The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays, Vol. 1 (of 2)Linton, E. Lynn (Elizabeth Lynn)
General
The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Linton, E. Lynn (Elizabeth Lynn)
Girls; Women
Another man wants a tender, adoring, fair-haired seraph, who will
worship him as a demigod and accept him as her best revelation of
strength and wisdom. The more dependent she is, the better he will
love her; the less of conscious thought, of active will, of
originative power she has, the greater will be his regard and
tenderness. To be the one sole teacher and protector of such a gentle
little creature seems to him the most delicious joy and the best
condition of married life; and he holds Milton's famous lines to be
expressive of the only fitting relations between men and women. The
adoring seraph is his ideal; Griselda, Desdemona, Lucy Ashton, are his
highest culminations of womanly grace; and the qualities which appeal
the most powerfully to his generosity are the patience which will not
complain, the gentleness that cannot resent, and the love which
nothing can chill.
Another man wants a cultivated intelligence in his ideal. As an
author, an artist, a student, a statesman, he would like his wife to
be able to help him by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect.
He believes in the sex of minds, and holds no work complete which
has not been created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees
how women have helped on the leaders in troublous times; he knows that
almost all great men have owed something of their greatness to the
influence of a mother or a wife; he remembers how thoughts which had
lain dumb and dormant in men's brains for more than half their
lifetime have suddenly wakened up into speech and activity by the
influence of a woman great enough to call them forth. The adoring
seraph would be an encumbrance and nothing better than a child on his
hands; and the soul which had to be awakened and directed by him would
run great chance of remaining torpid and inactive all its days. He has
his own life to lead and round off; and, so far from wishing to
influence another's, he wants to be helped for himself.
Another man cares only for the birth and social position of the woman
to whom he gives his name and affection. To another yellow gold stands
higher than blue blood, and 'my wife's father' may have been a
rag-picker, so long as rag-picking had been distilled in a
sufficiently rich alembic leaving a residuum admitting no kind of
doubt. Venus herself without a dowry would be only a pretty seaside
girl with a Newtown pippin in her hand; but Miss Kilmansegg would be
something worth thinking of, if but little worth looking at.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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