Still his fierce gaze fixed upon her; but now with a little more of the composure of searching inquiry.
'It is you who have brought all this destruction and misery upon me,' he said at length. 'From one step unto another, even to this end, I recognize your work. I was a weak fool not to have seen it before.'
'Is it about my mistress that you speak?' she responded. 'Is it my fault that she has been untrue?'
'If she is false, what need to have told me of it? Was it that the knowledge of it would make me more happy? And did I give it into the hands of my own slaves to watch over my honor? Is it a part of your duty that for weeks you should have played the spy upon herself and me, so as to bring her secret faults to light?'
She stood silent before him, not less amazed at his lingering fondness for his wife than at his reproaches against herself.
'How know I that she is guilty at all?' he said, continuing the train of thought into which his doubts and his better nature had led him. 'I must feel all this for certain. How do I know but what you have brought it about by some cunning intrigue for your own purposes? Speak!'
For Leta to stop now was destruction. Though to go on might bring no profit to her, yet her safety depended upon closing forever the path of reconciliation toward which his mind seemed to stray. And step by step, shrouding as far as possible her own agency, she spread out before him that basis of fact upon which she so well knew how to erect a false superstructure. She told him how the intimacy of Ænone and Cleotos had led her to keep watch—how Ænone had once confessed having had a lover in the days of her obscurity and poverty—how that this Greek was that same lover—and how improbable it was that he could have been domiciled in that house by chance, or for any other purpose than that of being in a situation to renew former intimacies. She told how, after long suspicion, she had settled this identity of the former lover with the slave—and how she had seen them, in the twilight of that very day, standing near the window and addressing each other endearingly by their own familiar names. As Sergius listened, the evident truthfulness of the facts gradually impressed themselves upon him; and no longer doubting his disgrace, he closed his heart against all further hope and charity and affection. The pleasant past no longer whispered its memories to his heart—those were now stifled and dead.
'And what reward for all this do you demand?' he hissed forth, seizing Leta by the arm, 'For of course you have not thus dogged her steps day after day, without expectation of recompense from me.'
Did he mean this—that she was capable of asking reward? Or was he cunningly trying her nature, to see whether she might prove worthy of the great recompense which she had promised herself? It was almost too much now to expect; but her heart beat fast as she saw or fancied she saw some strange significance in the gaze which he fastened upon her. Babbling incoherently, she told how she did not wish reward—how she had done it all for love of him—how she would be content to serve him for life, with no other recompense than his smile—and the like. Still that gaze was fastened upon her with penetrating power, more and more confusing her, and again she babbled forth the same old expressions of disinterested attachment. How it was that at last he understood her secret thoughts and aspirations, she knew not. Certainly she had not spoken, or even seemed to hint about them. But whether she betrayed herself by some glance of the eye or tremor of the voice, or whether some instinct had enabled him to read her, of a sudden he burst into a wild, hollow laugh of disdain, threw her from him, and cried, with unutterable contempt:
'This, then, was the purpose of all! This is what you dreamed of! That you, a slave—an hour's plaything—could so mistake a word or two of transient love-making as to fancy that you could ever be anything beyond what you are now! Poor fool that thou art!—Oho, Drumo!'
The giant entered the room, and Leta again drew back into the closest obscurity she could find, not knowing what punishment her audacity was about to draw upon her. But worse, perhaps, than any other punishment, was the discovery that Sergius had already forgotten her; or rather, that he thought so little about her as to be able to dismiss her and her pretensions with a single contemptuous rebuke. He had called his armor bearer for another purpose than to speak of her. A new phase had passed over his burdened and excited mind. He could not endure that solitude, with ever-present disagreeable reflection. And since his disgrace must, sooner or later, be known, he would brave it out by being himself the first to publish it.
'Is it not to-morrow that the games begin?'
'Yes, master,' responded the armor bearer.
'And does it not—it seems to me that I promised to my friends a banquet upon the previous night. If I did not, I meant to have done so. Go, therefore, and bid them at once come hither! Tell the poet Emilius—and Bassus—and the rest. You know all whom I would have. Let them know that I hold revel here, and that not one must dare to stay away! Tell my cooks to prepare a feast for the gods! Go! Despatch!'
The giant grinned his knowledge of all that his master's tastes would require, and left the room to prepare for his errand. And in a moment more Sergius also departed, without another thought of the Greek girl, who stood shrinking from his notice in the shadow of the farthest corner.
APHORISMS.—NO. XII
Knowledge and Action.—It is a common fault of our humanity, when not sunk too low in the scale of intellect, to seek knowledge rather than attempt any laborious application of it. We love to add to our stock of ideas, facts, or even notions of things, provided moderate pains will suffice; but to put our knowledge in practice is too often esteemed servile, or eschewed as mere drudgery. Useful activities flatter pride, and gratify the imagination, too little. But of what avail, ordinarily, is the possession of truth, unless as light to direct us in the ways of beneficent labor, for ourselves and for our fellow men? There are, indeed, objects of knowledge which elevate the soul in the mere act of contemplation; but, in most cases, if what we learn is brought into no definite relation to the practice of life, the acquisition is barren, and the labor of making it apparently a loss of time and strength.
This is no censure upon the course of learning as a process of mental discipline; for this in itself is one of the most productive forms of human activity.
EXCUSE
Song, they say, should be a king,
Crowned and throned by lightning-legions
Only they may dare to sing
Who can hear their voices ring
Through the echoing thunder-regions.
Yet, below the mountain's crest,
Chime the valley-bells to heaven;
If we may not grasp the best,
Deeper, closer, be our quest
For the good that Fate has given.
Parching in its fever pain,
Many a tortured life is thirsting
For a cooling draught to drain,
Though it flash no purple vein
From the mellow grape-heart bursting.
Must our sun-struck gaze despise
Starry isles in light embosomed?
Must we close our scornful eyes
Where the valley lily lies,
Just because the rose has blossomed?
Though the lark, God's perfect strain,
Steep his song in sunlit splendor;
Though the nightingale's sweet pain
With divine despair, enchain
Dew-soft darks in silence tender;
Not the less, from Song's excess,
Sings the blackbird late and early:
Nor the bobolink's trill the less
Laughs for very happiness,
Gurgling through its gateways pearly.
Though we reach not heavenly heights,
Where the sun-crowned souls sit peerless,
Let us wing our farthest flights
Underneath the lower lights;—
Soar and sing, unfettered, fearless—
Sings as bubbling water flows—
Sing as smiles the summer sunny.
Royal is the perfect rose,
Yet, from many a bud that blows,
Bees may drain a drop of honey.
AMERICAN WOMEN
A great deal has been said and written in this age and country on the subject of what is technically called woman's rights; and, in the course of such agitation, many good and true things have been thought out and made available to the bettering of her condition, besides many foolish and impracticable, arising from a too grasping desire for a wider and more exciting sphere of effort, as well as from a palpable misapprehension of their own nature and their legitimate sphere, which prevails quite extensively among women. The pioneers of the rights of woman have done a good work, however, and may well be pardoned wherein they have gone beyond what might be fairly and profitably demanded for our sex. They have called the public attention to the subject, and have enlisted the thoughts and the services of many earnest men as well as women in their cause; thus provoking that inquiry which will eventually lead to the finding of the whole truth concerning woman, her rights, privileges, duties. And for this, in common with the pioneers in every cause that has for its object the amelioration and advantage of any class of human beings, they deserve the thanks of all. That there should be some ultraists, who would not know where to stop in the extravagant and unsuitable claims they urge, was to be expected. This should not blind our eyes to the lawful claims of woman upon society, nor is it sufficient to throw ridicule upon a movement which has, in this day, indeed, borne its full share of obloquy from the careless, the thoughtless, the too conservative, all of whom are alike clogs upon the wheel of human progress.
This is not the age nor ours the people to shun the fair discussion of any question, much less one which commends itself as of practical importance. This American people has proved, by the calm and patient consideration it has accorded to the advocates of woman's rights, that it has reached that lofty point in the progress of society at which woman is regarded as a positive quantity in the problem which society is working out, and it marks an era in the history of the sex, prophetic of the full enjoyment of all the rights which are hers by nature, or may be hers by favor. I think that in this country, at least, woman has been put upon a very clear and unobstructed path, with many encouragements to go on in the highest course of improvement of which she is capable. There seems to be a general disposition to investigate, and to allow her the rights she claims—rights of education, of labor, of property, of a fair competition in any suitable field of enterprise; so that she bids fair to become as self-supporting, independent, and intelligent as she desires. It is true that much is still said of the jealousy and selfishness of men, leading them to monopolize most of the sources of profitable effort to their own use, thus cramping the sphere of woman, and making her dependent and isolated.
Now, it is very much a question with me whether, after all, the failure, so far, to secure these fancied rights, is not quite as much the result of woman's backwardness and inefficiency as of man's jealous and greedy monopoly; whether the greatest obstacle does not lie in the adverse opinions prevailing among women themselves. According to my observation, as fast as women have proved themselves adapted to compete with men in any particular field, their brothers have forthwith striven to make the path easy and pleasant for them.
But there is a natural and necessary jealousy excited when women attempt to go out of the beaten track, and establish new conditions and resources for themselves—a jealousy which has its source in the instinctive feeling of civilized society, that the standard of womanhood must not be lowered; that its safety and progressive well-being depend upon the immaculate preservation of that pure and graceful ideal of womanhood which every true man wishes to see guarded with a vestal precision. And society will pause, thoughtfully to consider, before the stamp of its approbation is affixed to any mode of development by which that lofty ideal would suffer. Anything which tends in the least to unsex, to unsphere woman, by so much works with a reflex influence on man and on society, and produces in both a gradual and dangerous deterioration. And self-preservation is the first instinct of society as well as of the individual being. Man, and the eternal and infinite order of the world, require that woman keep her proper place, and that she demand nothing which, granted, would introduce confusion and disorder among the social forces.
But it is not so much of woman's rights that I would speak. I am not afraid but that she will possess these in due time, as fast as her nature and true place and mission in the world come to be more fully understood. I am far more anxious that she should come into such more perfect understanding.
Woman has always been a puzzle, an enigma, to man. When, in the pride of his anatomical skill, he has essayed to make her his study, thinking to master the secret of her curious physical being, he has been forced to stop short of his purpose, dumb and blind in the presence of that wondrous complexity that no science of his own can master; and no casuist has yet solved the why of her equally wonderful and complex mental and spiritual being. They have made Reason, cold, critical, judge, the test; but the fine, delicate essence of her real being has always eluded it. When Love seeks the solution—the large, generous Love, that is one day to sit as the judge of all things, supreme over purblind human Reason—then she will be understood, for she will yield to the asking of that all-seeing One. This will be when the world is ripe for the advent of woman, who shall rule through love, the highest rule of all. Slowly, slowly, though surely, is the world ascending, through the wondrous secret chain of influences binding her to the moral order of the universe, to the height of this supernal law of love; and there, in that new and holy kingdom, woman's crown and sceptre await her.
But who shall say that a glimmer of this future royal beauty and glory has yet dawned upon her?
If man has misunderstood woman, she has none the less misunderstood herself. Indeed, her feet have for ages been treading debatable ground, that has shaken beneath her through the clashings of man's ignorance and her own vague, restless clamors and aimlessness. She has felt the stirrings within of that real being she was created, but has never dared to assert herself, or, to speak more truly, has only known to assert herself in the wrong direction. False voices there have been without number, but not even yet has true womanhood been able, in spite of its irrepressible longings, to utter that clear, free, elevated speech that shall yet stir the keenest pulses of the world.
As it is, the world has nearly outgrown the petty jealousy, the cool assumption of inferiority, the flippant criticism of her weaknesses, the insulting catering to her foibles, with which woman has been accustomed to be treated, and which have made her either the slave, the toy, or the ridicule of man; and it is getting to see that she is at least of as much relative importance as man; that without her he will in vain aspire to rise; that, by a law as infallible as that which moves and regulates the spheres, his condition is determined by hers; that wherever she has been a slave, he has been a tyrant, and that all oppression and injustice practised upon her has been sure in the end to rebound upon himself. If there is one thing more than another which, at any given period and in any particular nation, has pointed to the true state of society along the scale of advancement, it has been the degree of woman's elevation; the undercurrents of history have all set steadily and significantly in the direction of the truth, which the world has been slow to accept and make use of, indeed, that society nears perfection only in the proportion in which woman has been honored and enfranchised; in which she has had opportunity and encouragement to work and act in her own proper and lawful sphere.
Those who have gone the farthest in claiming special rights for woman have generally based their demands upon a virtual abandonment of the idea of sex, except in a physical sense. Here is a primary, fundamental error. There is unquestionably a sex of mind, of soul, and he who ignores or denies this is, it seems to me, studying his subject without the key which alone will unlock it.
Another error which many of the advocates of woman's rights have fallen into, is that of assuming that those conditions are weaknesses, disabilities, which God and nature have attested to be her crowning glory and power. Or, rather, this second error results naturally and most logically from the still more vital one of assuming that her sphere is intended to be no way different from man's.
And still another, equally false and mischievous, would place her in antagonism to man upon the question of comparative excellence and of precedence in the scale of being.
A brief analysis of some of the points of difference between the mind masculine and the mind feminine will show the futility of confounding the two, or of drawing any useless or invidious comparisons. They are as distinct in their normal action as any two things can well be. I begin, then, by dividing our whole conscious human life into two comprehensive departments, expressed by the generic terms, thought—feeling; reflection—spontaneity; knowledge—emotion; perception—reception; reason or intellect—affection or heart. The intelligent being unites these conditions—he is supreme in but one. Man reasons—woman feels; man analyzes—woman generalizes; man reaches his conclusions by induction—woman seizes hers by intuition. There is just the difference, in kind, between a man's mind and a woman's that there is between that of a man of genius and a man of talent. Genius grasps the idea, and works from it outward; talent moulds the form in which the already created idea may be embodied. Genius is creative, comprehensive, intuitive, all-seeing; talent is acute, one-sided, cumulative, inductive. The men of genius will ever be found to be gifted with this womanly quality of mind—the power of seizing truth, ideas, with the heart and soul, through love, rather than with the understanding, through reason.
Woman understands faith, or the taking things on trust; she has no love for that logical process of thought whereby, step by step, man delights to prove a fact in nature or law with mathematical precision and certainty. With the hard details and closely connected steps which make up the body of any science, mathematical, physical, or metaphysical, she has no patience. Her mind is not receptive of formulas or syllogisms. She comprehends results, but is incurious as to causes. She knows what love or benevolence means, under its triple form of charity, mercy, magnanimity, which, like a sea, surrounds the universe; she has no idea of law and justice, which are the eternal pillars thereof. If man feels or loves, it is because his reason is convinced; woman's affections go beyond reason, and without its aid, into the clear realm of ultimate belief. This is why there are so few skeptics in religious things among our sex. Woman's mental and spiritual constitution render belief or faith easy and natural. She is receptive in all the parts of her being.
I conclude, therefore, that in the outer world of fact, of demonstration, of volitions and knowledges, of tangible proofs and causalities, of positive and logical effects of reason, of all outward and material processes, man is supreme; while in that finer, higher, more subtile sphere of intuitions, loves, faiths, spiritual convictions, which overtop our actual life, and lead it up from grossness to glory, woman is the oracle and priestess. In the basic qualities of our nature man is stronger—woman, in those which, in grace, beauty, and sweetness, taper nicely toward its apex.
But are the two spheres therefore at war? By no means. Are they at all independent of each other? Are they not rather conjoined indissolubly? It is a fatal mistake which places an antagonism between the two. There should be between them harmony as sweet as that which moves the concentric rings of Saturn. Untaught by the presence and inspiration of woman, man becomes a cold, dry petrifaction, constantly obeying the centripetal force of his being, and adoring self. Without his basal firmness and strength, woman, in whom the centrifugal force is stronger, remains a weak, vacillating, impulsive creature, feebly swayed by the tides of emotion, lacking self-poise, and aimless and vagrant.
But teach her to reason—man to feel; open up to her the sources of knowledge, and cause him to learn the times of the tides of affection; cultivate her intellect and his heart, and in the healthy action and reaction consequent upon such a balance of forces, you have the true relationship established between the sexes, the relationship which the Creator pronounced perfect in the beginning.
It will be seen that while I attribute to woman a certain superiority both of nature and function, as to the highest part of the nature common to both, I at the same time assert her inferiority in what may be called its fundamental attributes, those which lie nearest to the constant and successful prosecution of mundane affairs, and, consequently, I also establish the fact of her absolute and inevitable dependence in such sense on man. But do I thus degrade her, or in effect annul this asserted superiority? Because man, and the strength, amplitude, and stability of his more practical nature, form a sure basis upon which she may rest, do I any the less make her the very crown and perfection of God's human handiwork? Assuredly not. The truth is, if, instead of making comparison where, from the nature of the case, comparison is almost precluded, so great is the difference between them, I were to say that each is the complement or counterpart of the other, and that, alone, each is but a half sphere, and imperfectly rounded at that, I should more nearly approach to accuracy. To make the perfect whole which the Creator had in His idea, the two halves must be united. And so I dignify the oldest of human institutions—marriage. I accord to it the very perfection of wisdom, beauty, utility, adaptation. I am aware that in so speaking I hold to an old-fashioned belief, and tread incontinently, not only on a notion afloat among some of the strong-minded of my sex at the present day, that this institution is nothing more nor less than an engine of selfish and despotic power on the one hand, and of slavish subjection on the other; but on the more moderate idea that it is not desirable for all women, nor even for a majority. But I still think that this state of union is the most natural, beneficent, satisfying condition possible for all of both sexes—the condition most conducive to the highest, widest, happiest development of the individual man or woman, especially the latter, for it is through marriage only, through the beautiful and sacred wifehood and motherhood which that institution guarantees in purity and holiness, that woman's highest nature finds scope and opportunity. And I make no exceptions. On the contrary, I should say that the exceptions which might occur should invariably be counted as misfortunes. Not that many good, true, noble women do not live and die unmarried. Circumstances, that inflexible arbiter of human life, as it often seems, may strangely turn into wide and unaccustomed channels the love, the devotion, the energy, the self-sacrifice, that, in their pure, strong action, make woman's best development, and so the world, the needy people of the world, humanity at large, may receive the immediate benediction of it. Let no woman who, alone it may be, goes steadfastly on her way of duty and self-abnegation, think she has lived in vain because the special lot of woman has been denied her. If not happiness, which comes from content and satisfaction, yet there is something higher, diviner still, arising from duty done and trials endured—blessedness. But such exceptions do not, I conceive, invalidate the general fact that marriage was intended to be the channel for the vast aggregate of human happiness and improvement. I speak of marriage as it should be, as it might be, as it will one day be, when men and women have acquainted themselves with the laws, physical and spiritual, which were intended to adjust these unions between the sexes in a harmonious manner, according to natural sympathies and affinities; laws, infallible, inherent in the individual constitution, and which, if understood and enforced, would obviate much of the sin, misfortune, and misery in the earth. It is a great and curious question, how much of the pain, suffering, and evil so rife among men, is due to the one-sided, blindfold, inconsiderate, and unsuitable marriages every day taking place; filling the homes of the land with discontent, bickerings, disorder, and continual strife, from the jostling together of antipathetic elements; cursing society with the influences derived from character formed and nurtured in such pestilent domestic atmospheres; and sending out thousands of unhealthy, misorganized, wrongly educated beings, the fruit of these disunions, to work ill both to themselves and their race. The world has much yet to learn with regard to the conditions necessary to a true and legitimate marriage of the sexes. There are thousands of illegal unions that have been blessed by church and magistrate, which yet carry only ban in their train. Whether read literally or not, the old, old story of the temptation and the fall has a significance not often dreamed of in respect to this question of marriage. It was a disturbance of the pure and perfect allegiance of each to the other, no less than a fall from the intimate communion of both with the Father of spirits. And a thicker darkness rests over the means whereby the institution of marriage may be rescued from its degradation, and man and woman be reinstated in the loyalty they owe to each other, than over the means by which the creature may make himself acceptable to the offended Creator; inasmuch as the former is left, without any special revelation, to the slow process of thought among men, to the workings of experience and the results of observation. And these laws are age-long in their evolutions. But when men and women have learned to look within themselves, have turned an intelligent eye upon the necessities of their threefold being, and when they recognize the God-made laws regulating these necessities, and have begun to mate themselves accordingly, the world will have received a powerful impulse toward its promised millennial epoch.
Such, then, being, in brief, the relation of woman to man, it is necessary to inquire, as pertinent to my subject, not so much whether man gives her all the rights within his own sphere which she may beneficially claim, but whether she has yet understood the weight and significance of her own position in the scale of being, and has exercised all the rights consequent therefrom. To know is far easier than to live according to knowledge. It is to be feared that women themselves have but a poor appreciation of the ideal of true womanhood. Oh, is it not time this ideal should be worthily understood? Has not poor suffering humanity borne the burden of its woes long enough, and will not woman help to lift it from the tired, stooping shoulders? For she may. How? Simply by working out her own divinely appointed mission. And is this not broad and absorbing enough? See what are some of its objects of influence and endeavors. First, here are the very faintest beginnings of intelligent existence to impress and mould—the embryos of character to stamp. And who knows how important this moulding and stamping may be? To go farther back still: Who knows what indelible constitution may be, is, fixed upon the individual organism, for better, for worse, by the authors of its life, that, if evil, no training, no education, no work of grace, not even omnipotence, can expunge or alter? This motherhood of woman, in its awful sanctity and mystery, in its bearings upon the immortality of personal identity, is a fearful dignity. Therein consists the first and chief claim of Woman to honor and reverence. She who has been a mother has measured the profoundest as well as the most exalted experience of which humanity is susceptible. Let her see to it that she honor herself.
Here is the white and plastic tablet of the new-born soul. Let woman fear and tremble to write on that, for the writing shall confront her forever. Like the Roman Pilate, what she has written, she has written. Here are the purblind human instincts to direct and culture; the vagrant, unbridled hosts of the spontaneous emotions to be tutored and restrained; the affections and the tastes to be trained toward the true, the beautiful, and the good; the warring passions to be curbed and disciplined; in short, the whole glorious domain of the heart and soul, the moral and spiritual nature, is to be surveyed, studied, swayed by that potential agency which woman possesses in a very eminent degree—personal influence. By this agency, informed and vitalized by love, she becomes the great educator in the great school of life, in the family, in society, in the world. Women do not sufficiently appreciate the importance of their work as the architects of character. Character! That, after all, is the man, the enduring individual, the real I, to whom the Creator has said, Live forever! Character is simply what education and habit make of a person, starting from the foundation of his inherited organic idiosyncrasies. It is a result—the work of time and countless shapings and impressings. It is not what a man thinks of himself, nor what others think of him, but what he really is in the sight of God, his Maker. This is what shall come out, at last, from the obscurations and uncertainties of this lower atmosphere into the clear, truthful light of eternity; shall cast off the devices, the flimsy pretences, the temporary shows, the convenient disguises, of this mortal life of mixed substance and shadow, and stand a bare, naked, unclothed fact of being before itself, the universe, and God. Alas! what multitudes of real dwarfs go out every day, 'unhouseled,' into that searching light of eternity.