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The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays, Vol. 1 (of 2)

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Title: The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays, Vol. 1 (of 2)

Author: E. Lynn Linton


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD, AND OTHER SOCIAL ESSAYS, VOL. 1 (OF 2) ***

    THE
    GIRL OF THE PERIOD
    ETC.

    VOL. I.




    [REPRINTED, _by permission, from the_ SATURDAY REVIEW]




    THE
    GIRL OF THE PERIOD

    AND OTHER
    Social Essays

    BY
    E. LYNN LINTON

    AUTHOR OF 'THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS' 'UNDER WHICH LORD?'
    'THE REBEL OF THE FAMILY' 'IONE' ETC.

    IN TWO VOLUMES

    VOL. I.

[Illustration]

    LONDON
    RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
    Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen

    1883

    [_All rights reserved_]




    LONDON: PRINTED BY
    SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
    AND PARLIAMENT STREET




    Dedicated
    TO
    ALL GOOD GIRLS
    AND
    TRUE WOMEN




PREFACE.


So many false reports followed the appearance of these essays, that I
am grateful to the authorities of the _Saturday Review_ for their
present permission to republish them under my own name, even though
the best of the day has a little gone by, and other forms of folly
have been flying about since these were shot at. The essays hit
sharply enough at the time, and caused some ill-blood. 'The Girl of
the Period' was especially obnoxious to many to whom women were the
Sacred Sex above criticism and beyond rebuke; and I had to pay pretty
smartly in private life, by those who knew, for what they termed a
libel and an untruth. With these passionate repudiators on the one
hand, on the other were some who, trading on the enforced anonymity of
the paper, took spurious credit to themselves for the authorship. I
was twice introduced to the 'Writer of the "Girl of the Period."' The
first time he was a clergyman who had boldly told my friends that he
had written the paper; the second, she was a lady of rank well
known in London society, and to this hour believed by her own circle
to have written this and other of the articles included in the present
collection. I confess that, whether for praise or blame, I am glad to
be able at last to assume the full responsibility of my own work.

In re-reading these papers I am more than ever convinced that I have
struck the right chord of condemnation, and advocated the best virtues
and most valuable characteristics of women. I neither soften nor
retract a line of what I have said. One of the modern phases of
womanhood--hard, unloving, mercenary, ambitious, without domestic
faculty and devoid of healthy natural instincts--is still to me a
pitiable mistake and a grave national disaster. And I think now, as I
thought when I wrote these papers, that a public and professional life
for women is incompatible with the discharge of their highest duties
or the cultivation of their noblest qualities. I think now, as I
thought then, that the sphere of human action is determined by the
fact of sex, and that there does exist both natural limitation and
natural direction. This creed, which summarizes all that I have said
_in extenso_, I repeat with emphasis, and maintain with the conviction
of long years of experience.

    E. LYNN LINTON.

    1883.




CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.


                                PAGE

    THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD         1

    MODERN MOTHERS (I.)           10

    MODERN MOTHERS (II.)          19

    PAYING ONE'S SHOT             27

    WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?         37

    LITTLE WOMEN                  48

    IDEAL WOMEN                   58

    PINCHBECK                     69

    AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD           79

    FEMININE AFFECTATIONS         88

    INTERFERENCE                  99

    THE FASHIONABLE WOMAN        109

    SLEEPING DOGS                119

    BEAUTY AND BRAINS            128

    NYMPHS                       137

    MÉSALLIANCES                 147

    WEAK SISTERS                 157

    PINCHING SHOES               167

    SUPERIOR BEINGS              176

    FEMININE AMENITIES           184

    GRIM FEMALES                 193

    MATURE SIRENS                203

    PUMPKINS                     213

    WIDOWS                       223

    DOLLS                        234

    CHARMING WOMEN               244

    APRON-STRINGS                254

    FINE FEELINGS                264

    SPHINXES                     273

    FLIRTING                     281

    SCRAMBLERS                   290

    FLATTERY                     299

    LA FEMME PASSÉE              309

    SPOILT WOMEN                 317

    DOVECOTS                     325

    BORED HUSBANDS               335




ESSAYS
UPON
SOCIAL SUBJECTS.




_THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD._


Time was when the 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, 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 his interests as identical with her own, 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 pass through; a tender mother, an industrious
housekeeper, 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 childlike 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--a creature whose
sole idea of life is fun; whose sole aim is unbounded luxury; and
whose dress is the chief object of such thought and intellect as
she possesses. Her main endeavour is to outvie her neighbours in the
extravagance of fashion. No matter if, in the time of crinolines, she
sacrifices decency; in the time of trains, cleanliness; in the time of
tied-back skirts, modesty; no matter either, if 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 lives 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 healthily 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 negress or a maniac.

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
_dévergondée en évidence_ 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 she
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 in deed
ought to be inseparable; and that no good girl can afford to appear
bad, under pain 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 honourable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It
leads to slang, bold talk and general 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, 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, fêted, and courted with
a certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the
admiration while she ignores the disdain. They have all that 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 round 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 that 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 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 against 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 the prudent mother--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 wheel 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_, who marry for love, or put
the husband before the banker. But the Girl of the Period 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 readily take her
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 mothers' drawing-rooms, with their sisters and their
sisters' friends, they want something of quite a different flavour.
_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 honour 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 women 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 piquante 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 understand 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.




_MODERN MOTHERS._

I.


No human affection has been so passionately praised as maternal love,
and none is supposed to be so holy or so strong. Even the poetic
aspect of that instinct which inspires the young with their dearest
dreams does not rank so high as this; and neither lover's love nor
conjugal love, neither filial affection nor fraternal, comes near the
sanctity or grandeur of the maternal instinct. But all women are not
equally rich in this great gift; and, to judge by appearances, English
women are at this moment wonderfully poor. It may seem a harsh thing
to say, but it is none the less true:--society has put maternity out
of fashion, and the nursery is nine times out of ten a place of
punishment, not of pleasure, to the modern mother.

Two points connected with this subject are of growing importance at
this present time--the one is the increasing disinclination of married
women to be mothers at all; the other, the large number of those who,
being mothers, will not, or cannot, nurse their own children. In the
mad race after pleasure and excitement now going on through
English society the tender duties of motherhood have become simply
disagreeable restraints, and the old feeling of the blessing attending
the quiver full is exchanged for one the very reverse. With some of
the more intellectual and less instinctive sort, maternity is looked
on as a kind of degradation; and women of this stamp, sensible enough
in everything else, talk impatiently among themselves of the base
necessities laid on them by men and nature, and how hateful to them is
everything connected with their characteristic duties.

This wild revolt against nature, and specially this abhorrence of
maternity, is carried to a still greater extent by American women;
with grave national consequences resulting; but though we have not yet
reached the Transatlantic limit, the state of feminine feeling and
physical condition among ourselves will disastrously affect the future
unless something can be done to bring our women back to a healthier
tone of mind and body. No one can object to women declining marriage
altogether in favour of a voluntary self-devotion to some project or
idea; but, when married, it is a monstrous doctrine to hold that they
are in any way degraded by the consequences, and that natural
functions are less honourable than social excitements. The world can
get on without balls and morning calls; it can get on too without
amateur art and incorrect music; but not without wives and mothers;
and those times in a nation's history when women have been social
ornaments rather than family home-stays have ever been times of
national decadence and of moral failure.

Part of this growing disinclination is due to the enormous expense
incurred now by having children. As women have ceased to take any
active share in their own housekeeping, whether in the kitchen or the
nursery, the consequence is an additional cost for service, which is a
serious item in the yearly accounts. Women who, if they lived a
rational life, could and would nurse their children, now require a
wet-nurse, or the services of an experienced woman who can 'bring up
by hand,' as the phrase is; women who once would have had one
nursemaid now have two; and women who, had they lived a generation
ago, would have had none at all, must in their turn have a wretched
young creature without thought or knowledge, into whose questionable
care they deliver what should be the most sacred obligation and the
most jealously-guarded charge they possess.

It is rare if, in any section of society where hired service can be
had, mothers give more than a superficial personal superintendence to
nursery or schoolroom--a superintendence about as thorough as their
housekeeping, and as efficient. The one set of duties is quite as
unfashionable as the other; and money is held to relieve from the
service of love as entirely as it relieves from the need of labour.
And yet, side by side with this personal relinquishment of natural
duties, has grown up, perhaps as an instinctive compensation, an
amount of expensive management specially remarkable. There never was a
time when children were made of so much individual importance in the
family, yet were in so little direct relation with the mother--never a
time when maternity did so little and social organization so much.
Juvenile parties; the kind of moral obligation apparently felt by all
parents to provide heated and unhealthy amusements for their boys and
girls during the holidays; extravagance in dress, following the same
extravagance among the mothers; the increasing cost of education; the
fuss and turmoil generally made over them--all render children real
burdens in a house where money is not too plentiful, and where every
child that comes is not only an additional mouth to feed and an
additional body to clothe, but a subtractor by just so much from the
family fund of pleasure. Even where there is no lack of money, the
unavoidable restraints of the condition, for at least some months,
more than counterbalance any sentimental delight to be found in
maternity. For, before all other things in life, maternity demands
unselfishness in women; and this is just the one virtue of which women
have least at this present time--just the one reason why motherhood is
at a discount, and children are regarded as inflictions instead of
blessings.

Few middle-class women are content to bring up their children with the
old-fashioned simplicity of former times, and to let them share
and share alike in the family, with only so much difference in their
treatment as is required by their difference of state; fewer still are
willing to take on themselves the labour and care which must come with
children in the easiest-going household, and so to save in the
expenses by their own work. The shabbiest little wife, with her two
financial ends always gaping and never meeting, must have her still
shabbier little drudge to wheel her perambulator, so as to give her an
air of fine-ladyhood and being too good for such work; and the most
indolent housekeeper, whose superintendence of domestic matters takes
her just half an hour, cannot find time to go into the gardens or the
square with nurse and the children, so that she may watch over them
herself and see that they are properly cared for.

In France, where it is the fashion for mother and _bonne_ to be
together both out of doors and at home, at least the children are not
neglected nor ill-treated, as is too often the case with us; and if
they are improperly managed, according to our ideas, the fault is in
the system, not in the want of maternal supervision. Here it is a very
rare case indeed when the mother accompanies the nurse and children;
and those days when she does are nursery gala-days to be talked of and
remembered for weeks after. As the little ones grow older, she may
occasionally take them with her when she visits her more intimate
friends; but this is for her own pleasure, not their good; and
going with them to see that they are properly cared for has nothing to
do with the matter.

It is to be supposed that each mother has a profound belief in her own
nurse, and that when she condemns the neglect and harshness shown to
other children by the servants in charge, she makes a mental
reservation in favour of her own, and is very sure that nothing
improper nor cruel takes place in _her_ nursery. Her children do not
complain; and she always tells them to come to her when anything is
amiss. On which negative evidence she satisfies her soul, and makes
sure that all is right because she is too neglectful to see if
anything is wrong. She does not remember that her children do not
complain because they dare not. Dear and beautiful as all mammas are
to the small fry in the nursery, they are always in a certain sense
Junos sitting on the top of Mount Olympus, making occasional gracious
and benign descents, but practically too far removed for useful
interference; while nurse is an ever-present power, capable of sly
pinches and secret raids, as well as of more open oppression--a power,
therefore, to be propitiated, if only with the grim subservience of a
Yezidi too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose him. Wherefore nurse
is propitiated, failing the protection of the glorified creature just
gone to her grand dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of jewels; and
the first lesson taught the youthful Christian in short frocks or
knickerbockers is not to carry tales down stairs, and by no means
to let mamma know what nurse desires should be kept secret.

A great deal of other evil, beside these sly beginnings of deceit, is
taught in the nursery; a great deal of vulgar thought, of
superstitious fear, of class coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not
be when we think of the early habits and education of the women taken
into the nursery to give the first strong indelible impressions to the
young souls under their care? Many a man with a ruined constitution,
and many a woman with shattered nerves, can trace back the beginning
of their sorrow to those neglected childish days when nurse had it all
her own way because mamma never looked below the surface, and was
satisfied with what was said instead of seeing for herself what was
done. It is an odd state of society which tolerates this transfer of a
mother's holiest and most important duty into the hands of a mere
stranger, hired by the month, and never thoroughly known.

Where the organization of the family is of the patriarchal kind--old
retainers marrying and multiplying about the central home, and
carrying on a warm personal attachment from generation to
generation--this transfer of maternal care has not such bad effects;
but in our present way of life, without love or real relationship
between masters and servants, and where service is rendered for just
so much money down and for nothing more noble, it is a hideous system,
and one that makes the modern mother utterly inexplicable. We
wonder where her mere instincts can be, not to speak of her reason,
her love, her conscience, her pride. Pleasure and self-indulgence have
indeed gained tremendous power, in these later days, when they can
thus break down the force of the strongest law of nature--a law
stronger even than that of self-preservation.

Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral world, and
penetrates every stratum of society; and the folly of extravagant
attire in the drawing-room is reproduced in the nursery. Not content
with bewildering men's minds and emptying their husbands' purses for
the enhancement of their own charms, women do the same by their
children; and the mother who leaves the health and mind and temper and
purity of her offspring in the keeping of a hired nurse takes especial
care of the colour and cut of the frocks and petticoats. And there is
always the same strain after show, and the same endeavour to make a
little look a mickle. The children of five hundred a year must look
like those of a thousand; and those of a thousand must rival the
_tenue_ of little lords and ladies born in the purple; while the
amount of money spent on clothes in the tradesman class is a matter of
real amazement to those let into the secret. Simplicity of diet, too,
is going out with simplicity of dress, with simplicity of habits
generally; and stimulants and concentrated food are now the rule in
the nursery, where they mar as many constitutions as they make. More
than one child of whom we have had personal knowledge has yielded
to disease induced by too stimulating and too heating a diet; but
artificial habits demand corresponding artificiality of food, and so
the candle burns at both ends instead of one.

Again, as for the increasing inability of educated women to nurse
their children, even if desirous of doing so, that also is a bodily
condition brought about by an unwholesome and unnatural state of life.
Late hours, high living, heated blood, and constantly breathing a
vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this alarming physical defect.
But it would be too much to expect that women should forego their
pleasurable indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to their senses,
for the sake of their offspring. They are not famous for looking far
ahead on any matter; but to expect them to look beyond themselves, and
their own present generation, is to expect the great miracle that
never comes.




_MODERN MOTHERS._

II.


There was once a superstition among us that mothers were of use in the
world; that they had their functions and duties, without which society
would not prosper nor hold together; and that much of the well-being
of humanity, present and future, depended on them. Mothers in those
bygone days were by no means effete personages or a worn-out
institution, but living powers exercising a real and pervading
influence; and they were credited with an authority which they did not
scruple to use when required.

One of the functions recognized as specially belonging to them was
that of guarding their young people from the consequences of their own
ignorance--keeping them from dangers both physical and moral until
wise enough to take care of themselves, and supplementing by their own
experience the want of it in their children. Another was that of
preserving the tone of society on a high level, and supplying the
antiseptic element by which the rest was kept pure; as, for example,
insisting that the language used and the subjects discussed
before them were such as should not offend the modesty of virtuous
women; that the people with whom they were required to associate
should be moderately honest and well conducted; and, in short, as
mothers, discountenancing everything in other men and women which they
would not like to see imitated by their own sons and daughters.

This was one of the fond superstitions of an elder time. For
ourselves, we boast of our freedom from superstition in these later
days; of our proud renunciation of restraints and habits which were
deemed beneficial by our forefathers; of our indifference to forms and
hatred of humbug; and of all that tends to fetter what is called
individualism. Hence we have found that we can go on without
safeguards for our young; that society does not want its matrons as
the preservative ingredient for keeping it pure; and that the world is
all the merrier for the loosening of bonds which once it was the duty
of women to draw closer. In fact, mothers have gone out, surviving
only in the form of chaperons.

More or less on the search for her own pleasure--if by any possibility
of artifice she can be taken for less than sixty, still ready for odd
snatches of flirting as she can find occasion--or, with her faculties
concentrated on the chance of winning the rubber by indifferent
play--the chaperon's charge is not a very onerous one; and her
daughters know as well as she does that her presence is a blind rather
than a protection. They are with mamma as a form of speech; but
they are left to themselves as a matter of fact. Anyone who is in the
confidence of young people of either sex knows a little of what goes
on in the dark corners and on the steps of the stairs--a favourite
anchorage for the loosely chaperoned in private houses where two
hundred are invited and only a hundred can find room. But then the
girls are 'with mamma,' and the young men are contented souls who take
what they can get without making wry faces. Mamma, occupied in her own
well-seasoned coquetries, or absorbed in the chances of her deep
'finesse' and the winning trick, lets the girls take care of
themselves, and would think it an intolerable impertinence should a
friend hint to her that her place of chaperon included vigilant
personal guardianship, and that she would do better to keep her
daughters in her own charge than leave them to themselves.

It is all very well for the advocates of youthful innocence to affect
to resent the slur supposed to be cast on girlhood by the advocacy of
this closer guardianship; or for those who do not know the world to
make their ignorance the measure of another's knowledge, and to deny
what they have not proved for themselves. Those who do know the world
know what they say when they deprecate the excessive freedom which is
too often granted to unmarried girls; and their warning is fully
justified by experience when they call mothers back to their duty
of stricter watchfulness. If indeed the young are capable of
self-protection, then we grant with them that mothers are a
mistake:--Let them abdicate without more ado. If license is more
desirable than modesty, and liberty better than reticence, the girls
may as well be left, as practically they are already, free from the
mother's guardianship; but if we have a doubt that way, we may as well
give it the benefit of consideration, and think a little on the
subject before going further on the present line.

From the first the mother, in the well-to-do classes, acts too much
the part of the hen ostrich with her eggs. She trusts to the kindly
influences of external circumstances rather than to her own care to
make the hatching successful. Nurses, governesses, schools, in turn
relieve her of the irksome duties of maternity. She sees her little
ones at their stated hour, and for the other twenty-three leaves them
to receive their first indelible impress from a class which she is
never tired of disparaging.

As the children grow older the women by whom they are moulded become
higher in the social and intellectual scale, but they are no more than
before subordinated to the mother's personal supervision. She, for her
part, cares only that her girls shall be taught the correct shibboleth
of their station; and for the rest, if she thinks at all, she cradles
herself in a generous trust in the goodness of human nature, or the
incorruptibility of her brood beyond that of any other woman's brood.
When they come under her own immediate hand, 'finished' and ready
to be introduced, she knows about as much of them as she knows of her
neighbours' girls in the next square; and in nine cases out of ten the
sole duties towards them which are undertaken by her are shirked when
possible, as a _corvée_ which she is too wise to bear unnecessarily.
When she can, she shuffles them off on some kind neighbourly hands,
and lets her daughters 'go about' with the first person who offers,
glad to have a little breathing time on her own side, and with always
that generous trust in providence and vicarious protection which has
marked her maternal career throughout.

In the lower half of the middle class the liberty allowed to young
girls grows yearly more and more unchecked. They walk alone, travel
alone, visit alone; and the gravest evils have been known to arise
from the habit which modern mothers have of sending their daughters of
sixteen and upwards unaccompanied in London to colleges and classes.
Mamma has grown stout and lazy, and has always some important matter
on hand that keeps her at home, half asleep in the easy-chair, while
the girls go to and fro, and take the exercise befitting their
youthful energies. Of course no harm can befall them. They are _her_
daughters, and the warnings given by the keener-eyed, who have had
experience, are mere inventions of the enemy and slanders against the
young. So they parade the streets, dressed in the most startling and
meretricious costumes of the period; and that fatal doctrine of
self-protection counts its victims by the score as the consequence.

The world is fond of throwing the blame of any misfortune that may
arise, now on the girl, now on the man concerned; but in honest fact
that blame really belongs to the mothers who let their daughters run
about the world without guide or guard. A work was given to them by
nature and love to do which they have neglected, a duty which they
have discarded. Whoever chooses may chaperon, accompany, mould their
daughters, so long as they are freed from the trouble; and their
dependence on the natural virtue of humanity and the beneficence of
circumstance runs exactly parallel with their own indolence and
neglect.

In preserving the tone of society pure the modern mother is as far
removed from the former ideal as she is in the duty of taking care of
her girls. Too often she is found making herself prominent in support
of the most objectionable movements; or, when doubtful questions are
discussed in mixed society, she forgets that regard for the purity of
her daughters should keep her silent, even if her own self-respect
were too weak to restrain her. When the conscienceless world, living
without a higher aim than that of success and what is known by getting
on, condones all kinds of moral obliquity for the sake of financial
prosperity and social position, do we find that, as a rule, mothers
and matrons protest against opening their houses to this gilded
rascality? If they did--if they made demerit and not poverty the
cause of exclusion, virtue and not success the title to
reception--there would be some check to the corruption which is so
insolently rampant now.

Women have this power in their own hands, more especially those women
who are mothers. If they would only set themselves to check the
inclination for loose talk and doubtful discussions which is
characteristic of the present moment, they could put an end to it
without delay. So also they might stop in less than a year the torrent
of slang with which Young England floods its daily speech; and by
setting themselves against the paint and dye and meretricious make-up
generally of the modern girl, they might bring next quarter's fashions
back to modesty and simplicity.

Women are apt to murmur at their lot as one without influence,
variety, stirring purpose, space for action. But it is, on the
contrary, a lot full of dignity and importance if properly regarded
and fitly undertaken. If they do not lead armies, they make the
characters of the men who lead and are led. If they are not State
Ministers nor Parliamentary orators, they raise by their nobleness or
degrade by their want of delicacy and refinement the souls and minds
of the men who are. If they are not in the throng and press of active
life, they can cheer others on to high aims, or basely reward the
baser methods of existence. As mothers they are the artificers who
give the initial touch that lasts for life; and as women they
complete what the mother began. Society is moulded mainly by them,
and they bring up their daughters on their own pattern.

It is surely weak and silly then to blame society for its ignoble
tone, or the young for their disorders. All men want the corrective
influence of social opinion, and it is chiefly women who create that
opinion. Youth, too, will ever be disorderly if it gets the chance,
and the race has not yet been born that carries old heads on young
shoulders. It is for the mothers to supplement by their own wisdom the
gaps left by the inexperience and ignorance of youth; it is for the
mothers to guide aright the steps that are apt, without that guidance,
to run astray, and to guard against passions, emotions, desires,
which, if left to themselves, bring only evil and disaster, but which,
guarded and directed, may be turned to the best ends. For ourselves,
we deeply regret to see the rapid extinction of motherhood in its best
sense, and decline to accept this modern loose-handed chaperon age as
its worthy substitute. We repudiate the plea of the insubordination of
the young so often put forward in defence of the new state of things,
for it is simply nonsense. The young are what the mothers make them,
just as society is what the matrons allow it to be; and if these
mothers and matrons did their duty, we should hear no more of the
wilfulness of the one or the shameless vagaries of the other. The
remedy for each lies in their own hands only.




_PAYING ONE'S SHOT._


It would save much useless striving and needless disappointment if the
necessity of paying one's shot were honestly accepted as absolute--if
it were understood, once for all, that society, like other
manifestations of humanity, is managed on the principle of exchange
and barter, and equivalents demanded for value received. The
benevolence which gives out of its own impulse, with no hope of reward
save in the well-being of the recipient, has no place in the
drawing-room code of morals. We may keep a useless creature from
starving at the cost of so much of our substance _per diem_, for the
sole remuneration of thanks and the consciousness of an equivocal act
of charity; but who among us opens his doors, or gives a seat at his
table, to drawing-room paupers unable to pay their shot? who cares to
cultivate the acquaintance of men or women who are unable to make him
any return? It is not necessary that this return should be in kind--a
dinner for a dinner, a champagne supper for a champagne supper, and
balls with waxed floors for balls with stretched linen; but shot
must be paid in some form, whether in kind or not, and the social
pauper who cannot pay his quota is Lazarus excluded from the feast.
This is a hard saying, but it is a true one. We often hear worthy
people who do not understand this law complain that they are
neglected--left out of wedding breakfasts--passed over in dinner
invitations--and that they find it difficult to keep acquaintances
when made. But the fact is, these poor creatures who know so much
about the cold-shoulder of society are simply those who cannot pay
their shot, according to the currency of the class to which they
aspire; and so by degrees they get winnowed through the meshes, and
fall to a level where their funds will suffice to meet all demands,
triumphantly. For the rejected of one level are not necessarily the
rejected of all, and the base metal of one currency is sound coinage
in another. People who would find it impossible to enter a
drawing-room in Grosvenor Square may have all Bloomsbury at their
command; and what was caviare to My Lord will be ambrosia to his
valet--all depending on the amount of the shot to be paid and the
relative value of coinage wherewith to pay it.

The most simple form of payment is of course by the elemental process
of reciprocity in kind; a dinner for a dinner and a supper for a
supper:--a form as purely instinctive as an eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth--the _lex talionis_ of early jurisprudence administered
among wine-cups instead of in the shambles. But there are other
modes of payment as efficient if less evident, and as imperative if
more subtle. For instance, women pay their shot--when they pay it
individually, and not through the vicarious merits of their masculine
relations--by dressing well and looking nice; some by being pretty;
some by being fashionable; a few by brilliant talk; while all ought to
add to their private speciality the generic virtue of pleasant
manners. If they are not pretty, pleasant, well-dressed nor
well-connected, and if they have no masculine pegs of power by which
they can be hooked on to the higher lines, they are let to drop
through the social meshes without an effort made to retain them, as
little fishes swim away unopposed through the loops which hold the
bigger ones. These things are their social duties--the final cause of
their drawing-room existence; and if they fail in them they fail in
the purpose for which they were created socially, and may die out as
soon as convenient. They have other duties, of course, and doubtless
of far higher moment and greater worth; but the question now is only
of their drawing-room duties--of the qualities which secure their
recognition in society--of the special coinage in which they must pay
their shot if they would assist at the great banquet of social life. A
dowdy, humdrum, well-principled woman, whose toilette looks as if it
had been made with the traditionary pitchfork, and whose powers of
conversation do not go beyond the strength of _Cobwebs to Catch
Flies_, or _Mangnall's Questions_, may be an admirable wife,
the painstaking mother of future honest citizens, invaluable by a
sick-bed, beyond price in the nursery, a pattern of all household
economies, a woman absolutely faultless in her sphere--and that sphere
a very sweet and lovely one. But her virtues are not those by which
she can pay her shot in society; and the motherly goodness, of so much
account in a dressing-jacket and list-slippers, is put out of court
when the fee to be paid is liveliness of manner or elegance of
appearance. Certainly, worthy women who dress ill and look ungraceful,
and whose conversation is about up to the mark of their children's
easy-spelling-books, are plentiful in society--unfortunately for those
bracketed with them for two hours' penance; but in most cases they
have their shot paid for them by the wealth, the importance, the
repute, or the desirableness of their relations. They may pay it
themselves by their own wealth and consequent liberal tariff of
reciprocity; but this is rare; the possession of personal superiority
of any kind for the most part acting as a moral stimulus with women
whom the superiority of their male belongings does not touch. And, by
the way, it is rather hard lines that so many celebrated men have such
dowdy wives. Artists, poets, self-made men of all kinds often fail in
this special article; and, while they themselves have caught the tone
of the circle to which they have risen, and pay their shot by manner
as well as by repute, their wives lag behind among the ashes of the
past, like Cinderellas before the advent of the fairy godmother.
How many of them are carried through society as clogs or excrescences
which a polite world is bound to tolerate with more or less
equanimity, according to the amount of sensitiveness bestowed by
nature and cultivated by art! Sometimes, however, self-made men and
their wives are wise in their generation and understand the terms on
which society receives its members; in which case the marital
Reputation goes to the front alone, and the conjugal Cinderella rests
tranquilly in the rear.

Notoriety of all kinds, short of murder or forgery, is one way of
paying one's shot, specially into the coffers of the Leo Hunters, of
whom there are many. It is shot paid to the general fund when one has
seen an accident--better still, if one has been in it. Many a man has
owed a rise in his scale of dinners to a railway smash; and to have
been nearly burnt to death, to have escaped by a miracle from
drowning, to have been set on by footpads or to have been visited by
burglars, is worth a round of At Homes, because of the ready cash of a
real adventure. To be connected more or less remotely with the
fashionable tragedy of the hour is paying one's shot handsomely. To
have been on speaking terms with the latest respectable scoundrel
unmasked, or to have had dealings, sufficiently remote to have
been cleanly, with the newest villainy, will be accepted as shot
while the public interest in the matter lasts. A chance visit to
ultra-grandees--grandees in ratio to the ordinary sphere--is shot
paid with an air. A bad illness, or the attendance on one, with the
apparently unconscious heroism of the details, comes in as part of the
social fine; especially if the person relating his or her experience
has the knack of epigram or exaggeration, while still keeping local
colour and verisimilitude intact. Interesting people who have been
abroad and seen things have good counters for a dinner-party; paying
their shot for themselves and their hosts too, who put them forward as
their contribution to the funds of the commonwealth, with certainty of
acceptance. Some pay their shot by their power of procuring orders and
free admissions. They know the manager of this theatre or the leading
actor of that; they are acquainted with the principal members of the
hanging committees, and are therefore great in private views; they are
always good for a gratuitous treat to folks who can afford to pay
twice the sum demanded for their day's pleasure. Such people may be
stupid, ungainly, not specially polished, in grain unpleasant; but
they circulate in society because they pay their shot and give back
equivalents for value received. A country-house, where there is a good
tennis-ground and a blushing bed of strawberries, is coinage that will
carry the possessor very far ahead through London society; and by the
same law you will find healthy, well-conditioned country folk tolerate
undeniable little snobs of low calibre because of that sixteen-roomed
house in Tyburnia, a visit to which represents so many concerts, so
many theatres, a given number of exhibitions, and a certain
quantity of operas and parties. Had those undeniable little snobs no
funds wherewith to pay their shot, they would have had no place kept
for them among the rose-trees and the strawberry-beds; but, bringing
their quota as they do, they take their seat with the rest and are
helped in their turn.

In fact, humiliating to our self-love as it may be, the truth is, we
are all valued socially, not for ourselves integrally, not for the
mere worth of the naked soul, but for the kind of shot that we
pay--for the advantage or amusement to others that we can bring--for
something in ourselves which renders us desirable as companions--or
for something belonging to our condition which makes us remunerative
as guests. If we have no special qualification, if we neither look
nice nor talk well, neither bring glory nor confer pleasure, we must
expect to be shunted to the side in favour of others who are up to the
right mark and who give as much as they receive. If this truth were
once fully established as a matter of social science, a great advance
would be made; for nothing helps people so much as to clear a subject
of what fog may lie about it. And as the tendency of the age is to
discover the fixed laws which regulate the mutable affairs of man, it
would be just as well to extend the inquiry from the jury-box to the
dinner-table, and from the blue-book to the visiting-list. Why is it
that some people struggle all their lives to get a footing in society,
yet die as they have lived--social Sisyphuses, never accomplishing
their perpetually-recurring task? There must be a reason for it,
seeing that nothing is ruled by blind chance, though much seems
to lie outside the independent will of the individual. Enlighten
these worthy people's minds on the unwritten laws of invitation, and
show them that--thoroughly honest souls and to be trusted with untold
gold or with their neighbour's pretty wife, which is perhaps a harder
test, as they may be--they are by no means to be trusted with the
amusement of a couple of companions at a dinner-table. Show them that,
how rich soever they may be in the rough gold of domestic morality,
they are bankrupts in the small-change which alone passes current in
society--and, if invited where they aspire to be, they would be taken
on as pauper cousins unable to pay their footing and good for neither
meat nor garnish. Let them learn how to pay their shot, and their
difficulties would vanish. They would leave off repeating the fable of
Sisyphus, and attain completion of endeavour. No one need say this is
a hard or a selfish doctrine, for we all follow it in practice. Among
the people we invite to our houses are some whom we do not specially
like, but whom we must ask because of shot paid in kind. There are
people who may be personally disagreeable, ill-educated,
uninteresting, ungainly, but whom we cannot cut because of the
relations in which we stand towards them, and who take their place by
right, because they pay their shot with punctuality. There are
others whom we ask because of liking or desirability, and shot paid in
some specific form of pleasantness, as in beauty, fashion, good
manner, notoriety; but there are none absolutely barren of all gifts
of pleasantness to the guests, of reflected honour to ourselves, and
of social small-change according to the currency. We do not go into
the byways and hedges to pick up drawing-room tatterdemalions who
bring nothing with them and are simply so much deadweight on the rest,
occupying so much valuable space and consuming so much vital energy.
The law of reciprocity may be hard on the strivers who are ignorant of
its inexorable provisions; but it is a wholesome law, like other rules
and enactments against remediable pauperism. And were we once
thoroughly to understand that, if we would sit securely at the table
we must put something of value into the pool--that we must possess
advantageous circumstances, or personal desirabilities, as the shot to
be paid for our place--the art of society would be better cultivated
than it is now, and the classification of guests would be carried out
with greater judgment. Surely, if the need of being gracious in
manner, sprightly in talk, and of pleasant appearance generally--all
cultivable qualities, and to be learned if not born in us by
nature--were accepted as an absolute necessity, without which we must
expect to be overlooked and excluded, drawing-rooms would be far
brighter and dinner-tables far pleasanter than they are at present; to
the advantage of all concerned! And, after all, society is a
great thing in human life. If not equal in importance to the family,
or to political virtue, it has its own special value; and whatever
adds to its better organization is a gain in every sense.




_WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?_


This is a question which one half the world is at this moment asking
the other half; with very wild answers as the result. Woman's work
seems to be in these days everything that it was not in times past,
and nothing that it was. Professions are undertaken and careers
invaded which were formerly held sacred to men; while things are left
undone which, for all the generations that the world has lasted, have
been naturally and instinctively assigned to women to do. From the
savage squaw gathering fuel or drawing water for the wigwam, to the
lady giving up the keys to her housekeeper, housekeeping has been
considered one of the primary functions of women. The man to
provide--the woman to dispense; the man to do the rough initial work
of bread-winning, whether as a half-naked barbarian hunting live meat
or as a City clerk painfully scoring lines of rugged figures--the
woman to cook the meat when got, and to lay out to the best advantage
for the family the quarter's salary gained by casting up ledgers and
writing advices and bills of lading. Take human society in any
phase we like, we must come down to these radical conditions; and any
system which ignores this division of labour, and confounds these
separate functions, is of necessity imperfect and wrong. We have
nothing whatever to say against the professional self-support of women
who have no men to work for them, and who must therefore work for
themselves in order to live. In what direction soever they can best
make their way, let them take it. Brains and intellectual gifts are of
no sex and no condition, and it is far more important that good work
should be done than that it should be done by this or that particular
set of workers. But we are speaking of the home duties of married
women, and of those girls who have no need to earn their daily bread,
and who are not so specially gifted as to be driven afield by the
irrepressible power of genius. We are speaking of women who cannot
help in the family income, but who might both save and improve in the
home; women whose lives are one long day of idleness, _ennui_ and
vagrant imagination, because they despise the activities into which
they were born, while seeking outlets for their energies impossible to
them both by functional and social restrictions.

It is strange to see into what unreasonable disrepute active
housekeeping--first social duty--has fallen in England. Take a family
with four or five hundred a year--and we know how small a sum that is
for 'genteel humanity' in these days--the wife who is an active
housekeeper, even with such an income, is an exception to the
rule; and the daughters who are anything more than drawing-room dolls
waiting for husbands to transfer them to a home of their own, where
they may be as useless as they are now, are rarer still. For things
are getting worse, not better, and our young women are less useful
even than were their mothers; while these last do not, as a rule, come
near the housekeeping ladies of olden times, who knew every secret of
domestic economy and made a wise and pleasant 'distribution of bread'
their grand point of honour. The usual method of London housekeeping,
even in the second ranks of the middle-classes, is for the mistress to
give her orders in the kitchen in the morning, leaving the cook to
pass them on to the tradespeople when they call. If she be not very
indolent, and if she have a due regard for neatness and cleanliness,
she may supplement her kitchen commands by going up stairs through
some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of advice to the housemaid
if she be sweet-tempered, or a harsh note of censure if she be of the
cross-grained type, her work in that department will be done, and her
duties for the day are at an end. There is none of the clever
marketing by which fifty per cent. is saved in the outlay, if a woman
knows what she is about and how to buy; none of that personal
superintendence, so encouraging to servants when genially performed,
which renders slighted work impossible; none of that 'seeing to
things' herself, or doing the finer parts of the work with her
own hands, which used to form part of a woman's unquestioned duty. She
gives her orders, weighs out her supplies, then leaves the maids to do
the best they know or the worst they will, according to the degree in
which they are supplied with faculty or conscience. Many women boast
that their housekeeping takes them perhaps an hour, perhaps half an
hour, in the morning, and no more; and they think themselves clever
and commendable in proportion to the small amount of time given to
their largest family duty. This is all very well where the income is
such as to secure first-class servants--professors of certain
specialities of knowledge and far in advance of the mistress; but how
about the comfort of the house under this hasty generalship, when the
maids are mere scrubs who ought to go through years of training if
they are ever to be worth their salt? It may be very well too in large
households governed by general system, and not by individual ruling;
but where the service is scant and poor, it is a stupid,
uncomfortable, as well as wasteful way of housekeeping. It is
analogous to English cookery--a revolting poverty of result with
flaring prodigality of means; all the pompous paraphernalia of
tradespeople and their carts and their red-books for orders, with
nothing worth the trouble of booking; and everything of less quantity
and lower quality than would be if personal pains were taken--which is
always the best economy.

What is there in practical housekeeping less honourable than the
ordinary work of middle-class gentlewomen? and why should women shrink
from doing for utility, and for the general comfort of the family,
what they would do at any time for vanity or idleness? No one need go
into extremes, and wish our middle-class gentlewomen to become
exaggerated Marthas occupied only with much serving, Nausicaas washing
linen, or 'wise Penelopes' spending their lives in needlework alone.
But, without undertaking anything unpleasant to her senses or
degrading to her condition, a lady might do hundreds of things which
are now left undone in a house, or are given up to the coarse handling
of servants; and domestic life would gain in consequence. What
degradation, for instance, is there in cookery? and how much more home
happiness would there not be if wives would take in hand that great
cold-mutton question? But women are both selfish and small on this
point. Born for the most part with feebly-developed gustativeness,
they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men, and think it low
and sensual if they are expected to give special attention to the
meals of the man who provides the meat. This contempt for good cooking
is one cause of the ignorance there is among them of how to secure
good living. Those horrible traditions of 'plain roast and boiled'
cling about them as articles of culinary faith; and because they have
reached no higher knowledge for themselves, they decide that no one
else shall go beyond them. For one middle-class gentlewoman who
understands anything about cookery, or who really cares for it as
a scientific art or domestic necessity, there are ten thousand who do
not; yet our mothers and grandmothers were not ashamed to be known as
deft professors, and homes were happier in proportion to the respect
paid to the stewpan and the stockpot. And cookery is more interesting
now than it was then, because more advanced, more scientific, and with
improved appliances; and, at the same time, it is of confessedly more
importance.

It may seem humiliating, to those who go in for spirit pure and
simple, to speak of the condition of the soul as in any way determined
by beef and cabbage; but it is so, nevertheless; the connexion between
food and virtue, food and thought, being a very close one. And the
sooner wives recognize this connexion the better for them and for
their husbands. The clumsy savagery of a plain cook, or the vile
messes of a fourth-rate confectioner, are absolute sins in a house
where a woman has all her senses, and can, if she will, attend
personally to the cooking. Many things pass for crimes which are
really not so bad as this. But how seldom do we find a house where the
lady does look after the food of the family; where clean hands and
educated brains are put to active service for the good of others! The
trouble would be too great in our fine-lady days, even if there were
the requisite ability; but there is as little ability as there is
energy, and the plain cook with her savagery and the fourth-rate
confectioner with his rancid pastry, have it all their own way,
according as the election is for economy or ostentation. If by chance
we stumble on a household where the woman does not disdain housewifely
work, and specially does not disdain the practical superintendence of
the kitchen, there we are sure to find cheerfulness and content.

There seems to be something in the life of a practical housekeeper
that answers to the needs of a woman's best nature, and that makes her
pleasant and good-humoured. Perhaps it is the consciousness that she
is doing her duty--of itself a wonderful sweetener of the temper;
perhaps the greater amount of bodily exercise keeps her liver in good
case; whatever the cause, sure it is that the homes of the active
housekeepers are more harmonious than those of the feckless and
do-nothing sort. Yet the snobbish half of the middle-classes holds
housewifely work as degrading, save in the trumpery pretentiousness of
'giving orders.' A woman may sit in a dirty drawing room which the
slipshod maid has not had time to clean, but she must not take a
duster in her hands and polish the legs of the chairs:--there is no
disgrace in the dirt, only in the duster. She may do fancy-work of no
earthly use, but she must not be caught making a gown. Indeed very few
women could make one, and as few will do plain needlework. They will
braid and embroider, 'cut holes, and sew them up again,' and spend any
amount of time and money on beads and wools for messy draperies which
no one wants. The end, being finery, sanctions the toil and
refines it. But they will not do things of practical use; or, if they
are compelled by the exigencies of circumstances, they think
themselves martyrs and badly used by the Fates.

The whole scheme of woman's life at this present time is untenable and
unfair. She wants to have all the pleasures and none of the
disagreeables. Her husband goes to the City and does monotonous and
unpleasant work there; but his wife thinks herself very hardly dealt
with if asked to do monotonous housework at home. Yet she does nothing
more elevating nor more advantageous. Novel-reading, fancy-work,
visiting and letter-writing, sum up her ordinary occupations; and she
considers these more to the point than practical housekeeping. In fact
it becomes a serious question what women think themselves sent into
the world for--what they hold themselves designed by God to be or to
do. They grumble at having children and at the toil and anxiety which
a family entails; they think themselves degraded to the level of
servants if they have to do any practical housework whatever; they
assert their equality with man, and express their envy of his life,
yet show themselves incapable of learning the first lesson set to
men--that of doing what they do not like to do. What, then, do they
want? What do they hold themselves made for? Certainly some of the
more benevolent sort carry their energies out of doors, and leave such
prosaic matters as savoury dinners and fast shirt-buttons for
committees and charities, where they get excitement and _kudos_
together. Others give themselves to what they call keeping up society,
which means being more at home in every person's house than their own;
and some do a little weak art, and others a little feeble literature;
but there are very few indeed who honestly buckle to the natural
duties of their position, and who bear with the tedium of home-work as
men bear with the tedium of office-work.

The little royalty of home is the last place where a woman cares to
shine, and the most uninteresting of all the domains she seeks to
govern. Fancy a high-souled creature, capable of æsthetics, giving her
mind to soup or the right proportion of chutnee for the curry! Fancy,
too, a brilliant creature fore-going an evening's conversational glory
abroad for the sake of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner! He
comes home tired from work, and desperately in need of a good dinner
as a restorative; but the plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles,
or an abomination which she calls hash, and the brilliant creature,
full of mind, thinks the desire for anything else rank sensuality. It
seems a little hard, certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at the
mill for such a return; but women believe that men are made only to
work at the mill that they may receive the grist accruing, and be kept
in idleness and uselessness all their lives. They have no idea of
lightening the labour of that mill-round by doing their own
natural work cheerfully and diligently. They will do everything but
what they ought to do. They will make themselves doctors,
committee-women, printers, what not; but they will not learn cooking,
and they will not keep their own houses. There never was a time when
women were less the helpmates of men than they are at present; when
there was such a wide division between the interests and the
sympathies of the sexes coincident with the endeavour, on the one
side, to approximate their pursuits.

A great demand is being made now for more work for woman and wider
fields for her labour. We confess we should feel a deeper interest in
the question if we saw more energy and conscience put into the work
lying to her hand at home; and we hold that she ought to perfectly
perform the duties which we may call instinctive to her sex before
claiming those hitherto held remote from her natural condition. Much
of this demand springs from restlessness and dissatisfaction; little,
if any, from higher aspirations or nobler energies unused. Indeed, the
nobler the woman the more thoroughly she will do her own proper work,
in the spirit of old George Herbert's well-worn line; and the less she
will feel herself above that work. It is only the weak who cannot
raise their circumstances to the level of their thoughts; only the
poor in spirit who cannot enrich their deeds by their motives.

That very much of this demand for more power of work comes from
necessity and the absolute need of bread, we know; and that the demand
will grow louder as marriage becomes scarcer, and there are more women
adrift in the world without the protection and help of men, we also
know. But this belongs to another part of the subject. What we want to
insist on now is the pitiable ignorance and shiftless indolence of
most middle-class housekeepers; and what we would urge on woman is the
value of a better system of life at home before laying claim to the
discharge of extra-domestic duties abroad.




_LITTLE WOMEN._


The conventional idea of a brave, energetic, or a supremely criminal,
woman has always been that of 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 debateable land, in fact, between the two
sexes, and almost as much the one as the other. Helen Macgregor, Lady
Macbeth, Catharine de Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned
murderesses in novels, were all of the muscular, black-brigand type,
with more or less of regal grace super-added according to
circumstances; and it would have been thought nothing but a puerile
fancy to have supposed the contrary of those whose personal
description was not already known. Crime, indeed, in art and fiction,
was generally painted in very nice proportion to the number of cubic
inches embodied and the depth of colour employed; though we are bound
to add that the public favour ran towards muscular heroines almost as
much as towards muscular murderesses, which to a certain extent
redressed 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
they have skill to design.

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 black-haired virago. 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,' and special delicacy
of feet and hands, we are booked for the companionship, through three
volumes, of a young person to whom Messalina or Lucrezia Borgia was 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 connexion 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 by her submissiveness. 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 going;
while, as for the conception or execution of any naughty piece of
self-assertion, she is as utterly incapable of either 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 order 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 she be a small and
fragile-looking woman. So that, if it be only a usurpation of places
specially masculine, she is allowed to retain what she has got, amid
the grave looks of the elders--not really displeased at the 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 contest 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-humoured 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 as makes you glad to escape from her,
no matter what spoils you leave in 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 she 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 stood
up against 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 devilry 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-coloured
complexions. As catalogued properties according to the ideal, they
would be placed in the list of the natural criminals and law-breakers,
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, in
audacity; the Israelitish Juno will go down before either of the small
Philistines, and the fallacy of weight and colour 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
Hera, 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 round
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 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 nor easy life of it,
if all we hear of them be true. To defend the farm and the homestead
during their husbands' absence, and to keep these and 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 of 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 which impede her progress; irresistible and irrepressible in
all circumstances and under any conditions.




_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
savour 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 who 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 besides 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, 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 public occasions for devotedness
occur, we 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 sacredness 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 be undeniably the
handsomest woman of his acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when
all men admire and all women envy. But he is blessed 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 be different, the kind is the
same. And so in minor proportions--from the most beautiful woman of
all, to simply beauty as a _sine quâ 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, be pretty or
ugly. Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house well,
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 colour or form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or a
squint. Given the broad foundations of an honourable 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 are facts; 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 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 amongst 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 will be his regard and
tenderness. To be the one sole teacher and protector of such a gentle
little creature seems to him the most delicious joy and the best
condition of married life; and he holds Milton's famous lines to be
expressive of the only fitting relations 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 no work complete which
has not been created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees
how women have helped on the leaders in troublous 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 and dormant in men's brains for more than half their
lifetime have suddenly wakened 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 on 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, he 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 distilled in a
sufficiently rich alembic leaving a residuum admitting no kind of
doubt. Venus herself without a dowry would be only a pretty seaside
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 he is not particular as to the strict
order or economy of the housekeeping, provided only his wife 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 order; 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 colour 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 be true of individuals, it is especially
true of nations, each of which has its own ideal 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 nor yet 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 which are as
good as revelations; without cool judgment but with the light of
burning passions which guide her just as well; thinking by her heart
and carrying the most refined metaphysics into her love; subtle;
incomprehensible by the coarser brains of men and women who are only
honest; 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 specially 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 æsthetics 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 æsthetic soul yearning after the Infinite and
worshipping at the feet of the prophet?

In Italy the ideal woman of late times was the ardent patriot, full of
active energy, of physical force, of 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 Dudù,
patient and submissive, always in good humour with her master,
economical in house-living to please the meanness, and gorgeous in
occasional attire to gratify the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental;
but by no means Dudù 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 unduly neglect them, 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 men; 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, housekeeping 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 attitude 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 which they have begun--in that we could sympathize--but
it is 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
characterises 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.




_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
niceness 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 by the aboriginal gentry of the place as more than a lucky
adventurer; 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 favour of reality, however poor and
barren; it was the condemnation of make-believe--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 humour 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 stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial
dignity on a wretched jerry-built 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 and nothing for use, in which 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 honour 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 broad way 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 neighbours'; 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 noise 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 will 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
practising her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in the frost;
walls streaming in the thaw; the lower offices reeking and green with
damp; the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted movement--all
these, and more miseries of the same kind, a woman given over to the
worship of pinchbeck 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 show.

In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbours, no
matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, so runs up a
milliner's bill beyond what she ought to afford for the whole family
expenses. If others 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, of glass, of vulcanite; she must break out into spangles
and beads and chains and _benoîtons_, which are cheap luxuries and, as
she thinks, effective decorations. 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 woman 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 substance is of the same quality;
that generals and admirals and lords and ladies are the common
elements of the special circle in which the family habitually moves;
that pinchbeck is good gold, and that 'composition' 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-colour 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's;
and we may be quite sure that all personal contact with grand folks so
expresses itself and perpetuates 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; consequently, for the most part it is
turned to this practical account. Whether the fashion 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 higher than the small pretences of which we have been
speaking--to women who have money, and so far have one reality, but
who have not, by their own birth or their husbands', the original
standing which would give them this social influence as of right. Some
make themselves notorious for their drawing-room patronage of artists,
which however does not include buying their pictures; others gather
round them scores of obscure authors, whose books they talk of but 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 to 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 like women of rank and fortune, and
who are ashamed of nothing so 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,
they are 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 sciences 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; 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, which endeavours so hard to hide its real estate and to pass
for what it is not and never can be.




_AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD._


Amongst other queer anomalies in human nature is the difference that
lies between sectarian sins and personal immoralities, between the
intellectual untruth of a man's creed and the spiritual evil of his
own nature. Rigid Calvinism, for instance, which narrows the issues of
divine grace and shuts up the avenues of salvation from all but a
select few, is a sour and illiberal faith; and yet a rigid Calvinist,
simply continuing to believe in predestination and election as he was
taught from the beginning, may be a generous, genial, large-hearted
man. An inventor scheming out the deadliest projectile that has yet
been devised is not necessarily indifferent to human life on his own
account; nor is every American who talks tall talk about the glorious
destinies of his country and the infinite superiority of his
countrymen, as conceited personally as he is vainglorious nationally.
In fact, he may be a very modest fellow by his own fireside; and
though in his quality of American he is of course able to whip
universal creation, in his mere quality of man he is quite ready to
take the lower seat at the table and to give honour where honour is
due.

This kind of distinction between the faults of the sect and the
person, the nature and the cause, is very noticeable in women; and
especially in all things relating to themselves. Individually, many
among them are meek and long-suffering enough, and would be as little
capable of resenting a wrong as of revenging it. Being used from the
cradle to a good deal of snubbing, they take to it kindly as part of
the inevitable order of things, and kiss the chastening rod with
edifying humility; but, collectively, they are the most impatient of
rebuke, the most arrogant in moral attitude, and the most restive of
all created things sought to be led or driven. The woman who will bear
to hear of her personal faults without offering a word in
self-defence, and who will even say peccavi quite humbly if hard
pressed, fires up into illimitable indignation when told that her
foibles are characteristic of her sex, and that she is no worse than
nature meant her to be. Personally she is willing to confess that she
is only a poor worm grovelling in the dust--perhaps an exceptionally
poor worm, if of the kind given to spiritual asceticism--but by her
class she claims to be considered next door to an angel, and arrogates
to her sex virtues which she would blush to claim on her own behalf.

Men, as men, are all sorts of bad things, as every one knows. They are
selfish, cruel, tyrannical, sensual, unjust, bloodthirsty--where does
the list end? and human nature in the abstract is a bad thing
too, given over to lies and various deadly lusts; but women, as women,
are exempt from any special share in the general iniquity, and only
come under the ban with universal nature--with lambs and doves and
other pretty creatures--not quite perfection, because of the Fall
which spoilt everything, and yet very near it. As children of the rash
parents who corrupted the race they certainly suffer from the general
infection of sin that followed, but, as daughters contrasted with the
sons, they are so far superior to those evil-minded brethren of theirs
that their comparative virtues by sex override their positive vices by
race. As individuals, they are worms; as human beings, they are poor
sinful souls; but by their womanhood they are above rebuke.

Women have been so long wrapped in this pleasant little delusion about
the sacredness of their sex, and the perfections belonging thereto by
nature, that any attempt to show them the truth and convince them that
they too are guilty of the mean faults and petty ways common to a
fallen humanity--whereof certain manifestations are special to
themselves--is met with the profound scorn or shrill cries of
affronted womanhood. A man who speaks of their faults as they appear
to him, and as he suffers by them, is illiberal and unmanly, and the
rage of the more hysterically indignant would not be very far below
that of the Thracian Mænads, could they lay hands on the offending
Orpheus of the moment; but a woman who speaks from knowledge, and
touches the weak places and the sore spots known best to the
initiated, is a traitress even baser than the rude man who perhaps
knows no better.

The whole life and being of womanhood must be held sacred from
censure, exalted as it is by a kind of sentimental apotheosis that
will not bear reasoning about, to something very near divinity. Even
the follies of fashion must be exempt from both ridicule and rebuke,
on the ground of man's utter ignorance of the merits of the question;
for how should a poor male body know anything about trains or
crinolines, or the pleasure that a woman feels in making herself
ridiculous or indecent in appearance and a nuisance to her neighbours?
while, for anything graver than the follies of fashion, it is in a
manner high treason against the supremacy of the sex to assume that
they deserve either ridicule or rebuke. Besides, it is indelicate.
Women are made to be worshipped, not criticized; to be reverenced as
something mystically holy and incomprehensible by the grosser
masculine faculties; and it is indiscreet, to say the least of it,
when vile man takes it on himself to test the idol by the hard
mechanical tests of truth and common-sense, and to show the world how
much alloy is mingled with the gold.

This is in ethics what the Oriental's reserve about his harem is in
domestic life. The sacredness of a Mohammedan's womankind must be so
complete that they are even nameless to the coarser sex; and not,
'How is your wife?' 'How are your daughters?' but, 'How is your
house?' is the only accepted form of words by which Ali may ask Hassan
about the health of his Fatimas and Zuliekas. In much the same way our
women must be kept behind the close gilded gratings of affected
perfectness, and, above all things, never publicly discussed--much
less publicly condemned.

It is by no means a proof of wisdom, or of the power of logically
reasoning out a position and its consequences, that women should thus
demand to be treated as things superior to the faults and follies of
humanity at large. They are clamouring loudly, and with some justice,
for an equal share in the world's work and wages, and it is
wonderfully stupid in them to stand on their womanly dignity and their
quasi-sacredness, when told of their faults and measured according to
their shortcomings, not their pretensions. If they come down into the
arena to fight, they must fight subject to the conditions of the
arena. They must not ask for special rules to be made in their
behalf--for blunted weapons on the one side and impregnable defences
on the other. If they demand either mystic reverence or chivalric
homage they must be content with their own narrow but safe enclosure,
where they have nothing to do but to look at the turmoil below, and
accept with gratitude such portions of the good things fought for as
the men to whom they belong see fit to bring them. They cannot at one
and the same time have the good of both positions--the courtesy
claimed by weakness and the honour paid to prowess. If they mingle in
the _mêlée_ they must expect as hard knocks as the rest, and must
submit to be bullied when they hit foul and to be struck home when
they hit wide. If they do not like these conditions, let them keep out
of the fray altogether; but if they choose to mingle in it, no
hysterics of affronted womanhood, however loud the shrieks, will keep
them safe from hard knocks and rough treatment.

Time out of mind women have been credited with all the graces and
virtues possible in a world which 'the trail of the serpent' has
defiled. To be sure they have been cursed as well, as the causes of
most of the miseries of society from Eve's time to Helen's, and later
still. _Teterrima causa._ But the praise alone sticks, so far as their
own self-belief is concerned, and men, who create the curses, may
arrange them to their own liking. The poet says they are 'ministering
angels;' the very name of mother is to some men almost as holy as that
of God, and the most solemn oath a Frenchman can take in a private way
is not by his own honour, but by the name or the head or the life of
his mother.

As wives--well, save in the old nursery doggrel which sets forth that
they are made of 'all that's good if well understood'--as wives
certainly they get not a few ungentle rubs. But then only a husband
knows where the shoe pinches, and if he blasphemes during the wearing
of it, on his own head be the guilt as is already the punishment.
As maidens they are confessedly the most sacred manifestation of
humanity, and to be approached with the reverence rightfully due to
the holiest thing we know; while in the new spiritualistic world we
are told to look for the time when the moral supremacy of woman shall
be the recognized law of human life and the reign of violence and
tears and all iniquity shall therefore be at an end. Thus the moral
loveliness of collective womanhood is a dogma which men are taught from
their boyhood as an article of faith if not a matter of experience,
and women naturally keep them up to the mark--theoretically, at all
events. Yet for all this lip-homage, of which so much account is
made, women are often ill-used and brutalized, and in spite of
their superior pretensions as often fall below men in every quality
but that of patience. And patience is eminently the virtue of
weakness, and therefore woman's cardinal grace; speaking broadly and
allowing for exceptions. But what women do not see is that all this
poetic flattery comes originally from the idealizing passion of men,
and that, left to themselves, with only each other for critics and
analyzers, they would soon find themselves stripped of their superfluous
moral finery and reduced to the bare core of uncompromising truth.
And this would be the best thing for them in the end. If they could
but rise superior to the weakness of flattery, they would rise
beyond the power of much that now degrades them. If they would but
honestly consider the question of their own shortcomings when told
where they fail, and what they cannot do, and what they will be sure
to make a mess of if they attempt, they would prove their title to
man's respect far more than they prove it now by the shrill cries and
indignant remonstrances of affronted womanhood.

This is the day of trial for many things--among others, for the
capacity of women for an enlarged sphere of action and more public
exercise of power. Do women think they show their fitness for nobler
duties than those already assigned them, by their impatience under
censure, which is, after all, but one mode of teaching? Are they
qualifying themselves to act in concert with men, by assuming an
absolute moral supremacy which it is a kind of sacrilege to deny? If
they think they are on the right road as at present followed, let them
go on in heaven's name. When they have wandered sufficiently far
perhaps they will have sense enough to turn back, and see for
themselves what mistakes they have made and might have avoided, had
they had the wisdom of self-knowledge in only a small degree.
Certainly, so long as womanhood is held to confer, _per se_, a special
and unassailable divinity, so long will women be rendered
comparatively incapable of the best work through vanity, through
ignorance, and through impatience of the teaching that comes by
rebuke. Nothing is so damaging in the long run as exaggerated
pretensions; for by-and-by, after a certain period of uncritical
homage, the world is sure to believe that the silver veil which it has
so long respected hides deformity, not divinity, and that what is too
sacred for public use is too poor for public honour. If the faults of
women are not to be discussed, nor their follies condemned, because
womanhood is a sacred thing and a man naturally respects his mother
and sisters, then women must be content to live in a moral harem,
where they will be safe from both the gaze and the censure of the
outside world; they must not come down into the battle-fields and the
workshops, where they forfeit all claim to protection and have to
accept the man's law of 'no favour.' It must be one thing or the
other. Either their merits must be weighed and their capacity assayed
in reference to the place they want to take--and in doing this their
faults must be boldly and distinctly discussed--or they must be
content with their present condition; and, with the mystic sanctity of
their womanhood, they must accept also its moral seclusion--belonging,
by their very nature, to things too sacred for criticism and too
perfect for censure. It rests with themselves to decide which it is to
be.




_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
vapours, 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 which 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 honourable
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 or Minerva, whom she was sure to call Phoebus or Pallas
Athene, as being the more poetical name of the two. Probably she had
dealings with Diana too--for this kind of woman does not in any age
affect the 'seaborn,' 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 are no dearer gaolers than any other;
and that household duties disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the
empyrean. This was the Ethereal Being of 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 æsthetics and
culture, and horribly neglect their babies and the weekly bills.

A favourite 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 is most
probably internal disease, when not antimony. 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 the string nor fasten the 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 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 this soft-mannered, large-eyed,
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 shirt-fronts, 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, throwing her
head well back, tosses off the whole at a draught--she would disdain
the lady-like 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 cork-screw, a gimlet, a big knife and a
small foot-rule; and in 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 endeavour 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 that which 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
_naïveté_ at a time when all England was astir about her, and when
colours and fashions went by her name to make them take with the
public at large. No one knew better than the fair _ingénue_ 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 like kind of affectation very common among pretty
women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are
pretty, and not recognizing 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 which 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 practised 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 practise 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 practised.

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 befit middle
age counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous
even then if the 'Indian summer' were specially bright and warm.

Then there is that 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 which 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 are
not quite certain of their company, and scarcely know if they are
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 self-enjoying life from end to end;
and the affectation of political fervour in those who would not give
up a ball or a new dress to save Europe from universal revolution.

Go where we will, the affectation of being something she is not meets
us in woman, like a ghost we cannot lay, a mist we cannot sweep away.
In the holiest and the most trivial things we find it penetrating
everywhere--even in church and at her prayers, when the pretty
penitent, rising from her lengthy orisons, lifts her eyes and
furtively looks about 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 heart's
core, and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she
would dare to tell a lie.




_INTERFERENCE._


About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely
personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. We do not mean
tyranny; that 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 it in hand to force
people to do what they dislike 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 most felt. Very many people spend their lives
in interfering with others--perpetually putting spokes into wheels
with the turning of which they have nothing to do, and thrusting their
fingers into pies about the baking of which they are in no 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, finnicking 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 other 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 that
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 favourite 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 so loftily
snubbed as sisters; while mothers nine times out of ten are 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 cigar
represents a battle, deepening in intensity according to the number.
The first may have been had with only a light skirmish--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 big guns thundering.
She could understand a man smoking one cigar 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 cigar herself, therefore does not understand the uses
nor the abuses of tobacco; but she holds herself pledged to interfere
so soon as she gets the chance; and she redeems that 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 nor 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 when he has gone beyond the range of her
own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks
herself justified in interfering with his further 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,
sons, in about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must
not go out without an overcoat; they must 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 given hour.

When such women as these have to do with men just on the boundary-line
between the last days of vigour and the first of old age, they put
forward the time of old age by many years. We see 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
and dread rather than desire the masculine comradeship which would
keep them up to the mark of virile independence; for 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 humour--one who calls a spade a spade, with no
circumlocution about an agricultural implement. According to the odd
law of compensation which regulates so much of human action, the wife
of such a man is generally one of the ultra-refined kind, who thinks
herself consecrated 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 so 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 be a man of free
speech and broad humour 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 nor 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 any kind can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn
instead of a pink, 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 in houses where there
are large families of unmarried girls must have seen. The nudges, the
warning looks, the deprecating 'Amy's!' and 'Oh, Lucy's!' and 'Hush,
Rose's!' 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 practise 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 analyze 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 parlour, 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 little
vanities, when she herself will not be interfered with--though press
and pulpit both try to turn her out of her present path into the way
which all ages have thought the best for her and the one naturally
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 saviours 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 given as 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 they evidently think
that it is so, and that they are each and all the keepers of keys
which give them a special entrance to the temple of morality, and by
which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser body of men. Hence
they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much rope, and measure
off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit; then think vile
man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things into his own
hand and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done in good if
in a very narrow faith--that we admit willingly; but we would call
their attention to the difference there is between influence and
interference; which is just the difference between their ideal duty
and their daily practice--between being the salt of the earth and the
blister of the home.

We think it only justice to put in a word for those poor henpecked
fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for Woman's
Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man knuckle
under on all occasions and of making one will serve for two lives--and
that will hers. We assure her that she would get her own way in large
matters much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small
ones, and not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern
her and have only reference to themselves.




_THE FASHIONABLE WOMAN._


Among the many odd products of a mature civilization, the fashionable
woman is one of the oddest. From first to last she is an amazing
spectacle; and if we take human life in any earnestness at all,
whether individually, as the passage to an eternal existence the
condition of which depends on what we are here, or collectively, as
the highest thing we know, we can only look in blank astonishment at
the fashionable woman and her career. She is the one sole capable
member of the human family without duties and without useful
occupation; the one sole being who might be swept out of existence
altogether, without deranging the nice arrangement of things, or
upsetting the balance of inter-dependent forces. We know of no other
organic creation of which this could be said; but the fashionable
woman is not as other creatures, being, fortunately, _sui generis_,
and of a type not existing elsewhere. If we take the mere ordering of
her days and the employment of her time as the sign of her mental
state, we may perhaps measure to a certain extent, but not fully, the
depth of inanity into which she has fallen and the immensity of her
folly. Considering her as a being with the potentiality of
reason, of usefulness, of thought, the actual result is surely the
saddest and the strangest thing under heaven!

She goes to bed at dawn and does not attempt to rise till noon. For
the most part she breakfasts in bed, and then amuses herself with a
cursory glance at the morning paper, if she have sufficient energy for
so great a mental exertion; if she have not, she lies for another hour
or two in that half-slumberous state which is so destructive to mind
and body, weakening as it does both fibre and resolution, both muscle
and good principle. At last she languidly rises, to be dressed in time
for luncheon and her favoured intimates--the men who have the _entrée_
at sacred hours when the world in general is forbidden. Some time
later she dresses again for her drive--for the first part of the day's
serious business; for paying visits and leaving cards; for buying
jewelry and dresses, and ordering all sorts of unnecessary things at
her milliner's; for this grand lady's ordinary 'day,' and that grand
lady's extraordinary At Home; for her final slow parade in the Park,
where she sees her friends as in an open air drawing-room, makes
private appointments, carries on flirtations, and hears and retails
gossip and scandal of a full flavour. Then she goes home to dress for
tea in a 'lovely gown' of suggestive piquancy; to be followed by
dinner, the opera or a concert, a _soirée_, or perhaps a ball or two;
whence she returns towards morning, flushed with excitement or
worn out with fatigue, feverish or nervous, as she has had pleasure
and success or disappointment and annoyance.

This is her outside life; and this is no fancy picture and no
exaggeration. After a certain time of such an existence, can we wonder
if her complexion fades and her eyes grow dim? if that inexpressible
air of haggard weariness creeps over her, which ages even a young girl
and makes a mature woman substantially an old one? It is then that she
has recourse to those foul and fatal expedients of which we have heard
more than enough in these latter days. She will not try simplicity of
living, natural hours, wholesome occupation, unselfish endeavour, but
rushes off for help to paints and cosmetics, to stimulants and drugs,
and attempts to restore the tarnished freshness of her beauty by the
very means which further corrode it. Every now and then, for very
weariness when not for idleness, she feigns herself sick and has her
favourite physician to attend her. In fact the funniest thing about
her is the ease with which she takes to her bed on the slightest
provocation, and the strange pleasure she seems to find in what is a
penance to most women.

You meet her in a heated, crowded, noisy room, looking just as she
always looks, whatever her normal state of health may be; and in
answer to your inquiries she tells you she has only two hours ago left
her bed to come here, having been confined to her room for a week,
with Dr. Blank in close attendance. If you are an intimate female
friend she will whisper you the name of her malady, which is sure to
be something terrific, and which, if true, would have kept her a real
invalid for months instead of days; but if you are only a man she will
make herself out to have been very ill indeed in a more mysterious
way, and leave you to wonder at the extraordinary physique of
fashionable women, which enables them to live on the most friendly
touch-and-go terms with death, and to overcome mortal maladies by an
effort of the will and the delights of a ducal ball. The favourite
physician has a hard time of it with these ladies; and the more
popular he is the harder his work. It is well for his generation when
he is a man of honour and integrity, and knows how to add self-respect
and moral power to the qualities which have made him the general
favourite. For his influence over women is almost unlimited--like
nothing so much as that of the handsome Abbé of the Regency or the
fascinating Monsignore of Rome; and if he chooses to abuse it and turn
it to evil issues, he can. And, however great the merit in him that he
does not, it does not lessen the demerit of the woman that he could.

Sometimes the fashionable woman takes up with the clergyman instead of
the physician, and coquets with religious exercises rather than with
drugs; but neither clergyman nor physician can change her mode of life
nor give her truth nor common-sense. Sometimes there is a fluttering
show of art-patronage, and the fashionable woman has a handsome
painter or well-bred musician in her train, whom she pets publicly and
patronizes graciously. Sometimes it is a young poet or a rising
novelist, considerably honoured by the association, who dedicates his
next novel to her, or writes verses in her praise, with such fervency
of gratitude as sets the base Philistines on the scent of the
secret--perhaps guessing not far amiss. For the fashionable woman has
always some love-affair on hand, more or less platonic according to
her own temperament or the boldness of the man--a love-affair in which
the smallest ingredient is love; a love-affair which is vanity,
idleness, a dissolute imagination and contempt of such prosaic things
as morals; a love-affair not even to be excused by the tragic frenzy
of earnest passion, and which may be guilty and yet not true.

The physical effects of such a life as this are as bad as the mental,
and both are as bad as the worst can make them. A feverish,
overstrained condition of health either prevents the fashionable woman
from being a mother at all, or makes her the mother of nervous, sickly
children. Many a woman of high rank is at this moment paying bitterly
for the disappointment of which she herself, in her illimitable folly,
has been the sole and only cause. And, whether women like to hear it
or not, it is none the less a truth that part of the reason for their
being born at all is that they may in their turn bear children. The
unnatural feeling against maternity existing among fashionable
women is one of the worst mental signs of their state, as their
frequent inability to be mothers is one of the worst physical results.
This is a condition of things which no false modesty nor timid reserve
should keep in the background, for it is a question of national
importance, and will soon become one of national disaster unless
checked by a healthier current and more natural circumstances.

Dress, dissipation and flirting make up the questionable lines which
enclose the life of the fashionable woman, and which enclose nothing
useful, nothing good, nothing deep nor true nor holy. Her piety is a
pastime; her art the poorest pretence; her pleasure consists only in
hurry and excitement alternating with debasing sloth, in heartless
coquetry or in lawless indulgence, as nature made her more vain or
more sensual. As a wife she fulfils no wifely duty in any grand or
loving sense, for the most part regarding her husband only as a banker
or an adjunct, according to the terms of her marriage settlement; as a
mother she is a stranger to her children, to whom nurse and governess
supply her place and give such poor makeshift for maternal love as
they are enabled or inclined. In no domestic relation is she of the
smallest value, and of none in any social circumstance beside the
adorning of a room--if she be pretty--and the help she gives to trade
through her expenditure. She lives only in the gaslight, and her
nature at last becomes as artificial as her habits.

As years go on, and she changes from the acknowledged belle to
_la femme passée_, she goes through a period of frantic endeavour to
retain her youth; and even when time has clutched her with too firm a
hand to be shaken off, and she begins to feel the infirmities which
she still puts out all her strength to conceal, even then she grasps
at the departing shadow and fresh daubs the crumbling ruin, in the
belief that the world's eyes are dim and that stucco may pass for
marble for another year or two longer. Or she becomes a Belgravian
mother, with daughters to sell to the highest bidder; and then the aim
of her life is to secure the purchaser. Her daughters are never
objects of real love with the fashionable woman. They are essentially
her rivals, and the idea of carrying on her life in theirs, of
forgetting herself in them, occurs to her only as a forecast of death.
She shrinks even from her sons, as living evidences of the lapse of
time which she cannot deny, and awkward _memoria technica_ for fixing
dates; and there is not a home presided over by a fashionable woman
where the family is more than a mere name, a mere social convention
loosely held together by circumstances, not by love.

Closing such a life as this comes the unhonoured end, when the
miserable made-up old creature totters down into the grave where paint
and padding, and glossy plaits cut from some fresh young head, are of
no more avail; and where death, which makes all things real, reduces
her life of lies to the nothingness it has been from the beginning.
What does she leave behind her? A memory by which her children
may order their own lives in proud assurance that so they will order
them best for virtue and for honour? Or a memory which speaks to them
of time misused, of duties unfulfilled, of love discarded for
pleasure, and of a life-long sacrifice of all things good and pure for
selfishness?

We all know examples of the worldly old woman clinging batlike to the
last to the old roofs and rafters; and we all know how heartily we
despise her, and how we ridicule her in our hearts, if not by our
words. If the reigning queens of fashion, at present young and
beautiful, would but remember that they are only that worldly old
woman in embryo, and that in a very few years they will be her exact
likeness, unhappily repeated for the scorn of the world once more to
follow! The traditional skeleton at the feast had a wonderfully wise
meaning, crude and gross as it was in form. For though its _memento
mori_, too constantly before us, would either sadden or brutalize, as
we were thoughtful or licentious, yet it is good to see the end of
ourselves, and to study the meaning and lesson of our lives in those
of our prototypes and elder likenesses.

The pleasures of the world are, as we all know, very potent and very
alluring, but nothing can be more unsatisfying if taken as the main
purpose of life. While we are young, the mere stirring of the blood
stands instead of anything more real; but as we go on, and the pulse
flags and pleasurable occasions get rare and more rare, we find
that we have been like the Prodigal Son, and that our food and his
have been out of much the same trough, and come in the main to much
the same thing.

This is an age of extraordinary wealth and of corresponding
extraordinary luxury; of unparalleled restlessness, which is not the
same thing as activity or energy, but which is the kind of
restlessness that disdains all quiet and repose, as unendurable
stagnation. Hence the fashionable woman of the day is one of extremes
in her own line also; and the idleness, the heartlessness, the
self-indulgence, the want of high morality, and the insolent luxury at
all times characteristic of her were never displayed with more cynical
effrontery than at present, and never called for more severe
condemnation.

The fashionable women of Greece and Rome, of Italy and France, have
left behind them names which the world has made typical of the vices
naturally engendered by idleness and luxury. But do we wish that our
women should become subjects for an English Juvenal? that fashion
should create a race of Laïses and Messalinas, of Lucrezia Borgias and
Madame du Barrys, out of the stock which once gave us Lucy Hutchinson
and Elizabeth Fry? Once the name of Englishwoman carried with it a
grave and noble echo as the name of women known for their gentle
bearing and their blameless honour--of women who loved their husbands,
and brought up about their own knees the children they were not
reluctant to bear and not ashamed to love. Now, it too often means a
girl of the period, a frisky matron, a fashionable woman--a thing of
paints and pads, consorting with dealers of no doubtful calling for
the purchase of what she grimly calls 'beauty,' making pleasure her
only good and the world her highest god. It too often means a woman
who is not ashamed to supplement her husband with a lover, but who is
unwilling to become the honest mother of that husband's children. It
too often means a hybrid creature, perverted out of the natural way
altogether, affecting the license but ignorant of the strength of a
man; as girl or woman alike valueless so far as her highest natural
duties are concerned; and talking largely of liberty while showing at
every turn how much she fails in that co-essential of liberty--knowledge
how to use it.




_SLEEPING DOGS._


There is a capital old proverb, often quoted but not so often acted
on, called 'Let sleeping dogs lie;' a proverb which, if we were to
abide by its injunction, would keep us out of many a mess that we get
into now, because we cannot let well alone. Certainly we fall into
trouble sometimes, or rather we drift into it--we allow it to gather
round us--for want of a frank explanation to clear off small
misunderstandings. At least novelists say so, and then make a great
point of the anguish endured by Henry and Angelina for three mortal
volumes, because they were too stupid to ask the reason why the one
looked cold the other evening at the duchess's ball, and the other
looked shy the next morning in the park. But then novelists, poor
souls, are driven to such extravagant expedients for motives and
matter, that we can scarcely take them as rational exponents of real
life in any way; though the very meaning and final cause of their
profession is to depict human nature as it is, and to show the reflex
action of character and circumstances somewhat according to the
pattern set out in the actual world. But, leaving novelists
alone, on the whole we find in real life that if speech is silvern,
silence is essentially golden, and that more harm is done by saying
too much than by saying too little; above all, that infinite mischief
arises by not letting sleeping dogs lie.

People are so wonderfully anxious to stir up the dregs of everything,
they can never let things rest. Take a man or woman who has done
something queer that gets noised abroad, and who is coldly looked on
in consequence by those who believe the worst reports which arise as
interpretations. Now the wisest thing undoubtedly is to bear this
coldness as the righteous punishment of that folly, and to trust for
rehabilitation to the mysterious process called 'living it down.' If
there has been absolutely no sinfulness to speak of, nothing but a
little imprudence and a big glossary of scandalous explanation, a
little precipitancy and a great deal of ill-nature, by all means wake
up the sleeping dog and set him howling through the streets. He may do
good, seeing that truth would be your friend. But if there be a core
of ugly fact, even if it be not quite so ugly as the envelope which
rumour has wrapped round it, then fall back on the dignity of 'living
it down,' and let the dog lie sleeping and muzzled.

There is another, but an unsavoury saying, which advises against the
stirring up of evil odours; but this is just what imprudent,
high-spirited people will not understand. They will take their own way
in spite of society and all its laws; they will kick over the
traces when it suits them; they will do this and that of which the
world says authoritatively, 'No, you shall not do it;' and then, when
the day of wrath arrives, and down comes the whip on the offending
back, they shriek piteously and wake up all the dogs in the town in
the 'investigation of their case.' And a queer kennel enough they turn
out sometimes! They would have done better to put up with their social
thrashing than to have set the bloodhounds of 'investigation' on their
heels.

Actions for libel often do this kind of thing, as every one may read
for himself. Many a man who gets his farthing damages had better have
borne the surly growl of the only half-roused dog, than have
retaliated, and so waked him up. The farthing damages, representing
say a cuff on the head or a kick in the ribs, or a milder 'Lie down,
sir!' may be very pleasant to the feelings of the yelped-at, as so
much revenge exacted--Shylock's pound of flesh, without the blood. But
what about the consequences? what about the disclosure of your secret
follies and the uncovering of the foundations on which the libel
rested? The foundations remain immoveable to the end of time if the
superstructure be disroofed, and the sleeping dog is awakened, never
to be set at rest again while he has a tooth in his head that can
bite.

One of the arts of peaceful living at home is contained in the power
of letting sleeping dogs lie. Papa is surly--it is a way papas
have--or mamma is snappish, as even the best of mammas are at
times when the girls are tiresome and will flirt with ineligible
younger brothers, or when the boys, who must marry money, are paying
attention to dowerless beauty instead. Well, the family horizon is
overcast, and the black dog keeps the gate of the family mansion.
Better let it lie there asleep, if it will but remain so. It is not
pleasant to have it there certainly, but it would be worse to rouse it
into activity and to have a general yelping through the house.

Sometimes, indeed, in a family given to tears and caresses and easily
excited feelings, a frank challenge as to reasons why is answered by a
temporary storm, followed by a scene of effusion and _attendrissement_,
and the black dog is not awakened, but banished, by the rousing he has
got. This is a method that can be tried when you have perfect knowledge
and command of your material; else it is a dangerous, and nine times
out of ten would be an unsuccessful, experiment. It is nearly always
unsuccessful with husbands and wives, who often sulk, but rarely
for causes needing explanation. Angelina knows quite well that she
danced too often the other night with that fascinating young Lovelace
for whom her Henry has a special, and not quite groundless, aversion.
She may put on as many airs of injured innocence as she likes, and
affect to consider herself an ill-used wife suffering grievous things
because of her husband's displeasure and the black dog of sulks
accompanying; but she knows as well as her Henry himself where her sin
lies, and to kick at the black dog would only be to set him
loose upon her, and be well barked at if not worried for her pains.
The wiser course would be to muzzle him by ignoring his presence;
and so in almost all cases of domestic dog, however black.

A sleeping dog of another kind, which it would be well if women would
always leave at rest, is the potential passion of a man who is a
cherished friend but an impossible lover. Certain slow-going men are
able to maintain for life a strong but strictly platonic attachment
for certain women. If any warmer impulse or more powerful feeling give
threatening notice of arising, it is kept in due subjection and a
wholesome state of coolness, perhaps by its very hopelessness even if
returned, perhaps by the fear or the knowledge that it would be
ill-received, and that the only passport to the pleasant friendship so
delighted in is in this calm and sober platonism. This is all very
well so long as the woman minds what she is about; for the passionless
attachment of a man depends mainly on her desire to keep things in
their present place, and on her power of holding to the line to be
observed. If she oversteps this line, if she wakens up that sleeping
dog of passion, it is all over with her and platonism. What was once a
pleasant truth would now be a burning satire; for friendship routed by
love can never take service under its old banners again.

And yet this is what women are continually doing. They are always
complaining that men are not their friends, and that they are only
selfish and self-seeking in their relations with them; yet no sooner
do they possess a man friend who is nothing else than they try their
utmost to convert him into a lover, and are not too well pleased if
they do not succeed--which might by chance sometimes happen like any
other rare occurrence, but not often. And yet success ruins
everything. It takes away the friend and does not give an available
lover; it destroys the existing good and substitutes nothing better.
If the woman be of the fishpond type, whose heart Thackeray wanted to
'drag,' she simply turns round upon the unhappy victim with one of the
'looks that kill;' if she be more weak than vain and less designing
than impulsive, she regrets the momentary infatuation which has lost
her her friend; but in any case she has lost him--by her own folly,
not by inevitable misfortune.

Just as easy is it to rouse the sleeping dogs of hatred, of jealousy,
of envy. You have a tepid well-controlled dislike to some one; and you
know that he knows it. For feelings are eloquent, even when dumb, and
express themselves in a thousand ways independent of words. You do not
care much about your dislike--you do not nurse it nor feed it in any
way, and are rather content than not to let it lie dormant, and so far
harmless. But your unloved friend cannot let well alone. He will be
always treading on your corns and touching you on the raw. That
unlucky speculation you made; your play that was damned; the election
you lost; the decision that was given against you, with
costs--whenever you see him he is sure to introduce some topic that
rubs you the wrong way, till at last the sleeping dog gets fairly
roused, and what was merely a well-ordered dislike bursts out into a
frantic and ungovernable hatred. It has been his own doing. Just as in
the case of the platonic friend transformed into the passionate lover
by the woman's wiles, so the dislike that gave you no trouble--become
now the hatred which is a real curse to your existence--results from
your friend's incessant rousing up of sleeping passions.

Young people are much given to this kind of thing. There is an impish
tendency in most girls, and in all boys, that makes teazing a matter
of exquisite delight to them. If they know of any sleeping dog which
an elder carries about under his cloak, they are never so happy as
when they are rousing it to activity, though their own backs may get
bitten in the fray. Let a youngster into the secret of a weakness, a
sore, and if he can resist the temptation of torturing you as the
result of his knowledge he may lay claim to a virtue almost unknown in
boyish morals. But he sometimes pays dearly for his fun. More than one
life-long dislike, culminating in a disastrous codicil or total
omission from the body of the will, has been the return-blow for a
course of boyish teazings which a testy old uncle or huffish maiden
aunt has had to undergo. The punishment may be severe and unjust;
but the provocation was great; and revenge is a human, if
indefensible, instinct common to all classes.

Fathers and mothers themselves are not always sacred ground, nor are
their special dogs suffered to lie sleeping undisturbed; and perhaps
the favouritism and comparative coldness patent in almost every family
may be traced back to the propensity for soothing or for rousing those
parental beasts. For even fathers and mothers have personal feelings
in excess of their instincts, and they, no more than any one else,
like to be put through their paces by the impish vivacity of youth,
and made to dance according to the piping of an irreverent lad or
saucy girl. If they have dogs, they do not want their children to pry
into their kennels and whistle them out at their pleasure; and those
who do so most will naturally get worst off in the great division of
family love. 'Let sleeping dogs lie,' certainly, as a rule for private
life.

Historically, the saying does not hold good. For if the great leaders
of thought and reform had not roused up the sleeping dogs of their
day, and made them give tongue for all after ages to hear, we should
be but poorly off at this present time. Many of our liberties have
been got only by diligently prodding up that very sleepy dog, the
public, till he has been forced to show his teeth; and history is full
of instances of how much has been done, all the world over and in
every age, by the like means. Sometimes the prodded dog flies at the
wrong throat on the other side, as we have had a few notable
instances of late; and then it would have been wiser to leave him
quietly sleeping in the shade, whether at Mentana or elsewhere; to
rouse for rending being a poor amusement at the best, and an eminently
unprofitable use of leather.




_BEAUTY AND BRAINS._


That lovely woman fulfils only half her mission when she is
unpersonable instead of beautiful, all young men, and all pretty girls
secure in the consciousness of their own perfections, will agree.
Indeed, it is cruel to hear the way in which ingenuous youths despise
ugly girls, however clever, whose charm lies in their cleverness only,
with a counteraction in their plainness. To hear them, one would think
that hardness of feature was, like poverty, a crime voluntarily
perpetrated, and that contempt was a righteous retribution for the
offence. Yet their preference, though so cruelly expressed, is to a
certain extent the right thing. When we are young, the beauty of women
has a supreme attraction beyond all other possessions or qualities;
and there are self-evident reasons why it should be so. It is only as
we grow older that we know the value of brains, and, while still
admiring beauty--as indeed who does not?--admire it as one passing by
on the other side--as a grace to look at, but not to hold, unless
accompanied by something more lasting.

This is in the middle term of a man's life. Old age, perhaps with
the unconscious yearning of regret, goes back to the love of youth and
beauty for their own sake; extremes meeting here as in almost all
other circumstances. The danger is when a young man, obeying the
natural impulse of his age and state, marries beauty only, with
nothing more durable beneath. The mind sees what it brings, and we
love the ideal we create rather than the reality that exists. A pretty
face, the unworn nerves of youth, the freshness of hope that has not
yet been soured by disappointment nor chilled by experience, a neat
stroke at croquet and a merry laugh easily excited, make a girl a
goddess to a boy who is what he himself calls in love and his friends
'spoony.' She may be narrow, selfish, spoilt, unfit to bear the
burdens of life and unable to meet her trials patiently; she may be
utterly unpractical and silly--one of those who never mature but only
grow old--without judgment, forethought, common-sense or courage; but
he sees nothing of all this. To him she is perfect; the 'jolliest girl
in the world,' if he be slangy, or the 'dearest,' if he be
affectionate; and he neither sees nor heeds her potential faults.

It is only when she has stepped down from her pedestal to the level of
the home-threshold that he finds out she is but a woman after all, and
perhaps an exceptionally weak and peevish one. Then he knows that he
would have done better for himself had he married that plain
brave-hearted girl who would have had him to a dead certainty if he
had asked her, but whom he so unmercifully laughed at when he was
making love to his fascinating charmer. As years go on and reduce the
Hebe and Hecate of eighteen to much the same kind of woman at
forty--with perhaps the advantage on Hecate's side if of the sort that
ripens well and improves by keeping--the man feels that he has been a
fool after the manner of Bunyan's Passion; that he has eaten up his
present in the past, and had all his good things at once. If he had
but looked at the future and been able to wait! But in those days he
wanted beauty that does not last, and cared nothing for brains which
do; and so, having made his election he must abide by it, and eat
bitter bread from the yeast of his own brewing.

Many a man has cursed, his whole life long, the youthful infatuation
that made him marry a pretty fool. Take the case of a rising
politician whose fair-faced wife is either too stupid to care about
his position, or who imperils it by her folly. If amiable and
affectionate, and in her own silly little way ambitious, she does him
incalculable mischief by exaggeration, and by saying and doing exactly
the things which are most damaging to him; if stupid, she is just so
much deadweight that he has to carry with him while swimming up the
stream. She is very lovely certainly, and people crowd her
drawing-room to look at her; but a plain-featured, sensible, shrewd
woman, with no beauty to speak of but with tact and cleverness, would
have helped him in his career far better than does his brainless
Venus. He finds this out when it is too late to change M. for N.
in the marriage service.

The successful men of small beginnings are greatly liable to this
curse of wifely hindrance. A barrister once briefless and now in
silk--an artist once obscure and now famous--who in the days of
impecuniosity and Bohemianism married the landlady's pretty daughter
and towards the meridian of life find themselves in the front ranks of
_la haute volée_ with a wife who drops her h's and multiplies her s's,
know the full bitterness of the bread baked from that hasty brewing.
Each woman may have been beautiful in her youth, and each man may have
loved his own very passionately; but if she have nothing to supplement
her beauty--if she have no brains to fall back on, by which she can be
educated up to her husband's present social position as the wife of
his successful maturity--she is a mistake. Dickens was quite right to
kill off pretty childish Dora in 'David Copperfield.' If she had lived
she would have been like Flora in 'Bleak House,' who indeed was Dora
grown old but not matured; with all the grace and beauty of her youth
gone, and nothing else to take their place.

Men do not care for brains in excess in women. They like a sympathetic
intellect which can follow and seize their thoughts as quickly as they
are uttered; but they do not much care for any clear or specific
knowledge of facts. Even the most philosophic among them would rather
not be set right in a classical quotation, an astronomical
calculation, or the exact bearing of a political question by a
lovely being in tarlatane whom he was graciously unbending to
instruct. Neither do they want anything very strong-minded. To most
men, indeed, the feminine strong-mindedness that can discuss immoral
problems without blushing is a quality as unwomanly as a
well-developed biceps or a 'shoulder-of-mutton' fist. It is sympathy,
not antagonism--it is companionship, not rivalry, still less
supremacy, that they like in women; and some women with brains as well
as learning--for the two are not the same thing--understand this, and
keep their blue stockings well covered by their petticoats. Others,
enthusiasts for freedom of thought and intellectual rights, show
theirs defiantly; and meet with their reward. Men shrink from them.
Even clever men, able to meet them on their own ground, do not feel
drawn to them; while all but high-class minds are humiliated by their
learning and dwarfed by their moral courage. And no man likes to feel
humiliated or dwarfed in the presence of a woman, and because of her
superiority.

But the brains most useful to women, and most befitting their work in
life, are those which show themselves in common-sense, in good
judgment, and that kind of patient courage which enables them to bear
small crosses and great trials alike with dignity and good temper.
Mere intellectual culture, however valuable it may be in itself, does
not equal the worth of this kind of moral power; for as the true
domain of woman is the home, and her way of ordering her domestic
life the best test of her faculties, mere intellectual culture does
not help in this; and, in fact, is often a hindrance rather than a
help. What good is there in one's wife being an accomplished
mathematician, a sound scholar, a first-rate musician, a deeply-read
theologian, if she cannot keep the accounts square, knows nothing of
the management of children, lets herself be cheated by the servants
and the tradespeople, has not her eyes opened to dirt and disorder,
and gives way to a fretful temper on the smallest provocation?

The pretty fool who spends half her time in trying on new dresses and
studying the effect of colours, and who knows nothing beyond the last
new novel and the latest plate of fashions, is not a more disastrous
wife than the woman of profound learning whose education has taught
her nothing practical. They stand at the opposite ends of the same
scale, and neither end gives the true position of women. Indeed, if
one must have a fool in one's house, the pretty one would be the best,
as, at the least, pleasant to look at; which is something gained.

The intellectual fool, with her head always in books and 'questions,'
and her children dropping off like sheep for the want of womanly care,
is something more than flesh and blood can tolerate. The pretty fool
cannot help herself. If nature proved herself but a stepmother to her,
and left out the best part of her wits while taking such especial care
of her face, it is no fault of hers; but the intellectual fool is a
case of maladministration of powers, for which she alone is
responsible; and in this particular alternative between beauty and
brains, without a shadow of doubt we would go in for beauty.

Ball-rooms and dinner-tables are the two places where certain women
most shine. In the ball-room Hebe is the queen, and has it all her own
way without fear of rivals. A very few men who care for dancing for
its own sake will certainly dance with Hecate if she is light on hand,
keeps accurate time, and manages her feet with scientific precision;
but to the ruck of youths, Hebe, who jerks herself into step every
second round, but whose lovely face and perfect figure make up for
everything, is the partner they all besiege. Only to those exceptional
few who regard dancing as a serious art would she be a bore with her
three jumps and a hop; while Hecate, waltzing like an angel, would be
divine, in spite of her high cheek-bones and light green eyes _à fleur
de tête_. But at a dinner-table, where a man likes to talk between the
dishes, a sympathetic listener with pleasant manners, to whom he can
air his stalest stories and recount his personal experiences, is
preferable to the prettiest girl if a simpleton, only able to show her
small white teeth in a silly smile, and say 'yes' and 'indeed' in the
wrong places. The ball-room may be taken to represent youth; the
dinner-table maturity. The one is the apotheosis of mere beauty, in
clouds of millinery glory and a heaven of flirting; the other is solid
enjoyment, with brains to talk to by the side and beauty to look
at opposite, in just the disposition that makes life perfect. A
well-ordered dinner-table is a social microcosm; and, being so, this
is the blue riband of the arrangement.

Every woman is bound to make the best of herself. The strong-minded
women who hold themselves superior to the obligations of dress and
manner and all the pleasant little artificial graces belonging to an
artificial civilization, and who think any sacrifice made to
appearance just so much waste of power, are awful creatures, ignorant
of the real meaning of their sex--social Graiæ wanting in every charm
of womanhood, and to be diligently shunned by the wary.

This making the best of themselves is a very different thing from
making dress and personal vanity the first considerations in life.
Where women in general fail is in the exaggerations into which they
fall on this and on almost every other question. They are apt to be
either demireps or devotees; frights or flirts; fashionable to an
extent that lands them in illimitable folly and drags their husbands'
names through the mire, or they are so dowdy that they disgrace a
well-ordered drawing-room, and among nicely-dressed women stand out as
living sermons on slovenliness. If they are clever, they are too
commonly blue-stockings, and let the whole household go by the board
for the sake of their fruitless studies; and if they are domestic and
good managers they sink into mere servants, never opening a book save
their daily ledger, and having no thought beyond the cheesemonger's
bill and the butcher's prices. They want that fine balance, that
accurate self-measurement and knowledge of results, which goes by
the name of common-sense and is the best manifestation of brains
they can give, and the thing which men most prize. It is the most
valuable working form of intellectual power, and has most endurance
and vitality; and it is the form which helps a man on in life, when
he has found it in his wife, quite as much as money or a good connexion.

So that, on the whole, brains are before beauty in the solid things of
life. For admiration and personal love and youthful enjoyment, beauty
of course is supreme; but as we cannot be always young nor always apt
for pleasure, it is as well to provide for the days when the daughters
of music shall be brought low and the years draw nigh which have no
pleasure in them.




_NYMPHS._


Between the time of the raw school-girl and that of the finished young
lady is the short season of the nymph, when the physical enjoyment of
life is perhaps at its keenest, and a girl is not afraid to use her
limbs as nature meant her to use them, nor ashamed to take pleasure in
her youth and strength. This is the time when a sharp run down a steep
hill, with the chance of a tumble midway, is an exercise by no means
objected to; when clambering over gates, stiles, and even crabbed
stone-walls is not refused because of the undignified display of ankle
which the adventure involves; when leaping a ditch comes in as one of
the ordinary accidents of a marshland walk; and when the fun of riding
is infinitely enhanced if the horse be only half broken or barebacked.

The nymph--an out-of-door, breezy, healthy girl, more after the
pattern of the Greek Oread than the Amazon--is found only in the
country; and for the most part only in the remoter districts of the
country. In the town she degenerates into fastness, according to the
law which makes evil merely the misdirection of force, as dirt is
only matter in the wrong place. But among the mountains, in the
secluded midland villages, or out on the thinly-populated moorland
tracts, the nymph may be found in the full perfection of her nature.
And a very beautiful kind of nature it is; though it is to be feared
that certain ladies of the stricter sort would call her 'tomboy', and
that those of a still narrower way of thought, unable to distinguish
between unconventionality and vulgarity, would hold her to be
decidedly vulgar--which she is not--and would wonder at her mother for
'letting her go on so.'

You fall upon the nymph at all hours and in all seasons. Indeed, she
boasts that no weather ever keeps her indoors, and prefers a little
roughness of the elements to anything too luscious or sentimental. A
fresh wind, a sharp frost, a blinding fall of snow, or a pelting
shower of rain are all high jinks to the nymph, to whom it is rare fun
to come in like a water-dog, dripping from every hair, or shaking the
snow in masses from her hat and cloak. She prefers this kind of thing
to the suggestive beauty of the moonlight or the fervid heats of
summer; and thinks a long walk in the crisp sharp frost, with the
leaves crackling under her feet, worth all the nightingales in the
wood. And yet she loves the spring and summer too, for the sake of the
flowers and the birds and the beasts and the insects they bring forth;
for the nymph is almost always a naturalist of the perceptive and
self-taught kind, and has a marvellous faculty for finding out
nests and rare habitats, and for tracking unusual trails to the hidden
home.

There is no prettier sight among girls than the nymph when thoroughly
at her ease, and enjoying herself in her own peculiar way. That
wonderful grace of unconsciousness which belongs to savages and
animals belongs to her also, and she moves with a supple freedom which
affectation or shyness would equally destroy. To see her running down
a green field, with the sunlight falling on her; her light dress blown
into coloured clouds by the wind; her step a little too long for the
correct town-walk--but so firmly planted and yet so light, so swift,
so even!--her cheeks freshly flushed by exercise; her eyes bright and
fearless; her white teeth shown below her upper lip as she comes
forward with a ringing laugh, carrying a young bird which she has just
caught, or a sheaf of wild flowers for which she has been perilling
her neck, is to see a beautiful and gracious picture which you
remember with pleasure all your life after. Or you meet her quite
alone on a wide bleak moor, with her hat in her hand and her hair
blowing across her face, looking for plovers' eggs, or ferns and
orchids down in the damp hollows. She is by no means dressed according
to the canons of _Le Follet_, and yet she always manages to have
something picturesque about her--something that would delight an
artist's taste, and that is in perfect harmony with herself and her
surroundings--which she wears with profound ignorance as to how well
it suits her--or at most with only an instinctive knowledge that
it is the right thing for her. She may be shy as she meets you; if she
is passing out of the nymph state into that of conscious womanhood,
she will be shy; but if still a nymph with no disturbing influences at
work, she will probably look at you with a fixed, perplexing,
half-provoking look of frank curiosity which you can neither notice
nor take advantage of; the trammels of conventional life fettering one
side heavily, if not the other.

Shocking as it is to say, the nymph may sometimes be met on the top of
a haycart, and certainly in the hayfield, where she is engaged in
scattering the 'cocks,' if not in raising them; and where even the
haymakers themselves--and they are not a notably romantic race--do not
grumble at the extra trouble she gives them, because of her evident
delight in her misdeeds. Besides, she has a bright word for them as
she passes; for the nymph has democratic tendencies, and is frank and
'affable' to all classes alike. She needs to be a little looked after
in this direction, not for mischief but for manners; for, if not
judiciously checked, she may become in time coarse. There are seamy
sides to everything, and the nymph does not escape the general law.

If the nymph condescends to any game at all, it is croquet, at which
she is inexorably severe. She knows nothing of the little weakness
which makes her elder sisters overlook the patent spooning of the
favourite curate, even though he is opposed to them--nothing of
the tender favouritism which pushes on an awkward partner by deeds of
helping outside the law. The nymph, who has no weakness nor tenderness
of that kind, knows only the game; and the game has not elastic
boundaries. Therefore she is inflexible in her justice to one side and
the other. Is it not the game? she says when reproached with being
disagreeable and unamiable.

But even croquet is slow to the nymph, who has been known to handle a
bat not discreditably, and who is an adept at firing at a mark with
real powder and ball. If she lives near a lake, a river, or the sea,
she is first-rate at boating, can feather her oar and back water with
the skill of a veteran oarsman, and can reef a sail or steer close
without the slightest hesitation or nervousness. She is also a fam

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