited experience. Some of them, at
least, might benefit in this way; but it is to be feared that there are a
few in whose nature harshness is inherent, and whose leisure will always
be spent in deriding the motes they so distinctly see in their neighbours'
eyes. They have scarcely sufficient kindliness to try to get them out.
[Sidenote: Dormant talents.]
[Sidenote: New occupations.]
There have been cases in which some unsuspected talent has been developed
in middle age. It has lain dormant through all the years when domestic
life has claimed the finest and best of a woman's energies, and with
leisure has come the opportunity for displaying itself, and making for
something in the life of its possessor. Women of middle age are now being
appointed to various posts of a semi-public character, such as inspectors
of workrooms under the Factory Act, washhouses and laundries, and Poor Law
guardians. In almost every case the appointments have proved satisfactory,
conscientious care being bestowed upon the duties and a praiseworthy
diligence being exhibited. But in some instances a peculiar and not too
common gift of organisation has been evolved in discharging such offices,
surprising the individual herself as much as those who are associated with
her. No promise of it appeared in youth, but here it is in middle age, a
quality that would for ever have remained unguessed and unutilised had
life been accepted with folded hands as so many accept it, alternating
between dining-room and drawing-room and daily drive, with no greater
interest than the affairs of neighbours.
[Sidenote: After the storm and stress!]
[Sidenote: The joy of the harvest.]
[Sidenote: In praise of mellowing years.]
[Sidenote: "Hope springs immortal."]
Youth is delightful, glorious, a splendid gift from the gods, but half
realised while we have it, only fully appreciated when it is gone for
ever. But let no young creature imagine that all is gone when youth is
gone! Sunsets have charms as well as sunrise; and incomparable as is "the
wild freshness of morning," there is often a beautiful light in the late
afternoon. The storm and stress are past, and the levels are reached,
after the long climb to the uplands. We still feel the bruises we
sustained in the long ascent, but the activity of pain has passed, and we
have learned the lesson of patience, and know by our own experience what
youth can never be induced to believe--that Time heals everything. We can
cull the harvest of a quiet eye, and our hearts are at leisure from
themselves. Cheerfulness, and even brightness, replace the wild spirits of
girlhood, and our interests, once bound within the narrow channel of a
girl's hopes and wishes, and then broadening only sufficiently to take in
the area of home, are now dispersed in a far wider life. Philanthropy
finds thousands of recruits among middle-aged women, and many of such
beginners rise to the rank of generals and commander-in-chief. Youth is
always looked back upon with a sentiment of longing, but middle age does
not deserve to be decried. One, at least, who has attained it, can testify
that at no other period of her life could she more intensely enjoy the
lark's song, the freshness of the spring meadows, the beauty of the summer
fields and woods, the pleasures of music and painting and oratory, and of
new scenes and fresh experiences in a world that seems inexhaustibly novel
the more we know of it. There are long, monotonous days in girlhood when
one ardently wishes for something to happen to make a change; but in
middle age life is full of interests, and days seem far too short for all
that we should like to pack into them. There is no monotony in middle age
if health is good and the energies are kept alive by congenial work. Nor
is the exultant joy in mere living quite dead within the heart of middle
age. It breaks out now and then on a bright spring day when the sun is
shining and the lark is singing, and when perennial hope points to yet
brighter days to come. For hope sings songs even to the grey-haired,
difficult as the young may find it to believe it. We were surely meant to
be happy, we humans, so indomitable is the inclination towards joyfulness
under circumstances the most adverse. It is easy enough in youth, and even
the sceptic, the pessimist, the cynic, if they live long enough, will find
that it is not so very difficult in middle age, when scepticism,
pessimism, and cynicism are apt to be outgrown. There lies the true secret
of the matter. There is a joy in growth, and we must see to it that we do
not cheat ourselves of it. Stunted natures are seldom happy ones, and
their middle age is merely mental shrinkage, with a narrowing of the heart
and a corresponding drought in all the sources of joy.
[Sidenote: The gist of the matter.]
In one of Christina Rossetti's loveliest songs, she refers to the meeting
in a better world of two who loved and were parted here. And in the last
line she wistfully and pathetically asks: "_But shall we be young and
together?_" There lies the whole gist of the matter. If we are to be young
again, what boots it if the loved faces of long ago are lacking? Could
happiness be indeed happiness without these?
[Sidenote: "After many years."]
[Sidenote: Memory's magic.]
Sometimes two who have loved each other in their youth meet again when
middle age has come to both. Such a meeting can never be commonplace to
either. Nor do the two see each other as they are visible to ordinary
acquaintances. In the eyes of memory, the grey hair is replaced by the
sunny locks of youth; the saddened eyes are bright again and eagerly
out-looking into a world of abundant promise; the worn and furrowed brow
becomes smooth and white, the pale cheeks touched with youthful bloom; and
with a delicious sense of reciprocity each knows that the lost youth of
both is present to the mind of either. Neither says inwardly of the other,
"Oh, what a change!" as is the case with ordinary acquaintances. Oh, no!
For each of these two the other is young again. They are both young again,
and together. The gentle wraiths of past joys take them by the hand and
lead them back to youth's enchanted land, to the days when love touched
everything with a radiant finger, turning the world and the future
celestial rosy red.
[Sidenote: "Fed on minors."]
What middle-aged women regret is the well-remembered friends that were
their companions in the old days, "when morning souls did leap and run."
And now they are "fed on minors" when they pause and listen to their
thoughts and the rhythm that they make. "The world's book now reads
drily," except, indeed, for such as are enwrapped and mummified in the
garments of the reiterant daily commonplace.
[Sidenote: The wider view.]
The only way to subdue regrets is to take the wider view, looking out on
the great world as might a mouse from the granary door, over hill and dale
and stream and distant town, blue sky and far green sea, realising how
infinitesimally small a part of the whole is each individual life. There
is a kind of comfort, after all, in insignificance. And can anything be
more redolent of that quality than middle age?
"What is it all but a trouble of gnats
In the gleam of a million million of worlds?"
_GROWING OLD._
[Sidenote: The common lot.]
To grow old is tragic, especially for women. Men feel it, too, there is
small doubt. I once spoke on the subject with one of the best-known men of
up-to-date journalism, and we exchanged condolences on the passing of
youth and the wild freshness of morning. We both agreed that at times we
felt as bright and blithe, as merry and as full of fun, as in the days of
our fleeting teens, though at times the world weighs heavily, and its
burdens are duly felt.
[Sidenote: In the eyes of the others.]