From the first splash of the Atlantic on a Massachusetts beach to the farthest cañon which the weary footsteps of the Mormon women at this moment press; from the shell-bound coast of Florida, hung with garlands of orange and lime, to the cold, green waters of Lake Superior, in their fretted chalice of copper and gold,—the novel holds its way. On the railroad, at the depot, in the Irish hut, in the Indian lodge, on the steamer and the canal-boat, in the Fifth-avenue palace, and the Five-Points den of infamy, its shabby livery betrays the work that it is doing.
Until very lately, it has kept faith with history and the classics; but it is passing more and more into the hands of women,—of late into the hands of noble and independent women; and there are signs which indicate that it may soon become a potent influence of redemption. It has thus far done infinite harm, by drawing false distinctions between the masculine and feminine elements of human nature, and perpetuating, through the influence of genius often intensifying, the educational power of a false theory of love.
Social customs follow in the train of literature; and sometimes in keeping with popular errors, but oftener in stern opposition to them, are the lives and labors of remarkable individuals of both sexes,—lives that show, if they show nothing else, how much the resolute endeavor of one noble heart may do towards making real and popular its own convictions.
The influence of newspapers sustains, of course, the general current derived from all these sources.
Public opinion, then, flows out of these streams,—out of classical literature, history, general reading, and the proverbial wisdom of all lands; out of social conventions, and customs and newspapers. These streams set one way. Only individual influences remain, to stem their united force.
We must treat of them more at length, and first of the classics. Until very lately, there were no proper helps to the study of Egyptian, Greek, or Roman mythology. It was studied by the letter, and made to have more or less meaning, according to the teacher who interpreted it. Lemprière had no room for moral deductions or symbolic indications; his columns read like a criminal report in the "New-York Herald." The Egyptian mythology was, doubtless, an older off-shoot from the same stem. Many of its ceremonies, its symbols, and its idols, must be confused by the uninstructed mind with realities of the very lowest, perhaps we should not be far wrong if we said, of the most revolting stamp. The Greek classics, so far as I know them, present a singular mixture of influences; but, where woman is concerned, the lowest certainly preponderate. We should be sorry to lose Homer and Æschylus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, from our library; but of how many poets and dramatists, from the few fragments of Pindar and Anacreon down through the tragic poets,—down, very far down, indeed, to Aristophanes,—can we say as much?
There need be no doubt about Aristophanes. The world would be the purer, and all women grateful, if every copy of his works, and every coarse inference from them, could be swept out of existence to-morrow. When we find a noble picture in Xenophon, it had a noble original, like Panthea in Persia, as old perhaps as that fine saying in the Heetopades which all the younger Veds disown. When we find an ignoble thought, it seems to have been born out of his Greek experience. Transported by a fair ideal, Plato asks, in his "Republic," "Should not this sex, which we condemn to obscure duties, be destined to functions the most noble and elevated?" But it was only to take back the words in his "Timæus," and in the midst of a society that refused to let the wife sit at table with the husband, and whose young wives were not "tame" enough to speak to their husbands, if we may believe the words of Xenophon, until after months of marriage. When Iscomachus, the model of an Athenian husband, and the friend of Socrates, asked his wife if she knew whether he had married her for love, "I know nothing," she replied, "but to be faithful to you, and to learn what you teach." He responded by an exhortation on "staying at home," which has come down to posterity, and left her, with a kiss, for the saloon of Aspasia! Pindar and Anacreon, even when they find no better representatives than Dr. Wolcott and Tom Moore, still continue to crown the wine-cup, and impart a certain grace to unmanly orgies. A late French writer goes so far as to call Euripides "a woman-hater, who could not pardon Zeus for having made woman an indispensable agent in the preservation of the species." In his portraits of Iphigenia and Macaria, Euripides follows his conception of heroic, not human nature. They are demi-goddesses; yet how are their white robes stained!
Iphigenia says,—
"More than a thousand women is one man
Worthy to see the light of day;"
a sentiment which has prevailed ever since.