No wonder Dr. Gregory counselled his daughters to silence. Lovers less generous than Cœlebs might well have been alienated by such disqualifications. “Oh, how lovely is a maid’s ignorance!” sighs Rousseau, contemplating with rapture the many things that Sophie does not know. “Happy the man who is destined to teach her. She will never aspire to be the tutor of her husband, but will be content to remain his pupil. She will not endeavour to mould his tastes, but will relinquish her own. She will be more estimable to him than if she were learned. It will be his pleasure to enlighten her.”
This was a well-established point of view, and English Sophies were trained to meet it with becoming deference. They heard no idle prating about an equality which has never existed, and which never can exist. “Had a third order been necessary,” said an eighteenth-century schoolmistress to her pupils, “doubtless one would have been created, a midway kind of being.” In default of such a connecting link, any impious attempt to bridge the chasm between the sexes met with the failure it deserved. When Mrs. Knowles, a Quaker lady, not destitute of self-esteem, observed to Boswell that she hoped men and women would be equal in another world, that gentleman replied with spirit: “Madam, you are too ambitious. We might as well desire to be equal with the angels.”
The dissimulation which Dr. Gregory urged upon his daughters, and which is the safeguard of all misplaced intelligence, extended to matters more vital than Latin and astronomy. He warned them, as they valued their earthly happiness, never to make a confidante of a married woman, “especially if she lives happily with her husband”; and never to reveal to their own husbands the excess of their wifely affection. “Do not discover to any man the full extent of your love, no, not although you marry him. That sufficiently shows your preference, which is all he is entitled to know. If he has delicacy, he will ask for no stronger proof of your affection, for your sake; if he has sense, he will not ask it, for his own. Violent love cannot subsist, at least cannot be expressed, for any time together on both sides. Nature in this case has laid the reserve on you.” In the passivity of women, no less than in their refined duplicity, did this acute observer recognize the secret strength of sex.
A vastly different counsellor of youth was Mrs. West, who wrote a volume of “Letters to a Young Lady” (the young lady was Miss Maunsell, and she died after reading them), which were held to embody the soundest morality of the day. Mrs. West is as dull as Dr. Gregory is penetrating, as verbose as he is laconic, as obvious as he is individual. She devotes many agitated pages to theology, and many more to irrefutable, though one hopes unnecessary, arguments in behalf of female virtue. But she also advises a careful submission, a belittling insincerity, as woman’s best safeguards in life. It is not only a wife’s duty to tolerate her husband’s follies, but it is the part of wisdom to conceal from him any knowledge of his derelictions. Bad he may be; but it is necessary to his comfort to believe that his wife thinks him good. “The lordly nature of man so strongly revolts from the suspicion of inferiority,” explains this excellent monitress, “that a susceptible husband can never feel easy in the society of his wife when he knows that she is acquainted with his vices, though he is well assured that her prudence, generosity, and affection will prevent her from being a severe accuser.” One is reminded of the old French gentleman who said he was aware that he cheated at cards, but he disliked any allusion to the subject.
To be “easy” in a wife’s society, to relax spiritually as well as mentally, and to be immune from criticism;—these were the privileges which men demanded, and which well-trained women were ready to accord. In 1808 the “Belle Assemblée” printed a model letter, which purported to come from a young wife whose husband had deserted her and her child for the more lively society of his mistress. It expressed in pathetic language the sentiments then deemed correct,—sentiments which embodied the patience of Griselda, without her acquiescence in fate. The wife tells her husband that she has retired to the country for economy, and to avoid scandalous gossip; that by careful management she is able to live on the pittance he has given her; that “little Emily” is working a pair of ruffles for him; that his presence would make their poor cottage seem a palace. “Pardon my interrupting you,” she winds up with ostentatious meekness. “I mean to give you satisfaction. Though I am deeply wronged by your error, I am not resentful. I wish you all the happiness of which you are capable, and am your once loved and still affectionate, Emilia.”
That last sentence is not without dignity, and certainly not without its sting. One doubts whether Emilia’s husband, for all her promises and protestations, could ever again have felt perfectly “easy” in his wife’s society. He probably therefore stayed away, and soothed his soul elsewhere. “We can with tranquillity forgive in ourselves the sins of which no one accuses us.”
THE PIETIST
They go the fairest way to Heaven that would serve God without a Hell.—Religio Medici.
“How cutting it is to be the means of bringing children into the world to be the subjects of the Kingdom of Darkness, to dwell with Divils and Damned Spirits.”
In this temper of pardonable regret the mother of William Godwin wrote to her erring son; and while the maternal point of view deserves consideration (no parent could be expected to relish such a prospect), the letter is noteworthy as being one of the few written to Godwin, or about Godwin, which forces us to sympathize with the philosopher. The boy who was reproved for picking up the family cat on Sunday—“demeaning myself with such profaneness on the Lord’s day”—was little likely to find his religion “all pure profit.” His account of the books he read as a child, and of his precocious and unctuous piety, is probably over-emphasized for the sake of colour; but the Evangelical literature of his day, whether designed for young people or for adults, was of a melancholy and discouraging character. The “Pious Deaths of Many Godly Children” (sad monitor of the Godwin nursery) appears to have been read off the face of the earth; but there have descended to us sundry volumes of a like character, which even now stab us with pity for the little readers long since laid in their graves. The most frivolous occupation of the good boy in these old story-books is searching the Bible, “with mamma’s permission,” for texts in which David “praises God for the weather.” More serious-minded children weep floods of tears because they are “lost sinners.” In a book of “Sermons for the Very Young,” published by the Vicar of Walthamstow in the beginning of the last century, we find the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah selected as an appropriate theme for infancy, and its lessons driven home with all the force of a direct personal application. “Think, little child, of the fearful story. The wrath of God is upon them. Do they now repent of their sins? It is all too late. Do they cry for mercy? There is none to hear them.... Your heart, little child, is full of sin. You think of what is not right, and then you wish it, and that is sin.... Ah, what shall sinners do when the last day comes upon them? What will they think when God shall punish them forever?”