Lessons in Life; A Series of Familiar Essays

by J. G. Holland

Well, all this can be improved. Men can cultivate the power to apprehend and express truth. They can cast off the prejudice, selfishness, bigotry, and sensuality that prevent them from receiving truth. They can refrain from conscious lying; and no one doubts that the world would be greatly improved by honest efforts directed to these ends. Only the naked soul, in Eternity's white light, can be wholly truthful; but we can all try for it, and we shall find our highest account in trying.

LESSON VI.

MISTAKES OF PENANCE.

"For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form and doth the body make."
SPENSER.

"Can sackcloth clothe a fault or hide a shame?
Or do thy hands make Heaven a recompense,
By strewing dust upon thy briny face?
No! though thou pine thyself with willing want,
Or face look thin, or carcass ne'er so gaunt;
Such holy madness God rejects and loathes
That sinks no deeper than the skin or clothes."
QUARLES.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty." KEATS.

I have every reason to believe that God loves Shakers, but I do not think He admires them. I do not see how He can; but perhaps this is not a competent reason to offer in the premises. I saw a wagon-load of what I supposed to be Shakers of both sexes, riding along the street, the other day; and I wondered what I should think of them if I had made them. I think I should have been about equally vexed and amused to see the lines that I had made beautiful, disguised, and every grace-giving swell of limb and bust, upon which I had exercised such exquisite toil, carefully hidden. They sat up very straight and prim, in a very square wagon, behind a square-trotting horse, driven by "right lines" in a pair of hands that seemed to grow out of the driver's stomach, while his elevated, rectangular elbows cut rigidly against the air on either side. It was a vision for a painter—a house painter— "a painter by trade." The long-haired, meek-looking men, with their flat-crowned, broad-brimmed hats, straight coats and neutral colors, and the women with their sugar-scoop bonnets, white kerchiefs and straight waists, looked like a case of faded wax-figures, in prison uniform, that had "come down to us from a former generation."

I heaved a sigh as the wagon-load of mortified and badly-dressed flesh passed out of sight, and wondered if the souls inside of those bodies were as angular as their covering. I did not believe it—I do not believe it. I have no doubt that underneath those straight waistcoats hearts have throbbed at the sight of woman and child, and longed for home and family life, with yearnings that could not be uttered. Those straightlaced sensibilities have been thrilled by beauty, and bathed in the grace and glory of the life around them. Trees have whispered to them, flowers have looked up and rebuked them, brooks have called to them with laughter, rivers have smiled upon them in sunshine, the great sky has bent over them with infinite tenderness and fulness of beauty, and they have felt what they could not define. It was something very wrong, they supposed, and so they buttoned their straight jackets around them, turned their eyes away from beholding vanity, and thought they had done an excellent thing. I know that those young women, with their abominable clothing outside, and their crushed and abused sympathies inside, are unhappy, unless they have all been mercifully transformed into fanatics. It is useless to tell me that a man can ignore or trample to death the strongest passion of his nature—the strongest, the purest, and the most ennobling—and be a happy man. It is useless to say that a man or woman can walk through a world of beauty—themselves the most beautiful of all things—and bind themselves up in unbecoming drapery, and smother all their impulses to express the beauty with which God inspires them, and do it with content and satisfaction. It cannot be done.

So, when this wagon-load of Shakers drove out of sight, I heaved a sigh, for I knew that not to be unhappy in the life which was typefied in their dress and establishment, would be a greater misfortune, essentially, than dissatisfaction and discontent would be. If they were happy in their life, they must have become perverted in their natures, or indurated beyond the susceptibility to receive the impressions of healthy men and women. If God ever put any thing majestic and noble into a man, and gave him a fitting frame for it, He never intended that it should be hidden in a meal-bag, or permanently quenched under a smock-frock. In the infinite variety which he has introduced into human character and into human forms and faces, there is no warrant for dressing men in uniform, but a most emphatic protest against it. If God made woman beautiful, He made her so to be looked at—to give pleasure to the eyes which rest upon her—and she has no business to dress herself as if she were a hitching-post, or to transform that which should give delight to those among whom she moves, into a ludicrous caricature of a woman's form.

I repeat that I have every reason to believe that God loves Shakers, but I do not think He admires them. If God admires the bodies He has made, He cannot admire them when they are covered by the Shaker dress, for it spoils the looks of them, and differs essentially from the plan which He pursues in draping all other forms of life. There is no grace about it, and no beauty of color. God admires clouds, I doubt not, when painted by the setting sun, and stars flashing in the heavens, and the flowers of myriad hues that are scattered over the earth, but if these are objects of His special admiration, as they are of ours, what can He think of a drab Shaker bonnet? What can He think when man and woman, the glory and crown of His creation, are entirely overtopped and thrown into the shade by birds and bees and blossoms, and go poking around the world in unexampled and ingeniously contrived ugliness? What does He think of men and women who take that passion of love, which was intended to make them happy, and give them sweet companionship, and bear young children to their arms, and trample it under their feet as an unholy thing, and to welcome to their hearts, in its stead, blackness, and darkness, and tempest? What does He think of lives out of which are shut all meaning and all individuality, and all love and expression of beauty, and all vivifying, liberalizing, and humanizing experience?