Part I.—Nothing Lost By Good Humor
For more than a month I had been ransacking my memory in search of some story or narrative to offer our readers, but with rather poor success. I thought of all the good things I had ever heard, and tumbled and tossed my books in vain—nothing could I find that was suitable for either children or parents. So I was, very reluctantly, about to abandon the enterprise, when it chanced that, being unable to compose myself to sleep, a few nights since, I took up, according to my custom on such occasions, an old copy of Montaigne, the usual companion of my vigils, the fellow-occupant of my pillow, and the only moralist whose musings one can read with pleasure on the wrong side of forty.
I opened the Essays carelessly, for each and every page of them is precious and replete with themes for meditation. In so doing, I alighted upon the chapter entitled, 'Of three Good Women,'—which commences thus: 'They are not to be found by the dozen, as every one knows, and especially not in the duties of married life, for that is a market full of such thorny circumstances that it is no easy matter for a woman's will to keep whole and sound in it for any length of time.'
'Montaigne is an impertinent fellow!' I exclaimed, slamming to the book. 'What? this close reader of antiquity, this fine analyst of the human heart, has been able to find only three good women, only three devoted wives, in all the Greek and Roman annals! This is playing the joker out of season. Goodness is the special attribute of woman. Every married woman is good, or supposed to be such. I bethink me, too, that our old jurists always make the law presume this goodness to exist, at the outset,'
Thus meditating, I wandered into my library, and there took up a fine old volume, bound in red morocco, and entitled 'The Dream of Vergier;' a book full of wisdom and logic, and written by some venerable clerk, during the reign of Charles V., king of France. I looked for the page that had struck my fancy, but—alas! how oddly one's memory changes with the lapse of years—instead of finding, in that grave old book, the just panegyric of woman's goodness, I discovered, to my great surprise, only a violent satire all spiced with texts borrowed from St. Augustine, the Roman laws and the ancient canons, with this sage conclusion, full worthy of the exordium:—
'I do not say, however, that there is no good woman at all, but the species is rare; and hence an old law says that no law concerning good women should be made, for that laws are to be made concerning things of usual occurrence, as it is written in Auth. sinc prohib., etc., quia vero and L. Nam ad ca, Dig. De Leffibus.'
These juridical epigrams, these cool pleasantries, in a serious book, shocked me more than even the hard hits of the Gascon philosopher. 'Good women,' I thought to myself, 'are found everywhere. In history? No; history is written by men who love and admire heroes only, that is to say, those who rob, subjugate, or slay them. In theology? No; it has not yet forgiven the daughters of Eve the fault which ruined us,—a sin of which they have retained at least a little share. In the records of the law, then? No, again; for men make the laws. Woman is, in their eyes, nothing but a minor, legally incapable of governing herself. God only knows what is, here, as in all things, the difference between the fact and the law. Are these good women to be found in plays, romances, or novels? No, still; for they are but the perpetual recital of feminine artfulness. Where, then, shall we look for good women?—In the realm of fable and fiction, in the kingdom of fancy—the dominion of the ideal.
These are the only regions in which merit holds the place it is entitled to or justice is done to the claims of virtue. What is the tenderness of Baucis, or the long fidelity of Penelope? Fiction only. And the resignation of the gentle Griseldis—what is it? An old tale of other days. In order to find the good woman we are looking for, this is the ivory portal at which we must knock.
Acting upon this conviction, I reperused all the old traditions, I called to my aid that peculiar lore of nations which is embodied in their legends, and which is so vividly, so amiably, and so ingenuously expressed. I interrogated the story-tellers of every country, Indian, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, French, German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Russian, Lithuanian, and even the hoary old wayside narrators of the far Thibet. I plunged into this ocean of fancy with the recklessness of an accomplished diver, but,—must I acknowledge it?—less fortunate than even Montaigne with his history, I have succeeded in bringing back only one woman that I can call really good, and her I have had to disinter from under the ice and snows of the North, in a wild country, too, and among a people who are not so delicate and refined as though Paris were in Norway. From Cadiz to Stockholm, from London to Cairo and Delhi, from Paris to Teheran and Samarcand, if the stories are to be believed, there are artful girls and scheming mothers, in any quantity; but the good woman!—where does she lie hid, and why do they never tell us anything about her? Here is a hiatus to which I specially call the attention of the learned. In observing it myself, I feel the more emboldened to relate the story of the only good woman and wife I have unearthed. It is a simple narrative, and not thoroughly in accordance with every-day experience, and, indeed, there may be some squeamish people who will say that it is ridiculous. No matter—it has one good quality which no one can dispute—it is not in the ordinary style of either adventure or narration. Novelty is all the rage at the present day, and what imparts value to things is not their intrinsic merit, but their strangeness.
Here, then, is my story presented to you, kind reader, just as Messrs. Asbjoernsen and Moe give it, in their curious collection of Norwegian tales and legends.