_Dec._ 29.
That, then, is the substance of what I would fain say convincingly, if it
might be, to my girl friends; at all events with certainty in my own mind
that I was thus far a safe guide to them.
For other and older readers it is needful I should write a few words
more, respecting what opportunity I have had to judge, or right I have to
speak, of such things; for, indeed, too much of what I have said about
women has been said in faith only. A wise and lovely English lady told
me, when ‘Sesame and Lilies’ first appeared, that she was sure the
‘Sesame’ would be useful, but that in the ‘Lilies’ I had been writing of
what I knew nothing about. Which was in a measure too true, and also
that it is more partial than my writings are usually: for as Ellesmere
spoke his speech on the — intervention, not, indeed, otherwise than he
felt, but yet altogether for the sake of Gretchen, so I wrote the
‘Lilies’ to please one girl; and were it not for what I remember of her,
and of few besides, should now perhaps recast some of the sentences in
the ‘Lilies’ in a very different tone: for as years have gone by, it has
chanced to me, untowardly in some respects, fortunately in others
(because it enables me to read history more clearly), to see the utmost
evil that is in women, while I have had but to believe the utmost good.
The best women are indeed necessarily the most difficult to know; they
are recognized chiefly in the happiness of their husbands and the
nobleness of their children; they are only to be divined, not discerned,
by the stranger; and, sometimes, seem almost helpless except in their
homes; yet without the help of one of them, {4} to whom this book is
dedicated, the day would probably have come before now, when I should
have written and thought no more.
On the other hand, the fashion of the time renders whatever is forward,
coarse, or senseless, in feminine nature, too palpable to all men:—the
weak picturesqueness of my earlier writings brought me acquainted with
much of their emptiest enthusiasm; and the chances of later life gave me
opportunities of watching women in states of degradation and
vindictiveness which opened to me the gloomiest secrets of Greek and
Syrian tragedy. I have seen them betray their household charities to
lust, their pledged love to devotion; I have seen mothers dutiful to
their children, as Medea; and children dutiful to their parents, as the
daughter of Herodias: but my trust is still unmoved in the preciousness
of the natures that are so fatal in their error, and I leave the words of
the ‘Lilies’ unchanged; believing, yet, that no man ever lived a right
life who had not been chastened by a woman’s love, strengthened by her
courage, and guided by her discretion.
What I might myself have been, so helped, I rarely indulge in the
idleness of thinking; but what I am, since I take on me the function of a
teacher, it is well that the reader should know, as far as I can tell
him.
Not an unjust person; not an unkind one; not a false one; a lover of
order, labour, and peace. That, it seems to me, is enough to give me
right to say all I care to say on ethical subjects; more, I could only
tell definitely through details of autobiography such as none but
prosperous and (in the simple sense of the word) faultless lives could
justify;—and mine has been neither. Yet, if any one, skilled in reading
the torn manuscripts of the human soul, cares for more intimate knowledge
of me, he may have it by knowing with what persons in past history I have
most sympathy.