but that persons of kind hearts, and the open sense which belongs to benevolence, are always meeting with opportunities of doing something for somebody,—even in London, where it often happens that one knows nothing whatever of one’s neighbour on either hand.
One goodnatured and serious-minded girl will be deeply interested in a Sunday School, and be thence led to know several families who may be the better for her acquaintance; while another girl, amiable in her way, may be heard to say (as one actually did say, to the horror of a foreign philanthropist), “I am thinking whether I ever in my life spoke to a poor person.” After all her thinking, she could not get beyond the washerwoman and the baker’s boy. This is certainly not the sort of life which agrees with our conceptions of social duty and personal disinterestedness. It is not the sort of life which can ever fully exercise the moral faculties of any intelligent person: and if living in London really involved the necessity of young women growing up in this narrowness and hardness, it would be the greatest of misfortunes to live in London. We all know it to be otherwise, however: and where we meet with the most active and self-forgetting kindliness we generally see the gleam of happiness in the eye, the glow of health on the cheek, and the cheerfulness and bloom of genuine vigour and enjoyment pervading the whole mind and countenance.
There remain the higher intellectual resources,—the study and practice of Art, for which London affords unequalled facilities; and the cultivation of literature, which is practicable everywhere. Intellectual privileges are at the command of all qualified to lay hold of them.
It appears, on the whole, that the main point in regard to health,—for persons who are well fed, clothed, and housed,—is having plenty to do:—in other words, having the brain well and equably exercised. Where we see a permanent condition of vigorous health, this must be the case. Where we see the too common spectacle of sickly girlhood, and of families of sisters growing sallow, feeble, depressed, and indolent, we may be very sure that, whatever else may be amiss, they are leading a self-corroding life, and need, above everything, imperative duties and interests which would call them out of themselves. If parents would but see what it is for any human being to have to invent something to do and care about, they would allow the utmost practicable liberty to their daughters to follow their own pursuits and adopt their own objects. It is not every father who can build a schoolroom for one daughter, and glaze a painting-room for another, and fit up a music-room for a third, and a conservatory for a fourth—like an old friend of mine: but every parent can so far respect the claims of his children as to consider their tastes, aid them in their objects, and abstain from confining them to petty interests and monotonous employments. It is the smallest consideration in the case, that the comfort and pleasure of his own home depend on the alternative he adopts.
In the country, it ought to be an unnatural circumstance, that young ladies are ever out of health. Besides the fresh air, and liberty and sociability of rural life, there is such various, and abundant and charming employment for young people! Early hours, plentiful exercise, sunlight without stint, and an ocean of fresh air; food perpetually fresh from the kitchen garden, the farmyard, and the river—here are conditions of health of very high value. The higher still seem to be no less plentifully afforded. In a country neighbourhood everybody knows everybody; and the calls for kindly action are incessant and perfectly natural. There are out-door pursuits for the whole year round, for girls of any spirit—the garden and green-house, the poultry-yard, the bees, and various branches of natural history, in which there is at present a demand for ability of every kind. Literature, again, and art are treasures within reach; and nowhere do they flourish more than in the bright atmosphere of rural life. Evenings of books are singularly charming after mornings of activity among the realities of the farm, the breezy common, the blossoming lanes, and the village school. Yet what do we actually see? Two contrasting cases rise up before my mind’s eye, which so illustrate the whole matter, that I may simply relate them, and then stop.
I once saw how a family may lead a prison life, by choice, in a breezy, open, pleasant country. It was so long ago that, considering their state of health and their determination not to get better, they must all be dead long since. If not, it is no matter. As they never read anything, nor heard of anything readable, they would never encounter any report of themselves: and if they did, they would stick to their own scheme of life, and sneer at every other.
The head of the family was an opulent man, the heir of a large and lucrative rural business which kept him constantly in the open air, on land or water. He rode many miles every day except Sundays. I saw him only once; but I well remember his healthy, brown complexion, his active gait; and especially the wistful, tender, anxious gaze with which he looked on his three young daughters. The wife was fat and foolish, but with life enough in her to give her orders, and make tea, and hope her guests were comfortable. Further conversation she had none. The daughters were a lamentable group. They appeared to be between eighteen and four-and-twenty. All had the same complexion, which was lemon colour: and the substance was more like dough than muscle and skin. Their eyes were half dead; the lids drooping and the brows contracted, as by a perpetual headache. One had a crooked shoulder; another a lame knee; and the third an obstinate liver complaint. They seemed never to speak, except to their mother. It was impossible to get from them an answer to even a direct question. They looked too languid to move; yet when a stranger drew near to any one of them, she fled to the others—the three squeezing upon two chairs rather than separate to fetch another. Winking in the blaze of fire and candles, shivering unless they were in the direct heat of an enormous fire, eating rich cake with the care required by aching teeth—looking as if they had never enjoyed an unmixed pleasure in their lives—there and thus lived the daughters of that stalwart father. They