"THE KEYS OF HEAVEN."

Otago Witness, Issue 2817, 11 March 1908, Page 82

"THE KEYS OF HEAVEN."

By Jessie Mxckat. i

Probably Otago, lik« Canterbury, has been ringing with the quaint old folksong, "The keye of heaven," since the visit of the distinguished singer, Madame Clara Butt, and her also distinguished partner in the long duet of life. The song has gone broadcast out of the music shops, and it is "cauld kail" to most if one rehearses the history of the medieval Ker.tieh lyric, with its Cheshire ending, '< and its jirobubly modern variant, "The keys of Canterbury." Has not Beth Ellis, | a modern reconstructor of eighteenthcentury life and manners, -whose " Moon of Bath " is now on New Zealand coun-t-ers, caught up the primitive echo of the j thing in a preceding novel, " Madam, Will | You Walk?" The folk-songs of England ' have been so decidedly shouldered out of favour by the subtler genius of Irish and • Scottish lyrics that it well behoves a truly English singer to revive what ancient perns may be yet found south of the Tweed. But in my own case it was not a historical chord that was struck by the charming old ballad, as rendered by our gifted entertainers of a month back. On the -contrary, a whimsical, but world-wide, analogy gathered form and face as the ancient wooing song fell silverly across our modern preciseness of thought ■ and phrase. Was he a philosopher or a prophet, that Old World bard who made his hero offer successively the keys of heaven, the blue silk gown, the coach and six, and, lastly, the keys of his heart ? Most unlikely. The woman idea of to-day, though latent from the dawn of historic time, had few expounders and fewer listeners in those days. And yet how pat the rhyme fits in with the- age-long history of the woman idea! That is the mysterious charm of the folk-song proper: it evolves at a time when love and life, war and death, time and eternity are hazily entwined, are almost interchangeable, in the child-minds of the singer and his audience. Naked, abrupt realities and nebulous idealities mix in the song with as little incongruity as in iEsop's dialogues between men and beasts. And we, who have in the interval laboriously built up wooden walls of partition between past and future, seen and unseen, are pleased to find them swept away foT the nonce, . and ourselves face to face with an older, i truer, simpler school of Nature, where the fine hyperbole of the singer was at once intensely appealing and intensely a matter of course. Nothing is truer than paradox, but in the better-known light of folkpoetry we cannot say that nothing is newer. Thus, whoever has thought at all on the ways of man and woman must know that the keys of heaven are the first offering to woman of awakening man. In the long history of what Mrs Grossmannterms the "barbaric dominion of man over woman " there was for ages no corner of earth or heaven reserved for the tnothere of men in their own right. That they were flung enough to keep body and bob! together here, that they were allowed to creep skyward through some abject trapdoor there, was a privilege wholly dependent on the exercise of superhuman wifely virtues on earth. All these things 'WGre in th« keeping of man, the male EyaiTa, who, after the first pure primeval conception of the Divine Motherhood passed, had peopled the heavens with fliale deities as passionate, lawless, and selfish a© himself. For 1900 years the Goepel of the Son of Mary has been fighting the barbaric dominion, zealously hindered by the hierarchy, from the old Jewish Sanhedrim down to the English JSpiscopalians, who disfranchised women in their courts last century. And at last civilised man began to get uneasy in his mind. It was unfortunate, distressing indeed, that women should have to go without 6O many things ; vet where was the remedy, It was plain that Providence had not created enough at once to giv© man all he wanted and woman all she needed. But there remained the keys of heaven. Happy thought! Rhe was welcome to them. So man cheerfully set about canonising woman. The idea worked to a rliarrn. It is ?o much easier to ennoniee than to pat- cnsli : fo much m-nre r^mipiiV to wot ship a s.iint than to diMiy on°wlf for a comra.de. And Aisfi WOJs£s took to the idea eg kindly.

albeit so tearfully. These were the lachrymose days of Felicia Hemans and "L. E. L.," when the preordained sighs of women turned all the wheels of the world — the grist thereof going to man's m&alchest only, as of old. A generation passed, and some women began bluntly to a6k whether the keys of earthly opportunity could not be held by them as well as the keys of heaven. All normalminded men were horrified at the idea There was nothing clean enough on earth j for woman to touch it seemed. Money J meant extravagance and care, liberty was I naved with pitfalls untold, power meant a j Pha?thon flight into fields of burning space. In point of fact, man played Pe'.ruohio to tame his refractory eaint, and in his precipitate haste to preserveher halo nearly murdered her with brickbats. This species of saint-worship is much in evidence in England at the pre- | sen;> time. But the saint continued refractory. Giudgingly and of necessity, man then offered the keys of earth, one at a time, saying at each bid, after th© manneT of David Copperfield's fearsome clothesdealer, "Go-roo ! will you go for eighteenpence?" The "blue silk gown" and the "coach and six" are being 1 offered to-day, and still they are refused as an absolute solution of the primeval problem of man and woman. More and more redoubt-s of the industrial and social position are bei-ig captured or surrendered to-day ; but still the rue has to be worn, with a d Terence ; still the cry is, "Will you go for eighteenpence ?" And still the enjant female economist cries. "No, full price !" and stands waiting at the world's counter, asking a/1 and sundry why two and two make four if the units be masculine, and only two and a-balf if they be feminine. More and more avenues of knowledge are opened to women, but always with the same timid and logical previso of a young mother with, the gift of a pen-knife, "Now, don't open it, there's a good boy, or you'll cut your fingers!'' And the pity of it all is that it is ?o bitter asking for a woman's own that she is at heartalmost convinced she has no "own," and must really be the riotous and greedy creature they say she is for making such preposterous demands. But nQI these material things were in very ti-uth only shadows to the woman, as material things must be to every soul which has risen to self-knowledge. As factors, developments, principles, they were to be fought for, agonised for. But when once the spirit that refused them is beaten down by truth and conviction, they will be no more to her than the dust of the street. Gain, loss, interest, profit — these, as the world reads them now, will never once be named between the man and woman of the. not distant future. "Equal P av >" "pinmoney" — these, in the Christian polity and Christian marriage we are dimly coming to grasp, will be outworn shibboleths. Woman's realities to-day, as men's realities will be to-morrow, are faith, kindness, honour, soul-giowth, love— "and th© greatest of these is charity." So the I day of the "blue silk gown" and the "coach and six" is wearing through. Lastly, there rings out the love-promise of the ages, "I will give you the keys of my heart!" And that suffices. The "keys of heaven," "the blue silk gown," "the coach and six" are all offered still as a matter of course, but now also as j an earnest of woman's true earthly kingI dom, the heart of man. Some such ' kingdom had been commonly offeied beI fore, but commonly of such a soit that j whoever entered in mistook it for a dungeon instead of a kingdom, so full of ! bars and bolts, and locked eofftis, and dark charnel vaults, and toiture chambers . did it prove to be. -But the "keys of \ the heart" already mean more than there ancient counterfeit keys, given in guile, and turned in treachery. For man, too, is coming to know himself at last. It ■was all a gigantic ignorance, the Bnibaiic Dominion, with its limping laws, its gaping cracks, its beggarly "eighteenpences." its racks and its thumb-screws! It is lifting now, and the new Adam ard the new Eve are even now going out to "walk ,\nd to talk" with each other m the dawnlight of a lasting later Eden. t

— "Tho trouble," sci"l thr <'cnri<=t, as he nrobed away .ir tne ;:ch !i< nio'.ar with a lon'j slo'i'lor in* 1 nriicnt. "i- o\:clen t !\ due 10 a <h,r)2 liirvc' 1 "We! 1 ," no iicrl the victim 'V.'« up to vo 1 to Ueut the djing , with & little moie respect."