Modern women and what is said of them : a reprint of a series of articles in the Saturday Review (1868)
by E. Lynn Linton · English · Gutenberg #26948 · 551,115 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Modern women and what is said of them : a reprint of a series of articles in the Saturday Review (1868)
Author: E. Lynn Linton
Author of introduction, etc.: Lucia Gilbert Runkle
Release date: October 18, 2008 [eBook #26948]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26948
Credits: Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Lisa Reigel, and
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN WOMEN AND WHAT IS SAID OF THEM : A REPRINT OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES IN THE SATURDAY REVIEW (1868) ***
Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Lisa Reigel, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was made using scans of
public domain works from the University of Michigan Digital
Libraries.)
MODERN WOMEN
AND
WHAT IS SAID OF THEM
A REPRINT OF
A SERIES OF ARTICLES IN THE
SATURDAY REVIEW
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
MRS. LUCIA GILBERT CALHOUN
NEW YORK
_J. S. REDFIELD, PUBLISHER_
140 FULTON STREET
1868
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
J. S. REDFIELD,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the
Eastern District of New York.
EDWARD O. JENKINS,
_PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER_,
No. 20 North William St.
ADVERTISEMENT.
The following papers on Woman were originally published in the columns
of the London SATURDAY REVIEW. Some of them have already been reprinted
in the literary and daily journals of this country, and they have
excited no little discussion and comment among readers of both sexes.
Whether agreeing or not with the writer, it is impossible not to concede
the eminent ability with which the various subjects are handled. No
series of essays has appeared in the English language for many years
which has been so extensively reprinted and so generally read.
The authorship of these papers has been attributed to different
individuals, male and female; but it is more than probable that the
writers whose names have been mentioned in this connection are precisely
those who have had nothing whatever to do with them. It is not unlikely
that, in due time, the publisher of this volume may be in possession of
authentic information on this head, and that the name of the author may
then appear on the title-page.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION, 5
I.--THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD, 25
II.--FOOLISH VIRGINS, 34
III.--LITTLE WOMEN, 43
IV.--PINCHBECK, 52
V.--PUSHING WOMEN, 61
VI.--FEMININE AFFECTATIONS, 73
VII.--IDEAL WOMEN, 83
VIII.--WOMAN AND THE WORLD, 93
IX.--UNEQUAL MARRIAGES, 101
X.--HUSBAND-HUNTING, 109
XI.--PERILS OF "PAYING ATTENTION," 118
XII.--WOMEN'S HEROINES, 128
XIII.--INTERFERENCE, 138
XIV.--PLAIN GIRLS, 148
XV.--A WORD FOR FEMALE VANITY, 157
XVI.--THE ABUSE OF MATCH-MAKING, 167
XVII.--FEMININE INFLUENCE, 177
XVIII.--PIGEONS, 188
XIX.--AMBITIOUS WIVES, 198
XX.--PLATONIC WOMAN, 206
XXI.--MAN AND HIS MASTER, 215
XXII.--THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER, 225
XXIII.--ENGAGEMENTS, 235
XXIV.--WOMAN IN ORDERS, 243
XXV.--WOMAN AND HER CRITICS, 253
XXVI.--MISTRESS AND MAID, ON DRESS AND UNDRESS, 262
XXVII.--AESTHETIC WOMAN, 272
XXVIII.--WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK? 281
XXIX.--PAPAL WOMAN, 291
XXX.--MODERN MOTHERS, 300
XXXI.--PRIESTHOOD OF WOMAN, 309
XXXII.--THE FUTURE OF WOMAN, 319
XXXIII.--COSTUME AND ITS MORALS, 329
XXXIV.--THE FADING FLOWER, 339
XXXV.--LA FEMME PASSEE, 347
XXXVI.--PRETTY PREACHERS, 355
XXXVII.--SPOILT WOMEN, 364
INTRODUCTION.
The "Woman Question" will not be put to silence. It demands an answer of
Western legislators. It besets college faculties. It pursues veteran
politicians to the fastnesses of so-called National Conventions. Under
the sacred sounding-boards of New England pulpits has its voice been
heard, and its unexpected ally, the London SATURDAY REVIEW, introduces
it to the good society of English drawing-rooms. That this introduction
comes in the form of diatribe and denunciation is a matter of the least
moment. Judgment will finally rest, not on the conclusions of the
special pleader, but on the strength of the case of the accused.
Something, clearly, is wrong with fashionable women. They accept the
thinnest gilt, the poorest pinchbeck, for gold. They care more for a
dreary social pre-eminence than for home and children. They find in
extravagance of living and a vulgar costliness of dress their only
expression of a vague desire for the beauty and elegance of life. Is
it, therefore, to be inferred that the race of noble women is dying out?
St. Paul was hardly less severe than the London SATURDAY, if less
explicit, in his condemnation of the fashionable women of his day, yet
we look upon that day as heroic. Certainly neither London nor New York
can rival the luxury of a rich Roman matron, yet it was not the luxury
of her women which destroyed the empire, and Brutus's Portia was quite
as truly a representative woman as the superb Messalina. John Knox
thought that things were as bad as they could possibly be when he
thundered at vice in high places; and if there had been a John Knox in
the court of Charles the Second, he would have sighed for a return of
the innocent days of his great-grandfather.
On the whole, that hope which springs eternal suggests that the
fashionable women of the reign of Victoria, and of our seventeenth
President, are not essentially more discouraging than all the
generations of the thoughtless fair who danced idly down forgotten
pasts. Nay, we may even hope that they are better. If they will not
actually think, yet the fatal contagion of the newspaper and the modern
novel communicates to them an intellectual irritation which might
almost stand for a mental process. If they have not ideas, they have
notions of things, and however inexact and absurd these may be, they are
better than emptiness.
"Worse, decidedly worse," says our implacable critic; "when women were
content with looking pretty before marriage, and with good housekeeping
after, they were uninteresting certainly, but they were respectable. Now
they dabble in all things; are weakly aesthetic, weakly scientific,
weakly controversial, and wholly prosy, and contemptible." Dabbling is
pitiful, certainly, and weakness has few allies, but let us do justice
even to the weak dabblers. AEsthetic, or scientific, or controversial
training has but recently been made possible to women. Their previous
range of study had been very narrow. It is not strange that the least
attainments should seem to them very profound and satisfactory, and the
most manifest deductions pass for original conclusions. It is natural
that their undisciplined faculties should grapple feebly with
difficulties, and be quite unequal to argument. This is no reason for
flinging the baffling volumes at their heads; better so educate their
heads that the volumes shall no longer baffle.
Scolded because they have not an idea beyond dress, laughed at when
they try to think of something better, a word may certainly be said for
the good temper and the patience even of the fashionable women, who
would be wiser if they could.
The fault is, we are assured, that these women take up books only to
enhance their matrimonial value, and with no thought of the worth of
study. Let us be just. What business or the professions are to most men,
marriage is to most women. Men qualify themselves, if they can, for that
competitive examination which is always going on, and which insures
clients to the best lawyers, and business to the best merchant, and
parishes to the best preacher. Women, compelled to wait at home for the
wooing which changes their destiny, qualify themselves with attractions
for that competitive examination which all marriageable young women feel
that they undergo from every marriageable young man. Each has an eye to
business. One does not feel that the motive in the one case is any
higher than in the other.
It is very bad, of course, that marriage should be a matter of business.
It is, perhaps, the most tragic of all perversions. But, evidently, the
evil is not to be abated by jeremiads, nor by lectures to young women,
no, nor even by brilliant editorials. So long as women believe that
inglorious ease is better than work, so long as they are taught that
they are born to be the gentle dependents of a stronger being, so long
as courage and capacity are held to be "strong-minded," so long as the
range of employments for women is narrow, and the standard of wages
lower than men's, so long they will seek in marriage a home, a larger
liberty of action, an establishment, a servant who shall supply them
with money and insure them ease without effort of their own.
Men take the business opening which seems most congenial and most
profitable. Women do the same thing, and their choice naturally falls
upon marriage as altogether the most promising speculation of their very
small list. The remedy seems to be to give women as thorough mental
training as men receive, to make their training tend as directly to the
business of earning their bread and their pretty feminine adornments,
and for the same work to pay them the same wages. If it be objected that
fashionable women will not work, let it be answered that work itself
would be fashionable if it were held to be a dignity, and not a
drudgery, and that the really fine and thoughtful leaders of society
could easily establish the new order of things. In an aristocratic
country, where labor is the badge of caste, it would be difficult to
make it honorable. In a democracy like our own, it is the most
contemptible snobbishness which frowns on the honest earning of money.
The accusation of prodigal and senseless expenditure in dress must stand
unrefuted. Sums which would adorn our cities with pleasure-gardens, with
libraries, with galleries of art, are spent on perishable gauds that
have not even beauty to commend them. Charities might be founded, lives
be enriched with travel, all lands laid under contribution with the
money that every year flows into Stewart's drawers, and the strong-boxes
of fashionable dress-makers. But the jewelled prodigals who spend it are
not more selfish, perhaps, than we plain folks who carp.
Again, it is a mistake. They have the money. They mean to secure all the
pleasure that money can buy. They have that feminine sensuousness which
delights in color, and odor, and richness of fabric. Their sense of
beauty is untaught. A little lower in the scale of civilization they
would pierce their noses, and dye their finger-nails, and wear strings
of glass beads. A little higher, they would sacrifice the splendid shawl
to a rare marble, banish the chromo-lithograph, and turn the solitaire
ear-drops into a lovely picture, and build a conservatory with the price
of lace flounces. A little higher still, and we might have model
lodging-houses, and foundling hospitals, and music in the squares given
us by kindly women who had saved the money from milliner, and jeweller,
and silk-mercer.
But standing just where they are, clothes seem to these same undeveloped
women the best things money can buy; and a lack of culture confuses them
as to the attributes of clothes. Just now our fashionable women are
bitterly reprehended for copying the dress of the "Anonymas," who
establish the very pronounced fashions of Paris. Half of them do not
know what model they have taken. The other half accept the various and
tasteless costumes, not because they are devised by "Anonyma," but
because they are striking. There is something in the commonplaceness of
fashionable life which smothers all originality of thought, of action,
even of device in costume; and the women who give most time and money to
dress, to whom one would look for perfection in that mixed art, are
almost invariably the women who are exact reproductions of their
neighbors in this regard, as in their house-furnishing, their equipages,
and their manners.
Upon these splendidly monotonous fine ladies flashes the vision of
"Anonyma," with her meretricious beauty, and her daring toilettes.
Amenable to no social Mrs. Grundy, her love of dress develops itself in
bold contrasts of color, in bizarre and showy ornaments, in picturesque,
and often in grotesque and tawdry effects. But whatever the details, the
whole is always striking. Our women longing for the new, accept the
absurd; desiring the picturesque, take the bizarre, and eager for the
elegant, content themselves with the costly.
Nor does the fact that our present fashionable evening costume is
immodest, of necessity impugn the modesty of the women who wear it. That
they are wanting in fineness of perception must be admitted. But women
of fashion accept without question the dictum of their modistes. La
Belle Hamilton, the famous beauty of the reign of Charles the Second, so
delicately modest and pure that she passed unbreathed upon by scandal
through that most dissolute court, is painted in a costume that the
fastest of New York belles would not venture to wear at the most
fashionable of receptions. The gracious and self-sacrificing and womanly
women of our revolution, wore dresses cut lower than those of their
great-grand-daughters, as any portrait-gallery will show. The dress is
indefensible, but let us not be too ready to condemn the wearer for
worse sins than thoughtlessness and vanity.
One doubts if there is a single Becky Sharp the less, (poor Becky!)
since Thackeray gave such terrible immortality to their great prototype.
The satirist is not the reformer. The satirized do not see themselves in
the exaggerated type. They go their way, and thank God that they are not
as these others. The critic of the London SATURDAY, beginning, perhaps,
with the intention of telling sad and sober truth about a class, has
ended with a list of the follies and faults of individuals, and these
are set down with the keen and unconvincing clearness of the satirist.
It is a good thing indeed, that any aspect of the "woman question"
should claim place, week after week, in a leading English journal. It is
a good thing that it has been thought wise to reprint these essays here.
All this talk about the wrong ways of women suggests that there is a
right way, as yet very much involved in the dust of discussion and the
fogs of speculation. All these accusations against her folly imply a
proportionate tribute to her possible wisdom, if once she can get a fair
chance to be wise.
What the reviewer urges against the effect of fashionable life on the
intellect, cannot be gainsayed. But in America, at least, the injury to
the young men is greater apparently than to the young women. At any
evening party in New York, at any "Hop" in Newport or Saratoga, the
faces of the men are of a lower type, their talk is more inane, their
manners are more vulgar. The girls are empty enough, heaven knows! but
they seem capable of better things, most of them. And they are not so
wholly spoiled in character. I have found very fashionable girls capable
of large sacrifices for love, or kindred, or obedience to some divine
voice. This proves that they have only to be taught that there is
something better than being very fashionable, to take it thankfully. But
the men seemed sordid and selfish, and grown worldly-wise before their
time.
Yet it might make us both more just and more generous to remember that
during our time of peril as a nation, these very ranks of purposeless
men furnished us soldiers and money, and a cheerful faith in the cause,
just as these very legions of idle women gave us workers and nurses.
There is this cheer for American readers of these pages: What we have
been told is our national sin of extravagance, the too pronounced
character of our social life, the frivolity and ignorance of our women,
the lack of a universal and high-toned society, we find not to be inborn
defects peculiar to our system of government, and hopeless of change,
but vices, also, of an old and cultivated and dignified nation.
A cheerful optimist may well believe that we are in a transition state;
that women, impatient of the old life which was without thought and
culture and motive, in the blind struggle to something better have
fallen for the time on something worse; that with the movement of the
age toward mutual helpfulness, man to man, women will move not less
steadily, if more slowly, and come gradually into truer relations with
each other and with men. It will not hurt woman to be criticised. She
has too long been assured of her angelhood, and denied her womanhood. It
will not help her very greatly to be criticised as if she were being
tomahawked. If they who come to scoff would but remain to teach! There
has been much ungentle judgment of men by women, of women by men.
Thoreau said, "Man is continually saying to Woman, 'Why are you not more
wise?' Woman is continually saying to Man, 'Why are you not more
loving?' Unless each is both wise and loving there can be no real
growth."
L. G. C.
THE
MODERN WOMEN.
THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD.
Time was when the stereotyped phrase, "a fair young English girl," meant
the ideal of womanhood; to us, at least, of home birth and breeding. It
meant a creature generous, capable, and modest; something franker than a
Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as brave as an
American, but more refined, as domestic as a German and more graceful.
It meant a girl who could be trusted alone if need be, because of the
innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in
bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be
her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival; one who would
consider their interests identical, and not hold him as just so much
fair game for spoil; who would make his house his true home and place of
rest, not a mere passage-place for vanity and ostentation to go through;
a tender mother, an industrious house-keeper, a judicious mistress. We
prided ourselves as a nation on our women. We thought we had the pick
of creation in this fair young English girl of ours, and envied no other
men their own.
We admired the languid grace and subtle fire of the South; the docility
and affectionateness of the East seemed to us sweet and simple and
restful; the vivacious sparkle of the trim and sprightly Parisienne was
a pleasant little excitement when we met with it in its own domain; but
our allegiance never wandered from our brown-haired girls at home, and
our hearts were less vagrant than our fancies. This was in the old time,
and when English girls were content to be what God and nature had made
them. Of late years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the
world a race of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we
had created another nation altogether. The girl of the period, and the
fair young English girl of the past, have nothing in common save
ancestry and their mother-tongue: and even of this last the modern
version makes almost a new language through the copious additions it has
received from the current slang of the day.
The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her
face, as the first articles of her personal religion; whose sole idea of
life is plenty of fun and luxury; and whose dress is the object of such
thought and intellect as she possesses. Her main endeavor in this is to
outvie her neighbors in the extravagance of fashion. No matter whether,
as in the time of crinolines, she sacrificed decency, or, as now in the
time of trains, she sacrifices cleanliness; no matter either, whether
she makes herself a nuisance and an inconvenience to every one she
meets.
The girl of the period has done away with such moral muffishness as
consideration for others, or regard for counsel and rebuke. It was all
very well in old-fashioned times, when fathers and mothers had some
authority and were treated with respect, to be tutored and made to obey,
but she is far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by
these slow old morals; and as she dresses to please herself, she does
not care if she displeases every one else. Nothing is too extraordinary
and nothing too exaggerated for her vitiated taste; and things which in
themselves would be useful reforms if let alone become monstrosities
worse than those which they have displaced so soon as she begins to
manipulate and improve. If a sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the
mud, she raises hers midway to her knee. If the absurd structure of wire
and buckram, once called a bonnet, is modified to something that shall
protect the wearer's face without putting out the eyes of her companion,
she cuts hers down to four straws and a rosebud, or a tag of lace and a
bunch of glass beads.
If there is a reaction against an excess of Rowland's Macassar, and hair
shiny and sticky with grease is thought less nice than if left clean and
healthy crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks hers out on end like
certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down her back like Madge
Wildfire's, and thinks herself all the more beautiful the nearer she
approaches in look to a maniac or a negress. With purity of taste she
has lost also that far more precious purity and delicacy of perception
which sometimes mean more than appears on the surface. What the
_demi-monde_ does in its frantic efforts to excite attention, she also
does in imitation. If some fashionable _devergondee en evidence_ is
reported to have come out with her dress below her shoulder-blades, and
a gold strap for all the sleeve thought necessary, the girl of the
period follows suit next day; and then wonders that men sometimes
mistake her for her prototype, or that mothers of girls not quite so far
gone as herself refuse her as a companion for their daughters. She has
blunted the fine edges of feeling so much that she cannot understand why
she should be condemned for an imitation of form which does not include
imitation of fact; she cannot be made to see that modesty of appearance
and virtue ought to be inseparable, and that no good girl can afford to
appear bad, under penalty of receiving the contempt awarded to the bad.
This imitation of the _demi-monde_ in dress leads to something in manner
and feeling, not quite so pronounced, perhaps, but far too like to be
honorable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang,
bold talk, and fastness; to the love of pleasure and indifference to
duty; to the desire of money before either love or happiness; to
uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with the monotony of ordinary life,
and horror of all useful work; in a word, to the worst forms of luxury
and selfishness, to the most fatal effects arising from want of high
principle and absence of tender feeling.
The girl of the period envies the queens of the _demi-monde_ far more
than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously
appointed, and she knows them to be flattered, feted, and courted with a
certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the admiration
while she ignores the disdain. They have all for which her soul is
hungering, and she never stops to reflect at what a price they have
bought their gains, and what fearful moral penalties they pay for their
sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coarse gilding on the base token,
and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the midst, and the foul
legend written around the edge.
It is this envy of the pleasures, and indifference to the sins, of these
women of the _demi-monde_ which is doing such infinite mischief to the
modern girl. They brush too closely by each other, if not in actual
deeds, yet in aims and feelings; for the luxury which is bought by vice
with the one is the thing of all in life most passionately desired by
the other, though she is not yet prepared to pay quite the same price.
Unfortunately, she has already paid too much, all, indeed, that once
gave her distinctive national character. No one can say of the modern
English girl that she is tender, loving, retiring, or domestic. The old
fault so often found by keen-sighted Frenchwomen, that, she was so
fatally _romanesque_, so prone to sacrifice appearances and social
advantages for love, will never be set down to the girl of the period.
Love, indeed, is the last thing she thinks of, and the least of the
dangers besetting her. Love in a cottage, that seductive dream which
used to vex the heart and disturb the calculations of prudent mothers,
is now a myth of past ages. The legal barter of herself for so much
money, representing so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure; that is
her idea of marriage; the only idea worth entertaining.
For all seriousness of thought respecting the duties or the consequences
of marriage, she has not a trace. If children come, they find but a
stepmother's cold welcome from her; and if her husband thinks that he
has married anything that is to belong to him--a _tacens et placens
uxor_ pledged to make him happy--the sooner he wakes from his
hallucination and understands that he has simply married some one who
will condescend to spend his money on herself, and who will shelter her
indiscretions behind the shield of his name, the less severe will be his
disappointment. She has married his house, his carriage, his balance at
the banker's, his title; and he himself is just the inevitable condition
clogging the wheels of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated
with more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the
old-fashioned sort, not girls of the period _pur sang_, that marry for
love, or put the husband before the banker.
But she does not marry easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason.
They may amuse themselves with her for an evening, but they do not take
her readily for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a
poor copy of the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than
the copy, because it is real. Men can get that whenever they like; and
when they go into their mother's drawing-rooms, to see their sisters and
their sisters' friends, they want something of quite different flavor.
_Toujours perdrix_ is bad providing all the world over; but a continual
weak imitation of _toujours perdrix_ is worse. If we must have only one
kind of thing, let us have it genuine; and the queens of St. John's Wood
in their unblushing honesty, rather than their imitators and
make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at whatever cost of
shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it cannot be too plainly
told to the modern English girl that the net result of her present
manner of life is to assimilate her as nearly as possible to a class of
women whom we must not call by their proper--or improper--name. And we
are willing to believe that she has still some modesty of soul left
hidden under all this effrontery of fashion, and that, if she could be
made to see herself as she appears to the eyes of men, she would mend
her ways before too late.
It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are
free to write as they do of the women of their own nation. Every word of
censure flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those who condemn as
much as those who are condemned; for surely it need hardly be said that
men hold nothing so dear as the honor of their women, and that no one
living would willingly lower the repute of his mother or his sisters. It
is only when these have placed themselves beyond the pale of masculine
respect that such things could be written as are written now; when they
become again what they were once they will gather round them the love
and homage and chivalrous devotion which were then an Englishwoman's
natural inheritance. The marvel, in the present fashion of life among
women, is how it holds its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men.
It used to be an old-time notion that the sexes were made for each
other, and that it was only natural for them to please each other, and
to set themselves out for that end. But the girl of the period does not
please men. She pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how
little she does that, the class of women she has taken as her models of
itself testifies.
All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl
of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties,
to this loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair and
painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by preference
leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She thinks she is piquant
and exciting when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse
original; and she will not see that though men laugh with her they do
not respect her, though they flirt with her they do not marry her; she
will not believe that she is not the kind of thing they want, and that
she is acting against nature and her own interests when she disregards
their advice and offends their taste. We do not see how she makes out
her account, viewing her life from any side; but all we can do is to
wait patiently until the national madness has passed, and our women have
come back again to the old English ideal, once the most beautiful, the
most modest, the most essentially womanly in the world.
FOOLISH VIRGINS.
The heroines of the London season--the fillies, we mean, who have been
entered for the great matrimonial stakes, and have been mentioned in the
betting--have by this time exchanged the fast pleasures of the town for
the vapid pastimes of the country. We do not of course concern ourselves
with those poor simple girls who only repeat the lives and morals of
old-fashioned English homes, and who are too respectable and too modest
to be pointed at as the girls of the season. We speak of the fast
sisterhood only. After three months of egregious dissipation they enter
duly upon the next stage of their regular yearly alternations. Three
months of headlong folly are succeeded by three months of deadly
_ennui_. Action and reaction are always equal. The pains and weariness
of moral crapulousness arise in nice proportion to the passion of the
debauch. It is a dismal hour when we look on the withered leaves of last
night's garland.
The lovely and unlovely beings who are now living depressed days far
from Belgravia and the Row have, it is true, but joyless orgies to look
back upon. Their pleasures gave but a pinchbeck joviality after all,
were but a thin lacker spread over mercenary cares and heart-aching
jealousies--not the jealousies of passion, but the nipping vulgar
vexation with which a shopkeeper trembles lest a customer should go to
his rival over the way. Still there was excitement--the excitement of
outdoing a rival in shamelessness of apparel, in reckless abandonment of
manner, in the unblushing tolerance of impudent speech, in all the other
elements of ignoble casino-emulation. Above all, there was the tickling
excitement of knowing that all this was in some sort clandestine; that
ostensibly, and on the surface, things looked as if they were all
exhibiting human nature at its stateliest, most dignified, and most
refined pitch. The consciousness that the thin surface only conceals
some of the worst elements of character in full force and activity must
give a pleasantly stinging sensation to an acutely cynical woman.
However, this is all over for a time.
For a time the half-dressed young Maenads of the season will be found
clothed and in their right minds. And what sort of a right mind is it?
We know the kind of preparation which they have had for the business of
the season--for flirting, husband-hunting, waltzing, dressing so as to
escape the regulations of the police, and the rest. For this their
training has been perfect. But wise men agree that education should
comprehend training for all the parts of life equally--for pleasure not
less than for business, for hours of relaxation as well as for hours of
strain and pressure, for leisure just as much as for active occupation.
Education is supposed to arm us at every point. Nobody in this world was
ever perfectly educated. Everybody has at least one side on which he is
weak--one quarter where temptations are either not irresistible, or else
are not recognised as alluring to what is wrong. But we all know that
training, though never perfect, can make the difference between a
decently right and happy life and a bad, corrupt half-life or no life.
What does training do for the nimble-footed young beauties of the London
ball-room? It makes them nimble-footed, we admit. And what else?
The root-idea of the training of girls of the uppermost class in this
country is perhaps the most absolutely shameless that ever existed
anywhere out of Circassia or Georgia. It puts clean out of sight the
notion that women are rational beings as well as animals, or that they
are destined to be the companions of men who are, or ought to be, also
something more than animals. It takes the mind into account only as an
occasionally useful accident of body. The mind ought to be developed a
little, and in such a way as to make the body more piquant and
attractive. Like the candle inside a Chinese lantern, it may serve to
light up and show to advantage the pretty devices outside. But the
outside is the important thing, and the inside only incidental.
Insipidity of mind is perhaps a trifle objectionable, because there are
a few young men of property who dislike insipidity, and who therefore
might be lost from the toils in consequence. It is a crotchet and an
eccentricity in a man to desire a wife with a bright mind, but since
there are such persons, it is just as well to pay a slight attention to
the mind in odd moments when one is not engaged upon the more urgent
business of the body. You don't know what may happen, and it is possible
that the most eligible _parti_ of a season may dislike the idea of
taking a female idiot to wife. Still it would be absurd to change the
entire system of up-bringing for our girls merely because here and there
a man has a distaste for a fool.
The majority of men are incapable of gauging power of intellect and
fineness of character. But the veriest blockhead and simpleton who ever
lounged in a doorway or lisped in Pall Mall can tell a fine woman when
he sees her, and is probably able to find pleasure and hope in the
spectacle. It is these blockheads and simpletons who thus set the mode.
They fix the standard of fashionable female education. Education, or the
astounding modern conception of it, means preparation of girls for the
marriage market. If a girl does not get well married, it were better for
her and for her mother also if she had never been born, or had been cast
with a millstone round her neck into the sea. Whom she marries--whether
a man old enough to be her father, whether a pattern of imbecility,
whether a man of a notoriously debauched character--this matters not a
jot. Only let him have money. This being the conception of marriage, and
marriage being the aim of all sagacious up-bringing, as most men
unhappily are more surely taken on their animal than on their rational
side, it is perfectly natural that you should strive to bring up a
worthy family of attractive young animals. And let us pause upon this.
If the idea which, even at its best, would be so deplorably imperfect,
were rationally carried out, still it would not be so absolutely
pestilent and debasing as it is. Physical education, rightly practiced,
is a fine and indispensable process in right living. If the system had
for its end the rearing of really robust and healthy creatures, it would
mean something. On the contrary, however, anybody who makes a tour
through fashionable rooms in the season may see that, in a vast quantity
of cases, the heroines of the night are just as sorrily off in bodily
stamina as they are for intellectual ideas and interests. Here we again
encounter the fundamental blunder, that it is only the outside about
which we need concern ourselves. Let a woman be well dressed (or
judiciously undressed), have bright eyes, a whitish skin, rounded
outlines, and that suffices. All this a wise English mother will
certainly secure, just as a wise Chinese woman will take care to have
tiny feet, plucked eyebrows, and black finger-nails.
If you go into a nursery you will see the process already at work. The
little girl, who would fain exercise her young limbs by manifold rude
sprawlings and rushing hither and thither, and single combats with her
brothers, is tricked out in ribbons and gay frocks, and bid sit still in
solemn decorum. With every year of her growth this principle of
attention to outside trickeries and fineries is more rigidly pursued.
Less and less every year are the nerves and muscles, the restless
activities of arms and legs, exercised and made to purvey new vigor to
the life. The blood is allowed to grow stagnant. The life of the woman,
even as mere animal, becomes poor and morbid and artificial. By dint of
much attention and many devices, the outside of the body is maintained
comely in the eyes of people whose notions of comeliness are thoroughly
artificial and sophisticated. But how can there be any health with high
eating, little exercise, above all, with the mind left absolutely vacant
of all interests? The Belgravian mother does not even understand the
miserable trade she has chosen. She is as poor a physical trainer as she
is poor morally and intellectually.
The truth is that in a human being, even from the physical point of
view, it is rather a dangerous thing to ignore the intellect and the
emotions. Nature resents being ignored. If you do not cultivate her, she
will assuredly avenge herself. If you do not get wheat out of your piece
of ground, she will abundantly give you tares. And there can be no other
rule expressly invented for the benefit of fashionable young women.
Their moral nature, if nobody ever taught them to keep an eager eye upon
it, is soon overgrown, either with flaunting poison plants, or at best
with dull gray moss. The parent dreams that the daughter's mind is all
swept and garnished. Lo, there are seven or any other number of devils
that have entered in and taken possession, more or less permanently. The
human creature who has never been taught to take an interest in what is
right and wholesome will, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, take an
interest in what is wrong and unwholesome. You cannot keep minds in a
state of vacuum. A girl, like anybody else, will obey the bent of the
character which has been given either by the education of design or the
more usual education of mere accidental experience. Everything depends,
in the ordinary course of things, upon the general view of the aims and
objects of life which you succeed, deliberately or by hazard, in
creating.
A girl is not taught that marriage has grave, moral and rational
purposes, itself being no more than a means. On the contrary, it is
always figured in her eyes as an end, and as an end scarcely at all
connected with a moral and rational companionship. It is, she fancies,
the gate to some sort of paradise whose mysterious joys are not to be
analysed. She forgets that there are no such swift-coming spontaneous
paradises in this world, where the future can never be anything more
than the child of the present, indelibly stamped with every feature and
line of its parent. This castle-building, however, is harmless. If it
does not strengthen, still it does not absolutely impoverish or corrupt,
characters. Of some castle-building one cannot say so much. Character
_is_ assuredly corrupted by avaricious dreams of marriage as a road to
material opulence and luxury. There is, indeed, no end to the depraved
broodings which may come to an empty and undirected mind. If the
emotions and the intellect are not tended and trained, they will run to
an evil and evil-propagating seed. Rooted and incurable frivolty is the
best that can come of it; corruption is the worst.
People madly suppose that going to church, or giving an occasional
blanket to a sick old woman, will suffice to implant a worthy conception
of the aims of life. At this moment, some mothers are, perhaps,
believing that the dull virtue of the country will in a few days redress
the balance which had been too much discomposed by the rush and whirl of
the town. As if one strong set of silly interests and emotions could be
effaced at will by simple change of scene, without substitution of new
interests and emotions. Excess of frivolous excitement is not repaired
or undone by excess of mere blankness and nothingness. The dreariness of
the virtue of the _villeggiatura_ is as noxious as the whirl of the
mercenary and little virtuous period of the season. Teach young women
from their childhood upwards that marriage is their single career, and
it is inevitable that they should look upon every hour which is not
spent in promoting this sublime end and aim as so much subtracted from
life. Penetrated with unwholesome excitement in one part of their
existence, they are penetrated with killing _ennui_ in the next.
If mothers would only add to their account of marriage as the end of a
woman's existence--which may be right or it may not--a definition of
marriage as an association with a reasonable and reflective being, they
would speedily effect a revolution in the present miserable system. To
the business of finding a husband a young lady would then add the not
less important business of making herself a rational person, instead of
a more or less tastefully decorated doll with a passion for a great
deal of money. She might awaken to the fact, which would at first
startle her very much no doubt, that there is a great portion of a
universe outside her own circle and her own mind. This simple discovery
would of itself effect a revolution that might transform her from being
an insipid idiot into a tolerably rational being. As it is, the universe
to her is only a collection of rich bachelors in search of wives, and of
odious rivals who are contending with her for one or more of these too
wary prizes. All high social aims, fine broad humanizing ways of
surveying life, are unknown to her, or else appear in her eyes as the
worship of Mumbo Jumbo appears in the eyes of the philosopher. She
thinks of nothing except her private affairs. She is indifferent to
politics, to literature--in a word, to anything that requires thought.
She reads novels of a kind, because novels are all about love, and love
had once something to do with marriage, her own peculiar and absorbing
business. Beyond this her mind does not stir. Any more positively gross
state one cannot imagine. There are women who are by accident more
degraded physically. _Mutatis mutandis_, there are none more degraded,
morally and intellectually, than those whose minds are constantly bent
upon marriage at any cost, and with anybody, however decrepit, however
silly, and however evil, who can make a settlement.
LITTLE WOMEN.
The conventional idea of a brave, an energetic, or a supremely criminal
woman is a tall, dark-haired, large-armed virago, who might pass as the
younger brother of her husband, and about whom nature seemed to have
hesitated before determining whether to make her a man or a woman--a
kind of debatable land, in fact, between the two sexes, and almost as
much one as the other. Helen Macgregor, Lady Macbeth, Catharine de'
Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned murderesses in novels, are
all of the muscular, black-brigand type, with more or less of regal
grace superadded according to circumstances; and it would be thought
nothing but a puerile fancy to suppose the contrary of those whose
personal description is not already known. Crime, indeed, especially in
art and fiction, has generally been painted in very nice proportion to
the number of cubic inches embodied, and the depth of color employed;
though we are bound to add that the public favor runs towards muscular
heroines almost as much as towards muscular murderesses, which to a
certain extent redresses the overweighted balance.
Our later novelists, however, have altered the whole setting of the
palette. Instead of five foot ten of black and brown, they have gone in
for four foot nothing of pink and yellow; instead of tumbled masses of
raven hair, they have shining coils of purest gold; instead of hollow
caverns whence flash unfathomable eyes eloquent of every damnable
passion, they have limpid lakes of heavenly blue; and their worst
sinners are in all respects fashioned as much after the outward
semblance of the ideal saint as can well be managed. The original notion
was a very good one, and the revolution did not come before it was
wanted; but it has been a little overdone of late, and we are threatened
with as great a surfeit of small-limbed, yellow-headed criminals as we
have had of the man-like black. One gets weary of the most perfect model
in time, if too constantly repeated; as now, when we have all begun to
feel that the resources of the angel's face and demon's soul have been
more heavily drawn on than is quite fair, and that, given "heavy braids
of golden hair," "bewildering blue eyes," "a small lithe frame," "a
special delicacy of feet and hands," and we are booked for the
companionship, through three volumes, of a young person to whom
Messalina or Lucretia Borgia would be a mere novice.
And yet there is a physiological truth in this association of energy
with smallness; perhaps, also, with a certain tint of yellow hair,
which, with a dash of red through it, is decidedly suggestive of nervous
force. Suggestiveness, indeed, does not go very far in an argument; but
the frequent connection of energy and smallness in women is a thing
which all may verify in their own circles. In daily life, who is the
really formidable woman to encounter?--the black-browed,
broad-shouldered giantess, with arms almost as big in the girth as a
man's? or the pert, smart, trim little female, with no more biceps than
a ladybird, and of just about equal strength with a sparrow? Nine times
out of ten, the giantess with the heavy shoulders and broad black
eyebrows is a timid, feeble-minded, good tempered person, incapable of
anything harsher than a mild remonstrance with her maid, or a gentle
chastisement of her children. Nine times out of ten her husband has her
in hand in the most perfect working order, so that she would swear the
moon shone at midday if it were his pleasure that she should make a fool
of herself in that direction. One of the most obedient and indolent of
earth's daughters, she gives no trouble to any one, save the trouble of
rousing, exciting, and setting her agoing; while, as for the conception
or execution of any naughty piece of self-assertion, she is as utterly
incapable as if she were a child unborn, and demands nothing better than
to feel the pressure of the leading-strings, and to know exactly by
their strain where she is desired to go and what to do.
But the little woman is irrepressible. Too fragile to come into the
fighting section of humanity, a puny creature whom one blow from a man's
huge fist could annihilate, absolutely fearless, and insolent with the
insolence which only those dare show who know that retribution cannot
follow--what can be done with her? She is afraid of nothing, and to be
controlled by no one. Sheltered behind her weakness as behind a triple
shield of brass, the angriest man dare not touch her, while she provokes
him to a combat in which his hands are tied. She gets her own way in
everything, and everywhere. At home and abroad she is equally dominant
and irrepressible, equally free from obedience and from fear. Who breaks
all the public orders in sights and shows, and, in spite of king,
kaiser, or policeman X, goes where it is expressly forbidden that she
shall go? Not the large-boned, muscular woman, whatever her temperament;
unless, indeed, of the exceptionally haughty type in distinctly inferior
surroundings, and then she can queen it royally enough, and set
everything at most lordly defiance. But in general the large-boned woman
obeys the orders given, because, while near enough to man to be somewhat
on a par with him, she is still undeniably his inferior. She is too
strong to shelter herself behind her weakness, yet too weak to assert
her strength and defy her master on equal grounds. She is like a
flying-fish, not one thing wholly; and while capable of the
inconveniences of two lives, is incapable of the privileges of either.
It is not she, for all her well-developed frame and formidable looks,
but the little woman, who breaks the whole code of laws and defies all
their defenders--the pert, smart, pretty little woman, who laughs in
your face, and goes straight ahead if you try to turn her to the right
hand or to the left, receiving your remonstrances with the most sublime
indifference, as if you were talking a foreign language she could not
understand. She carries everything before her, wherever she is. You may
see her stepping over barriers, slipping under ropes, penetrating to the
green benches with a red ticket, taking the best places on the platform
over the heads of their rightful owners, settling herself among the
reserved seats without an inch of pasteboard to float her. You cannot
turn her out by main force. British chivalry objects to the public
laying on of hands in the case of a woman, even when most recalcitrant
and disobedient; more particularly if a small and fragile-looking woman.
So that, if it is only a usurpation of places especially masculine, she
is allowed to retain what she has got amid the grave looks of the
elders--not really displeased though at a flutter of her ribbons among
them--and the titters and nudges of the young fellows.
If the battle is between her and another woman, they are left to fight
it out as they best can, with the odds laid heavily on the little one.
All this time there is nothing of the tumult of contest about her. Fiery
and combative as she generally is, when breaking the law in public
places she is the very soul of serene daring. She shows no heat, no
passion, no turbulence; she leaves these as extra weapons of defence to
women who are assailable. For herself she requires no such aids. She
knows her capabilities and the line of attack that best suits her, and
she knows, too, that the fewer points of contact she exposes the more
likely she is to slip into victory; the more she assumes, and the less
she argues, the slighter the hold she gives her opponents. She is
either perfectly good-humored or blankly innocent; she either smiles you
into indulgence or wearies you into compliance by the sheer hopelessness
of making any impression on her. She may, indeed, if of the very
vociferous and shrill-tongued kind, burst out into such a noisy
demonstration that you are glad to escape from her, no matter what
spoils you leave on her hands; just as a mastiff will slink away from a
bantam hen all heckled feathers and screeching cackle, and tremendous
assumption of doing something terrible if he does not look out. Any way
the little woman is unconquerable; and a tiny fragment of humanity at a
public show, setting all rules and regulations at defiance, is only
carrying out in the matter of benches the manner of life to which nature
has dedicated her from the beginning.
As a rule, the little woman is brave. When the lymphatic giantess falls
into a faint or goes off into hysterics, she storms, or bustles about,
or holds on like a game terrier, according to the work on hand. She will
fly at any man who annoys her, and bears herself as equal to the biggest
and strongest fellow of her acquaintance. In general she does it all by
sheer pluck, and is not notorious for subtlety or craft. Had Delilah
been a little woman she would never have taken the trouble to shear
Samson's locks. She would have defied him with all his strength
untouched on his head, and she would have overcome him too. Judith and
Jael were both probably large women. The work they went about demanded a
certain strength of muscle and toughness of sinew; but who can say that
Jezebel was not a small, freckled, auburn-haired Lady Audley of her
time, full of the concentrated fire, the electric force, the passionate
recklessness of her type? Regan and Goneril might have been beautiful
demons of the same pattern; we have the example of the Marchioness de
Brinvilliers as to what amount of spiritual deviltry can exist with the
face and manner of an angel direct from heaven; and perhaps Cordelia was
a tall dark-haired girl, with a pair of brown eyes, and a long nose
sloping downwards.
Look at modern Jewesses, with their flashing Oriental orbs, their
night-black tresses, and the dusky shadows of their olive-colored
complexions; as catalogued properties according to the ideal, they would
be placed in the list of the natural criminals and lawbreakers, while in
reality they are about as meek and docile a set of women as are to be
found within the four seas. Pit a fiery little Welsh woman or a petulant
Parisienne against the most regal and Junonic amongst them, and let them
try conclusions in courage, in energy, or in audacity; the Israelitish
Juno will go down before either of the small Philistines, and the
fallacy of weight and color in the generation of power will be shown
without the possibility of denial. Even in those old days of long ago,
when human characteristics were embodied and deified, we do not find
that the white-armed, large-limbed Here, though queen by right of
marriage, lorded it over her sister goddesses by any superior energy or
force of nature. On the contrary, she was rather a heavy-going person,
and, unless moved to anger by her husband's numerous infidelities, took
her Olympian life placidly enough, and once or twice got cheated in a
way that did no great credit to her sagacity. A little Frenchwoman would
have sailed around her easily; and as it was, shrewish though she was in
her speech when provoked, her husband not only deceived but chastised
her, and reduced her to penitence and obedience as no little woman would
have suffered herself to be reduced.
There is one celebrated race of women who were probably the
powerfully-built, large-limbed creatures they are assumed to have been,
and as brave and energetic as they were strong and big--the Norse women
of the sagas, who, for good or evil, seem to have been a very
influential element in the old Northern life. Prophetesses, physicians,
dreamers of dreams and the accredited interpreters as well, endowed with
magic powers, admitted to a share in the councils of men, brave in war,
active in peace, these fair-haired Scandinavian women were the fit
comrades of their men, the fit wives and mothers of the Berserkers and
the Vikings. They had no tame or easy life of it, if all we hear of them
is true. To defend the farm and the homestead during their husbands'
absence, and to keep themselves intact against all bold rovers to whom
the Tenth Commandment was an unknown law; to dazzle and bewilder by
magic arts when they could not conquer by open strength; to unite craft
and courage, deception and daring, loyalty and independence, demanded
no small amount of opposing qualities. But the Steingerdas and Gudrunas
were generally equal to any emergency of fate or fortune, and slashed
their way through the history of their time more after the manner of men
than women; supplementing their downright blows by side thrusts of
craftier cleverness when they had to meet power with skill, and were
fain to overthrow brutality by fraud. The Norse women were certainly as
largely framed as they were mentally energetic, and as crafty as either;
but we know of no other women who unite the same characteristics, and
are at once cunning, strong, brave and true.
On the whole, then, the little women have the best of it. More petted
than their bigger sisters, and infinitely more powerful, they have their
own way in part because it really does not seem worth while to contest a
point with such little creatures. There is nothing that wounds a man's
self-respect in any victory they may get or claim. Where there is
absolute inequality of strength, there can be no humiliation in the
self-imposed defeat of the stronger; and as it is always more pleasant
to have peace than war, and as big men for the most part rather like
than not to put their necks under the tread of tiny feet, the little
woman goes on her way triumphant to the end, breaking all the laws she
does not like, and throwing down all the barriers that impede her
progress, perfectly irresistible and irrepressible in all circumstances
and under any condition.
PINCHBECK.
Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman would have worn
pinchbeck. False jewelry and imitation lace were touchstones with the
sex, and the woman who would condescend to either was assumed, perhaps
not quite without reason, to have lost something more than the mere
perception of technical taste. This feeling ran through the whole of
society, and pinchbeck was considered as at once despicable and
disreputable. The successful speculator, sprung from nothing, who had
made his fortune during the war, might buy land, build himself a
mansion, and set up a magnificent establishment, but he was never looked
on as more than a lucky adventurer by the aboriginal gentry of the
place; and the blue blood, perhaps nourishing itself on thin beer,
turned up its nose disdainfully at the claret and madeira which had been
personally earned and not lineally inherited. This exclusiveness was
narrow in spirit, and hard in individual working; and yet there was a
wholesome sentiment underlying its pride which made it valuable in
social ethics, if immoral on the score of natural equality and human
charity. It was the rejection of pretentiousness, however gilded and
glittering, in favor of reality, however poor and barren; it was the
condemnation of make-believes--the repudiation of pinchbeck. It is not a
generation since this was the normal attitude of society towards its
_nouveaux riches_ and Brummagem jewelry; but time moves fast in these
later days, and national sentiments change as quickly as national
fashions.
We are in the humor to rehabilitate all things, and pinchbeck has now
its turn with the rest. The lady of slender means who would refuse to
wear imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the country society
which would exclude the _nouveau riche_ because of his newness, and not
adopt him because of his riches. The whole anxiety now is, not what a
thing is, but how it looks--not its quality, but its appearance. Every
part of social and domestic life is dedicated to the apotheosis of
pinchbeck. It meets us at the hall door, where miserable make-believes
of stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial dignity on a
wretched little villa, run up without regard to one essential of home
comfort or of architectural truth. It goes with us into the cold,
conventional drawing-room, where all is for show, nothing for use, where
no one lives, and which is just the mere pretence of a dwelling-room,
set out to deceive the world into the belief that its cheap finery is
the expression of the every-day life and circumstances of the family. It
sits with us at the table, which a confectioner out of a back street has
furnished, and where everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for
the occasion. It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in
the studs and signet-rings of the men; it is in the hired broughams,
the hired waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the
cheap champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet
us at every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle classes
is penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck, and for
one family that holds itself in the honor and simplicity of truth, ten
thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery and pretence.
The greatest sinners in this are women. Men are often ostentatious,
often extravagant, and not unfrequently dishonest in that broadway of
dishonesty which is called living beyond their means--sometimes making
up the deficit by practices which end in the dock of the Old Bailey;
but, as a rule, they go in for the real thing in details, and their
pinchbeck is at the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the
contrary, give themselves up to a more general pretentiousness, and,
provided they can make a show, care very little about the means;
provided they can ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the want
of the hall-stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their visiting-list, and
domestic appearances are the four things which they demand shall be in
accord with their neighbor's; and for these four surfaces they will
sacrifice the whole internal fabric. They will have a showy-looking
house, encrusted with base ornamentation and false grandeur, though it
lets in wind, rain, and sound almost as if it were made of mud or
canvas, rather than a plain and substantial dwelling-place, with comfort
instead of stucco, and moderately thick walls instead of porches and
pilasters. Most of their time is necessarily passed at home, but they
undergo all manner of house discomfort resulting from this preference of
cheap finery over solid structure, rather than forego their "genteel
locality" and stereotyped ornamentation. A family of daughters on the
one side, diligent over the "Battle of Prague;" a nursery full of crying
babies on the other; more Battles of Prague opposite, diversified by a
future Lind practicing her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in
the frost, walls streaming in the thaw, the lower offices reeking and
green with damp, and the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted
movement--all these, and more miseries of the same kind, she willingly
encounters rather than shift into a locality relatively unfashionable to
her sphere, but where she could have substantiality and comfort for the
same rent that she pays now for flash and pinchbeck.
In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbors, no
matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, and run up a
milliner's bill beyond what she can afford for the whole family living.
If they can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck; glass that looks like
jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is every bit to
her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot compass Valenciennes
and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy machine-made imitations
that will make quite as fine a show. How poor soever she may be, she
must hang herself about with ornaments made of painted wood, glass, or
vulcanite; she must break out into spangles and beads and chains and
_benoitons_, which are cheap luxuries, and, as she thinks, effective.
Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle to her ear as the stateliest brocade,
and cotton-velvet delights the soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The
love of pinchbeck is so deeply ingrained in her that even if, in a
momentary fit of aberration into good taste, she condescends to a simple
material about which there can be neither disguise nor pretence, she
must load it with that detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes
herself as vulgar in a muslin as she was in a cotton velvet.
The _simplex munditiis_, which used to be held as a canon of feminine
good taste, is now abandoned altogether, and the more she can bedizen
herself according to the pattern of a Sandwich islander the more
beautiful she thinks herself, the more certain the fascination of the
men, and the greater the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all
the tags and streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces
there, the puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead
girl's head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself
hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout. But we fear she is past praying for
in the matter of fashion, and that she is too far given over to the
abomination of pretence to be called back to truth for any ethical
reason whatsoever, or indeed by anything short of high examples. And
then, if simplicity became the fashion, we should have our pinchbeck
votaries translating that into extremes as they do now with
ornamentation; if my lady took to plainness, they would go to
nakedness.
Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list--the cards of invitation
stuck against the drawing-room glass--with the grandest names and
largest fortunes put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The
chance contact with the people represented may be quite out of the
ordinary circumstances of life, but their names are paraded as if an
accident, which has happened once and may never occur again, were in the
daily order of events. They are brought to the front to make others
believe that the whole social thickness is of the same quality; that
generals and admirals and sirs and ladies are the common elements of the
special circle in which the family habitually moves; that pinchbeck is
good gold, and that stucco means marble. Women are exceedingly tenacious
of these pasteboard appearances.
In a house with its couple of female servants, where formal visitors are
very rare, and invitations, save by friendly word of mouth, rarer still,
you may see a cracked china bowl or cheap mock _patera_ on the hall
table, to receive the cards which are assumed to come in the thick
showers usual with high people who have hall-porters, and a thousand
names or more on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to be sure,
and the upper layer turns by degrees from cream-color to brown; but
antiquity is not held to weaken the force of grandeur. The titled card
left on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps the uppermost
place, still represents a perpetual renewal of aristocratic visits, and
an unbroken succession of social triumphs. Yellowed and soiled, it is
none the less the trump-card of the list; and while the outside world
laughs and ridicules, the lady at home thinks that no one sees through
this puerile pretence, and that the visiting-list is accepted according
to the status of the fugleman at the head. She is very happy if she can
say that the pattern of her dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from
that of Lady So and So; and we may be quite sure that all personal
contact with grand folks does so express itself, and perpetuate the
memory of the event, by such imitation--at a distance. It is too good an
occasion for the airing of pinchbeck to be disregarded, and,
consequently, for the most part is turned to this practical account.
Whether the fashion will be suited to the material, or to the other
parts of the dress, is quite a secondary consideration, it being of the
essence of pinchbeck to despise both fitness and harmony.
There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social
influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind, and
with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a grade one
step higher than the small pretences we have been speaking of--to women
who have money, and so far have one reality, but who have not, by their
own birth or their husband's, the original standing which would give
them this influence as of right. Some make themselves notorious for
their drawing-room patronage of artists, which, however, does not often
include buying their pictures; others gather around them scores of
obscure authors, whose books they talk of, if they do not read; a few, a
short time since, were centres of spiritualistic circles, and got a
queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as Philistine desire to
witness the "manifestations" went; and one or two are names of weight in
the emancipated ranks, and take chiefly to what they call "working
women." These are they who attend Ladies' Committees, where they talk
bosh, and pound away at utterly uninteresting subjects, as diligently as
if what they said had any point in it, and what they did any ultimate
issue in probability or common sense. But beyond the fact of having a
large house, where their several sets may assemble at stated periods,
these would-be lady patronesses are utterly impotent to help or hinder;
and their patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of
weighing.
In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with
what they are, and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are not,
our middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society infinite
mischief. They set the tone to the world below them, and the small
tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their
superiors, do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's wife
over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies
everywhere, who all try to appear women of rank and fortune, and who are
ashamed of nothing as much as of industry, truth and simplicity. Hence
the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a trifle more ugly and
debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence the miserable
pretentiousness, and pinchbeck fine-ladyism, filtering like poison
through every pore of our society, to result God only knows in what
grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and education will come to
the front, and endeavour to stay the plague already begun.
Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes for important
moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols, of deep national
value. No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror
of pinchbeck, and once more insist on truth as the foundation of our
national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do
not land us here; and the progress of the arts and society must not be
brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the
semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women
are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home
business. Here is something for them to do--the regeneration of society
by means of their own energies; the bringing people back to the dignity
of truth and the beauty of simplicity; and the substitution of that
self-respect which is content to appear what it is, for the feeble pride
which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot get gold, and which
endeavors so hard to hide its real estate, and to pass for what it is
not and never could be.
PUSHING WOMEN.
The achievements of Anglo-Saxon energy present a rich mine of material
to the bookmaker. We are justly proud of our self-made men--of our
Chancellors who have risen from the barber's-shop to the Woolsack, of
our low-born inventors who have fought their way to scientific
recognition, of our merchant princes who have begun life with a capital
of one half-crown. The story of the man who has raised himself to
eminence by his own exertions, in the face of overwhelming disadvantages
and obstacles, is a thrice-told tale, thanks to Mr. Smiles and other
biographers. But our admiration has been almost exclusively drawn to
these signal examples of pushing _men_. The analogous exploits of the
fair sex remain comparatively unchronicled. No one has hitherto
published a book about Self-made Women. Yet this branch of the subject
would be very interesting, and even instructive. Of course the
opportunity for the display of energy in pushing is, in the case of
woman, much more limited. She cannot push at the Bar or in the Church,
or in business. Her sphere for pushing is practically narrowed down to
one department of human life--society. But within the limits of that
sphere she exhibits very remarkable proofs of this peculiar form of
activity. Moreover, pushing is a feature so peculiarly characteristic of
the English, as distinct from the Continental _salon_, that no attempt
to place a picture of the Englishwoman in her totality before her
foreign critics would be complete without it.
There are three periods in the career of a pushing woman. The first is
that in which she emerges from obscurity, or, worse perhaps, from the
notoriety of commercial antecedents, and carried, by a vigorous push,
the outworks of fashionable society. The wife of a successful speculator
in cotton or guano, who is also the mistress of a comfortable mansion in
Bloomsbury, gradually becomes restless and dissatisfied with her
surroundings. It would be curious to trace the growth of this
discontent. Ambition is deeply rooted in the female bosom. Even
housemaids are actuated by an impulse to better themselves, and village
school-mistresses yearn for a larger sphere. Perhaps it is this instinct
to rise, so creditable to the sex, which compels a lady with a long
purse, and a name well known in the city, to enter the lists as an
aspirant to fashion. Perhaps her career is developed by a more gradual
process. Climbing social Alps is like climbing material Alps--for a time
the intervening heights shut out from view the grander peaks. It is not
till one has topped Peckham or Hackney that a more extended horizon
bursts on the eye, and one catches sight of the glittering summits of
Belgravia. Account for it as we may, the phenomenon of a woman in the
enjoyment of every comfort and luxury that wealth can give, but ready
to barter it all for a few crumbs of contemptuous notice from persons of
rank, is by no means uncommon. Probably the fashionable newspaper is a
great stimulus to pushing.
The rich vulgarian pores over _Court Circulars_ and catalogues of
aristocratic names till the fascination becomes irresistible, and the
desire to see her own name, purged of cotton or guano, figuring in the
same sheet grows to a monomania. But how is this to be done? Fortunately
for the purpose which she has in view, there exist in these latter days
amphibious beings, half trader, half fop, with one set of relations with
the world of commerce and another set of relations with the world of
fashion. The dandy, driven into the city by the stress of his fiscal
exigencies, forms a link between the East-end and the West. Among his
other functions is that of giving aid and counsel, not exactly gratis,
to any fair outsider who wants to "get into" society. For every
applicant he has but one bit of advice. She must spend money.
For a woman who is neither clever nor beautiful nor high-born, there is
but one way to proceed. She must bribe right and left. No rotten borough
absorbs more cash than the fashionable world. Its recognition is merely
a question of money. All its distinctions have their price. It exacts
from the pushing woman a thumping entrance-fee in the shape of a
sumptuous concert or ball. Nor is it only the first push which costs.
Every subsequent advance is as much a matter of purchase as a step in
the army.
There is a tariff of its honors, and any Belgravian actuary can
calculate to a nicety the price of a stare from a great lady, or a card
from a leader of fashion. This is the philosophy expounded by the
amphibious dandy to his civic pupil. The upshot is, that she must give
an entertainment, or a series of entertainments, on a scale of great
splendor. Of course the house in Bloomsbury must be exchanged for
another in a fashionable quarter. A more profuse style of living must be
adopted. Her equipages must be gorgeous, her flunkeys numerous and well
powdered. Above all, she must at once and for ever make a clean sweep of
all her old friends. Upon these conditions, and in consideration of a
_douceur_ for himself, he agrees to be her friend, and help her to push.
Then follows a delicate negotiation with one of those dowagers who
rather pique themselves on their good nature in standing sponsors to
pushing nobodies. She, too, makes her conditions. For the sake of the
elderly pet to whom she is indebted for her daily supply of scandal, she
consents to countenance his _protegee_. But she declines to ask her to
her own house. She will dine with her, provided the dinner is exquisite,
and two or three of her own cronies are included in the invitation. Last
and crowning condescension, she will ask the company for the proposed
concert or ball, provided the thing is done regardless of expense. It
would be hard to say which a cynic would think most charming--the
readiness to accept, or the inclination to impose, such conditions.
At last the great occasion arrives. Planted at the top of her staircase,
under the wing of her fashionable allies, the nominal giver of the
entertainment is duly stared at and glared at by a supercilious crowd,
who examine her with the same sort of languid interest which they devote
to a new animal at the Zoological. The greater number are "going on" to
another party. But the next morning brings balm for every mortification.
Her ball is blazoned in the fashionable journals, and the well-bred
reporter, while elaborately complimentary to the exotics, is discreetly
silent as to the supercilious stares. She does not exactly awake to find
herself famous, but at least she is no longer outside the Pale. At a
considerable outlay, she has got into what a connoisseur in shades of
fashion would call tenth-rate society. This is not much; still, it is a
beginning, and a beginning is everything to a pushing woman.
In the pushing woman of the transition period we behold a lady who has
got a certain footing in society, but who is straining every nerve, in
season and out of season, by hook and by crook, to improve her position.
Society within the Pale is divided into a great many "zones" or "sets."
It is like a target, with outer, middle, inner, and innermost circles.
The exterior circle, corresponding to "the black" in archery, consists
of persona, for the most part, with limited means and moderate ambition.
People who try to combine fashion with economy stick here, and advance
no further. Carpet-dances and champagneless suppers are typical of this
circle. Here mothers and daughters prey upon the inexperienced youth of
the Universities and green young officers, who are deluded for one
season by their pretensions to fashion, but who cut them the next.
Here, too, may be found persons whose social progress has been retarded
by foolish scruples about cutting their old friends. Between this band
of prowlers upon the outskirts of fashion and "the best set"--the golden
ring in the centre of the shield--are many intermediate circles, each
representing a different stage of distinction and exclusiveness. It is
the multiplicity of these invisible lines of demarcation which makes
pushing so laborious.
The world of fashion is not one homogeneous camp, but it is parcelled
out into a number of cliques and coteries. Into one after another of
these a pushing woman effects her entrance. She is always edging her way
into a new and better set. At every step there are obstacles to be
encountered, rivals to be jostled, fierce snubs to be endured. There is
something almost sublime in the spectacle of this untiring activity of
shoulder and elbow. The mere shoving--_vis consili expers_--would never
bring her near to her goal. An adept in the art of pushing does not rely
on sheer impudence alone. She has recourse to artificial aids and
appliances. A great deal of ingenuity is exhibited in the selection of
her self-propelling machinery. It is a good plan to acquire a name for
some one social speciality.
Private theatricals, for instance, or similar entertainments, may be
turned to excellent account. Exhibitions of this kind pique curiosity,
and people who come to stare remain to supper, and possibly return to
drop a card on the following afternoon. But, if you go in for this sort
of thing, you must resign yourself to certain inconveniences. Your
pretty drawing-room will be like Park Lane in a state of chronic
obstruction. The carpenter's work will interfere somewhat with your
comfort, and it is tiresome to be perpetually unhinging your doors and
pulling your windows out of their frames. The jealousies and bickerings
among the performers are another source of vexation. Miss A. declines to
sit as Rowena to Miss B.'s Rebecca; and the drawing-room Roscius
invariably objects to the part for which he is cast. Altogether, unless
you have a positive taste for carpentry and green-room squabbles, it is
better to steer clear of private theatricals.
Then there is the musical dodge. In skillful hands there is no better
leverage for pushing operations than drawing-room music. Every one knows
Lady Tweedledum and her amateur concerts. The fuss she makes about them
is prodigious. They are a cheap sort of entertainment, but they cost the
thrifty patroness of art a vast deal of trouble. She is always
organizing practices, arranging rehearsals, drawing up programmes, or
scouring London for musical recruits. She has been known to invade dingy
Government offices for a tenor, and to run a soprano to earth in distant
Bloomsbury. After all, her "music" is only so-so. You may hear better
any night at Even's or the Oxford. One has heard "Dal tuo stellato
soglio" before, and Niedermeyer insipidities are a little _fade_.
Sometimes, to complete the imposture, the names of Mendelssohn and
Mozart are invoked, and, under cover of doing honor to an immortal
composer, a chorus of young people assemble for periodical flirtation.
On the whole, it is wise not to attempt too much. Miss Quaver, with her
staccato notes and semi-professional _minauderies_, is not exactly a
queen of song. Nor does it give one any exquisite delight to hear Sir
Raucisonous Trombone give tongue in a French romance. The talented band
of the Piccadilly Troubadours, floundering through the overture to
_Zampa_, hardly satisfies a refined musical ear. But, however
indifferent in a musical point of view, from the point of view of the
fair projector the thing is a success. It serves as a trap to catch
duchesses, a device for putting salt on the tails of the popinjays of
fashion. One fine day Lady Tweedledum's pretended zeal for music
receives its crowning reward. The noise of it reaches august ears. An
act of gracious condescension follows. Her Ladyship has the supreme
delight of leading a scion of Royalty to a chair of state in her
drawing-room, to hear Sir Raucisonous bleat and Miss Quaver trill.
There are subtler means of pushing than amateur concerts and private
theatricals. There is the push vertical, as in the case of the
commercial lady; and there is also the push lateral. A good example of
the latter style of operation is afforded by the dowager who is
fortunate enough to have an eldest son to use as a pushing machine.
Handled with tact, a young heir, not yet cut adrift from the maternal
apron-string, may be turned to excellent account. There is, or was, a
sentimental ballad entitled, "I'll kiss him for his mother." One might
reverse the sentiment in the case of _Madame Mere_. Of her the dowagers
with daughters to marry sing in chorus, "I'll visit her for her son."
Civility to the mother is access to the son. A sharp tactician sees her
advantage, and works the precious relationship for her own private ends.
It is a mine of invitations of an eligible kind. By aid of it she
springs over barriers which it would otherwise take her years to
surmount, and is lifted into circles which by their unassisted efforts
she and her daughters would never reach. Scheming dowagers are glad to
have her at their balls when there is a chance of young Hopeful
following in her train, and her five o'clock tea is delightful when
there is a young millionaire to sip it with. Deprived of her decoy duck
she would soon lose ground, and be left to push her way in society with
uncomfortably reduced momentum.
Another capital instrument for pushing is a country-house. The mistress
of a fine old hall and a cypher of a husband is apt to take a peculiar
view of the duties of property. One might expect her to be content with
so dignified and enviable a lot, and to pass tranquil days in coddling
the cottagers, patronizing the rector's wife, and impressing her
crotchet on the national school. But no--she is bitten with the
tarantula of social success. She wants to "get on" in society. She must
push as vigorously as any trumpery adventuress in May Fair. A good old
name is dragged into the dirt inseparable from pushing. The family
portraits look disdainfully from their frames, and the ancestral oaks
hang their heads in shame. The company reflects the peculiar ambition of
the hostess. The neighboring squires are conspicuous by their absence.
The local small fry are of course ignored, though to the great lady of
the county, who cuts her in town, she is cringingly obsequious. The
visitors consist mainly of relays of youths, fast, foolish, and
fashionable, with now and then a stray politician or journalist thrown
in to give the party a _soupcon_ of intellect. The principle of
invitation is very simple. No one is asked who will not be of use in
town. Any brainless little fop, any effete dandy, is sure of a welcome,
provided he is known to certain circles and can help her to scramble
into a little more vogue.
One more instance of lateral pushing. A connection with literature may
be very effectively worked. The wives of poets, novelists, and
historians have great facilities for pushing if they care to use them.
Even the sleek parasite who fattens on a literature which he has done
nothing to adorn, and conceals his emptiness under the airs of Sir
Oracle, has been known to hoist his female belongings into the high
levels of society.
The last period in the career of a pushing woman is the triumphant. This
is when she has achieved fashion, and has virtually done pushing. There
is nothing left to push for. The Belgravian citadel has fairly
capitulated. Like Alexander weeping that there are no more worlds to
conquer, she may indulge a transient regret that there are no more
_salons_ left to penetrate. But rest is welcome after so harassing a
struggle. And with rest comes a sensible improvement in her character
and manners. The last stage of a pushing woman is emphatically better
than the first. It is curious to notice what a change for the better is
produced in her by the partial recovery of her self-respect. One might
almost call her a pleasant person. She can at last afford to be civil,
occasionally even good-natured. And this is only natural. In the thick
of a struggle which taxes her energies to the uttermost, there is no
time for courtesies and amenities. The better instincts of her nature
necessarily remain in abeyance. But they reassert themselves, unless she
be irretrievably spoilt, when the struggle is over.
At last she can afford to speak her true thoughts, consult her own
tastes, and receive her own friends, not another's, like a lady to the
manner born. And if this emancipation from a self-imposed thraldom is
not too long deferred, if it finds her at sixty with a relish for gaiety
still unslaked, she may yet be able to enjoy society herself and to
render it enjoyable to others. How many women there are of whom one
says, How pleasant they will be when they have done pushing! or have
pushed enough to allow themselves and others a little rest! One longs
for the time to arrive when they shall have kicked down the ladders by
which they have mounted, and effaced the trace of the rebuffs which they
have encountered. One longs to see them cleansed from the stains with
which their toilsome struggle has bespattered them, enjoying the ease
and tranquillity of the after-push. If "getting on in society" must
continue to be an object of female ambition, would it not be wise to
abate the nuisance by rendering the process somewhat more easy? Might
not some central authority be established to grant diplomas to pushing
women, which would admit them _per saltum_ to those select circles which
they go through so much dirt to reach?
FEMININE AFFECTATIONS.
The old form of feminine affectation used to be that of a die-away fine
lady afflicted with a mysterious malady known by the name of the vapors,
or one, no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was an
etherealized being who had no capacity for homely things, but who passed
her life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most part
expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes that gave more satisfaction
to herself than to her friends. She was probably an Italian scholar, and
could quote Petrarch and Tasso, and did quote them pretty often; she
might even be a Della Cruscan by honorable election, with her own
peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver lyre; any way she was "a
sister of the Muses," and had something to do with Apollo and Minerva,
whom she was sure to call Pallas, as being more poetical. Probably she
had dealings with Diana too, for this kind of woman does not in any age
affect the "sea-born," save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no
fruits; a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being to
her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that the world
can give.
What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or the rosy kisses of
babies' lips compared to the pleasures of being a sister of the Muses,
and one of the beloved of Apollo? The Della Cruscan of former days, or
her modern avatar, will tell you that music and poetry are godlike and
bear the soul away to heaven, but that the nursery is a prison, and
babies no dearer gaolers than any other, and that household duties
disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the empyrean. This was the
Ethereal Being of the last generation--the Blue-stocking, as a poetess
in white satin, with her eyes turned up to heaven, and her hair in
dishevelled cascades about her neck. She dropped her mantle as she
finally departed; and we still have the Della Cruscan essence, if not in
the precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal beings who, as
the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and
poetry, and Halle and Ruskin, and horribly neglect their babies and the
weekly bills.
A favorite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the
prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness, an aggravating
intensity of womanliness, that makes one long for a little roughness,
just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is generally
found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by
which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face, a certain
look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty thought, that is very
effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of
the darkened lids and cavernous orbits, when not antimony, is most
probably internal disease; eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and
loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of nature, and, as all men
are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does quite as well as
truth.
The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They live
before a moral mirror, and pass their time in attitudinizing to what
they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply, nothing
spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how they do
it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action of their
lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel, as
impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give you a glass of
water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and Beauty ministering
to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they bring you a photographic
album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying her casket, a trifle
modernized; if they hold a child in their arms, they are Madonnas, and
look unutterable maternal love, though they never saw the little
creature before, and care for it no more than for the puppy in the mews;
if they do any small personal office, or attempt to do it, making
believe to tie a shoestring, comb out a curl, fasten a button, they are
Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect you to think them both
charitable and graceful. Nine times out of ten they can neither tie a
string nor fasten a button with ordinary deftness, for they have a trick
of using only the ends of their fingers when they do anything with their
hands, as being more graceful, and altogether fitting in better than
would a firmer grasp with the delicate womanliness of the character;
and the less sweet and more commonplace woman who does not attitudinize
morally, and never parades her womanliness, beats them out of the field
for real helpfulness, and is the Charity which the other only plays at
being.
This kind, too, affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It
upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and--still in
theory--between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for the
tyranny. "I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too much as I
liked," said one before she married, who, after she was married, managed
to get entire possession of the domestic reins, and took good care that
her nominal lord should be her practical slave. For, notwithstanding the
sweet submissiveness of her theory, the intensely womanly woman has the
most astonishing knack of getting her own way and imposing her own will
on others. The real tyrant among women is not the one who flounces and
splutters, and declares that nothing shall make her obey, but the
self-mannered, large-eyed, and intensely womanly person, who says that
Griselda is her ideal, and that the whole duty of woman lies in
unquestioning obedience to man.
In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman--the
woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she
flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness of
a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears
unmistakeable shirtfronts, linen collars, vests, and plain ties, like a
man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even
nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and
makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike. If
the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the
mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs
and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She boasts
of how good a marksman she is--she does not call herself markswoman--and
how she can hit right and left, and bring down both birds flying. When
she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass between her first two
fingers, hollows her underlip, and tosses it off, throwing her head well
back--she would disdain the ladylike sip or the closer gesture of
ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter beer, in claret cup
and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of
effervescing wines. She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward,
as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of
carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw;
for charms to her watch-chain she wears a corkscrew, a gimlet, a big
knife, and a small foot-rule; and in entire contrast with the intensely
womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman
when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a
needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of
which is affectation--from first to last affectation; a mere assumption
of virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical
and mental, of a woman.
Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and
orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a personal
insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of
her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the antiseptic
element in society, who makes believe that without her the world and
human nature would go to the dogs, and plunge headlong into the abyss of
sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of
man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavor and patient
seeking after truth, would serve his turn or the world's if she did not
spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the boundary lines
within which she would confine the range of thought and speculation. She
knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation,
and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as
she claims for herself; but it seems to her pretty to assume that woman
generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that
she, of all women, is most specially consecrated.
As an offshoot of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity--the
woman whose mental attitude is self-depreciation, and who poses herself
as a mere nobody when the world is ringing with her praises. "Is it
possible that your Grace has ever heard of _me_?" said one of this class
with prettily affected _naivete_ at a time when all England was astir
about her, and when colors and fashions went by her name to make them
take with the public at large. No one knew better than the fair
_ingenue_ in question how far and wide her fame had spread, but she
thought it looked modest and simple to assume ignorance of her own
value, and to declare that she was but a creeping worm when all the
world knew that she was a soaring butterfly.
There is a certain little kind of affectation very common among pretty
women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are pretty,
and not recognising the effect of their beauty on men. Take a woman with
bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape, and fringed with
long lashes that distract you to look at; the creature knows that her
eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire burns and that ice
melts; she knows the effect of that trick she has with them--the sudden
uplifting of the heavy lid, and the swift, full gaze that she gives
right into a man's eyes. She has practiced it often in the glass, and
knows to a mathematical nicety the exact height to which the lid must be
raised, and the exact fixity of the gaze. She knows the whole meaning of
the look, and the stirring of men's blood that it creates; but if you
speak to her of the effect of her trick, she puts on an air of extremest
innocence, and protests her entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may
say or mean: and if you press her hard she will look at you in the same
way for your own benefit, and deny at the very moment of offence.
Various other tricks has she with those bewildering eyes of hers--each
more perilous than the other to men's peace; and all unsparingly
employed, no matter what the result. For this is the woman who flirts to
the extreme limits, then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing.
Step by step she has led you on, with looks and smiles, and pretty
doubtful phrases always susceptible of two meanings, the one for the ear
by mere word, the other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and
manner, which are intangible; step by step she has drawn you deeper and
deeper into the maze where she has gone before as your decoy; then, when
she has you safe, she raises her eyes for the last time, complains that
you have mistaken her cruelly, and that she has meant nothing more than
any one else might mean; and what can she do to repair her mistake? Love
you? marry you? No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his
thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had not seen this
all along, and that you should have so misunderstood her! Besides, what
is there about her that you or any one should love?
Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own
harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when they
practice their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous
and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The very fact
that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his perception
until too late. That men love though they suffer is the woman's triumph,
guilt, and condonation; and so long as the trick succeeds it will be
practiced.
Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and
familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young
girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a year
or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate, declare
they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be natural. This
form of affectation, once begun, continues through life, being too
convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of
their teens assume a tone and ways that would about befit middle age
counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous even then
if the "Indian summer" was specially bright and warm.
Then there is the affectation pure and simple, which is the mere
affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the
mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude that by consciousness
ceases to be grace, and the thousand little _minauderies_ and coquetries
of the sex known to us all. And there is the affectation which people of
a higher social sphere show when they condescend to those of low estate,
and talk and look as if they were not quite certain of their company,
and scarcely knew if they were Christian or heathen, savage or
civilized. And there is the affectation of the maternal passion with
women who are never by any chance seen with their children, but who
speak of them as if they were never out of their sight; the affectation
of wifely adoration with women who are to be met about the world with
every man of their acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands;
the affectation of asceticism in women who lead a thoroughly
self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political
fervor in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save
Europe from universal revolution.
Go where we will, affectation of being something she is not meets us in
woman, like a ghost we cannot lay or a mist we cannot sweep away. In the
holiest and the most trivial things alike we find it penetrating
everywhere--even in church, and at her prayers, when the pretty
penitent, rising from her lengthy orison, lifts her eyes and looks about
her furtively to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to whom her
picturesque piety has commended itself.
All sorts and patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear
and delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural
and unaffected woman--that is, the woman who is truthful to her core,
and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would dare
to tell a lie.
IDEAL WOMEN.
It is often objected against fault-finders, writers or others, that they
destroy but do not build up, that while industriously blaming errors
they take good care not to praise the counteracting virtues, that in
their zeal against the vermin of which they are seeking to sweep the
house clean they forget the nobler creatures which do the good work of
keeping things sweet and wholesome. But it is impossible to be
continually introducing the saving clause, "all are not so bad as
these." The seven thousand righteous who have not bowed the knee to Baal
are understood to exist in all communities; and, vicious as any special
section may be, there must always be the hidden salt and savor of the
virtuous to keep the whole from falling into utter corruption. This is
specially true of modern women. Certainly, some of them are as
unsatisfactory as any of their kind that have ever appeared on earth
before, but it would be very queer logic to infer, therefore, that all
are bad alike, and that our modern womanhood is as ill off as the Cities
of the Plain which could not be saved for want of the ten just men to
save them.
Happily, we have noble women among us yet; women who believe in
something beside pleasure, and who do their work faithfully, wherever
it may lie; women who can and do sacrifice themselves for love and duty,
and who do not think they were sent into the world simply to run one mad
life-long race for wealth, for dissipation, or for distinction. But the
life of such women is essentially in retirement; and though the lesson
they teach is beautiful, yet its influence is necessarily confined,
because of the narrow sphere of the teacher. When such public occasions
for devotedness as the Crimean war occur, we can in some sort measure
the extent to which the self-sacrifice of women can be carried; but in
general their noblest virtues come out only in the quiet and secresy of
home, and the most heroic lives of patience and well-doing go on in
seclusion, uncheered by sympathy and unrewarded by applause.
Still, it is impossible to write of one absolute womanly ideal--one
single type that shall satisfy every man's fancy; for, naturally, what
would be perfection to one is imperfection to another, according to the
special bent of the individual mind. Thus one man's ideal of womanly
perfection is in beauty, mere physical outside beauty; and not all the
virtues under heaven could warm him into love with red hair or a snub
nose. He is entirely happy if his wife is undeniably the handsomest
woman of his acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when all men admire
and all women envy. But for his own sake rather than for hers. Pleasant
as her loveliness is to look on, it is pleasanter to know that he is the
possessor of it. The "handsomest woman in the room" comes into the same
category as the finest picture or the most thoroughbred horse within his
sphere, and if the degree of pride in his possession is different, the
kind is the same. And so in minor proportions, from the most beautiful
woman of all, to simply beauty as a _sine qua non_, whatever else may be
wanting. One other thing only is as absolute as this beauty, and that is
its undivided possession.
Another man's ideal is a good housekeeper and a careful mother, and he
does not care a rush whether his wife, if she is these, is pretty or
ugly. Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house well, and
brings up the children as they ought to be brought up, has good
principles, is trustworthy, and even-tempered, he is not particular as
to color or form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or a
squint. Given the great foundations of an honorable home, and he will
forego the lath and plaster of personal appearance which will not bear
the wear and tear of years and their troubles. The solid virtues stand.
His balance at the banker's is a fact; his good name and credit with the
tradespeople is a fact; so is the comfort of his home; so are the
health, the morals, the education of his children. All these are the
true realities of life to him; but the beauty which changes to deformity
by the small-pox, which fades under dyspepsia, grows stale by habit, and
is worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is only a skin-deep grace
which he does not value. Perhaps he is right. Certainly, some of the
happiest marriages among one's acquaintances are those where the wife
has not one perceptible physical charm, and where the whole force of her
magnetic value lies in what she is, not in how she looks.
Another man wants a tender, adoring, fair-haired seraph, who will
worship him as a demigod, and accept him as her best revelation of
strength and wisdom. The more dependent she is, the better he will love
her; the less of conscious thought, of active will, of originative power
she has, the greater his regard and tenderness. To be the one sole
teacher and protector of such a gentle little creature seems to him the
most delicious and the best condition of married life; and he holds
Milton's famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting relation
between men and women. The adoring seraph is his ideal; Griselda,
Desdemona, Lucy Ashton, are his highest culminations of womanly grace;
and the qualities which appeal the most powerfully to his generosity are
the patience which will not complain, the gentleness that cannot resent,
and the love which nothing can chill.
Another man wants a cultivated intelligence in his ideal. As an author,
an artist, a student, a statesman, he would like his wife to be able to
help him by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect. He believes
in the sex of minds, and holds only that work complete which has been
created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees how women have
helped on the leaders in troubled times; he knows that almost all great
men have owed something of their greatness to the influence of a mother
or a wife; he remembers how thoughts which had lain dumb in men's
brains for more than half their lifetime suddenly woke up into speech
and activity by the influence of a woman great enough to call them
forth. The adoring seraph would be an encumbrance, and nothing better
than a child upon his hands; and the soul which had to be awakened and
directed by him would run great chance of remaining torpid and inactive
all its days. He has his own life to lead and round off, and so far from
wishing to influence another's, wants to be helped for himself.
Another man cares only for the birth and social position of the woman to
whom he gives his name and affection; to another yellow gold stands
higher than blue blood, and "my wife's father" may have been a
rag-picker, so long as rag-picking had been a sufficiently rich alembic
with a residuum admitting of no kind of doubt. Venus herself without a
dowry would be only a pretty sea-side girl with a Newtown pippin in her
hand; but Miss Kilmansegg would be something worth thinking of, if but
little worth looking at. One man delights in a smart, vivacious little
woman of the irrepressible kind. It makes no difference to him how
petulant she is, how full of fire and fury; the most passionate bursts
of temper simply amuse him, like the anger of a canary-bird, and he
holds it fine fun to watch the small virago in her tantrums, and to set
her going again when he thinks she has been a long enough time in
subsidence. His ideal of woman is an amusing little plaything, with a
great facility for being put up, and a dash of viciousness to give it
piquancy.
Another wants a sweet and holy saint whose patient humility springs
from principle rather than from fear; another likes a blithe-tempered,
healthy girl with no nonsense about her, full of fun and ready for
everything, and is not particular as to the strict order or economy of
the housekeeping, provided only she is at all times willing to be his
pleasant playmate and companion. Another delights in something very
quiet, very silent, very home-staying. One must have first-rate music in
his ideal woman; another unimpeachable taste; a third, strict orders; a
fourth, liberal breadth of nature; and each has his own ideal, not only
of nature but of person--to the exact shade of the hair, the color of
the eyes, and the oval of the face. But all agree in the great
fundamental requirements of truth, and modesty, and love, and
unselfishness; for though it is impossible to write of one womanly ideal
as an absolute, it is very possible to detail the virtues which ought to
belong to all alike.
If this diversity of ideals is true of individuals, it is especially
true of nations, each of which has its own ideal of woman varying
according to what is called the genius of the country. To the Frenchman,
if we are to believe Michelet and the novelists, it is a feverish little
creature, full of nervous energy, but without muscular force; of frail
health and feeble organization; a prey to morbid fancies which she has
no strength to control or to resist; now weeping away her life in the
pain of finding that her husband, a man gross and material because
husband, does not understand her; now sighing over her delicious sins
in the arms of the lover who does; without reasoning faculties, but
with divine intuitions that are as good as revelations; without cool
judgment, but with the light of burning passions that guide her just as
well; thinking by her heart, yet carrying the most refined metaphysics
into her love; subtle; incomprehensible by the coarser brain of man; a
creature born to bewilder and to be misled, to love and to be adored, to
madden men and to be destroyed by them.
It does not much signify that the reality is a shrewd, calculating,
unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen eyes, who for the most part
makes a good practical wife to her common-sense middle-aged husband, who
thinks more of her social position than of her feelings, more of her
children than of her lovers, more of her purse than of her heart, and
whose great object of life is a daily struggle for centimes. It pleases
the French to idealize their eminently practical and worldly-wise women
into this queer compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases
them it need not displease us.
To the German his ideal is of two kinds--one, his Martha, the domestic
broad-faced _Hausmutter_, who cooks good dinners at small cost, and
mends the family linen as religiously as if this were the Eleventh
Commandment especially appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the
poetic culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and butter; the
other, his Mary, his Bettina, full of mind and aesthetics, and
heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes in her
stockings and her shoes down at heel. For what are coarse material
mendings to the aesthetic soul yearning after the infinite, and
worshipping at the feet of the prophet?
In Italy the ideal woman of modern times is the ardent patriot, full of
active energy, or physical force, and dauntless courage.
In Poland it is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized
type, passively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine scorn,
and living in perpetual music and mourning.
In Spain it is a woman beautiful and impassioned, with the slight
drawback of needing a world of looking after, of which the men are
undeniably capable.
In Mohammedan countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dudu,
patient and submissive, always in good humor with her master, economical
in house-living to suit the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire
to suit the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dudu
ever asleep and unoccupied; for, if not allowed to take part in active
outside life, the Eastern's wife or wives have their home duties and
their maternal cares like all other women, and find to their cost that,
if they neglect them unduly, they will have a bad time of it with Ali
Ben Hassan when the question comes of piastres and sequins, and the dogs
of Jews who demand payment, and the pigs of Christians who follow suit.
The American ideal is of two kinds, like the German--the one, the clever
manager, the woman with good executive faculty in the matters of
buckwheat cakes and oyster gumbo, as is needed in a country so poorly
provided with "helps;" the other, the aspiring soul who puts her
aspirations into deeds, and goes out into the world to do battle with
the sins of society as editress, preacher, stump orator, and the like.
It must be rather embarrassing to some men that this special
manifestation of the ideal woman at times advocates miscegenation and
free love; but perhaps we of the narrow old conventional type are not up
to the right mark yet, and have to wait until our own women are
thoroughly emancipated before we can rightly appreciate these questions.
At all events, if this kind of thing pleases the Americans, it is no
more our business to interfere with them than with the French compound;
and if miscegenation and free love seem to them the right manner of
life, let them follow it.
In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes, chameleon-like, to suit
the taste of man; and the great doctrine that her happiness does
somewhat depend on his liking is part of the very foundation of her
existence. According to his will she is bond or free, educated or
ignorant, lax or strict, house-keeping or roving; and though we advocate
neither the bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the principle
that, by the laws which regulate all human communities everywhere, she
is bound to study the wishes of man, and to mould her life in harmony
with his liking. No society can get on in which there is total
independence of sections and members, for society is built up on the
mutual dependence of all its sections and all its members. Hence the
defiant attitudes which women have lately assumed, and their
indifference to the wishes and remonstrances of men, cannot lead to any
good results whatever. It is not the revolt of slaves against their
tyrants--in that we could sympathize--which they have begun, but a
revolt against their duties. And this it is which makes the present
state of things so deplorable. It is the vague restlessness, the fierce
extravagance, the neglect of home, the indolent fine-ladyism, the
passionate love of pleasure which characterise the modern woman, that
saddens men, and destroys in them that respect which their very pride
prompts them to feel. And it is the painful conviction that the ideal
woman of truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has somehow
faded away under the paint and tinsel of this modern reality which makes
us speak out as we have done, in the hope, perhaps a forlorn one, that
if she could be made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she
would, by the very force of natural instinct and social necessity, order
herself in some accordance with the lost ideal, and become again what we
once loved and what we all regret.
WOMAN AND THE WORLD.
This, we are told in a tone of pathetic resignation, is a day of hard
sayings for women. It is, we will venture to add, a day when women have
to meet hard sayings with replies a little less superficial than the
conventional stare of outraged womanhood or the trivial retort on the
follies of men. Grant that woman's censors are as cynical and
hollow-hearted as you will, there can be no doubt that their criticisms
are simply the expression of a general uneasiness, and that that
uneasiness has some ground to go upon. It is possible that observers
across the water may be cynical in denouncing the "magnificent
indecency" of the heroines of New York. It is possible that the
schoolmasters of Berlin may be cynical in calling public opinion to
their aid against the degrading exhibitions of the Prussian capital. It
is possible that the thunders of the Vatican are merely an instance of
Papal cynicism. It is possible that the protest of the Bishop of Orleans
is as hollow-hearted as the protests of censors nearer home. But such a
world-wide outbreak of cynicism without a cause is a somewhat improbable
event, and the improbability is increased when we remark the silent
acquiescence of the women of America and the Continent in the justice of
these censures.
It is only the British mother who ventures to protest. Now, we
Englishmen have always felt a sort of national pride in the British
mother. It has been a part of our patriotic self-satisfaction to pique
ourselves on her icy decorum, on the merciless severity of her virtue.
Colorless, uninteresting, limited as Continental critics pronounced her
to be, we cherished her the more as something specially our own, and
regarded the Channel as a barrier providentially invented for the
isolation of her spotless prudery. It was peculiarly gratifying to
suppose that on the other side of it there were no British homes, no
British maidens, no British mothers. And it must be owned that the
British mother took her cue admirably. She owned, with a sigh of
complacency, that she was not as other women. She shuddered at foreign
morals, and tabooed French novels. She shook all life and individuality
out of her girls as un-English and Continental. She denounced all
aspirations after higher and larger spheres of effort as unfeminine.
Such a type of woman was naturally dull enough, but it fairly came up to
its own standard; and if its respectability was prudery, it still
earned, and had a right to claim, man's respect. The amusing thing is
the persistence in the claim when the type has passed away.
The British spouse has bloomed into the semi-detached wife, with a
husband always conveniently in the distance, and a cicisbeo as
conveniently in the corner. The British mother has died into the faded
matrimonial schemer, contemptuous of younger sons. The innocent simper
of the British maiden has developed into the loud laugh and the horsey
slang of the girl of the season. But maiden and matron are still on one
point faithful to the traditions of their grandmothers, and front all
censorious comers with a shrug of their shoulder-straps and a flutter of
indignant womanhood. And maiden and matron still claim their insular
exemption from the foibles of their sex. The Pope may do what he will
with the women of Italy, and Monseigneur of Orleans may deal stern
justice out to the women of France; Continental immorality is in the
nature of things; but there is something else that is in the nature of
things too, and before the impeccable majesty of British womanhood every
critic must stand abashed.
Unfortunately, we are no sooner awed with the marble silence of our
Hermione than Hermione descends from her pedestal and falls a-talking
like other people. Woman, in a word, protests; and protests are often
very dangerous things to the protesters. Nothing, for instance, can seem
more simple or more effective than the _tu quoque_ retort, and as it is
familiar to feminine disputants, we are favored with it in every
possible form. If the girl of the period is fast and frivolous, is the
young man of the period any better? No sketch can be more telling than
the picture which she is ready to draw of his lounging ways, his
epicurean indolence, his boredom at home, his foppery abroad, the
vacancy of his stare, the inanity of his talk, his incredible conceit,
his life vibrating between the Club and the stable. She hits off with a
charming vivacity the list of his accomplishments--his skill at
flirtation, his matchless ability at croquet, his assiduity over _Bell's
Life_, the cleverness of his book on the Derby. No sensible or
well-informed girl, she tells us, can talk for ten minutes to this
creature without weariness and disgust at his ignorance, his narrowness,
his triviality; no modestly-dressed or decently-mannered girl can win
the slightest share of his attentions. Married, he is as frivolous as
before marriage; he selects the toilette of the _demi-monde_ as an
agreeable topic of domestic conversation, he resents affection and
proclaims home a bore, he grudges the birth of children as an additional
expense, he stunts and degrades the education of his girls, he is the
despot of his household and the dread of his family.
The sketch is powerful enough in its way, but the conclusion which the
fair artist draws is at least an odd one. We prepare ourselves to hear
that woman has resolved to extirpate such a monster as this, or that she
will remain an obstinate vestal till a nobler breed of wooers arises.
What woman owns that she really does is to mould herself as much on the
monster's model as she can. According to her own account, she puts
nature's picture of herself into the hands of this imbecile, invites him
to blur it as he will, and lets him write under the daub "_Ego feci._"
As he cannot talk sense, she stoops to bandy chaff and slang. As he
refuses to be attracted by modesty of dress and manner, she apes the
dress and manner of the _demi-monde_. His indolence, his triviality, his
worldliness become her own. As he finds home a bore, she too plunges
into her round of dissipation; as he objects to children, she declines
to be a mother; as he wishes to get the girls off his hands, she flings
them at the head of the first comer.
Now, if such a defence as this at all adequately represents the facts of
the case, we can only say that the girl of the period must be a far
lower creature than we have ever asserted her to be. A sensible girl
stooping to slang, a modest girl flinging aside modesty, simply to
conquer a fool and a fop, is a satire upon woman which none but a woman
could have invented, and which we must confess to be utterly incredible
to men. But the assumption upon which the whole of this mimetic theory
is based is one well worthy of a little graver consideration.
"Tell me how to improve the youth of France," said Napoleon one day to
Madame de Campan. "Give them good mothers," was the reply. There are
some things which even a Napoleon may be pardoned for feeling a little
puzzled in undertaking, and Madame de Campan would no doubt have added
much to the weight of her reply by a few practical words as to the
machinery requisite for the supply of the article she recommended. But
her request is now the cry of the world. The general uneasiness of which
we have spoken before arises simply from the conviction that woman is
becoming more and more indifferent to her actual post in the social
economy of the world, and the criticisms in which it takes form, whether
grave or gay, could all be summed up in Madame de Campan's request,
"Give us good mothers."
After all protests against limiting the sphere of the sex to a single
function of their existence, public opinion still regards woman
primarily in her relation to the generation to come. If it censures the
sensible girl who stoops to slang, or the modest girl who stoops to
indecency, it is because the sense and the modesty which they abandon is
not theirs to hold or to fling away, but the heritage of the human race.
But this seems to be less and less the feeling of woman herself. For
good or for evil, or, perhaps more truly, for both good and evil, woman
is becoming conscious every day of new powers, and longing for an
independent sphere in which she can exert them. Marriage is aimed at
with a passionate ardor unknown before, not as a means of gratifying
affection, but as a means of securing independence.
To the unmarried girl life is a sheer bondage, and there is no sacrifice
too great to be left untried if it only promises a chance of
deliverance. She learns to despise the sense, the information, the
womanly reserve which fail to attract the deliverer. She has to sell
herself to purchase her freedom; and she will take very strong measures
to secure a purchaser. The fop, the fool, little knows the keen scrutiny
with which the gay creature behind her fan is taking stock of his feeble
preferences, is preparing to play upon his feebler aversions. Pitiful as
he is, it is for him that she arranges her artillery on the
toilette-table, the "little secrets," the powder bloom, the rouge
"precipitated from the damask rose-leaf," the Styrian lotion that gives
"beauty and freshness to the complexion, plumpness to the figure,
clearness and softness to the skin." He has a faint flicker of liking
for brunettes; she lays her triumphant fingers on her "walnut stain,"
and darkens into the favorite tint. He loves plumpness, and her "Sinai
Manna" is at hand to secure _embonpoint_. Belladonna flashes on him from
her eyes, Kohl and antimony deepen the blackness of her eyebrows, "bloom
of roses" blushes from her lips. She stoops to conquer, and it is no
wonder that the fop and the fool go down.
The freedom she covets comes with marriage, but it is a freedom
threatened by a thousand accidents, and threatened, above all, by
maternity. It is of little use to have bowed to slang and
shoulder-straps, if it be only to tie oneself to a cradle. The nursery
stands sadly in the way of the free development of woman; it clips her
social enjoyment, it curtails her bonnet bills. "The slavery of nursing
a child," one fair protester tells us, "only a mother knows." And so she
invents a pretty theory about the damage done to modern constitutions by
our port-drinking forefathers, and ceases to nurse at all. But even this
is only partial independence; she pants for perfect freedom from the
cares of maternity. Her tone becomes the tone of the household, and the
spouse she has won growls over each new arrival. She is quite ready to
welcome the growl. "Nature," a mother informs us, "turns restive after
the birth of two or three children," and mothers turn restive with
nature. "Whatever else you may do," she adds, "you will never persuade
us into liking to have children," and, if we did, we should not greatly
value the conversion. And so woman wins her liberty, and bows her
emphatic reply to the world's appeal, "Give us good mothers," by
declining to be a mother at all.
By the sacrifice of womanliness, by the sacrifice of modesty, by
flattering her wooer's base preferences before marriage, by encouraging
his baser selfishness afterwards, by hunting her husband to the club and
restricting her maternal energies to a couple of infants, woman has at
last bought her freedom. She is no slave to a husband as her mother was,
she is not buried beneath the cares of a family like her grandmother.
She has changed all that, and the old world of home and domestic
tenderness and parental self-sacrifice lies in ruins at her feet. She
has her liberty; what will she do with it? As yet, freedom means simply
more slang, more jewelry, more selfish extravagance, less modesty. As we
meet her on the stairs, as we see the profuse display of her charms, as
we listen to the flippant, vapid chatter, we turn a little sickened from
woman stripped of all that is womanly, and cry to Heaven, as Madame de
Campan cried to the Emperor--"Give us good mothers."
UNEQUAL MARRIAGES.
Acute ladies who concern themselves much with the superficial social
currents of the time are beginning to perceive, or at least to think
that they perceive, a fatal and growing tendency to _mesalliances_ on
the part of men who ought to know better. They complain not merely of
the doting old gentleman who has been a bachelor long enough to lose his
wits, and so marries his cook or his housemaid, nor of the debauched
young simpleton who takes a wife from a casino or the bar of a
night-_cafe_. Actions of this sort are as common at one time as at
another. Old fools and young fools maintain a pretty steady average.
Their silly exploits are the issue, not of the tendencies of the age,
but of their own individual and particular lack of wits. They do not
affect the general direction of social feeling, nor have we any right to
argue up from their preposterous connexions to the influences and
conditions of the society of which they are only the abnormal and
irregular growths. What people mean, when they talk of an increase in
the number of men who marry beneath them, is that men otherwise sensible
and respectable and sober-minded perpetrate the irregularity in
something like cold blood, and with a measure of deliberation. Whether
observers who have formed this opinion are right, or are only
anticipating their own apprehensions and alarms, is difficult to
ascertain. A good deal depends on the accidental range of the observer's
own acquaintances, and still more on their candor or discreet reticence.
Besides, how are we to know how far one generation is worse than
generations which have gone before it? Men are, after due time, forgiven
for this defiance of social usage, and women who were barely presentable
in youth become presentable enough by the time they reach middle age.
People may seem to us to be very equally and justly mated who
five-and-twenty years ago were the town's talk. It is practically
impossible, therefore, to compare the actual number of unequal marriages
in our day with those of a generation back. People may have their ideas,
but verification is not to be had. All we can do is to estimate the
increase in the conditions which are likely to make men find wives in a
rank below their own. If we look at these, there may be a good many
reasons for believing that the apprehensions of the shrewd and alarmed
observers are not without justification.
When a wise man with a living or a name to make, or both, looks for a
wife, he certainly does not desire a person who shall be troublesome and
an impediment to him. He wants a cheerful, sensible, and decently
thrifty person. He probably has no inclination for a bluestocking, nor
for a lady with aggressive views on points of theology, nor for one who
can beat him in political discussion. Strong intellectual power he can
most heartily dispense with. But then, on the other hand, he has no
fancy for sitting day after day at table with a vapid, flippant,
frivolous, empty soul who can neither talk nor listen, who takes no
interest in things herself, and cannot understand why other people
should take interest in them, who is penetrated with feeble little
egoisms. An aggressive woman with opinions about prevenient grace, or
the advantages of female emigration, or the functions of the deaconess,
would be far preferable to this. She would irritate, but she would not
fill the soul with everlasting despair, as the pretty vapid creature
does. To discuss predestination and election over dinner is not nice,
but still less is it nice to have to make talk with a fool, and to be
obliged to answer her according to her folly.
As the education of modern girls of fashion chiefly aims at making them
either very fast or very slow, it is not to be wondered at that men find
it hard to realize their ideals among their equals in position. It is
not merely that so many marriageable young ladies are ignorant. They are
this, but they are more. They are exacting and pretentious, and
uneducated in the worst sense, for they are ignorant how ignorant they
are, or even that they are ignorant at all.
Then there is a still more obvious, palpable, and impressive
circumstance. A man with ordinary means looks with alarm on the too
visible and too unbounded extravagance of the ladies from among whom he
is expected to take a partner. The thought of the apparel, of the
luxuries, of the attendants, of the restless moving about, to which they
have been accustomed, fills him with deep consternation. He might
perhaps deceive himself into thinking that he could get on very well
with an empty-minded woman, but he cannot forget the stern facts of
arithmetic, nor hoodwink himself as to what would be left out of his
income after he had paid for dresses, servants, household charges,
carriages, parties, opera-boxes, traveling, and all the rest.
Besides the flippancy of so many women, and the extravagance of most
women, arising from their inexperience of the trouble with which money
is made and of the importance of keeping it after it has been made,
there is something in the characteristics of modern social intercourse
which makes men of a certain temper intensely anxious to avoid a sort of
marriage which would, among other things, have the effect of committing
them more deeply to this kind of intercourse. Such men shrink with
affright from giving hostages to society for a more faithful compliance
with its most dismal exactions. To them there is nothing more
unendurable than the monotonous round of general hospitalities and
ceremonials, ludicrously misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome
formalities does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to
remember that those who feel it live in a world with other people, and
that a thoroughly social life is the only just and full life.
But there is all the difference between a really social life and a
hollow phantasmic imitation of it. A person may have the pleasantest
possible circle of friends, and may like their society above all things.
This is one thing. But to have to mix much with numbers of thoroughly
indifferent people, and in a superficial, hollow way, is a very
different thing. Of course, men who take life just as it comes, who are
not very sedulous about making the most of it in their own way, and are
quite willing to do all that their neighbors do just because their
neighbors do it, find no annoyance in this. Men cast in another mould
find not only annoyance but absolute misery. They know also that
marriage with a woman who is in the full tide of society means an
infinite augmentation of this round of tiresome and thoroughly useless
ceremonies. Add this consideration to the two other considerations of
elaborate vapidness and unfathomable extravagance, and you have three
tolerably good arguments why a man with large discourse of reason,
looking before and after, should be slow to fasten upon himself bonds
which threaten to prove so leaden.
The faults of the women of his own position, however, are a very poor
reason why he should marry a woman beneath his own position. A man must
be very weak to believe that, because fine ladies are often inane and
extravagant, therefore women who are not fine ladies must be wise,
clever, prudent, and everything else that belongs to the type of
companionable womanhood. The fact of the mistress being a blank does not
prove that the maid would be a prize. It may be wise to avoid the one,
but it is certainly folly to seek the other. Granting that the
housemaid or the cook or the daughter of the coachman is virtuous,
high-minded, refined, thoughtful, thrifty, and everything else that is
desirable under the sun, all will fail to counterbalance the drawbacks
that flow from the first inequality of position.
The misguided husband believes that he is going to live a plain
unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company
with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never
infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The
lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his
motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the
express desire of avoiding visits, yet he no sooner gets what he wished
than his success begins to make him miserable. What he expected to
please him as a relief mortifies him as a slight. Even if he be
unsympathetic enough in nature not to care much for the disapproval of
his fellows, he will rapidly find that his wife is a good deal less of a
philosopher in these points, and that, though he may relish his escape
from the miseries of society, she will vigorously resent her exclusion
from its supposed delights.
Again, from another point of view, he is tolerably sure to find that the
common opinion of society about unequal unions is not so unsound as he
used scornfully to suppose it to be. The vapidity of a polite woman is
bad, but the vapidity of a woman who is not polite is decidedly worse. A
simpering unthinking woman with good manners is decidedly better than
an unthinking woman with imperfect manners; and if polish can spoil
nature among one set of people, certainly among another set nature may
be as much spoilt by lack of polish. It does not follow, from a person
being indifferently well-bred, that therefore she is profoundly wise and
thoughtful and poetic, and capable of estimating the things of this
world at their worth. Boys at college indulge in this too generous
fallacy. For grown-up men there is less excuse. They ought to know that
obscure uneducated women are all the more likely on that account to fall
short of magnanimity, self-control, self-containing composure, than
girls who have grown up with a background of bright and gracious
tradition, however little their education may have done to stimulate
them to make the foreground like it. To have a common past is the first
secret of happy association--a past common in ideas, sentiments, and
growth, if not common in external incidents.
One reason why a cultivated man is wretched with a vapid woman is that
she has not traveled over a yard of that ground of knowledge and feeling
which has in truth made his nature what it is. But a woman in his own
station is more likely to have shared a past of this sort than a woman
of lower station. Mere community of general circumstances and
surrounding does something. The obscure woman taken from inferior place
has not the common past of culture, nor of circumstance either. The
foolish man who has married away from his class trusts that somehow or
other nature will repair this. He assumes, in a real paroxysm of folly,
that obscurity is the fostering condition of a richness of character
which could not be got by culture. He pays the price of his blindness.
Untended nature is more likely to produce weeds than choice fruits, and
the chances in such cases as this are beyond calculation in favor of his
having got a weed--in other words, having wedded himself to a life of
wrangling, gloom, and swift deterioration of character. This result may
not be invariable, but it must be more usual than not.
In the exceptional cases where a man does not repent of an unequal match
of this sort, you will mostly find that the match was unequal only in
externals, and that his character had been a very fit counterpart for
that of a vulgar and uneducated woman before he made her his wife. This
may lead one to think that there is something to be said for the woman
in morganatic marriages. The men who do these things are not always, not
even generally, philosophic men in search of an unsophisticated life,
but unamiable, defiant persons, who only hate society either because it
has failed to appreciate their qualities, or because they cannot be at
the trouble to go through the ordinary amount of polite usage.
HUSBAND-HUNTING.
What we have said in another place about the odium which attaches to
"match-making" naturally applies in a far greater degree to
"husband-hunting." Practically the two words mean much the same thing,
since the successful result of a husband-hunt is of course a match, and
match-making, in the common acceptation of the term, involves a
husband-hunt. This latter fact is somewhat curious. There is no reason
in the nature of things why the word match-making should be associated
only with the pursuit of the unmarried male. On the contrary, the theory
of marriage has always been that it is the woman who has to be hunted
down. It is curious to note under what completely different
circumstances, and occasionally in what grotesque forms, the same theory
has been found all over the world, both in civilized and savage life.
Sometimes the bride is carried away bodily from her home, as if nothing
short of physical force could make a woman quit her maiden state.
Sometimes the panting bridegroom has to run her down--no slight task if
the adorer happens to be stout, and the adored one coquettish and fleet
of foot. In marriage, this custom prevails only, we believe, among the
savages, but visitors to the Crystal Palace may see how modern
civilization has adapted it to courtship in the popular pastime of
kiss-in-the-ring.
We have read of a savage tribe in which the bride is thought no better
than she should be, if, on the day after the wedding, the bridegroom
does not show signs of having been vigorously pinched and scratched.
This custom, again, is perhaps represented in civilized life by the
kissing and struggling which are supposed every Christmas to go on under
the mistletoe. It is not unworthy of remark, as regards these two points
of comparison between civilization and barbarism, that, as the woman
gets more civilized, she seems more disposed to meet her pursuer
halfway. In the game of kiss-in-the-ring, for instance, although the
lady does not run after the gentleman, but, on the contrary, shows her
maiden modesty by giving him as hard a chase as she can, she still
delicately paves the way for osculation by throwing the
pocket-handkerchief. And, in the Christmas fights under the mistletoe
(if we may take Mr. Dickens as an authority), slapping, and even
pinching in moderation, are considered allowable--perhaps we ought to
say proper--on the lady's part; but scratching--serious scratching, we
mean, which would make her admirer's face look next morning as if he had
been taking liberties with a savage bird or a cat--is thought not merely
unnecessary, but unfair.
The difference between civilized and savage woman may perhaps help to
indicate the reason why, now-a-days, match-making should, as a matter of
fact, be associated with husband-hunting in spite of the theory that it
is the woman who has to be hunted, not the man. Popular phraseology has
an awkward trick of making people unconsciously countenance the theories
against which they most vehemently protest. Husband-hunting is a far
more generally obnoxious word than even the much-injured match-making,
simply because it flies in the face of the pet theory which we have
described. But, if the theory really hold good in modern practice, why
should man, not woman, be recognised as the professional match-maker's
victim and legitimate game? Why does not wife-hunting, the word which
this theory entitles us to expect, take its proper place in society?
Heiress-hunting, indeed, is well known, but this can scarcely be
considered a form of wife-hunting, for it is not the woman who is the
object of pursuit, but her money-bags. We have the word heiress-hunting
for the very obvious reason that heiresses are recognised game. The word
husband-hunting exists for the same reason.
Are we to infer from the non-existence, or at any rate the
non-appearance in good society, of the word wife-hunting, that the
practice is anything but common--that, since a hunt necessarily implies
pursuit on one side and flight on the other, a man cannot well be said
to hunt a woman who is either engaged in hunting him, or else only too
ready to meet him halfway? Are we gradually tending towards an advanced
stage of civilization in which woman will be formally recognized as the
pursuer, and man as the pursued? We are not bold enough to take under
our protection a view so glaringly heterodox, but still we think it
only common justice to point out that there are difficult problems in
the present state of society which the view helps materially to solve.
We fear, for instance, there can be no doubt that there is a good deal
of truth in the Belgravian mother's lament that marriage is gradually
ceasing to be considered "the thing" among the young men of the present
day; that girls of good families and even good looks are taking to
sisterhoods, and nursing-institutes, and new-fangled abominations,
simply because there is no one to marry them.
It is not merely that the young men are getting every day rarer; though,
unless there is some system, like Pharaoh's, for putting male infants to
death, what can become of them all is a mystery. India and the colonies
may absorb a good many, though these places also do duty in the
absorption of spinsterhood. But this will not account for the alarming
fact, that in almost every ball-room, no matter whether in the country
or in town, there are usually at least three crinolines to one
tail-coat, and that dancing bachelors are becoming so scarce that it is
a question whether hostesses ought not, for their own peace of mind, to
connive at the introduction of the Oriental nautch. Yet even the
alarming scarcity of marriageable men is not so serious an evil as their
growing disinclination to marry.
With the causes of this disinclination we are not now concerned. Some
attribute it to the increase of luxurious and expensive habits among
bachelors--habits specially fostered by "those hateful clubs;" some to
the "snobbishness" which makes a woman consider it beneath her dignity
to marry into an establishment less stylish than that which it has
perhaps taken her father all his life to secure; some to the
_demi-monde_--an explanation very like the theory that small-pox is
caused by pustules. But, whatever may be the causes of the
disinclination, there can be but little doubt that it exists, and the
worst part of the matter is, that it is found among rich men no less
than among poor. That really poor men should not wish to marry is, even
the Belgravian mother must admit, an admirable arrangement of nature.
But it is too bad that so many men-about-town should seem rich enough
for yachting, or racing, or opera-boxes, or even diamond necklaces--for
anything, in short, but a wife. The fact is, that in the eyes of poor
men a wife is associated chiefly with handsome carriages, showy dresses,
fine furniture, and other forbidden luxuries; and, inasmuch as there is
not one law of association for the rich and another for the poor, this
view spreads, until even rich men consider whether it is not possible to
secure the luxuries without the wife.
Now, since marriage is, on the whole, an institution with which society
cannot very well dispense--at any rate not until some good substitute
has been found for it--it is clear that rich men ought not to be allowed
to treat it in this way. If modern civilization tends to beget a
disinclination to marry, it ought also, on the principle of
compensation, to provide some means for counteracting this tendency, or
keeping it under control. Is the increase of husband-hunting--we ask the
question in a respectful and, we trust, purely philosophical spirit of
inquiry--calculated to supply this great and obvious want? What are its
merits, in this respect, as compared with the old-fashioned theory that
woman should be wooed, not woo? Even the most inveterate hater of
husband-hunting must admit that, so far as the great end of matrimony is
concerned, the two sexes nowadays stand to each other in a most
unnatural relation. It is alike the mission of both to marry, but
whereas women are honorably anxious to fulfill this mission, men, as we
have already seen, are too ready to shirk it. Yet, by a strange
inversion of the usual order of things, to the very sex which evades the
mission is its furtherance and chief control entrusted.
Besides, not only does woman take more kindly to the duty of matrimony
than man--or at least nineteenth-century man--but she has comparatively
nothing else to think about. A dozen occupations are open to him, but
her one object in life, her whole being's end and aim, is to marry.
Surely, if the art of marriage requires cultivation, it ought, like
everything else, to be entrusted to those who can give their whole time
to it, not to those who have so much else to do. Even when a bachelor is
in a position to marry, and not unwilling to make the experiment, he is
still far less fitted for the furtherance of matrimony than a woman. He,
perhaps, meets a nice girl at a ball, is taken with her, and after a
mild flirtation thinks, as he walks home in the moonlight, that she
would make a charming wife. He dreams about her, and next morning at
breakfast, as he pensively eats a pound of steak, resolves that on the
same afternoon, or the next at the very latest, he will contrive an
accidental meeting, or even find some excuse for a call. But then comes
office-work, or the _Times_, or some other distraction, and later on
perhaps a visit from some matter-of-fact friend with an unromantic taste
for "bitter," or a weakness for the Burlington Arcade. One day slips
away, and by the next the image of the evening's idol has waxed
comparatively faint. At least it is not sufficiently vivid to inspire
him with courage enough for a call, or a too suspicious-looking
rencontre. In a week he bows to the image, as it is driven by, as coolly
as if he had never had a thought of making his heart its shrine; and
thus a golden opportunity for bringing together two young people, in
whose auspicious union the whole community has an interest, has been
cruelly thrown away.
How different might the case have been if fashion had allowed the lady
to take the initiative, instead of compelling her to sit idly at home!
She has no office-work, nor _Times_, nor any business but that of
bringing last night's flirtation to a practical issue. Assuming her to
be satisfied as to the eligibility of her partner, there is nothing to
prevent her giving her whole time and attention to his capture. She is
as little likely to throw away any chance of an interview calculated to
help in bringing about this result as he is to neglect an opportunity
for winning the lawn sleeves or silk gown. Marriage is of as much
importance to her as either of these to him. It is, perhaps, not
impossible that the mere notion of a woman's thus taking the initiative
in courtship may to some appear outrageously immodest. But with this
point we have nothing to do, as we have been discussing the theory of
husband-hunting, not with any reference to its modesty, but solely and
exclusively in its connexion with the great question, how marriage is to
be carried on. We put together the three facts that nineteenth-century
civilization makes men indisposed to marry, that it gives women no
object in life but marriage, and yet that it assigns the furtherance of
marriage, which we assume to be an institution deserving of careful
cultivation, not to those whose interest it is to promote it, but to
those who are comparatively averse to it. Modest or immodest,
husband-hunting obviously tends to remedy this misdirection and waste of
force.
We take this to be the right explanation--and we have endeavored to make
it an impartial one--of the charge not uncommonly brought against the
young ladies of the present day, that, as compared with their mothers
and grandmothers, they are rather forward and fast, and that
husband-hunting in their hands, is gradually being developed to an
extent scarcely compatible with the old-fashioned theories about
maidenly modesty and reserve. The change may be considered the effort of
modern civilization to remedy an evil of its own creation. The tide
advances in one direction because it recedes in another. If the men
will not come forward, the women must. It is all very well for satirists
to call this immodest, but even modesty could be more easily dispensed
with than marriage. Besides, without quitting our position as impartial
observers, we may point out that it is only fair to the professor of
husband-hunting to remember that there are two kinds of immodesty, and
that some actions are immodest merely because it is the custom to
consider them so. It would, no doubt, be immodest for a young lady to
ride through Hyde Park in man's fashion. Yet what is there in the nature
of things to make a side-saddle more modest than any other? The Amazons
were positive prudes, and would never have even spoken to man if they
could have contrived to carry on society without him; yet they rode
astraddle. And if fashion could make this practice feminine, why should
it not some day do as much for husband-hunting?
THE PERILS OF "PAYING ATTENTION."
We have elsewhere asserted that the art of match-making requires
cultivation. We are told, however, that, on the contrary, match-making
is so zealously studied and skillfully pursued that it bids fair to be
the great social evil of nineteenth-century civilization. The growing
difficulty of procuring sons-in-law has called forth a corresponding
increase in the skill required for capturing them, just as the wits of
the detective are sharpened to keep pace with the expertness which the
general spread of useful knowledge has conferred upon the thief.
Eligible bachelors complain that scarcity of marrying men has much the
same effect upon the match-making mother as scarcity of food upon the
wolf. It makes her at once more ferocious and more cunning. Her
invitations to croquet-parties and little dinners are so constant and so
pressing that it is scarcely possible for her destined prey to refuse
them all without manifest rudeness, and yet it is equally hard for him
to go without being judiciously manoeuvred into "paying attention" to
the one young lady who has been selected to make him happy for life.
This chivalrous and graceful synonym for courtship in itself speaks
volumes for the serious nature of the risk which he runs. The truly
gallant assumption which underlies it, that an Englishman only "pays
attention" to a woman when he has a solid businesslike offer of marriage
to make her, not only puts a formidable weapon into the hands of the
match-maker, but also leaves her victim without a most effectual means
of protection. The national gallantry towards women upon which a
Frenchman so plumes himself may be, as your true Briton declares, a poor
sort of quality enough; a mere grimace and trick of the lips--not
genuine stuff from the heart; having much the same relation to true
chivalry that his _biere_ has to beer, or his _potage_ to soup. But at
any rate it has this advantage, that it enables him to pay any amount of
flowery compliments to a woman without risk of committing himself, or of
being misunderstood.
If an Englishman asks a young lady after her sore throat, or her invalid
grandmother, and throws into his voice that tone of eager interest or
tender sympathy which a polite Frenchman would assume as a matter of
course, he is at once suspected of matrimonial designs upon her. He is
obliged to be as formal and businesslike in his mode of address as the
lawyer's clerk who added at the end of a too ardent love-letter the
saving clause "without prejudice." We have heard of a young lady who
confided to her bosom friend that she that morning expected a proposal,
and, when closely pressed for her reasons, blushingly confessed that the
night before a gentleman had twice asked her whether she was fond of
poetry, and four times whether she would like to go into the
refreshment-room.
We do not mean to say that this tendency to look upon every "attention"
as a preliminary step to an offer is entirely, or even principally, due
to British want of gallantry. Our national theory of courtship and
marriage has probably much more to do with it. We say "theory"
advisedly, for our practice approaches every day nearer to that of the
Continental nations whose mercenary view of the holy estate of matrimony
we righteously abjure. Our system is, in fact, gradually becoming a
clumsy compromise between the _mariage de convenance_ and the _mariage
d'amour_, with most of the disadvantages, and very few of the
advantages, of either. Theoretically, English girls are allowed to marry
for love, and to choose whichever they like best of all the admiring
swains whom they fascinate at croquet-parties or balls. Practically, the
majority marry for an establishment, and only flirt for love. They leave
the school-room, no doubt, with an unimpeachably romantic conception of
a youthful bridegroom who combines good looks, great intellect, and
fervent piety with a modest four thousand a year, paid quarterly.
But they are not very long in finding out that the men whom they like
best, as being about their own age or still young enough to sympathise
with their tastes and enter heartily into all their notions of fun, are
rarely such as are pronounced by parents and guardians to be eligible;
and so, after one or two attacks, more or less serious, of love-fever,
they tranquilly look out for an admirer who can place the proper number
of servants and horses at their disposal, while they in return
magnanimously decline to make discourteously minute inquiries as to the
condition of his hair or teeth. A marriage made in this spirit, even
where no pressure is put upon the young lady by parents or friends, and
she is allowed full liberty of action, is open to all the charges
ordinarily brought against the Continental _mariage de convenance_. Yet,
on the other hand, it has not the advantage of being formally arranged
beforehand by a couple of elderly people, who are in no hurry, and who
have seen enough of the world to know thoroughly what they are about;
nor, we may add, does it usually take place in time to avert some one or
more of those troublesome flirtations with handsome, but penniless,
ball-room heroes which are not always calculated to improve either
temper or character.
Still, whatever our practice may be, we nevertheless do homage to the
theory that, in this favored country, young ladies choose whatever
husbands they like best, and marry for love; and although this theory is
in some respects a serious obstacle to marriage, and often stands
cruelly in the way of people with weak nerves, it places a powerful
weapon in the hands of the dauntless and determined match-maker. If
young people are to marry for love, they must obviously have every
facility afforded them for meeting and fascinating each other. It is
this consideration which reconciles the philosopher to some of our least
entertaining entertainments, although, at the same time, it makes so
much of our hospitality an organized hypocrisy.
It is, indeed, a hard fate to be obliged to leave your after-dinner
cigar and George Eliot's last novel in order to drive four miles through
wind and snow to a party which your hostess has given, not because she
has good fare, or good music, or agreeable guests, or anything, in
short, really calculated to amuse you, but simply and solely because she
has a tribe of daughters who somehow must be disposed of. Yet even a man
of the Sir Cornewall Lewis stamp, who thinks that this world would be a
very tolerable place but for its amusements, may forgive her when he
reflects that business, not pleasure, is at the bottom of the
invitation. If marriage is to be kept up, we must either abandon our
theory that young ladies are allowed to choose husbands for themselves,
or we must give them every possible facility for exercising the choice.
Bachelors must be dragged, on every available pretext, and without the
slightest reference to the nominal ends of amusement or hospitality,
from the novel or cigar, and made to run the gauntlet of female charms.
From the Sir Cornewall Lewis point of view, with which nearly all
Englishmen over thirty more or less sympathise, it is the only sound
defence of many of our so-called entertainments that they are virtually
daughter-shows--genteel auctions, without which a sufficiently brisk
trade in matrimony could not possibly be carried on. The consciousness
of this is doubtless in one way somewhat of an obstacle to flirtation,
and gives the frisky matron a cruel advantage over her unmarried rival.
A man must have oak and triple brass round his heart who can flirt
perfectly at his ease when he knows that his "attentions" are not
merely watched by vigilant chaperons, but are actually reduced to a
matter of numerical calculation--that a certain number of dances, or
calls, or polite speeches will justify a stern father or big brother in
asking his "intentions."
This application of arithmetic is, in some respects, as dangerous to
courtship as to the Pentateuch. But, nevertheless, it gives the clever
and courageous match-maker an advantage of which the eligible bachelor
complains that she makes the most pitiless use. He finds himself
manoeuvred into "paying the attentions" which society considers the
usual prelude to a marriage, with a dexterity which it is all but
impossible to evade. The lady is played into his hands with much the
same sort of skill that a conjuror exhibits in forcing a card. There are
perhaps a number of other ladies present, in promiscuous flirtation with
whom he sees, at first glance, an obvious means of escape. But this hope
speedily turns out a delusion. One lady is vigilantly guarded by a
jealous betrothed; a second is a poor relation, or humble friend, who
knows that she would never get another invitation to the house if she
once interfered with her patron's plans; a third is too plain to be
approached on any ordinary calculation of probabilities; a fourth is
hopelessly dull; the rest are married, and if not actually themselves in
the conspiracy--which, however, is as likely as not--are still carefully
chosen for their freedom from the flirting propensities of the frisky
matron. The destined victim finds, in short, that he must either
deliberately resign himself to be bored to death, or boldly face the
peril in store for him, and take his chance of evading or breaking the
net. Nine men out of ten naturally choose the latter alternative, too
often in that presumptuous spirit of self-confidence which is the
match-maker's best ally.
A bachelor is perhaps never in so great danger of being caught as when
he has come to the conclusion that he sees perfectly through the
mother's little game and merely means to amuse himself by carrying on a
strictly guarded flirtation with the daughter. We mean, of course, on
the assumption that the daughter is either a pretty or clever girl, with
whom any sort of flirtation is in itself perilous. His danger is all the
greater if it happens--and it is only fair to young-ladydom to admit
that it often does happen--that the daughter has sufficient spirit and
self-respect to repudiate all share in the maternal plot. Many a man has
been half surprised, half piqued, into serious courtship by finding
himself vigorously snubbed and rebuffed where he had been led to imagine
that his slightest advances would be only too eagerly received. But, in
any case, the match-maker knows that, if she can only bring the two
people whom she wishes to marry sufficiently often into each other's
society, the battle is half won. According to Lord Lytton, whom every
one will admit to be an authority on the philosophy of flirtation,
"proximity is the soul of love." And eligible bachelors complain that it
becomes every day harder to avoid this perilous proximity, and the duty
of "paying attention" which it implies, without being positively rude.
We have not much consolation to offer the sufferers who prefer this
complaint. As regards our own statement that the art of match-making
requires cultivation, we did not mean by it to imply that match-making
is not vigorously carried on. So long as there are mothers left with
daughters to be married, so long will match-making continue to be
pursued; and it must obviously be pursued all the more energetically to
keep pace with the growing disinclination of bachelors among the upper
and middle classes to face the responsibilities of married life. We
meant that match-making does not receive the sort of cultivation which
it seems to us fairly to deserve, when we consider the paramount
importance of the object which it at least professes to have in view,
and the delicate nature of the instruments and experiments with which it
is concerned.
We have not yet mustered up courage for the attempt to show what should
be its proper cultivation; but we may safely say that so long as it is
left in the hands of those who are influenced by merely mercenary or
interested motives, and who watch the "attentions" of a bachelor, not in
the spirit of a philosopher or a philanthropist, but in that of a
Belgravian mother, it cannot be cultivated as a fine art. It can only be
rescued from the unmerited odium into which it has fallen by being taken
under the patronage of those who are in a position to practice it on
purely artistic and disinterested grounds. In their hands, the now
perilous process of "paying attention" would be studied and criticized
in a new spirit. It might still, indeed, be treated arithmetically, as
perhaps the most promising way of reducing it to the precision and
certainty of an exact science. But still the problem would be to
determine, not what is the least possible number of dances, calls, or
compliments which may justify the intervention of a big brother or heavy
father, but what number warrants the assumption that the flirtation has
passed out of the frivolous into the serious stage. Three dances, for
instance, may expose a man to being asked what are his "intentions,"
where six dances need not imply that he really has any. The mercenary
match-maker considers only the first point; our ideal match-maker would
lay far more stress upon the second. But still, in any case, this
growing tendency to treat the practice of "paying attention" in the
spirit of exact science offers at least one ray of hope to those who
complain that, do what they will, they cannot escape having to pay this
dangerous tribute. The tendency must sooner or later bear fruit in a
generally recognised code of courtship (whether written or unwritten
does not much matter), prescribing the precise number and character of
the "attentions"--in their adaptation to dancing, croquet-playing,
cracker-pulling, and other conventional pretexts for flirtation--which
virtually amount to an offer of marriage. This scheme, we may mention,
is not wholly imaginary. There is somewhere or other a stratum of
English society in which such a code already exists. At least we have
seen a book of etiquette in which, among similar ordinances, it was laid
down that to hand anything--say a flower or a muffin--to a lady with
the left hand was equivalent to a proposal. The general introduction of
a system of this kind, although it might shorten the lives of timid or
forgetful men, would obviously confer an unspeakable boon upon the
majority of the match-maker's present victims. They would not only know
exactly how far to go with safety, but also how at once to recede. To
offer, for instance, two pieces of muffin firmly and decidedly with the
right hand would probably make up for offering one flower with the left,
at least if there were no guardian or chaperon on the spot to take
instant advantage of the first overture. But it would now perhaps be
premature to enter into the details of a system which it may take a
generation or so more of match-making to introduce.
WOMEN'S HEROINES.
A vigorous and pertinacious effort has of late years been made to
persuade mankind that beauty in women is a matter of very little moment.
As long as literature was more or less a man's vocation, an opposite
tendency prevailed; and a successful novelist would as soon have thought
of flying as of driving a team of ugly heroines through three volumes.
The rapid and portentous increase of authoresses changed the current of
affairs. As a rule, authoresses do not care much about lovely women; and
they must naturally despise the miserable masculine weakness which is
led captive by a pretty face, even if it be only upon paper. They can
have no patience with such feebleness, and it may well seem to them to
be a high and important mission to help to put it down.
It became, accordingly, the fashion at one time among the feminine
writers of fiction to make all their fascinating heroines plain girls
with plenty of soul, and to show, by a series of thrilling love
adventures, how completely in the long run the plain girls had the best
of it. There is a regular type of ideal young lady in women's novels, to
which we have at last become accustomed. She is not at all a perfect
beauty. Her features are not as finely chiseled as a Greek statue; she
is taller, we are invariably told, than the model height, her nose is
_retrousse_; and "in some lights" an unfavorable critic might affirm
that her hair was positively tawny. But there is a well of feeling in
her big brown eyes, which, when united to genius, invariably bowls over
the hero of the book. And the passion she excites is of that stirring
kind which eclipses all others.
Through the first two volumes the predestined lover flirts with the
beauties who despise her, dances with them under her eye, and wears
their colors in her presence. But at the end of the third an expressive
glance tells her that all is right, and that big eyes and a big soul
have won the race in a canter. Jane Eyre was perhaps the first
triumphant success of this particular school of art. And Jane Eyre
certainly opened the door to a long train of imitators. For many years
every woman's novel had got in it some dear and noble creature,
generally underrated, and as often as not in embarrassed circumstances,
who used to capture her husband by sheer force of genius, and by
pretending not to notice him when he came into the room. Some pleasant
womanly enthusiasts even went further, and invented heroines with
tangled hair and inky fingers. We do not feel perfectly certain that
Miss Yonge, for instance, has not married her inky Minervas to nicer and
more pious husbands, as a rule, than her uninky ones. The advantage of
the view that ugly heroines are the most charming is obvious, if only
the world could be brought to adopt it. It is a well-meant protest in
favor of what may be called, in these days of political excitement, the
"rights" of plain girls. It is very hard to think that a few more
freckles or a quarter of an inch of extra chin should make all the
difference in life to women, and those of them who are intellectually
fitted to play a shining part in society or literature may be excused
for rebelling against the masculine heresy of believing in beauty only.
Whenever such women write, the constant moral they preach to us is that
beauty is a delusion and a snare. This is the moral of Hetty in _Adam
Bede_, and it is in the unsympathetic and cold way in which Hetty is
described that one catches glimpses of the sex of the consummate author
of the story. She is quite alive to Hetty's plump arms and pretty
cheeks. She likes to pat her and watch her, as if Hetty were a cat, or
some other sleek and supple animal. But we feel that the writer of _Adam
Bede_ is eyeing Hetty all over from the beginning to the end, and
considering in herself the while what fools men are. It would be unjust
and untrue to say that George Eliot in all her works does not do ample
justice, in a noble and generous way, to the power of female beauty. The
heroines of _Romola_ and _Felix Holt_ prove distinctly that she does.
But one may fairly doubt whether a man could have painted Hetty. When
one sees the picture, one understands its truth; but men who draw pretty
faces usually do so with more enthusiasm.
A similar sort of protest may be found lurking in a great many women's
novels against the popular opinion that man is the more powerful animal,
and that a wife is at best a domestic appanage of the husband.
Authoresses are never weary of attempts to set this right. They like to
prove, what is continually true, that feminine charms are the lever that
moves the world, and that the ideal woman keeps her husband and all
about her straight. In religious novels woman's task is to exercise the
happiest influence on the man's theological opinions. Owing to the
errors he has imbibed from the study of a false and shallow philosophy,
he sees no good in going to church twice on Sundays, or feels that he
cannot heartily adopt all the expressions in the Athanasian creed. It is
the heroine's mission to cure this mental malady; to point out to him,
from the impartial point of view of those who have never committed the
folly of studying Kant or Hegel, how thoroughly superficial Kant and
Hegel are; and to remind him by moonlight, and in the course of
spiritual flirtation on a balcony, of the unutterable truths in theology
which only a woman can naturally discern. We are far from wishing to
intimate that there is not a good deal of usefulness in such feminine
points of view. The _argumentum ad sexum_, if not a logical, is often no
doubt a practical one, and women are right to employ it whenever they
can make it tell. And as it would be impossible to develop it to any
considerable extent in a dry controversial work, authoresses have no
other place to work it in except in a romance. What they do for religion
in pious novels, they do for other things in productions of a more
strictly secular kind.
There is, for instance, a popular and prevalent fallacy that women ought
to be submissive to, and governed by, their lords and masters. In
feminine fiction we see a very wholesome reaction against this mistaken
supposition. The hero of the female tale is often a poor, frivolous,
easily led person. When he can escape from his wife's eye, he speculates
heavily on Stock Exchange, goes in under the influence of evil advisers
for any sort of polite swindling, and forgets, or is ill-tempered
towards, the inestimable treasure he has at home. On such occasions the
heroine of the feminine novel shines out in all her majesty. She is kind
and patient to her husband's faults, except that when he is more than
usually idiotic her eyes flash, and her nostrils dilate with a sort of
grand scorn, while her knowledge of life and business is displayed at
critical moments to save him from ruin. When every one else deserts him,
she takes a cab into the city, and employs some clever friend, who has
always been hopelessly in love with her--and for whom she entertains,
unknown to her husband, a Platonic brotherly regard--to intervene in the
nick of time, and to arrest her husband's fall.
In a story called _Sowing the Wind_, which has recently been published,
the authoress (for we assume, in spite of the ambiguous assertion on the
title-page, that the pen which wrote it was not really a man's) goes to
very great lengths. The hero, St. John Aylott, is always snubbing and
lecturing Isola, whom he married when she was half a child, and whom he
treats as a child long after she has become a great and glorious woman.
He administers the doctrine of conjugal authority to her in season and
out of season, and his object is to convert her into a loving feminine
slave. Against this revolting theory her nature rebels. Though she
preserves her wifely attachment to a man whom she has once thought
worthy of better things, her respect dies away, and at last she openly
defies him when he wants her, in contravention of her plain duty, not to
adopt as her son a deserted orphan-boy. At this point her character
stands out in noble contrast to his. She does adopt the boy, and brings
him to live with her in spite of all; and when St. John is unnaturally
peevish at its childish squalling, Isola bears his fretful
animadversions with a patient dignity that touches the hearts of all
about her.
Any husband who can go on preaching about conjugal obedience through
three volumes to a splendid creature who is his wife, must have
something wrong about his mind. And something wrong about St. John's
mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is
the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last
St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged--a fate which is
partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual
indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It
is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives
so plainly or so practically put before us, but when it is put before
us, we recognize the service that may be conferred on literature and
society by lady authors. To assert the great cause of the independence
of the female sex is one of the ends of feminine fiction, just as the
assertion of the rights of plain girls is another. Authoresses do not
ask for what Mr. Mill wishes them to have--a vote for the borough, or
perhaps a seat in Parliament. They do ask that young women should have a
fair matrimonial chance, independently of such trivial considerations as
good looks, and that after marriage they should have the right to
despise their husbands whenever duty and common sense tell them it is
proper to do so.
The odd thing is that the heroines of whom authoresses are so fond in
novels, are not the heroines whom other women like in real life. Even
the popular authoresses of the day, who are always producing some lovely
pantheress in their stories, and making her achieve an endless series of
impossible exploits, would not care much about a lovely pantheress in a
drawing-room or a country-house; and are not perhaps in the habit of
meeting any. The fact is that the vast majority of women who write
novels do not draw upon their observation for their characters so much
as upon their imagination. In some respects this is curious enough, for
when women observe, they observe acutely and to a good deal of purpose.
Those of them, however, who take to the manufacture of fiction have
generally done so because at some portion of their career they have been
thrown back upon themselves. They began perhaps to write when
circumstances made them feel isolated from the rest of their little
world, and in a spirit of sickly concentration upon their own thoughts.
A woman with a turn for literary work who notices that she is distanced,
as far as success or admiration goes, by rivals inferior in mental
capacity to herself, flies eagerly to the society of her own fancies,
and makes her pen her greatest friend. It is the lot of many girls to
pass their childhood or youth in a somewhat monotonous round of domestic
duties, and frequently in a narrow domestic circle, with which, except
from natural affection, they may have no great intellectual sympathy.
The stage of intellectual fever through which able men have passed when
they were young is replaced, in the case of girls of talent, by a stage
of moral morbidity. At first this finds vent in hymns, and it turns in
the end to novels. Few clever young ladies have not written religious
poetry at one period or other of their history, and few that have done
so, stop there without going further. It is a great temptation to
console oneself for the shortcomings of the social life around, by
building up an imaginary picture of social life as it might be, full of
romantic adventures and pleasant conquests.
In manufacturing her heroines, the young recluse author puts on paper
what she would herself like to be, and what she thinks she might be if
only her eyes were bluer, her purse longer, or men more wise and
discerning. In painting the slights offered to her favorite ideal, she
conceives the slights that might possibly be offered to herself, and the
triumphant way in which she would (under somewhat more auspicious
circumstances) delight to live them down and trample them under foot.
The vexations and the annoyances she describes with considerable spirit
and accuracy. The triumph is the representation of her own delicious
dreams. The grand character of the imaginary victim is but a species of
phantom of her ownself, taken, like the German's camel, from the depths
of her own self-consciousness, and projected into cloudland. This is the
reason why authoresses enjoy dressing up a heroine who is ill-used. They
know the sensation of social martyrdom, and it is a gentle sort of
revenge upon the world to publish a novel about an underrated martyr,
whose merits are recognised in the end, either before or after her
decease. They are probably not conscious of the precise work they are
performing. They are not aware that their heroine represents what they
believe they themselves would prove to be under impossible
circumstances, provided they had only golden hair and a wider sphere of
action.
This is but another and a larger phase of a phenomenon which all of us
have become familiar with who have ever had a large acquaintance with
young ladies' poems. They all write about death with a pertinacity that
is positively astounding. It is not that the young people actually want
to die. But they like the idea that their family circle will find out,
when it is too late, all the mistakes and injustices it has committed
towards them, and that this world will perceive that it has been
entertaining unawares an angel, just as the angel has taken flight
upwards to another. The juvenile aspirant commences with revenging her
wrongs in heaven, but it occurs to her before long that she can with
equal facility have them revenged upon earth. Poetry gives way to prose,
and hymnology to fiction. The element of self-consciousness, unknown to
herself, still continues to prevail, and to color the character of the
heroines she turns out. Of course great authoresses shake themselves
free from it. Real genius is independent of sex, and first-rate writers,
whether they are men or women, are not morbidly in love with an
idealized portrait of themselves.
But the poorer or less worthy class of feminine novelists seldom escape
from the fatal influence of egotism. Women's heroines, except in the
case of the best artists, are conceptions borrowed, not from without,
but from within. The consequence is that there is a sameness about them
which becomes at last distasteful. The conception of the injured wife or
the glorified governess is one which was a novelty fifteen or twenty
years ago, while it cannot be said any longer to be lively or
entertaining. As literature has grown to be a woman's occupation, we are
afraid that glorified governesses in fiction will, like the poor, be
always with us, and continue to the end to run their bright course of
universal victory. The most, perhaps, that can be hoped is that they
will in the long run take the wind out of the sails of the glorified
adulteresses and murderesses which at present seem the latest and most
successful efforts of feminine art.
INTERFERENCE.
About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely
personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. Not tyranny, which
is another matter--tyranny being active while interference is negative;
the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of
the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in
view when it takes in hand to force people to do what they do not like
to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply
prevents the exercise of free will for the mere pleasure to be had out
of such prevention. Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than
domestic, but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within
the four walls of home, where also it is felt the most. Very many people
spend their lives in interfering with others--perpetually putting spokes
into wheels with which they have really nothing to do, and thrusting
their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are not in any
way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women
make up the larger number and are the greater sinners.
To be sure there are some men--small, fussy, finicking fellows, with
whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of sex--who are as
troublesome in their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and
most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine
characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them
into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in
any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a
right to control--say, with the wife's low dresses, or the daughter's
too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are
jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and
knowing what men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they
stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this
kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into
another class of motives altogether, and does not belong to the kind of
interference of which we are speaking.
Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other and
with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church
and subscribing to their favorite mission, so much as they tell us what
we are not to do; they do not command so much as they forbid; and, of
all women, wives and daughters are the most given to handling these
check-strings and putting on these drag-chains. Sisters, while young,
are obliged to be less interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of
bickering; for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of
creatures for the most part as loftily snubbed as sisters are; while
mothers are nine times out of ten laid aside for all but sentimental
purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be a boy and has learned to
become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and domestic
interference lies with wives, and they know how to use the prerogative
they assume.
Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest, his wife not liking to
forbid the pleasure entirely, but always grudging it, and interfering
with its exercise. Each segar represents a battle, deepening in
intensity according to the number. The first may have been had with only
a light skirmish perhaps, perhaps a mere threatening of an attack that
passed away without coming to actual onslaught; the second brings up the
artillery; while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets
the biggest guns thundering. She could understand a man smoking one
segar in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to masculine
weakness; but when it comes to more she feels that she is called on to
interfere, and to do her best towards checking such a reprehensible
excess. It does not weaken her position that she knows nothing of what
she is talking about. She never smoked a segar herself, and therefore
does not understand the uses or the abuses of tobacco; but she holds
herself pledged to interfere as soon as she gets the chance, and she
redeems the pledge with energy.
The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to
correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a feeble
digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the gauntlet
of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines or sups jollily with
his friends without being plucked at and reminded that salmon always
disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache
to-morrow; and "My dear! when you know how bad salad is for you!" or,
"How can you eat that horrid pastry! You will be so ill in the night!"
"What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you are! how
wrong!" The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear
stimulants; the husband is a strong large-framed man who can drink deep
without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit is her
husband's measure, and as soon as he has gone beyond the range of her
own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks herself
justified in interfering with his progress. For women cannot be brought
to understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be made to
understand that what is bad for themselves may not be bad for others,
and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge of a man's strength.
A pale chilly woman afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears furs
and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East-Indian
fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father, and sons in
about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must not go out
without an overcoat; they must be sure to take an umbrella if the day is
at all cloudy; they must not walk too far, nor ride too hard, and they
must be sure to be at home by a certain hour. When such women as these
have to do with men just on the boundary-line between the last days of
vigor and the first of old age, they put forward the time of old age by
many years. One sees their men rapidly sink into the softness and
incapacity of senility, when a more bracing life would have kept them
good for half-a-dozen years longer. But women do not care for this. They
like men to be their own companions more than they care for any manly
comradeship among each other; and most women--but not all--would rather
have their husbands manly in a womanly way than in a manly one, as being
more within the compass of their own sympathies and understanding.
The same kind of interference is very common where the husband is a man
of broad humor--one who calls a spade a spade, with no circumlocution
about an agricultural implement. The wife of such a man is generally one
of the ultra-refined kind, according to the odd law of compensation
which regulates so much of human action, and thinks herself obliged to
stand as the enduring censor of her husband's speech. As this is an
example most frequently to be found in middle life, and where there are
children belonging to the establishment, the word of warning is
generally "papa!"--said with reproach or resentment, according to
circumstances--which has, of course, the effect of drawing the attention
of the young people to the paternal breadth of speech, and of fixing
that special breach of decorum on their memory. Sometimes the wife has
sufficient self-restraint not to give the word of warning in public, but
can nurse her displeasure for a more convenient season; but as soon as
they are alone, the miserable man has to pass under the harrow, as only
husbands with wives of a chastising spirit can pass under it, and his
life is made a burden to him because of that unlucky anecdote told with
such verve a few hours ago, and received with such shouts of pleasant
laughter. Perhaps the anecdote was just a trifle doubtful; granted; but
what does the wife take by her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel;
possibly a good-natured _peccavi_ for the sake of being let off the
continuance of the sermon; perhaps a yawn; most certainly not reform. If
the man is a man of free speech and broad humor by nature and liking, he
will remain so to the end; and what the censorship of society leaves
untouched, the interference of a wife will not control.
Children come in for an enormous share of interference, which is not
direction, not discipline, but simple interference for its own sake.
There are mothers who meddle with every expression of individuality in
their young people, quite irrespective of moral tendency, or whether the
occasion is trivial or important. In the fancies, the pleasures, the
minor details of dress in their children, there is always that intruding
maternal finger upsetting the arrangements of the poor little pie as
vigorously as if thrones and altars depended on the result. Not a game
of croquet can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn instead of a pink one,
without maternal interference; so that the bloom is rubbed off every
enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to a kind of goose-step, with mamma
for the drill-sergeant prescribing the inches to be marked. Sisters,
too, do a great deal of this kind of thing among each other; as all
those who are intimate where there are large families of unmarried girls
must have seen. The nudges, the warning looks, the deprecating "Amies!"
and "Oh Lucies!" and "Hush Roses!" by which some seek to act as
household police over the others, are patent to all who use their
senses.
In some houses the younger sisters seem to have been born chiefly as
training grounds for the elders, whereon they may exercise their powers
of interference; and a hard time they have of it. If Emma goes to her
embroidery, Ellen tells her she ought to practice her singing; if Jane
is reading, Mary recommends sewing as a more profitable use of precious
time; if Amy is at her easel, Ada wants to turn her round to the piano.
It is quite the exception where four or five sisters leave each other
free to do as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference
as part of the daily programme. Something of the reluctance to domestic
service so painfully apparent among the better class of working women is
due to this spirit of interference with women. The lady who wrote about
the caps and gowns of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress, down
to the very material of their gloves, was an instance of this spirit.
For, when we come to analyse it, what does it really signify to us how
our servants dress, so long as they are clean and decent, and do not let
their garments damage our goods? Fashion is almost always ridiculous,
and women as a rule care more for dress than they care for anything
else; and if the kitchen apes the parlor, and Phyllis gives as much
thought to her new linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we cannot
wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the depravity
of the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose morality? If
it does not, there is no real ethical reason why my lady should
interfere with poor Phyllis's enjoyment in her ugly vanities, when she
herself will not be interfered with, though press and pulpit both try to
turn her out of her present path into one that all ages have thought the
best for her, and the one divinely appointed. It is a thing that will
not bear reasoning on, being simply a form of the old "who will guard
the guardian?" Who will direct the directress? and to whose interference
will the interferer submit?
There are two causes for this excessive love of interference among
women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which
insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes; the
other, their belief that they are the only saviors of society, and that
without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a certain
extent this belief is true, but surely with restrictions. Because the
clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness of women restrain
men's fiercer passions, and force them to be gentle and considerate,
women are not, therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine life, into
whose hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as they think
fit for the occasion. They would do better to look to their own tackle
before settling so exactly the run of others'; and if ever their desired
time of equality is to come, it must come through mutual independence,
not through womanly interference, and as much liberality and breadth
must be given as is demanded--which, so far as humanity has gone
hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squaring accounts.
Grant that women are the salt of the earth, and the great antiseptic
element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the
verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet by their lives they
evidently think that it is so, and that they are each an
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