Emotional Women : Part 3

Girls and Women
by Harriet E. Paine

(Page 15 of 18)

I seem to be speaking altogether of nourishing emotion, and we should to nourish noble emotions. But the task set especially to women is to control less noble emotions. We know well enough what is our duty in regard to jealousy, envy, and so forth, though so many of us who mean to be good women do not make a very heroic struggle even here, and perhaps justify our weakness by the plea that our feelings are strong.

I will therefore spoke particularly of some of our failings which lean to virtue's side. What is it, for instance, to be a sensitive woman? The highest women are exquisitely sensitive, they respond to beauty, to love, to truth, and goodness instantly. But suppose they also tremble at ugliness, and shrink from pain? The two kinds of sensitiveness do often exist together. The perfect woman would follow the example of Christ and look through outward ugliness and suffering to inward beauty and goodness, and would keep herself unspotted from the world not by shrinking from it, but by helping it upward.

But as we are imperfect, our sensitiveness shows itself most frequently in making us feel every jar to our pride and vanity. And we make a virtue of this. We should to guard ourselves against such sensitiveness. It is a fault which lies very deep. It is almost impossible for a very sensitive woman to be just. In fancying wrong to herself she imputes wrong to everybody about her. In trying to shield herself she wounds others. She fears a slight was intended, and rather than submit to it, deliberately hurts some one who she knows may be innocent. Would it not be better to believe that the person who has hurt her is innocent, and submit to the slight even if it was intended? What harm can it do her to think a guilty person innocent? And what harm can a slight do her? But it always does harm to stoop to an ignoble feeling.

Let us at least be just. But the special accusation against women is that they are not just, and sometimes their special virtue is believed to be a romantic generosity which shuts out justice. Women are prone to be so generous to one person as to be unjust to another. They are strong partisans, and are determined to believe those they love always in the right. That seems like an amiable failing; but is it? Do we wish even our enemy to be wronged to save our friend? I think every high-minded woman would choose to be just, even if she must make her friend suffer; but it is very hard to live by that standard.

Most men who write novels describe women as ready to forgive the man who has forsaken them for another woman, but as implacable towards the rival however innocent she may be. There is too much truth in such a picture, but the best women know that good women are not so unjust. That Dorothea in her anguish at finding Will Ladislaw singing with Rosamund Lydgate should do her utmost to help Rosamund take a better stand is of course unusual, but it is not unnatural. That was a splendid kind of generosity which did indeed swallow up justice, but it was founded on justice, the justice which strove to restore all things to their true relations. If any girl is puzzled as to the true province of feeling, and wishes to know how to reconcile warm-heartedness and self-control, let her read the wonderful chapter in "Middlemarch" which describes the interview between Dorothea and Rosamund.

Wherever we have to choose between justice and generosity we must be just. Otherwise, our generosity is mere sentimentality. And it does no good even to the person on whom we lavish it. Perhaps justice in its highest sense includes generosity. It is just that the rich should help the poor, and more truly generous to give with that thought than with the feeling that one has done something meritorious in giving. It is also mere justice that in dealing with our fellow-creatures we should always think of them as they may be, as they should to be, and not to remember simply what they are. Our faith in them helps them to rise, but not our pretense that they are right when they are wrong.

After all, however, who is perfectly balanced? There are worthy women who have all their feelings well in hand, who are pleasant to live with, and who do an immense amount of good in the world, and yet who never rise above common-placeness, and never lift anybody else much above the material plane. And there are other women so ardent and generous and loving that they seem to lend wings to everybody they meet, who are yet crushed and ruined themselves by the excess of their grief not only for their own sorrows, but for those of the whole world, until by and by they drag their dearest and most sympathetic friends down into the same abyss of woe.

How should we keep the true balance? I believe that it always is kept by religious faith, though that too is frequently distorted. The one thing necessary to believe is that a good God rules the universe. There is no limit to the love we may give to such a being or to the creatures He has made, and there is no sorrow which cannot be comforted by the thought that love underlies it, and that it has a meaning though we cannot see it, and there is nothing else which is so sure a spur to duty.

Even this simple creed, however, is not possible to all of us. The upheavals in religious beliefs which this century has seen reach even emotional women and unthinking girls. We cannot believe a thing simply because we should like to believe it. Without this one article of faith, I believe happiness to be impossible, but we need not fail in our duty.

A noble woman whose beautiful life is a benediction to all about her, but whose suffering has been intense, says that as her life has been an exceptionally favored one, it is impossible for her to believe in God. But she adds, "Though things are not for the best, we must make the best of them. We can always lighten somebody's burden." I believe she is wrong in saying things are not for the best, but there could be no more sublime resolution than to determine to do all we can to make wrong right.

Copyright, 1890 by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., All rights reserved.