Talks to Girls

Extracts from Arthur Mee's Talks to Girls

To a King’s Daughter (p. 16-17)

You will not crave for lesser things than those you have, you to whom the world belongs. You who own the stars in the sky will not sell the love of them for gold. You will learn the value of things and know the cost of money, and you will not buy money with things more precious than rubies. For we do buy money; let us all be sure of that. How many men, how many women, have bought riches and fine raiment with nothing less than Life itself! If somebody should come to you and offer you a million pounds for your happy hours, your peace of mind, your sweetness and pureness of heart, your healthy body, your sound sleep at night, you would laugh to scorn the thought of a million pounds for these things; yet these are the things, too often, that are paid for money.

You will know the power of money well enough to use it, and value it, and spend it to good purpose; but you will have a hundred things that money cannot buy, and you will not imperil these for cheaper things. You would not throw a piece of silver after a stone, or gold after bronze; and so you will not sell simplicity for vanities, truthfulness for flatteries, naturalness for artificialities. There is nothing in the world that can repay you if you lose the purity and gentleness and sweet simplicity with which you are setting out on the journey that ends beyond this world.

You will be rich, because you would hate to be poor in a world with such wealth for us all, but you will be rich in the rarest things. Nothing is of any use to you, however costly it may be, unless it serves your life, or strengthens your mind, or purifies your soul. I have known men whom the world calls rich, seeming to the world to have all that men can have, who yearn in vain for things their money cannot buy. And I have known men whom the world calls poor, labouring patiently from day to day, who would not sell their wealth to a millionaire. They are like the woman in the French Revolution, whose cottage was burned to the ground, so that she had nothing left in the world that the soldiers mocking her would value. But as she stood before them, listening to their jeers and scoffings, she was conscious of a calm that they could not disturb. They had burned down her home, and all the little things she loved to have about her, but she had something left, and with a scorn that must have stung those mothers’ sons she cried out to her enemies, Will you leave me the stars? There are things that even revolutions cannot take away.

To a King’s Daughter (p. 23-24)

I read a striking paragraph some years ago. Somebody who had been looking at the supplements printed for Sunday reading by the American papers was filled with despair by the appalling stuff these papers print, the silly, ignorant, and vulgar pictures which seem humorous to some people, and are thought to be the sort of thing to give to boys and girls. They are the best possible seed to sow if we want to turn little children into giggling apes instead of men and women, and the writer of the paragraph I read was moved to ask himself how these terrible papers came to be. He thought of the ages that had gone to the making of the forests, of the natural forces that had been at work for millions of years before printing machines were thought of, and then he wrote that, “merely to amuse thoughtless people for a brief Sunday morning hour of impossible and extravagant pictures, printed in loud colours, thousands of stately spruce and hemlock trees upon the northern hills, which had raised their graceful branches to the sunshine and rain of many changing seasons, have lived—in vain.”

That is a terrible thing. A tree lives by consuming the poison that would destroy our lives, but it is not the natural end of the tree to give back the poison to our minds. You will hate such wicked use of natural things, this utter destruction of the Life entrusted to us for nobler ends; and you will see that the hand of Time shall never write of your life as it writes of these murdered trees—that it is all in vain. It is for you to say.

To the Girl who is Wondering (p. 29)

It goes without saying that your education will continue, whether by work, or study, or by any other sort of contact with life and mind. Have nothing to do with the idea that girls should not be educated lest they grow dissatisfied with their place in life; it is right that you should be dissatisfied with any place in life which does not give full scope to all your natural yearnings and abilities. But watch carefully lest you allow either work, or study, or travel, or pleasure, or any of the countless ways in which you seek to equip yourself for life, to possess your entire soul, so that these things, which should be second, come first. Seek first the true kingdom of womanhood and all these things shall be added unto you.

To the Girl who is Wondering (p. 31)

You can have no more helpful introduction to the world, no more valuable experience on the threshold of womanhood, than you will find in some career that may open out for you. Whether it be to earn your own living, or to keep yourself actively useful in the years between school and the building up of your own home, work of some kind can only help your life, and you will never regret it. Two things especially it will save you from—the habit of wasting time, and an extravagant love of pleasure. It is natural, no doubt, that the one should lead to the other. Thousands of lives have been saved from ruin by a definite work in life; thousands have been wrecked by the want of it.

“Our time,” said Sir Walter Scott, “is like our money: when we change a sovereign the shillings escape as things of small account; when we break a day by idleness in the morning the rest of the hours lose their importance in our eyes.” Idle hours are temptations, but idle years are worse, and it is not surprising that the end of nothing-in-particular-to-do for years should be a consuming love of pleasure. And often in its train comes the sad waste and vanity of it all—the love of vain things, the desire for appearances rather than reality, the worship of dress, the display of jewels; all innocent enough in some ways if well controlled and kept within their proper bounds but fraught with danger because they lead so pleasantly away from the central things of life and the sweet simplicity of womanhood.

To the Girl who Loves Her Home (p. 40-41)

You will learn very soon, in building up your home, that simplicity of life is the golden key to happiness. It is one of the sad consequences of the progress of the world that civilisation brings with it a great increase in what we call our needs, though really they are only our desires. I would have you crave the things that will make you happy, but I would have you careful lest you create unnecessary wants. It is astonishing to think of the number of things we gather into our houses that we do not need, and I like to remember a wise friend who went with me to Norway, and was annoyed because I would linger in the shops when he wanted to be back on the ship. To all remarks about the shops he would say: “Yes, it is wonderful to see how many things we can do without.”

To the Girl in Search of Pleasure (p. 46-48)

You will not allow any sort of pleasure to come into your life which challenges or contradicts your noblest feelings; and you will not seek amusement that brings you into contact with doubtful company. For, remember, we are in the company of those who entertain us, though they be on the stage and we in the stalls. It will help you always to remember that. You would not think of taking certain people home; you would shrink from telling your mother that you had been with them at dinner, or walking with them in the street, or sitting with them by the fire, or talking freely with them. We need not think ourselves better than other people, and it is no hollow hypocrisy, and no sort of priggishness, that turns us from the company of those whose way of life is not ours. The natural pride of life, the dignity of girlhood, will cause you to shrink from evil things not less if they come in the form of men and women than if they come as serpents, and it will help us if we realise that, whenever we go to see men and women of doubtful character on the stage or in films, appealing to their audiences by the unworthy atmosphere with which they have become associated, we are in the company of these people as if we had invited them to our homes.

We need not be squeamish, and need not pry into the characters of other people while our own are full of imperfections; but we know the people who are not worth our company, and we should not allow ourselves to meet them merely because the meeting is impersonal and we have paid for it. That is adding humiliation to dishonour, and it is doing more: it is encouraging, in the most emphatic way we can—by paying for it with our money and our time—forms of pleasure which do infinite harm. You will shun the cinema when it is brutish, and the theatre when it falls from its high estate. Be sure a play is sweet before you go to see it, just as you will be sure that a man is honourable before you consent to know him.

Especially you will take care, in choosing your public pleasures, that they are worthy of you in another sense; you will refuse to enjoy yourself at the cost of another’s pain. You will not want another human being to imperil life to please you, and will refuse to be pleased by the sight of other people risking death to earn a living. You will love life too much to think lightly of endangering it for others, and you will turn in pity from excitements which involve peril to life and limb.

To the Girl in Search of Opportunity (p. 97-98)

More than anything, it seems to me, a girl should have deep sympathy. There is a sympathy beyond words, and perhaps it is the best of all; but no power can exaggerate the good that a cheering word may do. Often, when I have been sending out my papers to the world, I have been depressed and have thought I would give up all their worry; and then there has come a greeting from some human heart—from some unknown comrade, perhaps in Africa, or China, or Egypt, or Java; perhaps from some lonely mother bringing up her children in a place where wolves howl round the door at night; perhaps from some man whose life is wearing itself out in the slums of London; perhaps from some great school where hundreds of characters are being made; perhaps from a chaplain in the Army, giving his life for the men who garrison far-off places for England and civilisation and peace; perhaps from a boy or a girl; perhaps from somebody in joy or sorrow; and no word could express the power of uplifting that such letters have. Long ago, but for the unknown friends my papers have brought me, I must have given them up.

To the Girl who Brings Comfort in Pain (p. 111-112)

I stopped one Sunday morning at Ajaccio, and turned out of the hot sun that was pouring down on the Mediterranean into the shadow thrown by a street of high plain houses; and in a room in one of those plain houses I lay down on a bed where, a century and a half back in the history of the world, a mother lay with a little child. He was like most other baby boys in that street of Corsica, and nobody thought he mattered much, except his mother; but he mattered much to everybody who happened to be alive with him in Europe, for this mother’s child grew up to be Napoleon, whom some men call the Great. And while he was frightening Europe, while English politicians were wondering if Napoleon would come and put them in chains, and English mothers were saying that if he came he would eat their children, two little boys were playing in a London square. They were like all other boys around them to the passers-by, but perhaps to their mothers they were unlike, for they were mighty giants growing up, and one lived to be Prime Minister and change the face of politics in England, while the other stirred every pulpit in these islands to the depths. And while one was being buried in Westminster Abbey, and the other in a little garden off a country lane, a Polish mother was singing Polish cradle songs to a baby girl at Varsovie whom nobody would have expected to be anything but a peasant maid, though she grew up to be known as Madame Curie, who has made the power of her brain felt in every thinking room and in every scientific book throughout the world.

In such ways do little children make all the difference to the world; so quietly, and perhaps not knowing, does a mother bring into life a power that may shake the world like an earthquake, or may change it silently like the leaven, which mixes with the meal until the whole is leavened.