Chapter 5

Infancy, is perhaps, the finest and most perfect illustration of simplicity. It is a state of genuine nature throughout. The feelings of children are under no kind of restraint, but pure as the fire, free as the winds, honest and open as the face of heaven. Their joys incessantly flow in the thickest succession, and their griefs only seem fleeting and evanescent. To the calls of nature they are only attentive. They know no voice but hers. Their obedience to all her commands is prompt and implicit. They never anticipate her bounties, nor relinquish her pleasures. This situation renders them independent of artifice. Influenced only by nature, their manners, like the principle that produces them, are always the same.

Genuine simplicity is that peculiar quality of the mind, by which some happy characters are enabled to avoid the most distant approaches to any thing like affectation, inconstancy, or design, in their intercourse with the world. It is much more easily understood, however than defined; and consists not in a specific tone of the voice, movement of the body, or mode imposed by custom, but is the natural and permanent effect of real modesty and good sense on the whole behavior.

This has been considered in all ages, as one of the first and most captivating ornaments of the sex. The savage, the plebeian, the man of the world, and the courtier, are agreed in stamping it with a preference to every other female excellence.

Nature only is lovely, and nothing unnatural can ever be amiable. The genuine expressions of truth and nature are happily calculated to impress the heart with pleasure. No woman, whatever her other qualities may be, was ever eminently agreeable, but in proportion as distinguished by these. The world is good-natured enough to give a lady credit for all the merit she can possess or acquire, without affectation. But the least shade or coloring of this odious foible brings certain and indelible obloquy on the most elegant accomplishments. The blackest suspicion inevitably rests on every thing assumed. She who is only an ape of others, or prefers formality in all its gigantic and preposterous shapes, to that plain, unembarassed conduct which nature unavoidably produces, will assuredly provoke an abundance of ridicule, but never can be an object either of love or esteem.

The various artifices of the sex discover themselves at a very early period. A passion for expense and show is one of the first they exhibit. This gives them a taste for refinement, which divests their young hearts of almost every other feeling, renders their tempers desultory and capricious, regulates their dress only by the most fantastic models of finery and fashion, and makes their company rather tiresome and awkward, than pleasing or elegant.

No one perhaps can form a more ludicrous contrast to every thing just and graceful in nature, than the woman whose sole object in life is to pass for a _fine lady_. The attentions she every where and uniformly pays, expects, and even exacts, are tedious and fatiguing. Her various movements and attitudes are all adjusted and exhibited by rule. By a happy fluency of the most eloquent language, she has the art of imparting a momentary dignity and grace to the merest trifles. Studious only to mimic such peculiarities as are most admired in others, she affects a loquacity peculiarly flippant and teazing because scandal, routs, finery, fans, china, lovers, lap-dogs, or squirrels, are her constant themes. Her amusements, like those of a magpie, are only hopping over the same spots, prying into the same corners, and devouring the same species of prey. The simple and beautiful delineations of nature, in her countenance, gestures and whole deportment, are habitually arranged, distorted, or concealed, by the affected adoption of whatever grimace or deformity is latest or most in vogue.

She accustoms her face to a simper, which every separate feature in it belies. She spoils, perhaps, a blooming complexion with a profusion of artificial coloring, she distorts the most exquisite shape by loads or volumes of useless drapery. She has her head, her arms, her feet, and her gait, equally touched by art and affectation, into what is called the _taste_, the _ton_, or the _fashion_.

She little considers to what a torrent of ridicule and sarcasm this mode of conduct exposes her; or how exceedingly cold and hollow that ceremony must be, which is not the language of a warm heart. She does not reflect how insipid those smiles are, which indicate no internal pleasantry; nor how awkward those graces, which spring not from habits of good-nature and benevolence. Thus, pertness succeeds to delicacy, assurance to modesty, and all the vagaries of a listless to the sensibilities of an ingenuous mind.

With her, punctilio is politeness; dissipation, life; and levity, spirit. The miserable and contemptible drudge of every tawdry innovation in dress or ceremony, she incessantly mistakes extravagance for taste, and finery for elegance.

Her favorite examples are not those persons of acknowledged sincerity, who speak as they feel, and act as they think; but such only as are formed to dazzle her fancy, amuse her senses, or humor her whims. Her only study is how to glitter or shine, how to captivate and gratify the gaze of the multitude, or how to swell her own pomp and importance. To this interesting object all her assiduities and time are religiously devoted.

How often is debility of mind, and even badness of heart concealed under a splendid exterior! The fairest of the species, and of the sex, often want sincerity; and without sincerity every other qualification is rather a blemish, than a virtue, or excellence. Sincerity operates on the moral, somewhat like the sun on the natural world; and produces nearly the same effects on the dispositions of the human heart, which he does on inanimate objects. Wherever sincerity prevails and is felt, all the smiling and benevolent virtues flourish most, disclose their sweetest lustre, and diffuse their richest fragrance.

Heaven has not a finer or more perfect emblem on earth than a woman of genuine simplicity. She affects no graces which are not inspired by sincerity. Her opinions result not from passion and fancy, but from reason and experience. Candor and humility give expansion to her heart. She struggles for no kind of chimerical credit, disclaims the appearance of every affectation, and is in all things just what she seems, and others would be thought. Nature, not art, is the great standard of her manners; and her exterior wears no varnish, or embellishment, which is not the genuine signature of an open, undesigning, and benevolent mind. It is not in her power, because not in her nature, to hide, with a fawning air, and a mellow voice, her aversion or contempt, where her delicacy is hurt, here temper ruffled, or her feelings insulted.

In short, whatever appears most amiable, lovely, or interesting in nature, art, manners, or life, originates in simplicity. What is correctness in taste, purity in morals, truth in science, grace in beauty, but simplicity? It is the garb of innocence. It adorned the first ages, and still adorns the infant state of humanity. Without simplicity, woman is a vixen, a coquette, a hypocrite; society a masquerade, and pleasure a phantom.

The following story, I believe, is pretty generally known. A lady, whose husband had long been afflicted with an acute but lingering disease, suddenly feigned such an uncommon _tenderness_ for him, as to resolve on dying in his stead. She had even the address to persuade him not to outlive this extraordinary instance of her conjugal fidelity and attachment. It was instantaneously agreed they should mutually swallow such a quantity of arsenic, as would speedily effect their dreadful purpose. She composed the fatal draught before his face and even set him the desperate example of drinking first. By this device, which had all the appearance of the greatest affection and candor, the dregs only were reserved for him, and soon put a period to his life.

It then appeared that the dose was so tempered, as, from the weight of the principal ingredient, to be deadly only at the bottom, which she had artfully appropriated for his share. Even after all this finesse, she seized, we are told, his inheritance, and insulted his memory by a second marriage.

THE MILD MAGNANIMITY OF WOMEN.

A late eminent anatomist, in a professional discourse on the female frame, is said to have declared, that it almost appeared an act of cruelty in nature to produce such a being as woman. This remark may, indeed, be the natural exclamation of refined sensibility, in contemplating the various maladies to which a creature of such delicate organs is inevitably exposed; but, if we take a more enlarged survey of human existence, we shall be far from discovering any just reason to arraign the benevolence of its provident and gracious Author. If the delicacy of woman must render her familiar with pain and sickness, let us remember that her charms, her pleasures, and her happiness, arise also from the same attractive quality. She is a being, to use the forcible and elegant expression of a poet,

"Fine by defect, and admirably weak."

There is, perhaps, no charm by which she more effectually secures the tender admiration and the lasting love, of the more hardy sex, than her superior endurance, her mild and _graceful_ submission to the common evils of life.

Nor is this the sole advantage she derives from her gentle fortitude. It is the prerogative of this lovely virtue, to lighten the pressure of all those incorrigible evils which it cheerfully endures. The frame of man may be compared to the sturdy _oak_, which is often shattered by resisting the tempest. Woman is the pliant _osier_, which, in bending to the storm, eludes its violence.

The accurate observers of human nature will readily allow, that patience is most eminently the characteristic of woman. To what a sublime and astonishing height this virtue has been carried by beings of the most delicate texture, we have striking examples in the many female martyrs who were exposed, in the first ages of christianity, to the most barbarous and lingering torture.

Nor was it only from christian zeal that woman derived the power of defying the utmost rigors of persecution with invincible fortitude. Saint Ambrose, in his elaborate and pious treatise on this subject, records the resolution of a fair disciple of Pythagoras, who, being severely urged by a tyrant to reveal the secrets of her sex, to convince him that no torments should reduce her to so unworthy a breach of her vow, bit her own _tongue_ asunder, and darted it in the face of her oppressor.

In consequence of those happy changes which have taken place in the world, from the progress of purified religion, the inexpressible spirit of the tender sex is no longer exposed to such inhuman trials. But if the earth is happily delivered from the demons of torture and superstition; if beauty and innocence are no more in danger of being dragged to perish at the stake--perhaps there are situations, in female life, that require as much patience and magnanimity, as were formerly exerted in the fiery torments of the virgin martyr. It is more difficult to support an accumulation of _minute_ infelicities, than any single calamity of the most terrific magnitude.

FEMALE DELICACY.

Where the human race has little other culture than what it receives from nature, the two sexes live together, unconscious of almost any restraint on their words or on their actions. The Greeks, in the heroic ages, as appears from the whole history of their conduct, were totally unacquainted with delicacy. The Romans in the infancy of their empire, were the same. Tacitus informs us that the ancient Germans had not separate beds for the two sexes, but that they lay promiscuously on reeds or on heath, spread along the walls of their houses. This custom still prevails in Lapland, among the peasants of Norway, Poland, and Russia; and it is not altogether obliterated in some parts of the highlands of Scotland and Wales.

In Otaheite, to appear naked or in clothes, are circumstances equally indifferent to both sexes; nor does any word in their language, nor any action to which they are prompted by nature, seem more indelicate or reprehensible than another. Such are the effects of a total want of culture.

Effects not very dissimilar, are, in France and Italy, produced from a redundance of it. Though those are the polite countries in Europe, women there set themselves above shame, and despise delicacy. It is laughed out of existence, as a silly and unfashionable weakness.

But in China, one of the politest countries in Asia, and perhaps not even, in this respect, behind France, or Italy, the case is quite otherwise. No human being can be more delicate than a Chinese woman in her dress, in her behavior, and in her conversation; and should she ever happen to be exposed in any unbecoming manner, she feels with the greatest poignancy the awkwardness of her situation, and if possible, covers her face, that she may not be known.

In the midst of so many discordant appearances, the mind is perplexed, and can hardly fix upon any cause to which female delicacy is to be ascribed. If we attend, however, to the whole animal creation, if we consider it attentively wherever it falls under our observation, it will discover to us, that in the female there is a greater degree of delicacy or coy reserve than in the male. Is not this a proof, that, through the wide extent of creation, the seeds of delicacy are more liberally bestowed upon females than upon males?

In the remotest periods of which we have any historical account, we find that the women had a delicacy to which the other sex were strangers. Rebecca veiled herself when she first approached Isaac, her future husband. Many of the fables of antiquity mark, with the most distinguishing characters, the force of female delicacy. Of this kind is the fable of Actaeon and Diana. Actaeon, a famous hunter, being in the woods with his hounds, beating for game, accidentally spied Diana and her nymphs bathing in a river. Prompted by curiosity, he stole silently into a neighboring thicket, that he might have a nearer view of them. The goddess discovering him, was so affronted at his audacity, and so much ashamed to have been seen naked, that in revenge she immediately transformed him into a stag, set his own hounds upon him, and encouraged them to overtake and devour him. Besides this, and other fables, and historical anecdotes of antiquity, their poets seldom exhibit a female character without adorning it with the graces of modesty and delicacy. Hence we may infer, that these qualities have not been only essential to virtuous women in civilized countries, but were also constantly praised and esteemed by men of sensibility; and that delicacy is an innate principle in the female mind.

There are so many evils attending the loss of virtue in women, and so greatly are the minds of that sex depraved when they have deviated from the path of rectitude, that a general contamination of their morals may be considered as one of the greatest misfortunes that can befal a state, as in time it destroys almost every public virtue of the men. Hence all wise legislators have strictly enforced upon the sex a particular purity of manners; and not satisfied that they should abstain from vice only, have required them even to shun every appearance of it.

Such, in some periods, were the laws of the Romans; and such were the effects of these laws, that if ever female delicacy shone forth in a conspicuous manner, it was perhaps among those people, after they had worn off much of the barbarity of their first ages, and before they became contaminated, by the wealth and manners of the nations which they plundered and subjected. Then it was that we find many of their women surpassing in modesty almost every thing related by fable; and then it was that their ideas of delicacy were so highly refined, that they could not even bear the secret consciousness of an involuntary crime, and far less of having tacitly consented to it.

INFLUENCE OF FEMALE SOCIETY.

The company of ladies has a very powerful influence on the sentiments and conduct of men. Women, the fruitful source of half our joys, and perhaps of _more_ than half our sorrows, give an elegance to our manner, and a relish to our pleasures. They soothe our afflictions, and soften our cares. Too much of their company will render us effeminate, and infallibly stamp upon us many signatures of the female nature. A rough and unpolished behavior, as well as slovenliness of person, will certainly be the consequence of an almost constant exclusion from it. By spending a reasonable portion of our time in the company of women, and another in the company of our own sex, we shall imbibe a proper share of the softness of the female, and at the same time retain the firmness and constancy of the male.

As little social intercourse subsisted between the two sexes, in the more early ages of antiquity, we find the men less courteous, and the women less engaging. Vivacity and cheerfulness seem hardly to have existed. Even the Babylonians, who appear to have allowed their women more liberty than any of the ancients, seem not to have lived with them in a friendly and familiar manner. But, as their intercourse with them was considerably greater than that of the neighboring nations, they acquired thereby a polish and refinement unknown to any of the people who surrounded them. The manners of both sexes were softer, and better calculated to please.

They likewise paid more attention to cleanliness and dress.

After the Greeks became famous for their knowledge of the arts and sciences, their rudeness and barbarity were only softened a _few degrees_. It is not therefore arts, sciences, and _learning_, but the company of the other sex, that forms the manner and renders the man _agreeable_.

The Romans were, for some time, a community without any thing to soften the ferocity of male nature. The Sabine virgins, whom they had stolen, appear to have infused into them the first ideas of politeness. But it was many ages before this politeness banished the roughness of the warrior, and assumed the refinement of the gentleman.

During the times of chivalry, female influence was at the zenith of its glory and perfection. It was the source of valor, it gave birth to politeness, it awakened pity, it called forth benevolence, it restricted the hand of oppression, and meliorated the human heart. "I cannot approach my mistress," said one, "till I have done some glorious deed to deserve her notice. Actions should be the messengers of the heart; they are the homage due to beauty, and they only should discover love."

Marsan, instructing a young knight how to behave so as to gain the favor of the fair, has these remarkable words:--"When your arm is raised, if your lance fail, draw your sword directly; and let heaven and hell resound with the clash. Lifeless is the soul which beauty cannot animate, and weak is the arm which cannot fight valiantly to defend it."

The Russians, Poles, and even the Dutch, pay less attention to their females than any of their neighbors, and are, by consequence, less distinguished for the graces of their persons, and the feelings of their hearts.

The lightness of their food, and the salubrity of their air, have been assigned as reasons for the vivacity and cheerfulness of the French, and their fortitude, in supporting their spirits through all the adverse circumstances of this world. But the constant mixture of the young and old, of the two sexes, is no doubt one of the _principal_ reasons why the cares and ills of life sit lighter on the shoulders of that fantastic people, than on those of any other country in the world.

The French reckon an excursion dull, and a party of pleasure without relish, unless a mixture of both sexes join to compose in. The French women do not even withdraw from the table after meals; nor do the men discover that impatience to have them dismissed, which they so often do in England.

It is alleged by those who have no relish for the conversation of the fair sex, that their presence curbs the freedom of speech, and restrains the jollity of mirth. But, if the conversation and the mirth are decent, if the company are capable of relishing any thing but wine, the very reverse is the case. Ladies, in general, are not only more cheerful than gentlemen, but more eager to promote mirth and good humor.

So powerful, indeed, are the company and conversation of the fair, in diffusing happiness and hilarity, that even the cloud which hangs on the _thoughtful brow_ of an Englishman, begins in the present age to brighten, by his devoting to the ladies a larger share of time than was formerly done by his ancestors.

Though the influence of the sexes be reciprocal, yet that of the ladies is certainly the greatest. How often may one see a company of men, who were disposed to be riotous, checked at once into decency by the accidental entrance of an amiable woman; while her good sense and obliging deportment charms them into at least a temporary conviction, that there is nothing so delightful as female conversation, in its best form! Were such conviction frequently repeated, what might we not expect from it at last?

"Were virtue," said an ancient philosopher, "to appear amongst men in a visible shape, what vehement desires would she enkindle!" Virtue, exhibited without affectation, by a lovely young person, of improved understanding and gentle manners, may be said to appear with the most alluring aspect, surrounded by the _Graces_.

It would be an easy matter to point out instances of the most evident reformation, wrought on particular men, by their having happily conceived a passion for virtuous women.

To form the manners of men, various causes contribute; but nothing, perhaps, so much as the turn of the women with whom they converse. Those who are most conversant with women of virtue and understanding, will be always found the most amiable characters, other circumstances being supposed alike. Such society, beyond every thing else, rubs off the _corners_ that gives many of our sex an ungracious roughness. It produces a polish more perfect, and more pleasing than that which is received from a general commerce with the world. This last is often specious, but commonly superficial. The other is the result of gentler feelings, and more humanity. The heart itself is moulded. Habits of undissembled courtesy are formed. A certain flowing urbanity is acquired. Violent passions, rash oaths, coarse jests, indelicate language of every kind, are precluded and disrelished.

Female society gives men a taste for cleanliness and elegance of person. Our ancestors, who kept but little company with their women, were not only slovenly in their dress, but had their countenances disfigured with long beards. By female influence, however, beards were, in process of time, mutilated down to mustaches. As the gentlemen found that the ladies had no great relish for mustaches, which were the relics of a beard, they cut and curled them into various fashions, to render them more agreeable. At last, however, finding such labor vain, they gave them up altogether. But as those of the three learned professions were supposed to be endowed with, or at least to stand in need of, more wisdom than other people, and as the longest beard had always been deemed to sprout from the wisest chin, to supply this mark of distinction, which they had lost, they contrived to smother their heads in enormous quantities of frizzled hair, that they might bear greater resemblance to an owl, the bird sacred to wisdom and Minerva.