thing we had ever suspected. Nevertheless, the sincere and single-minded
worker is not asking herself anxious questions anent man’s contempt, but
is preserving “the true dignity of womanhood” by going steadfastly on
her appointed road, and doing her daily work as well as in her lies.
Neither does she consider the conversion of man to a less scornful frame
of mind as the just reward of her labors. She has other and broader
interests at stake. For my own part, I have a liking for those few
writers who are admirably explicit in their contempt for women, and I
find them more interesting and more stimulating than the “generous” men
who stand forth as the champions of our sex, and are insufferably
patronizing in their championship. When Schopenhauer says distinctly
that women are merely grown-up babies, short-sighted, frivolous, and
occupying an intermediate stage between children and men; when he
protests vigorously against the absurd social laws which permit them to
share the rank and titles of their husbands, and insists that all they
require is to be well fed and clothed, I feel a sincere respect for this
honest statement of unpopular and somewhat antiquated views. Lord Byron,
it will be remembered, professed the same opinions, but his
ingenuousness is by no means so apparent. Edward Fitzgerald’s distaste
for women writers is almost winning in its gentle candor. Ruskin,
despite his passionate chivalry, reiterates with tireless persistence
his belief that woman is man’s helpmate, and no more. Theoretically, he
is persuasive and convincing. Practically, he is untouched by the
obtrusive fact that many thousands of women are never called on to be
the helpmates of any men, fathers, brothers, or husbands, but must
stand or fall alone. Upon their learning to stand depends much of the
material comfort, as well as the finer morality, of the future.
And surely, the first and most needful lesson for them to acquire is to
take themselves and their work with simplicity, to be a little less
self-conscious, and a little more sincere. In all walks of life, in all
kinds of labor, this is the beginning of excellence, and proficiency
follows in its wake. We talk so much about thoroughness of training, and
so little about singleness of purpose. We give to every girl in our
public schools the arithmetical knowledge which enables her to stand
behind a counter and cast up her accounts. That there is something else
which we do not give her is sufficiently proven by her immediate
adoption of that dismal word, “saleslady,” with its pitiful assumption
of what is not, its pitiful disregard of dignity and worth. I own I am
dispirited when I watch the more ambitious girls who attend our great
schools of manual training and industrial art. They are being taught on
generous and noble lines. The elements of beauty and appropriateness
enter into their hourly work. And yet--their tawdry finery, the nodding
flower-gardens on their hats, the gilt ornaments in their hair, the
soiled kid gloves too tight for their broad young hands, the crude
colors they combine so pitilessly in their attire, their sweeping and
bedraggled skirts, their shrill, unmodulated voices, their giggles and
ill-controlled restlessness--are these the outward and visible results
of a training avowedly refining and artistic? Are these the pupils whose
future work is to raise the standard of beauty and harmonious
development? Something is surely lacking which no technical skill can
supply. Now, as in the past, character is the base upon which all true
advancement rests secure.
Higher in the social and intellectual scale, and infinitely more serious
in their ambitions, are the girl students of our various colleges. As
their numbers increase, and their superior training becomes less and
less a matter of theory, and more and more a matter of course, these
students will combine at least a portion of their present earnestness
with the healthy commonplace rationality of college men. At present they
are laboring under the disadvantage of being the exceptions instead of
the rule. The novelty of their position dazes them a little; and, like
the realistic story-tellers and the impressionist painters, they are
perhaps more occupied with their points of view than with the things
they are viewing. This is not incompatible with a very winning
simplicity of demeanor, and the common jest which represents the college
girl as prickly with the asperities of knowledge, is a fabric of man’s
jocund and inexhaustible imagination. Mr. Barrie, it is true, tells a
very amusing story of being invited, as a mere lad, to meet some young
women students at an Edinburgh party, and of being frightened out of his
scanty self-possession when one of them asked him severely whether he
did not consider that Berkeley’s immaterialism was founded on an
ontological misconception. But even Mr. Barrie has a fertile fancy, and
perhaps the experience was not quite so bad as it sounds. There is more
reason in the complaint I have heard many times from mothers, that
college gives their daughters a distaste for social life, and a rather
ungracious disregard for its amenities and obligations. But college
does not give men a distaste for social life. On the contrary, it is the
best possible training for that bigger, broader field in which the
ceaseless contact with their fellow-creatures rounds and perfects the
many-sidedness of manhood. If college girls are disposed to overestimate
the importance of lectures, and to underestimate the importance of
balls, this is merely a transient phase of criticism, and has no lasting
significance. Lectures and balls are both very old. They have played
their parts in the history of the world for some thousands of years;
they will go on playing them to the end. Let us not exaggerate personal
preference, however contagious it may appear, into a symbol of
approaching revolution.
For our great hope is this: As university training becomes less and less
exceptional for girls, they will insensibly acquire broader and simpler
views; they will easily understand that life is too big a thing to be
judged by college codes. As the number of women doctors and women
architects increases with every year, they will take themselves, and be
taken by the world, with more simplicity and candor. They will also do
much better work when we have ceased writing papers, and making
speeches, to signify our wonder and delight that they should be able to
work at all; when we have ceased patting and praising them as so many
infant prodigies. Perhaps the time may even come when women, mixing
freely in political life, will abandon that injured and aggressive air
which distinguishes the present advocate of female suffrage. Perhaps,
oh, joyous thought! the hour may arrive when women having learned a few
elementary facts of physiology, will not deem it an imperative duty to
embody them at once in an unwholesome novel. These unrestrained
disclosures which are thrust upon us with such curious zest, are the
ominous fruits of a crude and hasty mental development; but there are
some sins which even ignorance can only partially excuse. Things seen in
the light of ampler knowledge have a different aspect, and bear a
different significance; but the “fine and delicate moderation” which
Mme. de Souza declared to be woman’s natural gift, should preserve her,
even when semi-instructed, from all gross offences against good taste.
Moreover “whatever emancipates our minds without giving us the mastery
of ourselves is destructive,” and if the intellectual freedom of woman
is to be a noble freedom it must not degenerate into the privilege of
thinking whatever she likes, and saying whatever she pleases. That
instinctive refinement which she has acquired in centuries of
self-repression is not a quality to be undervalued, or lightly thrust
aside. If she loses “the strength that lies in delicacy,” she is weaker
in her social emancipation than in her social bondage.
The word “Virago,” in the Renaissance, meant a woman of culture,
character, and charm; a “man-like maiden” who combined the finer
qualities of both sexes. The gradual debasement of a word into a term of
reproach is sometimes a species of scandal. It is wilfully perverted in
the course of years, and made to tell a different tale,--a false tale,
probably,--which generations receive as true. On the other hand, it
sometimes marks the swift degeneracy of a lofty ideal. In either case,
the shame and pity are the same. Happily, as we are past the day when
men looked askance upon women’s sincere efforts at advancement, so we
are past the day when women deemed it profitable to ape distinctly
masculine traits. We have outgrown the first rude period of abortive and
misdirected energy, but it does not follow that the millennium has been
reached. Mr. Arnold has ventured to say that the best spiritual fruit of
culture is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and
vulgarizing, yet no one recognized more clearly than he the ungracious
nature of the task. What people really like to be told is that they are
doing all things well, and have nothing to learn from anybody. This is
the reiterated message from the gods of which the daily press delivers
itself so sapiently, and by which it maintains its popularity and power.
This is the tone of all the nice little papers about woman’s progress,
and woman’s work, and woman’s influence, and woman’s recent successes in
literature, science, and art. “I gain nothing by being with such as
myself,” sighed Charles Lamb, with noble discontent. “_We encourage one
another in mediocrity._” This is what we women are doing with such
apparent satisfaction; we are encouraging one another in mediocrity. We
are putting up easy standards of our own, in place of the best standards
of men. We are sating our vanity with small and ignoble triumphs,
instead of struggling on, defeated, routed, but unconquered still, with
hopes high set upon the dazzling mountain-tops which we may never
reach.
A NOTE ON MIRRORS.
Heinrich Heine, who had a particularly nice and discriminating taste in
ghosts, and who studied with such delicate pleasure the darkly woven
fancies of German superstition, frankly admitted that to see his own
face by moonlight in a mirror thrilled him with indefinable horror. Most
of us who are blessed, or burdened, with imaginations have shared at
moments in this curious fear of that smooth, shining sheet of glass,
which seems to hold within itself some power mysterious and malign. By
daytime it is commonplace enough, and lends itself with facile ease to
the cheerful and homely nature of its surroundings. But at dusk, at
night, by lamplight, or under the white, insinuating moonbeams, the
mirror assumes a distinctive and uncanny character of its own. Then it
is that it reflects that which we shrink from seeing. Then it is that
our own eyes meet us with an unnatural stare and a piercing
intelligence, as if another soul were watching us from their depths
with furtive, startled inquiry. Then it is that the invisible something
in the room, from which the merciful dullness of mortality has hitherto
saved us, may at any instant take sudden shape, and be seen, not in its
own form, but reflected in the treacherous glass, which, like the
treacherous water, has the power of betraying things that the air, man’s
friendly element, refuses to reveal.
This wise mistrust of the ghostly mirror is so old and so far spread
that we meet with it in the folk lore of every land. An English
tradition warns us that the new moon, which brings us such good fortune
when we look at it in the calm evening sky, carries a message of evil to
those who see it first reflected in a looking-glass. For such unlucky
mortals the lunar virus distils slow poison and corroding care. The
child who is suffered to see his own image in a mirror before he is a
year old is marked out for trouble and many disappointments. The friends
who glance at their reflections standing side by side are doomed to
quick dissension. The Swedish girl who looks into her glass by
candlelight risks the loss of her lover. A universal superstition,
which has found its way even to our own prosaic time and country,
forbids a bride to see herself in a mirror after her toilet is
completed. If she be discreet, she turns away from that fair picture
which pleases her so well, and then draws on her glove, or has some tiny
ribbon, flower, or jewel fastened to her gown, that the sour Fates may
be appeased, and evil averted from her threshold. In Warwickshire and
other parts of rural England it was long the custom to cover all the
looking-glasses in a house of death, lest some affrighted mortal should
behold in one the pale and shrouded corpse standing by his side. There
is a ghastly story of a servant maid who, on leaving the chamber where
her dead master lay, glanced in the uncovered mirror, and saw the
sheeted figure on the bed beckoning her rigidly to its side.
Some such tale as this must have been told me in my infancy, for in no
other way can I account for the secret terror I felt for the little oval
mirror which hung by my bed at school. Every night I turned it carefully
with its face to the wall, lest by some evil chance I should arise and
look in it. Every night I was tormented with the same haunting notion
that I had _not_ remembered to turn it; and then, shivering with cold
and fright, I would creep out of bed, and, with averted head and tightly
shut eyes, feel my way to the wretched thing, and assure myself of what
I knew already, that its harmless back alone confronted me. I never
asked myself what it was I feared to see;--some face that was not mine,
some apparition born of the darkness and of my own childish terror. Nor
can I truly say that this apprehension, inconvenient though it seemed on
chilly winter nights, did not carry with it a vague, sweet pleasure of
its own. Little girls of eleven may be no better nor wiser for the
scraps of terrifying folk lore which formed part of my earliest
education, yet in one respect, at least, I triumphed by their aid. Even
the somewhat spiritless monotony of a convent school was not without its
vivifying moments for a child who carried to bed with her each night a
horde of goblin fears to keep her imagination lively.
Superstitions of a less ghostly character cluster around the mirror,
and are familiar to us all. To break one is everywhere an evil omen.
“Seven years’ trouble, but no want,” follow fast upon such a mishap in
Yorkshire, while in Scotland, the cracking of a looking-glass, like the
falling of the doomed man’s picture from the wall, is a presage of
approaching death. Such portents as these, however,--though no one who
is truly wise presumes to treat them with levity,--are powerless to
thrill us with that indefinable and subtle horror which springs from
causeless emotions. Scott, in his prologue to “Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,”
has well defined the peculiar fear which is without reason and without
cure. The old lady who makes her servant maid draw a curtain over the
glass before she enters her bedroom, “so that she” (the maid) “may have
the first shock of the apparition, if there be any to be seen,” is of
far too practical a turn to trouble herself about the rationality of her
sensations. “Like many other honest folk,” she does not like to look at
her own reflection by candlelight, because it is an eerie thing to do.
Yet the tale she tells of the Paduan doctor and his magic mirror is, on
the other hand, neither interesting nor alarming. It has all the dreary
qualities of a psychical research report which cannot even provoke us to
a disbelief.
In fact, divining-crystals, when known as such professionally, are tame,
hard-working, almost respectable institutions. In the good old days of
necromancy, magicians had no need of such mechanical appliances. Any
reflecting surface would serve their turn, and a bowl of clear water was
enough to reveal to them all that they wanted to know. It was of more
importance, says Brand, “to make choice of a young maid to discern
therein those images or visions which a person defiled cannot see.” Even
the famous mirror, through whose agency Dr. Dee and his seer, Kelly,
were said to have discovered the Gunpowder Plot, was in reality nothing
more than a black polished stone, closely resembling coal.
“Kelly did all his feats upon
The devil’s looking-glass, a stone.”
Yet in an old Prayer-Book of 1737 there is a woodcut representing the
king and Sir Kenelm Digby gazing into a circular mirror, in which are
reflected the Houses of Parliament, and a man entering them with a dark
lantern in his hand. Above, the eye of Providence is seen darting a ray
of light upon the mirror. Below are legs and hoofs, as of evil spirits
flying rapidly away. The truth is, so many conflicting details are
related of Dr. Dee’s useful and benevolent possession that it has lost a
little of its _vraisemblance_. We are wont to rank it confusedly with
such mystic treasures as the mirror which told the fortunate Alasnam
whether or not a maid were as chaste as she was beautiful, or the glass
which Reynard described with such minute and charming falsehoods to the
royal lioness, who would fain have gratified her curiosity by a sight of
its indiscreet revelations.
It is never through magic mirrors, nor crystal balls, nor any of the
paraphernalia now so abundantly supplied by painstaking students of
telepathy that we approach that shadowy land over which broods perpetual
fear. Let us rather turn meekly back to the fairy-taught minister of
Aberfoyle, and learn of him the humiliating truth that “every drop of
water is a Mirrour to returne the Species of Things, were our visive
Faculty sharpe enough to apprehend them.” In other words, we stand in
need, not of elaborate appliances, but of a chastened spirit. If we seek
the supernatural with the keen apprehension which is begotten of
credulity and awe, we shall never find ourselves disappointed in our
quest. The same reverend authority tells us that “in a Witch’s Eye the
Beholder cannot see his own Image reflected, as in the Eyes of other
people,” which is an interesting and, it may be, a very useful thing to
know.
Two curious stories having relation to the ghostly character of the
mirror will best serve to illustrate my text. The first is found in
Shelley’s journal; one of the inexhaustible store supplied to the poet
by “Monk” Lewis, and is about a German lady who, dancing with her lover
at a ball, saw in a glass the reflection of her dead husband gazing at
her with stern, reproachful eyes. She is said to have died of terror.
The second tale is infinitely more picturesque. In the church of Santa
Maria Novella at Florence is the beautiful tomb of Beata Villana, the
daughter of a noble house, and married in extreme youth to one of the
family of Benintendi. Tradition says that she was very fair, and that,
being arrayed one night for a festival, she stood looking long in the
mirror, allured by her own loveliness. Suddenly her eyes were opened,
and she saw, close by her side, a demon dressed with costly raiment like
her own, and decked with shining jewels like those she wore upon her
arms and bosom. Appalled by this vision of evil, Beata Villana fled from
the vanities of the world, and sought refuge in a convent, where she
died a holy death in 1360, being then but twenty-eight years of age. Her
marble effigy rests on its carven bed in the old Florentine church, and
smiling angels draw back the curtains to show her sweet, dead beauty,
safe at last from the perilous paths of temptation. In such a legend as
this there lingers for us still the elements of mystery and of horror
which centuries of prosaic progress are powerless to alienate from that
dumb witness of our silent, secret hours, the mirror.
GIFTS.
There is a delightful story, which we owe to Charles Lever’s splendid
mendacity, of an old English lady who sent to Garibaldi, during that
warrior’s confinement at Varignano, a portly pincushion well stocked
with British pins. Her enthusiastic countrywomen had already supplied
their idol with woolen underwear, and fur-lined slippers, and
intoxicating beverages, and other articles equally useful to an
abstemious prisoner of war in a hot climate; but pins had been
overlooked until this thoughtful votary of freedom offered her tribute
at its shine.
Absurd though the tale appears, it has its counterparts in more sober
annals, and few men of any prominence have not bewailed at times their
painful popularity. Sir Walter Scott, who was the recipient of many
gifts, had his fair share of vexatious experiences, and laughs at them
somewhat ruefully now and then in the pages of his journal. Eight large
and very badly painted landscapes, “in great gilded frames,” were given
him by one “most amiable and accomplished old lady.” She had ordered
them from an impoverished amateur whom she desired to befriend, and then
palmed them off on Sir Walter, who was too gentle and generous to
protest. A more “whimsical subject of affliction” was the presentation
of two emus by a Mr. Harmer, a settler in Botany Bay, to whom Scott had
given some useful letters of introduction. “I wish his gratitude had
either taken a different turn, or remained as quiescent as that of
others whom I have obliged more materially,” writes Sir Walter in his
journal. “I at first accepted the creatures, conceiving them, in my
ignorance, to be some sort of blue and green parrots, which, though I do
not admire their noise, might scream and yell at their pleasure, if hung
up in the hall among the armor. But your emu, it seems, stands six feet
high on his stocking soles, and is little better than a kind of
cassowary or ostrich. Hang them! They might eat up my collection of old
arms, for what I know.”
Finally, like the girl who was converted at a revival, and who gave her
blue ribbons to her sister because she knew they were taking her to
hell, Scott got himself out of the scrape by passing on the emus, as a
sort of feudal offering, to the Duke of Buccleugh, and leaving that
nobleman to solve as best he could the problem of their maintenance. The
whole story is very much like the experience of Mr. James Payn’s lawyer
friend, to whom a “grateful orphan” sent from the far East a dromedary,
with the pleasant assurance that its hump was considered extremely
delicate eating. As this highly respected member of the London bar could
not well have the dromedary butchered for the sake of its hump,--even if
he had yearned over the dish,--and as he was equally incapable of riding
the beast to his office every morning, he considered himself fortunate
when the Zoölogical Gardens opened their hospitable gates and the
orphan’s tribute disappeared therein, to be seen and heard of no more.
Charles Lamb, on the other hand, if we may trust the testimony of his
letters, appears to have derived a keen and kindly pleasure from the
more reasonable and modest presents of his friends. Perhaps, like
Steele, he looked upon it as a point of morality to be obliged to those
who endeavored to oblige him. Perhaps it was easy for one so lovable to
detect the honest affection which inspired these varied gifts. It is
certain we find him returning genial thanks, now to Hazlitt for a pig,
now to Wordsworth for a “great armful” of poetry, and now to Thomas
Allsop for some Stilton cheese,--“the delicatest, rainbow-hued, melting
piece I ever flavored.” He seems equally gratified with an engraving of
Pope sent by Mr. Procter, and with another pig,--“a dear pigmy,” he
calls it,--the gift of Mrs. Bruton. Nor is it only in these letters of
acknowledgment--wherein courtesy dispenses occasionally with the
companionship of truth--that Lamb shows himself a generous recipient of
his friends’ good will. He writes to Wordsworth, who has sent him
nothing, and expresses his frank delight in some fruit which has been
left early that morning at his door:--