There can be no deep and enduring union of human beings without truthfullness, earnestness, aspiration. It is glorious for people to meet who ascend to meet. For social conquests, as well as for private content, the aggrandizement of individual character and experience is the mightiest talisman. As with the increase of esteem and confidence the spiritual veils are lifted, one by one, the person itself charms because the soul is seen, and seen to be divine. Even in those examples where beauty is the hook, grace is the bait, and virtue the line, with which hearts are caught. When we see wisdom and goodness the guests of another's eyes, love becomes the guest of our own. The great evil of an excessive devotion to society and fashion is the mechanical hollowness and insincerity it breeds—an evil as fatal to happiness as it is to virtue. Economy of force is the governing standard with those who are too constantly in contact with the world, too much given to the spirit of crowded company and fashion. Conscientious truthfullness, earnest discrimination, and a behavior honestly adapted to the facts of feeling and duty, are too expensive, would quickly drain to death the fop, the self-seeker, and the coquette. Accordingly, indifference is the shield of polite society, and affectation is the valve of artificial characters; but sincerity of soul is the first charm of manners, and extent of sympathy is the proper measure of happiness. The soul, dried and hardened by the heat and wear of crowds, or exhausted by dissipation, measures its success by how much it can exclude, how much it despises, how much it can save; but the glory of youth, the joy of genius, the height and charm of life, is the exuberance of the expenditure of force they can afford. Their standard of success is how much their sympathies can include, how much they can revere and love and serve. It is littleness and misery to make a private hoard of the good of the universe. The amount it lavishes measures the wealth of the rich and happy soul. That will be a blessed day when we make our social parties not for the purpose of ostentation or luxury, not to give dinners or suppers in return for those to which we have been invited, not to secure acquaintances who will aid in gratifying our external ambition, but simply to enjoy the society of friends whom we honor and love, to enhance our interior life by sincere spiritual intercourse, the reflection of minds and hearts. Wherever human beings meet, the bazaar of Fate stands open.
Another duty, closely allied with the foregoing, and especially incumbent on the finest and highest women, is to improve the common standard of good manners. This is a region of influence of momentous importance, and for which the most honored and beloved women have a pre-eminent adaptation by their beauty, grace, docility, and sympathetic ease of self-sacrifice. To associate with a quick-witted woman is an education. The last words of Madame Pompadour, addressed to her withdrawing confessor, just before her final breath, were, "Wait a moment, father; and we will go out together." In a democratic age and country like ours, many causes are at work to lower the average standard of manners by generating universal self-assertion, arrogance, and irreverence. As compared with the gracious type of chivalric manners exhibited in the best specimens of three or four centuries ago, it must be confessed that sweetness of dignity, abundance of courtesy, gentleness, magnanimity, have suffered badly. No gentle and lofty mind can turn from the reading of Digby's "Broad Stone of Honor" to that of Thackeray's "Book of Snobs," without deep pain. Here is a field of influence superlatively fitted for the activity of women, and worthy of the aspirations of the most favored and admirable representatives of the sex. Opinions may ascend; but manners descend.
The chief source of complacency to petty natures is in contemplating the weaknesses of their superiors. Pride nourishes itself by gazing on inferiors, and heightening the contrast. But the true habit of virtue is to stoop graciously, to lift inferiors towards itself, and to look reverentially on the merits of superiors, lifting itself with aspiring docility towards them.
Among the people of the present age, there is no need of teaching the lessons of social scorn or envy; but there is need of teaching the lessons of disinterested reverence and aspiration. It must therefore be a profitable service to hold up for the contemplation and study of women the examples of the noble sway, the delightful charm exerted by such women as the grand Duchess Louise of Weimar, Madame Récamier, Madame Swetchine, or the Duchess of Orleans. Each one of these deserves the homage of being patterned after:
For she was of that better clayThat treads not oft this earthly stage:Such charmed spirits lose their way,But once or twice into an age.
They seemed to shed dignity, wisdom, virtue, repose, and bliss around them wherever they moved, and to put all persons in their debt by the boons unconsciously emitted from their being and their manners. We cannot hold too constant or too worshipful communion with such characters: it is equally a culture and an enjoyment. The secret of their divine skill is not flattery, but deferential treatment. They take for granted, that their friends have noble qualities and admirable aims, and treat them accordingly, with a respectful attention which heightens the self-respect of its recipients. Neglect is insolent, and contempt is injurious. He who suffers them is hurt and lowered. One blessed magic there is, as guileless as it is supreme. This charm, this witchcraft, is a sincere and honoring attention.
Woman can more keenly than man "taste the pure enjoyment that results from the mere growth and exercise of good feelings." Who so well as she knows how much more true pleasure there is in one peaceful moment of modest goodness than in all the excitement that waits on the gaudy game of ambition? She is never so happy, as when doing most and asking least.
The Duchess de Duras wrote to a friend, "Madame de Montcalm has been sick: she is eaten up by politics: they are her vulture." To man, genius is an instrument, which he must use to achieve triumphs: to woman, it is a load, which she must transmute into blessings. Thus far in human history, it has been much easier for the most gifted of our race to be unhappy than to be happy; because happiness is an equilibrium of inner powers and outer conditions, and the most extraordinary gifts are surest to destroy or prevent that adjustment. The divine remedy is self-sacrifice, self-detachment, and the attuning of the soul by the laws of the ideal world, the perfect state of society.
Poor and feeble souls exact most from the world. Rich and soaring souls have a self-sufficing modesty, which, in its own exuberance, asks but little from others. The lark, when, at sunrise, she rises, singing, above our sight, shows that it was not from lack of power to climb, that she made the humble choice to build her nest in the grass. Here lies the most elect office of woman—to attract and train men to the sober and blissful ends of wisdom and love, and withdraw their passions from the wretched ends of folly, on which so many waste their lives, in ploughing the air, sowing the sea, and trying to catch the wind with a net. The redemption of the worst men will be effected when they make voluntary acquisition of what the best women possess by instinct, and spontaneously exhibit; namely, that disinterested love of goodness, which is willing to give all and ask nothing. Happy is he, and he alone safely happy, who gives affection to his fellows, as the sun gives light to the creation. It receives not directly back from single objects what it gives them; but, from the whole, all that it radiates is returned. It is so with the good man and his race. Persons may not return the reverence and love he lavishes, but humanity will. For what is his total feeling towards the collective individuals that constitute his race, except the glorified reverberation from humanity, back into his experience, of what his own soul has sent forth?
The call of woman, in this age, then, is not to be a brawling politician, clamoring for her share in the authorities and honors of the world, launching jokes, sarcasms, and sneers to the right and the left. Clearly, her genuine work, beyond the family circle, is to set an example of modest devotion to personal improvement and the social weal. Sir Philip Sidney describes a horseman who "stirred the bridle so gently, that it did rather distil virtue than use violence." That is, in some sense, a type of the proper power of woman. It is her heavenly mission to influence by yielding, rule by obeying, conquer by surrender, and put the crowning grace of joy and glory on her sex by ministering to the hurts and wants of humanity. Kindled by her example, and compensated by her smile, man will aspire to complete his highest destiny. Her destiny will be fulfilled with his, and in it; his in hers, and with it. They cannot be really separated; since woman as the inspirer and rewarder of man, in the most intense action at the top of society, moulds him by her ideal of him reflected in his imagination. Womanhood is by no means to be personified in the exclusive aspect of a nurse; but as artist, teacher, law-giver, queen, as well. The just personification of womanhood must include the total aspects and offices of humanity. She has as good a claim as man to them all. But let no hasty advocate insist on adding to the totality of true and permanent features in that personification, any of those vicious, accidental, and temporary features incident to the imperfect stages through which humanity has been passing, and is still passing, in its progressive evolution.
There is one respect, not often thought of, in which the various ethnic pantheons, from those of the rawest barbarism to those of the most intellectual civilization, possess deep interest and instructiveness. Their leading personages, gods and goddesses, reveal to us the chief types of human character from which they were created. The heavens and hells of mythology are the higher and lower reflections, or upward and downward echoes, of the earth; and the supernatural beings who people them are idealizations of men and women, more or less richly draped with attributes suggested by the phenomena of the universe. The groups of feminine figures furnished by mythology, therefore, afford a most striking exhibition of the typical groups of women which must have been known in the mythological ages of the world. Conceived in this way, with what thoughtfullness we should contemplate the Graces, the Muses, the Furies, the Fates, Nemesis, Vesta, Fortuna, Diana, Eris, Ceres, the majestic port of Juno, the frosty splendor of Minerva, the melting charm of Venus, the snaky horror of Medusa, Egvptian Isis, throned among the stars, and Scandinavian Hela, crouching in her grisly house!
It is a characteristic of satirists, in every age, that they class women together, as if they were all alike. Every fair view of the subject shows how false such a conclusion is. There is more freshness, subtilty, spontaneity, variety, in womanly characters than in manly. Their range, between the extremes of the demure and the hoydenish, is greater. The feminine types, Helen and Penelope, or Clytemnestra and Antigone, are as distinct as the masculine types, Agamemnon and Ulysses, or OEdipus and Philoctetes. The injustice of the vulgar saying, "It is just like a woman," implying that there are no differences among women, makes one indignant. Have we not seen women to whom death seems an indignity—looking, in every feature and glance, as immortal as Pallas Athene? And have we not seen women whose hideous shape and fiendish spirit suggested an alliance with antediluvian monsters? Is there not a Volumnia, as chaste as that star seen in winter dawns shivering on the cold forehead of the morning? And is there not a Messalina, who would receive embraces in a bath of blood? Is there not a Fulvia, who takes the head of the murdered Cicero in her hands, and tears his dumb tongue with her bodkin? And are there not a Saint Elizabeth and a Lady Godiva, capable of supernal deeds of self-denial and heroism for the sake of blessing the poor? The personality of any one of the best representatives of womanhood is as vivid and delicate as though moulded from a sensitive leaf instead of clay; yet of such strength as to be rich in frankness and courage, and sublime in patience. In fact, the distinction of woman is as much greater than that of men psychologically as it is physiologically. But her choicest vocation must always lie in the domestic range of the personal relations, and throughout the heights and depths of the spiritual life. Let her become there all that the capacities of human nature prophesy, and man will rapidly be perfected everywhere else.
The number of claimants contending for the prizes of society increases. The facility of a shallow and momentary success become greater; but the difficulty and rareness of a substantial and enduring triumph grow in a higher ratio. The arena is crowded; the battle is vulgar; the sufferings of the contestants are extreme; the rewards sought are uncertain and disappointing. How quickly, in our day, notoriety ends; and what a poor cheat it is! The passionate aspirant for fame, as described so finely by Michelet, stands beside the unknown sea of futurity, picks up a shell, lifts it to his ear, and listens to a slight noise, in which he fancies he hears the murmur of his own name! For solid dignity or pure contentment, no life can compare with the one devoted to intrinsic personal ends, the achievement of knowledge, harmony, and piety. Not the warrior, Ambition, not the giant, Legislation, but the little child, Love, is to lead in the golden age. She is the best woman who does most to hasten the inauguration of that divine Child.
Thoughtful observers agree, that the most ominous characteristic of the present age is, its complication of interests, its doubts, its weariness, its frittering multiplicity of indulgences, cares, and obligations. The best individual remedy for this evil is friendship. Affectionate communion with a trusted and confiding friend, more than any other experience, appeases the misgivings of conscience, satisfies the vague searches of the mind, and gives peace to the eternal cravings of our gregarious nature.
If ever the cry of the horse-leech shall cease to be the painful language of the heart, it will be when, the longings of the heart no longer baffled by the vacancies or the irritating rivalries of a vapid and jealous society, all human beings developed enough to need, and noble enough to deserve, shall also be fortunate enough to possess, true friends with whom they may commune in unity of spirit and mirrored doubleness of life. Gratified affection is the true fruition of a spiritual existence. To hope and fear in the being of another first gives us the fulfilled consciousness of our own.