sure, that the heroines of such books are acting very wrongly in embarking upon these secret intrigues; but I had much rather she did not know that such things go on in the world at all.’ ‘This is really too much!’ thought Murasaki. ‘That he should come straight from one of his interminable visits to Tamakatsura and at once begin lecturing me on how to bring up young ladies!’
‘I should be very sorry,’ she said, ‘if she read books in which licentious characters were too obviously held up to her as an example. But I hope you do not wish to confine her reading to The Hollow Tree.[1] Lady Até certainly knows how to look after herself, in a blundering sort of way; and she gets her reward in the end, but at the expense of so grim a tenacity in all her dealings that, in reading the book, we hardly feel her to be a woman at all.’ ‘Not only did such women actually exist in those days,’ replied Genji, ‘but I can assure you that we have them still among us. It comes of their being brought up by unsocial and inhuman people who have allowed a few one-sided ideas to run away with them. The immense pains which people of good family often take over their daughters’ education is apt to lead only to the production of spiritless creatures whose minds seem to grow more and more childlike in proportion to the care which is lavished on their upbringing. Their ignorance and awkwardness are only too apparent; and after wondering in what, precisely, this superior education consisted, people begin to regard not only the children as humbugs but the parents as well.
‘On the other hand if the children happen to have natural talents, parents of this kind at once attribute the faintest sign of such endowment to the efficacy of their own inhuman
- ↑ See vol. ii, p. 15. Lady Até refuses suitor after suitor. Finally she marries the Crown Prince and lives happily ever after. The book seemed as old-fashioned to Murasaki as Hannah More’s novels do to us.
