My Wife and I. Harry Henderson's History

"Well," said my uncle, "for every kind of existence in creation God has made a mate, and the eagles that live on mountain tops, and fly toward the sun, have still their kindred eagles. Now, I think, for my part, that if Fénelon had married Madame Guyon, he would have had a richer and a happier life of it, and she would have gone off into fewer vagaries, and they would have left the Church some splendid children, who might, perhaps, have been born without total depravity. You see these perfected specimens owe it to humanity to perpetuate their kind."

"Well," said I, "let them do it by spiritual fatherhood and motherhood. St. Paul speaks often of his converts as those begotten of him – the children of his soul; a thousand-fold more of them there were, than there could have been if he had weighted himself with the care of an individual family. Think of the spiritual children of Plato and St. Augustine!"

"This may be all very fine, youngster," said, my uncle, "but very exceptional; yet for all that, I should be sorry to see a fine woman like Caroline withering into an old maid."

"She certainly will," said I, "unless you and mother stretch forth your hands and give her liberty to seek her destiny in the mode in which nature inclines her. You will never get her to go husband-hunting. The mere idea suggested to her of exhibiting her charms in places of resort, in the vague hope of being chosen, would be sufficient to keep her out of society. She has one of those independent natures to which it is just as necessary for happiness that she should make her own way, and just as irksome to depend on others, as it is for most young men. She has a fine philosophic mind, great powers of acquisition, a curiosity for scientific research; and her desire is to fit herself for a physician, – a sphere perfectly womanly, and in which the motherly nature of woman can be most beautifully developed. Now, help her with your knowledge through the introductory stages of study, and use your influence afterward to get her father to give her wider advantages."

"Well, the fact is," said my uncle, "Caroline is a splendid nurse; she has great physical strength and endurance, great courage and presence of mind, and a wonderful power of consoling and comforting sick people. She has borrowed some of my books, and seemed to show a considerable acuteness in her remarks on them. But somehow the idea that a lovely young woman should devote herself to medicine, has seemed to me a great waste, and I never seriously encouraged it."

"Depend upon it," said I, "Caroline is a woman who will become more charming in proportion as she moves more thoroughly and perfectly in the sphere for which nature has adapted her. Keep a great, stately, white swan shut up in a barn-yard and she has an ungainly gait, becomes morose, and loses her beautiful feathers; but set her free to glide off into her native element and all is harmonious and beautiful. A superior woman, gifted with personal attractions, who is forgetting herself in the enthusiasm of some high calling or profession, never becomes an old maid; she does not wither; she advances as life goes on, and often keeps her charms longer than the matron exhausted by family cares and motherhood. A charming woman, fully and happily settled and employed in a life-work which is all in all to her, is far more likely to be attractive and to be sought than one who enters the ranks of the fashionable waiters on Providence."

"Well, well," said my uncle, "I'll think of it. The fact is, we fellows of three-score ought to be knocked on the head peaceably. We have the bother of being progressive all through our youth, and by the time we get something settled, up comes your next generation and begins kicking it all over. It's too bad to demolish the house we spend our youth in building just when we want rest, and don't want the fatigue of building over."

"For that matter," said I, "the modern ideas of woman's sphere were all thought out and expressed in the Greek mythology ages and ages ago. The Greeks didn't fit every woman to one type. There was their pretty, plump little Aphrodite, and their godlike Venus de Milo; there was Diana – the woman of cold, bright, pure physical organization, – independent, free, vigorous. There was Minerva, the impersonation of the purely intellectual woman, who neither wished nor sought marriage. There was Juno, the house-keeper and domestic queen, and Ceres, the bread-giver and provider. In short, the Greeks conceived a variety of spheres of womanhood; but we, in modern times, have reduced all to one – the vine that twines, and the violet hid in the leaves; as if the Victoria Regia hadn't as good a right to grow as the daisy, and as if there were not female oaks and pines as well as male!"

"Well, after all," he said, "the prevalent type of sex through nature, is that of strength for man and dependence for woman."

"Nay," said I; "if you appeal to nature in this matter of sex, there is the female element in grand and powerful forms, as well as in gentle and dependent ones. The she-lion and tiger are more terrible and untamable than the male. The Greek mythology was a perfect reflection of nature, and clothed woman with majesty and power as well as with grace; how splendid those descriptions of Homer are, where Minerva, clad in celestial armor, leads the forces of the Greeks to battle! What vigor there is in their impersonation of the Diana; the woman strong in herself, scorning physical passion, and terrible to approach in the radiant majesty of her beauty, striking with death the vulgar curiosity that dared to profane her sanctuary! That was the ideal of a woman, self-sufficient, victorious, and capable of a grand, free, proud life of her own, not needing to depend upon man. The Greeks never would have imagined such goddesses if they had not seen such women, and our modern civilization is imperfect if it does not provide a place and sphere for such types of womanhood. It takes all sorts of people to make up a world, and there ought to be provision, toleration, and free course for all sorts."

"Well, youngster," said my uncle, "I think you'll write tolerable leaders for some radical paper, one of these days, but you fellows that want to get into the chariot of the sun and drive it, had better think a little before you set the world on fire. As for your Diana, I thank Heaven she isn't my wife, and I think it would be pretty cold picking with your Minerva."

"Permit me to say, uncle, that in this 'latter day glory' that is coming, men have got to learn to judge women by some other standard than what would make good wives for them, and acknowledge sometimes a femininity existing in and for itself. As there is a possible manhood complete without woman, so there is a possible womanhood complete without man."

"That's not the Christian idea," said my uncle.

"Pardon me," I replied, "but I believe it is exactly what St. Paul meant when he spoke of the state of celibacy, in devotion to the higher spiritual life, as being a higher state for some men and women than marriage."

"You are on dangerous ground there," said my uncle, "you will run right into monastic absurdity."

"High grounds are always dangerous grounds," said I, "full of pitfalls and precipices, yet the Lord has persisted in making mountains, precipices, pitfalls, and all, and being made they may as well be explored, even at the risk of breaking one's neck. We may as well look every question in the face, and run every inquiry to its ultimate."

"Go it then," said my uncle, "and joy go with you; the chariot of the sun is the place for a prospect! Up with you into it, my boy, that kind of driving is interesting; in fact, when I was young, I should have liked it myself, but if you don't want to kick up as great a bobbery as Phæton did, you'd better mind his father's advice: spare the whip, and use the reins with those fiery horses of the future."

"But, now," said I, "as the final result of all this, will you help Caroline?"

"Yes, I will; soberly and seriously, I will. I'll drive over there and have a little talk with the girl, as soon as you're gone."

"And, uncle," said I, "if you wish to gain influence with her, don't flatter nor compliment; examine her, and appoint her tasks exactly as you would those of a young man in similar circumstances. You will please her best so; she is ready to do work, and make serious studies; she is of a thorough, earnest nature, and will do credit to your teaching."

"What a pity she wasn't born a boy," said my uncle, under his breath.

"Well, let you and me do what we can," said I, "to bring in such a state of things in this world that it shall no longer be said of any woman that it was a pity not to have been born a man."

Subsequently I spoke to my mother on the same subject and gave her an account of my interview with Caroline.

I think that my mother, in her own secret heart, had cherished very much the same hopes for me that had been expressed by Uncle Jacob. Caroline was an uncommon person, the star of the little secluded neighborhood, and my mother had seen enough of her to know that, though principally absorbed in the requirements of a very hard domestic sphere she possessed an uncommon character and great capabilities. Between her and my mother, however, there had been that silence which often exists between two natures, both sensitive and both reticent, who seem to act as non-conductors to each other. Caroline stood a little in awe of the moral and religious force of my mother, and my mother was a little chilled by the keen intellectualism of Caroline.

There are people that cannot understand each other without an interpreter, and it is not unfrequently easier for men and women to speak confidentially to each other than to their own sex. There are certain aspects in which each sex is sure of more comprehension than from its own. I served, in this case, as the connecting wire of the galvanic battery to pass the spark of sympathetic comprehension between these two natures.

My mother was one of those women naturally timid, reticent, retiring, encompassed by physical diffidence as with a mantle – so sensitive that, even in an argument with me, the blood would flush into her cheeks – yet, she had withal that deep, brooding, philosophical nature, which revolves all things silently, and with intensest interest, and comes to perfectly independent conclusions in the irresponsible liberty of solitude. How many times has this great noisy world been looked out on, and silently judged by these quiet thoughtful women of the Virgin Mary type, who have never uttered their magnificat till they uttered it beyond the veil! My mother seemed to be a woman in whom religious faith had risen to that amount of certainty and security, that she feared no kind of investigation or discussion, and had no prejudices or passionate preferences. Thus she read the works of the modern physical philosophical school with a tranquil curiosity, and a patient analysis, apparently enjoying every well-turned expression, and receiving with interest, and weighing with deliberation every record of experiments, and every investigation of facts. Her faith in her religion was so perfect that she could afford all these explorations, no more expecting her Christian hopes to fall, through any discoveries of modern science, than she expected the sun to cease shining on account of the contradictory theories of astronomers. They who have lived in communion with God have a mode of evidence unknown to philosophers; a knowledge at first hand. In the same manner, the wideness of Christian charity gave my mother a most Catholic tolerance for natures unlike her own.

"I have always believed in the doctrine of vocations," she said, as she listened to me; "it is one of those points where the Romish church has shown a superior good sense in discovering and making a place for every kind of nature."

"Caroline has been afraid to confide in you, lest you should think her struggles to rise above her destiny, and her dissatisfaction with it, irreligious."

"Far from it," said my mother; "I wholly sympathize with her; people don't realize what it is to starve faculties; they understand physical starvation, but the slow fainting and dying of desires and capabilities for want of anything to feed upon, the withering of powers for want of exercise, is what they do not understand. This is what Caroline is condemned to, by the fixed will of her father, and whether any mortal can prevail with him, I don't know."

"You might, dear mother, I am sure."

"I doubt it; he has a manner that freezes me. I think in his hard, silent, interior way, he loves me, but any argument addressed to him, any direct attempt to change his opinions and purpose only makes him harder."

"Would it not, then, be her right to choose her course without his consent – and against it?" My mother sat with her blue eyes looking thoughtfully before her.

"There is no point," she said slowly, "that requires more careful handling, to discriminate right from wrong, than the limits of self-sacrifice. To a certain extent it is a virtue, and the noblest one, but there are rights of the individual that ought not to be sacrificed; our own happiness has its just place, and I cannot see it to be more right to suffer injustice to one's self than to another, if one can help it. The individual right of self-assertion of child against parent is like the right of revolution in the State, a difficult one to define, yet a real one. It seems to me that one owes it to God, and to the world, to become all that one can be, and to do all that one can do, and that a blind, unreasoning authority that forbids this is to be resisted by a higher law. If I would help another person to escape from an unreasoning tyranny, I ought to do as much for myself."

"And don't you think," said I, "that the silent self-abnegation of some fine natures has done harm by increasing in those around them the habits of tyranny and selfishness?"

"Undoubtedly," said my mother, "many wives make their husbands bad Christians, and really stand in the way of their salvation, by a weak, fond submission, and a sort of morbid passion for self-sacrifice – really generous and noble men are often tempted to fatal habits of selfishness in this way."

"Then would it not be better for Caroline to summon courage to tell her father exactly how she feels and views his course and hers?"

"He has a habit," said my mother, "of cutting short any communication from his children that doesn't please him by bringing down his hand abruptly and saying, 'No more of that, I don't want to hear it.' With me he accomplishes the same by abruptly leaving the room. The fact is," said my mother, after a pause, "I more than suspect that he set his foot on something really vital to Caroline's life, years ago, when she was quite young."

"You mean an attachment?"

"Yes. I had hoped that it had been outgrown or superseded, probably it may be, but I think she is one of the sort in which such an experience often destroys all chance for any other to come after it."

"Were you told of this?"

"I discovered it by an accident, no matter how. I was not told, and I know very little, yet enough to enable me to admire the vigor with which she has made the most of life, the cheerfulness and thoroughness with which she has accepted hard duties. Well," she added, after a pause, "I will talk with Caroline, and we will see what can be done, and then," she added, "we can carry the matter to a higher One, who understands all, and holds all in his hands."

My mother spoke with a bright assured force of this resort, sacred in every emergency.

This was the last night of my stay at home, the next day I was to start for my ship to go to Europe. I sat up late writing to Caroline, and left the letter in my mother's hands.

CHAPTER XII.

I LAY THE FIRST STONE IN MY FOUNDATION

My story now opens in New York, whither I am come to seek my fortune as a maker and seller of the invisible fabrics of the brain.

During my year in Europe I had done my best to make myself known at the workshops of different literary periodicals, as a fabricator of these airy wares. I tried all sorts and sizes of articles, from grave to gay, from lively to severe, sowing them broadcast in various papers, without regard to pecuniary profit, and the consequence was that I came back to New York as a writer favorably known, who had made something of a position. To be sure my foot was on the lowest round of the ladder, but it was on the ladder, and I meant to climb.

"To climb – to what?" In the answer a man gives to that question lies the whole character of his life-work. If to climb be merely to gain a name, and a competence, a home, a wife, and children, with the means of keeping them in ease and comfort, the question, though beset with difficulties of practical performance, is comparatively simple. But if in addition to this a man is to build himself up after an ideal standard, as carefully as if he were a temple to stand for eternity; if he is to lend a hand to help that great living temple which God is perfecting in human society, the question becomes more complicated still.

I fear some of my fair readers are by this time impatient to see something of "my wife." Let me tell them for their comfort that at this moment, when I entered New York on a drizzly, lonesome December evening she was there, fair as a star, though I knew it not. The same may be true of you, young man. If you are ever to be married, your wife is probably now in the world; some house holds her, and there are mortal eyes at this hour to whom her lineaments are as familiar as they are unknown to you. So much for the doctrine of predestination.

But at this hour that I speak of, though the lady in question was a living and blessed fact, and though she looked on the same stars, and breathed the same air, and trod daily the same sidewalk with myself, I was not, as I perceive, any the wiser or better for it at this particular period of my existence.

In fact, though she was in a large part the unperceived spring and motive of all that I did, yet at this particular time I was so busy in adjusting the material foundations of my life that the ideas of marrying and giving in marriage were never less immediately in my thoughts. I came into New York a stranger. I knew nobody personally, and I had no time for visiting.

I had been, in the course of my wanderings, in many cities. I had lingered in Paris, Rome, Florence, and Naples, and, with the exception of London, I never found a place so difficult to breathe the breath of any ideality, or any enthusiasm, or exaltation of any description, as New York. London, with its ponderous gloom, its sullen, mammoth, aristocratic shadows, seems to benumb, and chill, and freeze the soul; but New York impressed me like a great hot furnace, where twig, spray, and flower wither in a moment, and the little birds flying over, drop down dead. My first impulse in life there was to cover, and conceal, and hide in the deepest and most remote caverns of my heart anything that was sacred, and delicate, and tender, lest the flame should scorch it. Balzac in his epigrammatic manner has characterized New York as the city where there is "neither faith, hope, nor charity," and, as he never came here, I suppose he must have taken his impressions from the descriptions of unfortunate compatriots, who have landed strangers and been precipitated into the very rush and whirl of its grinding selfishness, and its desperate don't-care manner of doing things. There is abundance of selfishness and hardness in Paris, but it is concealed under a veil of ideality. The city wooes you like a home, it gives you picture-galleries, fountains, gardens, and grottoes, and a good natured lounging population, who have nothing to do but make themselves agreeable.

I must confess that my first emotion in making my way about the streets of New York, before I had associated them with any intimacy or acquaintances, was a vague sort of terror, such as one would feel at being jostled among cannibals, who on a reasonable provocation wouldn't hesitate to skin him and pick his bones. There was such a driving, merciless, fierce "take-care-of-yourself, and devil take the hindmost" air, even to the drays and omnibuses, and hackmen, that I had somewhat the feeling of being in an unregulated menagerie, not knowing at what moment some wild beast might spring upon me. As I became more acquainted in the circles centering around the different publications, I felt an acrid, eager, nipping air, in which it appeared to me that everybody had put on defensive armor in regard to his own innermost and most precious feelings, and like the lobster, armed himself with claws to seize and to tear that which came in his way. The rivalry between great literary organs was so intense, and the competition so vivid, that the offering of any flower of fancy or feeling to any of them, seemed about as absurd as if a man should offer a tea-rose bud to the bawling, shouting hackman that shake their whips and scream at the landing.

Everything in life and death, and time and eternity, whether high as Heaven, or deep as hell, seemed to be looked upon only as subject matter for advertisement, and material for running a paper. Hand out your wares! advertise them and see what they will bring, seemed to be the only law of production, at whose behest the most delicate webs and traceries of fancy, the most solemn and tender mysteries of feeling, the most awful of religious emotions came to have a trademark and market value! In short, New York is the great business mart, the Vanity Fair of the world, where everything is pushed by advertising and competition, not even excepting the great moral enterprise of bringing in the millennium; and in the first blast and blare of its busy, noisy publicity and activity, I felt my inner spirits shrink and tremble with dismay. Even the religion of this modern century bears the deep impress of the trade-mark, which calendars its financial value.

I could not but think what the sweet and retiring Galilean, who in the old days was weary and worn with the rush of crowds in simple old Palestine, must think if he looks down now, on the way in which his religion is advertised and pushed in modern society. Certain it is, if it be the kingdom of God that is coming in our times, it is coming with very great observation, and people have long since forgot the idea that they are not to say "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" since that is precisely what a large part of the world are getting their living by doing.

These ideas I must confess bore with great weight on my mind, as I had just parted from my mother, whose last words were that whatever else I did, and whether I gained anything for this life or not, she trusted that I would live an humble, self-denying, Christian life. I must own that for the first few weeks of looking into the interior management of literary life in New York, the idea at times often seemed to me really ludicrous. To be humble, yet to seek success in society where it is the first duty to crow from morning till night, and to praise, and vaunt, and glorify, at the top of one's lungs, one's own party, or paper, or magazine, seemed to me sufficiently amusing. However, in conformity with a solemn promise made to my mother, I lost no time in uniting myself with a Christian body, of my father's own denomination, and presented a letter from the Church in Highland to the brethren of the Bethany Church.

And here I will say that for a young man who wants shelter, and nourishment and shade for the development of his fine moral sensibilities, a breakwater to keep the waves of materialism from dashing over and drowning his higher life, there is nothing better, as yet to be found, than a union with some one of the many bodies of differing names and denominations calling themselves Christian Churches. A Christian Church, according to the very best definition of the name ever yet given, is a congregation of faithful men in which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments duly ministered according to Christ's ordinance; and making due allowance for all the ignorance, and prejudice, and mistakes, and even the willful hypocrisy, which, as human nature is, must always exist in such connections, I must say that I think these Churches are the best form of social moral culture yet invented, and not to be dispensed with till something more fully answering the purpose has been tested for as long a time as they.