Part 9
Some curious facts may be noted. The wife is kept in seclusion and the husband does the marketing, buying among other things her _rouge_. Observe how perfunctory are the pretty lady’s ablutions (the soap, by the way, is in the form of paste). The little boy represents the ruling sex and will be removed at an early age from her control. She is disposed to rebel against her lord and master, but takes the utmost care of the important boy-child. While the ladies with their slaves make up their own dresses, the designs and the finest needlework are done by men. The Greek woman in Athens was practically uneducated and regarded as an inferior being; but these ladies were Dorian Greeks and would no doubt be better treated and have somewhat more freedom—especially in Alexandria, which was a colony and, therefore, probably less conservative. Although no doubt veiled, their eyes would be visible and, as seen in the East to-day, a pretty woman can always manage to show her beauty, if she chooses. It will be seen that one man is polite to the two young, pretty, richly-dressed ladies, and saves them from being crushed by the crowd, while another is a crusty, grumpy person, who treats them with some rudeness and, in the original, ridicules their Dorian pronunciation. Praxinoë is most grateful to the polite man for what would now be an ordinary act of courtesy.
As regards the conversation Andrew Lang says: “Nothing can be more gay and natural than the chatter of the women, which has changed no more in two thousand years than the song of birds.”
* * * * *
I have seen A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract Of inland ground, applying to his ear The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell; To which, in silence hushed, his very soul Listened intensely; and his countenance soon Brightened with joy; for from within were heard Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed Mysterious union with its native sea. Even such a shell the universe itself Is to the ear of Faith; and there are times, I doubt not, when to you it doth impart Authentic tidings of invisible things; Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power; And central peace, subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation.
WORDSWORTH (_The Excursion_).
* * * * *
Marriage is a desperate thing; the Frogs in Aesop were extreme wise: they had a great mind to some Water, but they would not leap into the Well, because they could not get out again.
* * * * *
’Tis reason a Man that will have a Wife should be at the Charge of her Trinkets, and pay all the Scores she sets on him. He that will keep a Monkey, ’tis fit he should pay for the Glasses he breaks.
SELDEN (_Table Talk_).
* * * * *
When you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now; but vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much to learn so little, as the charity-boy said wen he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o’ taste. _I_ rayther think it isn’t.
CHARLES DICKENS (_Pickwick Papers_).
* * * * *
Matrimony is the only game of chance the clergy favour.
AUTHOR NOT TRACED.
* * * * *
A man, who admires a fine woman, has yet no more reason to wish himself her husband, than one, who admired the Hesperian fruit, would have had to wish himself the dragon that kept it.
ALEXANDER POPE.
* * * * *
You wish, Paula, to marry Priscus. I am not surprised; You are wise; Priscus will not marry you and he is wise.
MARTIAL, IX, 5.
* * * * *
IN THE TWILIGHT.
Men say the sullen instrument, That, from the Master’s bow, With pangs of joy or woe, Feels music’s soul through every fibre sent, Whispers the ravished strings More than he knew or meant; Old summers in its memory glow; The secrets of the wind it sings; It hears the April-loosened springs; And mixes with its mood All it dreamed when it stood In the murmurous pine-wood, Long ago!
The magical moonlight then Steeped every bough and cone; The roar of the brook in the glen Came dim from the distance blown; The wind through its glooms sang low, And it swayed to and fro With delight as it stood In the wonderful wood, Long ago!
O my life, have we not had seasons That only said, Live and rejoice? That asked not for causes and reasons, But made us all feeling and voice? When we went with the winds in their blowing, When Nature and we were peers, And we seemed to share in the flowing Of the inexhaustible years? Have we not from the earth drawn juices Too fine for earth’s sordid uses? Have I heard, have I seen All I feel and I know? Doth my heart overween? Or could it have been Long ago?
Sometimes a breath floats by me, An odour from Dreamland sent, That makes the ghost seem nigh me Of a splendour that came and went, Of a life lived somewhere, I know not In what diviner sphere, Of memories that stay not and go not, Like music heard once by an ear That cannot forget or reclaim it, A something so shy, it would shame it To make it a show, A something too vague, could I name it, For others to know, As if I had lived it or dreamed it, As if I had acted or schemed it, Long ago!
And yet, could I live it over, This life that stirs in my brain Could I be both maiden and lover, Moon and tide, bee and clover, As I seem to have been, once again, Could I but speak and show it, This pleasure more sharp than pain, That baffles and lures me so, The world should not lack a poet, Such as it had In the ages glad, Long ago.
J. R. LOWELL.
* * * * *
I am especially pleased with their _freundin_ (the German word meaning a female friend), which unlike the _amica_ of the Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now I know it will be said that a friend is already something more than a friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a female; but this I deny—in that sense at least in which the objection will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a sister—nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.
S. T. COLERIDGE (_Biographia Literaria_, Letter to a Lady).
Coleridge also says: “The qualities of the sexes correspond. The man’s courage is loved by the woman, whose fortitude again is coveted by the man. His vigorous intellect is answered by her infallible tact. Can it be true what is so constantly affirmed, that there is no sex in souls?—I doubt it, I doubt it exceedingly.”—_Table Talk._
But surely Coleridge might have found the best proof of his contention in the nature of children, the small boy who fights with his fists, plays with tin soldiers and despises “girls,” and the girl-child who loves her doll and her pretty clothes. See next quotation.
* * * * *
O thou most dear! Who art thy sex’s complex harmony God-set more facilely; To thee may love draw near Without one blame or fear. Unchidden save by his humility: Thou Perseus’ Shield wherein I view secure The mirrored Woman’s fateful-fair allure! Whom Heaven still leaves a twofold dignity, As girlhood gentle, and as boyhood free; With whom no most diaphanous webs enwind The barèd limbs of the rebukeless mind. Wild Dryad, all unconscious of thy tree, With which indissólubly The tyrannous time shall one day make thee whole; Whose frank arms pass unfretted through its bole Who wear’st thy femineity Light as entrailèd blossoms, that shalt find It erelong silver shackles unto thee. Thou whose young sex is yet but in thy soul;— As hoarded in the vine Hang the gold skins of undelirious wine, As air sleeps, till it toss its limbs in breeze;— In whom the mystery which lures and sunders; Grapples and thrusts apart; endears, estranges, —The dragon to its own Hesperides— Is gated under slow-revolving changes, Manifold doors of heavy-hingèd years. So once, ere Heaven’s eyes were filled with wonders To see Laughter rise from Tears, Lay in beauty not yet mighty, Conchèd in translucencies, The antenatal Aphodrite, Caved magically under magic seas; Caved dreamlessly beneath the dreamful seas.
FRANCIS THOMPSON (_Sister Songs_).
Francis Thompson is one of the “difficult” poets who repay study. Here he says that, in the young girl, sex appears in a less complex form than in the woman and, just as Perseus could safely look at the reflection on his shield of the fatal Medusa’s head, so we can freely view womanhood in the girl-child. Nothing conceals her open, innocent, feminine nature. She is the Dryad, the Nymph who lives in the tree and is born and dies with it, but is as yet unconscious of the tree, that is, of her sex. Her “young sex is yet but in her soul,” and is like the juice of the grape which has not yet fermented into wine, or the calm air which sleeps undisturbed. The mystery of womanhood, which attracts and yet, in its own protection, repulses man, will not come to her until after the changes of years. It is the Aphrodite lying in unawakened beauty before she rises as a goddess from the sea. (“Facilely” appears to have the strained meaning “easy to understand” or “simply”; the word “gated,” “confined,” is a curious use of a university word: the Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate, who has misbehaved, may be “gated” for a period, _i.e._, confined to the precincts of his own college.) “The dragon to its own Hesperides”—the Hesperides were maidens who guarded the golden apples of love and fruitfulness, which Earth had given to Hera on her marriage to Zeus. The maidens were protected by a dragon. Here the dragon is the maiden’s own sensitive reserve and self-protecting nature, which enable her to protect herself. (“Conchèd,” Aphrodite is lying in her shell.)
* * * * *
Women, as they are like riddles in being unintelligible, so generally resemble them in this, that they please us no longer when once we know them.
ALEXANDER POPE.
* * * * *
Compare the ancient with the modern world; “Look on this picture, and on that.” One broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into prominence. Among all the men of the ancient heathen world there were scarcely one or two to whom we might venture to apply the epithet “holy.” In other words, there were not more than one or two, if any, who besides being virtuous in their actions were possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides abstaining from vice regarded even a vicious thought with horror. Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few will maintain that it has been exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth is, that there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country since the time of Christ where a century has passed without exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at times like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has Christ failed? or can Christianity die?
SIR J. R. SEELEY (_Ecce Homo_).
The quotation from Hamlet should read, “Look here, upon this picture, and on this.”
* * * * *
DAY
Waking one morning In a pleasant land, By a river flowing Over golden sand:—
Whence flow ye, waters, O’er your golden sand? We come flowing From the Silent Land.
Whither flow ye, waters, O’er your golden sand? We go flowing To the Silent Land.
And what is this fair realm? A grain of golden sand In the great darkness Of the Silent Land.
JAMES THOMSON (“B.V.”)
* * * * *
For there is not a lie, spite of God’s high decree, But has made its nest sure on some branch of our tree, And has some vested right to exist in the land: And many will have it the tree could not stand, If the sticks, straws, and feathers, that sheltered the wrong, Were swept from the boughs they have cumbered so long.
W. C. SMITH (_Borland Hall_).
* * * * *
I shall be old and ugly one day, and I shall look for man’s chivalrous help, but I shall not find it. The bees are very attentive to the flowers till their honey is done, and then they fly over them.
OLIVE SCHREINER (_The Story of an African Farm_).
* * * * *
There are some of us who in after years say to Fate “Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.”
OLIVE SCHREINER (_The Story of an African Farm_).
* * * * *
Il n’a jamais fait couler larmes à personne sauf à sa mort.
(He never caused any one to shed tears, except at his death.)
_B. Seebohm’s Life of Grellet._
Epitaph on Pétion, President of Hayti about 1816.
* * * * *
... that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Middlemarch_).
* * * * *
If there are two things not to be hidden—love and a cough—I say there is a third, and that is ignorance, when one is obliged to do something besides wagging his head.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Romola_—Nello speaking).
George Eliot is quoting the Latin proverb, _Amor tussisque non celantur_. It is also found in George Herbert’s _Jacula Prudentum_, 1640. The same proverb appears with all sorts of variations, “love and a sneeze,” “love and smoke,” “love and a red nose,” “love and poverty,” etc., being the things that cannot be hidden. “Love and murder will out” (Congreve, _The Double Dealer_, Act IV, 2). (I took these instances from some collection of proverbs.)
* * * * *
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied The elements, must vanish;—be it so! Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour: And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower, We feel that we are greater than we know.
WORDSWORTH (_After-Thought_).
* * * * *
You can’t turn curds to milk again, Nor Now, by wishing, back to Then; And, having tasted stolen honey, You can’t buy innocence for money.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Felix Holt_).
* * * * *
The gods are brethren. Wheresoe’er They set their shrines of love or fear In Grecian woods, by banks of Nile, Where cold snows sleep or roses smile, The gods are brethren. Zeus the Sire Was fashioned of the self-same fire As Odin, He, whom Ind brought forth, Hath his pale kinsman east and north; And more than one, since life began, Hath known Christ’s agony for Man. The gods are brethren. Kin by fate, In gentleness as well as hate, ’Mid heights that only Thought may climb They come, they go; they are, or seem; Each, rainbow’d from the rack of Time, Casts broken lights across God’s Dream.
R. BUCHANAN (_Balder the Beautiful_).
* * * * *
“You remember Tom Martin, Neddy? Bless my dear eyes,” said Mr. Roker, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and gazing abstractedly out of the grated window before him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth; “it seems but yesterday that he whopped the coal-heaver down Fox-under-the-hill, by the wharf there. I think I can see him now, a-coming up the Strand between the two street-keepers, a little sobered by his bruising, with a patch o’ winegar and brown paper over his right eyelid, and that ’ere lovely bull-dog, as pinned the little boy arterwards, a-following at his heels. What a rum thing Time is, ain’t it, Neddy?”
CHARLES DICKENS (_Pickwick Papers_).
Mr. Roker is a turnkey in the Fleet prison.
* * * * *
THE COURTIN’
God makes sech nights, all white an’ still Fur’z you can look or listen, Moonshine an’ snow on field an’ hill, All silence an’ all glisten.
Zekle crep’ up quite unbeknown An’ peeked in thru’ the winder, An’ there sot Huldy all alone, ’Ith no one nigh to hender.
A fireplace filled the room’s one side With half a cord o’ wood in— There warn’t no stoves (till comfort died) To bake ye to a puddin’.
The wa’nut logs shot sparkles out Towards the pootiest, bless her, An’ leetle flames danced all about The chiny on the dresser....
The very room, coz she was in, Seemed warm from floor to ceilin’, An’ she looked full ez rosy agin Ez the apples she was peelin’....
He was six foot o’ man, A1, Clear grit an’ human natur’; None couldn’t quicker pitch a ton Nor dror a furrer straighter.
He’d sparked it with full twenty gals, He’d squired ’em, danced ’em, druv ’em, Fust this one, an’ then thet, by spells— All is, he couldn’t love ’em.
But long o’ her his veins ’ould run All crinkly like curled maple, The side she breshed felt full o’ sun Ez a south slope in Ap’il.
She thought no v’ice hed sech a swing Ez hisn in the choir; My! when he made Ole Hundred ring, She _knowed_ the Lord was nigher.
An’ she’d blush scarlit, right in prayer, When her new meetin’-bunnet Felt somehow thru’ its crown a pair O’ blue eyes sot upon it.
Thet night, I tell ye, she looked _some_! She seemed to ’ve gut a new soul, For she felt sartin-sure he’d come, Down to her very shoe-sole.
She heered a foot, an’ knowed it tu, A-raspin’ on the scraper,— All ways to once her feelins flew Like sparks in burnt-up paper.
He kin’ o’ l’itered on the mat, Some doubtfle o’ the sekle, sequel. His heart kep’ goin’ pity-pat, But hern went pity Zekle.
An’ yit she gin her cheer a jerk Ez though she wished him furder, An’ on her apples kep’ to work, Parin’ away like murder.
“You want to see my Pa, I s’pose?” “Wal ... no ... I come designin’”— “To see my Ma? She’s sprinklin’ clo’es Agin to-morrer’s i’nin’.”
To say why gals acts so or so, Or don’t, ’ould be presumin’; Mebby to mean _yes_ an’ say _no_ Comes nateral to women.
He stood a spell on one foot fust, Then stood a spell on t’other, An’ on which one he felt the wust He couldn’t ha’ told ye nuther.
Sez he, “I’d better call agin;” Sez she, “Think likely, Mister;” Thet last word pricked him like a pin, An’ ... Wal he up an’ kist her.
When Ma bimeby upon ’em slips, Huldy sot pale ez ashes, All kin’ o’ smily roun’ the lips An’ teary roun’ the lashes....
The blood clost roun’ her heart felt glued Too tight for all expressin’, Till mother see how metters stood, An’ gin ’em both her blessin’.
Then her red come back like the tide, Down to the Bay o’ Fundy, An’ all I know is they was cried In meetin’ come nex’ Sunday.
J. RUSSELL LOWELL
* * * * *
What is the life of man? Is it not to turn from side to side? From sorrow to sorrow? To button up one cause of vexation and unbutton another?
STERNE (_Tristram Shandy_).
* * * * *
I know thy heart by heart.
P. J. BAILEY (_Festus_).
* * * * *
HERBERT SPENCER’S “FIRST PRINCIPLES.”
Mr. Spencer’s genesis of the universe from chaos to the Crimean War ... For our own part, we must confess that this new book of Genesis appears to us no more credible than the old.
J. MARTINEAU (_Science, Nescience, and Faith_).
* * * * *
JAMES MILL.
Did the facts of consciousness stand, as he represents them, his method would work. He satisfactorily explains—the wrong human nature.
J. MARTINEAU (_Essay on John Stuart Mill_).
* * * * *
(Referring to those who insist on the _practical_ as against the _theoretical_.) This solitary term (“practical”) serves a large number of persons as a substitute for all patient and steady thought; and, at all events, instead of meaning that which is useful as opposed to that which is useless, it constantly signifies that of which the use is grossly and immediately palpable, as distinguished from that of which the usefulness can only be discerned after attention and exertion.
SIR HENRY MAINE.
* * * * *
(Men are) dragged along the physiological history, because easy to conceive, and baffled by the spiritual, because it has no pictures to help it.
J. MARTINEAU (_Hours of Thought_, I, 100).
* * * * *
As psychology comprises all our sensibilities, pleasures, affections, aspirations, capacities, it is thought on that ground to have a special nobility and greatness, and a special power of evoking in the student the feelings themselves. The mathematician, dealing with conic sections, spirals, and differential equations, is in danger of being ultimately resolved into a function or a co-efficient: the metaphysician, by investigating conscience, must become conscientious; driving fat oxen is the way to grow fat.
ALEXANDER BAIN (1818-1903) (_Contemporary Review_, April 1877).
* * * * *
There is a crude absurd materialism abroad which hasn’t yet learned the fundamental difference between Mind and Matter. It is altogether incomprehensible how any material processes can beget sensations and feelings and thoughts; it is altogether incomprehensible how _you_ arose or _I_ arose. Listen to Spencer:—“Were we compelled to choose between the alternatives of translating mental phenomena into physical phenomena, or of translating physical phenomena into mental phenomena, the latter alternative would seem the more preferable of the two.... Hence though of the two it seems easier to translate so-called Matter into so-called Spirit, than to translate so-called Spirit into so-called Matter (which latter is, indeed, wholly impossible), yet no translation can carry us beyond our symbols.”
RICHARD HODGSON (_Letter, March 21, 1880_).
* * * * *
_Clown._ What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?
_Malvolio._ That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.
_Clown._ What thinkest thou of his opinion?
_Malvolio._ I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.
_Clown._ Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness.
SHAKESPEARE (_Twelfth Night_, IV, 2).
* * * * *
As the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, “That, that is, is.”
SHAKESPEARE (_Twelfth Night_, IV, 2).
* * * * *
WHAT IS LOVE?