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RETROSPECTIVE.
Suddenly I become aware that I am drawing nigh the close of my monthly
labors for a long year. Yet the year seems to have passed more rapidly
because of this addition to my anxieties. Not that I haven't enjoyed the
labor while I have been actually engaged in it, but the prospect of the
next month's work would often come in to damp the pleasure of the present;
making me fancy, as the close of each chapter drew near, that I should not
have material for another left in my head. I heard a friend once remark
that it is not the cares of to-day, but the cares of to-morrow, that weigh
a man down. For the day we have the corresponding strength given, for the
morrow we are told to trust; it is not ours yet.
When I get my money for my work, I mean to give my husband a long holiday.
I half think of taking him to Italy,--for of course I can do what I like
with my own, whether husband or money,--and so have a hand in making him a
still better painter. Incapable of imitation, the sight of any real work
is always of great service to him, widening his sense of art, enlarging
his idea of what can be done, rousing what part of his being is most in
sympathy with it,--a part possibly as yet only half awake; in a word,
leading him another step towards that simplicity which is at the root of
all diversity, being so simple that it needs all diversity to set it forth.
How impossible it seemed to me that I should ever write a book! Well or ill
done, it is almost finished, for the next month is the twelfth. I must look
back upon what I have written, to see what loose ends I may have left, and
whether any allusion has not been followed up with a needful explanation;
for this way of writing by portions--the only way in which I could have
been persuaded to attempt the work, however--is unfavorable to artistic
unity; an unnecessary remark, seeing that to such unity my work makes
no pretensions. It is but a collection of portions detached from an
uneventful, ordinary, and perhaps in part therefore very blessed life.
Hence, perhaps, it was specially fitted for this mode of publication. At
all events, I can cast upon it none of the blame of what failure I may have
to confess.
A biography cannot be constructed with the art of a novel, for this reason:
that a novel is constructed on the artist's scale, with swift-returning
curves; a biography on the divine scale, whose circles are so large that
they shoot beyond this world, sometimes even before we are able to detect
in them the curve by which they will at length round themselves back
towards completion. Hence, every life must look more or less fragmentary,
and more or less out of drawing perhaps; not to mention the questionable
effects in color and tone where the model himself will insist on taking
palette and brushes, and laying childish, if not passionate, conceited,
ambitious, or even spiteful hands to the work.
I do not find that I have greatly blundered, or omitted much that I ought
to have mentioned. One odd thing is, that, in the opening conversation in
which they urge me to the attempt, I have not mentioned Marion. I do not
mean that she was present, but that surely some one must have suggested
her and her history as affording endless material for my record. A thing
apparently but not really strange is, that I have never said a word about
the Mrs. Cromwell mentioned in the same conversation. The fact is, that I
have but just arrived at the part of my story where she first comes in.
She died about three months ago; and I can therefore with the more freedom
narrate in the next chapter what I have known of her.
I find also that I have, in the fourth chapter, by some odd
cerebro-mechanical freak, substituted the name of my Aunt Martha for
that of my Aunt Millicent, another sister of my father, whom he has not,
I believe, had occasion to mention in either of his preceding books. My
Aunt Martha is Mrs. Weir, and has no children; my Aunt Millicent is Mrs.
Parsons, married to a hard-working attorney, and has twelve children, now
mostly grown up.
I find also, in the thirteenth chapter, an unexplained allusion. There my
husband says, "Just ask my brother his experience in regard of the word to
which you object." The word was stomach, at the use of which I had in my
ill-temper taken umbrage: however disagreeable a word in itself, surely a
husband might, if need be, use it without offence. It will be proof enough
that my objection arose from pure ill-temper when I state that I have since
asked Roger to what Percivale referred. His reply was, that, having been
requested by a certain person who had a school for young ladies--probably
she called it a college--to give her pupils a few lectures on physiology,
he could not go far in the course without finding it necessary to make a
not unfrequent use of the word, explaining the functions of the organ to
which the name belonged, as resembling those of a mill. After the lecture
was over, the school-mistress took him aside, and said she really could not
allow her young ladies to be made familiar with such words. Roger averred
that the word was absolutely necessary to the subject upon which she had
desired his lectures; and that he did not know how any instruction in
physiology could be given without the free use of it. "No doubt," she
returned, "you must recognize the existence of the organ in question; but,
as the name of it is offensive to ears polite, could you not substitute
another? You have just said that its operations resemble those of a
mill: could you not, as often as you require to speak of it, refer to it
in the future as the mill?" Roger, with great difficulty repressing
his laughter, consented; but in his next lecture made far more frequent
reference to the mill than was necessary, using the word every time--I
know exactly how--with a certain absurd solemnity that must have been
irresistible. The girls went into fits of laughter at the first utterance
of it, and seemed, he said, during the whole lecture, intent only on the
new term, at every recurrence of which their laughter burst out afresh.
Doubtless their school-mistress had herself prepared them to fall into
Roger's trap. The same night he received a note from her, enclosing his fee
for the lectures given, and informing him that the rest of the course would
not be required. Roger sent back the money, saying that to accept part
payment would be to renounce his claim for the whole; and that, besides,
he had already received an amount of amusement quite sufficient to reward
him for his labor. I told him I thought he had been rather cruel; but he
said such a woman wanted a lesson. He said also, that to see the sort of
women who sometimes had the responsibility of training girls must make the
angels weep; none but a heartless mortal like himself could laugh where
conventionality and insincerity were taught in every hint as to posture and
speech. It was bad enough, he said, to shape yourself into your own ideal;
but to have to fashion yourself after the ideal of one whose sole object in
teaching was to make money, was something wretched indeed.
I find, besides, that several intentions I had when I started have fallen
out of the scheme. Somehow, the subjects would not well come in, or I felt
that I was in danger of injuring the persons in the attempt to set forth
their opinions.
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