Decoration.
Thereare ways of governing every mind which lies within the circle described by our own; the only question is, whether the means required be such as wecanuse? and if so, whether we shall think it right to do so?
You think I do not know you, or that I mistake you utterly, because I am actuated by the impulses of my own nature, rather than by my perception of the impulses of yours? It is not so.
If we would retain our own consistency, without which there is no moral strength, we must stand firm upon our own moral life.
“Be true unto thyself;And it shall follow as the night to day,Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
“Be true unto thyself;And it shall follow as the night to day,Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
But to be true to others as well as ourselves, is not merely to allow to them the same independence, but to sympathise with it. Unhappily here lies the chief difficulty. There are brains so large that they unconsciously swamp all individualities which come in contact or too near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts. As in Religion, where there is a strong, sincere, definite faith, there is generally more or less intolerance; so in character, where there is strong individuality,self-assurance, and defined principles of action, there is usually something hard and intolerant of the individuality of others. In some characters we meet with, toleration is a principle of the reason, and intolerance a quality of the mind, and then the whole being strikes a discord.
Decoration.
Ifwe can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the more. It is as if the principle, that conflict is a necessary law of progress, were applicable even to love. For there is no love like that which has roused up the intensest feelings of our nature,—revealed us to ourselves, like lightning suddenly disclosing an abyss,—yet has survived all the storm and tumult of such passionate discord and all the terror of such a revelation.
Decoration.
Fhasmuch, much to learn! Through power, through passion, through feeling we do much, but only through observation, reflection, and sympathy we learn much; hence it is that minds highly giftedoften remain immature. Artist minds especially, so long as they live only or chiefly for their art, their faculties bent on creating or representing, remain immature on one side—the reasoning and reflecting side of the character.
Decoration.
Saida Frenchman of his adversary, “Il se croit supérieur à moi de toute la hauteur de sa bêtise!” There is a mingled felicity, politeness, and acrimony, in this phrase quite untranslatable.
Itis a pity that we have no words to express the French distinction betweenrêverandrêvasser. The one implies meditation on a definite subject: the other the abandonment of the mind to vague discussion, aimless thoughts.
Decoration.
Itseems to me that the conversation of the first converser in the world wouldtireme,pallon me at last, where I am not sure of the sincerity. Talk without truth is the hollow brass; talk without love is like the tinkling cymbal, and where it does not tinkle it gingles, and where it does not gingle, it jars.
Decoration.
Thereare few things more striking, more interesting to a thoughtful mind, than to trace through all the poetry, literature, and art of the Middle Ages that broad ever-present distinction between the practical and the contemplative life. This was, no doubt, suggested and kept in view by the one grand division of the whole social community into those who were devoted to the religious profession (an immense proportion of both sexes) and those who were not. All through Dante, all through the productions of mediæval art, we find this pervading idea; and we must understand it well and keep it in mind, or we shall never be able to apprehendthe entire beauty and meaning of certain religious groups in sculpture and painting, and the significance of the characters introduced. Thus, in subjects from the Old Testament, Leah always represents the practical, Rachel, the contemplative life. In the New Testament, Martha and Mary figure in the same allegorical sense; and among the saints we always find St. Catharine and St. Clara patronising the religious and contemplative life, while St. Barbara and St. Ursula preside over the military or secular existence. It was a part, and a very important part, of that beautiful and expressive symbolism through which art in all its forms spoke to the popular mind.
For myself, I have the strongest admiration for thepractical, but the strongest sympathy with thecontemplativelife. I bow to Leah and to Martha, but my love is for Rachel and for Mary.
Decoration.
Bettinadoes not describe nature, she informs it, with her own life: she seems to live in the elements, to exist in the fire, the air, the water, like a sylph, a gnome, an elf; she does not contemplate nature, sheisnature; she is like the bird in the air,the fish in the sea, the squirrel in the wood. It is one thing to describe nature, and quite another unconsciously so to inform nature with a portion of our own life.
Decoration.
Joanna Bailliehad a great admiration of Macaulay’s Roman Ballads. “But,” said some one, “do you really account them as poetry?” She replied, “Theyarepoetry if the sounds of the trumpet be music!”
Decoration.
Allmy own experience of life teaches me thecontemptof cunning, not thefear. The phrase “profound cunning” has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet hate dissembling, but a “cunning mind” emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning. That “pleasure in deceiving and aptness to be deceived” usually go together, was one of the wise sayings of the wisest of men.
Decoration.
Itwas a saying of Paracelsus, that “Those who would understand the course of the heavens above must first of all recognise the heaven in man:” meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge which is not accompanied by praise of God and love of our fellow-creatures must turn to bitterness, emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to have come to this conclusion only late in life.
Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracelsus,—a poem in which there is such a profound far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuriance of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth of glorious eloquence, that I know nothing to be compared with it since Goethe and Wordsworth,—represents his aspiring philosopher as at first impelled solely by the appetite toknow. He asks nothing of men, he despises them; but he will serve them, raise them, after a sort of God-like fashion,independent of their sympathy, scorning their applause, using them like instruments, cheating them like children,—all for their good; but it will not do. In Aprile, “who would love infinitely, and be beloved,” is figured the type of the poet-nature, desiring only beauty, resolving all into beauty; while in Paracelsus we have the type of the reflecting, the inquiring mind desiring only knowledge, resolving all into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown his being. And both find out their mistake; both come to feel that love without knowledge is blind and weak, and knowledge without love barren and vain.
“I too have sought toknowas thou toLOVE,Excluding love as thou refused’st knowledge;Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake!*****“Are we not halves of one dissever’d world,Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part?—Never!Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower,Love—until both are saved!”
“I too have sought toknowas thou toLOVE,Excluding love as thou refused’st knowledge;Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake!*****“Are we not halves of one dissever’d world,Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part?—Never!Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower,Love—until both are saved!”
After all, perhaps, only the same old world-renowned myth in another form—the marriage of Cupid and Psyche; Love and Intelligence long parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted on by Beauty to an immortal union. But to return to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own aimless, dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who knows; and Paracelsus, who began with a selfsufficing scorn of his kind, dies a baffled and degraded man in the arms of him who loves;—yet wiser in his fall than through his aspirations, he dies trusting in the progress of humanity so long as humanity is content to behuman; toloveas well as toknow;—to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as to aspire.
Decoration.
Lord Baconsays: “I like a plantation (in the sense of colony) in apuresoil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others: for else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation.” (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to James I. the plantation of Ulster exactly on the principle he has here deprecated.)
He adds, “It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant” (i. e.colonise). And it is only now that our politicians are beginning to discover and act upon this great moraltruth and obvious fitness of things!—like Bacon, adopting practically, and from mere motives of expediency, a principle they would theoretically abjure!
Decoration.
Becausein real life we cannot, or do not, reconcile the high theory with the low practice, we use our wit to render the theory ridiculous, and our reason to reconcile us to the practice. We ought to do just the reverse.
Decoration.
Many would say, if they spoke the truth, that it had cost them a life-long effort to unlearn what they had been taught.
For as the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so through social conventionalism the conscience becomes blinded to positive immorality.
It is fatal in any mind to make the moral standard for men high and the moral standard for women low, orvice versâ. This has appeared to me the verycommonest of all mistakes in men and women who have lived much in the world, butfatalnevertheless, and in three ways; first, as distorting the moral ideal, so far as it exists in the conscience; secondly, as perplexing the bounds, practically, of right and wrong; thirdly, as being at variance with the spirit and principles of Christianity. Admit these premises, and it follows inevitably that such a mistake isfatalin the last degree, as disturbing the consistency and the elevation of the character, morally, practically, religiously.
Akin to this mistake, or identical with it, is the belief that there are essential masculine and feminine virtues and vices. It is not, in fact, the quality itself, but the modification of the quality, which is masculine or feminine: and on the manner or degree in which these are balanced and combined in the individual, depends the perfection of that individual character—its approximation to that of Christ. I firmly believe that as the influences of religion are extended, and as civilisation advances, those qualities which are now admired as essentiallyfemininewill be considered as essentiallyhuman, such as gentleness, purity, the more unselfish and spiritual sense of duty, and the dominance of the affections over the passions. This is, perhaps, what Buffon, speaking as a naturalist, meant, when he said that with theprogress of humanity, “Les races se féminisent;” at least I understand the phrase in this sense.
A man who requires from his own sex manly direct truth, and laughs at the cowardly subterfuges and small arts of women as beingfeminine;—a woman who requires from her own sex tenderness and purity, and thinks ruffianism and sensuality pardonable in a man as beingmasculine,—these have repudiated the Christian standard of morals which Christ, in his own person, bequeathed to us—that standard which we have accepted as Christians—theoretically at least—and which makes no distinction between “the highest, holiest manhood,” and the highest, holiest womanhood.
I might illustrate this position not only scripturally but philosophically, by quoting the axiom of the Greek philosopher Antisthenes, the disciple of Socrates,—“The virtue of the man and the woman is the same;” which shows a perception of the moral truth, a sort of anticipation of the Christian doctrine, even in the pagan times. But I prefer an illustration which is at once practical and poetical, and plain to the most prejudiced among men or women.
Every reader of Wordsworth will recollect, if he does not know by heart, the poem entitled “The Happy Warrior.” It has been quoted often as anepitome of every manly, soldierly, and elevated quality. I have heard it applied to the Duke of Wellington. Those who make the experiment of merely substituting the wordwomanfor the wordwarrior, and changing the feminine for the masculine pronoun, will find that it reads equally well; that almost from beginning to end it is literally as applicable to the one sex as to the other. As thus:—
CHARACTER OF THE HAPPY WOMAN.Who is the happywoman? Who issheThat everywomanborn should wish to be?It is the generous spirit, who, when broughtAmong the tasks of real life, had wroughtUpon the plan that pleasedherchildish thought;Whose high endeavours are an inward light,That make the path beforeheralways bright:Who, with a natural instinct to discernWhat knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,But makeshermoral beingherprime care;Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,And Fear, and Sorrow, miserable train!Turnsthatnecessity to glorious gain;In face of these doth exercise a powerWhich is our human nature’s highest dower:Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereavesOf their bad influence, and their good receives;By objects, which might force the soul to abateHerfeeling, rendered more compassionate;Is placable—because occasions riseSo often that demand such sacrifice;More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pureAs tempted more; more able to endure,As more exposed to suffering and distress;Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.’Tisshewhose law is reason; who dependsUpon that law as on the best of friends;Whence in a state where men are tempted stillTo evil for a guard against worse ill,And what in quality or act is best,Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,Shefixes good on good alone, and owesTo virtue every triumph thatsheknows.Who, ifsherise to station of command,Rises by open means; and there will standOn honourable terms, or else retire.*****Who comprehendshertrust, and to the sameKeeps faithful with a singleness of aim;And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in waitFor wealth, or honours, or for worldly state;Whom they must follow; on whose head must fallLike showers of manna, if they come at all:Whose powers shed roundherin the common strifeOr mild concerns of ordinary life,A constant influence, a peculiar grace;But who, ifshebe called upon to faceSome awful moment to which Heaven has joinedGreat issue, good or bad for human kind,Is happy as a lover; and attiredWith sudden brightness, like to one inspired;And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the lawIn calmness made, and sees whatsheforesaw;Or if an unexpected call succeed,Come when it will, is equal to the need!
CHARACTER OF THE HAPPY WOMAN.Who is the happywoman? Who issheThat everywomanborn should wish to be?It is the generous spirit, who, when broughtAmong the tasks of real life, had wroughtUpon the plan that pleasedherchildish thought;Whose high endeavours are an inward light,That make the path beforeheralways bright:Who, with a natural instinct to discernWhat knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,But makeshermoral beingherprime care;Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,And Fear, and Sorrow, miserable train!Turnsthatnecessity to glorious gain;In face of these doth exercise a powerWhich is our human nature’s highest dower:Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereavesOf their bad influence, and their good receives;By objects, which might force the soul to abateHerfeeling, rendered more compassionate;Is placable—because occasions riseSo often that demand such sacrifice;More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pureAs tempted more; more able to endure,As more exposed to suffering and distress;Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.’Tisshewhose law is reason; who dependsUpon that law as on the best of friends;Whence in a state where men are tempted stillTo evil for a guard against worse ill,And what in quality or act is best,Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,Shefixes good on good alone, and owesTo virtue every triumph thatsheknows.Who, ifsherise to station of command,Rises by open means; and there will standOn honourable terms, or else retire.*****Who comprehendshertrust, and to the sameKeeps faithful with a singleness of aim;And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in waitFor wealth, or honours, or for worldly state;Whom they must follow; on whose head must fallLike showers of manna, if they come at all:Whose powers shed roundherin the common strifeOr mild concerns of ordinary life,A constant influence, a peculiar grace;But who, ifshebe called upon to faceSome awful moment to which Heaven has joinedGreat issue, good or bad for human kind,Is happy as a lover; and attiredWith sudden brightness, like to one inspired;And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the lawIn calmness made, and sees whatsheforesaw;Or if an unexpected call succeed,Come when it will, is equal to the need!
In all these fifty-six lines there is only one line which cannot be feminised in its significance,—that which I have filled up with asterisks, and which is totally at variance with our ideal ofA Happy Woman. It is the line—
“And in himself possess his own desire.”
“And in himself possess his own desire.”
No woman could exist happily or virtuously in such complete independence of all external affections as these words express. “Her desire is to her husband,”—this is the sort of subjection prophesied for the daughters of Eve. A woman doomed to exist without this earthly rest for her affections, does not “in herself possess her own desire;” she turns towards God; and if she does not make her life a life of worship, she makes it a life of charity, (which in itself is worship,) or she dies a spiritual and a moral death. Is it much better with the man who concentrates his aspirations in himself? I should think not.
Decoration.
Swift, as a man and a writer, is one of those who had least sympathy with women; and I have sometimes thought that the exaggeration, even to morbidity, of the coarse and the cruel in his character, arose from this want of sympathy; but his strong sense showed him the one great moral truth as regards the two sexes, and gave him the courage to avow it.
He says, “I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a woman which is not equally so in a man. I do not except even modesty and gentleness of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly which isnot equally detestable in both.” Then, remarking that cowardice is aninfirmitygenerally allowed to women, he wonders that they should fancy it becoming or graceful, or think it worth improving by affectation, particularly as it is generally allied to cruelty.
Here is a passage from one of Humboldt’s letters, which I have seen quoted with sympathy and admiration, as applied to the manly character only:—
“Masculine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first requisite for the formation of a character of real manly worth. The man who suffers himself to be deceived and carried away by his own weakness, may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a good man; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a woman, for a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature should be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the character of man.”
Now we will take this bit of moral philosophy, and, without the slightest alteration of the context, apply it to the female character.
“Feminine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first requisite for the formation of a character of real feminine worth. The woman who allows herself to be deceived and carried away byher own weakness may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a good woman; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a man, for the truly beautiful and purely manly nature should be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the character of woman.”
After reading the above extracts, does it not seem clear, that by the exclusive or emphatic use of certain phrases and epithets, as more applicable to one sex than to the other, we have introduced a most un-christian confusion into the conscience, and have prejudiced it early against the acceptance of the larger truth?
It might seem, that where we reject the distinction between masculine and feminine virtues, one and the same type of perfection should suffice for the two sexes; yet it is clear that the moment we come to consider the personality, the same type will not suffice: and it is worth consideration that when we place before us the highest type of manhood, as exemplified in Christ, we do not imagine him as the father, but as the son; and if we think of the most perfect type of womanhood, we never can exclude the mother.
Montaigne deals with the whole question in his own homely straightforward fashion:—
“Je dis que les mâles et les fémelles sont jettés en même moule; sauf l’institution et l’usage la différence n’y est pas grande. Platon appelle indifféremment les uns et les autres à la société de touts études, exercises, charges, et vocations guerrières et paisibles en sa république, et le philosophe Antisthènes ôtait toute distinction entre leur vertu et la nôtre. Il est bien plus aisé d’accuser un sexe que d’excuser l’autre: c’est ce qu’on dit, ‘le fourgon se moque de la poële.’”
Not that I agree with Plato,—rather would leave all the fighting, military and political, if there must be fighting, to the men.
Decoration.
Among the absurdities talked about women, one hears, perhaps, such an aphorism as the following quoted with a sort of ludicrous complacency,—“The woman’s strength consists in her weakness!” as if it were not the weakness of a woman which makes her in her violence at once so aggravating and so contemptible, in her dissimulation at once so shallow and so dangerous, and in her vengeance at once so cowardly and so cruel.
Decoration.
I should not say, from my experience of my own sex, that a woman’s nature is flexible and impressible,though her feelings are. I know very few instances of a very inferior man ruling the mind of a superior woman, whereas I know twenty—fifty—of a very inferior woman ruling a superior man. If he love her, the chances are that she will in the end weaken and demoralise him. If a superior woman marry a vulgar or inferior man he makes her miserable, but he seldom governs her mind, or vulgarises her nature, and if there be love on his side the chances are that in the end she will elevate and refine him.
The most dangerous man to a woman is a man of high intellectual endowments morally perverted; for in a woman’s nature there is such a necessity to approve where she admires, and to believe where she loves,—a devotion compounded of love and faith is so much a part of her being,—that while the instincts remain true and the feelings uncorrupted, the conscience and the will may both be led far astray. Thus fell “our general mother,”—type of her sex,—overpowered, rather than deceived, by the colossal intellect,—half serpent, half angelic.
Decoration.
Coleridge speaks, and with a just indignant scorn, of those who consider chastity as if it were athing—a thing which might be lost or kept by external accident—a thing of which one might berobbed, instead of a state of being. According to law and custom, the chastity of Woman is as the property of Man, to whom she is accountable for it, rather than to God and her own conscience. Whatever people may say, such is the common, the social, the legal view of the case. It is a remnant of Oriental barbarism. It tends to much vice, or, at the best, to a low standard of morality, in both sexes. This idea of property in the woman survives still in our present social state, particularly among the lower orders, and is one cause of the ill treatment of wives. All those who are particularly acquainted with the manners and condition of the people will testify to this; namely, that when a child or any weaker individual is ill treated, those standing by will interfere and protect the victim; but if the sufferer bethe wifeof the oppressor, it is a point of etiquette to look on, to take no part in the fray, and to leave the brute man to do what he likes “with his own.” Even the victim herself, if she be not pummelled to death, frequently deprecates such an interference with the dignity and the rights of her owner. Like the poor woman in the “Médecin malgré lui:”—“Voyez un peu cet impertinent qui vent empêcher les maris de battre leurs femmes!—et si je veux qu’il me batte, moi?”—and so ends by giving her defender a box on the ear.
Decoration.
“Au milieu de tous les obstacles que la nature et la société out semés sur les pas de la femme, la seule condition de repos pour elle est de s’entourer de barrières que les passions ne puissent franchir; incapable de s’approprier l’existence, elle est toujours semblable a la Chinoise dont les pieds ont été mutilés et pour laquelle toute liberté est un leurre, toute espace ouverte une cause de chute. En attendant que l’éducation ait donné aux femmes leur véritable place, malheur à celles qui brisent les lisses accoutumées! pour elles l’indépendance ne sera, comme la gloire, qu’un deuil éclatant du bonheur!”—B. Constant.
This also is one of those common-places of well-sounding eloquence, in which a fallacy is so wrapt up in words we have to dig it out. If this be true, it is true only so long as you compress the feet and compress the intellect,—no longer.
Here is another:—
“L’expérience lui avait appris que quel que fut leur âge, ou leur caractère, toutes les femmes vivaient avec le même rêve, et qu’elles avaient toutes au fond du cœur un roman commencé dont elles attendaient jusqu’à la mort le héros, comme les juifs attendent le Messie.”
This “roman commencé,” (et qui ne finit jamais), is true as regards women who are idle, and who have not replaced dreams by duties. And what are the“barrières” which passion cannot overleap, from the moment it has subjugated the will? How fine, how true that scene in Calderon’s “Magico Prodigioso,” where Justina conquers the fiend only by notconsentingto ill!
——“This agonyOf passion which afflicts my heart and soulMay sweep imagination in its storm;The will is firm.”
——“This agonyOf passion which afflicts my heart and soulMay sweep imagination in its storm;The will is firm.”
And the baffled demon shrinks back,—
“Woman, thou hast subdued meOnly by not owning thyself subdued!”
“Woman, thou hast subdued meOnly by not owning thyself subdued!”
Decoration.
A friend of mine was once using some mincing elegancies of language to describe a high degree of moral turpitude, when a man near her interposed, with stern sarcasm, “Speak out! Give things their proper names!Half words are the perdition of women!”
Decoration.
“I observe,” said Sydney Smith, “thatgenerallyabout the age of forty, women get tired of beingvirtuous and men of being honest.” This was said and received with a laugh as one of his good things; but, like many of his good things, how dreadfully true! And why? because,generally, education has made the virtue of the woman and the honesty of the man a matter of external opinion, not a law of the inward life.
Decoration.
Dante, in his lowest hell, has placed those who have betrayed women; and in the lowest deep of the lowest deep those who have betrayed trust.
Decoration.
Inveterate sensuality, which has the effect of utterly stupifying and brutifying lower minds, gives to natures more sensitively or more powerfully organised a horrible dash of ferocity. For there is an awful relation between animal blood-thirstiness and the proneness to sensuality, and in some sensualists a sort of feline propensity to torment and lacerate the prey they have not the appetite to devour.
Decoration.
“La Chevalerie faisait une tentative qui n’a jamais réussi, quoique souvent essayée; la tentative de se servir des passions humaines, et particulièrement de l’amour pour conduire l’homme à la vertu. Dans cette route l’homme s’arrête toujours en chemin. L’amour inspire beaucoup de bons sentiments—le courage, le dévouement, le sacrifice des biens et de la vie; mais il ne se sacrifie pas lui-même, et c’est là que la faiblesse humaine reprend ses droits.”—St. Marc-Girardin.
I am not sure that this well-sounding remark is true—or, if true, it is true of the mere passion, not of love in its highest phase, which is self-sacrificing, which has its essence in the capability of self-sacrifice.
“Love was given,Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end;For this the passion to excess was driven,Thatselfmight be annull’d.”
“Love was given,Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end;For this the passion to excess was driven,Thatselfmight be annull’d.”
Decoration.
In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear, there is a strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such intense haters.
Decoration.
Our present social opinion says to the man, “You may be a vulgar brutal sensualist, and use the basest means to attain the basest ends; but so long as you do not offend against conventional good manners you shall be held blameless.” And to the woman it says, “You shall be guilty of nothing but of yielding to the softest impulses of tenderness, of relenting pity; but if you cannot add hypocrisy you shall be punished as the most desperate criminal.”
Decoration.
“Itis worthy of notice that the external expressions appropriated to certain feelings undergo change at different periods of life and in different constitutions. The child cries and sobs from fear or pain, the adult more generally from sudden grief or warm affection, or sympathy with the feeling of others.”—Dr. Holland.
Those who have been accustomed to observe the ways of children will doubt the accuracy of thisremark, though from the high authority of one of the most accomplished physiologists of our time. Children cry from grief, and from sympathy with grief, at a very early age. I have seen an infant in its mother’s arms, before it could speak, begin to whimper and cry when it looked up in her face, which was disturbed and bathed with tears; and that has always appeared to me an exquisite touch of most truthful nature in Wordsworth’s description of the desolation of Margaret:—
“Her little childHad from its mother caught the trick of grief,And sighed amid its playthings.”
“Her little childHad from its mother caught the trick of grief,And sighed amid its playthings.”
Decoration.
“Letters,”said Sir James Mackintosh, “must not be on a subject. Lady Mary Wortley’s letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admirable book of travels, but they are not letters. A meeting to discuss a question of science is not conversation, nor are papers written to another to inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation, not business, and must never appear to be occupation;—nor must letters.”
“A masculine character may be a defect in a female, but a masculine genius is still a praise to a writer of whatever sex. The feminine graces of Madame de Sevigné’s genius are exquisitely charming, but the philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Staël are above the distinctions of sex.”
Decoration.
Ofthe wars between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance, Madame de Staël once said with most admirable and prophetic sense:—“It is a contest between amanwho is the enemy of liberty, and asystemwhich is equally its enemy.” But it is easier to get rid of a man than of a system: witness the Russians, who assassinate their czars one after another, but cannot get rid of theirsystem.
Decoration.
TheEmpress Elizabeth of Russia during the war with Sweden commanded the old Hetman ofthe Cossacks to come to court on his way to Finland. “If the Emperor, your father,” said the Hetman, “had taken my advice, your Majesty would not now have been annoyed by the Swedes.” “What was your advice?” asked the Empress. “To put all the nobility to death, and transplant the people into Russia.” “But that,” said the Empress, “would have been cruel!” “I do not see that,” he replied quietly; “they are all dead now, and they would only have been dead if my advice had been taken.”
Something strangely comprehensive and unanswerable in this barbarian logic!
Decoration.
Itwas the Abbé Boileau who said of the Jesuits, that they had lengthened the Creed and shortened the Decalogue. The same witty ecclesiastic being asked why he always wrote in Latin, took a pinch of snuff, and answered gravely, “Why, for fear the bishops should read me!”
Decoration.
WhenTalleyrand once visited a certain reprobate friend of his, who was ill of cholera, the patient exclaimed in his agony, “Je sens les tourmens de l’enfer!”
“Déjà?” said Talleyrand.
Much in a word! I remember seeing a pretty French vaudeville wherein a lady is by some accident or contrivance shut up perforce with a lover she has rejected. She frets at thecontretemps. He makes use of the occasion to plead his cause. The cruel fair one will not relent. Still he pleads—still she turns away. At length they are interrupted.
“Déjà!” exclaims the lady, in an accent we may suppose to be very different from that of Talleyrand; and on the intonation of this one word, pronounced as only an accomplished French actress could pronounce it, depends thedénouementof the piece.
Decoration.
Louis XVI. sent a distinguished physician over to England to inquire into the management of our hospitals. He praised them much, but added, “Il y manque deux choses; nos curés et nos hospitalières;” that is, he felt the want of the religious element in the official and medical treatment of the sick. A want which, I think, is felt at present and will be supplied.
Decoration.
Thosewho have the largest horizon of thought, the most extended vision in regard to the relation of things, are not remarkable for self-reliance and ready judgment. A man who sees limitedly and clearly, is more sure of himself, and more direct in his dealings with circumstances and with others, than a man whose many-sided capacity embraces an immense extent of objects andobjections,—just as, they say, a horse with blinkers more surely chooses his path, and is less likely to shy.
Decoration.
Whatwe truly and earnestly aspireto be, that in some sense weare. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment realises itself.
Decoration.
Thereare no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when they only feel.
Decoration.
Thereare moments when the liberty of the inner life, opposed to the trammels of the outer, becomes too oppressive: moments when we wish that our mental horizon were less extended, thought less free; when we long to put the discursive soul into a narrow path like a railway, and force it to run on in a straight line to some determined goal.