The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons Part 8

THE INFLUENCE OF SISTERS

Hitherto I have dealt exclusively with the moral training of boys and young men, but I am aware that I have left out one of the great shaping influences of a boy's life, which certainly comes next to the mother's where it exists--the influence of sisters. The childish hand that he clasps in his is the hand that unconsciously moulds him to higher ends or the reverse. For if the man is the director, the ruler, and defender, "the builder of the house" as he is called in the grand old word husband,[31] the woman is the shaping and moulding influence of life; and if G.o.d has placed her in the power of the man, both through the weakness of her frame and the strength of her affections, on the other hand He has given into her hands the keys of his being, and according as he fulfils or abuses his trust towards her, she opens or closes the door of higher life to him.[32]

I often wonder whether we women sufficiently realize this truth for ourselves or our girls. Walter Bagehot used to say in his blind, masculine way, "It's a horrid sc.r.a.pe to be a woman,"--a sentiment which, I fear, will find some echo in the hearts of a good many women themselves. But is it so? If to the man chiefly belongs power in all its forms, does not the woman wield as her portion that far more potent but wholly silent, and often unnoticed thing, influence? Not the storm, or the earthquake, or the strong wind, but the still, small voice: the benediction of dews and gentle rains, the mute beat.i.tudes of still waters flowing through sun-parched lands and transforming them into "fruitful fields that the Lord hath blest"; the silent but irresistible influence of the sunlight, which in the baby palm of a little leaf becomes a golden key to unlock the secret treasures of the air and build up great oaks out of its invisible elements; the still, small voice of the moral sense, so still, so small, so powerless to enforce its dictates, but before which all the forces of the man do bow and obey, choosing death rather than disobedience--are not all these silent influences emblems of the supreme, shaping, moulding influence that is given to the woman as the "mother of all living," coming without observation, but making far more strongly than any external power for the kingdom of love and light? Truly we have a goodly heritage if only we had eyes to see it. Alas! that we should have made so little comparative use of it in these great moral questions. Alas! that we should have to acknowledge the truth and justice of the poet's words:

Ah, wasteful woman! she who may On her sweet self set her own price, Knowing he cannot choose but pay-- How has she cheapen'd Paradise, How given for nought her priceless gift, How spoiled the bread and spilt the wine, Which, spent with due respective thrift, Had made brutes men, and men divine!"[33]

But even here is there not place for a hopeful thought, that if women have made so little comparative use of their well-nigh irresistible influence in setting a high standard and shaping men to a diviner and less animal type, it has been, as I have already said, chiefly owing to ignorance? The whole of one of the darkest sides of life has been sedulously kept from us. Educated mothers, till lately, have been profoundly ignorant of the moral evils of schools, and have never dreamt that that young, frank, fresh-faced lad of theirs had any temptations of the kind. Their moral influence, which the poet blames them so strongly for misusing, has been largely, at least with good women, not so much a misused as an undirected force, and we know not, therefore, what that force may accomplish when a larger and truer knowledge enables it to be persistently directed to a conscious aim. This fact, at least, has been stamped into my inmost being, that men will rise to any moral standard which women choose to set them.

I ask, therefore, cannot we get our girls to help us here more than we do, without being crippled by the fear of initiating them too much in the evil of the world or destroying that unconscious virginal purity which is, even as things are, so strong and pathetic an influence for good over young men?

In the addresses that I have given to large numbers of educated girls, I used often to begin by quoting a pa.s.sage from the Jewish Prayer-Book. In a general thanksgiving for the mercies of life, the men say: "We thank Thee, O Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast not made us a woman."

One a little wonders how the poor women could join in this thanksgiving.

But in one corner of the page there is a little rubric in very small print which directs, "Here shall the women say: 'We thank Thee, O Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast made us according unto Thy will!'"

And, looking upon that bed of spring flowers before me, I used to tell them that it made me feel what a fair and gracious and beautiful thing it was to be made according unto G.o.d's will, to be made a woman.

Now, in the first place, could we not get them to realize this great truth a little more than they do, and not in their heart of hearts to wish that they were men? Could we not get them to realize a little more the divine possibilities of their womanhood, and instead of making it their ambition to figure as a weaker form of man, and become lawyers, stockbrokers, and other queer things the modern woman is striving after, to make it their ambition to become stronger and truer women?

But how is this to be done? I remember on one occasion, when I was going in the evening to address a ma.s.s meeting of working-cla.s.s girls, a stout, middle-aged lady bustling up to me in a morning conference we were holding, and exclaiming: "And what are you going to say to them?

What can you say to them, except to tell them to take care of themselves and keep the men at arm's length?"

Now, this old-fashioned method, which we have adopted in dealing with the girls of the poor, I contend traverses the central and most fundamental facts of a woman's being. A woman will never find salvation in being told to take care of herself, and least of all for the purpose of keeping the man, for whom she was created to be a helpmate, at arm's length. Gospels of self-culture may take seeming root here and there in the exotic woman; but even in her, at some moment of swift pa.s.sion or strong emotion, they will crumple up and fall off from her like a withered leaf. James Hinton knew a woman's nature but too well when he said that she would respond to the appeal "Lay down your life" more readily and more surely than to the appeal "Take up your rights." She certainly has a most divine power of flinging herself away, whether n.o.bly or ign.o.bly, which forms both her strength and her weakness. But I have never yet known a woman who would not, at any rate to some degree, respond to an appeal to save, not herself, but another: "Do not let him do this wrong thing, for his sake. You can do anything you like with a man who loves you. G.o.d has given him body and soul into your hands, and you can lift him up into something of His image and make a true man of him; or you can let his love for you sink him into a selfish beast of prey. Do not let him do anything that will for ever lower his manhood, but use your power over him to keep him true to all that is best and highest in him." I have never yet known the woman who will not be moved by such an appeal as this. In other words, the central motive force of a woman's nature, the key of her whole being, is, and must ever be, the mother in her, that divine motherhood which is at the heart of every woman worthy of the name, married or unmarried. It is this divine motherhood, which all evolution, the whole "process of the suns," has gone to strengthen, and which Christianity has enshrined at her very heart--it is this that makes her for ever the Christ factor in the world, the supreme expression of the redeeming Love--that care of the strong for the weak which even in Nature comes trembling into existence beneath the tender wing of the nesting bird, or forces itself into notice in the fierce lioness's care for her whelps, and which we believe will work out the ultimate consummation of the "whole creation that groaneth and travaileth in pain until now." And I contend that if we are to have in the future such women as Lady Augusta Stanley, round whose lifeless form were united in one common sorrow the Queen on her throne and the poorest of the poor, such women as Browning's wife and Browning's mother, of whom he used to say, with a slight tremor in his voice, "She was a divine woman," it will be by strengthening and appealing to this element of divine motherhood in a woman's nature.

What I would, therefore, teach the girls is this: that they have got to mother the boys, that they are the guardians of all that is best and highest in them, of all that makes for the chivalrous American gentleman, and that their womanhood should therefore be to them a fountain of fine manners, of high thoughts, and n.o.ble actions. I would rub into their very bones, if I could, the old saw I have already quoted: "A man is what a woman makes him"; that if there were more high womanhood there would be less low manhood; and that if the boys are rude and rough and slangy, and loutish in their manner to women, the blame lies with their sisters who, in their foolish fondness and indulgence, or in their boyish camaraderie, have allowed them to slouch up into a slovenly manhood. The man at most is the fine prose of life, but the woman ought to be its poetry and inspiration. It is her hand that sets its key, whether

"To feed the high tradition of the world,"

or add to its low discords. Surely Ruskin's n.o.ble words apply here: "It is the type of an eternal truth that the soul's armor is never well set to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when she has braced it loosely that the honor of manhood fails"; or those other still stronger and n.o.bler words of Frederick Robertson's: "There are two rocks in a man's life on which he must either anchor or split: G.o.d and Woman."

And could we not appeal to our girls to make their womanhood a rock which bears a light to all in peril on the rough sea of life--a light to save from moral shipwreck and lead to the safe haven beneath the Rock of Ages? Surely we might appeal to them, in the name of their own brothers and others with whom they are intimately thrown, to work out these higher possibilities of their own womanhood; not to lower it by picking up slang words from their brothers--a woman ought to be above coa.r.s.ening and vulgarizing G.o.d's great gift of speech--not to engage in games or romps that involve a rude rough-and-tumble with boys, which may develop a healthy hoyden, but is utterly destructive of the gracious dignity of the true woman; not to adopt fast ways of either dress or bearing which lead to young men making remarks behind their backs which they ought not to make on any woman; above all, never in girlish flightiness, or, worse still, in order to boast of the number of offers they have received, to flirt or trifle in any way with a man's affections; but to remember that to every man they have to make a woman only the other name for truth and constancy. G.o.d only knows the number of young men who have received their first downward bent from what to a young girl, in the wilfulness of her high spirits and her ignorance of life, has been only a bit of fun, but which to the young man has been the first fatal break in his faith in woman--that faith which in his soul dwells so hard by his faith in the Divine that in making shipwreck of the one is only too likely to make shipwreck of the other.

As to the mothers who send out their young girls into society the victims of their fashionable dressmakers, to be a fountain, not of high, pure thoughts to young men, but a spring of low temptations and impure suggestions, I do not blame the young girls here; but surely the severest blame is due to the criminal folly, or worse, of their mothers, who must know what the consequences of immodest dressing necessarily are to the inflammable mind of youth.

But that that unlovely phenomenon "the girl of the period," is also deeply to blame for the lowered traditions of English society, and consequently of English manhood, I have only too sorrowfully to acknowledge. I remember Mrs. Herbert of Vauxhall telling a very fashionable audience how on one occasion she had to rebuke a young man moving in the first London society for using some contemptuous expression with regard to women, and was led to appeal very earnestly to him to reverence all women for his mother's sake. He turned upon her with a sort of divine rage and said: "I long to reverence women, but the girls I meet with in society won't let me. They like me to make free with them; they like me to talk to them about doubtful subjects, and they make me"--and he ground his teeth as he said it--"what I just hate myself for being." Alas! alas! can sadder words knell in a woman's ears than these?

But side by side with this desecrating womanhood there rises up before me the vision of a young girl, not English, nor American, but French--now a mature woman, with girls and boys of her own, but who in her young days was the very embodiment of all that I have been urging that our girls might become to their brothers. She was a daughter of the great French preacher, Frederick Monod, and had an only brother who was all in all to her. She knew enough of the evil of the world to know that a medical student in Paris was exposed to great temptations; and she was resolved, so far as she could, to make her womanhood a crystal shield between him and them. She entered into all his pursuits; she took an interest in all his friends and companions; she had always leisure for sympathy and counsel in his difficulties and troubles. She had a little room of her own to which she used to get him to come every evening and talk over the day with her, so that she might keep herself heart to heart with him in all that concerned him. She even overcame her girlish reserve, and would get him to kneel down by her side and pour out her sweet girlish heart in prayer that G.o.d would guide him in all his ways, and keep him unspotted from the world. Years after, when he was a married man, with boys of his own, he said to her: "You little know all that you were to me as a young man. My temptations were so maddening that I used sometimes to think that I must yield to them and do as other young men did all round me. But then a vision of you used to rise up before me, and I used to say to myself: 'No; if I do this thing, I can never go and sit with her in her own little room; I can never look into her dear face again.'" And the thought of that young girl, the angel of her presence in the midst of the furnace, kept that young man unspotted from the world through all the gutters of Paris life. Could not our sweet English and American girls be to their brothers what that young French girl was to hers?

But perhaps some pessimistic mother will exclaim, "What is the use of making these old-fashioned appeals to our modern girls? They are so taken up with the delights of their freedom, so absorbed in the pleasure of cycling and athletic games, so full of manly ambitions, so persuaded that the proper cultivated att.i.tude is to be an agnostic, and to look at G.o.d and the universe through a sceptical and somewhat supercilious eyegla.s.s, that if we did make an appeal to them such as you suggest they would only laugh at such old-fashioned notions." I can only say that I have not found it so. I can bear the highest testimony at least to our English girls, of whom I have addressed thousands, all over the three kingdoms. Occasionally it has happened that maturer women have left me stranded, stretching out hands of vain appeal to them; but my girls, my dear girls, never once failed me. Not only could I see by the expression of their faces how deeply they responded to my appeal to work out the latent possibilities of their womanhood, and be the uplifting influence to their brothers, and other young men with whom they were thrown, that a true woman can be; but they came forward in troops to take up the position I a.s.signed to them in our woman's movement towards a higher and purer life. n.o.bly did those young girls respond, joining a movement for opening club-rooms and cla.s.ses for working girls, a movement initiated not by me, but by educated girls like themselves, and which has since spread all over England and Scotland.

And if this is true of our English girls, still more would it be true of the American girl, who has a unique position and influence of her own, and is dowered with that peculiar capacity and graciousness which seem to belong by divine right to the American woman.

I cannot but think that if we were to teach our girls less in religious phraseology and more from the great realities of life; if they were taught that Christianity is only human life rightly seen and divinely ordered, that the Cross is only the uncovering of what is going on all round us, though hidden to a careless gaze,--the sin, the pain, the misery, which are forever crucifying and forever calling forth that great pa.s.sion of redeeming Love to which, through the motherhood that is in us, "one touch of nature makes us kin"; and that the central truth of Christianity is not, as we have too often taught, saving our own souls, but a life poured out for the good of others, and personal salvation as a means for having a life to pour forth--I cannot but think that much fashionable girlish agnosticism would disappear, and the true woman would reach forth to that divine humanity to which she belongs.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 31: Husband is derived from two words--"house" and the Saxon word to "build," German _bauen_.]

[Footnote 32: See a little White Cross paper called _My Little Sister_, which I wish mothers would get into the hands of their sons just entering into manhood to read, mark, learn, digest. (Wells Gardner, Darton and Co.)]

[Footnote 33: Coventry Patmore.]

CHAPTER IX

THE MODERN WOMAN AND HER FUTURE

Up to this point I have dealt only with the great shaping and moulding principles of life, with indirect influence rather than direct. How far direct teaching on matters of s.e.x should be given to our girls has been a far greater perplexity to me than in the case of boys. In the present state of our schools and our streets our boys must get to know evil.

Hitherto it was possible to say that our girls _might_ get to know evil, and between that "must" and "might" lay a great and perplexing chasm. We do not want our garden lilies to smell of anything but pure dews and rains and sun-warmed fragrance. But is this ideal possible any longer, except in a few secluded country homes, where, hidden like Keats's nightingale "among the leaves," they may remain innocent and ignorant of the world's evil?

But with the ordinary conditions of the present day, with the greater freedom accorded to women, the wider range of education, involving a wider range of reading, with modern newspapers left about, I ask, How is it possible for a mother to keep her girls in ignorance and unconscious innocence? A volume of short stories comes into the house from the circulating library; they are clever and apparently absolutely harmless.

Yet embedded in the heart of one such volume, which shall be nameless, I came upon a story almost as vile as anything in a French novel, and conveying the most corrupt knowledge. How, I ask, can a busy mother read through every book of short stories before letting it fall into the hands of her girls; or how, if they are to read Latin and Greek, or even carefully to study our own old literature, is she to guard them from a knowledge of evil conveyed in cla.s.sical allusions, or in the coa.r.s.e plainness of speech of an earlier age? I know as a fact, whether we recognize it or not, that behind our mature backs our girls are discussing these moral problems with quite an alarming amount of freedom, and some at least, guided by no teaching, and with no practical knowledge of the great laws of human life, are coming to quite startling conclusions, which would make their mothers' hair stand on end. And one most undesirable, and I may add unnatural, result noticeable among the more advanced section is a certain distaste for marriage, a tendency to look upon it as something low and animal, which strikes me as simply a fatal att.i.tude for women to take up.

Have we not, therefore, got clearly to recognize that the old order has changed, giving place to new, and requiring, therefore, new methods. We may or we may not like the new order, but it is _there_. Under the changed conditions of modern life it is inevitable; therefore it must be in the providence of G.o.d; it cannot be wholly bad, and if we will work in with it loyally, and not thrust it aside for some old order of our own, it may be, nay, it will be, wholly for good. Let us remember that the two most conservative organic forms, the two that have most resisted progressive evolution, are the donkey and the goose. To ignore the new order, to cling to the old views and methods, is to court moral extinction as a living force. As well think to find safety in escaping from the advance of an express engine by adopting the stately pace of our grandmothers, which was perfectly adapted for getting out of the way of a lumbering stage-coach. May not He

"Whose large plan ripens slowly to a whole"

be working out a progressive ideal such as we trace in the great spiritual records of our race? The Bible, thank G.o.d! neither begins nor ends with sin; but it begins with a sinless garden, it ends with a strong city of G.o.d, with evil known and recognized, but cast out beyond its walls. May He not be leading us to form a wiser, deeper, stronger ideal; to aim for our girls not so much at Innocence, with her fading wreath of flowers--fading, as, alas! they must ever fade in a world like this--but to aim at Virtue, with her victor's crown of gold, tried in the fire? May it not be that His divine providence is constraining us to take as our ideal for our womanhood, not the old sheltered garden, but a strong city of G.o.d, having foundations, whose very gates are made of pearl, through which nothing that defileth is suffered to enter, and whose common ways are paved with pure gold, gold of no earthly temper, but pure and clear as crystal;--a city of refuge for all who are oppressed with wrong, and from which all foul forms of evil are banned by the one word "_Without_"? Sure I am that if we will accept this deeper and larger ideal, and endeavor, however imperfectly, to work it out on the earth, in the midst of it, as in the old garden ideal, will be found the tree of life; but then its very leaves will be for the healing of the nations.

But whether you go with me as far as this or not, I think you will agree with me that we must not leave our girls to their own crude notions on the deepest matters of life. Still less must we leave them to get their teaching on marriage and matters of s.e.x from some modern novels, which I can only characterize as tuberculosis of the moral sense, but from which, as I have already pointed out, we cannot always guard them. We must give them direct teaching of some kind.

First, I think our girls, as well as our boys, need far more direct teaching than has been customary as to the sanct.i.ty of the body. This is especially true of girls who are sent to boarding-schools, as some of the moral evils of boys' schools are not, I am sorry to say, altogether unknown in girls' schools, though, as far as I can ascertain, the evil is much less in extent, and in some is non-existent. Still, all girls need to be taught that the body is the temple of the Lord and Giver of life, and that from the crown of their heads to the sole of their feet those bodies belong to Christ.

Secondly, I think that they ought to have some such teaching about life and birth as that which I have already recommended for boys, that they may see how through the marital tie and the consequent rise of the parental relation, a world of blind mechanical force gradually developed into a world of life and beauty, and at last crowned itself with a conscious love in an indissoluble union, which makes marriage the very type of the union of the soul with G.o.d, of Christ with His Church.

Thirdly, they need to be taught that much in their own physical const.i.tution, which they rebel against as handicapping them in the struggle of life, is Nature's provision for them that no merely physical function should press upon them as we see it do in the animal creation at certain periods of the year, but that they should be free to serve G.o.d, whether in the married or in the unmarried state, in quietness and G.o.dly living.

Fourthly, above all they need definite teaching on the true nature, the sanct.i.ty, and the beauty of marriage. It appears that the line of progress is always a spiral, and it would seem as if we were in the backward sweep of the spiral which looks like retrogression, but will doubtless bring us out further up in the end. The masculine view that marriage is the one aim and end of a woman's existence, adopted also by some careful mothers, is now exploded. Young men are no longer led to look upon every girl that they meet as furtively, to use a vulgarism, "setting her cap for him," and only too ready to fling herself at his feet. So far so good. But have we not suffered our girls to drift into the opposite extreme? In the heyday of their bright young life, with so many new interests and amus.e.m.e.nts open to them, in the pride of their freedom and independence, they are no longer so inclined to marry, and are even apt to look down upon the married state. They form so high an ideal of the man to whom they would surrender their independence--an ideal which they fortunately do not apply to their fathers and brothers, whom they find it quite possible to love on a far lower and more human level--that because a man does not fulfil this ideal, and is not a fairy prince dowered with every possible gift, they refuse men who, though not angels, would have made them happy as wife and mother. Would not a little sound, sensible teaching be of great good here? Could we not point out that, though in so vital and complex a union as the family there must be some seat of ultimate authority, some court of final appeal somewhere, and that the woman herself would not wish it to rest anywhere else than in the man, if she is to respect him; yet there is no subservience on the part of the wife in the obedience she renders, but rather in South's grand words, "It is that of a queen to her king, who both owns a subjection and remains a majesty"? Cannot we contend against this falsehood of the age which seems so to underlie our modern life, and which inclines us to look upon all obedience as a slavish thing--that obedience which "doth preserve the stars from wrong," and through which "the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong"; that obedience which when absolute and implicit to the Divine will is "a service of perfect freedom"? It is the profession which exacts unquestionable obedience that forms the finest school for character, as I have already pointed out. We do not hear of a Wellington or a Roberts refusing to enter the service because they could not give up their independence. Our military heroes at least know that it is through discipline and obedience that they gain their real independence--the independence of a strong character.

Again, our girls need to be taught not only that there is nothing derogatory in the married relation to the freest and fullest independence of character, but surely in these days of open advocacy by some popular writers of "les unions libres" and a freedom of divorce that comes to much the same thing, they need to be taught the sanct.i.ty of marriage--those first principles which hitherto we have taken for granted, but which now, like everything else, is thrown into the crucible and brought into question. They need definite teaching as to the true nature of marriage; that it is no mere contract to be broken or kept according to the individual contractor's convenience--I never yet heard of a contract for bringing into existence, not a successful machine, but a moral and spiritual being with infinite possibilities of weal or woe, of heaven or h.e.l.l--but a sacramental union of love and life, with sacramental grace given to those who will seek it to live happily and endure n.o.bly within its sacred bounds--a union so deep and mystical that even on its physical side our great physiologists are wholly at a loss to account for some of its effects;[34] a union of which permanence is the very essence, as on its permanence rests the permanence and stability of the whole fabric of our life. It can never be treated on an individualistic basis, though that is always the tendency with every man and woman who has ever loved. In Mrs. Humphry Ward's words:

"That is always the way; each man imagines the matter is still for his deciding, and he can no more decide it than he can tamper with the fact that fire burns or water drowns. All these centuries the human animal has fought with the human soul. And step by step the soul has registered her victories. She has won them only by feeling for the law and finding it--uncovering, bringing into light the firm rocks beneath her feet. And on these rocks she rears her landmarks--marriage, the family, the State, the Church. Neglect them and you sink into the quagmire from which the soul of the race has been for generations struggling to save you."[35]

Fall on this rock, stumble into unhappiness and discontent, as so many do in marriage, and you will be broken. But be faithful to it and to the high traditions which generations of suffering men and women have worked out for you, and you will be broken as the bud is broken into the blossom, as the acorn is broken into the oak--broken into a higher and stronger life. On the other hand rebel against it, attempt to drag it down or cast it from its place, and it will crush you, and grind some part of your higher nature to powder. How strangely and sadly is this shown in the case of one of our greatest writers, who thought that the influence of her writings would far outweigh the influence of her example, but whose name and example are now constantly used by bad men to overcome the virtue of young educated girls struggling alone in London, and often half starving on the miserable pittance which is all they can earn. But still more is it shown in the life of the nation which tampers with the laws of marriage and admits freedom of divorce.

Either such suits must be heard _in camera_ without the shame of exposure, when divorce is so facilitated that the family and the State rest rather on a superstructure of rickety boards than on a rock; or they must be heard in public court and form a moral sewer laid on to the whole nation, poisoning the deepest springs of its life, and through that polluted life producing far more individual misery than it endeavors to remedy in dissolving an unhappy marriage. G.o.d only knows what I suffered when a _cause celebre_ came on, and I felt that the whole nation was being provided with something worse and more vitally mischievous than the most corrupt French novel.

Deeply do I regret--and in this I think most thoughtful minds will agree with me--that the Reformers in their inevitable rebound from the superst.i.tions of Rome, rejected her teaching of the sacramental nature of marriage, which has made so many Protestant nations tend to that freedom of divorce which is carried to so great an extent in some parts of America, and is spreading, alas! to many of our own colonies--a laxity fatally undermining the sanct.i.ty and stability of the family. If marriage be not a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual life and grace, I ask what is?

I would therefore earnestly beseech you to oppose your direct teaching to the whole tendency of modern life, and to much of the direct teaching of modern fiction--even of so great a novelist as George Meredith--which inculcates the subordination of the marriage bond to what is called the higher law of love, or rather, pa.s.sion. In teaching your sons, and especially your girls, who are far more likely to be led astray by this specious doctrine, base marriage not on emotion, not on sentiment, but on duty. To build upon emotion, with the unruly wills and affections of sinful men, is to build, not upon the sand, but upon the wind. There is but one immovable rock on which steadfast character, steadfast relations, steadfast subordination of the lower and personal desires, to the higher and immutable obligations and trusts and responsibilities of life can be built--duty. When this rock has been faithfully clung to, when in the midst of disillusionment and shattered ideals the n.o.ble resolution has been clung to never to base personal happiness on a broken trust or another's pain, I have over and over again known the, most imperfect marriage prove in the end to be happy and contented.

Here again I quote some words of Mrs. Humphry Ward, which she puts into the mouth of her hero: "No," he said with deep emphasis--"No; I have come to think the most disappointing and hopeless marriage, n.o.bly borne, to be better worth having than what people call an 'ideal pa.s.sion'--if the ideal pa.s.sion must be enjoyed at the expense of one of those fundamental rules which poor human nature has worked out, with such infinite difficulty and pain, for the protection and help of its own weakness,"[36] I am aware that neither Mr. Grant Allen with his "hill-top" novels, nor Mrs. Mona Caird need be taken too seriously, but when the latter says, "There is something pathetically absurd in this sacrifice to their children of generation after generation of grown people,"[37] I would suggest that it would be still more pathetically absurd to see the whole upward-striving past, the whole n.o.ble future of the human race, sacrificed to their unruly wills and affections, their pa.s.sions and desires. If as Goldwin Smith says in his rough, incisive way, "There is not much union of heart in marriage, I do not see that there would be any more union of heart in adultery."

I have dwelt thus earnestly upon this point because the sooner we realize for ourselves and our girls that any relaxation of the marriage bond will in its disastrous consequences fall upon us, and not upon men, the better. It is the woman who first grows old and loses her personal attractions, while a man often preserves his beauty into extreme old age. It is the burdened mother of a family who cannot compete in companionship with the highly cultured young unmarried lady, with the leisure to post herself up in the last interesting book or the newest political movement. It is the man who is the more variable in his affections than the woman; more constant as she is by nature, as well as firmly anch.o.r.ed down by the strength of her maternal love. It is therefore on the woman that any loosening of the permanence of the marriage tie will chiefly fall in untold suffering. "Le mariage c'est la justice," say the French, who have had experience enough of "les unions libres"--justice to the wife and mother, securing her the stability of her right to her husband's affections, the stability to her right of maintenance after she has given up her means of support, above all, the stability of her right to the care of her own children. If we want to study the innate misery to women arising from the relaxation of the married tie, or transient unions, we had better read Professor Dowden's _Life of Sh.e.l.ley_--misery not the result of public stigma, for there was no such stigma in the circle in which Sh.e.l.ley moved, but misery brought about by the facts themselves, and producing state of things which Matthew Arnold could only characterize by the untranslatable French word "_sale_." But nearer home, one of your most brilliant writers, Mr. Henry James, has given us an equally profitable study in his novelette, _What Maisie Knew_, which I presume is intended as a satire on freedom of divorce, but which again can only be characterized by the French word "_sale_."

I confess it does fill me with sardonic laughter to find this oldest and stalest of all experiments, this oldest and flattest of failures, paraded as a brand new and original panacea for all the woes of our family life,--woes which, if n.o.bly borne, at least make "perfect through suffering."

There is but one great rock-hewn dam successfully reared against the lawless pa.s.sions of men and women, and that is Christian marriage. It has at least given us the Christian home, and pure family life. And sometimes it fills me with despair to see enlightened nations, like America and Australia, whittling away and slowly undermining this great bulwark against the devastating sea of human pa.s.sion. If only I could feel that any poor words of mine could in any faint measure rouse American women to set themselves against what must in the end affect the depth and steadfastness of those family affections on which the beauty and solidity of the national character mainly rest, I should feel indeed I had not lived in vain.