Full of my new resolution, I immediately set myself at work to carry it into effect. The safest and most expeditious way of doing it, I thought, would be to place myself at once in communication with some prominent and well-instructed philanthropist. Accordingly, I started forthwith for Philadelphia, to consult the beautiful and fascinating young lady, who, in my previous visit, had so warmly and energetically defended the eating of the forbidden fruit at the suggestion of that first of philanthropists, as a brave, heroic, and disinterested act. She, of all my acquaintances and friends, was unquestionably the one best fitted to complete my initiation into the mysteries of philanthropy, and to inspire and direct me in my efforts at world-reform.
This lady, whom, out of respect to the great Montanus, who claimed to be the Paraclete or Comforter, and professed to have the power of working miracles very much of the character of those wrought by our modern mesmerizers and spiritualists, I must be permitted to call Priscilla, had some years before touched my fancy, and if the truth must be confessed, had made more than an ordinary impression on my heart. She had often visited me in my waking dreams, as a lovely, though flitting vision. She was at my last visit at least twenty-five years old, but as fresh and as blooming as at seventeen, when first I had the pleasure of meeting her. She was a sweet lady, with a lovely and graceful figure, exquisitely moulded, regular and expressive features, and as learned, as brilliant, as fascinating, and as enthusiastic as the celebrated Hypatia of Alexandria, who stirred up the zeal of the good monks of Nitria, gave so much trouble to Saint Cyrill, and spread such a halo around expiring paganism. She had been sent by the Abolition Society as a delegate to the great Anti-Slavery World’s Convention at London, and being denied a seat in that illustrious body, because a woman, she had turned her attention to the question of woman’s rights, and, after travelling a few months on the continent, had returned home well instructed in Godwin’s Political Justice, and a devout believer in Mary Wolstonecroft. She was liberal in her views, and very far from being a “one-idea” woman. Her mind was large and comprehensive, and her heart was capacious and loving enough to embrace and warm all classes of reformers, white, red, black, religious, moral, political, social, and domestic.
The morning after my arrival in the City of Brotherly Love, I called on Priscilla at her residence in Arch Street, as I supposed with her mother. I found her surrounded by some ten or a dozen reformers, variously dressed; some in petticoats, some in pantaloons: some with and some without beards; the majority appearing to be of what grammarians call the epicene gender. She greeted me kindly, and requested me to be seated; she would be disengaged in a few moments. I took a seat, and amused myself as well as I could in studying the interesting group before me, and considering the sort of materials that go to the making up of a world-reformer, and the charming associates I was likely to have in my new career. Having listened to their several reports, heard their suggestions, and given them her directions, Priscilla soon dismissed them with a sweet smile, and a graceful salute with her hand, that would have done credit to the grace and dignity of an empress. She then seated herself near me, and welcomed me most cordially and affectionately to Philadelphia. My visit was an unexpected pleasure, but all the more welcome. “But,” she exclaimed, looking me more closely in the face, and struck with my changed and careworn expression, “what in the world, my friend, has happened to you?”
I was about to reply, when I observed that we were not alone. An exceedingly meek and submissive-looking man, if man he could be called, had just entered the room, and seemed to be hesitating whether to advance or retreat. I looked inquiringly at Priscilla.
“O, it is only my husband,” she replied. Then turning, with her sweet face to him, with an indefinable charm in her soft musical tones, said, “You may leave us, dear James. This gentleman and I would be alone.”
He quietly retreated through the door he had entered, gently closed it, and went away without speaking a word, or betraying the least sign of discontent.
“But, my dear madam,” said I, “this takes me by surprise. I was not aware that you had a husband.”
“Possibly not; yet I have been married these five years.”
“What! you were married when I was in the city last year and had the pleasure of meeting you, and having that most pleasant and instructive conversation with you?”
“Most assuredly.”
“This alters my plan. I had made up my mind,—”
“Not to marry me yourself?”
“Pardon me, my dear madam, but I own that I had dreamed of something of the sort.”
“You might have done worse. I could have made you a good wife, but you would never have made me a good husband.”
“Why not? I am not precisely a man to be slightly rejected.”
“That may be; and had you proposed in season, I might not have rejected you. I am glad, however, that you did not, for I might have loved you, and you alone, and then I should never have become a philanthropist, and devoted all my sympathies and energies to the emancipation of my sex, and to the development and progress of my race. You would have engrossed all my thoughts and affections, and have been my tyrant.”
“But if I had loved you in return, and laid my own heart at your feet?”
“That would have made the matter worse. In loving me you would only have loved yourself, and sought only your own pleasure. Men usually love only to sacrifice her they love to themselves; while woman, when she loves, is ready to sacrifice herself to her beloved. Man’s love is selfish; woman’s is disinterested.”
“Women are disinterested creatures, and never exact any return for their love!”
“They are more disinterested than you believe. There is nothing that a true woman will not do for him she loves. She will abandon herself without reserve to his wishes, go through fire and water, nay, hell itself, for him, and take delight in damning her own soul, to please him.”
“That is because her love is an instinct, a blind passion, a sort of madness or frenzy, not a sober, rational affection.”
“Perhaps so; but it is rather because her love is love. Unhappily, woman feels, she does not reason, or if she reasons, it is only in the interest of her feeling. Reason is cold, calculating; love is warm and self-sacrificing. It is heedless of consequences.”
“And therefore is the better for having reason or prudence for a companion.”
“It is clear that you have never loved.”
“Perhaps not; but at any rate I think I could have loved you very much in your own fashion.”
“That is not improbable, at least, as far as it is in your calculating nature; for I have been thought to have my attractions, and it would not be difficult to make any man my slave—unless I loved him. Yet you would always have loved me as a master, and have always held me in subjection. There are natures born to command. You would never have loved me as my dear James loves me, and never have been the meek, submissive, quiet, dear good man that he is. His love is not tyrannical, and it imposes no burden on me. He interferes with none of my plans, restrains none of my movements, and is satisfied with feeling that he is my husband and belongs to me, without once presuming to think of me as his wife and as belonging to him.”
“That is charming, and must, no doubt, entirely satisfy your heart.”
“That is my own affair. But I will tell you that it does not, and that it does.”
“But that is a riddle; pray rede it.”
“It does not satisfy the deep want of the heart to love, for no woman can love, with all her heart, a man she can make her slave, or who does not maintain himself as her master. But as I would not become any one’s slave, as I would not that any man should engross all my affections, and compel me to live all my life in love’s delirium, it satisfies, and more than satisfies me. It leaves me free to be a philanthropist, and does not compel me to give up to one what was meant for mankind. If my husband engrossed all my affections I should be happy and contented at home, and should never seek relief in going abroad.”
“And should it not be so?”
“Consult the parsons and old-fashioned moralists, and they will tell you that it should. But I am a philanthropist. My James loves me sincerely, warmly, disinterestedly, consults my wishes, does whatever I require of him, has full confidence in me, is proud of me, and never doubts that whatever I do is perfect. That is enough.”
“But do you return his love with a disinterestedness and generosity equal to his own?”
“Why should I? It is enough for him that I permit him to love me, and to call himself my husband. For myself, I remain free to be a philanthropist. I cannot give my heart to any individual. I reserve its deepest and holiest affections for mankind.”
“But mankind, without individuals, is an abstraction, a nullity; and to love the race, without loving individuals, is worse than loving a statue or a shadow.”
“Ah! my dear friend, I see that you have not studied the profound philosophy of Plato, and are still a Nominalist, and therefore an egotist. You are still a psychologist, stuck fast in the slough of individualism.”
“It may be so, my dear Priscilla, but I am willing and even anxious to be liberated and set right. I have resolved, let come what will, to be a philanthropist, and to become a world-reformer; and it is to solicit your instructions and assistance to this end that I have visited your city, and sought my interview with you this morning.”
She shook her head and looked doubtingly.
“Do not doubt it,” I said, “I am serious, never more serious in my life. I am on the verge of important discoveries, and perhaps well-nigh within reach of a more than human power. But it is necessary that I at first become a philanthropist, unite myself with the movement party of the age, and take a decided and an active part in the great philanthropic reforms now so widely agitated, and live henceforth for mankind, and not for myself alone.”
“Is this true?”
“Most assuredly; as true as that I am here present.”
Slowly conviction seemed to fasten on her mind as she saw my serious and earnest manner, and indeed my agitation, as I rose from my chair and stood before her. A brilliant joy suddenly sparkled from her large, liquid, deep blue eye, and radiated over her whole face. Springing from her seat, and seizing me by both my hands, “This is too much,” she exclaimed. “This I had wished, had prayed for, but had not dared hope.” Her eyes filled with sweet tears, and, as if overcome with her emotions, she sunk into my arms, and rested her head upon my shoulder. I pressed her to my breast. But she instantly recovered herself, and we both resumed our seats. After a few moments’ silence, Priscilla, with an animated and contented look, exclaimed:—
“Now, my dear, dearest friend, I have hope. The good work will now go bravely on. Pure, noble, and strong-minded women to coöperate with me, I have found, but a man, a full-grown man, with a clear head, and a well-balanced mind, heretofore found I not. The men who have been ready to embark with me, are dwarfs, pigmies, simpletons, needy adventurers, cheats, knaves, or crack-brained enthusiasts, with but one idea in their heads, and that only half an idea. Drill them as I may, I can make nothing of them.”
“But,” said I, maliciously, “is not your dear James a philanthropist and reformer?”
“My dear James is my husband,” she said, with dignity and spirit. “But you are slow to comprehend these things. The great and glorious work of regenerating man and society, cannot be carried on either by man alone or by woman alone. The two must be united and coöperate, or there can be no spiritual, as there can be no natural, offspring. But in regeneration, in the palingenesia, it is not at all necessary that they be husband and wife after the flesh. Married and made one in spirit they must be, but not married and made one flesh. Man and woman are each other’s half, and they must be brought together to make a complete, active, and productive whole. But the relation of husband and wife is a purely domestic relation, and looks solely to a domestic end. If each finds the complementary half in the other, both are satisfied, contented, and neither has any wish or motive to look beyond the circle of the purely domestic affections.”
“That is, they who find their bliss at home have no need and no temptation to go a-roaming.”
“Precisely.”
“Then it is unhappiness, discontent, uneasiness, want, at home, that makes men and women turn philanthropists, and take to world-reform?”
“Yes; and herein you learn the deep philosophy of life, and the significance of that Religion of Sorrow, of which Carlyle speaks so touchingly, and which the world has professed for two thousand years, but which it has never understood. Hear my favorite poet:—
‘The Fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best;
Yawns the pit of the Dragon
Lit by rays from the Blest;
The Lethe of nature
Can’t trance him again,
Whose soul sees the Perfect,
Which his eyes seek in vain.
‘Profounder, profounder
Man’s spirit must dive;
To his aye-rolling orbit
No goal will arrive;
The heavens that now draw him,
With sweetness untold,
Once found,—for new heavens
He spurneth the old.
‘Pride ruined the angels,
Their shame then restores;
And the joy that is sweetest
Lurks in the stings of remorse.
Have I a lover
Who is noble and free?
I would he were nobler
Than to love me.
‘Eterne alternation,
Now follows, now flies,
Under pain, pleasure,
Under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre,
Heart-heaving alway,
Forth speed the strong pulses
To the borders of day.’
“The ‘love of the Best’ is our innate and deathless desire of happiness, our being’s end and aim. Happiness is ever the coy maiden, that still woos us onward, and flies ever as pursued,
‘Man never is, but always to be blest.’
In this deep ever-recurring want of the soul for happiness, the source of all our pain and sorrow, is the spring and motive of all our activity, and in activity is all our life and joy. Hence, ‘under pain pleasure, under pleasure pain lies.’ All our life and joy have their root in pain and sorrow, in this eternal craving of the soul to be what we are not, and to have what we have not. The pain and sorrow spur us on, and lead us to acquire and possess. But no possession satisfies us. The most coveted is no sooner obtained than it is loathed and cast away.
‘The heavens that now draw him,
With sweetness untold,
Once found,—for new heavens
He spurneth the old.’
“Love dies in the wooing. The acquiring is more than the possessing. All possessing leaves the heart empty,—an aching void within, which nothing fills or can fill. This aching void will not let us rest, will not leave us in repose, which is only another name for inaction, death, but compels us to exert ourselves, to struggle with all our strength and energy to make new acquisitions. In this struggle, in these efforts, humanity is developed, and the progress of the race carried on.”
“Carried on, my dear Priscilla, towards what? Sings not your poet,
‘Profounder, profounder
Man’s spirit must dive,
To his aye-rolling orbit
No goal will arrive?’”
“That is the glorious secret, my dear friend. The end of man is not the possession, but the pursuit, of happiness, or rather eternal progress and growth. By the fact that the pain, the want, the aching void, remains eternally, there is and must be eternal activity, therefore eternal development and progress of humanity.”
“But as that development and progress leave us as far as ever from happiness, or fixed and durable good, I see not in what consists their value.”
“Their value is obvious. Good is relative to the end of a being, and consists in going to the end for which it exists. Progress being our end, of course our good must consist in making progress. This progress is the progress of the race, and is effected by the activity of individuals, and to it all the activity of individuals, whether what is called vicious or virtuous, alike contributes.”
“If all our activity, our vices, and crimes, as well as our virtues, contribute to this progress, or to the realization of our destiny, I do not see any great call for us to be world reformers. Moreover, our destiny seems to be any thing but a cheering one. Your poet-philosophy is apparently very sad. If we are destined to chase forever a happiness that flies us, a good that recedes as we advance, all exertion seems to me as idle, as useless as that of the child striving to grasp the rainbow.”
“So it may seem to you, for you are, as yet, not a philanthropist. You are still affected by your egotism, and unable to appreciate any activity that does not bring something solid and durable to the individual. Here is the rock on which all old-fashioned morality splits. Individuals are nothing in themselves; they are real, substantial, only in humanity. The race is every thing. Individuals die, the race survives. Men and women have no substantiality of their own. They are merely the bubbles that rise on the surface of the broad ocean of humanity, burst, disappear, and become as if they had not been. Foolish bubbles, ye forget your own nothingness, and would arrogate to yourselves all the rights and prerogatives, glory and happiness of humanity. The race is not for individuals; individuals are for the race. They are simply the sensations, sentiments, and cognitions of the race, in which it manifests its own inherent virtuality, and through which it is developed and carried forward in its endless career through the ages,—through which it grows and realizes its own eternal and glorious destiny. The progress you are to seek is not the progress of individuals, for individuals have, properly speaking, no progress; but the progress of the race, which is and can be effected only by the activity of individual men and women.”
“Still, I do not comprehend the work there is for world-reformers.”
“Why, you are stupid, Doctor. All activity, whether called vicious or criminal, is good, for it aids progress. But nothing is vicious, criminal, or sinful, except that which represses the free activity of individuals, and thus hinders the development and growth of the race. It was, therefore, not a friend, but an enemy, that imposed upon our first parents the prohibition to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It was a friend, not an enemy, that inspired Eve with the thought and the courage to disregard that prohibition, to reach forth her hand and pluck the fruit, and having eaten thereof, to give it also unto her husband. The fable was invented by priests and governors as a means of imposing their system of restraints, of establishing their restrictive policy, to which they have adhered, as old fogie politicians adhere to protection. They have always had a horror of free trade, as incompatible with their monopoly, and have made it their study to repress our native activity, to keep us cabined, cribbed, and confined, within the narrow enclosure of their hidebound systems, of their immoral, contracted, galling, and senseless conventionalism. They will not allow nature, humanity, fair play. They brand, as from the enemy of souls, all free activity. The heart must move according to their rules, and love or hate as they bid; the mind must run only in the grooves which they have hollowed out, and never dare search beneath their solemn shams, or send sharp and piercing glances into the artificial world they have built up around us. We must repress our purest and noblest instincts, and crucify our sweetest and holiest affections. Everywhere restraint, repression, tyranny. The church tyrannizes over the state; the state tyrannizes over man and society; man and society tyrannize over woman, making her a puppet, a toy, or a drudge. Here, my dear, dear friend, behold your work, and that of your fellow-reformers. Go forth and break down this vast system of tyranny. Emancipate the state from the church, man and society from the state, and woman from man and society.”
“But some government, some restraint is necessary to keep our appetites, passions, and lusts within bounds, and to maintain peace and order in the community.”
“Alas! my friend, how hard it is for you to cease to be an egotist, and to learn to be a philanthropist. Know, that philanthropy seeks no individual, no exclusive good, and does not consist in loving and seeking the welfare of our fellow men and women. It is the love of man, not men, and seeks the welfare of the race, not of individuals. The welfare of the race consists in progress, which is effected only by free activity. All free activity is good, virtuous, right. Virtue is in action, not in non-action, which is death, the wages of sin. The only good is free activity, and every conceivable good is included in that one word, LIBERTY.”
“But liberty, if not sustained and regulated by authority, may degenerate into license.”
“Still, mon pauvre ami, in bondage to the law, and ignorant of the glorious liberty of the children of God. Away with your legal cant. By the deeds of the law no flesh ever was or ever will be justified. Long had the world groaned in this ignoble bondage, but know you not that it was to set them free that the Liberator came? O, liberty! sweet, sacred liberty! how I love thee! My heart and soul pant for thee as the thirsty hind pants for brooks of water. My flesh cries out for thee. Thou art my God, and to thee I consecrate my life, my love, and on thy altar I offer myself a living holocaust.”
“Is there really no difference between liberty and license?”
“Be not the dupe of words. You seek to be a philanthropist. Philanthropy, I tell you again and again, is the love of man, mankind, humanity. Who that loves humanity would repress any thing human? If man is the supreme object of your love, how can you distrust any human tendency, or fear any human activity?”
“Suppose, my dear Priscilla, who speak to me as one inspired, I should forget myself so far as not to remember James, and proceed to make love to his wife?”
“She would say you have a very short memory, and no very great sagacity. She would most likely know how to oppose her activity to yours.”
“And thus surrender her doctrine; for in such case her activity would overcome mine, or mine would overcome and restrain hers.”
“Not necessarily. There would be a struggle of opposing forces, a free activity on both sides, and whatever the result, a development and progress of humanity. But all this is folly. There can be no love passages between us. We understand each other on such matters. United, married, if you will, in spirit, we are, or if not, must be, but we have no leisure or inclination for dalliance, which would be foreign to our mission. Our thoughts, I trust, yours as well as mine, rise higher, and move in a serener atmosphere. But be not disheartened. Our relation is, and must be, purely spiritual.”
“I did but ask the question, my dear Priscilla, in order to see if you were prepared to carry out your doctrine to its legitimate conclusion.”
“That was foolish. No true woman ever stops half way in her principles, or shrinks from carrying them out, by a cold and cowardly calculation of consequences. She leaves that to masculine virtue. When once women adopt a principle, they are prepared to follow it to its last results, without counting the sacrifice. You men cannot do this. You are always hesitating, deliberating, craving the end, but afraid to grasp it, compromising with your reason and your conscience. Recollect Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth, as painted by Shakspeare, who knew man’s heart and woman’s too. Here is the reason why you always stop half way in your reforms, or never do more than patch a piece of new cloth on to an old garment, which only makes the rent worse. Hence your need of woman’s straightforward logic, her disinterestedness, her singleness of heart, her constancy of purpose, and her invincible courage.”
“But perhaps, my dear lady, women are not seldom rash, and what you commend in them is the effect of narrowness of view, and not of that clear and enlarged comprehensiveness, that “many sidedness,” to use a Germanism, which is desirable in a true and trustworthy reformer. Perhaps she lacks prudence, and may not use sufficient caution in adopting her principles, and thus may adopt false principles, and find ruin where she imagines she is to find only safety.”
“It is safer to trust her instincts than man’s reason. Yet I deny not the danger to which you allude, and therefore it is that it is never safe to trust her to act alone. Hence the necessity, in all our movements for reform, of the strict union of man and woman. She needs him as a drag on her too great rapidity of motion, and to temper her zeal with his prudence, and he needs her to inspire him with courage, energy, and love. Either is only a half without the other, and both must be united, as I have already told you, to form a complete and productive whole.”
“I think I now understand what is meant by philanthropy. I have the idea, but as a pure idea it amounts to nothing. We must realize it, or reduce it to practice. Our great work is to remodel the world according to this idea. But how is this to be done?”
“That is undoubtedly the most difficult question, although our difficulties will not end even there. When we have ascertained what we are to do, and how it is to be done, we have still the difficult task to do it. But courage, mon ami. Once started, reforms are carried forward by their own momentum, and, like popular rumor, grow as they go onward. For myself, I am not exclusive, and have no special plan of my own. I listen to all sorts of plans, and countenance all sorts of reforms. None of them commend themselves in all respects to my understanding any more than to my taste. But all seem to me to be inspired by the same spirit, and in different ways to work to one and the same end. There is a diversity of gifts. All see not truth under the same aspect; none, perhaps, see it under all aspects at once, and each sees it under some special aspect. We must tolerate them all; for to attempt to bring them all into order, and to compel them all to think alike, and to work after one and the same manner, or in one and the same method, is absurd, and if successful, would only establish in another, and perhaps in an aggravated form, the very system of tyranny and repression we are laboring to demolish. You know something already of our reformers, and the most prominent are now in the city, holding conventions. We have representatives from all the Northern and Middle States, and several English and Continental philanthropists. Some of them, I cannot say how many, will meet at my house this evening, and you must meet with them. You will find their conversation interesting and instructive, and perhaps you will become acquainted with some who will give you valuable hints, although, to confess the truth, I have no very high opinion of any of them, taken individually. Be sure and not fail me; come early, at seven o’clock.”
So saying, she rose, gave me her hand, au revoir, and I departed to my lodgings, charmed with the sweetness and fascinated by the manner of Priscilla, rather than enlightened by her philosophy or convinced by her reasons.
