Agnes Repplier

“ For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century. All that we value as well as all that we condemn in womanhood has played its part for good and for evil in the history of mankind. To talk about either sex as a solid embodiment of reform is as unmeaning as to talk about it as a solid embodiment of demoralization. ”

“ He is a sturdy hero-worshiper, who yet never spares his heroes, believing that when all is set down truthfully and without excuses, those strong and vivid qualities which make a man a leader among men will of themselves claim our homage and admiration. What Cromwell is to Carlyle, what William of Orange is to Macaulay, what Henry VIII. is to Froude, Gaston Phœbus, Count de Foix, is to Froissart. But not for one moment does he assume the tactics of either Macaulay or of Froude, coloring with careful art that which is dubious, and softening or concealing that which is irredeemably bad. ”

“ When the time came for the great flowering of English fiction, when Fielding and Richardson took England by storm, and France confessed herself beaten in the field (“Who would have thought,” wrote the Marquis d’Argenson, “that the English would write novels, and better ones than ours?”) , then it was that women asserted themselves distinctly as patronesses well worth the pleasing. To Smollett and Defoe they had never given whole-hearted approbation. Such robustly masculine writing was scarcely in their way. But Fielding, infinitely greater than these, met with no warmer favor at their hands. ”

“ It is hard to make choice among so many attractions, especially as two days out of the four the Sire de Gayant and his family march through the streets, and draw us irresistibly after them. But we see the archers, and the pigeons, and the balloon, which takes three hours to get ready, and three minutes to be out of sight, carrying away in its car a grizzled aeronaut, and an adventurous young woman who embraces all her friends with dramatic fervor, and unfurls the flag of France as she ascends, to the unutterable admiration of the crowd. ”

“ The pleasant duty of admonishing the rich, the holy joy of preaching a crusade against other people’s pleasures, are daily gaining favor with the elect; but to the unregenerate there is a wholesome flavor in cheerful enjoyment no less than in open-handed generosity.
The one real drawback to a veracious diary is that—life being but a cloudy thing at best—the pages which tell the story make often melancholy reading. Mr. Pepys has, perhaps, the lightest heart of the fraternity, and we cannot help feeling now and then that a little more regret on his part would not be wholly unbecoming. ”

“ What freedom throughout from the morbid and unchildish vanity of Marie Bashkirtseff, whose diary is simply a vent for her own exhaustless egotism! There must always be some moments in life when it becomes impossible for us, however self-centred, to intrude our personalities further upon our rebellious families and friends. There must come a time when nobody will think of us, nor look at us, nor listen to us another minute. Then how welcome is the poor little journal which cannot refuse our confidences! ”

“ Of all the journals bequeathed to the world, and which the wise world has guarded with jealous care, Sir Walter’s makes the strongest appeal to honest human nature, which never goes so far afield in its search after strange gods as to lose its love for what is simply and sanely good. We hear a great deal about the nobler standards of modernity, and about virtues so fine and rare that our grandfathers knew them not; but courage and gayety, a pure mind and a kind heart, still give us the assurance of a man. ”

“ As she went by, the last of that strange procession, we moved after her, without another thought of Lille and its comfortable hotels. Comfort, forsooth! Were we not back in the fifteenth century, when comfort had still to be invented? Was that not the Song of Gayant which the drums were beating so gayly? And who yet ever turned their backs upon Douai when the famous Ranz des Douaisiens was ringing triumphantly in their ears? ”

“ In Elizabeth's day, Arcadia had reached the zenith of its popularity. Robert Green had peopled its dewy fields with amorous swains, and Sir Philip Sidney had described its hills and dales in the four hundred and eighty folio pages of his imperishable romance. A golden land, it lies before us still, brilliant with sunshine that shall never fade. Knights and noble ladies ride through it on prancing steeds. Well-bred shepherds, deeply versed in love, sing charming songs, and extend open-hearted hospitality. Shepherdesses, chaste and fair, lead their snowy flocks by meadows and rippling streams. ”

“ If we can believe with him that it is better to revere great men than to belittle them, better to worship blindly than to censure priggishly, better to enlarge our mental vision until it embraces the standards of other centuries than to narrow it in accordance with the latest humanitarian doctrine,—then we may stray safely through the storied past, until even Froissart, writing in a feudal chimney-corner strange tales of chivalry and carnage, will have for us a message of little practical service, but of infinite comfort in hours of idleness and relaxation. ”

“ If Defoe, that master of narrative, had written fewer political and religious tracts, and had kept a journal of his eventful career, what welcome and admirable reading it would have made! If Lord Hervey had been content to tell us less about government measures, and more about court and country life, his thick volumes would now be the solace of many an idle hour. So keen a wit, so powerful and graphic a touch, have never been wasted upon matters of evanescent interest. History always holds its share of the world's attention. The charm of personal gossip has never been known to fail. ”

“ Diaries tell their little tales with a directness, a candor, conscious or unconscious, a closeness of outlook, which gratifies our sense of security. Reading them is like gazing through a small clear pane of glass. We may not see far and wide, but we see very distinctly that which comes within our field of vision.
[Pg 31]
In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us. Neither “eternal youth” nor “nothing else to do” seems an adequate foundation for such structures. ”

“ But are women so comfortably and happily indifferent to genius? Some have loved it to their own destruction, feeding it as oil feeds flame; and other some have fluttered about the light, singeing themselves to no great purpose, as pathetically in the way as the doomed moth. At the same time that Hazlitt accused the whole sex of this impatient disregard for inspiration, Keats found it only too devoted at the shrine. ”

“ And what is true of the individual is true also of the race. The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the story-teller. Whether he spoke in rude prose or in ruder rhyme, his was the eloquence which won a hearing everywhere. All through the young world's vigorous, ill-spent manhood it found time mid wars, and pestilence, and far migrations to cherish and cultivate the first wild art of fiction. We, in our chastened, wise, and melancholy middle age, find still our natural solace in this kind and joyous friend. ”

“ At present, every child that learns its letters makes one more story-reader in the world, and the chances are it will make one more story-writer to help deluge the world with fiction. Novels, it has been truly said, are the only things that can never be too dear or too cheap for the market. The beautiful and costly editions of Miss Austen and Scott and Thackeray compete for favor with marvelously cheap editions of Dickens, that true and abiding idol of people who have no money to spend on hand-made paper and broad margins. ”

“ The world at present is full of people to whom drinking-songs are inseparably associated with drinking habits, and drinking habits with downright drunkenness; and it would be hard to persuade them that the sweet Muses have never smiled upon the joyless bestiality which wrecks the lives of men. Even in days long past, when consciences had still to be developed, and poets sang that wine was made to scatter the cares of earth, the crowning grace of self-control was always the prize of youth. ”

“ At the Douai concerts no one dreamed of drinking anything. The townspeople sat in decorous little groups under the trees, talking furtively when the loudness of the clarionets permitted them, and reserving their enthusiastic applause for the Chant de Gayant, with which, as in honor bound, each entertainment came to a close. Young girls, charmingly dressed, lingered by their mothers’ sides, never even lifting their dark eyes to note the fine self-appreciation of the men who passed them. ”

“ This was Mary Manley, who, in the reign of Queen Anne, wrote the "New Atalantis," allying herself vigorously with the Tories, and pouring forth the vials of her venom on the Duke of Marlborough, and—what is harder for us to forgive—on Richard Steele, whom all women are bound to honor a little and love a great deal, as having been, in spite of many failings, our true and chivalrous friend. Not one of all the modern apologists who prate about us endlessly to-day in print, in pulpit, on the platform, and on the stage, has reached the simple tenderness, the undeviating insight of Steele. ”

“ When a boy, a real human boy, laments and bewails in his journal that he whittled a stick upon the Sabbath Day, “and, for fear of being seen, did it behind the door,—a great reproach of God, and a specimen of that atheism I brought into the world with me,”—we recognize the fearful possibilities of untempered sanctimony. Boyhood, thank Heaven, does not lend itself easily to introspection, and seldom finds leisure for remorse. As a rule, a lad commits himself to a diary, as to any other piece of work, only because it has been forced upon him by the voice of authority. ”

“ With the natural tendency of a woman to temporize, I buy my freedom one day by engaging his services for the next. If he will permit me to go alone and in peace to the Greek theatre, to sit on the grassy hill amid the wild flowers, to look at the charming view and breathe the delicious air for a long, lazy afternoon, I will drive with him the following morning over the dusty glaring road to Fort Euryelus, and be marched submissively through the endless intricacies of its subterranean corridors, and have every tiresome detail pointed out to me and explained with merciless prolixity. ”

“ Always either too new or too old, too intelligent or too stupid, too restless after what concerns her not, or too passively content with narrow aims and outlooks, she is sure to be in the wrong whether she mounts her ass or leads him. Has the satire now directed against the higher education of women—a tiresome phrase reiterated for the most part without meaning—any flavor of novelty, save for those who know no satirists older than the contributors to “Punch” and “Life”? It is just as new as the new woman who provokes it, just as familiar in the annals of society. ”

“ Four ways there are of telling a curious world that endless story of the past which it is never tired of hearing. History, memoir, biography, and the diary run back like four smooth roads, connecting our century, our land, our life, with other centuries and lands and lives that have all served in turn to make us what we are. ”

“ A dawning intelligence, finer than humored precocity can ever show, sits on each tranquil brow. When they speak, it is with propriety and grace. In the restrained alertness of their brown eyes, in their air of simplicity and self-command, in the instinctive elegance of their dress, one may read, plainly written, the subtle possibilities of the future. That offensive and meaningless phrase, the woman problem, is seldom heard in France, where all problems solve themselves more readily than elsewhere. ”

“ Thanks to the protecting hand of England, Cairo, which once was little better than Constantinople, is now as safe as London. On the Nile, it is hardly possible to leave one's boat, save under the care of a dragoman. Even at Luxor and Assuân, the attentions of the native population are of a rather overpowering character. But at Cairo, whether amid the hurrying crowds in the bazaars or on the quiet road to the Gézirah, there is no annoyance of any kind to be apprehended. ”

“ There is no reason why the literature of the Sunday-school, since it represents an important element in modern bookmaking, should be uniformly and consistently bad. There is no reason why all the children who figure in its pages should be such impossible little prigs; or why all parents should be either incredibly foolish and worldly minded, or so inflexibly serious that they never open their lips without preaching. There is no reason why people, because they are virtuous or repentant, should converse in stilted and unnatural language. ”

“ But it is not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which turns a trial into a blessing. The facility for being diverted where less fortunate people are annoyed is a rare birthright, and worth many a mess of pottage. Moreover, in these days when Baedeker smooths the traveler's path to knowledge, guides are no longer "necessary nuisances." They are plagues to no purpose, whose persistency deprives inoffensive strangers of that tranquil enjoyment they have come so far to seek. ”

“ The best thing about our neighbor’s trouble, says the old adage, is that it does not keep us awake at night; and the best thing about the endless troubles of other generations is that they do not in any way impair our peace of mind. It may be that they did not greatly vex the sturdier race who, five hundred years ago, gave themselves scant leisure for reflection. Certain it is that events which should have been considered calamitous are narrated by Froissart in such a cheerful fashion that it is difficult for us to preserve our mental balance, and not share in his unreasonable elation. ”

“ It never seems to occur to the author of these remarkable stories that a child's most precious privilege is to be exempt from serious moral responsibility; that a supreme confidence in the wisdom and goodness of his parents is his best safeguard; and that to shake this innocent belief, this natural and holy creed of infancy, is to destroy childhood itself, and to substitute the precocious melancholy of a prig.
For nothing can be more dreary than the recital of Elsie's sorrows and persecutions. Every page is drenched with tears. ”

“ Romance and realism, the proven and the impossible, wild stories of youthful passion and sedate studies of middle-aged spinsters, tales of New England villages, tales of Western towns, tales of Scotch hamlets, and tales of the mist-lands beyond the mountains of Africa, are all welcomed and read with avidity. The novelist, unless he be inhumanly dull, is sure of his audience, and he grows didactic from sheer excess of prosperity. ”

“ I do not for one moment believe that it was the blithe and brutal coarseness of Fielding's novels that exiled them from the female heart, that inconsistent heart which never fluttered over the more repellent indecency of "Pamela." Insidious influences were at work within the dovecotes. The eighteenth-century woman, while less given to self-analysis and self-assertion than her successor to-day, was just as conscious of her own nature, its resistless force, its inalienable laws, its permanent limitations ”

“ Truth stares us coldly in the face, and checks our unmeaning gayety of heart. What wonder that we turn for pleasure and distraction to those charming dreams with which the story-teller, now grown to be a novelist, is ever ready to lure us away from everything that it is comfortable to forget. ”