Little Essays of Love and Virtue | Page 6

enabled to attain the full stature of their
genius only by that brief sojourn in Brussels, are representative.
Elizabeth Barrett, chained to a couch of invalidism under the eyes of an
imperiously affectionate father until with Robert Browning's aid she
secretly eloped into the open air of freedom and health, and so attained
complete literary expression, is a typical figure. It is only because we
recognise that she is a typical figure among the women who attained
distinction that we are able to guess at the vast number of mute
inglorious Elizabeth Barretts who were never able to escape by their
own efforts and never found a Browning to aid them to escape.
It is sometimes said that those days are long past and that young
women, in all the countries which we are pleased to called civilised, are
now emancipated, indeed, rather too much emancipated. Critics come
forward to complain of their undue freedom, of their irreverent
familiarity to their parents, of their language, of their habits. But there
were critics who said the very same things, in almost the same words,
of the grandmothers of these girls! These incompetent critics are as
ignorant of the social history of the past as they are of the social
significance of the history of the present. We read in Once a Week of
sixty years ago (10th August, 1861), the very period when the domestic
conditions of girls were the most oppressive in the sense here
understood, that these same critics were about at that time, and as
shocked as they are now at "the young ladies who talk of 'awful swells'
and 'deuced bores,' who smoke and venture upon free discourse, and try
to be like men." The writer of this anonymous article, who was really (I
judge from internal evidence) so distinguished and so serious a woman
as Harriet Martineau, duly snubs these critics, pointing out that such
accusations are at least as old as Addison and Horace Walpole; she
remarks that there have no doubt been so-called "fast young ladies" in
every age, "varying their doings and sayings according to the fopperies
of the time." The question, as she pertinently concludes is, as indeed it
still remains to-day: "Have we more than the average proportion? I do
not know." Nor to-day do we know.

But while to-day, as ever before, we have a certain proportion of these
emancipated girls, and while to-day, as perhaps never before, we are
able to understand that they have an element of reason on their side, it
would be a mistake to suppose that they are more than exceptions. The
majority are unable, and not even anxious, to attain this light-hearted
social emancipation. For the majority, even though they are workers,
the anciently subtle ties of the home are still, as they should be, an
element of natural piety, and, also, as they should not be, clinging
fetters which impede individuality and destroy personal initiative.
We all know so many happy homes beneath whose calm surface this
process is working out. The parents are deeply attached to their
children, who still remain children to them even when they are grown
up. They wish to guide them and mould them and cherish them, to
protect them from the world, to enjoy their society and their aid, and
they expect that their children shall continue indefinitely to remain
children. The children, on their side, remain and always will remain,
tenderly attached to their parents, and it would really pain them to feel
that they are harbouring any unwillingness to stay in the home even
after they have grown up, so long as their parents need their attention. It
is, of course, the daughters who are thus expected to remain in the
home and who feel this compunction about leaving it. It seems to
us--although, as we have seen, so unlike the attitude of former days--a
natural, beautiful, and rightful feeling on both sides.
Yet, in the result, all sorts of evils tend to ensue. The parents often take
as their moral right the services which should only be accepted, if
accepted at all, as the offering of love and gratitude, and even reach a
degree of domineering selfishness in which they refuse to believe that
their children have any adult rights of their own, absorbing and drying
up that physical and spiritual life-blood of their offspring which it is the
parents' part in Nature to feed. If the children are willing there is
nothing to mitigate this process; if they are unwilling the result is often
a disastrous conflict. Their time and energy are not their own; their
tastes are criticised and so far as possible crushed; their political ideas,
if they have any, are treated as pernicious; and--which is often on both
sides the most