DOMESTIC INFELICITY OF LITERARY WOMEN.

BY MARION HARLAND.

THE opinion that women who make literature a profession unfit themselves for domestic life, antedates Dr. Johnson's dictum that "the study of Greek is incompatible with feminine delicacy." Milton's Eve, whose interest in the angelic visitant to her spouse was centred in the lunch menu, was a reproduced photograph, badly faded by time, of Solomon's wise woman. Molière's Précienses Ridicules, and Paulding's Azure Hose are one-string symphonies in the same key.

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Here and there, as the centuries roll, a woman is strong enough to withstand the deluge of popular prejudice. A Deborah judges the tribes for forty years, and leaves recorded as her proudest title, "A Mother in Israel"; a Sappho is remembered by her loves longer than by her songs; a Maria Mitchell and a Caroline Herschel pluck secrets from the stars, and remain very women in spite of the deteriorating influence of wisdom and genius; and I may, and must add — without reversing the drift of the afore-named flood. The conviction that out of one material cannot be wrought learned or literary women, and good wives, and mothers, and housekeepers, may not be mighty because of oneness with truth, but it prevails. Less in degree than in the day when it was reckoned more disgraceful to read Latin than to spell badly, it is identical in kind with the leaven of Milton, Johnson, Molière, and Paulding.

Nor - and this is affirmed in the teeth of the stout contradiction of men of large mind and catholic sympathies, appreciative of large-minded people everywhere, irrespective of sex is the sentiment these synonymize with prejudice, confined to the brutish illiterate. With the rank and file of masculine thinkers, and unthinking women, the conclusion that she whose "mind to her a kingdom is," must, of need, neglect the weightier matters of home affections, and homely duties, may be as illogical as to argue that, because a woman

has a pretty hand, she must have an ugly foot, but the deduction holds its own, and the unreason is too common to be ignored. Women's congresses may moderate opposition to feminine progress, and the growing influence of women's clubs teach writer and speaker to veil sneers under the guise of gallantry. The unchanged belief works in the caviler's system like the point of the broken needle that eventually makes its way to the surface with a prick as sharp as it is surprising.

Yet, educational journals quote at length, and italically, the saying of a college president that a university graduate can plough nearer to a stump without hitting it than the unlearned laborer. The majority of pundits and papers decline to explain how a knowledge of the Differential Calculus, or the ability to write one's vernacular clearly and forcibly hampers the woman who must season salads and sweep rooms. A few are magnanimous enough to reason the case. Let us, with responsive magnanimity, examine facts and deductions.

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First, and frankly, let us admit that a just sense of proportion and the management of perspective in the consideration of a subject in the abstract and in the concrete is not a characteristic of the feminine mind. The training, or rather the non-training of ages, has had much to do with this defect, but, to some extent, it is inherent. Judgment bends to sympathy; emotion shakes conscience from the balance, unless when the question is, to our apprehension, one of positive right or unequivocal wrong. Men like their chosen professions. A woman loves hers; informs it with her personality, and, holding it to her heart, minifies everything else. Her book is her bantling. The throes that gave it birth belong to the maternal side of her nature, and whatever other gender-traits she may overcome, she never gets away from the consciousness that she is of the mother

sex.

The critic's caustic gibe as to the message that ought to meet visitors at the slow poet's door, after a day of seclusion and tied-up knocker," Mr. Rogers and his little couplet are doing well,"—has more of fact than fancy in it where the figure is applied to woman's mental work. The production is hers, soul of her soul, and heart of her heart. The passion of maternity that made Miss Ferris's Mrs. Fairbairn, after

becoming a mother, cease to be anything else, accounts for more with the literary woman than she or her censors suspect. The slave of society has less excuse for neglect of household duties than the pen-wright. Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle, made conservative and Christian, have no more when the written thing is worthy. It is, in the author's sight, of more consequence to her kind that she should write a poem to elevate other souls, or an essay that may reform a wrong, than that the pie-crust should be short, or John's socks darned with pious respect for alternate threads. The health of his wife's mind ought to be of more moment (if he loves her) than the condition of his linen.

Now John likes flaky pastry, and to have socks and linen looked after in his mother's way. The dear old dame who hardly read one book a year, bored the dutiful son sometimes. If the truth were told, the monotony of housewifely homilies impelled him to admiration of the clever woman he afterward learned to love. In maturer manhood, he hankers after more savory flesh-pots than those prepared by untutored Bridget, while Hypatia nurses a fine frenzy in the locked sanctum above-stairs. Poetry is estimable in its way, and Hypatia a glorious creature in hers, to whom he feels constrained to apologize in naming buttons, or the rip in a fellow's pocket. Dingy soup is, of course, more tolerable when he has read on his way up-town, what the critics are saying of his wife's last and best book; but if clear consommé and a high order of intellect were not incompatible, John would be a happier, if not so wise a man.

Which leads by an air-line to the second tenable reason why the household presided over by a "professional woman is subject to peculiar disorders.

Second. The exactingness of husbands.

The word is coined if it be coinage-in no captious spirit. A man has a right to demand that his home should deserve the name. In accepting the estate and title of wifehood, his elect partner pledges herself solemnly to the performance of duties pertaining to the position. She defrauds him when she is no more in his life than an exemplary and "capable" unsalaried housekeeper, although this aspect of their relation is seldom studied in the right light. It is the nobler side of his nature which is cheated by a mere domestic drudge or a vapid society doll, or a shrewish gossip; when

the talk and thought of the home-circle are narrowed down to commonplaces, or such frothy discussion of people and events as supplies excitement and variety when higher themes are excluded.

Nevertheless, the physical man must be built up and fortified daily to resist recurrent assaults from the outside world. He is an exceptionally robust, or an exceptionally phlegmatic American citizen who does not come home every night, "fit to drop." The homely phrase tells it all. The blooded horse is he who falls in his tracks.

I foresee, having heard and answered it so often, the objection that the housemother has labored as hard and is as weary as he. I grant it I grant it with a difference. Except when she has office hours in the city, even the woman who writes for a living toils under the shelter of the home-roof. She is on the inside of the barricade. How much is typified, how much realized in the mere environment of roof and walls, few women know until the dear refuge has crumbled away and left them in the open field. It has been said that Deity alone can comprehend the infinitely great and the finitely small. A woman must be mentally broad, and, in feeling, deep and tender, before she can content herself to spread cement as well as to carve stone. It is a horrible surprise to discover that her husband cannot live by her intellect alone, whereas the lover swore that it was victuals and drink to his whole being. Leaving out of sight the trifling truth that in the days of that love-making, his mother or landlady had his bodily case in charge, she reads in his apparent contempt for the product of her mind-kingdom, disloyalty to herself as his spouse. She must lay to intellect, and to her pride in and love of the fruits of intellect, the line and plummet of common sense, and study in calm diligence her specimen of the genus homo. Doing this, she will learn that her hungry John is, inwardly, as savagely impatient of brilliant epigram and unanswerable logic, when dinner is late or badly cooked, as Irish Mick who caresses his "woman" in like circumstances with leather strap or lid-lifter, and her tired John as incapable of appreciating a sonnet as if he had never learned to read.

More "cases of incompatibility" grow out of non-appreciation of these trite and simple facts than husbands, wives, and the courts that divorce them dream of.

Furthermore, and to quote St. Paul, "I say this of mine own judgment,"-the husband, be he never so noble, and fond, and generous, is fatally apt to love his wife less when he sees her tower above and overshadow him. She is a part, and a secondary division of himself, and her overgrowth is an excrescence. He may, according to Dr. Holmes, be the stately ship that, without the brave little tug beside him, "would go down with the stream and be heard of no more; but he keeps the toiling little craft upon the seaward side, well hidden from the admiring crowd on shore. Should she enlarge in bulk and increase in power so as to threaten to surpass his dimensions, there would not be room for both in the widest harbor of the world.

This may all be wrong and in flat opposition to the law of natural harmonies and mutual balance; but since it is, our literary woman must weigh the odds of disturbing causes in married life, as she calculates those of friction and gravitation in physics. Precedent and native aggressiveness have begotten in man this sort of absorptiveness that is satisfied with. nothing short of "heart, soul, and strength." Man's mind, we are taught, is many-chambered. Business, politics, philanthropy, art, literature, love, and home, each has an allotted and lawful territory. In insisting that his wife shall have neither thought nor interest which he does not regulate and pervade, he makes her soul and intellect into a big lumberloft, without other plan or use than to hold what he chooses to store there. Such husbands are not infrequently men of education and refinement, who, in most things, follow justice and incline to mercy.

I have lately re-read the life of Charlotte Bronté, and could find it in my heart to be glad that her married life was brief. "Mr. Nicholls was not a man to be attracted by any kind of literary fame," says Mrs. Gaskell. "I imagine that this, by itself, would rather repel him when he saw it in the possession of a woman. He was a grave, reserved, conscientious man, with a deep sense of religion, and of his duties. as one of its ministers.'

"I believe," writes Charlotte of the parish-work her husband laid out for her," it is not bad for me that his bent should be so wholly toward matters of real life and active usefulness,- so little inclined to the literary and contemplative."