Now, sleep is a most important consideration in such a nervous generation as ours: every woman ought to have eight hours' sleep, and more if she needs it, but she should not wake up and then go to sleep again; that second sleep, which is so pleasant, is the sleep of the sluggard. I would like to give her "a chamber deaf to noise and blind to light," and never let her be woke, but she should get up the moment she wakes of her own accord, or, at most, spend ten minutes in the process of waking.
"She planteth a vineyard." I should like my Virtuous Woman to be fond of gardening, and at all events read in Bacon's Essays how God Almighty first planted a garden.
"She strengthened her arms." This verse makes us fancy the Virtuous Woman as being unpleasingly strong, but we should guard against being purposely weak, with an idea of its being pleasing; Thackeray's Amelia is hardly a good model, and Patient Grizzel did her husband an infinity of harm!
"Her candle goeth not out by night." But the Virtuous Woman must be self-denying in the matter of sitting up, now that modern life makes so many more demands upon her brain. You know it is self-indulgence when you sit up late; you were not bound to be so sociable as all that; you only hinder yourself and others from proper time for prayer and sleep; if you made a move after a reasonable amount of talk, the others would be sensible too. And so you repent and force yourself to get up very punctually the next morning, not seeing that this is on the principle that two wrongs make a right. It is your duty to get up in good time, but it is also a duty to get sufficient sleep. I know you have a more comfortable feeling when you have punished yourself,—you feel that you took the self-indulgence and you want to pay for it. This sounds fair and honest, but it is not, because you pay for it with the health and strength that God gave you to use for Him. Instead of the satisfactory scourge and hair shirt of rising betimes next morning, try the more commonplace penance of going to bed in proper time the next night, without any dawdling. So many girls do things in a dreamy, dawdling way, that must be a sore trial to those about them: if a thing has to be done, you should do it in a quick, purpose-like way, and not waste your own time and other people's temper. A girl will placidly tell you, "I'm always slow, it's my way," never realizing that "ways" may be very objectionable. We think it dishonest in workmen that there should be a difference between a man who works by time and one who works by the piece: you blame the workman who spends twice as much of his master's time as he need, but, when you dawdle, you spend your Master's time: getting through with things quickly and "deedily" is a matter of habit, and the Virtuous Woman practises it in everything she does.
"Her hands hold the distaff." The Virtuous Woman will not be satisfied until she knows how to make a dress and do plain work; not that, having acquired the knowledge, she will necessarily use it, for a woman with brains and education can employ her time to more purpose, and can give employment to poorer women at her gate, by putting out her work. It is burying her talent in the ground if she employs, in making her children's frocks, the time which should be spent in cultivating her mind, so as to be fit to educate them when they are older.
"She stretcheth out her hand to the poor." The "classes" are poor and needy, as well as the "masses:" read Mozley's "University Sermon" on "Our Duty to our Equals," and learn to see that they also need a stretched-out hand. We may be very kind in our district; are we as kind to social bores? We may be very energetic in school feasts; are we as careful to provide amusements of other kinds for people who, in rank or brains, are slightly our inferiors?
"She is not afraid of the snow for her household, for all her household are clothed with scarlet" (marg., double garments). She looks after the health of other people as well as her own; she does not keep her maid sitting up night after night, or overwork her dressmaker. She is as considerate for the flyman waiting for her on a rainy night as she would be for her father's coachman and horses, remembering that the flyman is quite as liable to catch cold as the coachman, and has fewer facilities for curing himself.
"Her clothing is silk and purple." She dresses suitably, richly if occasion demand it, but never showily. If she has to walk as a rule, she will not buy dresses that look fit only for a carriage: she will not wear, in church, a brilliant dress that would be suitable at a flower-show.
"Her husband is known in the gates." There was doubtless a great difference among the husbands at the gate, and I feel sure that this one took a specially large and public-spirited view of the business there discussed. The Virtuous Woman would not usurp his office, just because she had the power of speaking well,—she would remember the Russian proverb, "The Master is the Head of the House, while the Mistress is its Soul," and she would be a very high-souled mistress, and care greatly that her master should not only be a good husband and a father, but should also serve his generation as a good citizen and a true patriot. When the public good demanded sacrifices, she would not drag him back by insisting on his duty to his family, nor would she persuade him to rob the public stores, or time, by taking little perquisites or shortening his office hours. She would feel with De Tocqueville, who says, "A hundred times I have seen weak men show real public virtue, because they had by their sides women who supported them—not by advice as to particulars, but by fortifying their feelings of duty, and by directing their ambition. More frequently, I must confess, I have observed the domestic influence gradually transforming a man, naturally generous, noble, and unselfish, into a cowardly, commonplace, place-hunting, self-seeker, thinking of public business only as the means of making himself comfortable; and this simply by daily contact with a well-conducted woman, a faithful wife, an excellent mother, but from whose mind the grand notion of public duty was entirely absent."
The husband of "a superior woman" is usually much to be pitied, but surely the reason is that the woman is not superior enough. She has capabilities and knowledge, and has learnt to value them, and is right in so doing, but she has not learnt the next page of Life's Lesson Book, which is, the relative insignificance of her own acquirements, and the value of the qualities she has not got,—qualities which her husband very likely possesses, only he has not the feminine power of expression. How often a woman's seeming superiority lies in this gift of words, which, as George Eliot says, is in her, "often a fatal aptitude for expressing what she neither believes nor feels." The man often silently knows, and lives, the noble sentiment, which the woman fluently utters, imagining herself to be its discoverer and prophet. Another point to remember in this matter is that women are apt to overvalue intellect, perhaps because it is only during the last few years that intellectual advantages have been within their reach. Sydney Smith looked forward hopefully to a day when French would be a common accomplishment, and women would be no more vain of possessing it than of having two arms and legs! Perhaps when, not only French, but still higher education becomes more generally diffused, we may learn the proportions, and realize that, though intellect is a good gift, many others are to be preferred before it. The more we know, the wider our horizon grows, and the smaller we ourselves seem relatively to the wider expanse around us. "Man's first word is, No: his second, Yes: and his third is, No, again." We start with ignorance and are necessarily humble, in a negative way: then comes the schoolroom, when we prize highly the knowledge so laboriously acquired; and then comes the schoolroom of life, which sends us back again to humility, though of a larger and nobler kind.