[Ida Van Arsdel to Mrs. Courtney.]
My Dear Friend:—I am glad you have written as you have to Eva. It is perfectly inexplicable to me that a girl of her general strength of character can be so undecided. Eva has been deteriorating ever since she came from Europe. This fashionable life is to mind and body just like a hotbed to tender plants in summer, it wilts everything down. Eva was a good scholar and I had great hopes of her. She had a warm heart; she has really high and noble aspirations, but for two or three years past she has done nothing but run down her health and fritter away her mind on trifles. She is not half the girl she was at school, either mentally or physically, and I am grieved and indignant at the waste. Her only chance of escape and salvation is to marry a true man.
But when people set out as a first requisite that the man must be rich, how many are the chances of finding that?
The rich men of America are either rich men's sons, who, from all I have seen of them, are poor trash enough, or business men, who have made wealth by their own exertions. But how few there are who make money, who do not sacrifice their spiritual and nobler natures to do it? How few with whom the making of money is not the beginning, middle, and end of life, and how little can such men do to uphold and elevate the moral nature of a wife!
Mr. Sydney is a man, heart, soul, and strength, interested in that mighty game of chance and skill by which, in America, money is made. He is a railroad king—a prince of stocks—a man going with a forty thousand steam power through New York waters. He wants a wife—a brilliant, attractive, showy, dressy wife, to keep his house and ornament his home; and he is at Eva's feet, because she is, on the whole, the belle of his circle. He chooses en Grand Seigneur, and undoubtedly he is as much in love with her as such a kind of man can be. But, in fact, he knows nothing about Eva; he does not even know enough to know the dangers of marrying such a woman. With all her fire, and all her softness, all her restless enthusiasms, her longings and aspirations and inconsistencies, what could he do with her? The man who marries Eva ought to know her better than she knows herself, but this man never would know her, if they lived together an age. He has no traits by which to estimate her, and the very best result of the marriage will be a mutual laisser aller of two people who agree not to quarrel, and to go their own separate ways, he to his world, and she to hers; and this sort of thing is what is called in our times a good marriage.
I am out of patience with Eva for her very virtues. It is her instinct to want to please and to comply, and because mamma and aunt Maria have set their heart on this match, and because she is empty-hearted and tired, and ennuyeuse, she has no strength to stand up for herself. Her very conscientiousness weakens her; she doubts, but does not decide. She has just enough of everything in her nature to get her into trouble, and not enough to get her out. A phrenologist told her she needed destructiveness. Well, she does. The pain-giving power is a most necessary part of a well organized human being. Nobody can ever do anything without the courage to be disagreeable at times, which I have plenty of. They do not try to control me, or enslave me. Why? Because I made my declaration of independence, and planted my guns, and got ready for war. This is dreadfully unamiable, but it did the thing; it secured peace; I am let alone. I am allowed my freedom, but everybody interferes with Eva. She is conquered territory—has no rights that anybody is bound to respect. It provokes me.
As to the religious part of your letter, dear friend, I thank you for it. I cannot see things as you do, however. To me it appears that in our day everything has got to be brought to the simple test of, What good does it do? If baptism, confirmation and eucharist make unworldly, self-denying, self-sacrificing people just as certainly as petunia-seed make petunias, why, then, nobody will have any doubt of their necessity, and the church will have its throngs. I don't see now that they do. Go into a fashionable party I have been in, and watch the girls, and see if you can tell who have been baptized and confirmed, and who have not.
The first Christians carried Christianity over all the pomp and power of the world simply by the unworldly life they lived. Nobody doubted where the true church was in those days. Christians were a set of people like nobody else in the world, and whenever and wherever and by whatever means that kind of character that they had is created, it will have power.
I like the Episcopal Church, but I cannot call it the church till I see evidences that it answers practically the purpose of a church better than any other. For my part I go to hear a dreadfully heretical preacher on Sunday, who lectures in a black-coat in a hall, simply because he talks to me on points of duty, which I am anxious to hear discussed. Eva, poor child, wears down her health and strength with night after night in society, and spends all her money on dress; doing no earthly thing for any living creature, except in the pleasure-giving way, like a bird or a flower, and then is shocked and worried about me because I read scientific works on Sunday.