Part 18

and the rod perpetually held over any deeper ripening is the not always unspoken threat of a forfeiture of masculine deference. From those who want what they have not shall be taken away that which they have. Very well, take it away. No thoughtful woman desires any homage that can be given or withheld at pleasure. The only reverence, the only respect, which has any value, is that which springs from the depths of the heart spontaneously. If the politeness which men show to women, and for which American men are famous, does not spring from their own sense of fitness, if it is a kind of barter, a reward of merit, let us dispense with it altogether. Sometimes I almost fear that it is so. Sometimes I am half inclined to believe that men are kind and courteous chiefly to those who are independent of them. In a railroad-car, not long since, I saw a woman, hard-featured, coarse-complexioned, ignorant, rude, and boisterous, engaged in an altercation with the conductor regarding her fare. The dozen men in the vicinity leaned forward or looked around with intent eyes, and--must I say, smiling? no--grinning faces, and saluted each fresh outburst of violence with laughter. Could a true courtesy have found amusement, or anything but pain, in such an exhibition? The woman was most unwomanly, but she was a woman. That should be enough, on your principles. She was a human being. That is enough, on mine.

In "Our Old Home," Hawthorne--O the late sorrow of that beloved name!--has most tenderly told the story of Delia Bacon. When her book was published, we are informed, "it fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never been picked up. A few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the volume deeper into the mud.... From the scholars and critics in her own country, indeed, Miss Bacon might have looked for a worthier appreciation." But, "If any American ever wrote a word in her behalf, Miss Bacon never knew it, nor did I. Our journalists at once republished some of the most brutal vituperations of the English press, thus pelting their poor countrywoman with stolen mud, without even waiting to know whether the ignominy was deserved. And they never have known it to this day, nor ever will."

Is this courtesy? Is this the lofty manhood which women are to bow down and worship? To such as these is it that women are to say, "What thou bid'st, unargued I obey"? Men may promise all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them, and women may make never so persistent efforts to bow down and enter into possession; but the worship will never be heartsome, nor the title ever secure. Never will the human mind, whether of man or woman, rest in that which is not excellent. So long as men are unworthy of fealty, they may forever grasp, but they cannot retain it. Their empire will be turbulent and their claim disputed. They will have a secure hold on woman's respect only so far as character commands it. Feudalism was better than barbarism, and the nineteenth is an advance on the fifteenth century. But the inmost germ of chivalry has not yet flowered into perfect blossom. By the restiveness of woman under the tutelage of man may he measure his own short-comings. It is not necessary that men should be renowned, but they should be great. Fame is a matter of gifts, but character is always at command. Not every man can be a philosopher, poet, or president, but every man can be gentle, reverent, unselfish, upright, magnanimous, pure. In field and wood and prairie, standing behind the counter, bending over lapstone or anvil, day-book, ledger, or graver, a man may fashion himself on the true heroic model, and so

"Move onward, leading up the golden year; For unto him who works, and feels he works, The same grand year is ever at the doors."

In that grand year courtesy shall be recognized as the growth of the soul and not of circumstance. A man shall bear himself towards a woman, not according to what she is, but to what himself is. He shall dispense the kindnesses of travel, assembly, and all manner of association, not only to the good and the gentle, but also to the froward; and he will do it, not because he thinks it best or right, but because he cannot do otherwise, without working inward violence upon himself. If a woman show herself rude or unthinking, or if in any way she transgresses the laws of taste, propriety, or morality, he shall not, therefore, consider himself at liberty to utter coarse jests or coarse rebuke, to cast free looks, or disport himself with laughter. It shall not be possible for him to do so; but he shall rather feel in his own heart the thrill and in his own blood the tingle of degradation, and gravely and sadly will he

"Pay the reverence of old days To her dead fame; Walk backward with averted gaze, And hide the shame."

Nor shall his deference be confined to woman, but man to man shall do that which is seemly. For all poverty, loneliness, helplessness, repulsiveness, and every form of weakness and misfortune, especially for those worst misfortunes that come from one's own imprudence or misdoing, he shall have sympathy and help. Then, indeed, "shall all men's good be each man's rule." Then between man and woman shall be no mine and thine, but Maud Muller's dream shall be fulfilled, and joy is duty and love is law.

Much of our classification of qualities into masculine and feminine, all assignment of superiority or inferiority to one or other of the sexes, seems to me to be founded on a false conception.[5] No virtue, scarcely a quality, is the prerogative of man or woman, but manly and womanly together make the perfect being. A man who has not in his soul the essence of womanhood, is an unmanly man. A woman who has not the essence of manhood, is an unwomanly woman. It is woman in man,--gentleness, guilelessness, truth, permeating strength and valor, that gives to man his charm: it is man in woman,--courage, firmness, fibre, underlying grace and beauty, that give to woman her fascination. A brutal man, a weak woman, is as fatally defective as a coward or an Amazon. God made man in his own image; God made man male and female. God, then, is in himself type of both male and female, and only in proportion as all men are womanly and all women manly, does each become susceptible of the love and worthy of the respect of the other. Neither is the man superior to the woman, nor the woman to the man, but they twain are one flesh.

[5] This paragraph was written with a partial reference to Mrs. Farnham's "Woman and her Era," of which book I had at the time but a very general notion, derived from one or two newspaper notices. Since then the appearance of an unclean criticism in the "Publishers' Circular" induced me to suspect that the book must embody some unusual excellence, or it could not have forced a fallen soul thus to foam out its own shame. From such a brief glance as I have been able to give to "Woman and her Era," while these pages are going through the press, I infer that, a little hidden from common eyes under a somewhat appalling mass of metaphysical and other learning, are collected a greater number of valuable, timely truths than I have met in any other book on this topic. Not agreeing to all her opinions, one can but rejoice in the sagacity which most of them display, and in the good temper and just spirit which characterize all.

XIV.

Doubtless there are many men who will say: To what purpose is all this? What new development has arisen to necessitate a new outcry? The world is getting on very well. People marry and are given in marriage; buy, sell, and get gain. There is a good deal of wickedness and suffering, but less of both than formerly, and both are evidently diminishing. Earth is not heaven, and in the world we shall always have tribulation, men and women both, but neither men nor women make any particular complaint, and on the whole it may reasonably be inferred that they are getting on comfortably. Pray let well enough alone.

But your well enough cannot be let alone, because it is not well enough. Nothing is well enough so long as it can be bettered. The world is not getting on comfortably, however comfortable you may be. Mounted in your car of Juggernaut, you may find the prospect pleasing, the motion exhilarating, and the journey agreeable, but your _Io triumphe_ has but a discordant twang to those whom you are so pleasantly crushing under your chariot-wheels. Your vision is not trustworthy. Through I know not what process a judicial blindness seems to come upon people, so that those ways seem good whose end is death. True, the world is advancing, but with a motion which, compared with that which it might attain, is retrogression. Whose fiat has decreed, "Thus fast shalt thou go, and no faster"? Why is it that we only creep, when we might run and not be weary, might mount up with wings as eagles? Why do we dwell, with toil and tears, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, when the voice from heaven centuries ago bade us come up higher? We have for our inheritance the elements of all things good and great and to be desired; but we lack the clear vision and the cunning hand to construct from them the Paradise that every family might be, in spite of the sin that despoiled the first; so we continue to dwell without Paradise, and very far off. Men and women are at variance with themselves and with one another. Power and passion run to waste. Positions are inverted, relations confused, and light obscured. The sanctuary of the Lord is built up with untempered mortar, and jewels of gold are degraded to a swine's snout.

Underneath all wars and convulsions, underneath all forms of government and all social institutions, it seems to me that the relations between man and woman are the granite formation upon which the whole world rests. Society will be elevated only just so fast and so far as these relations become what God intended them to be. Monarchies, republics, democracies, may have their benefits and their partisans, but the family is the foundation of country. I said "it seems to me" so. I have been charged with being sometimes too positive in my opinions. It may have been a youthful fault, but I long since corrected it. I should now suggest rather than affirm the equality between the angles of a triangle and two right angles. I am open to conviction on the subject of the multiplication-table; but on this point my feet are fixed, and, as my Puritan ancestors were wont to sing, somewhat nasally perhaps, but with hand on sword,--

"Let mountains from their seats be hurled Down to the deep, and buried there, Convulsions shake the solid world, My faith shall never yield to fear."

All other influences are fitful and fragmentary: the home influence alone is steady and sufficient, and the home influence depends upon the relations between father and mother. Unless there is on both sides respect first, and then love, such love as brings an all-embracing sympathy, and so an outer and inner harmony,--harmony between life and its laws and harmony between heart and heart,--the child's head will be pillowed upon discord, his cradle will be rocked by restlessness, and his character can hardly fail to be unsymmetrical. We have all seen the wickedness of man, that it is great in the earth; but why should it not be, when he is conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity; when his plastic soul is moulded amid jarring elements, and the voices that fall upon his infant ear--voices that should be modulated only to tenderness and love, and all the sweet and endearing qualities--are sharpened by coldness, embittered by disappointment, shrill through unremitting toil and rough with sordid ambitions? I only wonder that children bred up in such uncongenial homes come to be so much men and women as they are. No outbreak of treachery or turpitude astonishes me, when I remember the discordant circumstances into the midst of which the baby-soul was born. The only astonishment is, that every soul tends so strongly towards its original type as to have even an outer seeming of virtue. I wonder that, when the twig is so ruthlessly and persistently bent, the tree should reach up ever so crookedly towards heaven. Kind Nature takes her poor warped little ones, and with gentle, imperceptible hand touches them to a grace and softness which we have no right to expect, but to never that divine grace, that ineffable sweetness, of which the human soul is capable, and to which in its highest moods it ever yearns. O, if this one truth could be imprinted upon this age,--the one truth that the regeneration of the world is to come through love,--what hope could one not see for the future! God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, and henceforth there is no more offering for sin. It only remains for us to enter into the holiest by this new and living way which he hath consecrated for us. The offering of Divine love is complete. Let human love come in to do its part, and the human soul shall be sanctified from its birth. When clamor and wrath and evil-speaking and evil-feeling are banished from the household hearth, murder and plunder and lust will fly from the public ways. When the child is the child of mutual love and trust and reverence and wisdom, he will never belie his parentage.

We give to the dead their honors,--meet homage for the dust that shrined a soul. All passion is hushed, all pettiness vanishes in the presence of the dread mystery. But there is a mystery more dread, a mystery to which death is but as the sunshine for clearness,--the only sunshine which lights up its hidden labyrinths. It is the inexplicable secret of life. Fear not before the power which kills the body, but is not able to kill the soul. Stand in awe before that Power which can evoke both soul and body from nothingness into everlasting life. Death does but mark the accomplishment of one stage in a journey, with whose inception we had nothing to do. It is but a necessary change of carriage at some relay-house,--an involuntary and inevitable event in which we are but interested spectators or passive participants. But whether the Spirit shall set out on its journey at all, and what shall be the manner of its going, what its sustenance by the way, and what the light upon its path,--these are matters for concern; for these involve the weightiest responsibilities which man can bear. To fashion an infinite soul and send it forth upon an infinite career,--infinite susceptibilities laid open to the touch of infinite sorrow,--oh! to him who has ever faced the facts of being,--not death, not death, but this irrevocable gift of life, is the one solemnity, the awful sacrament!

You will say that you believe all this now, but you do not believe it. You agree to it in a certain sentimental Pickwickian sense, but you do not hold it as a living truth. You will assent to all that is said of the importance of the family, and then go straightway and give your chief time, thought, ingenuity, to your farms and your merchandise. What men really believe in is making money, not making true men and women. They believe that the greatness of a nation consists in its much land and gold and machinery and ability to browbeat another nation, not in the incorruptibility of its citizens. Wealth and fame, purple and fine linen and sumptuous fare, brute force of intellect, position, and power, one or another or all forms of self-indulgence,--these, not purity, love, content, aspiration, and hearty good-will, they take to constitute blessedness. What a man gives his life to, what he will attend to with his own eyes and mind, and will not trust to any other person, that he believes in. Any amount of fulsome adulation may be poured out upon the womanly in nature, but one particle of true reverence, one single award of rightful freedom, is worth it all. Surely, if you could but see how the land is as the garden of Eden before you, and around you a desolate wilderness, you would suffer yourselves to be charmed into its ways of pleasantness and its paths of peace. You do not know the beautiful capacities which this earth, this very sin-stained, death-struck earth, bears in its redeemed bosom. Where sin abounds to sorrow, grace may much more abound to peace. Through the wonder of the Divine redemption there is possible for us a new heaven and a new earth, wherein righteousness shall dwell, and always and everywhere righteousness and peace kiss each other. You sing the praises of woman, but you do not begin to dream of the loveliness, the blessedness, the beneficence of which she is capable. You extol her in song and story, but with your life you will not suffer women to be womanly. You are so evil, and you decree so much evil, that, alas! a woman wakes to conscious life, and is not free to follow the bent of her nature; she must expend all her energies in clearing a breathing-space. O, you do a fearful wrong in this, and you endure a fearful wrong. For do you think the work is for woman alone? Do you think there is any such thing as a "woman question" that is not also a man question? Do you not know, that

"Laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed, And, close as sin and suffering joined, We march to fate abreast"?

The first shock of penalty for transgression falls upon woman, but sure and swift as the lightning it passes on to man. Every measure that keeps woman down keeps man down. Every jot taken from woman's joy is so much taken from man. All his wrong-thinking and wrong-doing that bears so heavily upon her bears down upon himself with equal weight. Action and reaction are not only inevitable, but constant. Every small or great improvement in woman's condition elevates society, and society is only men and women. If men persist in alternate or in combined scorn and flattery, and will not do justly, the sorrow as well as the shame is theirs, and both are instantaneous.

We are told of the Persian bird Juftak, which has only one wing. On the wingless side the male has a hook and the female a ring, and when fastened together, and only when fastened together, can they fly. The human race is that Persian, bird, the Juftak. When man and woman unite, they may soar skyward, scorners of the ground, but so long as man refuses God's help proffered in woman, he and she must alike grub on the earth. If he will have her minister only to the wants of his lower nature, his higher nature as well as hers shall be forever pinioned.

You may possibly suspect that I have sometimes insinuated a greater moral obliquity on the part of man than on that of woman; and, indeed, I believe you are right. But the greater obliquity which I attribute to him is the result of his training, not an attribute of his nature. I once held the contrary opinion, but it is not tenable. Man is made in the image of God, and one part of God cannot be better than another. If men were not capable of being nobler than their ordinary life exhibits them, I should think this war an especial providence of God in other respects than are usually mentioned. But look at the developments which this very war has made. Is fortitude in pain, as many have asserted, a womanly attribute? But what fortitude under pain has been shown by our soldiers on the battle-field and in hospital! Torn with ghastly wounds, tortured with thirst, weak from loss of blood and lack of food, untended and unconsoled; or wasting away in the crowded hospital week after week and month after month, longing for home while dying for country; or scarred, maimed, and disabled for life; yet uttering no word of complaint, breathing no murmur of impatience, making a sport of pain, grateful for every word and touch and look and thought of tenderness, when a nation's tenderness is their just due, and glad all through that they have been able to fight for the beloved land,--is fortitude indeed only a womanly virtue? Or is it that gentleness and self-sacrifice are pure womanly, as is so often maintained? Look through the same battle-fields and hospitals; see men waiting upon men with the indescribable gentleness of compassion and pure sympathy; see them risking life to save a wounded comrade; see them passing day and night from cot to cot, to bathe the fevered brow, to moisten the parched lip, to soothe the restless mind, to receive the last message of love, and speed the parting soul. See the wounded man bidding the surgeon pass him by to heal the sorer hurts of his neighbor, or putting the canteen from his own lips to the paler lips beside him, till you shall take every soldier to be a Sidney. Rough men they may be or polished, rudely or delicately nurtured, trained to every accomplishment or only born into the world, but everywhere you shall look on such high heroic gentleness and thoughtfulness and patience and self-abnegation as make the courage of onset seem in comparison but a low, brute virtue. O blood-red blossoms of war, with your heart of fire, deeper than glow and crimson you unfold the white lilies of Christ!

Who shall show us any good that cannot be predicated of the nature which, stunted and twisted from the beginning, can yet bring forth such heavenly fruit? If God can work in man so to will and to do, is it for woman to stand aside and say, "I am holier than thou"?

But though the exigencies of war make more obvious the fine possibilities of men, it does not need a continent in deadly strife to indicate their existence. There are sacred hours in every life when that which is of the earth is held in abeyance and celestial influences reign. No man, perhaps, has ever lived who has not had his better moments,--moments when the spirit of God moved upon the turbid waters of his soul and brought light out of darkness and beauty from chaos: silent moments it may be, and solitary, or hallowed with a companionship dearer even than solitude; moments when helplessness, loveliness, innocence, or suffering thrilled him to the depths with pity and tenderness, with indignation or with adoration. Have you never seen the sweetest ties existing between father and daughter, or brother and younger sister, when the wife has been removed by death, or, through some fatal fault, is no mother to her child? What love, what devotion, what watchful care, what sympathy, what strength of attachment! The little unmothered daughter calls out all the motherhood in the great, brawny man, and they walk hand in hand, blest with a great content. "'Tis the old sweet mythos,"--the infant nourished at the father's breast.