NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
I cut out of the ‘Morning Post’ of September 15th, 1873, the following piece of fashionable intelligence, as a sufficiently interesting example of the “Sorrowful Paradise” which marriage, and the domestic arrangements connected with it, occasionally construct in the districts of England where Mr. Applegarth’s great principle, “No sentiment ought to be brought into the subject,” would be most consistently approved in all the affairs of life. The inconvenience to his master of the inopportune expression of sentiment on the part of the dog, is a striking corroboration of Mr. Applegarth’s views:—“Charles Dawson, an ironworker, who had left his wife and cohabited with a young woman named Margaret Addison, attacked her in the house with a coal rake on the head and body. He then, when his victim screamed, pressed her neck down on the floor with one of his heavy boots, while with the other he kicked her. He jumped upon her, and finally seized a large earthern pan and dashed it upon her head, killing her on the spot. The whole of the attack was witnessed by a man who was deterred from interfering by a loaded revolver which Dawson held. Dawson decamped, and strong bodies of police guarded the different roads from the town, and searched several of his haunts. At three o’clock yesterday morning a dog recognised to be Dawson’s was followed, and Sergeant Cuthbert broke open the door where the animal was scratching to obtain admission, and captured Dawson, who was sitting on a chair. Although he was armed with a loaded revolver, he offered no resistance.”
I ought to have noted in last ‘Fors,’ respecting the difficulty of spelling, some forms of bad spelling which result from the mere quantity of modern literature, and the familiarity of phrases which are now caught by the eye and ear, without being attentively looked at for an instant, so that spelling and pronunciation go to ruin together.
On the other hand, I print the following portions of a very graceful letter I received early this year, which indicates the diffusion of really sound education. I wish its writer would tell me her employment.
“London, S.E.
“March 9th, 1873.
“And you will not again call yourself our friend, because you are disheartened by our regardlessness of your friendship, and still more, it may be, by the discouraging voice of some on whom you might perhaps more reasonably have counted.
“You say we have never written you a word of encouragement. But don’t you think the fault-finders would be sure to speak first, and loudest? I even, in my loneliness, am able to lend my copies to four, who all look forward to their turn with pleasure. (They get their pleasure for nothing, and I was not quite sure you would approve! until I found you would be willing to lend your Talmud!)
“On one point I grumble and find fault.
“Most of those works which you say you want us to read, I have read; but if I had had to pay the price at which you propose to publish them, they would have cost me £3 and I could not have afforded it; because, much as I delighted in them, I longed for certain other books as well. Many an intelligent working man with a family is poorer than I am.
“I quite thoroughly and heartily sympathise with your contempt for advertising (as it is abused at present, anyway). But I think all good books should be cheap. I would make bad ones as dear as you like.
“Was it not Socrates alone of the great Greeks who would put no price on his wisdom?—and Christ ‘taught daily in their streets.’ I do assure you there are plenty of us teachable enough, if only any one capable of teaching could get near enough, who will never, in this world, be able to afford ‘a doctor’s fee.’
“I wonder—if it be wrong to take interest—of what use my very small savings could be to me in old age? Would it be worth while for working women to save at all?
(Signed) “A Working Woman.”
No, certainly not wrong. The wrong is in the poor wages of good work, which make it impossible to buy books at a proper price, or to save what would be enough for old age. Books should not be cheaper, but work should be dearer.
A young lady writing to me the other day to ask what I really wanted girls to do, I answered as follows, requesting her to copy the answer, that it might serve once for all. I print it accordingly, as perhaps a more simple statement than the one given in ‘Sesame and Lilies.’
Women’s work is,—
| I. | To please people. |
| II. | To feed them in dainty ways. |
| III. | To clothe them. |
| IV. | To keep them orderly. |
| V. | To teach them. |
I. To please.—A woman must be a pleasant creature. Be sure that people like the room better with you in it than out of it; and take all pains to get the power of sympathy, and the habit of it.
II. Can you cook plain meats and dishes economically and savourily? If not, make it your first business to learn, as you find opportunity. When you can, advise, and personally help, any poor woman within your reach who will be glad of help in that matter; always avoiding impertinence or discourtesy of interference. Acquaint yourself with the poor, not as their patroness, but their friend: if then you can modestly recommend a little more water in the pot, or half an hour’s more boiling, or a dainty bone they did not know of, you will have been useful indeed.
III. To clothe.—Set aside a quite fixed portion of your time for making strong and pretty articles of dress of the best procurable materials. You may use a sewing machine; but what work is to be done (in order that it may be entirely sound) with finger and thimble, is to be your especial business.
First-rate material, however costly, sound work, and such prettiness as ingenious choice of colour and adaptation of simple form will admit, are to be your aims. Head-dress may be fantastic, if it be stout, clean, and consistently worn, as a Norman paysanne’s cap. And you will be more useful in getting up, ironing, etc., a pretty cap for a poor girl who has not taste or time to do it for herself, than in making flannel petticoats or knitting stockings. But do both, and give—(don’t be afraid of giving;—Dorcas wasn’t raised from the dead that modern clergymen might call her a fool)—the things you make to those who verily need them. What sort of persons these are, you have to find out. It is a most important part of your work.
IV. To keep them orderly,—primarily clean, tidy, regular in habits.—Begin by keeping things in order; soon you will be able to keep people, also.
Early rising—on all grounds, is for yourself indispensable. You must be at work by latest at six in summer and seven in winter. (Of course that puts an end to evening parties, and so it is a blessed condition in two directions at once.) Every day do a little bit of housemaid’s work in your own house, thoroughly, so as to be a pattern of perfection in that kind. Your actual housemaid will then follow your lead, if there’s an atom of woman’s spirit in her—(if not, ask your mother to get another). Take a step or two of stair, and a corner of the dining-room, and keep them polished like bits of a Dutch picture.
If you have a garden, spend all spare minutes in it in actual gardening. If not, get leave to take care of part of some friend’s, a poor person’s, but always out of doors. Have nothing to do with greenhouses, still less with hothouses.
When there are no flowers to be looked after, there are dead leaves to be gathered, snow to be swept, or matting to be nailed, and the like.
V. Teach—yourself first—to read with attention, and to remember with affection, what deserves both, and nothing else. Never read borrowed books. To be without books of your own is the abyss of penury. Don’t endure it. And when you’ve to buy them, you’ll think whether they’re worth reading; which you had better, on all accounts.
(Glacier catastrophe, page 22.)
With the peculiar scientific sagacity on which Professor Tyndall piques himself, he has entirely omitted to inquire what would be the result on a really brittle body,—say a sheet of glass, four miles long by two hundred feet thick, (A to B, in this figure, greatly exaggerates the proportion in depth,) of being pushed down over a bed of rocks of any given probable outline—say C to D. Does he suppose it would adhere to them like a tapering leech, in the line given between C and D? The third sketch shows the actual condition of a portion of a glacier flowing from E to F over such a group of rocks as the lower bed of the Glacier des Bois once presented. Professor Tyndall has not even thought of explaining what course the lines of lower motion, or subsidence, (in ice of the various depths roughly suggested by the dots) would follow on any hypothesis; for, admitting even Professor Ramsay’s theory, that the glacier cut its own bed—(though it would be just as rational to think that its own dish was made for itself by a custard pudding)—still the rocks must have had some irregularity in shape to begin with, and are not cut, even now, as smooth as a silver spoon.
2 Or Méhun, near Beaugency, Loire. ↑
3 On Mr. M’Fie’s motion for a committee to consider the relations that subsist between the United Kingdom and the Colonies. On the varieties of filial sentiment, compare Herodotus, iii. 38; iv. 26. ↑
4 Much the most important part of the service in Protestant Switzerland, and a less formal one than in Scotland. ↑
5 Utmost wisdom is not in self-denial, but in learning to find extreme pleasure in very little things. ↑
6 This pleasure is a perfectly natural and legitimate one, and all the more because it is possible only when the riches are very moderate. After getting the first shilling of which I told you, I set my mind greatly upon getting a pile of new “lion shillings,” as I called them—the lion standing on the top of the crown; and my delight in the bloomy surface of their dead silver is quite a memorable joy to me. I have engraved, for the frontispiece, the two sides of one of Hansli’s Sunday playthings; it is otherwise interesting as an example of the comparatively vulgar coinage of a people uneducated in art. ↑
8 “Les ont brusquées.” I can’t get the derivation beyond Johnson: “Fr. brusque; Gothic, braska.” But the Italian brusco is connected with the Provençal brusca, thicket, and Fr. broussaille. ↑
10 ‘The Forms of Water.’ King and Co., Cornhill. 1872. ↑
11 When next the reader has an opportunity of repeating Professor Tyndall’s experiments (p. 92) in a wreath of dry snow, I recommend him first to try how much jumping is necessary in order to get into it “breast-deep”; and secondly, how far he can “wade” in that dramatic position. ↑
12 See the last terminal note. ↑
FORS CLAVIGERA.
