By Agnes Repplier
COUNTER-CURRENTS.
AMERICANS AND OTHERS.
A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY AND OTHER ESSAYS.
IN OUR CONVENT DAYS.
COMPROMISES.
THE FIRESIDE SPHINX. With 4 full-page and 17 text Illustrations by
Miss E. BONSALL.
BOOKS AND MEN.
POINTS OF VIEW
ESSAYS IN IDLENESS.
IN THE DOZY HOURS, AND OTHER PAPERS.
ESSAYS IN MINIATURE.
A BOOK OF FAMOUS VERSE. Selected by Agnes Repplier. In Riverside
Library for Young People.
THE SAME. _Holiday Edition._
VARIA.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
[Illustration]
VARIA
By AGNES REPPLIER, LITT. D.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY
AGNES REPPLIER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE ETERNAL FEMININE 1
THE DEATHLESS DIARY 30
GUIDES: A PROTEST 63
LITTLE PHARISEES IN FICTION 85
THE FÊTE DE GAYANT 109
CAKES AND ALE 130
OLD WINE AND NEW 155
THE ROYAL ROAD OF FICTION 185
FROM THE READER’S STANDPOINT 217
“Little Pharisees in Fiction” is reprinted by permission of the
publishers from “Scribner’s Magazine,” and “From the Reader’s
Standpoint” from “The North American Review” (where it was called “The
Contentiousness of Modern Novel Writers”).
VARIA.
THE ETERNAL FEMININE.
There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than
the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the
public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance. Such a
phrase--employed with tireless irrelevance in journalism, and creeping
into the pages of what is, by courtesy, called literature--is the “new
woman.” It has furnished inexhaustible jests to “Life” and “Punch,”
and it has been received with seriousness by those who read the
present with no light from the past, and so fail to perceive that all
femininity is as old as Lilith, and that the variations of the type
began when Eve arrived in the Garden of Paradise to dispute the claims
of her predecessor. “If the fifteenth century discovered America,”
says a vehement advocate of female progress, “it was reserved for the
nineteenth century to discover woman;” and this remarkable statement
has been gratefully applauded by people who have apparently forgotten
all about Judith and Zenobia, Cleopatra and Catherine de Medici, Saint
Theresa and Jeanne d’Arc, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth of England,
who played parts of some importance, for good and ill, in the fortunes
of the world.
“Les Anciens out tout dit,” and the most curious thing about the
arguments now advanced in behalf of progressive womanhood is that they
have an air of specious novelty about them when they have all been
uttered many times before. There is scarcely a principle urged to-day
by enthusiastic champions of the cause which was not deftly handled
by that eminently “new” woman, Christine de Pisan, in the fourteenth
century, before the court of Charles VI. of France. If we read even
a few pages of “La Cité des Dames,”--and how delightfully modern is
the very title!--we recognize the same familiar sentiments, albeit
disguised in archaic language and with many old-time conceits, that
we are accustomed to hearing every day. Christine is both amused and
wearied, as are we, by the foolish invectives of men against our useful
and necessary sex. She is forced to conclude that God had made a foul
thing when He made woman, yet wonders a little--not unnaturally--that
“so worshipful a Workman should have deigned to turn out so poor a
piece of work.” This leads her to reflect on our alleged weakness and
incapacity, of which she finds, as do we, but insufficient proof.
She is firm to insist, as do we, that if little maidens are put to
school, and carefully taught the sciences like men-children, they
learn as well, and make as steady progress. What is more, she is
able to prove her case, which we often are not, by writing a grave,
solid, and systematic treatise on arms and the science of war; a
treatise which handles every topic from the details of a siege to safe
conducts, military passports, and the laws of knightly courtesy. And
this complete soldier’s manual was held to be of practical value and
an authority in those battle-loving days. It may also be worth while
to mention that Christine de Pisan supported an invalid husband, two
poor relations, and three children by her pen; and what more could
any struggling authoress of our own century be reasonably expected to
accomplish?
Another interesting fact presented for our consideration, in these days
of Civic Clubs and active training for citizenship, is that one of the
first Englishwomen who entered the field of letters professionally,
as a recognized rival of professional men writers, entered it as a
politician, and a very acrid and scurrilous politician at that, who
made herself as abhorrent and abhorred as any law-giver in England.
This was Mary Manley, who, in the reign of Queen Anne, wrote the “New
Atalantis,” allying herself vigorously with the Tories, and pouring
forth the vials of her venom on the Duke of Marlborough, and--what is
harder for us to forgive--on Richard Steele, whom all women are bound
to honor a little and love a great deal, as having been, in spite of
many failings, our true and chivalrous friend. Not one of all the
modern apologists who prate about us endlessly to-day in print, in
pulpit, on the platform, and on the stage, has reached the simple
tenderness, the undeviating insight of Steele.
These things, however, counted for little with Mary Manley, who had
less sentiment and less reticence than most party writers of even
that outspoken and unsentimental age. Perhaps to attack those high
in power who have done their country such priceless service as did
the Duke of Marlborough, and to attack them, moreover, with an utter
lack of decency and self-respect, is not precisely the kind of deed
which warms our hearts to female politicians; but it must be confessed
that if this vehement partisan in petticoats had all the acerbity of
a woman, she had all the courage of one too. When her publisher was
prosecuted for the scandalous libels of the “New Atalantis,” she did
not seek to shelter herself behind his responsibility; but appeared
briskly before the Court of King’s Bench, acknowledged the authorship
of her book, and, with magnificent feminine effrontery, asserted it
was entirely fictitious. Lord Sunderland, who examined her, and who
appears to have been vastly diverted by the whole proceeding, pointed
out urbanely certain passages of a distinctly libelous character which
could scarcely have been the result of chance. “Then,” replied the
imperturbable Mrs. Manley, “it must have been inspiration.” Again Lord
Sunderland interposed with the suggestion that details of that order
could not well be traced to such a source. “There are bad angels as
well as good,” said Mrs. Manley serenely, and escaped all penalties for
her wrong-doing; earning for herself, moreover, solid rewards when the
Tories returned to power, which is something that never happens to any
would-be female politician of to-day.
For indeed the newly awakened and intelligent interest which women are
supposed to be taking in things political is but a faint reflection
of the fiery zest with which our English great-great-grandmothers
threw themselves into the affairs of the nation, meddling and mending
and marring everywhere, until Addison, hopeless of any other appeal,
was fain to remind them that nothing was so injurious to beauty as
inordinate party zeal. “It gives an ill-natured cast to the eye,” he
wrote warningly, “and a disagreeable sourness to the look. Besides
that, it makes the lines too strong, and flushes them worse than
brandy. Indeed I never knew a party-woman who kept her countenance for
a twelvemonth.”
But little the ardent politicians cared for such mild arguments as
these. In 1739, on the occasion of an especially important debate
in the House of Lords, the Chancellor gave orders that ladies were
not to be admitted, and that the gallery was to be reserved for the
Commons. The Duchess of Queensberry, the Duchess of Ancaster, Lady
Huntingdon, and a number of other determined women presented themselves
at the door by nine o’clock in the morning. When refused entrance, the
Duchess of Queensberry, with an oath as resonant as the doorkeeper’s,
swore that in they would come, in spite of the Chancellor and the
Lords and the Commons to boot. The Peers resolved to starve them into
docility, and gave orders that the doors should not be opened until
they raised their siege. These Amazons stood there, so we are informed
by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, from nine in the morning until five in
the afternoon, uncheered by food or drink, but solacing themselves
repeatedly by thumping and kicking at the doors with so much violence
that the speakers in the House were scarcely heard. When the Lords
remained unconquered by such tactics, the two duchesses, well versed
in the stratagems of war, commanded half an hour of dead silence;
and the Chancellor thinking this silence a certain proof of their
withdrawal (the Commons, who had been kept out all this time, being
very impatient to enter), the doors were finally opened; whereupon the
astute and triumphant women rushed in, and promptly secured the best
seats in the gallery. There they stayed, with magnificent endurance,
until after eleven at night, and indulged themselves during the debate
in such noisy tokens of regard or disapproval that the greatest
confusion ensued. The newest of new women is but a modest and shrinking
wild-flower when compared with such flaunting arrogance as this.
Nor were the “platform women,” as they are unkindly called to-day,
unknown or even uncommon in those good old times of domesticity; for
nearly a hundred and twenty years ago the “London Mirror” printed a
caustic protest against the mannishness of fashionable ladies, their
pernicious meddling with things which concerned them not, and, above
all, their calm effrontery in addressing public audiences on political
and social questions, “with the spirit and freedom of the boldest male
orators.” In fact, several societies had been already formed with the
express view of enlightening the public as to the opinions of women on
matters which were presumably beyond their jurisdiction, and of pushing
these opinions to some ultimate and practical conclusion,--which is
the precise object of similar societies to-day. For the determination
of the sex from the beginning has been, not merely to assert its own
intellectual independence, like the heroine of Vanbrugh’s comedy,--so
out of date yet so strikingly modern,--who affirms that the pleasure
of women’s lives is founded on entire liberty to think and to do what
they please; but there was always the well-defined anticipation of
influencing by unconstrained thought and action the current of affairs.
They wished their voices to count. When Dr. Sacheverell was prosecuted
by the Whigs for his famous sermons on the neglect of the church by
the government, the women of London made his cause their own. All
duties and all diversions gave way before the paramount excitement of
this trial. Churches and theatres were alike deserted. “The ladies lay
aside their tea and chocolate,” writes Defoe pleasantly, “leave off
visiting after dinner, and, forming themselves into cabals, turn privy
councillors, and settle the affairs of state. Gallantry and gayety
are given up for business. Even the little girls talk politics.” Lady
Wentworth, with her customary acuteness, remarked that Dr. Sacheverell
would make the women good house-wives. The laziest of them had ceased
to lie in bed in the mornings, since the trial began every day at
seven. So great was the enthusiasm for the persecuted divine, that his
conviction and punishment, though the latter was purely nominal, helped
largely to overthrow the Whig ministry, and added one more triumph to
the energetic interference, the “pernicious meddling,” of women.
To understand, however, the full extent of female influence in affairs
of state, we should turn to France, where for centuries the sex has
played an all-important part, for good and ill, in the ruling of
the land. Any page of French history will tell this tale, from the
far-off day when Brabant and Hainault, and England, too, listened
to the persuasions of Joan of Valois, raised the siege of Tournay,
and suffered the exhausted nation to breathe again, down to the
less impetuous age when that astute princess, Charlotte Elizabeth,
remarked--out of the fullness of her hatred for Mme. de Maintenon--that
France had been governed by too many women, young and old, and that
it was almost time the men began to take a hand. Perhaps we can best
appreciate the force of feminine dominion when we read the half-amused,
half-exasperated comments of Gouverneur Morris, whose diary, written on
the eve of the French Revolution, reveals an intimate knowledge of that
strange society, already crumbling to decay. At a dinner in the château
of M. le Norrage, the political situation is discussed with so much
vehemence by the men that the women’s gentler voices are lost in the
uproar, which sorely vexes these fair politicians, accustomed to being
listened to with deference. “They will have more of this,” says Morris
shrewdly, “if the States General should really fix a constitution.
Such an event would be particularly distressing to the women of this
country, for they would be thereby deprived of their share in the
government; and hitherto they have exercised an authority almost
unlimited, with no small pleasure to themselves, though not perhaps
with the greatest advantage to the community.”
He realizes this more fully when he goes to consult with M. de Corney
on a question of finance, and finds that Mme. de Corney is well
acquainted with the matter. “It is the woman’s country,” he writes with
whimsical dismay; and he is fain to repeat the sentiment hotly and
angrily when Mme. de Staël, who was not wont to be troubled by petty
scruples, dupes him into showing her some papers, and gossips about
them to her father and Bishop d’Autun. “She is a devilish creature,”
says the outraged American, feeling he has been outwitted in the
game; but it is difficult, in the face of such little anecdotes, to
distinguish between the new woman and the old.
One thing is tolerably sure. The new woman, to whatever century she
belonged,--and she has been under varying aspects the product of
every age,--has never achieved great popularity with man. This is
not wholly to her discredit; for the desire to look at life from a
standpoint of her own, while irritating and subversive of general
order, cannot reasonably be accounted a crime. Yet when we consider
the invectives which have been hurled at women from the day they were
created until now, we find that most of them have for their basis the
natural indignation which is born of disregarded advice. The whole
ground for complaint is summed up admirably in the angry remonstrance
of Clarissa Harlowe’s uncle, when his niece prefers the lover she has
chosen for herself to the suitor chosen for her by her family. “I have
always found a most horrid romantic perverseness in your sex,” says
this experienced old man. “To do and to love what you should not, is
meat, drink, and vesture to you all.” There lies the argument in a
nutshell; and if Richardson be the first great English novelist who
has painted for us a woman moved by the secret and powerful impulses
of her heart, the unwritten and irrefutable laws of her own nature,
he has also expressed for us in brief and accurate phraseology the
masculine reading of this problem. “Nothing worse than woman can
befall mankind,” says Sophocles apprehensively; and far-off Hesiod, as
cheerless, but somewhat more philosophical, explains that our sex is a
necessary deduction from the coveted happiness of life. Burton tells
us of an excellent old anchorite who fell into a “cold palsy” whenever
a woman was brought before him; which pious and consistent behavior
is more to my liking than the gay ingratitude of the Greeks, who drew
their inspiration from the fairness and weakness, the passion and pain
of women, and then bequeathed to all coming ages the weight of their
dispassionate condemnation. Better to me is the old Sanskrit saying,
“The hearts of women are as the hearts of wolves;” or the Turkish
jibe anent the length of our hair and the shortness of our wits; or
that last and final verdict from the pen of our modern analyst, Mr.
George Meredith, “Woman will be the last thing civilized by man,”--an
ambiguously brilliant epigram which waits for the elucidation of the
critics.
The really curious thing is, not that we should have been found in
a general way unsatisfactory, which was to be expected, but that we
should be held to blame for such widely divergent desires. Take for
example the indifference of women to intellectual pursuits, which has
earned for them centuries of masculine contempt; and their thirst for
intellectual pursuits, which has earned for them centuries of masculine
disapprobation. On the one hand, we have some of the most delightful
writers England has known, calmly reminding them that sewing is their
one legitimate occupation. “Now for women,” says dear old Robert
Burton, “instead of laborious studies, they have curious needlework,
cutwork, spinning, bonelace, and many pretty devices of their own
making with which to adorn their houses.” Addison, a hundred years
later, does not seem to have advanced one step beyond this eminently
conservative attitude. He wishes with all his heart that women would
apply themselves more to embroidery and less to rhyme, a wish which
was heartily echoed by Edward Fitzgerald, who carried unimpaired to
the nineteenth century these sound and orthodox principles. Addison
would rather listen to his fair friends discussing the merits of red
and blue embroidery silks than the merits of Whigs and Tories. He
would rather see them work the whole of the battle of Blenheim into
their tapestry frames than hear their opinions once about the Duke
of Marlborough. He waxes eloquent and even vindictive--for so mild a
man--over the neglect of needlework amid more stirring avocations.
“It grieves my heart,” he says, speaking in the character of an
indignant letter-writer to the “Spectator,” “to see a couple of proud,
idle flirts sipping their tea for a whole afternoon”--and doubtless
discussing politics with heat--“in a room hung round with the industry
of their great-grandmothers.”
It has been observed before this that it is always the
great-grandmothers in whom is embodied the last meritoriousness of
the sex; always the great-grandmothers for whom is cherished this
pensive masculine regard. And it may perhaps be worth while to note
that these “proud, idle flirts” of Addison’s day have now become
_our_ virtuous great-grandmothers, and occupy the same shadowy
pedestal of industrious domesticity. I have little doubt that _their_
great-grandmothers, who worked--or did not work--the tapestries upon
the Addisonian walls, were in their day the subject of many pointed
reproaches, and bidden to look backward on the departed virtues of
still remoter generations. And, by the same token, it is encouraging to
think that, in the years to come, we too shall figure as lost examples
of distinctly feminine traits; we too shall be praised for our sewing
and our silence, our lack of learning and our “stayathomeativeness,”
that quality which Peacock declared to be the finest and rarest
attribute of the sex. What a pleasure for the new woman of to-day, who
finds herself vilified beyond her modest deserts, to reflect that she
is destined to shine as the revered and faultless great-grandmother of
the future.
To return, however, to the contrasting nature of the complaints lodged
against her in her more fallible character of great-grand-daughter.
Hazlitt, who was by no means indifferent to women nor to their regard,
clearly and angrily asserted that intellectual attainments in a man
were no recommendation to the female heart,--they merely puzzled and
annoyed. “If scholars talk to women of what they can understand,” he
says, “their hearers are none the wiser; if they talk of other things,
they only prove themselves fools.” Mr. Walter Bagehot was quite of
Hazlitt’s opinion, save that his serener disposition remained unvexed
by a state of affairs which seemed to him natural and right. He thought
it, on the whole, a wise ordinance of nature that women should look
askance upon all intellectual superiority, and that genius should
simply “put them out.”--“It is so strange. It does not come into the
room as usual. It says such unpleasant things. Once it forgot to brush
its hair.” The well-balanced feminine mind, he insisted, prefers
ordinary tastes, settled manners, customary conversation, defined and
practical pursuits.
But are women so comfortably and happily indifferent to genius? Some
have loved it to their own destruction, feeding it as oil feeds flame;
and other some have fluttered about the light, singeing themselves to
no great purpose, as pathetically in the way as the doomed moth. At
the same time that Hazlitt accused the whole sex of this impatient
disregard for inspiration, Keats found it only too devoted at the
shrine. “I have met with women,” he says with frank contempt, “who
I really think would like to be wedded to a poem, and given away by
a novel.” At the same time that Mr. Pater said coldly that there
were duties to the intellect which women but seldom understood, Sir
Francis Doyle protested with humorous indignation against the frenzy
for female education which filled his lecture-room with petticoats,
and threatened to turn the universities of England into glorified
girls’ schools. At the same time that Froude was writing, with the
enviable self-confidence which was his blessed birthright, that it
is the part of man to act and labor, while women are merely bound by
“the negative obedience to prohibitory precepts;” or, in other words,
that there is nothing in the world which they ought to do, but plenty
which they ought to refrain from doing, Stevenson was insisting with
all the vehemence of youth that it is precisely this contentment
with prohibitory precepts, this deadening passivity of the female
heart, which “narrows and damps the spirits of generous men,” so
that in marriage a man becomes slack and selfish, “and undergoes a
fatty degeneration of his moral being.” Which is precisely the lesson
thundered at us very unpleasantly by Mr. Rudyard Kipling in “The
Gadsbys.”
“You may carve it on his tombstone, you may cut it on his card,
That a young man married is a young man marred.”
Now I wonder if the peasant and his donkey were in harder straits
than the poor woman, who has stepped down the centuries under this
disheartening, because inevitable condemnation. Always either too
new or too old, too intelligent or too stupid, too restless after
what concerns her not, or too passively content with narrow aims and
outlooks, she is sure to be in the wrong whether she mounts her ass or
leads him. Has the satire now directed against the higher education
of women--a tiresome phrase reiterated for the most part without
meaning--any flavor of novelty, save for those who know no satirists
older than the contributors to “Punch” and “Life”? It is just as new
as the new woman who provokes it, just as familiar in the annals of
society. Take as a modern specimen that pleasant verse from Owen
Seaman’s “Horace at Cambridge,” which describes gracefully and with
good temper the rush of young Englishwomen to the University Extension
lectures.
“Pencil in pouch, and syllabus in hand,
Hugging selected poets of the land,
Keats, Shelley, Coleridge,--all but Thomas Hood
And Byron (more’s the pity!),
They caught the local colour where they could;
And members of the feminine committee
To native grace an added charm would bring
Of light blue ribbons,--not of abstinence,
But bearing just this sense--
Inquire within on any mortal thing.”
This is charming, both in form and spirit, and I wish Sir Francis Doyle
had lived to read it. But the same spirit and an even better form may
be found in Pope’s familiar lines which mock--kindly as yet, and in
a friendly fashion--at the vaunted scholarship of Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu.
“In beauty and wit
No mortal as yet
To question your empire has dared;
But men of discerning
Have thought that, in learning,
To yield to a lady was hard.”
Even the little jibes and jeers which “Punch” and “Life” have flung so
liberally at girl graduates, and over-educated young women, have their
counterparts in the pages of the “Spectator,” when Molly and Kitty are
so busy discussing atmospheric pressure that they forget the proper
ingredients for a sack posset; and when they assure their uncle, who
is suffering sorely from gout, that pleasure and pain are imaginary
distinctions, and that if he would only fix his mind upon this great
truth he would no longer feel the twitches. When we consider that this
letter to the “Spectator” was written over a hundred and eighty years
ago, we must acknowledge that young England of 1711 is closely allied
with young England and with young America of 1897, both of whom are
ever ready to assure us that we are not, as we had ignorantly supposed
ourselves to be, in pain, but only “in error.” And it is even possible
that old England and old America of 1897, though separated by nearly
two centuries from old England of 1711, remain, when gouty, in the same
darkened frame of mind, and are equally unable to grasp the joyous
truths held out to them so alluringly by youth.
Is there, then, anything new? The jests of all journalism, English,
French, and American, anent the mannishness of the modern woman’s
dress? Surely, in these days of bicycles and outdoor sports, this at
least is a fresh satiric development. But a hundred and seventy-five
years ago just such a piece of banter was leveled at the head of the
then new and mannish woman, who, riding through the country, asks a
tenant of Sir Roger de Coverley if the house near at hand be Coverley
Hall. The rustic, with his eyes fixed on the cocked hat, periwig, and
laced riding-coat of his questioner, answers confidently, “Yes, sir.”
“And is Sir Roger a married man?” queries the well-pleased dame. But by
this time the bumpkin’s gaze has traveled slowly downwards, and he sees
with dismay that this strange apparition finishes, mermaid-fashion, in
a riding-skirt. Horrified at his mistake, he falters out, “No, madam,”
and takes refuge from embarrassment in flight. Turn the horse into a
wheel, the long skirt into a short one, or into no skirt at all, and we
have here all the material needed for the ever-recurring joke presented
to us so monotonously to-day.
The belligerent sex, Mr. Lang has called us, and we are not stouter
fighters now than we have been through all the centuries, albeit the
methods of warfare have changed somewhat, and changed perchance for
ill. It is pleasant to think that in the days when muscle was better
than mind (which days, thanks to our colleges, are fast returning to
us), and the sword was very much mightier than the pen, women held
their own as easily as they do now. Not only through the emotions
they inspired, as when the fair Countess of Salisbury, beautiful,
courageous, and chaste, heartened the little garrison besieged at
Warwick, so that, as it is quaintly chronicled, “every man was made
as valiant as two men, by reason of her kind and loving words.” Not
only through the loyalty they evoked, as when the heroic Countess of
Montford defended her husband’s cause through twelve years of well-nigh
hopeless struggle, until, by her invincible bravery and determination,
she placed her unheroic son upon the ducal chair of Brittany. Not only
through their astuteness in diplomacy, as when the crafty Duchess of
Brabant, “a lady,” says Froissart, “of a very active mind,” duped
England, cajoled France, and united the great houses of Burgundy and
Hainault in a double marriage, overcoming the well-nigh insuperable
obstacles by her woman’s wit and her resistless resolution. But when
it came to downright fighting, these hardy dames were not much behind
their husbands and brothers in the field. In that sharp warfare which
the Black Prince carried into the heart of Spain, it chanced that
Sir Thomas Trivet at the head of an English force laid siege to the
Castilian town of Alaro. Its garrison made a rash sortie, were trapped
in an ambuscade, and nearly every man was slain or taken prisoner.
Elated by this success, and deeming the town an easy prey, the English
marched joyously to occupy it. But behold! the women had closed the
gates and barriers, mounted the battlements, and were ready to defend
themselves against all comers. Their men might be foolish enough to
fall into the enemy’s snares, but they would look after their homes.
Sir Thomas, like the gallant Englishman he was, refused to make the
attack. “See these good women,” he said, “standing like wolf-dogs on
their walls. Let us turn back, and God grant our English wives to be
as brave in battle.”
The ludicrous side of female belligerency has seldom been lacking in
history. It is admirably illustrated by the story, at once absurd and
tragic, of the unfortunate William Scott of Harden, whose wife, an
aggressively pious woman, insisted on attending the forbidden meetings
of the Covenanters. Scott was called before the Council, and told to
keep his lady at home. He answered, frankly and sadly, that he could
not. The Council, arguing after the fashion of the Queen in “Alice in
Wonderland,” insisted that if he had a wife he could oblige her to obey
him, and dismissed him with a serious warning. Off to the Eildon Hills
went Madam Scott, and prayed as hard as ever. Her husband received a
second summons from the Council, and was fined a thousand pounds for
her obstinate recusancy. Madam Scott, who now occupied the proud yet
comfortable position of a martyr for the faith whose sufferings were
borne vicariously by another, clung more insistently than before to
her religious rights. Scott was fined another thousand pounds. Madam
Scott merely denounced the persecutors of the righteous with redoubled
vehemence at the next gathering of the elect. The luckless man was
then actually imprisoned in the Bass Fortress, where he remained three
years, while his triumphant spouse, secure from molestation, trod
her saintly path, and prayed whenever and wherever she desired. The
revolting wife is not invariably a thing of beauty, but it is hard to
see how she could carry her spirit of independence any farther.
For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and
over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century. All that
we value as well as all that we condemn in womanhood has played its
part for good and for evil in the history of mankind. To talk about
either sex as a solid embodiment of reform is as unmeaning as to talk
about it as a solid embodiment of demoralization. If the mandrake be
charmed by a woman’s touch, as Josephus tells us, the rue, says Pliny,
dies beneath her fingers. She has made and marred from the beginning,
she will make and mar to the end. The best and newest daughter of
this restless generation may well read envyingly Sainte Beuve’s brief
description of Mme. de Sévigné, a picture drawn with a few strokes,
clear, delicate, and convincing. “She had a genius for conversation
and society, a knowledge of the world and of men, a lively and acute
appreciation both of the becoming and the absurd.” Such women make the
world a pleasant place to live in; and, to the persuasive qualities
which win their way through adamantine resistance, Mme. de Sévigné
added that talent for affairs which is the birthright of her race, that
talent for affairs which we value so highly to-day, and the broader
cultivation of which is perhaps the only form of newness worth its
name. Since Adam delved and Eve span, life for all of us has been full
of labor; but as the sons of Adam no longer exclusively delve, so the
daughters of Eve no longer exclusively spin. In fact, delving and
spinning, though admirable occupations, do not represent the sum total
of earthly needs. There are so many, many other useful things to do,
and women’s eager finger-tips burn to essay them all.
“Cora’s riding, and Lilian’s rowing,
Celia’s novels are books one buys,
Julia’s lecturing, Phillis is mowing,
Sue is a dealer in oils and dyes;
Flora and Dora poetize,
Jane is a bore, and Bee is a blue,
Sylvia lives to anatomize,
Nothing is left for the men to do.”
The laugh has a malicious ring, yet it is good-tempered too, as though
Mr. Henley were not sufficiently enamoured of work to care a great
deal who does it in his place. Even the plaintive _envoy_ is less
heart-rending than he would have it sound, and in its familiar burden
we catch an old-time murmur of forgotten things.
“Prince, our past in the dust-heap lies!
Saving to scrub, to bake, to brew,
Nurse, dress, prattle, and scandalize,
Nothing is left for the men to do.”
THE DEATHLESS DIARY.
Four ways there are of telling a curious world that endless story
of the past which it is never tired of hearing. History, memoir,
biography, and the diary run back like four smooth roads, connecting
our century, our land, our life, with other centuries and lands and
lives that have all served in turn to make us what we are. Of these
four roads, I like the narrowest best. History is both partial and
prejudiced, sinning through lack of sympathy as well as through lack
of truth. Memoirs are too often false and malicious. Biographies
are misleading in their flattery: there is but one Boswell. Diaries
tell their little tales with a directness, a candor, conscious or
unconscious, a closeness of outlook, which gratifies our sense of
security. Reading them is like gazing through a small clear pane of
glass. We may not see far and wide, but we see very distinctly that
which comes within our field of vision.
In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women
wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us. Neither
“eternal youth” nor “nothing else to do” seems an adequate foundation
for such structures. They were considered then a profitable waste
of time, and children were encouraged to write down in little books
the little experiences of their little lives. Thus we have the few
priceless pages which tell “pet Marjorie’s” story; the incomparable
description of Hélène Massalski’s schooldays at the Abbaye de Notre
Dame aux Bois; the demure vivacity of Anna Green Winslow; the lively,
petulant records of Louisa and Richenda Gurney; the amusing experiences
of that remarkable and delightful urchin, Richard Doyle. These youthful
diaries, whether brief or protracted, have a twofold charm, revealing
as they do both child-life and the child itself. It is pleasant to
think that one of the little Gurneys, who were all destined to grow
into such relentlessly pious women that their adult letters exclude
the human element absolutely in favor of spiritual admonitions, was
capable, when she was young, of such a defiant sentiment as this: “I
read half a Quaker’s book through with my father before meeting. I am
quite sorry to see him grow so Quakerly.” Or, worse and worse: “We went
on the highway this afternoon for the purpose of being rude to the
folks that passed. I do think being rude is most pleasant sometimes.”
Of course she did, poor little over-trained, over-disciplined Richenda,
and her open confession of iniquity contrasts agreeably with the
anxious assurance given by Anna Winslow to her mother that there
had been “no rudeness, Mamma, I assure you,” at her evening party.
Naturally, a diary written by a little girl for the scrutiny and
approbation of her parents is a very different thing from a diary
written by a little girl for her own solace and diversion. The New
England child is always sedate and prim, mindful that she is twelve
years old, and that she is expected to live up to a rather rigorous
standard of propriety. She would no more dream of going into the
highway “for the purpose of being rude to the folks that passed” than
she would dream of romping with boys in those decorous Boston streets
where, as Mr. Birrell pleasantly puts it, “respectability stalked
unchecked.” Neither does she consider her diary a vent for naughty
humors. She fills it with a faithful account of her daily occupations
and amusements, and we learn from her how much wine and punch little
New England girls were allowed to drink a hundred years ago; how they
danced five hours on an unsustaining supper of cakes and raisins; how
they sewed more than they studied, and studied more than they played;
and what wondrous clothes they wore when they were permitted to be seen
in company.
“I was dressed in my yelloe coat black bib and apron,” writes Anna in
an unpunctuated transport of pride, “black feathers on my head, my
paste comb and all my paste garnet marquasett and jet pins, together
with my silver plume, my locket, rings, black collar round my neck,
black mitts and yards of blue ribbon (black and blue is high taste)
striped tucker and ruffles (not my best) and my silk shoes completed my
dress.”
And none too soon, thinks the astonished reader, who fancied in his
ignorance that little girls were plainly clad in those fine old days of
simplicity. Neither Marie Bashkirtseff nor Hélène Massalski cared more
about frippery than did this small Puritan maid. Indeed, Hélène, after
one passionate outburst, resigned herself with great good humor to the
convent uniform, and turned her alert young mind to other interests and
pastimes. If the authenticity of her childish copy-books can be placed
beyond dispute, no youthful record rivals them in vivacity and grace.
It was the fashion among the older _pensionnaires_ of Notre Dame aux
Bois to keep elaborate journals, and the little Polish princess, though
she tells us that she wrote so badly as to be in perpetual penance for
her disgraceful “tops and tails,” scribbled away page after page with
reckless sincerity and spirit. She is so frank and gay, so utterly free
from pretense of any kind, that English readers, or at least English
reviewers, appear to have been somewhat scandalized by her candor;
and these innocent revelations have been made the subject of serious
diatribes against convent schools, which, it need hardly be said, have
altered radically in the past century, and were, at their worst, better
than any home training possible in Hélène Massalski’s day. And what
fervor and charm in her affectionate description of that wise and
witty, that kind and good nun, Madame de Rochechouart! What freedom
throughout from the morbid and unchildish vanity of Marie Bashkirtseff,
whose diary is simply a vent for her own exhaustless egotism! There
must always be some moments in life when it becomes impossible for us,
however self-centred, to intrude our personalities further upon our
rebellious families and friends. There must come a time when nobody
will think of us, nor look at us, nor listen to us another minute.
Then how welcome is the poor little journal which cannot refuse our
confidences! What Rousseau did on a large scale, Marie Bashkirtseff
copied on a smaller one. Both made the world their father confessor,
and the world has listened with a good deal of attention to their
tales, partly from an unquenchable interest in unhealthy souls, and
partly from sheer self-complacency and pride. There is nothing more
gratifying to human nature than the opportunity of contrasting our own
mental and spiritual soundness with the disease which cries aloud to us
for scrutiny.
If the best diaries known in literature have been written by men, the
greater number have been the work of women. Even little girls, as we
have seen, have taken kindly enough to the daily task of translating
themselves into pages of pen and ink; but little boys have been wont
to consider this a lamentable waste of time. It is true we have such
painful and precocious records as that of young Nathaniel Mather, who
happily died before reaching manhood, but not before he had scaled the
heights of self-esteem, and sounded the depths of despair. When a boy,
a real human boy, laments and bewails in his journal that he whittled
a stick upon the Sabbath Day, “and, for fear of being seen, did it
behind the door,--a great reproach of God, and a specimen of that
atheism I brought into the world with me,”--we recognize the fearful
possibilities of untempered sanctimony. Boyhood, thank Heaven, does
not lend itself easily to introspection, and seldom finds leisure for
remorse. As a rule, a lad commits himself to a diary, as to any other
piece of work, only because it has been forced upon him by the voice of
authority. It was the parental mandate, thinly disguised under parental
counsel, which started young Dick Doyle on that delightful journal
in which spirited sketches alternate with unregenerate adventures
and mishaps. He begins it with palpable reluctance the first day of
January, 1840; fears modestly that it “will turn out a hash;” hopes
he may be “skinned alive by wildcats” if he fails to persevere with
it; draws an animated picture of himself in a torn tunic running away
from seven of these malignant animals that pursue him over tables and
chairs; and finally settles down soberly and cheerfully to work. The
entries grow longer and longer, the drawings more and more elaborate,
as the diary proceeds. A great deal happened in 1840, and every event
is chronicled with fidelity. The queen is married in the beginning of
the year; a princess royal is born before its close. “Hurra! Hurra!”
cries loyal Dick. Prince Louis Napoleon makes his famous descent upon
Boulogne, and Dick sketches him sailing dismally away on a life-buoy.
Above all, the young artist scores his first success, and the glory
of having one of his drawings actually lithographed and sold is more
than he can bear with sobriety. “Just imagine,” he writes, “if I was
walking coolly along, and came upon the Tournament in a shop window.
Oh, cricky! it would be enough to turn me inside out.”
He survives this joyous ordeal, however, and toils gayly on until
the year is almost up and the appointed task completed. On the 3d of
December a serious-minded uncle invites him to go to Exeter Hall, an
entertainment which the other children flatly and wisely decline.
What he heard in that abode of dismal oratory we shall never know,
for, stopping abruptly in the middle of a sentence,--“Uncle was going
somewhere else first, and had started,”--Richard Doyle’s diary comes to
an untimely end.
And this is the fate of all those personal records which have most
deeply interested and charmed us. It is so easy to begin a journal,
so difficult to continue it, so impossible to persevere with it to
the end. Bacon says that the only time a man finds leisure for such
an engrossing occupation is when he is on a sea voyage, and naturally
has nothing to write about. Perhaps the reason why diaries are ever
short-lived may be found in the undue ardor with which they are set
agoing. Man is sadly diffuse and lamentably unstable. He ends by
saying nothing because he begins by leaving nothing unsaid. “Le secret
d’ennuyer est de tout dire.” Haydon, the painter, it is true, filled
twenty-seven volumes with the melancholy record of his high hopes
and bitter disappointments; but then he did everything and failed in
everything on the same gigantic scale. The early diary of Frances
Burney is monumental. Its young writer finds life so full of enjoyment
that nothing seems to her too insignificant to be narrated. Long and
by no means lively conversations, that must have taken whole hours to
write, are minutely and faithfully transcribed. She reads “The Vicar of
Wakefield,” and at once sits down and tells us all she thinks about it.
Her praise is guarded and somewhat patronizing, as befits the author
of “Evelina.” She is sorely scandalized by Dr. Primrose’s verdict that
murder should be the sole crime punishable by death, and proceeds to
show, at great length and with pious indignation, how “this doctrine
might be contradicted from the very essence of our religion,”--quoting
Exodus in defense of her orthodoxy. She is charmingly frank and
outspoken, and these youthful pages show no trace of that curious,
half-conscious pleading with which she strives, in later days, to make
posterity her confidant; to pour into the ears of future partisans like
Macaulay her side of the court story, with all its indignities and
honors, its hours of painful ennui, its minutes of rapturous delight.
That Macaulay should have worked himself up into a frenzy of
indignation over Miss Burney’s five years at court is an amusing
instance of his unalterable point of view. The sacred and exalted
profession of letters had in him its true believer and devotee. That
kings and queens and princesses should fail to share this deference,
that they should arrogantly assume the privileges of their rank
when brought into contact with a successful novelist, was to him an
incredible example of barbaric stupidity. The spectacle of Queen
Charlotte placidly permitting the authoress of “Cecilia” to assist
at the royal toilet filled him with grief and anger. It is but too
apparent that no sense of intellectual unworthiness troubled her
Majesty for a moment, and this shameless serenity of spirit was more
than the great Whig historian could endure. To less ardent minds it
would seem that five years of honorable and well-paid service were
amply rewarded by a pension for life; and that Miss Burney, however
hard-worked and overdriven, must have had long, long hours of leisure
in which to write the endless pages of her journal. Indeed, a woman who
had time to listen to Fox speaking “with violence” for five hours, had
time, one would imagine, for anything. Then what delicious excitation
to sit blushing and smiling in the royal box, and hear Miss Farren
recite these intoxicating lines!
“Let sweet Cecilia gain your just applause,
Whose every passion yields to nature’s laws.”
And as if this were not enough, the king, the queen, the royal
princesses, all turn their heads and gaze at her for one distracting
moment. “To describe my embarrassment,” she falters, “would be
impossible. I shrunk back, so astonished, and so ashamed of my public
situation, that I was almost ready to take to my heels and run away.”
Well, well, the days for such delights are over. We may say what we
please about the rewards of modern novel-writing; but what, after
all, is the cold praise of reviewers compared with this open glory
and exaltation? It is moderately impressive to be told over and
over again by Marie Corelli’s American publishers that the queen of
England thinks “The Soul of Lilith” and “The Sorrows of Satan” are
good novels; but this mere announcement, however reassuring,--and it
is a point on which we require a good deal of reassurance,--does not
thrill us with the enthusiasm we should feel if her Majesty, and the
Prince of Wales, and the Duke of York, and the British public united
in a flattering ovation. The incidents which mark the irresistible and
unwelcome changes forced upon the world by each successive generation
which inhabits it are the incidents we love to read about, and which
are generally considered too insignificant for narration. In a single
page Addison tells us more concerning the frivolous, idle, half torpid,
wholly contented life of an eighteenth-century citizen than we could
learn from a dozen histories. His diaries, meant to be purely satiric,
have now become instructive. They show us, as in a mirror, the early
hours, the scanty ablutions,--“washed hands, but not face,”--the
comfortable eating and drinking, the refreshing absence of books, the
delightful vagueness and uncertainty of foreign news. A man could
interest himself for days in the reported strangling of the Grand
Vizier, when no intrusive cablegram came speeding over the wires to
silence and refute the pleasant voice of rumor.