Stray Thoughts for Girls Part 11

G.o.d gives each of us a nature with "pulses of n.o.bleness," and it rests with us whether this shall grow, or be choked by the commonplace part of us. To be n.o.ble does not come without trouble. Good things are hard, and "n.o.ble growths are slow."[7]

He who would be n.o.ble must go through life like Hercules and the old heroes, working hard for others; not troubling about personal comfort and amus.e.m.e.nt, but practised in going without when he _could_ have,--for the sake of better things.

To be n.o.ble means having your impulses under control, and this most especially where your affections are concerned.

Do you want to help others to go right in life? I need not ask, for every generous nature would care to do that, even if she did not care much about her own soul.

Now, you will not do much by direct effort, but you will do an immense deal by conquering your own besetting sin. In the "Hallowing of Work,"

Bishop Paget says, "Increased skill and experience and ability are great gifts in working for others, but they do not _compare_ with the power gained by conquering one fault of our own."

Friendship can be the most beautiful thing in the world: it can be the silliest thing in the world. It can be the most lowering: it can be the most enn.o.bling. Nothing excites so much laughter and hard speaking in the world as "schoolgirl friendships;" as often as not they are found among older people, but schoolgirls have given a name to this particular kind of folly, so it behooves schoolgirls to keep clear of it, and to deprive the name of its point.

But can you help being sentimental if you are made like that? Some are of good wholesome stuff, with an innate distaste for everything of the kind, while to some it is their besetting sin.

You can at least take precautions; for instance, do not day-dream about your friend,--brooding over the thought of her weakens your fibre more than being with her.

Make a rule of life for yourself about your intercourse; walk and talk with her more than with others, but at the same time sandwich those walks and talks by going with other friends,--it is a great pity to narrow your circle of possible friends by being absorbed in one person.

Do not write sentimental letters, and, finally, do not sit in your friend's pocket and say "Darling." (If you wish to know how it sounds, read "A Bad Habit," by Mrs. Ewing.)

I must confess that I believe in what is so often jeered at as "kindred souls." Love is not measured by time; often we are truer friends through some half-hour's talk, in which we saw another's real self, than through years of ordinary meeting. But this is so different from the folly I speak of, that I need not dwell on it; except to say that you will be spared many disappointments if you are content with the fact that such moments of sympathy have been, and do not look to have a permanent friendship on that basis. When people draw the veil aside for a minute they generally put it back closer than ever, and do not like to be reminded of the self-revelation.

In the foolish friendships that make so much unhappiness, half the folly lies in expecting the other person to be always at high-water mark, and in being fretful and reproachful when she is not.

But to return to "schoolgirl friendships." When you go out into society you may perhaps want to make private jokes among your friends, or to talk privately to them instead of helping in general conversation, and you may feel "I have nothing much to contribute to the general stock; why shouldn't I enjoy myself? it's very hard I should be so severely criticized for bad manners if I do." But if you look into any such matter, you are sure to find that bad manners are bad Christianity. There is a want of self-restraint in this schoolgirlishness; and you ought not to be able to pick out a pair of great friends in general society, not merely because, if you could, it would show them to be absurd and underbred, but because it would mean that others were made to feel "left out." Have you ever had some violent friendship--or laughed at it in others--which meant running in and out of each other's houses at all hours--being inseparable--quoting your friend, till your brothers exclaimed at her very name--and making all your family feel that they ranked nowhere in comparison with her? In this matter of home and friends conflicting, I quite see the point of view of some: "My family don't give me the sympathy and help that my friend does--they always tease or scold if I come to them in a difficulty, and yet they are vexed and jealous when I find a friend who can and will help."

I do not say, Cut yourself off from your friend,--she is sent by G.o.d to help you; but, Remember to feel for your Mother;--see how natural and loving her jealousy is, and spare it by constant tact--instead of being a martyr, feel that it is _she_, and not _you_, who is ill-used. And in all ways, never let outside affections interfere with home ones. It is the great difference between them, that outside, self-chosen affections burn all the stronger for repression and self-restraint; while home ones burn stronger for each act of attention to them and expression of them; _e.g._ postponing a visit to a friend for a walk with a brother will make both loves stronger, and _vice versa_,--and your friendship will last all the longer because you consume your own smoke. Dr. Carpenter says that signs of love wear out the feeling;--every now and then they strengthen it, but their frequency shows weakness. Friendships are G.o.d-given ties when they are real, but inseparable ones are mostly only follies;--anyhow, family ties are the most G.o.d-given of all, and friendship should help us to fulfil family claims better, instead of making us neglect them. The best test of whether your love for an outside person is of the right kind, is, does it make you pleasanter at home? Mr. Lowell mentions an epitaph in the neighbourhood of Boston, which recorded the name and date of a wife and mother, adding simply, "She was so pleasant."

We realize that we ought to make the world better than we find it, but we do not realize how much more we should succeed in doing so if we made it brighter,--a task which is in everybody's power. We are all ready to bear pain for others, but we overlook the little ways in which we might give pleasure. "Always say a kind word if you can," says Helps, "if only that it may come in perhaps with a singular opportuneness, entering some mournful man's darkened room, like a beautiful firefly, whose happy circ.u.mvolutions he cannot but watch, forgetting his many troubles."

And there is one tiny little suggestion I would make to you, so small it will not fit on to any of my larger headings. Do not make fun of your friend's little mishaps, little stupidities, losing her luggage, having said the wrong thing, or having a black on her face when she especially wished to look well! Your remark may be witty, but it does not really amuse the victim. I know it is very good for people to be chaffed, and I do not wish them to lose this wholesome bracing. And yet we have a special clinging to some tactful friends who never let us feel foolish.

Another test you should apply to Friendship is, does it lead to idle words? Every one likes talking about their neighbours, and dress, and amus.e.m.e.nt, but we need to be careful that kindliness and nice-mindedness are not sacrificed, and that all our interests are not on that level. Many think that a woman's interest can rise no higher, and many girls and many women give colour to what you and I think a slander on us! We all like these things, but we all like higher things too, and we need to encourage the higher part of us because it so soon dies away. You know better than I do how much of your own talk may be silly chatter--or worse--flippant or wrong talk, which you would stop if an older person were by. I have heard High Schools strongly objected to because they made the girls so full of gossip, about what this or that teacher said, or what some girl did, till their people hated the very name of school. If school friends talk much school gossip, they must weaken their minds and feel at a loss when out of their school set. It is very "provincial" to have no conversation except the small gossip which would bore a stranger, and yet I fear many friends confine themselves to a kind of talk which unfits them for general society. You prohibit "talking shop," by which you sometimes mean subjects which are interesting to all intelligent people, and yet you talk gossiping "shop" about the mere accidents of school life. But, unless you interweave thoughtful interests and sensible topics of conversation with your friendship, it cannot last. There must be the tie of a common higher interest--it may be a common work, or intellectual sympathy, or, best of all, oneness in the highest things--but without this a mere personal fancy will not stand the monotony, much less the rubs and jars, of close intimacy. A friendship, where the personal affection is the deepest feeling, is not a deep love, or of a high kind;--we must in the widest sense love "honour more." "Love is a primary affection in those who love little: a secondary one in those who love much" (Coleridge).

A stool must have three legs if it is to support you, and two friends want a third interest to unite them, or the friendship will die away in unreasonable claims and jealousies; since "claimativeness" is the evil genius which haunts friendship, unless common sense and wholesome interests are at hand to help. It is difficult, but necessary, to learn that affection is not a matter of will, except in family ties; that our friends love us in exact proportion as we appear to them lovable, that "the less you claim, the more you will have," as the Duke of Wellington said of authority. A very little humility would wonderfully lessen our demands upon our friends' affections, and a very little wisdom would preserve us from trying to win them by reproaches. How many coolnesses would be avoided could we learn to see that friendship, like all other relations of life, has more duties than rights. Nothing so certainly kills love as reproaches; I do not believe any affection will stand it. Our hurt feelings may seem to us tenderness and depth of feeling, but they are selfish:--"fine feelings seldom result in fine conduct." If our love were perfectly selfless, we should be glad of all pleasure for our friend; failure in his allegiance to us would not change us, nothing would do that except failure in his allegiance to his better self. We should love our friends not for what they are to us, but for what they are in themselves.

Of course, it may be said that fickleness to us is a flaw in his better self, but if we stop to think how many tiresome ways we probably have, we shall be lenient to the friends who show consciousness of them.

It is a natural instinct with all of us to claim love; those who seem most richly blessed with it probably have some one from whom they desire more than they receive; every one has to learn, sooner or later, that "an unnavigable ocean washes between all human souls,"--

"We live together years and years, And leave unsounded still Each other's depths of hopes and fears, Each other's depths of ill.

"We live together day by day, And some chance look or tone Lights up with instantaneous ray An inner world unknown."

We all have to learn, sooner or later, that nothing less than Divine Love can satisfy us, but because our natural longings are so often denied, some say they are wrong and should be crushed out. It is wrong to give way to them, to yield to the tendency which is so strong with some, to let all their interests be personal,--to care for places and natural beauty and subjects only because they are a.s.sociated with people,--to let life be dull to us unless our personal affections are in play. Women ought to make it a point of conscience to learn to care for things impersonally. We are too apt to be like Recha in "Nathan," when she only looked at the palm trees because the Templar was standing under them; when her mind recovered its balance, she could see the palm trees themselves.

"Nun werd' ich auch die Palmen wieder sehen Nicht ihn bloss untern Palmen."

If G.o.d sends us the trial of loneliness, it may be that He has a special work for us, which needs a long and lonely vigil beside our armour. He may be depriving us of earthly comfort to draw us closer to Himself, that we may learn from Him to be true Sons of Consolation.

"When G.o.d cuts off the shoots of our own interests," it has been well said, "it is that we may graft on our hearts the interests of others."

Nothing but knowing what loneliness is can teach us to feel for it in others. Nine-tenths of the world do suffer from it at some time or other; you may not now, but you will some day; and, if you are spared it, nine-tenths of the sorrows of life will be a sealed book to you. "I prayed the Lord," says George Fox, "that he would baptize my heart into a sense of the conditions and needs of all men."

But our Lord, Who Himself suffered under the trial of loneliness, sends all of us friends whom we do not deserve. We can trust to Him to give us the friends we need, just when we need them, and just as long as we need them, as surely as we trust Him for daily bread. He may be keeping His best to the last; nay, the best may never come to us in this life at all; but it is as true now as when St. Anselm said it, eight hundred years ago:--

"In Thee desires which are deferred are not diminished, but rather increased; no n.o.ble part, though unfulfilled on earth, is suffered to perish in the soul which lives in Thee, but is deepened and hollowed out by suffering and yearning and want, that it may become capable of a larger fulfilment hereafter."

The hunger of the heart is as natural, and therefore as much implanted by G.o.d, as the hunger of the body. Neither must be gratified unlawfully; but when G.o.d sends food to either we should accept it thankfully, without either asceticism or greediness, and use the strength it gives us as a means of service. Does not the essence of the wrong sort of love consist in our looking on the affection we receive, or crave for, as a self-ending pleasure, instead of as a gift which is only sent to us to make us happier, and stronger to serve others?

We do not need to be always self-questioning as to how far we are using our happiness for others. We do not count our mouthfuls of food, we feed our bodies without thinking of it, and so we should do to our hearts; but we are often not healthy-minded enough to go right unconsciously, though some happy souls there are--

"Glad hearts, without reproach or blot, Who do G.o.d's work, and know it not."

The Fall brings us under the curse; the tree of knowledge of good and evil has entailed upon us the necessity of self-knowledge; and if we find our hearts out of joint, and craving for more love than we get, we should examine ourselves as to whether we use the love we do get, like the runner's torch handed on from one to the other; whether the glow of our happiness warms us to pa.s.s on light and heat to others, or whether we absorb it all ourselves.

And if we know that we are selfish in the matter,--what then? We cannot make ourselves unselfish by a wish; we cannot win love at will. But, though we cannot gain love, we can give it; we can learn to love so well, that we are satisfied by the happiness of those we love, even though we have nothing to do with that happiness.

"How hard a thing it is to look into happiness with another man's eyes!"

but it can be done. People do sometimes live, "quenching their human thirst in others' joys."

Although our craving for sympathy is wrong if it be allowed to lame our energies, yet in itself we cannot say it is wrong. "To become saints,"

says F.W. Robertson, "we must not cease to be men and women. And if there be any part of our nature which is essentially human, it is the craving for sympathy. The Perfect One gave sympathy and wanted it. 'Could ye not watch with Me one hour?' 'Will ye also go away?' Found it, surely, even though His brethren believed not on Him; found it in St. John and Martha, and Mary and Lazarus:"--

"David had his Jonathan, and Christ His John."

Some people are quite conscious that they do not "get on" with others; and they are tempted to be morbidly irritable and exacting, or else to shut themselves up and say, "It's no use, no one wants me." If no one wants you, it is your fault; for if you were always ready to be unselfish and thoughtful for others in small ways, you would be wanted. You need not fret because you are not amusing to talk to, and think that therefore you cannot win affection. As a rule, people do not want you to talk; they want you to listen. Now, any one can be a good listener, for that requires moral, and not intellectual qualifications. Sympathy to guess somebody's favourite subject, and to be really interested in it, will always make that somebody think you pleasant; but the interest must be real: if you only give it for what you can get, you will get nothing.

The right person always is sent just when needed. I do not believe in people missing each other--though it may very well be that we are not fit to be trusted with the affection we should like, and that G.o.d knows we should rest in it if we had it, and never turn to Him, and so He keeps it from us till we are ready for it. The longer we live the more we are struck by the apparent chance which threw us with the right people.

There is a Turkish proverb which says, "Every only child has a sister somewhere," and F.D. Maurice, in his beautiful paper on the "Faery Queen,"

declares his belief that all who are meant to be friends and to help each other will find each other at the right time, just as Spenser's knights, though wandering in trackless forests, always encountered each other when help was wanted.

And if all this is true of ordinary friendship--if it calls for so much high principle and self-denial and prayer--what of love, "the perfection of friendship"? It is usually either ignored or joked about. The jokes are edged tools always in bad taste and often dangerous, but it is a pity the subject should be ignored. When it becomes a personal question the girl is sure to be too excited or irritable to take advice, so that there is something to be said for that discussion of "love in the abstract," which Sydney Smith overheard at a Scotch ball. It is surely better, in forming her standard and opinion on this most important of all points, that a girl should have the help of her mother and older friends. Girls do not go to their mothers as they might, because they wait till they are sore and conscious and resentful. Most girls would rather be married, and quite right too,--in no other state of life will they find such thorough discipline and chastening!--it is the only life which makes a true and perfect woman. But if they wish it, let them not be so untidy, so fidgety, so domineering, that no man in his senses would put up with them! And if she be a "leisured girl" with no duty calling her from home (or very possibly many duties calling her to remain at home), let her think, not twice, but many times, before a wish for independence and Bohemianism (which she translates into "Art") leads her into grooves of life where she is very unlikely to meet the sort of man who can give her the home and the surroundings to which she is accustomed. Harriet Byron's despair and ecstasy about Sir Charles have pa.s.sed away, but girls still dream of heroes (not always so heroic as Sir Charles). Their dreams cannot fail to be coloured by the novels they read and the poetry they dwell on; do they always realize the responsibility of keeping good company? Read love-stories, by all means, but let them be n.o.ble ones, such as show you, Molly Gibson, Mary Colet, Romola, Di Vernon, Margaret Hale, Shirley, Anne Elliot, The Angel in the House, The Gardener's Daughter, The Miller's Daughter, Sweet Susan Winstanley, and Beatrice. It is impossible to dwell on the mere pa.s.sionate emotion of second-rate novels and sensuous poetry, without wiping some possibility of n.o.bleness out of your own life. Every influence which you allow to pa.s.s through your mind colours it, but most of all, those which appeal to your feelings. You take pains to strengthen your minds, but you let your feelings come up as wheat or tares according to chance; and yet the unruly wills and affections of women need more discipline than their minds.

Perhaps the individual girl feels commonplace and of small account. Why should she restrain her love of fun, her Tomboyism, her tendency to flirtation? She is no heroine! But, let her be as commonplace as possible, she will represent Woman to the man who is in love with her, as surely as Beatrice represented it to Dante.

Every woman, married or single, alters the opinion of some man about women. Even a careless man judges a girl in a way that she, with her head full of nonsense, probably never dreams of;--he has a standard for her, though he has none for himself.

It is small wonder that chivalrous devotion should decrease when women lay so little claim to it. Miss Edgeworth needed to decry sentimental and high-flown feelings,--the Miss Edgeworth of to-day would need to uphold romance.

Women may still be "Queens of n.o.ble Nature's crowning," but they too often find that crown irksome, and prefer to be hail-fellow-well-met, taking and allowing liberties, which give small encouragement to men to be like Susan Winstanley's lover.

Dante never watched the young man and maiden of to-day accosting each other, or he would not have said--

"If she salutes him, all his being o'er Flows humbleness."

I am afraid Dante would now be left "_sole_ sitting by the sh.o.r.es of old Romance," unless indeed he went to some of the seniors, who are supposed to have no feelings left! "If you want to marry a young heart, you must look for it in an old body."