The Romance of Zion Chapel | Page 7

of power,--it breaks in the moulding; and it is rather
because woman is so strong that she is able to take the Caesarean stamp
of any form of power. Nor cares she by whose hands she is moulded,
whose image she wears, be it warrior, poet, or priest, so long as she
feels the veritable grasp and impress of power. Some women are
already made in the image of the man they are to love before they meet
him. Very wonderful, very terrible, then, is the meeting, and it is a
meeting that usually comes too late. But oftener God gives a man a
little measure of porcelain and a handful of stars, and leaves him to
make the woman he needs for himself; and very wonderful too is that
making,--though the man will always have been the father before he
was the lover.
Why, one may ponder, should a man who is great enough to mould a
woman to help him be great, not be great enough to do without her at
all? Let lovers of the unfathomable ask at the same time: Why is man,
man? and woman, woman? and what are both?
This gentle doll with the sweet breath, which he nips up in his arms and
kisses, and gives a tongue that she may talk back to him his own words,
endows with brains that she may think his thoughts,--a quaint little
helpless lovely parody of his wisdom and power; a toy, yes; a
refreshment, yes; a place of peace, yes,--but how much more! Yes,
more by all that we don't understand when we say "woman."
Why a great man should need, not a great woman, but a little woman, a
very little woman,--how is it to be explained, unless it be that woman,
however little, is mysteriously great, just because she is a woman, a
little woman? Unknown properties were wrapped up somewhere in that

porcelain; to press it with the lips is to feel strange virtue coming into
one,--the devil was in those stars.
Great men are only nourished on the elements. Woman is an element,
all the elements in one,--earth, air, fire, and water, met together in a
rose. She is a spring among the rocks, and she comes up dimpling from
the roots of the world. She is just as simple and just as strange. O! little
shining spring of woman that is called Jenny, a great man must draw up
through you the unfathomed, deep strengths of the old world. He bends
above you and drinks, and as he drinks, his face is mirrored in yours.
"Jenny, I don't think I'd read 'Miss ----,' if I were you," would say the
great man.
"No, dear?" So Jenny was presently reading Ruskin instead, and
wondering how she could ever have read "Miss ----." And deep in her
dear heart she was saying, "Of course not; great men's wives never read
'Miss ----.'"
And yet had the great man said, "Read Gaboriau instead,"--as a certain
very great man does,--Jenny's heart would have said, "Of course, great
men's wives always read Gaboriau."
No! great men's wives read "Sesame and Lilies," and "Sartor Resartus,"
and "Marius the Epicurean," and "Richard Feverel," and "Virginibus
Puerisque,"--they even try to read Newman's "Apologia." Such were
the books on the sunnier side of Theophilus Londonderry's little library
in No. 3 Zion Place. In dark corners behind easy-chairs were the
deep-sea pools of theology,--pools which had long since given up all
the fish they had in them for their owner,--slabs of antique divinity,
such as you would find likewise in the equally cherished library of
Londonderry Senior.
Such were the fathers that slumbered on in a well-earned repose, and
which, far from desiring new readers, were so old that they were glad to
rest undisturbed,--being far too self-important to confuse a considerate
regard for their repose with neglect. And many of them were really
quite valuable as decoration, because of their fine old coats of gilded

leather; and such were ranged in the more penetrable shadows or even
in the lamp-light. Theophilus would point to them as to a
portrait-gallery of dead ancestors. One might admire the quaint and
distinguished cut of their clothes without dreaming of wearing the
same,--and indeed old divinity, he used to say, was poor food for young
divines.
His divinity indeed was fed on the technical side, it is to be feared, by
the more destructive biblical criticism, like most destructive engines,
coming all the way from Germany, and at its more vital centres by
importations of strong meat from Russia and Scandinavia. Tolstoi and
Ibsen were his archprophets.
There was likewise a great Paris moralist called Zola, and a strange old
American father called Walt Whitman. And beauty, that can never be
far away from strength,