Part 16
"Born in Amherst, March 8th, 1796, fitted for college and accomplished alike in the fine arts and the exact sciences in an age when the standard of female education was comparatively low, associated with Dr. Hitchcock, then unknown to the public, in the instruction of Deerfield Academy, and there the instrument of her future husband's conversion, _filling_ to the full the office of a pastor's wife for five years, in Conway, Massachusetts, and for the rest of her long life sharing all her husband's labors, sorrows, joys, and honors, while at the same time she was the centre of every private, social, charitable, and public movement of which it was suitable for a lady to be the centre, she passed away from us by a death as serenely beautiful as the evening on which she died, May 26, 1863, at the age of sixty-seven, leaving a vacancy not only in the home and the hearts of her bereaved husband and afflicted children, but in the community and the wide circle of her acquaintance, which can be filled by none but Him who comforted the mourning family at Bethany. If strangers would form some idea of what Mrs. Hitchcock was, especially as a _help meet_ for her honored husband, and if friends would refresh their memory of a truly 'virtuous woman,' let them read, as it were over her still open grave, the dedication, by Dr. Hitchcock, of his 'Religion and Geology' to his 'beloved wife.' Never did husband pay to wife a higher or _juster_ tribute of respect and affection.
"The following is the dedication referred to. It was written in 1851:--
"'_To my beloved Wife._ Both gratitude and affection prompt me to dedicate these Lectures to you. To your kindness and self-denying labors I have been mainly indebted for the ability and leisure to give any successful attention to scientific pursuits. Early should I have sunk under the pressure of feeble health, nervous despondency, poverty, and blighted hopes, had not your sympathies and cheering counsels sustained me. And during the last thirty years of professional labors, how little could I have done in the cause of science, had you not, in a great measure, relieved me of the cares of a numerous family! Furthermore, while I have described scientific facts with the pen only, how much more vividly have they been portrayed by your pencil! And it is peculiarly appropriate that your name should be associated with mine in any literary effort where the theme is geology; since your artistic skill has done more than my voice to render that science attractive to the young men whom I have instructed. I love especially to connect your name with an effort to defend and illustrate that religion which I am sure is dearer to you than everything else. I know that you would forbid this public allusion to your labors and sacrifices, did I not send it forth to the world before it meets your eye. But I am unwilling to lose this opportunity of bearing a testimony which both justice and affection urge me to give. In a world where much is said of female deception and inconstancy, I desire to testify that one man at least has placed implicit confidence in woman, and has not been disappointed. Through many checkered scenes have we passed together, both on the land and the sea, at home and in foreign countries; and now the voyage of life is almost ended. The ties of earthly affection, which have so long united us in uninterrupted harmony and happiness, will soon be sundered. But there are ties which death cannot break; and we indulge the hope that by them we shall be linked together and to the throne of God through eternal ages. In life and in death I abide
"'Your affectionate husband, "'EDWARD HITCHCOCK.'"
Note here everything, but specially two things
1. Mrs. Hitchcock was fitted for college, accomplished in the fine arts and the exact sciences, sympathized in her husband's tastes and understood his pursuits so thoroughly as to be able to render him essential assistance in his professional duties.
2. Note the use and connections of the word _kindness_. She relieved him of the cares of a numerous family, and so gave him leisure for his scientific researches. Does that invalidate what I have before said regarding paternal duties? On the contrary, it strengthens my words. Dr. Hitchcock, in the fulness of his beautiful fame, in the ripeness of his years, confirms the truth of my principles. He knew--the great-hearted gentleman, the beloved disciple--that these cares belonged to him by right, and that it was of grace and not of law that his wife assumed them. So impressed is he with her kindness, so filled with gratitude is his magnanimous heart, that he even ventures to run the risk of wounding her delicacy by offering thanks in this public manner; shielding her, however, from every breath of offence by skilfully declaring her freedom from all participation in the publicity. _He_ uses the word kindness properly. It was a kindness, indeed, for her to step out of her own sphere and assume the burdens of his; but her husband's love was her impelling motive, and his gratitude her exceeding great reward. Not strictly her duty, it became undoubtedly her delight. For love is lavish. Love counts no sacrifice, knows of none. For a husband who loved and recognized her, a wife would bear Atlas on her shoulders. Only when it is coldly reckoned upon as a right, coldly received as a due, does service become servitude.
Read now the dedication of that royal book "On Liberty," by John Stuart Mill, "one of the most powerful and original thinkers of the nineteenth century," a man of culture so thorough that his has been said to be the most cultivated mind of the age:--
"To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings,--the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward,--I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful re-examination, which they are now never destined to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, we are told by encyclopedists, was educated in a masculine range of studies, and with a masculine strictness of intellectual discipline. The poets and philosophers of Greece were the companions of her mind. In imaginative power and originality of intellectual construction she is said to be entitled to the very first place among the later English poets. She had considered carefully, and was capable of treating wisely, the deepest social problems which have engaged the attention of the most sagacious and practical minds. Society in the aggregate, and the self-consciousness of the solitary individual, were held in her grasp with equal ease, and observed with equal accuracy. She had a statesman's comprehension of the social and political problems which perplex the well-wishers of Italy, and discussed them with the spirit of a statesman. This is not my pronunciamento nor my language, but those of Hon. George S. Hillard.
With a word fitly spoken this eminently strong-minded woman drew to her side a poet of poets, and he in turn drew her to his heart.
When ten years of marriage had made him so well acquainted with his wife as to give weight to his testimony, he wrote, at the close of a volume of poems called "Men and Women," "One word more,"--surely the seemliest word that ever poet uttered. He sang of the one sonnet that Rafael wrote, of the one picture that Dante painted,--
"Once, and only once, and for one only, (Ah, the prize!) to find his love a language Fit and fair and simple and sufficient,"--
and somewhat sadly adds:--
"I shall never, in the years remaining, Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, Make you music that should all-express me; So it seems: I stand on my attainment. This of verse alone, one life allows me; Other heights in other lives, God willing-- All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love.
"Yet a semblance of resource avails us-- Shade so finely touched, love's sense must seize it. Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly, Lines I write the first time and the last time.
* * * * *
He who writes may write for once, as I do.
"Love, you saw me gather men and women, Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy.
* * * * *
I am mine and yours,--the rest be all men's.
Let me speak this once in my true person,
Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence,-- Pray you, look on these my men and women, Take and keep my fifty poems finished; Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also! Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things.
"Not but that you know me! Lo, the moon's self! Here in London, yonder late in Florence. Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured.
* * * * *
What, there's nothing in the moon noteworthy? Nay--for if that moon could love a mortal, Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy) All her magic ('t is the old sweet mythos) She would turn a new side to her mortal, Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman,-- Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace, Blind to Galileo on his turret, Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats--him, even!
* * * * *
God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures Boasts two soul-sides,--one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her.
"This I say of me, but think of you, Love! This to you,--yourself my moon of poets! Ah, but that's the world's side,--there's the wonder,-- Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you. There, in turn I stand with them and praise you, Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it, But the best is when I glide from out them, Cross a step or two of dubious twilight, Come out on the other side, the novel Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of, When I hush and bless myself with silence.
"O, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas, O, their Dante of the dread Inferno, Wrote one song--and in my brain I sing it, Drew one angel--borne, see, on my bosom!"
Have you read it a hundred times before? Are you not grateful to me for giving you an excuse to begin on the second hundred?
O women, since the heavens have been opened to reveal these points of light, and you can infer somewhat the radiance which may wrap you about with ineffable glory, will you be satisfied again with the beggarly elements of a sordid world? Seeing on what heights a woman may stand, will you lower to the level graded by generations of silly, selfish, sensual male minds? Is it really worth while? If it is not a good bargain to lose your own soul that you may gain the whole world, what must it be to lose your soul and gain only a few stereotyped phrases? If every other man that ever lived preached a crusade for "stocking-mending, love, and cookery," and only these three whom I have mentioned bore a different banner, would it not still be better to shape your course by theirs? Is it not better to be worthy of the respect and reverence of thinkers, than to receive the serenade of sounding brass? Is it not better to heed the one true voice crying in the wilderness, than to join in the uproar of the idolatrous mob that shouts, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" When I lose faith in human destiny, and am almost ready to say, "Who shall show us any good?" I remember these utterances,--so lofty that one may say, not as the fulsome courtiers of old time cried, but reverently and duly, "It is the voice of God, and not of men,"--I recall these utterances, the first so heartsome and overflowing that there is no thought for niceties of phrase, but only one eager desire to pay an undemanded tribute, only a warm, imperative urgency of expression; the second inexpressibly mournful, but with such calm majesty of pain as an ancient sculptor might have wrought into passionless marble, or a Roman Senator folded beneath his mantle;--in the first, a man looking from his happy earthly home, forward and upward to a happier home in heaven; in the second, one gazing hopelessly from his waste places down into darkness and the grave;--the first believing, "Because I live ye shall live also"; the second sadly querying, "Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?"--the first become as a little child through faith; the second only as a pagan sage by reason;--the third heaping up with ever unwearied and ever more delighted hand the brightest gems of learning and fancy to adorn a beloved brow;--all turning at the summit of their renown, at the point of their grandest achievement, to do honor to a woman, the first two vindicating the intellect of wifeliness, the last the wifeliness of intellect; all breathing a magnanimity in whose presence no smallness can be so much as named;--and I say there is more strength and courage to be gained, more hope for the future and more faith in humanity to be gathered, from such a glimpse than from the contemplation of five--what? hundred? thousand? millions?--of ordinary marriages.
But to return to the question at issue,--Are these exceptional cases? It is man's own work if they are. Just as the elevation of one negro from slavery to supremacy, from stupidity to intelligence, is an indisputable proof that the elevation of the whole race is possible, so the case of one such woman as those I have mentioned settles the question for the whole sex. All may not attain the same heights, but this shows that intellectuality is open to them without destroying spirituality. Education, it seems, can do just as much for woman as for men. As careful mental training makes a man large-minded, it makes a woman large-minded. If it does not make a man narrow-souled and shallow-hearted, it will not make a woman so. If it does not unfit a man for manly duties, it will not unfit a woman for womanly duties. If ignorance and petty interests and limited views make a man trivial, obstinate, prejudiced, why is it not the same things which make a woman so? It is not necessary to determine whether there is an essential difference between the masculine and feminine brain or nature. All the difference, both in quantity and quality, which any one demands, may be granted without affecting this question of mental culture. No matter whether it be strong or weak, large or small, educate what mind there is to its highest capacity. If there is no difference, it is so much gained. If there is a difference, each mind will select from the material furnished that which is suitable for its own sustenance. Violet and apple-tree grow side by side. If the soil is poor they are both meagre; if the soil is rich, they both flourish. From the same tract one gathers his golden and mellow fruit, the other her glowing purple richness. You may put a covering over the violet and stunt it into a pale, puny, sickly thing, or you may cultivate it to an imperial beauty. But it will be a violet still. The utmost cultivation will not turn it into an apple-tree. Every plant may have a different taste and a different need from every other plant, but they all want the earth. The tiny draughts of the slender anemone are not to be compared with the rivers of sap that bear to the royal oak its centuries; but oak and anemone each demands all the juice it can quaff, and earth and sea and sky are alike laid under tribute to fill the fairy drinking-cup of the one, as well as the huge wassail-bowl of the other.
So with mind. The philosopher, the poet, the theologian, the chemist, quarry in the same mine, and each brings up thence the treasure that his soul loves. The same cloud sweeps over the farmer to refresh his thirsty lands, over the philosopher to confirm his theories, over the painter to tempt his pencil. The principle of selection that obtains in the lower ranks of Nature will not fail us in her higher walks.
It is because law, logic, science, philosophy, have been so almost exclusively in the hands of men, that they have accomplished such puerile results. With all their beauty and power, they have left our common life so poor, and vapid, and vicious, because only half their lesson has been learned. But they bear a message from the Most High, and when woman shall be permitted to lend her listening ear and bring to the interpretation her finer sense, we shall have good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.
But what is to become of masculine domination and feminine submission? O faithless and perverse generation! Do you indeed believe that it is "natural" for woman to trust and for man to be trusted,--for man to guide and woman to be guided,--for man to rule and woman to be ruled? In whose hand, then, lies the power to change Nature? Is she so weak that a little more or less of this or that, administered by one of her creatures, can alter all her arrangements? The granite of this round world lies underneath, and the alluvium settles on the surface. Do you suppose that anything and everything you can do in the way of cultivation will have power to upheave the granite from its hidden depths and send down the alluvium to discharge its underground duties? What bands hold in their place the oxygen and nitrogen? Who says to the silex and the phosphorus, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther"? And do you think that, if you cannot change the quantities of these simple elements, whose processes are patent to the eye, you can change the qualities of the most complex thing in the whole world, which works behind an impenetrable veil? If you cannot add one cubit to a woman's stature, nor make one hair of her head white or black, do you think you can add or subtract one feature from her mind? Cease with high-sounding praise to extol the womanly nature, while practically you deny that there is any. Bring your deeds up to your words. Believe that God did not give to bird and brake and flower a stability of character which he denied to half the human race. Believe that a woman may be a woman still, though careful culture make the wilderness blossom like the rose,--and not only a woman, but as much more and better a woman as the garden is more and better than the wilderness. The distinctions of sex are innate and eternal. They create their own barriers, which cannot be overleaped.
Do you think that, in the examples which I have given,--and perhaps in others which your own observation may have furnished you,--there was any unusual lack of harmony or adjustment? Do you judge, from the testimony of their husbands, that Mrs. Hitchcock, or Mrs. Mill, or Mrs. Browning were any more overbearing, any more greedy of authority, any more ambitious of outside power, any more unlovely and unattractive, than the silliest Mrs. Maplesap, who never knew any "sterner duty than to give caresses"? He must have used his eyes to little purpose who has failed to see that, in a symmetrical womanhood, every member keeps pace with every other. If one member suffers, all the members suffer. Power is not local, but all-embracing. Weakness does not coexist with strength. A silly, shallow woman cannot love deeply, cannot live commandingly. I believe that a woman of intellectual strength has a corresponding affectional strength. An evil education may have so warped her that she seems to be a power for evil rather than for good; but, all other things being equal, the sounder the judgment the deeper the love. The clear head and the strong heart go together. A woman who can assist her husband in geology, or revise his metaphysics, or criticise his poetry, is much more likely to hold him in wifely love and honor, is much more likely to enliven his joy and medicine his weariness, than she who can only clutch at the hem of his robe. Her love is intelligent, comprehensive, firmly founded, and not to be lightly disturbed. Weakness may possess itself of the outworks, but is easily dislodged. Strength goes within and takes possession.
All the unloveliness and unwisdom which may have characterized the "woman's movement," and of which men seem to stand in perpetual dread, are but the natural consequence of their own misdoing. It was a reaction against their wrong. Did women demand ungracefully? It was because their entreaty had been scorned and their grace slighted. Never,--I would risk my life on the assertion,--never did any number of women leave a home to clamor in public for social rights unless impelled by the sting of social wrongs, either in their own person or in the persons of those dear to them. Every unwomanliness had its rise in a previous unmanliness.
In a vile, nameless book to which I have before referred, I find quoted the story of a rajah who was in the habit of asking, "Who is she?" whenever a calamity was related to him, however severe or however trivial. His attendants reported to him one morning that a laborer had fallen from a ladder when working at his palace, and had broken his neck. "Who is she?" demanded the rajah. "A man, no woman, great prince," was the reply. "Who is she?" repeated the rajah, with increased anger. In vain did the attendants assert the manhood of the laborer. "Bring me instant intelligence what woman caused this accident, or woe upon your heads!" exclaimed the prince. In an hour the active attendants returned, and, prostrating themselves, cried out, "O wise and powerful prince, as the ill-fated laborer was working on the scaffold, he was attracted by the beauty of one of your highness's damsels, and, gazing on her, lost his balance and fell to the ground." "You hear now," said the prince, "no accident can happen without a woman being, _in some way_, an instrument."
One might, perhaps, be pardoned for asking whether entire reliance can be placed on testimony which is dictated beforehand on penalty of losing one's head; but the anecdote indicates about the usual quantity of sense and sagacity which is popularly brought to bear on the "woman question," and we will let it pass. I have quoted the story because, by changing the feminine for the masculine noun and pronoun, it so admirably expresses my own views. As I look around upon the world, and see the sin, the sorrow, the suffering, it seems to me that, so far as it can be traced to human agency, man is at the bottom of every evil under the sun. As the husband is, the wife is. The nursery rhyme gives the whole history of man and woman in a nutshell:--
"Jack and Gill Went up the hill To draw a pail of water; Jack fell down And broke his crown, And Gill came tumbling after."