The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner — Volume 1

by Charles Dudley Warner

II

You cannot know, the Young Lady wrote, with what longing I look back to those winter days by the fire; though all the windows are open to this May morning, and the brown thrush is singing in the chestnut- tree, and I see everywhere that first delicate flush of spring, which seems too evanescent to be color even, and amounts to little more than a suffusion of the atmosphere. I doubt, indeed, if the spring is exactly what it used to be, or if, as we get on in years [no one ever speaks of "getting on in years" till she is virtually settled in life], its promises and suggestions do not seem empty in comparison with the sympathies and responses of human friendship, and the stimulation of society. Sometimes nothing is so tiresome as a perfect day in a perfect season.

I only imperfectly understand this. The Parson says that woman is always most restless under the most favorable conditions, and that there is no state in which she is really happy except that of change. I suppose this is the truth taught in what has been called the "Myth of the Garden." Woman is perpetual revolution, and is that element in the world which continually destroys and re-creates. She is the experimenter and the suggester of new combinations. She has no belief in any law of eternal fitness of things. She is never even content with any arrangement of her own house. The only reason the Mistress could give, when she rearranged her apartment, for hanging a picture in what seemed the most inappropriate place, was that it had never been there before. Woman has no respect for tradition, and because a thing is as it is is sufficient reason for changing it. When she gets into law, as she has come into literature, we shall gain something in the destruction of all our vast and musty libraries of precedents, which now fetter our administration of individual justice. It is Mandeville's opinion that women are not so sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken poetry of nature; being less poetical, and having less imagination, they are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make less failures in business. I have noticed the almost selfish passion for their flowers which old gardeners have, and their reluctance to part with a leaf or a blossom from their family. They love the flowers for themselves. A woman raises flowers for their use. She is destruct-ion in a conservatory. She wants the flowers for her lover, for the sick, for the poor, for the Lord on Easter day, for the ornamentation of her house. She delights in the costly pleasure of sacrificing them. She never sees a flower but she has an intense but probably sinless desire to pick it.

It has been so from the first, though from the first she has been thwarted by the accidental superior strength of man. Whatever she has obtained has been by craft, and by the same coaxing which the sun uses to draw the blossoms out of the apple-trees. I am not surprised to learn that she has become tired of indulgences, and wants some of the original rights. We are just beginning to find out the extent to which she has been denied and subjected, and especially her condition among the primitive and barbarous races. I have never seen it in a platform of grievances, but it is true that among the Fijians she is not, unless a better civilization has wrought a change in her behalf, permitted to eat people, even her own sex, at the feasts of the men; the dainty enjoyed by the men being considered too good to be wasted on women. Is anything wanting to this picture of the degradation of woman? By a refinement of cruelty she receives no benefit whatever from the missionaries who are sent out by—what to her must seem a new name for Tantalus—the American Board.

I suppose the Young Lady expressed a nearly universal feeling in her regret at the breaking up of the winter-fireside company. Society needs a certain seclusion and the sense of security. Spring opens the doors and the windows, and the noise and unrest of the world are let in. Even a winter thaw begets a desire to travel, and summer brings longings innumerable, and disturbs the most tranquil souls. Nature is, in fact, a suggester of uneasiness, a promoter of pilgrimages and of excursions of the fancy which never come to any satisfactory haven. The summer in these latitudes is a campaign of sentiment and a season, for the most part, of restlessness and discontent. We grow now in hot-houses roses which, in form and color, are magnificent, and appear to be full of passion; yet one simple June rose of the open air has for the Young Lady, I doubt not, more sentiment and suggestion of love than a conservatory full of them in January. And this suggestion, leavened as it is with the inconstancy of nature, stimulated by the promises which are so often like the peach-blossom of the Judas-tree, unsatisfying by reason of its vague possibilities, differs so essentially from the more limited and attainable and home-like emotion born of quiet intercourse by the winter fireside, that I do not wonder the Young Lady feels as if some spell had been broken by the transition of her life from in-doors to out-doors. Her secret, if secret she has, which I do not at all know, is shared by the birds and the new leaves and the blossoms on the fruit trees. If we lived elsewhere, in that zone where the poets pretend always to dwell, we might be content, perhaps I should say drugged, by the sweet influences of an unchanging summer; but not living elsewhere, we can understand why the Young Lady probably now looks forward to the hearthstone as the most assured center of enduring attachment.

If it should ever become the sad duty of this biographer to write of disappointed love, I am sure he would not have any sensational story to tell of the Young Lady. She is one of those women whose unostentatious lives are the chief blessing of humanity; who, with a sigh heard only by herself and no change in her sunny face, would put behind her all the memories of winter evenings and the promises of May mornings, and give her life to some ministration of human kindness with an assiduity that would make her occupation appear like an election and a first choice. The disappointed man scowls, and hates his race, and threatens self-destruction, choosing oftener the flowing bowl than the dagger, and becoming a reeling nuisance in the world. It would be much more manly in him to become the secretary of a Dorcas society.

I suppose it is true that women work for others with less expectation of reward than men, and give themselves to labors of self-sacrifice with much less thought of self. At least, this is true unless woman goes into some public performance, where notoriety has its attractions, and mounts some cause, to ride it man-fashion, when I think she becomes just as eager for applause and just as willing that self-sacrifice should result in self-elevation as man. For her, usually, are not those unbought—presentations which are forced upon firemen, philanthropists, legislators, railroad-men, and the superintendents of the moral instruction of the young. These are almost always pleasing and unexpected tributes to worth and modesty, and must be received with satisfaction when the public service rendered has not been with a view to procuring them. We should say that one ought to be most liable to receive a "testimonial" who, being a superintendent of any sort, did not superintend with a view to getting it. But "testimonials" have become so common that a modest man ought really to be afraid to do his simple duty, for fear his motives will be misconstrued. Yet there are instances of very worthy men who have had things publicly presented to them. It is the blessed age of gifts and the reward of private virtue. And the presentations have become so frequent that we wish there were a little more variety in them. There never was much sense in giving a gallant fellow a big speaking-trumpet to carry home to aid him in his intercourse with his family; and the festive ice-pitcher has become a too universal sign of absolute devotion to the public interest. The lack of one will soon be proof that a man is a knave. The legislative cane with the gold head, also, is getting to be recognized as the sign of the immaculate public servant, as the inscription on it testifies, and the steps of suspicion must ere-long dog him who does not carry one. The "testimonial" business is, in truth, a little demoralizing, almost as much so as the "donation;" and the demoralization has extended even to our language, so that a perfectly respectable man is often obliged to see himself "made the recipient of" this and that. It would be much better, if testimonials must be, to give a man a barrel of flour or a keg of oysters, and let him eat himself at once back into the ranks of ordinary men.

III

We may have a testimonial class in time, a sort of nobility here in America, made so by popular gift, the members of which will all be able to show some stick or piece of plated ware or massive chain, "of which they have been the recipients." In time it may be a distinction not to belong to it, and it may come to be thought more blessed to give than to receive. For it must have been remarked that it is not always to the cleverest and the most amiable and modest man that the deputation comes with the inevitable ice-pitcher (and "salver to match"), which has in it the magic and subtle quality of making the hour in which it is received the proudest of one's life. There has not been discovered any method of rewarding all the deserving people and bringing their virtues into the prominence of notoriety. And, indeed, it would be an unreasonable world if there had, for its chief charm and sweetness lie in the excellences in it which are reluctantly disclosed; one of the chief pleasures of living is in the daily discovery of good traits, nobilities, and kindliness both in those we have long known and in the chance passenger whose way happens for a day to lie with ours. The longer I live the more I am impressed with the excess of human kindness over human hatred, and the greater willingness to oblige than to disoblige that one meets at every turn. The selfishness in politics, the jealousy in letters, the bickering in art, the bitterness in theology, are all as nothing compared to the sweet charities, sacrifices, and deferences of private life. The people are few whom to know intimately is to dislike. Of course you want to hate somebody, if you can, just to keep your powers of discrimination bright, and to save yourself from becoming a mere mush of good-nature; but perhaps it is well to hate some historical person who has been dead so long as to be indifferent to it. It is more comfortable to hate people we have never seen. I cannot but think that Judas Iscariot has been of great service to the world as a sort of buffer for moral indignation which might have made a collision nearer home but for his utilized treachery. I used to know a venerable and most amiable gentleman and scholar, whose hospitable house was always overrun with wayside ministers, agents, and philanthropists, who loved their fellow-men better than they loved to work for their living; and he, I suspect, kept his moral balance even by indulgence in violent but most distant dislikes. When I met him casually in the street, his first salutation was likely to be such as this: "What a liar that Alison was! Don't you hate him?" And then would follow specifications of historical inveracity enough to make one's blood run cold. When he was thus discharged of his hatred by such a conductor, I presume he had not a spark left for those whose mission was partly to live upon him and other generous souls.

Mandeville and I were talking of the unknown people, one rainy night by the fire, while the Mistress was fitfully and interjectionally playing with the piano-keys in an improvising mood. Mandeville has a good deal of sentiment about him, and without any effort talks so beautifully sometimes that I constantly regret I cannot report his language. He has, besides, that sympathy of presence—I believe it is called magnetism by those who regard the brain as only a sort of galvanic battery—which makes it a greater pleasure to see him think, if I may say so, than to hear some people talk.