THE peculiar mission of woman, it has been said, is to be a wife and
mother. Is it not as truly the peculiar mission of man to be a
husband and father? If she is called to add to the happiness and
worth of her husband, he is called to add to the happiness and worth
of his wife. They are alike bound to protect and educate their
children. And the other duties, the private improvement of self and
the public improvement of society rest on them in common. The
assertion, then, that the distinctive Office of woman is to be the
helpmeet of man, does not imply that she ought to be legally or
morally any more subservient to him than he to her; for the supreme
duty of a woman, as of every other human being, is, through the
perfecting of her own nature as a child of God, to fulfil her
personal destiny in the universe. To love, to marry, to rear a
family, is by no means an entire statement of the obligations and
privileges of women: because no woman always has lover, husband, or
children; many fail to have all of them in succession; and a few
never have either of them.
In some of these cases the domestic appointment of woman is defeated;
but her personal destiny may still De achieved. The qualities of her
soul and the fruitions of her life, as a free individual, may be
perfected in spite of this relative mutilation in her lot. The
growing desire in our time for show and luxury, the increase of the
excitements of publicity, the sensational literature of fiction,
which is absorbing an ever-larger share of attention from the more
sensitive portion of the feminine public, these causes are
concentrating an undue interest on the passion of love. It is the
almost exclusive theme of plays, novels, poems. One consequence is an
exaggeration of the part that should be played by this sentiment in
the experience of the individual. It comes to be the engrossing
subject of regard. Life is considered a failure, unless it contains
love, followed by marriage; yet it must often be deprived of this
experience. In the most civilized countries, especially in their
brilliant capitals, a higher and higher ratio of women miss of happy
love and marriage.
There never were many morally baffled, uneasy, and complaining women
on the earth as now; because never before did the capacities of
intelligence and affection so greatly exceed their gratifications.
New perceptions are the scouts of fresh desires; fresh desires
precede their own fulfilment: a just reconciliation is a slow,
historic process. The lives of a multitude of women all around us
contain a large element of unsuccessful outward or inward ambitions,
vain attempts and prayers. This drives them back upon themselves,
into a deeper and sadder seclusion than that naturally imposed by
their housekeeping and their historic withdrawment from the bustling
businesses of the world. In that silent retirement, in thousands of
instances, a tragedy not less severe than unobtrusive is enacted, the
tragedy of the lonely and breaking heart. An obscure mist of sighs
exhales out of the solitude of women in the nineteenth century. The
proportionate number of examples of virtuous love, completing itself
in marriage, will probably diminish, and the relative examples of
defeated or of unlawful love increase, until we reach some new phase
of civilization, with better harmonized social arrangements,
arrangements both more economical and more truthful. In the mean
time, every thing which tends to inflame the exclusive passion of
love, to stimulate thought upon it, or to magnify its imagined
importance, contributes so much to enhance the misery of its
withholding or loss, and thus to augment an evil already lamentably
extensive and severe.
Now, the most healthful and effective antidote for the evils of an
extravagant passion is to call into action neutralizing or
supplementary passions; to balance the excess of one power by
stimulating weaker powers, and fixing attention on them; to assuage
disappointments in one direction by securing gratifications in
another. Accordingly, the offices of friendship in the lives of
women, lives often so secluded, impoverished, and self-devouring, is
a subject of emphatic timeliness; promising, if properly treated, to
yield lessons of no slight practical value. This vein of sentiment
has suffered unmerited neglect among us. No other vein of sentiment
in human nature, perhaps, has so much need to be cherished. In the
lives of women, friendship is, First, the guide to love; a
preliminary stage in the natural development of affection. Secondly,
it is the ally of love; the distributive tendrils and branches to the
root and trunk of affection. Thirdly, it is, in some cases, the
purified fulfilment and repose into which love subsides, or rises.
Fourthly, it is, in other cases, the comforting substitute for love.
A just display of these points, in the light of an accurate analysis,
aided by the appropriate learning, can hardly fail to repay the study
it will require. The insight into the nature and the working of the
affections, to be secured by a careful study of the subject, should
be a precious acquisition of knowledge easily convertible into power.
The activity of the sympathies enkindled by tracing the biographical
sketches of a large number of the richest and most winsome examples
of feminine friendship preserved for us in history, should bestow a
rare pleasure. And the plain directions to be deduced from the
discussion and the narratives should furnish a store of instruction
for the wiser guidance of personal experience.
The writer, as he is about to intrust his book upon that current of
literature which flows by the doors of all the intelligent, bearing
its offerings to their hands, is quite aware that the subject of the
rights and the wrongs, the joys and the griefs, the hopes and the
fears, the duties and the plans, belonging to the outer and inner
life of womankind in the present age, happens just now to be one of
the chief matters of popular interest and agitation. This, however,
has had no influence in leading him to treat the subject. It has long
been in his mind. He has been drawn to investigate it and write on it
simply by its intrinsic attractions for him. But the extent and
earnestness with which the public mind is preoccupied by the social
and political discussions of the theme, going on in all quarters,
much increase the difficulty of treating it, as is here proposed,
from the scholarly, moral, and experimental point of view, with
perfect candor and calmness, and with a careful avoidance of
prejudices, exaggerations, and declamatory appeals. Demagogues and
partisans, who seek personal notoriety or other ends of private
passion, naturally try to produce effect by the use of pungent
epigrams, overstrained trifles, extravagant views, and sophistical
arguments, fitted to play on the biases, piques, and ignorances of
those whose attention they can gain. All this obviously adds to the
hardness of the task imposed on him who would steer clear of every
extremity, and keep in the golden mean of truth and use.
Such a one is also least likely to secure popular praise. The extreme
conclusions, peppery rhetoric, and passionate declamation of the
leaders on both sides, who aim at sensation and victory, are surest
to awaken the enthusiasm of the extremists, who always direct the
admiring gaze of heir parasites to the favorite representatives of
their own party, their scorn to the favorite representatives of the
other party. But under such circumstances, by is much as the
moderation of impartiality and of a patient search for the exact
truth is hard to be kept, an unlikely to win popularity, it is the
more a duty, and the surer to bear good fruits of service to the
public. There is a fashionable habit of laughing or sneering at the
illusions of the young, a habit usually mistimed and injurious. For
an illusion is as real as a truth. Every phenomenon implies truth,
however incorrectly t may be understood. An illusion is, in fact, but
a reality misinterpreted. Harmless, joy-breeding illusions are the
magic coloring of our existence. They should be cultivated rather
than rudely driven away.
The dry critic who daily labors, and with success, to destroy them,
may be knowing; but he is not wise. Every seeming acquisition really
impoverishes him. The noble Mendelssohn once said, "Life without
illusions is only death." The illusions of high and guileless hearts
are the blessed hopes created by generous faiths fastening on the
better aspects of truth. They are to our experience what the
tremulous iridescence is to the neck of the dove. To allow, as we
grow old, a sinister gaze at the sterner aspects of truth to banish
these rich and kindly illusions, is a wretched folly, however much it
may dress itself as wisdom. There are lures and deceits, enchanting
at an early period, which, at a later one, ought to be outgrown, seen
through and left behind, but not with arid and scoffing conceit. The
way to escape sadness, when the light of one beautiful promise after
another goes out, is to kindle in place thereof the light of one
glorious reality after another. If the gathered experience we carry
at evening renders worthless many things we prized in the morning, it
should also give preciousness to many things unvalued then.
When the fallen torch of ambition has smouldered into blackness, we
ought to make the eternal star of religion our guide. To take
spiritual treasures away without replacing them by better ones is
robbery. The cynical authors who deal chiefly in ridicule and satire,
or in what they call solid facts, the alternate levity and bitterness
of whose writings tend to destroy all ingenuous faith and glowing
affection, all magnanimous sympathies and hopes, seem to me to be
engaged in as miserable a business as those African hunters who train
falcons to dart on gazelles, and pick out their beautiful eyes. The
illusiveness of life that results from teeming love and trust is as a
mist of gold sifted into the atmosphere, through which all the
objects of our regard loom, colossal and glittering. As we advance in
years, we should indeed learn to recognize, and make allowance for,
this refraction and these tints, but without ceasing to enjoy the
beautiful aggrandizement they bestow. When there is danger that a
character will melt into a mere mush of ungirt feelings, the
astringent and bracing use of satire is fit. The application of a
fleecing nonchalance or of a jibing scorn to a soul of strong and
ardent sentiment, is unfit. A certain divinity should hedge every
manifestation of trustful affection, even though it be misjudged. It
is for the most part profane to scoff an overstretched or misplaced
admiration: it calls rather for a considerate instruction which shall
tenderly set it right.
It is insipidity of the feelings that gives rise to sentimentality,
as, when the tongue is disordered, we are always trying it. The cure
of that insipidity is to direct upon it the energy of an objective
earnestness, a current of positive faith and love. No negative
treatment, of indifference or of contempt, can avail. Sentimentality,
frozen under the cutting breath of derision, resembles that loathsome
ice-lake of poison in the Scandinavian hell. Sentimentality, fired by
the glorious contagion of self-forgetful admiration and loyalty, is
raised into sentiment, or even divinized into enthusiasm. The author
will devote his best endeavor to do justice to both sides of the
subject treated in his book, taking warning from the partisans who
fix an exclusive attention on that aspect of it which they
respectively prefer. He will try to set down such true thoughts in
such a pure spirit, as, instead of drying up in his readers the
springs of generous faith, and disenchanting them of all romantic
expectation, will leave them at the end with a higher estimate of the
worth of human nature and of the sweetness of human life.
Ever so correct a perception of what we despise and detest leaves our
moral rank undetermined; but the measure of what we love and admire
is the measure of our own worth. It should never be forgotten, that
the most delicate and enduring pleasures we enjoy are those we give.
It should always be remembered, that, while the proud demand honor,
and the humble seek sympathy, there is a self-respectful affection,
neither haughty nor cringing, which will always earn honor, but never
stop to ask it, always enjoy sympathy, but never be dependent on it.
This whole book is a demonstration of the truth, that, however much
woman may need deliverance from some outward trials and disabilities,
her grand want is a freer, deeper, richer, holier, inward life. Let
her, if she so please, reach out for the ballot, enter on a larger
range of work and responsibility. But let her not be blind to the
truth, that her foremost, weightiest need is a more thorough
intellectual possession and moral fulfilment of herself, leading to a
closer union with friends and an absolute surrender to God. The just
formula for the aims of woman, as it seems to me, is neither, on the
one hand, limitation to domestic life; nor, on the other hand,
devotion to public life as an end; but, dedication to the duties and
joys of family and social life, and to the nurture of the personal
inner life, as the true ends, and a free participation in the grand
interests of public life, as a means of purifying the domestic and
the inner life from selfish littlenesses, and enriching the
experience of the individual with the wide obligations and hopes of
humanity at large. Not domestic life alone; not public life alone;
not merely domestic life and public life together; but domestic life
and public life, for the sake of the personal inner life, purified
and aggrandized by the ideal appropriation of the essential
experience and progress of the whole world.
This, with such allowances as the distinction of sex really requires,
should be the aim of every woman as well as of every man. If this
view be correct, it is plain how great and vital an interest it gives
to the theme of the present work; the friendship of women; since the
very ground and gist of a noble friendship is the cultivation in
common of the personal inner lives of those who partake in it, their
mutual reflection of souls and joint sharing of experience inciting
them to a constant betterment of their being and their happiness.