By Winifred Kirkland
———
THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN.
THE OLD DILLER PLACE. Illustrated.
THE BOY-EDITOR. Illustrated.
THE HOME-COMERS. Illustrated.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston and New York
The Joys of Being a Woman
The
Joys of Being a Woman
AND OTHER PAPERS
BY
WINIFRED KIRKLAND
BOSTON & NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1918
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY WINIFRED KIRKLAND
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published August 1918
FOREWORD
The Ego in the Essay
WE are each launched in life with an elfin shipmate—set jogging uponearth beside a fairy comrade. When our ears are clear, he pipes magicmusic; when our feet are free he pleads with us to follow him onwitching paths. We cannot often hear, we cannot often follow, but whenwe do, we know him for what he is; when we sail or run or fly with him,we know him for the gladdest fellow with whom life ever paired us, acompanion rarely glimpsed, but glorious, for he is our own true Self.Poets and dreamers have sometimes snared him in a sonnet, but for themost part, for his waggishness and his wanderings, he demands, not thestrait-jacketing of poetry, but the flexible garment of prose. It is theshifting subtleties of the essay that have ever best expressed him.
One man there was in that peopled past, where friendship’s best doorsfly open at our knock, who knew how to catch his elusive Ego and keepit glad even on ways that led through sordid counting-house and saddermadhouse; and who knew also, better than any one since has ever known,how to envisage and investure that exquisite Self of his, sweet, quaintsprite that it was, in an essay. Ever since that time those of us wholove essays say, of one possessing special grace, it is like Elia’s,meaning not that it imitates Lamb’s style, the inimitable, but that itreveals, as only the essay can do, personality.
Of all literary forms the personal essay appears the most artless,a little boat that sails us into pleasant havens, without any soundof machinery and without any chart or compass. To read is as if weoverheard some one chatting with that little merry-heart, his ownparticular Ego. We do not stop to think what childlike simplicitiesany grown-up must attain before he can hear that fairy divinity, hisown Self, speak at all, for the only true tongue in which the Selfspeaks is joy. Only childlike feet can follow the feet of fairies. Theself-annalist whose essays warm our hearts with friendship, must beone who sips the wine of mirth when all alone with his own Self. Notmany such are born, and fewer of them write essays. The essay is noeasy thing. The true mood and the true manner of it are rare. It isas difficult to write an essay on purpose as it is to be a person onpurpose, a teasing game and unsatisfactory.
Yet the difficulties of essay-writing are offset by the delights: fo