Читать книгу Common Sense About Women - Thomas Wentworth Higginson - Страница 19

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A Providence (R.I.) newspaper remarked some time since that Mrs. Livermore had just delivered in Newport her celebrated lecture, “What shall we do with our Trials?” It was, I suppose, one of those felicitous misprints, by which compositors build better than they know. The real title of the lecture was, “What shall we do with our Girls?” Perhaps it was the unconscious witticism of some poetic young typesetter, to whom damsels were as yet only pleasing pains; or of some premature cynic of the printing-office, who was in the habit of regarding himself as a Blighted Being.

Yet to how many is this morose phrase “humanly adaptive,” as Mrs. Browning abstrusely says! Anxious mothers, for instance, will accept it, the mothers of the thousands of surplus maidens—or whatever the statistics say—in Massachusetts. Frederica Bremer inserts in one of her novels an “Extra Leaf on Daughter-full Houses;” an extra that should have a large circulation in many towns of New England. The most heroic and unflinching remedy for this class of trials, so far as my knowledge goes, was that announced by a small relative of my own, aged three, who sitting on the floor thus soliloquized to her doll: “If I had too many daughters, I’d take ’em into the woods and lose ’em—I’d take ’em to the sea and push ’em in: I wouldn’t have too many daughters!” She is now a happy wife and mother; but Fate, warned in time by such exceeding plainness of speech, has judiciously endowed her chiefly with sons.

Most of the serious assertion that women are trials comes from masculine wisdom. One hears a good deal of it in summer, at the seaside, from the marriageable youth of some of our chief cities. After a languid hour’s chat upon tailors or boots or the proper appointments of a harness,—or of the groom, so perfectly costumed that he seems but a part of the harness,—how often they fall to lamenting the extravagance, the exactions, the general unmarriageableness, of the young women of the present day! Some wit once said that the Pilgrim Mothers had much more to bear than the Pilgrim Fathers, since the Mothers had not only to endure the cold and the hunger, but to endure the Fathers beside. In hearing these remarks I have sometimes thought that these young ladies must be extravagant indeed, if, in addition to their own expenses, they take to themselves so very costly a luxury as a fashionable husband.

And I think that wiser critics than these youths are sometimes tempted into treating these lovely and lovable “trials” in too severely hopeless a way. There is folly enough on the surface, no doubt, and something of it below the surface: yet who does not remember how, in time of need, all these follies proved themselves, during our civil war, but superficial things? The very maidens over whom we had shaken our anxious heads were suddenly those who with pale cheeks bade their lovers leave them, or who changed their gorgeous array for the plain garments of the hospital. So far as I can judge, there is not a young girl within the range of my knowledge who can confidently be insured against marrying a poor artist or a poorer army officer to-morrow, should she once fall thoroughly in love. And, once married, she will very probably develop a power of self-denial, of economy, and of dressing herself and baby gracefully out of the cast-off clothes of her genteel relations,—in a way to put her critics to shame. I think we ought all patiently to endure “trials” that turn to such blessings in the end.

For one, I can truly say, with charming Mrs. Trench in her letters written in 1816, “I do believe the girls of the present day have not lost the power of blushing; and, though I have no grown-up daughters, I enjoy the friendship of some who might be my daughters, in whom the greatest delicacy and modesty are united with perfect ease of manner, and habitual intercourse with the world.” And if this is the case,—and I think we shall all own it to be so,—we may as well have the typographical error corrected, after all, and hereafter say—for “trials” read “girls.”