NOW AND THEN A COMPOSITE SKETCH

‘The old order changeth, giving place to new,’ and many and bewildering have been such changes since the daughters of Zelophehad trooped down before the elders of Israel to plead for women’s rights. The claim of those five fatherless, husbandless sisters to ‘have a possession among the brethren of our father’ has been brought, and has been answered since in a thousand different ways, but the chivalrous spirit in which it was met then seems, in a subtle sort of way, to symbolise the attitude of Israel to unprotected womanhood, and to suggest the type of character which ensured such ready and respectful consideration. It is curious and interesting in these modern days to take up what Heine called the ‘family chronicle of the Jews,’ and to find, as in a long gallery of family portraits, the type repeating itself through every variety of ‘treatment’ and costume. Clear and distinct they stand out, the long line of our Jewish maids and matrons, not ‘faultily faultless’ by any means, yet presenting in their vigorous lovableness a delightful continuity of wholesome womanhood, an unbroken line of fit claimants for fitting woman’s rights.

Foremost among all heroines of all love tales comes, of course, she whose long wooing seemed ‘but as a few days’ to her young lover, so strong and so steadfast was the worship she won. To the young, that maiden ‘by the well’s mouth’ will stand always for favourite text and familiar illustration, but to older folks the sad-eyed mater dolorosa of the Old Testament is to the full as interesting and as suggestive an ideal. One pictures her with sackcloth for sole couch and covering spread upon the bare rocks, selfless and tireless, through the heat of early harvest days till chill autumn rains ‘dropped upon them,’ scaring ‘the birds of the air and the beasts of the field’ from her unburied dead. And then, as corrective to the pathos of Rizpah and the romance of Rachel, the sweet, homely figure of Ruth is at hand to suggest a whole volume of virtues of the comfortable, everyday sort; the one character, perhaps, in all story who ever addressed an impassioned outburst of affection to her mother-in-law, and then lived up to it. But the solitariness of the circumstance notwithstanding, and for all the fact that she was a Moabitess born, Ruth, in the practical nature of her good qualities, is a typical Jewish heroine. For what strikes one most in the record of these long ago dead women is that there is so much sense in their sentiment, so much backbone to their gentleness and simple-mindedness. They do little things in a great way instead of attacking great things feebly. Their womanhood in its entire naturalness belongs to no especial school, fits in to no especial groove of thought. The same peg serves for a Solomon or a Wordsworth, for an aphorism or a sonnet. The woman whose ‘price was above rubies,’ and she who was

might either have stood for the other’s likeness; and if the test of poetry be, as Goethe says, the substance which remains when the poetry is reduced to prose, the test of an ideal woman may be perhaps how she would translate into reality. The ‘family chronicle’ stands the test, and a dozen instances of it at once occur to memory. Michal, with her husband in danger, does not wait to weep nor to exclaim, but, strong of heart as of hand, helps him to escape, and, ready of resource, by her quick, deft arrangement of the bedchamber, gains time to baffle his pursuers. Hannah, for all her holy enthusiasm, is mindful of the bodily needs of her embryo prophet, and as she comes with her husband to offer the ‘yearly sacrifice’ at Shiloh, brings with her the ‘little coat’ which she has made for the boy, and which, we may be quite sure, she has remembered to make a little bigger each time. Nor less, in her far-sighted scheming for her favourite son, is Rebekah heedless of ‘human nature’s daily food.’ For all her concentration of thought on great issues she remembers to make ready ‘the savoury meat such as his father loved’ before she sends Jacob to the critical interview. It is altogether with something of a shock that we ponder on that curious development. The scheming, unscrupulous wife seems quite other than the simple country maiden with her quick assent to the grave young husband whom she was able to ‘comfort after his mother’s death.’ Was that pretty, frank ‘I will go’ of hers only unconventional, one wonders, or perhaps just a trifle unfeeling, foreshadowing in the young girl, so ready to leave her home, a rather rootless state of affections, an Undine-like indifference to old ties? That touch of the carefully prepared dinner at any rate makes us smile as we sigh, putting us fin de siècle folks, as it does, in touch with tent life, and keeping the traditions of home influence unaltered through the ages.

In Lord Burleigh’s Precepts to his Son for the Well-Ordering of a Mans Life, occurs the direction, ‘Thou wilt find to thy great grief there is nothing more fulsome than a she-fool.’ It is an axiom almost as pregnant of meaning as its author’s famous nod, and seems to suggest as possible that the proverbial harmony of the Jewish domestic circle may be in a measure due to its comparative immunity from she-fools. The women of Israel, pur sang, it is certain, are rarely noisy or assertive, and have at all times been more ready to realise their responsibilities than their ‘rights.’ In their woman’s kingdom, comprehending its limits and not wasting its opportunities, they have been content to reign and not to govern, and neither exceptional power nor exceptional intellect have affected this position. The pretty young Queen of Persia, we read, for all her new dignities, ‘did the commandment of Mordecai as when she was brought up with him,’ and Miriam with her timbrel and Deborah under her palm-tree might have been unconscious illustrative anachronisms of a very profound saying, so well content were they to ‘make their country’s songs’ and to leave it to Moses to ‘make the laws.’ The one-man rule has been always fully and freely acknowledged in Israel, and in the ideal sketch as in the real portraits of its womankind, her ‘husband,’ her ‘children,’ her ‘clothing,’ and the ‘ways of her household’ are supreme features. ‘To do a man,’ one man, ‘good and not evil all the days of his life,’ may seem to modern maidens a somewhat limited ambition, but it is just to remember that to this typical woman comes full permission to indulge in her ‘own works’ and encouragement ‘to speak with merchants from afar,’ a habit this, one ventures to think, which would open up even to Girton and Newnham graduates extended powers of conversation and correspondence in their own and foreign languages. And, withal, that pretty saying of an elderly and prosaic Rabbi, ‘I do not call my wife, wife, but home,’ has poetry and practicality too, to recommend it. For in so far as there is truth in the dictum, that ‘men will be always what women please, that if we want men to be great and good, we must teach women what greatness and goodness are,’ there really seems a good deal to be said for the old-fashioned type we have been considering, and certainly some comfort to be found in the fact that against the ewig weibliche time itself is powerless. Realities may shift and vary, but ideals for the most part stand fast, and thus, despite all superficial differences, in essentials the situation is unchanged between those daughters of the desert and our daughters of to-day. Now, as then, the claim is allowed to a rightful ‘possession among their brethren.’

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press

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