A New Atmosphere Part 8

"To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings,--the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward,--I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful re-examination, which they are now never destined to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and n.o.ble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and una.s.sisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, we are told by encyclopedists, was educated in a masculine range of studies, and with a masculine strictness of intellectual discipline. The poets and philosophers of Greece were the companions of her mind. In imaginative power and originality of intellectual construction she is said to be ent.i.tled to the very first place among the later English poets. She had considered carefully, and was capable of treating wisely, the deepest social problems which have engaged the attention of the most sagacious and practical minds. Society in the aggregate, and the self-consciousness of the solitary individual, were held in her grasp with equal ease, and observed with equal accuracy. She had a statesman's comprehension of the social and political problems which perplex the well-wishers of Italy, and discussed them with the spirit of a statesman. This is not my p.r.o.nunciamento nor my language, but those of Hon. George S.

Hillard.

With a word fitly spoken this eminently strong-minded woman drew to her side a poet of poets, and he in turn drew her to his heart.

When ten years of marriage had made him so well acquainted with his wife as to give weight to his testimony, he wrote, at the close of a volume of poems called "Men and Women," "One word more,"--surely the seemliest word that ever poet uttered. He sang of the one sonnet that Rafael wrote, of the one picture that Dante painted,--

"Once, and only once, and for one only, (Ah, the prize!) to find his love a language Fit and fair and simple and sufficient,"--

and somewhat sadly adds:--

"I shall never, in the years remaining, Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, Make you music that should all-express me; So it seems: I stand on my attainment.

This of verse alone, one life allows me; Other heights in other lives, G.o.d willing-- All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love.

"Yet a semblance of resource avails us-- Shade so finely touched, love's sense must seize it.

Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly, Lines I write the first time and the last time.

He who writes may write for once, as I do.

"Love, you saw me gather men and women, Live or dead or fas.h.i.+oned by my fancy.

I am mine and yours,--the rest be all men's.

Let me speak this once in my true person,

Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence,-- Pray you, look on these my men and women, Take and keep my fifty poems finished; Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also!

Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things.

"Not but that you know me! Lo, the moon's self!

Here in London, yonder late in Florence.

Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured.

What, there's nothing in the moon noteworthy?

Nay--for if that moon could love a mortal, Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy) All her magic ('t is the old sweet mythos) She would turn a new side to her mortal, Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman,-- Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace, Blind to Galileo on his turret, Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats--him, even!

G.o.d be thanked, the meanest of his creatures Boasts two soul-sides,--one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her.

"This I say of me, but think of you, Love!

This to you,--yourself my moon of poets!

Ah, but that's the world's side,--there's the wonder,-- Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you.

There, in turn I stand with them and praise you, Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it, But the best is when I glide from out them, Cross a step or two of dubious twilight, Come out on the other side, the novel Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of, When I hush and bless myself with silence.

"O, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas, O, their Dante of the dread Inferno, Wrote one song--and in my brain I sing it, Drew one angel--borne, see, on my bosom!"

Have you read it a hundred times before? Are you not grateful to me for giving you an excuse to begin on the second hundred?

O women, since the heavens have been opened to reveal these points of light, and you can infer somewhat the radiance which may wrap you about with ineffable glory, will you be satisfied again with the beggarly elements of a sordid world? Seeing on what heights a woman may stand, will you lower to the level graded by generations of silly, selfish, sensual male minds? Is it really worth while? If it is not a good bargain to lose your own soul that you may gain the whole world, what must it be to lose your soul and gain only a few stereotyped phrases? If every other man that ever lived preached a crusade for "stocking-mending, love, and cookery," and only these three whom I have mentioned bore a different banner, would it not still be better to shape your course by theirs? Is it not better to be worthy of the respect and reverence of thinkers, than to receive the serenade of sounding bra.s.s? Is it not better to heed the one true voice crying in the wilderness, than to join in the uproar of the idolatrous mob that shouts, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" When I lose faith in human destiny, and am almost ready to say, "Who shall show us any good?" I remember these utterances,--so lofty that one may say, not as the fulsome courtiers of old time cried, but reverently and duly, "It is the voice of G.o.d, and not of men,"--I recall these utterances, the first so heartsome and overflowing that there is no thought for niceties of phrase, but only one eager desire to pay an undemanded tribute, only a warm, imperative urgency of expression; the second inexpressibly mournful, but with such calm majesty of pain as an ancient sculptor might have wrought into pa.s.sionless marble, or a Roman Senator folded beneath his mantle;--in the first, a man looking from his happy earthly home, forward and upward to a happier home in heaven; in the second, one gazing hopelessly from his waste places down into darkness and the grave;--the first believing, "Because I live ye shall live also"; the second sadly querying, "Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?"--the first become as a little child through faith; the second only as a pagan sage by reason;--the third heaping up with ever unwearied and ever more delighted hand the brightest gems of learning and fancy to adorn a beloved brow;--all turning at the summit of their renown, at the point of their grandest achievement, to do honor to a woman, the first two vindicating the intellect of wifeliness, the last the wifeliness of intellect; all breathing a magnanimity in whose presence no smallness can be so much as named;--and I say there is more strength and courage to be gained, more hope for the future and more faith in humanity to be gathered, from such a glimpse than from the contemplation of five--what?

hundred? thousand? millions?--of ordinary marriages.

But to return to the question at issue,--Are these exceptional cases?

It is man's own work if they are. Just as the elevation of one negro from slavery to supremacy, from stupidity to intelligence, is an indisputable proof that the elevation of the whole race is possible, so the case of one such woman as those I have mentioned settles the question for the whole s.e.x. All may not attain the same heights, but this shows that intellectuality is open to them without destroying spirituality. Education, it seems, can do just as much for woman as for men. As careful mental training makes a man large-minded, it makes a woman large-minded. If it does not make a man narrow-souled and shallow-hearted, it will not make a woman so. If it does not unfit a man for manly duties, it will not unfit a woman for womanly duties. If ignorance and petty interests and limited views make a man trivial, obstinate, prejudiced, why is it not the same things which make a woman so? It is not necessary to determine whether there is an essential difference between the masculine and feminine brain or nature. All the difference, both in quant.i.ty and quality, which any one demands, may be granted without affecting this question of mental culture. No matter whether it be strong or weak, large or small, educate what mind there is to its highest capacity. If there is no difference, it is so much gained. If there is a difference, each mind will select from the material furnished that which is suitable for its own sustenance. Violet and apple-tree grow side by side. If the soil is poor they are both meagre; if the soil is rich, they both flourish.

From the same tract one gathers his golden and mellow fruit, the other her glowing purple richness. You may put a covering over the violet and stunt it into a pale, puny, sickly thing, or you may cultivate it to an imperial beauty. But it will be a violet still. The utmost cultivation will not turn it into an apple-tree. Every plant may have a different taste and a different need from every other plant, but they all want the earth. The tiny draughts of the slender anemone are not to be compared with the rivers of sap that bear to the royal oak its centuries; but oak and anemone each demands all the juice it can quaff, and earth and sea and sky are alike laid under tribute to fill the fairy drinking-cup of the one, as well as the huge wa.s.sail-bowl of the other.

So with mind. The philosopher, the poet, the theologian, the chemist, quarry in the same mine, and each brings up thence the treasure that his soul loves. The same cloud sweeps over the farmer to refresh his thirsty lands, over the philosopher to confirm his theories, over the painter to tempt his pencil. The principle of selection that obtains in the lower ranks of Nature will not fail us in her higher walks.

It is because law, logic, science, philosophy, have been so almost exclusively in the hands of men, that they have accomplished such puerile results. With all their beauty and power, they have left our common life so poor, and vapid, and vicious, because only half their lesson has been learned. But they bear a message from the Most High, and when woman shall be permitted to lend her listening ear and bring to the interpretation her finer sense, we shall have good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.

But what is to become of masculine domination and feminine submission?

O faithless and perverse generation! Do you indeed believe that it is "natural" for woman to trust and for man to be trusted,--for man to guide and woman to be guided,--for man to rule and woman to be ruled?

In whose hand, then, lies the power to change Nature? Is she so weak that a little more or less of this or that, administered by one of her creatures, can alter all her arrangements? The granite of this round world lies underneath, and the alluvium settles on the surface. Do you suppose that anything and everything you can do in the way of cultivation will have power to upheave the granite from its hidden depths and send down the alluvium to discharge its underground duties?

What bands hold in their place the oxygen and nitrogen? Who says to the silex and the phosphorus, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther"? And do you think that, if you cannot change the quant.i.ties of these simple elements, whose processes are patent to the eye, you can change the qualities of the most complex thing in the whole world, which works behind an impenetrable veil? If you cannot add one cubit to a woman's stature, nor make one hair of her head white or black, do you think you can add or subtract one feature from her mind? Cease with high-sounding praise to extol the womanly nature, while practically you deny that there is any. Bring your deeds up to your words. Believe that G.o.d did not give to bird and brake and flower a stability of character which he denied to half the human race. Believe that a woman may be a woman still, though careful culture make the wilderness blossom like the rose,--and not only a woman, but as much more and better a woman as the garden is more and better than the wilderness. The distinctions of s.e.x are innate and eternal. They create their own barriers, which cannot be overleaped.

Do you think that, in the examples which I have given,--and perhaps in others which your own observation may have furnished you,--there was any unusual lack of harmony or adjustment? Do you judge, from the testimony of their husbands, that Mrs. Hitchc.o.c.k, or Mrs. Mill, or Mrs. Browning were any more overbearing, any more greedy of authority, any more ambitious of outside power, any more unlovely and unattractive, than the silliest Mrs. Maplesap, who never knew any "sterner duty than to give caresses"? He must have used his eyes to little purpose who has failed to see that, in a symmetrical womanhood, every member keeps pace with every other. If one member suffers, all the members suffer. Power is not local, but all-embracing. Weakness does not coexist with strength. A silly, shallow woman cannot love deeply, cannot live commandingly. I believe that a woman of intellectual strength has a corresponding affectional strength. An evil education may have so warped her that she seems to be a power for evil rather than for good; but, all other things being equal, the sounder the judgment the deeper the love. The clear head and the strong heart go together. A woman who can a.s.sist her husband in geology, or revise his metaphysics, or criticise his poetry, is much more likely to hold him in wifely love and honor, is much more likely to enliven his joy and medicine his weariness, than she who can only clutch at the hem of his robe. Her love is intelligent, comprehensive, firmly founded, and not to be lightly disturbed. Weakness may possess itself of the outworks, but is easily dislodged. Strength goes within and takes possession.

All the unloveliness and unwisdom which may have characterized the "woman's movement," and of which men seem to stand in perpetual dread, are but the natural consequence of their own misdoing. It was a reaction against their wrong. Did women demand ungracefully? It was because their entreaty had been scorned and their grace slighted.

Never,--I would risk my life on the a.s.sertion,--never did any number of women leave a home to clamor in public for social rights unless impelled by the sting of social wrongs, either in their own person or in the persons of those dear to them. Every unwomanliness had its rise in a previous unmanliness.

In a vile, nameless book to which I have before referred, I find quoted the story of a rajah who was in the habit of asking, "Who is she?" whenever a calamity was related to him, however severe or however trivial. His attendants reported to him one morning that a laborer had fallen from a ladder when working at his palace, and had broken his neck. "Who is she?" demanded the rajah. "A man, no woman, great prince," was the reply. "Who is she?" repeated the rajah, with increased anger. In vain did the attendants a.s.sert the manhood of the laborer. "Bring me instant intelligence what woman caused this accident, or woe upon your heads!" exclaimed the prince. In an hour the active attendants returned, and, prostrating themselves, cried out, "O wise and powerful prince, as the ill-fated laborer was working on the scaffold, he was attracted by the beauty of one of your highness's damsels, and, gazing on her, lost his balance and fell to the ground." "You hear now," said the prince, "no accident can happen without a woman being, _in some way_, an instrument."

One might, perhaps, be pardoned for asking whether entire reliance can be placed on testimony which is dictated beforehand on penalty of losing one's head; but the anecdote indicates about the usual quant.i.ty of sense and sagacity which is popularly brought to bear on the "woman question," and we will let it pa.s.s. I have quoted the story because, by changing the feminine for the masculine noun and p.r.o.noun, it so admirably expresses my own views. As I look around upon the world, and see the sin, the sorrow, the suffering, it seems to me that, so far as it can be traced to human agency, man is at the bottom of every evil under the sun. As the husband is, the wife is. The nursery rhyme gives the whole history of man and woman in a nutsh.e.l.l:--

"Jack and Gill Went up the hill To draw a pail of water; Jack fell down And broke his crown, And Gill came tumbling after."

Men have a way of falling back on Eve's transgression, as if that were a sufficient excuse for all short- or wrong-coming. Milton glosses over Adam's part in the transgression, and even gives his sin a rather magnanimous air,--which is very different from that which Adam's character wears in Genesis,--while all the blame is laid on "the woman whom thou gavest to be with me." But before p.r.o.nouncing judgment, I should like to hear Eve's version of the story. Moses has given his, and Milton his,--the first doubtless conveying as much truth as he was able to be the medium of, the second expressing all the paganism of his s.e.x and his generation, mingled with the gall of his own private bitterness; but we have never a word from Eve. That is, we have man's side represented. But Eve will awake one day, and then, and not till then, we shall know the whole. Meanwhile, it is well for men to go back to the beginning of creation to find woman the guilty party. If they stop anywhere short of it, they will be forced to s.h.i.+ft the burden to their own shoulders. A woman may have been originally one step in advance of man in evil-doing, but he very soon caught up with her, and has never since suffered himself to labor under a similar disadvantage. I cannot think of a single folly, weakness, or vice in women which men have not either planted or fostered; and generally they have done both. But they do not see the link between cause and effect, and they fail to direct their denunciation to the proper quarter.

It only needs to trust nature! Learn that women crave to pay homage as strongly as men crave to receive it. The higher women rise the more eagerly will they turn to somewhat higher. It cannot be sweeter for a man to be looked up to than it is for a woman to look up to him. Never can you raise women to such an alt.i.tude that they will find their pride and pleasure in looking down. Women want men to be masters quite as much as men themselves wish it; but they want them first to be worthy of it. Women never rebel against the authority of goodness, of superiority, but against the tyranny of obstinacy, ignorance, heartlessness. The supremacy which a husband holds by virtue of his character is a wife's boon and blessing, and she suns herself in it and is filled with an unspeakable content. It is the supremacy of mere position, the supremacy of inferiority, that galls and irritates; that breaks out in conventions and resolutions and remonstrances, in suicide and insanity and crime. "The women now-a-days are playing the devil all round," I heard a man say not long ago, in speaking of a woman hitherto respectable, who had left husband and children and eloped with some unknown adventurer. And I said in my heart, "I am glad of it. Men have been playing the devil single-handed long enough, I am glad women are taking it up. _Similia similibus curantur_."

Things must, to be sure, be in a very dreadful condition to require such "heroic treatment," but things are in a very dreadful condition, and if men will not amend them out of love of justice and right and purity, I do not see any other way than that they must be forced to do it out of a selfish regard to their own household comfort. Let my people go, that they may serve me, was the word of the Lord to Pharaoh, but Pharaoh hardened his heart and would not let the people go. Not until there was no longer in Egypt a house in which there was not one dead did the required emanc.i.p.ation come. Then with a great cry of horror and dread were the children of Israel sent out as the Lord their G.o.d commanded. Let my people go, that they may serve me, seems the Lord to have been saying these many years to the taskmasters of America; but who is the Lord, the taskmasters have cried, that we should obey his voice to let Israel go? We know not the Lord, neither will we let Israel go. Now on summer fields red with blood, through the terrible voice of the cannonade bearing its summons of death, we are learning in anguish and tears who is the Lord; and if men choose not to do justly and love mercy and walk softly with women, it is according to a.n.a.logy that women shall become to them the scourge of G.o.d. The very charities, the tendernesses, the blessing and beneficent qualities against which they have sinned shall become thongs to lash and scorpions to sting,--and all the people shall say amen!

I am so far from being surprised when women occasionally run away from their husbands, that I rather marvel that there is not a hegira of women; that our streets and lanes are not choked up with fugitives. I do not believe in women's leaving their husbands to live with other men; it is infamy and it is folly: but I do believe most profoundly in women's leaving their husbands. It may be their right and their duty.

I think there is not the smallest danger in the state's putting all possible power of this nature into the hands of women; because a woman's nature is such that she will never exercise this power till she has borne to the utmost, cruelty, malignity, or indifference; and, in point of morality, indifference is just as good ground for separation as cruelty. Love is the sole morality of marriage, and a marriage to which love has never come, or from which it has departed, is immorality, and a woman cannot continue in it without continually incurring stain. I do not think she has a right to marry again; not even a legal divorce justifies a second marriage; but she has a right to withdraw from the man who imbrutes her. If the law does not justify such action, she is right in taking the matter into her own hands.

There is no power on earth that can make a woman live with a man, if she chooses not to live with him, and has a will strong enough to bear out her choice; and when she finds that she ministers only to his selfishness, when she discovers that her marriage is no marriage at all, but an alliance offensive to all delicacy and opposed to all improvement, she is not only justified in discontinuing it, but she is not justified in continuing it. The position which a woman occupies in such a connection is fairer in the eyes of the law, but morally it is no less objectionable than if the marriage ceremony had never taken place. A prayer and a promise cannot turn pollution into purity.

Is this a movement towards violating the sanct.i.ty of marriage? It is rather causing that marriage shall not with its sanct.i.ty protect sin.

When a slaver, freighted with wretchedness, unfurls from its masthead the Stars and Stripes, that it may avoid capture, does it thereby free itself from guilt, or does it desecrate our flag? Who honors his country, he who permits the slave-s.h.i.+p to go on her horrible way protected by the sacred name she has dared to invoke, or he who scorns to suffer those folds to sanction crime, tears down the flag from its disgracing eminence, unlooses the bands of the oppressor and bids the oppressed go free?

But are there not inconstant, weak women, who would take advantage of such power, and for any fancied slight or foolish whim desert a good home and a good husband? Well, what then? If a silly woman will of her own motion go away and live by herself, I think she pursues a wise course and deserves well of the Republic. I do not believe her good husband will complain. On the contrary, he would doubtless adopt a part at least of the Napoleonic principle, and build a bridge of gold for his fleeing spouse. Such power will never make silly women, though it may possibly render them more conspicuous, and that will be a benefit. The more vividly a wrong is seen and felt, the more likely is it to be removed. The remedy for the mischief which Lord Burleigh's she-fool may do is, not to bind her to your hearth, but to keep her away from it altogether; and better than a remedy, the preventive is, so to treat women that they shall not be fools. If the ways of male transgressors against women can be made so hard that they shall, in very self-defence, set to and mend them--Heaven be praised!

But what of the Bible? Is not the permanency of the marriage connection inculcated there? No more than I inculcate it. I certainly do not see it enforced in any such manner as to weaken my position.

Its permanency is a.s.sumed rather than enjoined; but a basis of essential oneness is also a.s.sumed, which is the sufficient, the true, and the only true and sufficient basis. "Therefore," says Adam, "shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." But if, instead of cleaving to his wife, a man cleaves away from his wife, and instead of being one flesh, the twain become twain,--I do not see that Adam has anything to say on the subject. I suppose Eve looked so lovely to him, and he was so delighted to have her, that it never occurred to him to make any provision against the contingency of his abusing her. I have not made any especial research, but I do not remember anything in the precepts or examples of the Bible that enjoins the continuance of a.s.sociation in spite of everything. In principle it is presumed to be perpetual, but in practice the Bible makes certain exceptions to perpetuity,--lays down rules indeed for separation. "What G.o.d hath joined together let not man put asunder," says our Saviour, which surely does not mean that what greed or l.u.s.t or ambition has joined together woman may not put asunder. When a young man and a maiden, drawn towards each other by their G.o.d-given instincts, have become one by love, no mere outside incompatibility of wealth or rank, or any such thing, should forbid them to become one by marriage. For what G.o.d hath joined together let not man put asunder. But the G.o.d who would not permit an ox and an a.s.s to be yoked together to the same plough, never, surely, joined in holy wedlock a brute and an angel; and if the angel struggles to escape from the unequal yoke-fellow to whom the powers of evil have coupled her, who dare thrust her back under the yoke with a "Thus saith the Lord"? Christ himself does not p.r.o.nounce against the putting away of wife or husband, but against the putting away of one and marrying another. St. Paul's words regarding the Christian and the idolater can hardly be applied in our society, but so far as they can be applied they confirm my views. "Let not the wife depart from her husband," he says, and immediately adds, "_but and if she depart, let her remain unmarried_, or be reconciled to her husband." Precisely. For no trivial cause should the wife give her husband over to be the prey of his own wicked pa.s.sions; but if he is so bad, if he so degrades her life that she must depart, let her remain unmarried.