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Copyright' 1895 by Henry Altemus.
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CONTENTS
As DAUGHTER * - * I 5
AS WIFE – * º º- – 5 I
As MOTHER – - - gº 89
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AS DAUGHTER
I.
As DAUGHTER.
|s that most touching apologue
by which the prophet awoke
to life the dormant conscience of
King David, when he lay under
the paralysing glamour of an unre-
pented sin, Nathan said: “The
poor man had nothing save one
little eve lamb, which he had
bought and nourished up ; and
it grew up together with him, and
with his children, and it did eat of
his own morsel, and drank of his
Own Cup, and lay in his bosom,
and was unto him as a daughter.”
The seer evidently chose those
I6 wOMAN'S WORK
words to express the most tender
of all family relations, the sweetest
of all the family affections. The
daughter of a house is pre-emi-
nently the child of home. It is
true that if she marries she passes
into another home; but up to the
time of her marriage she is far
more deeply under her father's in-
fluence, and under her mother's
care. Most daughters, even in
these days when the education of
women has been so largely
developed, receive their chief
moral and intellectual training at
home. } When Once a boy has
passed—often at the age of eight
or nine years — into a private
school he only spends his holidays
AS DAUGHTER 17
at home, and during the greater
part of his life, usually for three-
fourths of the year, he is away
from the paternal roof. The spell
of home affection can only be
kept alive by the weekly letter,
which, in the case of boys, is often
but a brief and hasty scrawl. If
a girl is sent to school, it is at a
later age, and for a briefer period
of her life. (The home, which
may be the chief home of all her
future years, constitutes a more
intense and integral part of her
moral, spiritual and intellectual
life than, in any ordinary case,
it can be to a boy.) It will, I
think, be the experience of most
parents that, as a rule, the ..}
I8 WOMAN'S WORK
letters of daughters are fuller,
more frequent and more loving
than those of sons; and that
daughters cling to them with a
more complete and tender de-
pendence.
It may be said that when
daughters marry the severance
between them and their parents is
more complete than when sons
marry. We recall the words of
the psalmist: “Hearken, O daugh-
ter, and consider, incline thine ear:
Forget also thine own people and
thy father's house, so shall the
King have pleasure in thy beauty;
for He is thy Lord God, and wor-
ship thou Him.”
But I do not think that married
AS DAUGHTER I9
daughters are one whit more—
nay, I think that they are less—
separated than sons from the old
and clinging ties as an ordinary
rule. If, indeed, it should most
unfortunately happen that clash-
ing interests arise and jarring feel-
ings supervene between the two
families, it is perhaps natural, and
almost inevitable, that the woman
should throw in her lot with the
fortunes of her husband.
Historic instances of this will
readily occur to the memory. In
the eleventh chapter of the Book
of Daniel (verse 6) we read: “The
king's daughter of the South
(Egypt) shall come to the king
of the North (Syria) to make an
2O wOMAN’s WORK
agreement.” The allusion is to
the marriage of the Egyptian
princess, Berenice, daughter of
Ptolemy II (Philadelphus) with
Antiochus III (Theos), of the Se-
leucid dynasty; but in this in-
stance, as in the subsequent mar-
riage of Cleopatra, daughter of
Antiochus the Great, with Ptolemy
Epiphanes (Daniel xi, 17), the
divided interests of the princesses
prevented the establishment of
peace between the rival kings.
And, in modern times, the grave
of Elizabeth Claypole in Henry
VII's Chapel, in Westminster, re-
minds us that wives adopt the
cause of their husbands quite as
often as that of their parents.
AS DAUGHTER 2 I
When twenty-six of the great
men of the Commonwealth were,
by that Act of infinite baseness
which warred even against the
ashes of the dead, dug up from
their honoured graves in the
Abbey and flung into a promiscu-
ous pit in St. Margaret's Church-
yard, Cromwell's daughter alone
was exempted from the decree.
The Act included not only Crom-
well, Bradshaw, Ireton and one of
the greatest of our hero-sailors—
Admiral Blake, and Sir Thomas
May, the historian of the Long
Parliament, but even included the
Lord Protector's venerable mother,
who died at the age of ninety-two.
But the mortal remains of Eliza-
22 WOMAN'S WORK
beth Claypole were allowed to
rest in their last long home,
because she leaned, more or less
strongly, to Royalist opinions, and
is even said to have bitterly re-
proached her father with the exe-
cution of Charles the First.
Happily such conflict of inter-
ests is among the rarer contingen-
cies of life, and the married daugh-
ter, as a rule, with her husband
and her children, is the most wel-
come of guests in her father's
house. Tennyson beautifully
dwells, in the “In Memoriam,” on
the fact that death means separa-
tion, and the marriage of a daugh-
ter does not—
As DAUGHTER 23
Ay me, the difference I discern :
How often shall her old fireside
Be cheered with tidings of the bride;
How often she herself return,
And tell them all they would have told,
And bring her babe, and make her boast,
Till even those that miss'd her most
Shall count new things dear as old !
And thus, even when they are
married, our daughters still “are
to us as daughters.” But when a
daughter is not married how sweet
and how deep may be the range
of her influence As years grow
upon the father, how may she cher-
ish him, and add to his comfort and
happiness, and relieve him of all
such burdens as she can under-f
take for him, and brighten his
evenings and his home ! As years
24 WOMAN'S WORK
grow upon the mother, how much
the daughter can do to lighten the
burden of domestic management,
to soothe the sorrows, and ten-
derly to nurse the sickness of her
to whom she owes so much The
daughter of a widowed father or
of a widowed mother, if she is
still living in the old home, may be
the chief centre of all the varied
family life which has grown up in
the course of years. Berenger
wrote for the inscription on the
tomb of a lady who died unmar-
ried : “She was never a mother,
yet many Sons arose and called
her blessed.” The epitaph illus-
trates in a most striking way how
false is the notion that the life of
AS DAUGHTER 25
an unmarried daughter is doomed
to ineffectuality or uselessness.
On the contrary, to her father and
mother, to her brothers and sisters,
to her little nephews and nieces,
she may be the greatest of bless-
ings, and may find in her own
family relations a field of useful-
ness, which may spread in concen-
tric circles of blessing to the far-
thest shore.
And when the grace of God has
taken early hold of the young
heart, so that “reason and reli-
gion run together to weave the
web of a wise and exemplary life,”
how rich in influence may a young
girl make her life, even in the
limited sphere of her own house-
26 WOMAN'S WORK
hold | She need not be learned
in anything save the natural
courtesy which is in reality noth-
ing but sympathy and consider-
ateness, and yet she may be an un-
told blessing to all the household.
There is often one member of a
family for whom all the servants
feel a special tenderness. They
say, “Oh, it is always a pleasure
to do anything for dear Miss So-
and-So, because she is always so
kind.” To her father and her
mother the love of such a daugh-
ter may be as the dew on the
parched ground. Every one of
her sisters may be the wiser, the
better, the happier for her example.
Above all, what may she not add
AS DAUGHTER 27
to the character and the well-being
of her brothers | Fiction and bi-
ography alike have recorded the
inestimable preciousness of a
sister's love. Many a sister has
been chosen by her brothers as a
confidante of secrets which they
dare not reveal to father or
mother; and many a sister has
saved her brothers from fatal
dangers, and from the conse-
quences of fatal errors. George
Eliot has revealed to us the trans-
cendent affection for her brother
which was the romance of her
early years. She depicts it in the
earlier volumes of the M7/Z on
the A/oss, and she writes of it in
V6 TS62—
28 WOMAN'S WORK
I cannot choose but think upon the time
When our two lives grew like two buds that
kiss,
At lightest thrill from the bee's swinging
chime,
Because the one so near the other is.
He was the elder, and a little man
Of forty inches, bound to show no dread;
And I the girl, that puppy-like, now ran,
Now lagged behind, my brother's larger
tread.
But were another childhood world my share,
I would be born a little sister there.
She has also furnished us with a
lovely picture of a daughter's de-
votion in the chapters which tell
how Romola loved, cherished and
assisted her old blind father. We
know that Elizabeth Barrett Brown-
ing was such a daughter in her
AS DAUGHTER t 29
father's house, as also was Ade-
laide Procter. The latter sweet
poetess, in her “Bertha,” has
drawn an exquisitely pathetic
picture of a girl who gave up
every precious hope of individual
life for the sake of a brother who
never recognised the enormous
debt of gratitude which he owed
to her, and finally left to itself her
lonely and blighted life, when he
gave his whole affections to a girl
only seen a few days before.
In the history of science grate-
ful record will always be preserved
of the indefatigable devotion which
made Caroline Herschell toil with
her famous brother, Sir William
Herschell, for long years. She at-
3O t WOMAN'S WORK
tended him when he was polishing
mirrors, “by way of keeping him
alive; and I was constantly
obliged,” she says, “to feed him,
by putting the victuals by bits
into his mouth.” From Decem-
ber, 1783, she was absorbed in
the arduous labour of assisting
her brother. Her presence when
he was observing was indispens-
able. She habitually worked with
him till daybreak. She not only
read his clocks and noted down
his observations, but executed
subsequently the whole of the
extensive calculations involved.
Between 1785 and 1797 she dis-
covered eight comets, five of them
with undisputed priority. She was
AS DAUGHTER 3 I
remarkable for her unselfish de-
votion; and Madame D'Arblay
describes her as “very little, very
gentle, very modest, and very in-
genuous.”
Few things shock us more in
the records of history than the
mention of Öad daughters. Happily
they are not numerous. It is inex-
pressibly painful to find among
them two at least of the daughters
of Milton—Mary and Anne, the
two elder. The third daughter,
Deborah, seems to have been
better than her unnatural sisters,
and spoke of her father with aſ-
ſection after his death.
There is too much reason to
fear that heredity, as well as
32 WOMAN'S WORK
the many unhappy circumstances
which surrounded that ill-starred
family, may account for a relation-
ship so disastrous. Miss Powell,
whom Milton married, was the
daughter of a rowdy, impecuni-
ous, and broken-down Cavalier.
It would have been impossible for
him to select a young lady less
suited to be at the head of a sober
Puritan household. There are
strong grounds for the belief that
she treated him shamefully—far
more shamefully than is usually
suspected. And though, in his
consummate magnanimity, he for-
gave her and received her back
into his home, and also gave
shelter to her endangered and
AS DAUGHTER 33
broken-down relatives, it is hardly
likely that their union ever pro-
duced much happiness. Her
daughters seem to have re-
sembled her. No doubt Milton
made mistakes in the too scanty
intellectual training which he was
alone able to give to those shallow
natures. His ideal of woman-
hood was not ignoble, as we see
in what he writes of Eve—
She as a veil down to the slender waist
Her unadorned golden tresses wore,
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best received.
For contemplation he, and valour formed;
For softness she, and sweet attractive grace:
He for God only, she for God in him.
But this Hebrew and Puritan
34 WOMAN’s WORK
ideal required to be coloured with
some of the hues of chivalry. Mil-
ton adored his second wife, and
we hear the sobs which sound
through his sonnet on his “late-
espoused saint” after her too early
death. When he was old and
blind, and could no longer court
for himself, his third wife was
chosen for him by his friend Dr.
Paget. This lady, Elizabeth Min-
shull, who was much younger than
Milton, seems to have been of a
retiring and self-respecting char-
acter. In his last conversation
with his brother Christopher he
spoke of her as “his loving wife.”
But it was impossible for her to
live with the daughters of Milton
AS DAUGHTER 35
and Mary Powell. She wisely per-
suaded Milton to have all three
“sent to learn some curious and
ingenious sorts of manufacture
that are proper for women to
learn, particularly embroideries in
gold or silver.” The maid-servant
who gave evidence about Milton's
will, tells us that when the second
daughter, Mary, was told that her
father was to be married, “she said
that was no news, but if she should
hear of his death, that was some-
thing.”
It is difficult to pardon their
frightful and unnatural Philistin-
ism, and Milton felt it deeply. The
worst was that they were guilty of
petty purloinings, cheated him, and
36 WOMAN'S WORK
actually sold his books, forcing
him to feel an anguish more acute
than that caused by his blindness.
He would leave them nothing but
what was supposed to belong to
their mother, “because,” he said,
“they have been very undutiful to
me.” “My children, have been
unkind to me,” as he often told his
brother, “but my wife has been
very kind and careful of me.” It
may be a palliation, not an excuse,
that they had to read to him
in eight languages, not one of
which they understood, because,
he would often say in jest, that
“one tongue was enough for a
woman.” Doubtless they felt a
rebellious dissatisfaction at the
As DAUGHTER 37
dullness of their lives in that sad
home, with nothing about them ex-
cept books, which they loathed.
Perhaps some of the bitterness
of Milton's disappointments in his
experience of womanhood breathes
through the lines of Paradise Zosſ—
For that fair female troop thou saw'st, that
seemed
Of goddesses, so blithe, so smooth, so gay,
Yet empty of all good wherein consists
Woman's domestic honour and chief praise;
Bred only, and completed to the taste,
Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance,
To dress, and troll the tongue, and roll the eye.
But I will conclude with the
picture of a model daughter, of
one whose name shines out on the
page of history as a supreme ex-
ample of daughterly affection —
38 WOMAN'S WORK
Margaret Roper, the favourite
child of Sir Thomas More.
Some writers imagine that learn-
ing and advanced education in the
children tend to diminish affection
towards the parents. History does
not bear out the suspicion. Mar-
garet Roper is one conspicuous
instance to the contrary. She, the
best and most loving of daughters,
was one of the most learned
women of her day. She wrote
Latin with such elegance as to ex-
cite the astonishment and admira-
tion of the accomplished Cardinal
Pole. She wrote an essay in Latin
on the “Four Last Things,” which
her father, the great and learned
Chancellor of England, preferred
suºmqºneCI s, tion IIIA uqof
/ & toA+ s.w.tºurº，

AS DAUGHTER 39
to one which he had himself com-
posed on the same subject. She
was capable of discussing with her
father some of the gravest ques-
tions of theology and politics. An-
other remarkable proof that learn-
ing interferes in no way with the
domestic affections is Lady Jane
Grey—
Girl never breathed to rival such a rose,
Rose never blew that equalled such a bud.
She was so devoted to learning
that, at the age of sixteen, as Roger
Ascham tells us, she preferred
studying Plato's Phaedo with Roger
Ascham to joining the youths and
maidens in the exhilarating diver-
sion of the chase. Yet she was a
model of loving obedience to her
4O WOMAN’s WORK
parents, and of devotion to her
husband. And this was the case
although her parents educated her
with the astonishing and atrocious
cruelty which was in those days
deemed necessary to success in
education. Fuller may well say
that her parents, the Duke and
Duchess of Suffolk, treated “with
more severity than needed to so
sweet a temper” their lovely child,
who at thirteen was writing Greek,
and at fifteen was also learning
Hebrew, Latin, Italian and French,
and corresponding with the learned
Bullinger, while she could also
embroider beautifully, and had
many feminine accomplishments.
Yet here, taken from Roger
AS DAUGHTER 4. I
Ascham's Scholemaster, is the ac-
count she gave him of the way in
which she was trained : “When I
am in presence either of father or
mother; whether I speake, or
keepe silence, sit, stand, or go,
eate, drinke, be merrie or sad, be
Sowying, playing, dauncing, or do-
ing anie thing else, I must do it, as
it were, in such weight, measure,
and number, even so perfitelie as
God made the world, or else I am
so sharplie taunted, so cruelly
threatened, yea, presentlie some-
times with pinches, nippes, and
bobbes, and other waies which I will
not name, for the honour I bear
them, without measure misorder-
ed, that I thinke myselfe in hell.”
42 wOMAN'S WORK
But to return to Margaret
Roper, the passages which de-
scribe her relation to her father
are very beautiful— -
“When he had remained with great cheer-
fulness about a month's space in the Tower,
his daughter Margaret, longing Sore to see
her father, made earnest Suit, and at last got
leave to go to him ; at whose coming, after
they had said together the seven psalms and
litanies, among other speeches he said thus
unto her: “I believe, Megg, that they who
have put me here think they have done me a
high displeasure, but I assure thee, mine own
good daughter, that if it had not been for
my wife, and you my children, whom I ac-
count the chief part of my charge, I would
not have failed long ere this to have closed
myself in as strait a room as this, and straiter
y 9 º'
to O.
Here is the famous description
AS DAUGHTER 43
of the last parting of father and
daughter by his great-grandson,
Cresacre More—
“When Sir Thomas was come now to the
Tower-wharf, his best-beloved child, my Aunt
Roper, desirous to see her father . . . to
have his last blessing, gave her attendance to
meet him ; whom, as soon as she espied,
after she had received upon her knees his
fatherly blessing, she ran hastily unto him,
and without consideration of care of herself,
passing through the midst of the throng and
guard of men, who, with bills and halberts
compassed him round, there openly in the
sight of them all embraced him, took him
about the neck and kissed him, not able to
say any word but ‘Oh, my father Oh, my
father ' ' He liking well her most natural
and dear affection to him, gave her his fath-
erly blessing, telling her that, whatsoever he
should suffer, though he were innocent, yet
it was not without the will of God, counsel-
44 WOMAN'S WORK
ling her to accommodate her will to God's
blessed pleasure, and to be patient for her
loss. She was no sooner parted from him, and
had gone scarce ten steps, when she, not sat-
isfied with her former farewell, like one who
had forgot herself, ravished with the entire
love of so worthy a father, having neither
respect to herself nor to the press of people
about him, suddenly turned back and ran
hastily to him, took him about the neck, and
divers times together kissed him ; whereat he
spoke not a word, but carrying still his grav-
ity, tears fell also from his eyes; yea, there
were very few in all the troop who could re-
frain hereat from weeping; . . . yet at last,
with a full heavy heart, she was severed from
} }
him.
The day before his execution he
wrote a letter to her with a coal,
the use of pen and ink being still
denied him, in which he expressed
a great affection for all his chil-
AS DAUGHTER 45
dren, and a grateful sense of her
filial piety and tenderness when
she took leave of him in the street.
He sent her also his whip and
shirt of hair.
To any who know how deep
and rich may be the blessings and
life compensations of a happy
Christian home—to any who have
breathed the air of that paradise—
it must be saddening to read that
the emancipation of womanhood
from many trammels which this
age has witnessed is said to have
culminated in a “revolt of the
daughters.” I can imagine many
fatal errors in the training of
daughters and of Sons. I can
imagine that the daughters of
46 WOMAN'S WORK
women of fashion, who are that
and nothing more, may think their
own aims at least as noble and as
little reprehensible as that of any
mother who would sell their hap-
piness into the gilded servitude of
a “great” or a “wealthy ’’ mar-
riage with some decrepit million-
aire or titled debauchee. I can
imagine, too, that many mothers
may make the mistake about their
daughters which so many fathers
make about their sons, in expect-
ing that their children ought to be
like themselves, and have similar
views and similar aspirations.
Every human soul is an island,
and it is surrounded by an unvoy-
ageable sea. It does not, by any
AS DAUGHTER 47
means, follow that the child will
reflect either the character or the
ideal of its parents. It may even
revert by atavism to some far-dis-
tant type wholly alien from that of
its immediate progenitors; and, in
any case, our children, like all
other human beings, are — as
someone has said — simply the
summed-up totals of innumerable
double lines of ancestors which go
back to our first parents, Adam
and Eve. A Commodus, who is
a monster of brutalism and vul-
garity, is the son of a Marcus
Aurelius, who is the “bright con-
summate flower” of all pagan
m or a lity. An Agrippina the
younger, whose name was stained
48 WOMAN'S WORK
with so many infamies, was the
daughter of the virtuous wife of
Germanicus, who set an example
of stainless purity in an evil and
adulterous age. If there be any
general “revolt of the daughters,”
which I do not believe, there must
be some deep underlying germ of
disease in our modern civilisation.
It can hardly occur when parents
are wise and loving, and when, for
the fussiness of wearisome re-
straints and incessant interfer-
ences, they substitute the firm
control of gentleness and love.
AS WIFE
II.
AS WIFE.
E hear a great deal in these
days about woman's rights,
and the sphere of woman's influ-
ence. Christianity has given to
women an immense sphere of
overwhelming influence, if she
have the gifts and the grace to
use it rightly, in the bosom of her
º If the domestic du-
ties be well performed,” said Con-
own family. '
fucius, “there is no need to go
afar to offer sacrifice.”) Perhaps
some emancipated women may
read the remark with a sneer;
but so far from regarding the
5I
52 woMAN’s WORK
domestic duties as too narrow an
area for influence, I regard them
as forming a region coextensive
with that of the human race. A
woman may indeed take deep in-
terest in ever-extending horizons
of vision, and yet not
rank with those detestable,
Who let the bantling scald at home, and
brawl
Their rights and wrongs like potherbs in the
StreetS.
(Her duties undoubtedly begin with
the home, and if home duties be
generally neglected, all attempts
at performing wider ones will be a
more or less disastrous failure. )
A woman may be profoundly
learned, she may be pre-eminently
AS WIFE 53
devoted to religion, she may be
widely philanthropic, and yet be a
perfect wife. *
If a salient modern instance be
needed to prove that a woman
Superior to most men in learning
may yet be faultlessly faithful in
the performance of her home du-
ties, we may take the well-known
life of Mary Somerville. So
splendid were her scientific attain-
ments that the Edinburgh Review
called the first of her treatises
“one of the most remarkable
works which the female intellect
ever produced in any age or coun-
try.” Even in her eighty-ninth
year she was still engaged in solv-
ing abstruse mathematical prob-
54 WOMAN'S WORK
lems. Yet she won the warmest
testimonies of her husband and
children to the entire faithfulness
with which she discharged the
humblest and most fastidious du-
ties which can fall to the lot of the
most ordinary woman.
It has been sometimes supposed
that one who is absorbed in the
exercises of religion may be less
attentive to the mundane triviali-
ties which make up the total of
our daily life. The example of
St. Frances at once refutes such
an error. She was a Roman lady
of noble birth, born in 1384, and
married in 1396 to a Roman
noblem a n, Laurence Ponzani.
“Her obedience and condescen-
AS WIFE 55
sion to her husband was inimi-
table,” says Alban Butler, “which
engaged such a return of affec-
tion, that for forty years which
they lived together, there never
happened the least disagreement;
and their whole life was a con-
stant strife and emulation to pre-
vent each other in mutual com-
plaisance and respect.” “A mar-
ried woman,” she used to say,
“must, when called upon, quit her
devotions at the altar to find them
in her household affairs.”
The beautiful story which is told
of her is meant to illustrate the
fact that a woman's religious pur-
suits must never be suffered to in-
terfere with her obligations to pro-
56 WOMAN'S WORK
vide for the welfare and comfort
of her husband and her children.
It was the daily custom of this
lady to spend one of the early
hours of the morning in prayer
and the study of the Holy Scrip-
ture. On one occasion she had
sat down at her desk for this pur-
pose, when some domestic trifle—
the requirements of one of her
servants or one of her children—
demanded her attention. Mindful
of the true rule, “Doe the 7ze-cá
*Aynge,” and ready to sacrifice at
Once her personal desires to the
claim of duty, she arose, did what
was necessary, and returned to
her reading. But no sooner had
she sat down than a second inter-
AS WIFE 57
ruption occurred. Again she rose
with quiet dignity, attended to the
needs of her household, and went
back to her Bible. But before she
had begun to read she was again
called, and again did her task.
This happened seven times in suc-
cession, yet she never delayed, nor
uttered one murmur, nor showed
the smallest fretfulness. When
for the seventh time she came back
to the Psalm which lay open be-
fore her, she found that angel
hands, in high approval of her
cheerful faithfulness, had inscribed
the verse for her in letters of shin-
ing gold. In 1433 she founded
the female order of Oblates or
Collatines.
58 WOMAN'S WORK
Philanthropy, I know not why,
has been regarded as fatal to the
lesser duties of a wife. Dickens
seems to have felt a special dis-
like for philanthropic ladies, and
has painted them in severest car-
icature when he describes the
household of Mrs. Jellyby, whose
whole energies are absorbed in
the work of training the inhabit-
ants of Borrioboolagha in the art
of turning piano-ſorte legs. Yet
some of those women who have
become immortal for their good
deeds were not celibates like St.
Catherine of Siena, or St. Theresa
of Avila, but were married
women, who never allowed their
duties to interfere with the just
AS WIFE 59
requirements of their children and
households.
Take the case of St. Elizabeth
of Hungary. She was married to
Louis, Landgrave of Thuringia.
She lived under the bad, one-sided
guidance and perverted religious
ideals of Conrad of Marburg, who
tried to introduce the Inquisition
into Germany; yet during all her
earlier married life, before his
false conceptions of Sainthood had
forced her into the unnatural self-
abnegation of her later years, she
was a sweet and loving consort to
her noble husband. Nay, legend in-
voked the most amazing miracles,
to prevent even the semblance of
failure in her performance of these
6O WOMAN's WORK
requirements. Thus we are told,
that when on one occasion she dis-
pleased him by giving away all
dainties, and living only on bread
and water, they were suddenly
changed, when he tasted them,
into delicate viands and choicest
wines. And on another, when she
had most unwarrantably put a
leper into her husband's bed, and
he was naturally enraged, it was
found that the leper had super-
naturally vanished, whereby they
knew that it was Christ Himself
who had appeared in that sad
guise. She died in 1231.
We may here pause to note the
superior practical wisdom of the
sweet saint of Assisi. He no
AS WIFE 6 I
doubt held that, as a counsel of
perfection for those who had a
special call, the life of his friend
Santa Clara was higher than that
of women who had not left the
world for the cloistered cell; yet
he purposely founded his order
of Tertiaries, to enable men and
women, who were living the com-
mon life of married people in the
ordinary routine of society, to be-
come, to some extent, members of
his order, and to carry out the
precepts of the religious life.
If the example of St. Elizabeth
of Hungary seems too far away,
we may take the case of women
in our own century.
Mrs. Chisholm was married to
to2 WOMAN'S WORK
an officer in the Indian army at
the age of twenty, in 1830. She
accompanied and cheered her hus-
band in all the vicissitudes of his
life. When they were in India
she founded a school for the
female children and orphans of
the British soldiery; and when
the ill health of Captain Chisholm
compelled them to leave India, she
went with him to Sydney, and
there by her loving kindness en-
deared herself to thousands of
emigrants, and saved the life of
many a destitute girl from misery
and ruin. She never found that
home duties clashed with her
services to the suffering, and she
AS WIFE 63
earned the noble eulogy Of Walter
Savage Landor—
Chisholm of all the ages that have rolled
Around this rolling world, what age hath
See Il
Such arduous, such heaven-guided enterprise
As thine P Crime flies before thee, and the
shores
Of Australasia, lustrated by thee,
Collect no longer the putrescent weed
Of Europe, flung by senates, to infect
The only unpolluted continent.
Or take the case of Elizabeth Fry.
In the year 1800, at the age of
twenty, she was married and be-
came the mother of a large family.
The sight of her work at Newgate
made Sydney Smith weep like a
child, and he said that “to see her
in the midst of the wretched pris-
64 WOMAN'S WORK
oners, to see them all calling
earnestly upon God, soothed by
her look, animated by her voice,
clinging to the hem of her gar-
ment, worshipping her as the only
being who has ever loved them,
or taught them, or noticed them,
or spoken to them of God, was a
sight which broke down the pag-
eant of the world.” Yet these
labours, of which England is
justly proud, and which enroll her
among “the benefactors of the
race,” made her in no respect
less tender as a mother, or less
devoted as a wife.
It seems to be believed that
literary women make indifferent
wives. Again I do not think that
AS WIFE - 65
this is true. We all know that,
according to Mrs. Carlyle, literary
husbands are to be avoided. We
read how she used to warn young
ladies, “My dear, whatever you
do, do not marry a literary man.”
And Captain Hemans, who by all
accounts seems to have been
something of a Philistine, com-
plained that it was the curse of be-
ing married to a literary wife, that
he never had a button on his
shirts. It was probably more his
fault than that of the poetess. At
any rate, this age has seen the
marriage of a poet and a poetess,
both of the first rank, which was
consummately happy; and Robert
66 woMAN'S WORK
Browning could hardly read for
tears his own lines—
O lyric Love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire—
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face—
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart . . .
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God, who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand,
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be ; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very
thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile.
In these lines, after the death of
Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
the poet expressed the over-flow-
ing love and reverence which he
had implied in his “One Word
AS WIFE 67
More.” Perhaps no poet has
deeper lessons to tell us of
“Woman as Wife” than Robert
Browning. He had evidently
studied married relations with
the same profound insight and
inexhaustible in te rest which
marked his attention to all human
documents. In his poems we may
trace the passionate growth of
love, as in his “Blot on the
y
Scutcheon; ” the decay of love,
due to the fungous growth of
lower and baser passions, in his
“Fifine at the Fair;” the quarrels
of love, ending as deeper peace,
in that exquisitely tender lyric,
“A Woman's Last Word”—
68 WOMAN'S WORK
Let's contend no more, love,
Strive nor weep;
All be as before, love,
Only sleep.
Be a god, and hold me
With a charm;
Be a man, and fold me
In thine arm.
Teach me, only teach, love,
As I ought,
I will speak thy speech, love,
Think thy thought.
Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands.
No one has pointed out as he
has done what little things create
love, and by what imperceptible
gradations it may be destroyed.
AS WIFE 69
He does so in “A Lover's Quar-
rel"—
Dearest, three months ago,
When we loved each other so,
Lived and loved the same,
Till an evening came
When a shaft from the Devil's bow
Pierced to our ingle glow,
And the friends were friend and foe.
Again, his lyric “In a Year” is
full, as many of his poems are, of
the unspeakable pathos which sur-
rounds human lives when the fires
of hell are lit upon the hearth—
Never any more,
While I live,
Need I hope to see his face
As before.
7o wOMAN'S WORK
Once his love grown chill,
Mine may strive—
Bitterly we re-embrace,
Single still.
Was it something said,
Something done,
Vexed him 2 was it touch of hand,
Turn of head P
Strange that very way
Love begun ;
I as little understand
Love's decay.
We may perhaps learn more on
the subject of “Woman as Wife.”
from Browning's poems than from
any book in the language, but this
must not make us do injustice to
Tennyson. To him more than any
man has been due the extension
to women of the advantages of the
-----
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ſae|-
|
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№ae，
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-
Penelope, the Faithful Wife
Pºoman's Pºork 2

AS WIFE 71
very highest college education.
“The Princess,” thrown into a
form so slight, yet contained sug-
gestions which have taken force
in the colleges for women, which
now not unfrequently produce
Senior Classics and Senior Wrang-
lers. And no one has written
more nobly of the ideal of married
life than he has done at the close
of that poem—
For woman is not undevelopt man,
But diverse; could we make her as the man,
Sweet love were slain ; his dearest bond is
this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker they must grow :
The man be more of woman, she of man ;,
He gain in Sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews which throw the
world :
72 WOMAN’s WORK
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward
Care, -
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man
As noble music unto noble words.
But we must not overlook the
fact that if, in countless instances,
the influence of women is enno -
bling and elevating, so—and here-
in lies a very solemn warning—
it is in countless instances dwarf-
ing and disintegrating. George
Eliot drew a terrible picture of
this in her Midd/e/earch. The
narrow and dwarfish pedantry
of Mr. Casaubon was not able to
drag down Dorothea from her
fixed height; but Rosamond
Vincy acts as a blight and a
canker on the whole life, career,
AS WIFE 73
and aspirations of Lydgate, with
her false, narrow mind and feeble
prettiness. There is something
terrible in the passage—
“Lydgate's hair never became white. He
died when he was only fifty. . . . But he
always regarded himself as a failure; he had
not done what he once meant to do. His
acquaintances thought him enviable to have
so charming a wife, and nothing happened to
shake their opinion. Rosamond never com-
mitted a second indiscretion. She simply
continued to be mild in her temper, inflexible
in her judgment, disposed to admonish her
: husband, and able to frustrate him by strata-
gem. . . . To the last Tertius occasionally
let slip a bitter speech. AE/e once called her
his basi/ ?/aná, and when she asked for azz
explanation, said that basil was a Ż/ant which
Jad ſourished wonderfully on a murdered
man's brains. Rosamond had a placid but
74 WOMAN'S WORK
strong answer to such speeches: Why then
had he chosen her ?”
The reason of the downward-
dragging influence of some women
is due to the misdirected exagger-
ation of their best affections. It is
a common proverb that the ordi-
nary British ſyzaier-ſa/27/ias is like
the Prophet Habakkuk, caftaff/e de
tout. But when this is so, it is
only because her love for her hus-
band and family is so absorbingly
intense that it leaves room for
nothing else. This is the fatal
tendency of narrow and exclusive
domesticity. The woman thus be-
comes not selfish for herself, but
abnormally and absorbingly selfish
for her husband and children. For
AS WIFE 75
them she will be unjust; for them
she will be niggardly. It is no
better than a “slightly expanded
egotism "-the egoisme a flusiezºrs
replacing the egoisme a soi. That
this happens not unfrequently is
certain, and therefore the words
of so eminent a political thinker
and so keen an observer as Alex-
ander de Tocqueville are full of
warning—
“In politics,” he says, “as in all else, we
'must be careful to inculcate certain princi-
ples, to instil certain feelings. I do not ask
the clergy, for instance, to make the persons
they influence either Republicans or Royal-
ists, but I wish they would more frequently
let them hear of the ties which attach them
to the great human society in which God has
76 wOMAN’s WORK
placed them, and to instil into their very
souls that every one belongs much more to
the great collective Being than he does to
himself. . . . This is what I wish to have
taught to men, and still more to women.
During my experience, now long, of public
life, nothing has struck 77te more than the in-
fluence of woment & Zhis meafter, an inftuence
a/Z the greater because it is indirect. I do not
hesitate to say that they give to every nation
a moral temperament which shows itself in
politics. A hundred times / have seen weak
meat show real folitical value, because they
Åad by their sides women who supported them
zºoſ by advice as to £articulars, but by fort:-
ſying their feelings and directing their ambi-
tion. More frequently, / must confess, / /*ave
seen the domestic influence gradually trans-
forming a man naturally noöſe, generous, and
wnseófish, into a coward/y, common//ace, Zlace-
/...unting seſſ-seeker, thinéing of Żublic business
only as a means of making himself comfort-
able, and this simply by daily contact with a
As wiFE 77
well-conducted woman, a faithful wife, an
exce//ent mother, from whose mind the grand
motion of Żublic duty was entirely absent.”
And of this tendency, also,
Browning has given us a consum-
mate study in his Andrea del
Sarto. It is in its main features
historical. Andrea del Sarto was
called “the Faultless Painter,” the
Pitfore senzº cºrori. He can cor-
rect the mistakes even of Raphael;
he can be almost regarded as
standing on a level with him and
the mighty Michael Angelo. But
they are unmarried, and he has
married a haughty, avaricious
beauty, Lucrezia Fede, who loves
him not, and neither cares for nor
can appreciate his art, but only
78 WOMAN'S WORK
cares to get scudi for her jewels
and her ruffs. He was invited to
the court of Francis the First, and
proudly painting “in that humane
great monarch's golden look” he
felt capable of attaining any height.
But Francis has intrusted him with
a sum of money to buy pictures in
Italy; and at the instigation of his
wife he embezzles this money, and
builds a house with it. Henceforth
he is despised and shunned. He
feels that his career is over. The
wife whose beauty he still adores
though he sees through her emp-
ty and frivolous selfishness, has
dragged him down into misery
and ruin. He has shadowed forth
something of what he felt in his
AS WIFE 79
own melancholy portrait with that
of the full-blown comeliness of his
wife. And Browning, interpret-
ing those melancholy pictures,
makes him say—
But had you—oh, with the same perfect brow,
And perfect eyes, and more than perfect
mouth, . . .
Had you, with these the same but brought a
mind
Some women do so. Had the mouth there
urged,
“God and the glory ! never care for gain.
The Present by the Future, what is that ?
Live for fame, side by side with Angelo,
Raphael is waiting. Up to God all three "
I might have done it for you.
Solomon has drawn for all time
a golden picture of the virtuous
woman in her manifold and fruit-
8O WOMAN'S WORK
ful domestic activities in the last
chapter of the Proverbs, which is
described as “the praise and prop-
erties of a good wife.” And be-,
sides this, the Song of Songs has
presented us with the impassioned
idyll of the pure love of a peasant
girl for her peasant lover, victo-
riously resisting all the splendid
allurements of a magnificent and
voluptuous court, and finding purer
rapture in the sight of the bud-
ding pomegranates and tender
grapes, and the time of singing
birds, and the streams of her na-
tive hills.
There are many striking pic-
tures of wedded love in our
poets. Shakespeare has deline-
AS, WIFE 8 I
ated it in Portia, in Calpurnia, in
Miranda, in Hero, in Desdemona,
in Lady Percy, in Imogen, and
many more of his sweet heroines.
Milton, who, if his first mar-
riage was pre-eminent in misery,
found brief but perfect happiness
in his union with Catherine Wood-
cock, and peace in his marriage
with Elizabeth Minshull, writes—
Hail, wedded love, mysterious law, true source
Of human offspring, sole propriety
In Paradise, of all things common else,
Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure. By
thee
Relations dear, and all the charities
Of father, son, and brother first were known.
Here Love his golden shafte employ; here
lights
His constant lamp, and waves his purple wing;
Here reigns and revels.
32 WOMAN's work
But I know few more tender
pictures than that in the little lyric
of the Chartist poet, Ernest
Jones—
My wife, my child, come near to me;
The world we know is a stormy sea :
With your hands in mine, if your eyes but
shine,
What care I how wild the wild waves be 2
For the wildest storm that ever blew
Is nothing to me if I shelter you;
No warmth do I lack, for the howl at my back
Sings down in my heart, “Man brave and
} }
true.
A pleasant sail, my child, my wife,
O'er a pleasant sea to many is life;
The wind blows warm, and they fear no
Storm,
And wherever they sail kind friends are rife.
AS WIFE 83
But, wife and child, the love, the love
That lifteth us to heaven above,
Could only have grown where storms have
blown,
The truth and strength of the heart to prove.
For a prose picture of wedded
bliss I know of none superior to
that by Charles Reade in his
charming story, Christie Żohn-
Słoſzé—
“He a gentleman; she a wifely wife, a
motherly mother, and a lady. This, then,
is a happy couple. Their life is full of pur-
pose and industry, yet lightened by gaiety.
There the divine institution of marriage takes
its natural colours; and it is at once pleasant
and good to catch such glimpses of Heaven's
designs, and sad to think how often this great
boon accorded by God to man and woman
must have been abused ere it could have
sunk to be the standing joke of farce writers
84 wOMAN’s WORK
and the theme of weekly punsters. In this
pair we see the wonders a male and a female
can do for each other in the sweet bond of
holy wedlock. In that blessed relation alone
two interests are really one, and two hearts
lie safe at anchor side by side.
They are friends—for they are man and wife,
They are lovers still—for they are man and
wife,
They are one forever—for they are man and
wife.
“This wife brightens the house from kit-
chen to garret for her husband; the husband
works like a king for his wife's comfort and
his own fame, and that fame is his wife's
glory. When one of them expresses or hints
a wish, the other's first impulse is to find the
means, not the objection.
They share all troubles, and by sharing halve
them ;
They share all pleasures, and by sharing
double them.
AS WIFE - 85
“They climb the hill together now ; and
when, by the inevitable law they begin to
descend towards the dark valley, they will
still go hand in hand, Smiling so tenderly and
supporting each other with a care more lovely
than when the arm was strong and the foot
was firm.”
AS MOTHER
III.
As MOTHER.
ſ N every nation above the sav-
\ age the love of sons for their
mothers is the strongest and ten-
derest of all affections; and for
that reason the influence of women
must always be a supreme factor
in the history of the world)
This is constantly referred to in
Holy Scripture. When the psalm-
ist wishes to express the extreme
of sorrow he says, “I went heavily,
as one that mourneth for his
mother ”; when the prophet would
illustrate the utmost intensity of
which earthly love is capable, he
89 *
90 wOMAN’s WORK
asks, “Can a mother forget her
sucking child, that she should not
be mindful of the son of her
womb 2" It is a love strong as
death, yea, and even stronger
than death. Poetry and art have
alike been haunted by the un-
speakably pathetic record which
tells us how “Rizpah, the daugh,
ter of Aiah, took sackcloth and
spread it for her upon the rock,
from the beginning of harvest
until water dropped upon them
out of heaven, and suffered neither
the birds of the air to rest upon
them by day, nor the beasts of the
field by night.”
It was the subject of a picture
by Sir Frederick Leighton in last
AS MOTHER 9I
year’s Academy, and had been
already shadowed forth in weird
grandeur by the imagination of
Turner. A living poet, Mr.
Coventry Patmore, writes of the
hapless mother of Armoni and
Mephibosheth—
Staring astonied many days
Upon the corpses of her two fair sons,
Who loved her once,
Dead in the dim and lion-haunted ways;
and Lord Tennyson chose Rizpah
as the title of a poem which told
an analogous tale in common life.
Shakespeare, whom nothing es-
caped, has used the motive—the
passionate love of sons for their
mothers, and mothers for their
sons—in many of his plays. In
92 WOMAN'S WORK
his “Coriolanus ” all turns on the
fact that the stern Roman con-
queror cannot resist the entreaty
of his mother, even when he has
rejected the petition of his wife.
In “King John ” the wail of Con-
stance over her little Arthur is
expressed in one of the most im-
passioned outbursts of that very
noble play. In “Hamlet” even a
wicked and perverted mother still
asserts some power over the heart
of her miserable son. In “Troilus
and Cressida "Shakespeare sums
up everything which is strongest
in woman's influence when he
makes the young hero exclaim—
Let it not be named for womanhood,
Think, we had mothers
AS MOTHER 93
As we pass down the stream of
English literature few passages
are more touching than those
which endorse the feelings of sons
for their mothers.
Fond sharer of my infant joy,
Fond soother of my infant tear,
Is not thy ghost still lingering near 2
Am I not still thy soul's employ P
If ever the sobs of a poet were
audible, it is in the famous “Lines
to my Mother's Picture” of poor
Cowper—
Oh that those lips had language Life has
passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
In “The Princess” Tennyson
Wrote—
94 wOMAN's work
My mother was as whole as some serene
Creation, minted in the golden mood
Of sovereign artist;
and he describes her as
Not learned, save in gracious household ways;
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants;
No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt
In angel instincts, breathing Paradise.
The following lines of a living
poet—Sir Edwin Arnold—to his
mother will probably be unknown
to most of our readers. I have
only space for a few verses—
The crimson sun is sinking,
And the Highland hills are blue,
And the silver lake is sleeping
At the back of Ben Venue.
And weary miles between us,
And dreary leagues there be,
But my heart flies back untravelled,
Dear mother mine, to thee.
Rizpah Defending Her Sons

AS MOTHER 95
I mind the time, dear mother,
When 'twas happiness alone
To sit and listen ever
To thy kind and gentle tone.
I think of days forgotten,
As my ſancies older grew,
How I had wayward changes
And thy love no changing knew.
I think how still thou lov'st me,
How thy lips my brow have kissed,
And my cheek, for all I hide it,
Is wet—and not with mist.
That love—and lie I cannot
Here in this quiet spot—
Hath undeserved been often,
But never once forgot.
So I kneel to thee in spirit
For thy blessing, mother true,
Where the silver lake is sleeping
At the back of Ben Venue.
96 WOMAN'S WORK
I only quote these passages
from the poets because I have
ever regarded poets as at once
the greatest of moral teachers,
and as possessing an insight into
all the phases of human life which
is unattainable by souls less richly
gifted. But history furnishes us
with one memorable example that
the influence of mothers can mould
the whole career and ideal of their
sons. It is the example of the
Spartan mothers. What they de-
sired, and what the whole Spartan
nation desired beyond all things
else, was that their boys should be
heroically brave, and indomitably
hardy in the endurance of pain)
This was essential in a race which
AS MOTHER 97
held its hegemony solely by its
thews and sinews, and which had
no walls to its capital except the
breasts of its defenders. Hence
those two most characteristic
stories in which antiquity de-
lighted. A Spartan boy com-
plaining to his mother that his
Sword was too short, she replied,
“Add a step to it.” A Spartan
mother giving a shield to her son,
said with laconic brevity, à Tây 7,
éiri Täv. “This, or on it”—bring
it back, or be brought back upon
it dead.
All great legislators have felt
the importance of using the
influence of mothers to shape
great national ends. (w hen Napo-
98 WOMAN’s WORK
leon was asked which were the
best training-places for recruits,
he said, “The nurseries"; and it
was to the mothers of France that
he looked for help in inspiring
those traditions of glory which
enabled his raw and half-fed sol-
diers to sweep away from battle-
field after battlefield the chivalry
of Europe. Deeply have those
nations rued their folly which kept
womanhood in a condition of ser-
vitude and depression. Woe to the
people in which the women pray,
as they are once said to have done
in Hindostan, “Oh, Vishnu, let not
my child be a girl; for very sad is
the life of woman ſ” Woe to the fu-
ture of the land in which there are
AS MOTHER 99
Mothers who, all prophetic pity, fling
Their pretty babes into the running brook.
It may perhaps be urged that the
ancient Greeks were a race splen-
didly endowed with physical beauty
and intellectual power, and yet
that in Athens women held a
somewhat subordinate and de-
spised position. Appeal may
perhaps be made to the famous
funeral oration pronounced by
Perikles on those who had fallen
in the third year of the Pelopon-
nesian war, in which he described
it as the highest ideal of woman-
hood to be conspicuous neither
for good nor for evil. The an-
swer is, that the Athenian women
cannot be described as despised
IOO WOMAN'S WORK
or downtrodden. The names of
many famous women were hon-
oured, and although the majority
were expected to live purely
domestic lives, within the sphere
of home they exercised their legit-
imate influence. Further, the
glory of Greece in the zenith of
her greatness was very shortlived,
and the undoubted cause of her
speedy deterioration was con-
nected with the poverty of her
conception of the true dignity of
woman's nature.
If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall man live 2
It may even be said that false and
degraded views about the soul-
lessness of women have tended
AS MOTHER IOI
more than anything else to cor-
rupt the morals and stereotype
the immobility of the unprogres-
sive East, and indeed to retard the
best development of many na-
tions and many ages.) Only con-
sider the senselessness in this re-
spect of “little-footed China”;
the onesided misappreciation of
Semitic nations; the errors of
Persia, Greece, and Rome; even
the fantastic idolism of chivalry in
the Middle Ages.
There are three ways in which
women may mould the entire
future of mankind.
I. One is by doing their utmost
to secure that the childhood of
their boys and girls shall be as
IO2 WOMAN'S WORK
happy as outward circumstances
render possible.) It is a golden
rule to “give to the morn of life
its natural blessedness.” Men
and women who are at least able
to look back on happy childhoods
have drunk one sweet, cool
draught of the river of the
water of life, which may leave
in their souls not only a refresh-
ful memory, but a vivifying in-
fluence in the days when we are
forced to say that." there is no
pleasure in them.” "Every mother
should make a study in the art of
creating happiness in her children.
That art cannot be learnt from
books; it comes from the inspira-
tion of a divine unselfishness.
AS MOTHER Io3
Poverty, is no bar to its attain-
º at all times is
“a pearl not of the Indian but
of the empyrean ocean’; but the
mother who tries so to love as “to
go to heaven every day,” will be
sure to bring it thence and impart
it to her little ones.
2. Another is by the wise train-
ing of the will. Nothing can be
more deadly in its foolishness
than the efforts of some ill-in-
structed parents to break down a
child's will. The attempt may
often be absolutely defeated, for
the will even of a child may be-
come so fossilised that nothing
can alter it; but even if ultimate
obedience be enforced, the dam-
IO4. wOMAN's WORK
age done may be incredible. Miss
Martineau, in her admirable book
on Household Education, points
out that the endeavor to break
dowſ, the will is almost as fatal as
the error of escaping trouble by
indulging it. She tells how a
mere inſant was almost starved
and driven into epilepsy by the
attempt of its father to make it
eat a piece of bread from which it
turned at first with repulsion, but
had become, in the contest, an ob-
ject of absolute terror and dis-
gust. She points out that the
true and natural way is to control
the will of a child moſt by another
person's zwiſ/, 64t Öy the other ſacuſ-
ties of the child iſse/. Avoid both
AS MOTHER I O5
indulgence and opposition, and a
habit of docility will be formed by
the time the child becomes capa-
ble of deliberate self-control.
And under this important head,
by way of a good piece of advice,
I would call the attention of
mothers to the practice known as
“planishing.” It may help to con-
vince them of the weakness of
purely restrictive systems. A
wrought-iron plate which is not
quite flat, but sticks up a little on
one side, is said to cockle. Now
it would utterly fail to attempt to
flatten it by hitting hard at the
place which sticks up. That not
only makes the defect worse, but
also makes it warp at the outer
IO6 WOMAN'S WORK
edge. The only way to treat it is
by “planishing,” i. e., “by va-
riously directed and specially ad.
justed blows with the hammer
elsewhere, so attacking the evil,
not by direct, but by indirect ac-
tions. The required process is
less simple than you thought.”
Even a sheet of metal is not to
be successfully dealt with after
methods which are supposed to
be obvious to common sense."
The same lesson lies in this illus-
tration as in the old fable which
tells us how Sol quietly effects
what all the bluster of Boreas
cannot achieve.
3. A third, and the last which
—y
* Herbert Spencer, Sociology, xi. 271.
AS MOTHER Ioy
I will dwell upon, is the early in-
culcation of religion in its broad,
eternal, essential verities upon the
yet plastic mind, and above all, of
the one main end and aim of all
religion, which is to mould the
character and sway the moral con-
duct.) Nothing will have less ef-
fect upon children than the mere
decent simulation of a perfunctory
and superficial religionism; noth-
ing will be more useless and more
wearisome to them than outside
forms to which they see no real
correspondence in the life. But
when a child sees in the lives of
its parents the twelve fair fruits of
the Spirit which grow upon the
tree of life; when it sees the
IO8 WOMAN'S WORK
faith which they profess shining
through all their words and
works, and producing the lovely
results of holiness and sympathy
and self-denial; when it will be
helped through life by beautiful
emories of an example consist-
ent with the belief on which it
professed to be moulded—then,
indeed, the child starts on its ca-
reer with the most precious of
heritages. Professor Huxley has
dwelt on the matchless value of
Holy Writ as setting forth to us
the records of human beings dur-
ing many generations, who passed
for their brief hour across the nar-
row stage of earthly existence as
members of the vast, intermin-
AS MOTHER IO9
able procession of humanity from
eternity to eternity, and who
earned the blessings or the
curses of all time according as
they did good or evil. But the
child of parents who have borne
their part as saints of God, holy,
just, and true, ought to possess
an amulet of more immediate Do-
tency against evil example. [“I
was always glad that I received a
religious education,” said Lord
William Russell when he stood
upon the scaffold, “for even when
I most seemed to forget it, it still
hung about me and gave me
checks.”
Let us close with two examples.
Many of the best, greatest,
I IO WOMAN's WORK
wisest men whom the world has
ever seen have confessed the un-
speakable debt of gratitude which
they owed to their mothers.
Among them, we may count such
kings as our own Alfred and St.
Louis of France; such painters as
François Millet; such statesmen
as Washington and Garfield; such
men of letters as Sir W. Jones and
Goethe. As a rule, such women
as Cornelia have such sons as the
Gracchi; such a woman as Agrip-
pina the younger has such a son as
Nero.
But we have conspicuous in-
stances, in the last generation and
in this, of the evil and the good
which a mother may do to her
AS MOTHER III
young son. We will not take any
of the worst influences which his-
tory affords. We will not for a
moment speak of “unmotherly
mothers and unwomanly women,
who nigh turn motherhood to
shame and womanhood to loath-
ing.” Far short of this, a mother
may irreparably flaw the jewels
whom God has given her in her
children by lack of seriousness
and lack of self-control.
Who shall ever say how much
harm was done to the character of
Lord Byron by the caprice, the
passionateness, the unwisdom of
his mother? “Capricious and pas-
sionate by nature,” says Mr.
Leslie Stephen, “she treated her
II 2 woMAN's work
child with alternate excesses of
violence and tenderness. She was
short and fat, and would chase her
mocking child around the room in
impotent fury. To the frank re-
mark of a schoolfellow, ‘Your
mother is a fool, he replied, ‘I
know it.' Another phase is said to
be the germ of his ‘The Deformed
Transformed.’ His mother re-
viling him as ‘a lame beast,' he
replied, ‘I was born so, mother.’
. . . In 1806 she ended a quarrel
with him by throwing the poker
and tongs at his head. She fol-
lowed him to his lodgings in Lon-
don whither he retreated, and
there another engagement suc-
ceeded in the defeat of the enemy
—his mother.”
AS MOTHER II 3
On the other hand, Mr. Ruskin
has always borne the most loving
testimony to the character of his
mother, and has owned without
stint the debt which he owes to
her for all her love and care of
him in a system of education,
which if, in many respects, it was
puritanically stern, was neverthe-
less founded on high principles of
wisdom and righteousness.
“My mother,” he says, “forced me by
steady daily toil to learn long chapters of the
Bible by heart, as well as to read it every
syllable through, aloud, hard names and all,
from Genesis to Apocalypse, about once a
year; and to that discipline—patient, ac-
Curate, and resolute—I owe, not only a
knowledge of the book which I find occa-
Sionally Serviceable, but much of my general
II.4. wOMAN's WORK
power of taking pains, and the best part of
my taste in literature.”
Elsewhere he dwells on the ab-
solute implicit obedience always
required of him, but also on the
loving and boundless care taken
to shelter him from every evil in-
fluence, on the delightful earnest-
ness in endeavouring to promote
his intellectual and moral culture,
and on the never-ceasing desire to
wean him from all pleasures which
were perilous, by amply supplying
his childhood with all such as were
harmless and improving. Carlyle
speaks with no less warmth of
his peasant-mother. It is the ex-
ception to find any great man who
AS MOTHER II 5
does not echo the tribute, (. If I
have done anything in life, I owe
it all to my mother.”
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