Take young Wilton and Rebecca into a room, and talk the whole matter over.
Tell them how deeply you love them, and how you have just come to realize the mistake you have made in trying to eradicate from them the natural desire for wholesome pleasure instead of giving it proper avenues of expression.
Say frankly that you see your error, and that you intend to rectify it.
Ask their cooperation, and appeal to their good taste and affection not to mortify or humiliate you in your position of clergyman, by overstepping the bounds of decorum or discretion.
Lead them to talk of their ambitions and desires, and, as consistently as you can, gratify them.
Let your daughter come to me for a season. I will help to reshape and modify her ideals of enjoyment to some degree.
I am sure if she sees a few of our best spectacular plays, and hears good music, and enjoys beautiful rhythmic dancing, she will not be so carried away with the travelling show.
I will acquaint her with some of the commonplace facts concerning the lives of theatrical people, and show her the frayed tinsel and worn faces by daylight. This will do more for her than all your sermons on the dangers of a theatrical career.
The young heart is fascinated with the thought of danger and temptation.
It is repelled by the commonplace and the ugly.
When you talk to a young mind in a whisper and behind locked doors about a temptation to be avoided, you but give edge to appet.i.te and curiosity.
When you bring the temptation out into the glare of sunlight, and speak of it in presence of the whole world, you dispel the illusion.
I will gather together some data concerning the sporting men of America, and send your son. I will also mail him the sporting papers regularly.
Let him talk and read openly about the subject, and it will lose half its weird charm.
He, too, should learn to dance, swim, fence, and ride. His bounding vitality needs directing in wholesome channels. I have never understood the prejudice against dancing.
To me, it is a form of religious praise of the Creator of youth, health, vitality, and grace. I have always loved dancing, and the exercise, besides being eminently beneficial to the health and wonderfully conducive to grace is, to my thinking, highly moral in its effect. Its only danger lies in wrong a.s.sociations, and these seem to threaten young people who are restricted from the enjoyment in their homes and among their rightful companions.
I cannot help thinking that Loie Fuller should have a niche in the hall of fame, among the "Immortals," for having given the last century her exquisitely beautiful creations in dancing.
No woman has given us a great epic, or a great painting, or a great musical composition, but she has given us a great dance-poem, which is at the same time a painting and a song. Oh, you poor starved, blind soul, to be deprived of such beautiful spectacles. How I pity you, and how I pray you to give your children the privileges you have missed through a belittling idea of your Creator.
Do you fancy G.o.d would punish beautiful young Rebecca for dancing, any sooner than he would blight the willow-tree for waving its graceful arms to the tune the wind-harps play?
Come up out of the jungles of ignorance and bigotry, my dear cousin, and live on the hilltops and bring your children with you. For there you will all find yourself nearer to G.o.d and to humanity.
To Mrs. Charles McAllister
_Formerly Miss Winifred Clayborne_
I am glad that for once you have written and asked my advice before you began your course of action.
You wrote me after you entered Va.s.sar and asked me what I thought of your doing so.
You wrote me after you married Doctor McAllister, and asked me what I thought of that. My reply was a wedding gift and a telegram of good wishes. Now, after three years of married life, you write again and ask me to decide a question which has caused some discussion between you and the doctor.
"He did not take my view of the matter at first," you say, "but he does now. Still, I feel that I would like another unprejudiced opinion before I take the contemplated step. You knew I left college before finishing my course. I was in love and the doctor urged me not to make him wait another year. He said I knew enough to make him happy, and so I consented."
Then you proceed to tell me that you have never regretted this step, and that you have the best husband in the world. But you have decided musical gifts, and before meeting the doctor you intended going abroad to cultivate them after you finished at Va.s.sar. This old ambition has taken hold of you again, and you want to join a friend, one of your cla.s.smates, who sails in June to study art in Europe. You desire to take a two or three years" course, and then you will be equipped with an accomplishment which could be made a profession if necessity demanded.
"One never knows what the future holds," you say, "and it is the duty of every woman to make the most of herself." Both remarks are as true as they are trite. An almost graduate of Va.s.sar should be more original in expressing herself.
But there is another duty a woman should not forget--the duty to stand by her marriage vows and to make her husband a good wife. It seems the doctor did not eagerly approve your idea at the beginning. I am glad he did not. Unless a wife is in a precarious state of health or has an ailing child, I always suspect the honesty of a husband who cheerfully seconds her suggestion of a protracted absence from home.
When a man shows no regret at having his wife away for an entire season, there is something wrong with his heart.
Love does not find its home there, or he could not speed her going so far, and for so long a time, at the bidding of ambition or pleasure. You evidently have won the doctor over by argument, and made him feel that he is selfish to tie you down or clip the wings of your ambition. The American husband is so fearful of seeming a tyrant. "He realizes now,"
you say, "that a woman has the right to develop the talents G.o.d gave her just as a man does, and that it is a wrong against her "higher self"
to crush down these ambitions. He realizes, too, that this separation means greater powers of usefulness for me in the future, and greater opportunities for pleasure. It will be a long and lonely time for both of us, as I shall only come home once or twice and the doctor may not be able to go over at all, though I hope he will. But the expense of my studies will of course be great, and we shall both need to economize. It is my intention to start a little conservatory after I return and take a few high-priced pupils. In that way I can reimburse our expenditure."
But can you, my dear Winifred, _reimburse your mutual losses in other ways_? You do not seem to realize what such a separation may mean. You are both young and both attractive. I know now that you are beginning to be angry at my suggestion, but, fortunately, you cannot interrupt me, and you must hear what I have to say.
Of course you are not a frivolous flirt, or a silly-headed creature with no ideals or principles. You have nothing of the adventuress in your composition, but you are a young woman, with personal charms and talents, and life will be unutterably desolate for you if you make a recluse of yourself. You will be surrounded by people of artistic temperaments and tastes, and I know, if you do not, that many of these people do lack ideals, and some of them lack principles and take pride in the fact. "Art for art"s sake, life for pleasure"s sake," is their motto. The entire situation will be full of danger for you. But far more danger will surround your husband. A man"s temptations are always greater than a woman"s. That is, there are _more_ temptations in his pathway, from the fact that he is by nature and environment less guarded and protected, and the penalties for folly are less severe. And of all men, unless it is a clergyman, a physician is most exposed to temptation. He is the confidant of hysterical women and the sharer of domestic secrets. Many a woman believes she is ill only because she desires the sympathy of her doctor, just as many a woman fancies herself disturbed with religious agitation only because she wants the society of her minister.
Of course a doctor of any character or principle does not compromise his reputation or disgrace his calling readily. I hear Doctor McAllister spoken of as a man of high standing, and his picture shows a well-balanced head and an honest, manly face. But "A man"s a man for a"
that," my dear Winifred.
We must accept facts as they exist all about us, and we must not demand of half-evolved human beings what we would expect of wholly divine creatures. It is an unnatural position for a man to be separated from the wife he loves for months and years.
Unless he is sustained by intense religious beliefs, extreme sympathy or sorrow for her (as he might be were she compelled by some great trouble or duty to be absent), it is impossible for him not to grow in a measure forgetful of his ideals of constancy, and to drift into bachelor habits of distraction. Men do a thousand and one things for amus.e.m.e.nt which no woman could or would. Gilded and glittering halls of vice are inviting the inspection and patronage of men who are left at home by journeying and pleasure-seeking wives.
I know this terrible statement to be absolutely true--_gambling-houses and dens of infamy speak of their "best season" when wives leave town for summer outings, just as a farmer speaks of his harvest season when crops are ripe._ I do not suppose your husband will seek the companionship of gamblers or depraved souls during your absence. Men as seemingly high and strong as he have fallen so low, but I do not believe he will. Yet, so long as we know such conditions exist, and so long as men as a cla.s.s take the liberties they do when left to find distraction and entertainment, it seems to me little less than criminal when a young wife like yourself deliberately leaves her home and husband for the sake of any possible attainment.
You have no right to marry a man and then to make his happiness and his comfort secondary to your ambitions.
If he had neglected you, if he failed to support you, if he was not loyal to you, it would be different.
But you say he is "the best of men," and that you never have regretted marrying him.
Then let me beg of you to stand by him, as a wife should, and to make what progress in your music you can at home, and wait until your husband can accompany you before you go abroad to study.
The highway of divorce is crowded with the student wives who have been "abroad to study," leaving their husbands at home to earn the money. Do not be one of them.
There are greater things than a satisfied ambition, and a clean, happy, united married life is one.
To Mrs. Charles Gordon
_Concerning Maternity_