The Wit of Women

by Kate Sanborn

  THE VEGETABLE GIRL.

  BY MAY TAYLOR.

  Behind a market-stall installed,

  I mark it every day,

  Stands at her stand the fairest girl

  I’ve met within the bay;

  Her two lips are of cherry red,

  Her hands a pretty pair,

  With such a charming turn-up nose,

  And lovely reddish hair.

  ‘Tis there she stands from morn till night,

  Her customers to please,

  And to appease their appetite

  She sells them beans and peas.

  Attracted by the glances from

  The apple of her eye,

  And by her Chili apples, too,

  Each passer-by will buy.

  She stands upon her little feet

  Throughout the livelong day,

  And sells her celery and things—

  A big feat, by the way.

  She changes off her stock for change,

  Attending to each call;

  And when she has but one beet left,

  She says, “Now, that beats all.”

  As to puns in conversation, my only fear is that they are too generally indulged in. Only one of this sort can be allowed, and that from the highest lady in the land, who is distinguished for culture and good sense, as well as wit. A friend said to her as she was leaving Buffalo for Washington: “I hope you will hail from Buffalo.”

  “Oh, I see you expect me to hail from Buffalo and reign in Washington,” said the quick-witted sister of our President.

  In epigrams there is little to offer. But as it is stated that “women cannot achieve a well-rounded epigram,” a few specimens must be produced.

  Jane Austen has left two on record. The first was suggested by reading in a newspaper the marriage of a Mr. Gell to Miss Gill, of Eastborne.

  “At Eastborne, Mr. Gell, from being perfectly well,

  Became dreadfully ill for love of Miss Gill;

  So he said, with some sighs, ‘I’m the slave of your iis;

  Oh, restore, if you please, by accepting my ees.’”

  The second is on the marriage of a middle-aged flirt with a Mr. Wake, whom gossips averred she would have scorned in her prime.

  “Maria, good-humored and handsome and tall,

  For a husband was at her last stake;

  And having in vain danced at many a ball,

  Is now happy to jump at a Wake.”

  It was Lady Townsend who said that the human race was divided into men, women, and Herveys. This epigram has been borrowed in our day, substituting for Herveys the Beecher family.

  When some one said of a lady she must be in spirits, for she lives with Mr. Walpole, “Yes,” replied Lady Townsend, “spirits of hartshorn.”

  Walpole, caustic and critical, regarded this lady as undeniably witty.

  It was Hannah More who said: “There are but two bad things in this world—sin and bile.”

  Miss Thackeray quotes several epigrammatic definitions from her friend Miss Evans, as:

  “A privileged person: one who is so much a savage when thwarted that civilized persons avoid thwarting him.”

  “A musical woman: one who has strength enough to make much noise and obtuseness enough not to mind it.”

  “Ouida” has given us some excellent examples of epigram, as:

  “A pipe is a pocket philosopher, a truer one than Socrates, for it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very tiresome, when one thinks of it.”

  “Dinna ye meddle, Tam; it’s niver no good a threshin’ other folks’ corn; ye allays gits the flail agin’ i’ yer own eye somehow.”

  “Epigrams are the salts of life; but they wither up the grasses of foolishness, and naturally the grasses hate to be sprinkled therewith.”

  “A man never is so honest as when he speaks well of himself. Men are always optimists when they look inward, and pessimists when they look round them.”

  “Nothing is so pleasant as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.”

  “When you talk yourself you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only, ‘What a crib from Rochefoucauld!’”

  “Boredom is the ill-natured pebble that always will get in the golden slipper of the pilgrim of pleasure.”

  “It makes all the difference in life whether hope is left or—left out!”

  “A frog that dwelt in a ditch spat at a worm that bore a lamp.

  “‘Why do you do that?’ said the glow-worm.

  “‘Why do you shine?’ said the frog.”

  “Calumny is the homage of our contemporaries, as some South Sea Islanders spit on those they honor.”

  “Hived bees get sugar because they will give back honey. All existence is a series of equivalents.”

  “‘Men are always like Horace,’ said the Princess. ‘They admire rural life, but they remain, for all that, with Augustus.’”

  “If the Venus de Medici could be animated into life, women would only remark that her waist was large.”

  The brilliant Frenchwomen whose very names seem to sparkle as we write them, yet of whose wit so little has been preserved, had an especial facility for condensed cynicism.

  Think of Madame du Deffand, sceptical, sarcastic; feared and hated even in her blind old age for her scathing criticisms. When the celebrated work of Helvetius appeared he was blamed in her presence for having made selfishness the great motive of human action.

  “Bah!” said she, “he has only revealed every one’s secret.”

  And listen to this trio of laconics, with their saddening knowledge of human frailty and their bitter Voltaireish flavor:

  We shall all be perfectly virtuous when there is no longer any flesh on our bones.—_Marguerite de Valois._

  We like to know the weakness of eminent persons; it consoles us for our inferiority.—_Mme. de Lambert._

  Women give themselves to God when the devil wants nothing more to do with them.—_Sophie Arnould._

  Madame de Sevigne’s letters present detached thoughts worthy of Rochefoucauld without his cynicism. She writes: “One loves so much to talk of one’s self that one never tires of a tete-a-tete with a lover for years. That is the reason that a devotee likes to be with her confessor. It is for the pleasure of talking of one’s self—even though speaking evil.” And she remarks to a lady who amused her friends by always going into mourning for some prince, or duke, or member of some royal family, and who at last appeared in bright colors, “Madame, I congratulate myself on the health of Europe.”

  I find, too, many fine aphorisms from “Carmen Sylva” (Queen of Roumania):

  “Il vaut mieux avoir pour confesseur un medecin qu’un pretre. Vous dites au pretre que vous detestez les hommes, il vous reponds que vous n’etes pas chretien. Le medecin vous donne de la rhubarbe, et voila que vous aimez votre semblable.”

  “Vous dites au pretre que vous etes fatigue de vivre; il vous reponds que le suicide est un crime. Le medecin vous donne un stimulant, et voila que vous trouvez la vie supportable.”

  “La contradiction anime la conversation; voila pourquoi les cours sont si ennuyeuses.”

  “Quand on veut affirmer quelque chose, on appelle toujours Dieu a temoin, parce qu’il ne contredit jamais.”

  “On ne peut jamais etre fatigue de la vie, on n’est fatigue que de soi-meme.”

  “Il faut etre ou tres-pieux ou tres-philosophe! il faut dire: Seigneur, que ta volonte soit faite! ou: Nature, j’admets tes lois, meme lorsqu’elles m’ecrasent.”

  “L’homme est un violon. Ce n’est que lorsque sa derniere corde se brise qu’il devient un morceau de bois.”

  In the recently published sketch of Madame Mohl there are several sentences which show trenchant wit, as: “Nations squint in looking at one another; we must discount what Germany and France say of each other.”

  Several En
glishwomen can be recalled who were noted for their epigrammatic wit: as Harriet, Lady Ashburton. On some one saying that liars generally speak good-naturedly of others, she replied: “Why, if you don’t speak a word of truth, it is not so difficult to speak well of your neighbor.”

  “Don’t speak so hardly of –-,” some one said to her; “he lives on your good graces.”

  “That accounts,” she answered, “for his being so thin.”

  Again: “I don’t mind the canvas of a man’s mind being good, if only it is completely hidden by the worsted and floss.”

  Or: “She never speaks to any one, which is, of course, a great advantage to any one.”

  Mrs. Carlyle was an epigram herself—small, sweet, yet possessing a sting—and her letters give us many sharp and original sayings.

  She speaks in one place of “Mrs. –-, an insupportable bore; her neck and arms were as naked as if she had never eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

  And what a comical phrase is hers when she writes to her “Dearest”—”I take time by the pig-tail and write at night, after post-hours”—that growling, surly “dearest,” of whom she said, “The amount of bile that he brings home is awfully grand.”

  For a veritable epigram from an American woman’s pen we must rely on Hannah F. Gould, who wrote many verses that were rather graceful and arch than witty. But her epitaph on her friend, the active and aggressive Caleb Cushing, is as good as any made by Saxe.

  “Lay aside, all ye dead,

  For in the next bed

  Reposes the body of Cushing;

  He has crowded his way

  Through the world, they say,

  And even though dead will be pushing.”

  Such a hit from a bright woman is refreshing.

  Our literary foremothers seemed to prefer to be pedantic, didactic, and tedious on the printed page.

  Catharine Sedgwick dealt somewhat in epigram, as when she says: “He was not one of those convenient single people who are used, as we use straw and cotton in packing, to fill up vacant places.”

  Eliza Leslie (famed for her cook-books and her satiric sketches), when speaking of people silent from stupidity, supposed kindly to be full of reserved power, says: “We cannot help thinking that when a head is full of ideas some of them must involuntarily ooze out.”

  And is not this epigrammatic advice? “Avoid giving invitations to bores—they will come without.”

  Some of our later literary women prefer the epigrammatic form in sentences, crisp and laconic; short sayings full of pith, of which I have made a collection.

  Gail Hamilton’s books fairly bristle with epigrams in condensed style, and Kate Field has many a good thought in this shape, as: “Judge no one by his relations, whatever criticism you pass upon his companions. Relations, like features, are thrust upon us; companions, like clothes, are more or less our own selection.”

  Miss Jewett’s style is less epigrammatic, but just as full of humor. Speaking of a person who was always complaining, she says: “Nothing ever suits her. She ain’t had no more troubles to bear than the rest of us; but you never see her that she didn’t have a chapter to lay before ye. I’ve got ‘s much feelin’ as the next one, but when folks drives in their spiggits and wants to draw a bucketful o’ compassion every day right straight along, there does come times when it seems as if the bar’l was getting low.”

  “The captain, whose eyes were not much better than his ears, always refused to go forth after nightfall without his lantern. The old couple steered slowly down the uneven sidewalk toward their cousin’s house. The captain walked with a solemn, rolling gait, learned in his many long years at sea, and his wife, who was also short and stout, had caught the habit from him. If they kept step all went well; but on this occasion, as sometimes happened, they did not take the first step out into the world together, so they swayed apart, and then bumped against each other as they went along. To see the lantern coming through the mist you might have thought it the light of a small craft at sea in heavy weather.”

  “Deaf people hear more things that are worth listening to than people with better ears; one likes to have something worth telling in talking to a person who misses most of the world’s talk.”

  “Emory Ann,” a creation of Mrs. Whitney’s, often spoke in epigrams, as: “Good looks are a snare; especially to them that haven’t got ‘em.” While Mrs. Walker’s creed, “I believe in the total depravity of inanimate things,” is more than an epigram—it is an inspiration.

  Charlotte Fiske Bates, who compiled the “Cambridge Book of Poetry,” and has given us a charming volume of her own verses, which no one runs any “Risk” in buying, in spite of the title of the book, has done a good deal in this direction, and is fond of giving an epigrammatic turn to a bright thought, as in the following couplet:

  “Would you sketch in two words a coquette and deceiver?

  Name two Irish geniuses, Lover and Lever!”

  She also succeeds with the quatrain:

  ON BEING CALLED A GOOSE.

  A signal name is this, upon my word!

  Great Juno’s geese saved Rome her citadel.

  Another drowsy Manlius may be stirred

  And the State saved, if I but cackle well.

  I recall a charming jeu d’esprit from Mrs. Barrows, the beloved “Aunt Fanny,” who writes equally well for children and grown folks, and whose big heart ranges from earnest philanthropy to the perpetration of exquisite nonsense.

  It is but a trifle, sent with a couple of peanut-owls to a niece of Bryant’s. The aged poet was greatly amused.

  “When great Minerva chose the Owl,

  That bird of solemn phiz,

  That truly awful-looking fowl,

  To represent her wisDom, little recked the goddess of

  The time when she would howl

  To see a Peanut set on end,

  And called—Minerva’s Owl.”

  Miss Phelps has given us some sentences which convey an epigram in a keen and delicate fashion, as:

  “All forms of self-pity, like Prussian blue, should be sparingly used.”

  “As a rule, a man can’t cultivate his mustache and his talents impartially.”

  “As happy as a kind-hearted old lady with a funeral to go to.”

  “No men are so fussy about what they eat as those who think their brains the biggest part of them.”

  “The professor’s sister, a homeless widow, of excellent Vermont intentions and high ideals in cup-cake.”

  And this longer extract has the same characteristics:

  “You know how it is with people, Avis; some take to zoology, and some take to religion. That’s the way it is with places. It may be the Lancers, and it may be prayer-meetings. Once I went to see my grandmother in the country, and everybody had a candy-pull; there were twenty-five candy-pulls and taffy-bakes in that town that winter. John Rose says, in the Connecticut Valley, where he came from, it was missionary barrels; and I heard of a place where it was cold coffee. In Harmouth it’s improving your mind. And so,” added Coy, “we run to reading-clubs, and we all go fierce, winter after winter, to see who’ll get the ‘severest.’ There’s a set outside of the faculty that descends to charades and music and inconceivably low intellectual depths; and some of our girls sneak off and get in there once in a while, like the little girl that wanted to go from heaven to hell to play Saturday afternoons, just as you and I used to do, Avis, when we dared. But I find I’ve got too old for that,” said Coy, sadly. “When you’re fairly past the college-boys, and as far along as the law students—”

  “Or the theologues?” interposed Avis.

  “Yes, or the theologues, or even the medical department; then there positively is nothing for it but to improve your mind.”

  Listen to Lavinia, one of Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke’s sensible Yankee women:

  “Land! if you want to know folks, just hire out to ‘em. They take their wigs off afore the help, so to speak, seemingly.”

>   “Marryin’ a man ain’t like settin’ alongside of him nights and hearin’ him talk pretty; that’s the fust prayer. There’s lots an’ lots o’ meetin’ after that!”

  And what an amount of sense, as well as wit, in Sam Lawson’s sayings in “Old Town Folks.” As this book is not to be as large as Worcester’s Unabridged Dictionary, I can only give room to one.

  “We don’t none of us like to have our sins set in order afore us. There was David, now, he was crank as could be when he thought Nathan was a talkin’ about other people’s sins. Says David: ‘The man that did that shall surely die.’ But come to set it home and say, ‘Thou art the man!’ David caved right in. ‘Lordy massy, bless your soul and body, Nathan!’ says he, ‘I don’t want to die.’”

  And Mrs. A.D.T. Whitney must not be forgotten. “As Emory Ann said once about thoughts: ‘You can’t hinder ‘em any more than you can the birds that fly in the air; but you needn’t let ‘em light and make a nest in your hair.’”

  And what a capital hit on the hypocritical apologies of conceited housekeepers is this bit from Mrs. Whicher (“Widow Bedott”): “A person that didn’t know how wimmin always go on at such a place would a thought that Miss Gipson had tried to have everything the miserablest she possibly could, and that the rest on ‘em never had anything to hum but what was miserabler yet.”

  And Marietta Holley, who has caused a tidal-wave of laughter by her “Josiah Allen’s Wife” series, shall have her say.

  “We, too, are posterity, though mebby we don’t realize it as we ort to.”

  “She didn’t seem to sense anything, only ruffles and such like. Her mind all seemed to be narrowed down and puckered up, just like trimmin’.”

  But I must have convinced the most sceptical of woman’s wit in epigrammatic form, and will now return to an older generation, who claim a fair share of attention.