“Journey along
With an armful of girl and a heart full of song!”
We older folk, who were brought up and educated in the sweet
provincial ways, can see that it has been the atrabilious old maids
and the matronly flirts who have banished the dear, delicious girl
from artistic consideration. The woman of thirty, and upwards, by
persistent manœuvring, has got between us and sweet sixteen. What we
have to show for the change is the feminine novel of nasty morals. Of
course many of these flabby romances about over-mature heroines are
written by men; but they are mostly men of a beardless style with much
complaint to make against their ancestors. A sound man naturally loves
a healthy young girl and wants to be her father, her brother, or her
lover, according to propriety. He is, moreover, lenient towards the
elderly unmarried females, when they do not insist upon the superiority
of an Isabella-colored complexion; but at best they are not girls; in
which they differ from happily married women, who keep to themselves a
girlish charm late into life.
We all have our misfortunes for which we are not in the least to blame.
The single woman whose bloom is gone is interesting as an embodied
pathos, but not thrilling as a sweetheart; she looks dry as a heroine
of romance; she spoils a love-song. No wonder that the realists
cannot fit their art to girlhood while their theory of life excludes
sweetness and health. It is a pursuit of love within discouraging
limitations when some middle-aged man, with gray in his whiskers, limps
rheumatically on the track of a stout lady in her thirties, and with a
picture of such a race is pessimism best represented.
But the healthy and natural girl, apple-cheeked and merry-eyed,
sweet-voiced—παρθενον αδυφονον [Greek: parthenon adyphonon]—a girl of
girls, is what charms mankind in life and literature. Her ways are like
thistledown in a summer breeze; they suggest idyllic dreams and make us
believe in all manner of delightful human happiness. We are all poets
when she engages our imagination; we are all young when she loves us;
we are all good in her presence,—holy-minded at thought of her.
Perhaps the surest sign of decadence in art is the appearance of
the dame in the space naturally occupied by the lass; for it proves
that taste is no longer an elemental impulse, but rather a matter
of fashion, or of illicit influence. We do not find Madame Bovary
appealing to the ever-fresh wells of our manhood. We could not be glad
of having her for mother, wife, daughter, sister, or sweetheart. She
poisons our imagination and repels our interest. It is a delight to
turn away from her to the blushing young heroine who loves purely and
with all her heart,—a girl as fresh and sound as a May strawberry.
Of all unnatural things none can seem quite so unjust as ill health
falling upon a girl. Balzac, in one of his hideously interesting
romances, pictures to the minutest line a poor child stricken with
disease and robbed of her season of bud and bloom. I have always felt
that the story was an unpardonable piece of writing. We sometimes
see such pitiful and appealing objects in the street, or at some
country place; but why should they be put into books written for our
delectation?
Once upon a time a friend and I, upon archery intent, tramped together
for a fortnight among the hills of North Carolina, in a region given
over to the race of mountaineers. It was saddening to observe the
lean, vacant, bloodless faces of the girls in the cabins. As a rule,
however, activity of body and a certain limberness go with these
desiccated-looking countenances, and now and again you find a flower
of rustic loveliness wasting its sweetness and ignorance on the
mountain air. An instance comes to mind. We were having luncheon at a
spring under the hill, upon which an ancient cabin nestled amid its
peach-trees.
Down a zig-zag path worn into the brick-yellow clay and rotten slate
of the declivity came a maiden bearing on her head a cedar noggin. She
stepped briskly and nimbly, not deigning to touch the noggin with her
hand, but with scarcely perceptible head-movements kept it at perfect
equilibrium on her crown. Barefooted, her coarse blue petticoat very
scant and short, a wonderful brush of pale gold hair crinkling over her
perfect shoulders, her arms half bare, a throat like a bird’s, and a
face-flower full of happy lights, she made just that sudden impression
of æsthetic surprise which comes with the poet’s rarest phrase and most
unexpected rhyme.
It turned out that this strong young thing was as ignorant and empty as
she was beautiful and healthy; but when she spoke to us her voice had
the _timbre_ of a hermit thrush’s and she gave us a glimpse of teeth
incomparably white and even. She was not timid, not bold, but natural.
Took hold of my yew bow, which rested against a tree, and inquired
about it, fingered my arrows and quiver, asked my companion whither we
were going. All this time the cedar noggin on her sunny head wagged
gently, but kept its place, until presently she took it off, and, with
a melodious souse in the spring, filled it, replaced it aloft and
walked back up the hill, hands down and absolutely sure of foot.
“Well,” said my companion, in a breathless tone, “if I didn’t think for
a moment that you meant to shoot her! A regular wood nymph.”
As for myself I did not like the term wood nymph applied to a girl
like that. She was as pretty, as pure, and as ignorant as a wild blue
violet, and evidently as happy as a lark in a meadow. I felt the better
for having seen her, and, as we trudged on, there was a new fragrance
in my imagination.
The streets and suburban lanes of our little Western towns and cities
offer great facilities for the study of happy girlhood, large thanks to
the bicycle. During my summer walks and drives I meet whisps and flocks
and bevies of lasses, or they pass me at scorching speed. They put the
“bicycle-face” to shame with their rippling countenances and merry
chatter. I shall never, I hope, forget one little maid of fifteen who
drove her wheel as straight and steady as a flying quail, with her arms
folded on her breast, and her lithe body poised inimitably. She looked
at me with big round eyes, as if to say: “Do you see how I can do this?”
Indeed, my enjoyment of the frank sweetness in the air where girls are
at play would be perfect were it not for the “Little Lord Fauntleroy”
so often in evidence; but for him, all becurled and beruffled, I have a
supreme and stony aversion. If some ruddy, ragged urchin, of the true
Adamic race, would but down him and bedaub him with mud! If some girl
would spank him and send him home; but the girl seems actually to like
the self-conscious and unnatural little scamp. She smoothes his collar
and pulls down his velvet jacket, hugs him and calls him pet names. He
is the fellow who will grow up to be gun-shy, and inclined to marry a
double-divorced actress, much to the girl’s disgust.
It was Madame de Staël, I believe, who said: “Let my children be not
girls; for a woman’s life is so sad.” Even she, however, did not find
girlhood unhappy, and the preventive to be used against the misery of
womanhood would be to hold on to girlish simplicity, faith, and sanity
as long as possible. We grow like what we contemplate, and the question
is, do we now-a-days give adequate contemplation to the true, the
beautiful, and the good, whose symbol and measure is the heart of a
healthy girl? Our civilization must luxuriate in what maidenhood can
safely assimilate, or it must grovel at the feet of the yellow woman,
tough and _passée_.
There is encouraging evidence, visible just now, of a desire on the
public’s part to get rid of Old Mrs. Woman, and take up once more
with her granddaughter, the not wholly unsophisticated, but yet quite
innocent and undesigning maiden. Men of the right sort have always felt
that the happy married woman should be sheltered from publicity, and
that the unhappy wife’s sorrows are sacred; but the love of a youth and
a maid, that is something for the delight of the whole world. We are
tired of this rank immorality tricked out in the toggery of love,—and
the lovers married to other folk,—this rank immorality of the old blasé
hero and the adroit, conscienceless and time-battered heroine.
A return to the insipid pastoral of the early centuries would be
tolerable, if no better shift can be had, as breach full and wide with
the feminine party of faded spinsterhood and preposterous sociology,
of tirades against marriage and of the sainthood of grass widows.
Let in the young girl of sound body and merry heart; give her another
chance; the whole world is ready to welcome her. Her smile will banish
the yellow dust of the faded asters; her presence will hush even the
whisper of brutalities.
The other day I wrote to a distant friend and put to him Horace’s light
question:—
“Quæ circumvolitas agilis thyma?”
Back came the answer: “I am running races with my three little girls.
What is there better to do?” A man of gravity and distinction playing
with his little daughters has what a politician would call a “pull”
upon the gods for the highest joy of existence. From that play-ground
he bears away the nectar of incomparable flowers, and the pollen on his
thighs will freshen the whole hive of the world.
We may be sure that there is something wrong when we hear it growled
around that young maidenhood is insipid in art, and that virility—a
murrain seize the word—demands a Harriet Martineau, or the like, for
a good, substantial feast of the imagination. Not assuming to know a
great deal about virile women, I can venture the statement that truly
virile men adore the young girl. She is the heroine of the iron-willed,
vastly capable, boy-hearted fellows who make the world move. There
is always a love of simple, elemental pleasures in great masculine
natures. Precious little they care for artificial cheeks and pencilled
eyebrows. Better a healthy, dewy-lipped milkmaid, singing behind the
hedge, than a bediamonded old heiress whose teeth have ground luxuries
some three dozen long years.
At all events my own preference for the blushing young heroine is
unalterable, and I am eager to see her come back, garlanded and happy,
to take her rightful place in both life and romance. I long to read
yet one more book wherein the sound-hearted story-teller gives full
run to that quintessential joy of loving which only the young girl can
inspire. I am tired of bacon and potatoes; give me some of old Gervase
Markham’s simples—
“The king-cup, the pansy with the violet,
The rose that loves the shower,
The wholesome gilliflower.”