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

by E. Lynn Linton · English · Gutenberg #41736 · 493,757 chars · public domain (US)

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

Author: E. Lynn Linton


        
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Language: English

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

    THE

    GIRL OF THE PERIOD

    ETC.


    VOL. II.

    [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. II.

[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




CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.


                                  PAGE
    GUSHING MEN                      1

    SWEET SEVENTEEN                  9

    THE HABIT OF FEAR               19

    OLD LADIES                      28

    VOICES                          37

    BURNT FINGERS                   46

    DÉSOEUVREMENT                   55

    THE SHRIEKING SISTERHOOD        64

    OTHERWISE-MINDED                72

    LIMP PEOPLE                     82

    THE ART OF RETICENCE            91

    MEN'S FAVOURITES               100

    WOMANLINESS                    109

    SOMETHING TO WORRY             119

    SWEETS OF MARRIED LIFE         127

    SOCIAL NOMADS                  136

    GREAT GIRLS                    145

    SHUNTED DOWAGERS               155

    PRIVILEGED PERSONS             164

    MODERN MAN-HATERS              173

    VAGUE PEOPLE                   181

    ARCADIA                        190

    STRANGERS AT CHURCH            199

    IN SICKNESS                    208

    ON A VISIT                     217

    DRAWING-ROOM EPIPHYTES         227

    THE EPICENE SEX                235

    WOMEN'S MEN                    243

    HOTEL LIFE IN ENGLAND          252

    OUR MASKS                      261

    HEROES AT HOME                 268

    SEINE-FISHING                  276

    THE DISCONTENTED WOMAN         285

    ENGLISH CLERGYMEN IN
      FOREIGN WATERING-PLACES      293

    OLD FRIENDS                    302

    POPULAR WOMEN                  310

    CHOOSING OR FINDING            319

    LOCAL FÊTES                    327




ESSAYS

UPON

SOCIAL SUBJECTS.




_GUSHING MEN._


The picture of a gushing creature all heart and no brains, all impulse
and no ballast, is familiar to most of us; and we know her, either by
repute or by personal acquaintance, as well as we know our alphabet.
But we are not so familiar with the idea of the gushing man. Yet
gushing men exist, if not in such numbers as their sisters, still in
quite sufficient force to constitute a distinct type. The gushing man
is the furthest possible removed from the ordinary manly ideal, as
women create it out of their own imaginations. Women like to picture
men as inexorably just, yet tender; calm, grave, restrained, yet full
of passion well mastered; Greathearts with an eye cast Mercywards if
you will, else unapproachable by all the world; Goethes with one weak
corner left for Bettina, where love may queen it over wisdom, but in
all save love strong as Titans, powerful as gods, unchangeable as
fate. They forgive anything in a man who is manly according to their
own pattern and ideas. Even harshness amounting to brutality is
condoned if the hero have a jaw of sufficient squareness, and mighty
passions just within the limits of control--as witness _Jane Eyre's_
Rochester and his long line of unpleasant followers. But this
harshness must be accompanied by love. Like the Russian wife who wept
for want of her customary thrashing, taking immunity from the stick to
mean indifference, these women would rather have brutality with love
than no love at all.

But a gushing man, as judged by men among men, is a being so foreign
to the womanly ideal that very few understand him when they do see
him. And they do not call him gushing. He is frank, enthusiastic,
unworldly, aspiring; perhaps he is labelled with that word of power,
'high-souled;' but he is not gushing, save when spoken of by men who
despise him. For men have an intense contempt for him. A woman who has
no ballast, and whose self-restraint goes to the winds on every
occasion, is accepted for what she is worth, and but little
disappointment and less annoyance is felt for what is wanting. Indeed,
men in general expect so little from women that their follies count as
of course and only what might be looked for. They are like marriage,
or the English climate, or a lottery ticket, or a dark horse heavily
backed, and have to be taken for better or worse as they may turn out,
with the violent probability that the chances are all on the side of
the worse.

But the gushing man is inexcusable. He is a nuisance or a
laughing-stock; and as either he is resented. In his club, at the
mess-table, in the city, at home, wherever he may be and whatever he
may be about, he is always plunging headlong into difficulties and
dragging his friends with him; always quarrelling for a straw; putting
himself grossly in the wrong and vehemently apologizing afterwards;
hitting wild at one moment and down on his knees the next, and as
absurd in the one attitude as he is abject in the other. He falls in
love at first sight and makes a fool of himself on unknown ground
while with men he is ready to swear eternal friendship or undying
enmity before he has had time to know anything whatever about the
object of his regard or his dislike. In consequence he is being
perpetually associated with shaky names and brought into questionable
positions. He is full of confidence in himself on every occasion, and
is given to making the most positive assertions on things he knows
nothing about; when afterwards he is obliged to retract and to own
himself mistaken. But he is just as full of self-abasement when, like
vaulting ambition, he has overleaped himself and fallen into mistakes
and failures unawares. He makes rash bets about things of which he has
the best information; so he says; and will not be staved off by those
who know what folly he is committing, but insists on writing himself
down after Dogberry at the cost of just so much. He backs the worst
player at billiards on the strength of a chance hazard, and bets on
the losing hand at whist. He goes into wild speculations in the city,
where he is certain to land a pot of money according to his own
account and whence he comes with empty pockets, as you foretold and
warned. He takes up with all manner of doubtful schemes and yet more
doubtful promoters; but he will not be advised. Is he not gushing? and
does not the quality of gushingness include an Arcadian belief in the
virtue of all the world?

The gushing man is the very pabulum of sharks and sharpers; and it is
he whose impressibility and gullible good-nature supply wind for the
sails of half the rotten schemes afloat. Full of faith in his fellows,
and of belief in a brilliant future to be had by good luck and not by
hard work, he cannot bring himself to doubt either men or measures;
unless indeed his gushingness takes the form of suspicion, and then he
goes about delivering himself of accusations not one of which he can
substantiate by the weakest bulwark of fact, and doubting the
soundness of investments as safe as the Three per Cents.

In manner the gushing man is familiar and caressing. He may be
patronizing or playful according to the bent of his own nature. If the
first, he will call his superior, My dear boy, and pat him on the back
encouragingly; if the second, he will put his arm schoolboy fashion
round the neck of any man of note who has the misfortune of his
intimacy, and call him Old fellow, or Governor, or _rex meus_, as he
is inclined. With women his familiarity is excessively offensive. He
gives them pet names, or calls to them by their Christian names from one
end of the room to the other, and pats and paws them in all fraternal
affectionateness, after about the same length of acquaintanceship
as would bring other men from the bowing stage to that of shaking
hands. His manners throughout are enough to compromise the toughest
reputation; and one of the worst misfortunes that can befall a
woman whose circumstances lay her specially open to slander and
misrepresentation is to include among her friends a gushing man of
energetic tendencies, on the look-out to do her a good turn if he can,
and anxious to let people see on what familiar terms he stands with
her. He means nothing in the least degree improper when he puts his
arm round her waist, calls her My dear and even Darling in a loud
voice for all the world to hear; or when he seats himself at her table
before folk to write her private messages, which he makes believe to
be of so much importance that they must not be spoken aloud, and which
are of no importance at all. He is only familiar and gushing; and he
would be the first to cry out against the evil imagination of the
world which saw harm in what he does with such innocent intent.

The gushing man has one grave defect--he is not safe nor secret. From
no bad motive, but just from the blind propulsion of gushingness, he
cannot keep a secret, and he is sure to let out sooner or later all
he knows. He holds back nothing of his friends nor of his own--not
even when his honour is engaged in the trust; being essentially
loose-lipped, and with his emotional life always bubbling up through
the thin crust of conventional reserve. Not that he means to be
dishonourable; he is only gushing and unrestrained. Hence every friend
he has knows all about him. His latest lover learns the roll-call of
all his previous loves; and there is not a man in his club, with whom
he is on speaking terms, who does not know as much. Women who trust
themselves to gushing men simply trust themselves to broken reeds; and
they might as well look for a sieve that will hold water as expect a
man of the sieve nature to keep their secret, whatever it may cost
them and him to divulge it.

As a theorist the gushing man is for ever advocating untenable
opinions and taking up with extreme doctrines, which he announces
confidently and out of which he can be argued by the first opponent he
encounters. The facility with which he can be bowled over on any
ground--he calls it being converted--is in fact one of his most
striking characteristics; and a gushing man rushes from the school of
one professor to that of another, his zeal unabated, no matter how
many his reconversions. He is always finding the truth, which he never
retains; and the loudest and most active in damning a cast-off
doctrine is the gushing man who has once followed it. As a leader, he
is irresistible to both boys and women. His enthusiastic,
unreflecting, unballasted character finds a ready response in the
youthful and feminine nature; and he is the idol of a small knot of
ardent worshippers, who believe in him as the logical and
well-balanced man is never believed in. He takes them captive by a
community of imagination, of impulsiveness, of exaggeration; and is
followed just in proportion to his unfitness to lead.

This is the kind of man who writes sentimental novels, with a good
deal of love laced with a vague form of pantheism or of weak
evangelical religion, to suit all tastes; or he is great in a certain
kind of indefinite poetry which no one has yet been found to
understand, save perhaps, a special Soul Sister, which is the subdued
version among us of the more suggestive Spiritual Wife. He adores the
feminine virtues, which he places far beyond all the masculine ones;
and expatiates on the beauty of the female character which he thinks
is to be the rule of the future. Perhaps though, he goes off into
panegyrics on the Vikings and the Berserkers; or else plunges boldly
into the mists of the Arthurian era, and gushes in obsolete English
about chivalry and the Round Table, Sir Launcelot and the Holy Graal,
to the bewilderment of his entranced audience to whom he does not
supply a glossary. In religion he is generally a mystic and always in
extremes. He can never be pinned down to logic, to facts, to reason;
and to his mind the golden mean is the sin for which the Laodicean
Church was cursed. Feeling and emotion and imagination do all the
work of the world according to him; and when he is asked to reason and
to demonstrate, he answers, with the lofty air of one secure of the
better way, that he Loves, and that Love sees further and more clearly
than reason.

As the strong-minded woman is a mistake among women, so is the gushing
man among men. Fluid, unstable, without curb to govern or rein to
guide, he brings into the masculine world all the mental frailties of
the feminine, and adds to them the force of his own organization as a
man. Whatever he may be he is a disaster; and at all times is
associated with failure. He is the revolutionary leader who gets up
abortive risings--the schemer whose plans run into sand--the poet
whose books are read only by schoolgirls, or lie on the publisher's
shelves uncut, as his gushingness bubbles over into twaddle or exhales
itself in the smoke of obscurity--the fanatic whose faith is more
madness than philosophy--the man of society who is the butt of his
male companions and the terror of his lady acquaintances--the father
of a family which he does his best, unintentionally, to ruin by
neglect, which he calls nature, or by eccentricity of training, which
he calls faith--and the husband of a woman who either worships him in
blind belief, or who laughs at him in secret, as heart or head
preponderates in her character. In any case he is a man who never
finds the fitting time or place; and who dies as he has lived, with
everything about him incomplete.




_SWEET SEVENTEEN._


A vast amount of poetry has always been thrown round that special time
of a woman's life when,

    Standing with reluctant feet
    Where the brook and river meet,

she is no longer a child and yet not quite a woman--that transition
time between the closed bud and the full-blown flower which we in
England express by the term, among others, of Sweet Seventeen. Without
meaning to be sentimental, or to envelope things in a golden haze
wrought by the imagination only and nowhere to be found in fact, we
cannot deny the peculiar charm which belongs to a girl of this age, if
she is nice, and neither pert nor silly. Besides, it is not only what
she is that interests us, but what she will be; for this is the time
when the character is settling into its permanent form, so that the
great thought of every one connected with her is, How will she turn
out? Into what kind of woman will the girl develop? and, What kind of
life will she make for herself?

Certainly Sweet Seventeen may be a most unlovely creature, and in
fact she often is; a creature hard and forward, having lost the
innocence and obedience of childhood and having gained nothing yet of
the tact and grace of womanhood; a creature whose hopes and thoughts
are all centred on the time when she shall be brought out and have her
fling of flirting and fine dresses with the rest. Or she may be only a
gauche and giggling schoolgirl, with a mind as narrow as her life,
given up to the small intrigues and scandals of the dormitory and the
playground--a girl who scamps her lessons and cheats her masters;
whose highest efforts of intellect are shown in the cleverness with
which she can break the rules of the establishment without being found
out; who thinks talking at forbidden times, peeping through forbidden
windows, giving silly nicknames to her companions and teachers, and
telling silly secrets with less truth than ingenuity in them, the
greatest fun imaginable, and all the greater because of the spice of
rebellion and perversity with which her folly is dashed. Or she may be
a mere tomboy, regretting her sex and despising its restraints;
cultivating schoolboy slang and aping schoolboy habits; ridiculing her
sisters and disliked by her companions, while thinking girlhood a bore
and womanhood a mistake in exact proportion to its feminality. Or she
may be a budding miss, shy and awkward, with no harm in her and as
little good--a mere sketch of a girl, without a leading line as yet
made out or the dominant colour so much as indicated.

Sometimes she is awkward in another way, being studious and
preoccupied--when she passes for odd and original, and is partly
feared, partly disliked, and wholly misunderstood by her own young
world; and sometimes she has a cynical contempt for men and beauty and
pleasure and dress, when she will make herself ridiculous by her
revolt against all the canons of good taste and conventionality. But
after her _début_ in tattered garments of severe colours and ungainly
cut, she will probably end her days as a frantic Fashionable, the
salvation of whose soul depends on the faultless propriety of her
wardrobe. The eccentricities of Sweet Seventeen not unfrequently
revenge themselves by an exactly opposite extravagance of maturity.
But though there are enough and to spare of girls according to all
these patterns, the Sweet Seventeen of one's affections is none of
them. And yet she is not always the same, but has her different
presentations, her varying facets, which give her variety of charm and
beauty.

The best and loveliest thing about Sweet Seventeen is her sense of
duty--for the most part a new sense. She no longer needs to be told
what to do; she has not to be kept to her tasks by the fear of
authority nor the submissive grace of obedience; but of her own free
will, because understanding that it is her duty and that duty is a
holier thing than self-will, she conscientiously does what she does
not like to do, and cheerfully gives up what she desires without being
driven or exhorted. She has generally before her mind some favourite
heroine in a girl's novel, who goes through much painful discipline
and comes out all the brighter for it in the end; and she makes noble
resolves of living as worthily as her model. She comforts her soul
too, with passages from Longfellow and Tennyson and the 'Christian
Year,' and learns long extracts from 'Evangeline' and the 'Idyls;'
poetry having an almost magical influence over her, nearly as powerful
as the Sunday sermons to which she listens so devoutly and tries so
patiently to understand. For the first time she wakes to a dim sense
of her own individuality, and confesses to herself that she has a life
of her own, apart from and extraneous to her mere family membership.
She is not only the sister or the daughter living with and for her
parents or her brothers and sisters, but she is also herself, with a
future of her own not to be shared with them, not to be touched by
them. And she begins to have vague dreams of this future and its
hero--dreams that are as much of fairyland as if they were of the
young prince coming over the sea in a golden boat to find the princess
in a tower of brass waiting for him.

Quite impersonal, and with a hero only in the clouds, nevertheless
these dreams are suggested by the special circumstances of her life,
by her favourite books or the style of society in which she has been
placed. The young prince is either a beautiful and high-souled
clergyman--not unlike the young vicar or the new curate, but
infinitely more beautiful--an apostle in the standing collar and
single-breasted coat of the nineteenth century; or he is an artist in
a velvet blouse and with flowing hair, living in a world of beauty
such as no Philistine can imagine; or he is a gallant sailor, with
blue eyes and a loose necktie, looking up to heaven in a gale, and
thinking of his mother and sisters at home and of the one still more
beloved, when he certainly ought to be thinking of tarry ropes and
coarse sailcloth; or he is a magnificent young officer heading his men
at a charge, and looking supremely well got up and handsome. This is
the kind of _futur_ she dreams of when she dreams at all, which is not
often. The reality of her mature life is perhaps a stolid square-set
squire, or a prosaic city merchant without the thinnest thread of
romance in his composition; while her own life, which was to be such a
lovely poem of graceful usefulness and heroic beauty, sinks into the
prosaic routine of housekeeping and society, the sigh after the
vanished ideal growing fainter and fainter as the weight of fact grows
heavier.

Married men are all sacred to Sweet Seventeen when she is a good girl;
so are engaged men. For the matter of that, she believes that nothing
could induce her to marry either a widower or one who had been already
engaged, as nothing could induce her to marry any man under five foot
eleven, or with a snub nose or sandy whiskers. Sweet Seventeen has in
general the most profound aversion for boys. To be sure she may have
her favourites--very few and very seldom; but she mostly thinks them
stupid or conceited, and impartially resents either their awkward
attentions to herself or their assumptions of superiority. An
abnormally clever boy--the Poet-Laureate or George Stephenson of his
generation--is her detestation, because he is odd and unlike every one
else; while the one that she dislikes least among them is the school
hero, who is first in the sports and takes all the prizes, and who
goes through life loved by every one and never famous.

For her several brothers she has a range of entirely different
feelings. Her younger schoolboy brothers she regards as the torments
of her existence, whose unkempt hair, dirty boots and rude manners are
her special crosses, to be borne with patience, tempered by an active
endeavour after reform. But the more advanced, and those who are older
than herself, are her loves for whom she has an enthusiastic
admiration, and whose future she believes in as something specially
brilliant and successful. If only slightly older or younger than
herself, she impresses them powerfully with the sentiment of her
superiority, and patronizes them--kindly enough; but she makes them
feel the ineffable supremacy of her sex, and how that she by virtue of
her womanhood is a glorified creature beside them--an Ariel to their
Caliban.

Now too, she begins to speak to her mother on more equal terms; to
criticize her dress, and to make her understand that she considers her
old-fashioned and inclined to be dowdy. She ties her bonnet-strings
for her; arranges her cap; smartens up her old dress and compels her
to buy a new one; and, while considering her immeasurably ancient,
likes her to look nice, and thinks her in her own way beautiful.
Sometimes she opposes and quarrels with her, if the mother has less
tact than arbitrariness. But this is not her natural state; for one of
the characteristics of Sweet Seventeen is her love for her mother and
her need of better counsel and guidance; so that if she comes into
opposition with her it is only through extreme pain, and the bitter
teaching of tyranny and injustice. This is just the age indeed, when
the mother's influence is everything to a girl; and when a silly, an
unjust, or an unprincipled woman is the very ruin of her life. But
with a low or evil-natured mother we seldom see a Sweet Seventeen
worth the trouble of writing about: which shows at least one
thing--the importance of the womanly influence at such a time, and how
so much that we blame in our modern girls lies to the account of their
mothers.

Great tact is required with Sweet Seventeen in such society as is
allowed her; care to bring her out a little without obtruding her on
the world, without making her forward and consequential, and without
attracting too much attention to her. She is no longer a child to be
shut away in the nursery, but she is not yet entitled to the place and
consideration of a member of society. And yet it would be cruel to
debar her wholly from all that is going on in the house. To be sure
there is the governess, as well as mamma, to look after her manners
and to give her rope enough and not too much; but by the time a girl
is seventeen a governess has ceased to be the autocrat _ex officio_,
and she obeys her or not according to their respective strengths.
Still, the governess or mamma is for the most part at her elbow; and
Sweet Seventeen, if well brought up, is left very little to her own
guidance, and sees the world only through half-opened doors.

Girls of this age are often wonderfully sad, and full of a kind of
wondering despair at the sin and misery they are beginning to learn.
They take up extreme views in religion and talk largely on the
nothingness of pleasure and the emptiness of the world; and many fair
young creatures whom their elders, laden with sorrowful experience,
think full of hope and joy, are ready to give up all the pleasure of
life, and to lay down life itself, for very disgust of that of which
they know nothing. They delight in sorrowful lamentations and
sentimental regrets put into rhyme; and one of the funniest things in
the world is to see a girl dancing with the merriest in the evening,
and to hear her talking broken-hearted pessimism in the morning. It is
merely an example of the old proverb about the meeting of extremes;
vacuity leading to the same results as experience.

But however she takes this unknown life, it is always in an unreal and
romantic aspect. Some of more robust mind delight in the bolder
stories of Greece and Rome, and wish they had played a part in the
sensational heroism of those grand old times; while others go to
Venice, and make pictures for themselves out of the gliding gondolas
and the mysterious Council of Ten, the lovely ladies with grim old
fathers and high-handed brothers acting as gaolers, and the handsome
cavaliers serenading them in the moonlight. That is their idea of
love. They have no perception of anything warmer. It is all romance
and poetry, and tender glances from afar, and long and patient wooing
under difficulties and a little danger, with scarce a word spoken, and
nothing more expressive than a flower furtively given, or a fleeting
pressure of the finger tips. They know nothing else and expect nothing
else. Their cherry is without stone, their bird without bone, their
orange without rind, as in the old song; and they imagine a love as
unreal as all the rest.

When thrown into actualities, though--say when left motherless, and
the eldest girl of perhaps a large family with a father to comfort and
a young brood to see after--Sweet Seventeen is often very beautiful in
her degree, and rises grandly to her position. Sometimes the burden of
her responsibilities is too much for her tender shoulders, and she is
overweighted, and fails. Sometimes too she is tyrannical and selfish
in such a position, and uses her power ill; and sometimes she is
careless and good-humoured, when they all scramble up together,
through confusion, dirt and disorder, till the close time is over, and
they scatter themselves abroad. Sometimes she is a martyr, and makes
herself and every one else uncomfortable by the perpetual
demonstration of her martyrdom, and how she considers herself
sacrificed and put upon. Indeed she is not unfrequently a martyr from
other causes than heavy duties, being fond of adopting unworkable
views which cannot run in the family groove anyhow. If she falls upon
this rock she is in her glory; youth being marvellously proud of
voluntary crucifixion, and thinking itself especially ill-used because
it must be made conformable and is prevented from making itself
ridiculous.

But Sweet Seventeen is intolerant of all moral differences. What she
holds to be right is the absolute, the one sole and only just law; and
she thinks it tampering with sin to allow that any one else has an
equal right with herself to a contrary opinion. But on the whole she
is a pleasant, loveable interesting creature; and one's greatest
regret about her is that she is so often in the hands of unsuitable
guides, and that her powers and noble impulses get so stunted and
shadowed by the commonplace training which is her general lot, and the
low aims of life which are the only ones held out to her.




_THE HABIT OF FEAR._


The mind, like the body, contracts tricks and habits which in time
become automatic and involuntary--habits of association, tricks of
repetition, of which the excess is monomania, but which, without
attaining to quite that extreme, become more or less masters of the
brain and directors of the thoughts. And, of all these tricks of the
mind, the habit of fear is the most insidious and persistent. It is
seldom that any one who has once given in to it is able to clear
himself of it again. However unreasonable it may be, the trick clings,
and it would take an exceptionally strong intellect to be convinced of
its folly and learn the courage of common-sense. But this is just the
intellect which does not allow itself to contract the habit in the
beginning; a coward being for the most part a washy, weak kind of
being, with very little backbone anyhow. We do not mean by this fear
that which is physical and personal only, though this is generally the
sole idea which people have of the word; but moral and mental
cowardice as well. Personal fear indeed, is common enough, and as
pitiable as it is common; and we are ashamed to say that it is not
confined to women, though naturally it is more predominant with them
than with men.

As for women, the tyranny of fear lies very heavy on them, taking the
flavour out of many a life which else would be perfectly happy; being
often the only bitter drop in a cup full of sweetness. But how bitter
that drop is!--bitter enough to destroy all the sweetness of the rest.
Some women live in the perpetual presence of dread, both mental and
personal. It surrounds them like an atmosphere; it clothes them like a
garment; day by day, and from night to morning, it dogs their steps
and sits like a nightmare on their hearts; it is their very root work
of sensation, and they could as soon live without food as live without
fear.

Ludicrous as many of their terrors are, we still cannot help pitying
these poor self-made martyrs of imaginary danger. Take that most
familiar of all forms of fear among women, the fear of burglars, and
let us imagine for a moment the horror of the life which is haunted by
a nightly dread--by a terror that comes with as unfailing regularity
as the darkness--and measure, if we can, the amount of anguish that
must be endured before death comes to take off the torture. There are
many women to whom night is simply this time of torture, never
varying, never relieved. They dare not lock their doors, because then
they would be at the mercy of the man who sooner or later is to come
in at the window; and if they hear the boards creak or the furniture
crack they are in agonies because of the man who they are sure is in
the house, and who will come in at the door. They cannot sleep if they
have not looked all about the room--under the bed, behind the
curtains, into the closet, where perhaps a dress hanging a little
fantastically gives them a nervous start that lasts for the night.

But though they search so diligently they would probably faint on the
spot if they so much as saw the heels of the housebreaker they are
looking for. Yet you cannot reason with these poor creatures. You
cannot deny the fact that burglars have been found before now secreted
in bedrooms; and you cannot pooh-pooh the murders and housebreakings
which are reported in the newspapers; so you have nothing to say to
their argument that things which have happened once may happen again,
and that there is no reason why they specially should be exempt from a
misfortune to which others have been subjected. But you feel that
their terrors are just so much pith and substance taken out of their
strength; and that if they could banish the fear of burglars from
their minds they would be so much the more valuable members of
society, while the exorcism of their dismal demon would be so much the
better for themselves.

It is the same in everything. If they are living in the country, and
go up to London lodgings, they take the ground floor for fear of fire
and being burnt alive in their beds. If they go from London to the
country they see an escaped convict or a murderer in every ragged
reaper asking for work, or every tramp that begs for broken victuals
at the door. The country to them is full of dangers. In the shooting
season they are sure they will be shot if they go near a wood or a
turnip-field. They think they will be gored to death if they meet a
meek-eyed cow going placidly through the lane to her milking; and you
might as well try to march them up to the cannon's mouth as induce
them to cross a field where cattle are grazing. If they are driving,
and the horses are going at full trot, they say they are running away
and clutch the driver's arm nervously. As travellers they are in a
state of not wholly unreasonable apprehension the whole time the
railway journey lasts. They wait at Folkestone for days for a smooth
crossing; and when they are on board they call a breeze a gale, and
make sure they are bound for the bottom if the sea chops enough to
rock the boat so much as a cradle. If they go over a Swiss pass they
say their prayers and shut their eyes till it is over; and they are
horribly afraid of banditti on every foot of Italian ground, besides
firmly believing in the complicity with brigands of all the innkeepers
and _vetturini_.

Their fear extends to all who belong to them, for whom they conjure up
scenes of deadly disaster so soon as they are out of sight. Their
fancy is faceted, like the eyes of a fly, and they worry themselves
and every one else by exaggerating every chance of danger into a
certainty of destruction. When an epidemic is abroad, they are sure
all the children will take it; and if they have taken it, they are
sure they will never get over it. In illness indeed, those people who
have allowed themselves to fall into the habit of fear are especially
full of foreboding; not because they are more loving, more sympathetic
than others, but because they are more timid and less hopeful. If you
believe them, no one will recover who is in any way seriously
attacked; and the smallest ailment in themselves or their friends is
the sure forerunner of a mortal sickness. They make no allowance for
the elastic power of human nature; and they dislike hope and courage
in others, thinking you unfeeling in exact proportion to your
cheerfulness.

Morally this same habit of fear deteriorates, because it weakens and
narrows, the whole nature. So far from following Luther's famous
advice--Sin boldly and leave the rest to God--their sin is their very
fear, their unconquerable distrust. These are the people who regard
our affections as snares and all forms of pleasure as so many waymarks
on the road to perdition--who would narrow the circle of human life to
the smallest point both of feeling and action, because of the sin in
which, according to them, the whole world is steeped. They see guilt
everywhere, but innocence not at all. Their minds are set to the trick
of terror; and fear of the power of the devil and the anger of God
weighs on them like an iron chain from which there is no release.
This is not so much from delicacy of conscience as from simple moral
cowardice; for you seldom find these very timid people lofty-minded or
capable of any great act of heroism. On the contrary, they are
generally peevish and always selfish; self-consideration being the
tap-root of their fears, though the cause is assigned to all sorts of
pretty things, such as acute sensibilities, keen imagination, bad
health, tender conscience, delicate nerves--to anything in fact but
the real cause, a cowardly habit of fear produced by continual moral
selfishness, by incessant thought of and regard for themselves.

Nothing is so depressing as the society of a timid person, and nothing
is so infectious as fear. Live with any one given up to an eternal
dread of possible dangers and disasters, and you can scarcely escape
the contagion, nor, however brave you may be, maintain your
cheerfulness and faculty of faith. Indeed, as timid folks crave for
sympathy in their terrors--that very craving being part of their
malady of fear--you cannot show them a cheerful countenance under pain
of offence, and seeming to be brutal in your disregard of what so
tortures them. Their fears may be simply absurd and irrational, yet
you must sympathize with them if you wish even to soothe; argument or
common-sense demonstration of their futility being so much mental
ingenuity thrown away.

Fear breeds suspicion too, and timid people are always suspecting ill
of some one. The deepest old diplomatist who has probed the folly and
evil of the world from end to end, and who has sharpened his wits at
the expense of his trust, is not more full of suspicion of his kind
than a timid, superstitious, world-withdrawn man or woman given up to
the tyranny of fear. Every one is suspected more or less, but chiefly
lawyers, servants and all strangers. Any demonstration of kindness or
interest at all different from the ordinary jogtrot of society fills
them with undefined suspicion and dread; and, fear being in some
degree the product of a diseased imagination, the 'probable' causes
for anything they do not quite understand would make the fortune of a
novel-writer if given him for plots. If any one wants to hear
thrilling romances in course of actual enactment, let him go down
among remote and quiet-living country people, and listen to what they
have to say of the chance strangers who may have established
themselves in the neighbourhood, and who, having brought no letters of
introduction, are not known by the aborigines. The Newgate Calendar or
Dumas' novels would scarcely match the stories which fear and
ignorance have set afoot.

Fearful folk are always on the brink of ruin. They cannot wait to see
how things will turn before they despair; and they cannot hope for the
best in a bad pass. They are engulfed in abysses which never open, and
they die a thousand deaths before the supreme moment actually arrives.
The smallest difficulties are to them like the straws placed
crosswise over which no witch could pass; the beneficent action of
time, either as a healer of sorrow or a revealer of hidden mercies, is
a word of comfort they cannot accept for themselves, how true soever
it may be for others; the doctrine that chances are equal for good as
well as for bad is what they will not understand; and they know of no
power that can avert the disaster, which perhaps is simply a
possibility not even probable, and which their own fears only have
arranged. If they are professional men, having to make their way, they
are for ever anticipating failure for to-day and absolute destruction
for to-morrow; and they bemoan the fate of the wife and children sure
to be left to poverty by their untimely decease, when the chances are
ten to one in favour of the apportioned threescore and ten years. Life
is a place of suffering here and a place of torment hereafter; yet
they often wish to die, reversing Hamlet's decision by thinking the
mystery of unknown ills preferable to the reality of those they have
on hand.

Over such minds as these the vaticinations of such a prophet as Dr.
Cumming have peculiar power; and they accept his gloomy
interpretations of the Apocalypse with a faith as unquestioning as
that with which they accept the Gospels. They have a predilection
indeed for all terrifying prophecies, and cast the horoscope of the
earth and foretell the destruction of the universe with marvellous
exactitude. Their minds are set to the trick of foreboding, and they
live in the habit of fear, as others live in the habit of hope, of
resignation, or of careless good-humour and indifference. There is
nothing to be done with them. Like drinking, or palsy, or a nervous
headache, or a congenital deformity, the habit is hopeless when once
established; and those who have begun by fear and suspicion and
foreboding will live to the end in the atmosphere they have created
for themselves. The man or woman whose mind is once haunted by the
nightly fear of a secreted burglar will go on looking for his heels so
long as eyesight and the power of locomotion continue; and no failure
in past Apocalyptic interpretations will shake the believer's faith in
those of which the time for fulfilment has not yet arrived. It is a
trick which has rooted, a habit that has crystallized by use into a
formation; and there it must be left, as something beyond the power of
reason to remedy or of experience to destroy.




_OLD LADIES._


The world is notoriously unjust to its veterans, and above all it is
unjust to its ancient females. Everywhere, and from all time, an old
woman has been taken to express the last stage of uselessness and
exhaustion; and while a meeting of bearded dotards goes by the name of
a council of sages, and its deliberations are respected accordingly, a
congregation of grey-haired matrons is nothing but a congregation of
old women, whose thoughts and opinions on any subject whatsoever have
no more value than the chattering of so many magpies. In fact the poor
old ladies have a hard time of it; and if we look at it in its right
light, perhaps nothing proves more thoroughly the coarse flavour of
the world's esteem respecting women than this disdain which they
excite when they are old. And yet what charming old ladies one has
known at times!--women quite as charming in their own way at seventy
as their grand-daughters are at seventeen, and all the more so because
they have no design now to be charming, because they have given up the
attempt to please for the reaction of praise, and long since have
consented to become old though they have never drifted into
unpersonableness nor neglect. While retaining the intellectual
vivacity and active sympathies of maturity, they have added the
softness, the mellowness, the tempering got only from experience and
advancing age. They are women who have seen and known and read a great
deal; and who have suffered much; but whose sorrows have neither
hardened nor soured them--but rather have made them even more
sympathetic with the sorrows of others, and pitiful for all the young.
They have lived through and lived down all their own trials, and have
come out into peace on the other side; but they remember the trials of
the fiery passage, and they feel for those who have still to bear the
pressure of the pain they have overcome. These are not women much met
with in society; they are of the kind which mostly stays at home and
lets the world come to them. They have done with the hurry and glitter
of life, and they no longer care to carry their grey hairs abroad.
They retain their hold on the affections of their kind; they take an
interest in the history, the science, the progress of the day; but
they rest tranquil and content by their own fireside, and they sit to
receive, and do not go out to gather.

The fashionable old lady who haunts the theatres and drawing-rooms,
bewigged, befrizzled, painted, ghastly in her vain attempts to appear
young, hideous in her frenzied clutch at the pleasures melting from
her grasp, desperate in her wild hold on a life that is passing away
from her so rapidly, knows nothing of the quiet dignity and happiness
of her ancient sister who has been wise enough to renounce before she
lost. In her own house, where gather a small knot of men of mind and
women of character, where the young bring their perplexities and the
mature their deeper thoughts, the dear old lady of ripe experience,
loving sympathies and cultivated intellect holds a better court than
is known to any of those miserable old creatures who prowl about the
gay places of the world, and wrestle with the young for their crowns
and garlands--those wretched simulacra of womanhood who will not grow
old and who cannot become wise. She is the best kind of old lady
extant, answering to the matron of classic times--to the Mother in
Israel before whom the tribes made obeisance in token of respect; the
woman whose book of life has been well studied and closely read, and
kept clean in all its pages. She has been no prude however, and no
mere idealist. She must have been wife, mother and widow; that is, she
must have known many things of joy and grief and have had the
fountains of life unsealed. However wise and good she may be, as a
spinster she has had only half a life; and it is the best half which
has been denied her. How can she tell others, when they come to her in
their troubles, how time and a healthy will have wrought with her, if
she has never passed through the same circumstances? Theoretic comfort
is all very well, but one word of experience goes beyond volumes of
counsel based on general principles and a lively imagination.

One type of old lady, growing yearly scarcer, is the old lady whose
religious and political theories are based on the doctrines of
Voltaire and Paine's _Rights of Man_--the old lady who remembers Hunt
and Thistlewood and the Birmingham riots; who talks of the French
Revolution as if it were yesterday; and who has heard so often of the
Porteus mob from poor papa that one would think she had assisted at
the hanging herself. She is an infinitely old woman, for the most part
birdlike, chirrupy, and wonderfully alive. She has never gone beyond
her early teaching, but is a fossil radical of the old school; and she
thinks the Gods departed when Hunt and his set died out. She is an
irreligious old creature, and scoffs with more cleverness than grace
at everything new or earnest. She would as lief see Romanism rampant
at once as this newfangled mummery they call Ritualism; and Romanism
is her version of the unchaining of Satan. As for science--well, it is
all very wonderful, but more wonderful she thinks than true; and she
cannot quite make up her mind about the spectroscope or protoplasm. Of
the two, protoplasm commends itself most to her imagination, for
private reasons of her own connected with the Pentateuch; but these
things are not so much in her way as Voltaire and Diderot, Volney and
Tom Paine, and she is content to abide by her ancient cairns and to
leave the leaping-poles of science to younger and stronger hands.
This type of old lady is for the most part an ancient spinster, whose
life has worn itself away in the arid deserts of mental doubt and
emotional negation. If she ever loved it was in secret, some
thin-lipped embodied Idea long years ago. Most likely she did not get
even to this unsatisfactory length, but contented herself with books
and discussions only. If she had ever honestly loved and been loved,
perhaps she would have gone beyond Voltaire, and have learned
something truer than a scoff.

The old lady of strong instinctive affections, who never reflects and
never attempts to restrain her kindly weaknesses, stands at the other
end of the scale. She is the grandmother _par excellence_, and spends
her life in spoiling the little ones, cramming them with sugar-plums
and rich cake whenever she has the chance, and nullifying mamma's
punishments by surreptitious gifts and goodies. She is the dearly
beloved of our childish recollections; and to the last days of our
life we cherish the remembrance of the kind old lady with her beaming
smile, taking out of her large black reticule, or the more mysterious
recesses of her unfathomable pocket, wonderful little screws of paper
which her withered hands thrust into our chubby fists; but we can
understand now what an awful nuisance she must have been to the
authorities, and how impossible she made it to preserve anything like
discipline and the terrors of domestic law in the family.

The old lady who remains a mere child to the end; who looks very much
like a faded old wax doll with her scanty hair blown out into
transparent ringlets, and her jaunty cap bedecked with flowers and
gay-coloured bows; who cannot rise into the dignity of true
womanliness; who knows nothing useful; can give no wise advice: has no
sentiment of protection, but on the contrary demands all sorts of care
and protection for herself--she, simpering and giggling as if she were
fifteen, is by no means an old lady of the finest type. But she is
better than the leering old lady who says coarse things, and who, like
Béranger's immortal creation, passes her time in regretting her plump
arms and her well-turned ankle and the lost time that can never be
recalled, and who is altogether a most unedifying old person and by no
means nice company for the young.

Then there is the irascible old lady, who rates her servants and is
free with full-flavoured epithets against sluts in general; who is
like a tigress over her last unmarried daughter, and, when crippled
and disabled, still insists on keeping the keys, which she delivers up
when wanted only with a snarl and a suspicious caution. She has been
one of the race of active housekeepers, and has prided herself on her
exceptional ability that way for so long that she cannot bear to
yield, even when she can no longer do any good; so she sits in her
easy chair, like old Pope and Pagan in _Pilgrim's Progress_, and gnaws
her fingers at the younger world which passes her by. She is an
infliction to her daughter for all the years of her life, and to the
last keeps her in leading-strings, tied up as tight as the sinewy old
hands can knot them; treating her always as an irresponsible young
thing who needs both guidance and control, though the girl has passed
into the middle-aged woman by now, shuffling through life a poor
spiritless creature who has faded before she has fully blossomed, and
who dies like a fruit that has dropped from the tree before it has
ripened.

Twin sister to this kind is the grim female become ancient; the gaunt
old lady with a stiff backbone, who sits upright and walks with a firm
tread like a man; a leathery old lady, who despises all your weak
slips of girls that have nerves and headaches and cannot walk their
paltry mile without fatigue; a desiccated old lady, large-boned and
lean, without an ounce of superfluous fat about her, with keen eyes
yet, with which she boasts that she can thread a needle and read small
print by candlelight; an indestructible old lady, who looks as if
nothing short of an earthquake would put an end to her. The friend of
her youth is now a stout, soft, helpless old lady, much bedraped in
woollen shawls, given to frequent sippings of brandy and water, and
ensconced in the chimney corner like a huge clay figure set to dry.
For her the indestructible old lady has the supremest contempt,
heightened in intensity by a vivid remembrance of the time when they
were friends and rivals. Ah, poor Laura, she says, straightening
herself; she was always a poor creature, and see what she is now! To
those who wait long enough the wheel always comes round, she thinks;
and the days when Laura bore away the bell from her for grace and
sweetness and loveableness generally are avenged now, when the one is
a mere mollusc and the other has a serviceable backbone that will last
for many a year yet.

Then there is the musical old lady, who is fond of playing small
anonymous pieces of a jiggy character full of queer turns and shakes,
music that seems all written in demi-semi-quavers, and that she gives
in a tripping, catching way, as if the keys of the piano were hot.
Sometimes she will sing, as a great favour, old-world songs which are
almost pathetic for the thin and broken voice that chirrups out the
sentiment with which they abound; and sometimes, as a still greater
favour, she will stand up in the dance, and do the poor uncertain
ghosts of what were once steps, in the days when dancing was dancing
and not the graceless lounge it is now. But her dancing-days are over,
she says, after half-a-dozen turns; though, indeed, sometimes she
takes a frisky fit and goes in for the whole quadrille:--and pays for
it the next day.

The very dress of old ladies is in itself a study and a revelation of
character. There are the beautiful old women who make themselves like
old pictures by a profusion of soft lace and tender greys; and the
stately old ladies who affect rich rustling silks and sombre velvet;
and there are the original and individual old ladies, who dress
themselves after their own kind, like Mrs. Basil Montagu, Miss Jane
Porter, and dear Mrs. Duncan Stewart, and have a _cachet_ of their own
with which fashion has nothing to do. And there are the old women who
wear rusty black stuffs and ugly helmet-like caps; and those who
affect uniformity and going with the stream, when the fashion has
become national--and these have been much exercised of late with the
strait skirts and the new bonnets. But Providence is liberal and
milliners are fertile in resources. In fact, in this as in all other
sections of humanity, there are those who are beautiful and wise, and
those who are foolish and unlovely; those who make the best of things
as they are, and those who make the worst, by treating them as what
they are not; those who extract honey, and those who find only poison.
For in old age, as in youth, are to be found beauty, use, grace and
value, but in different aspects and on another platform. And the folly
is when this difference is not allowed for, or when the possibility of
these graces is denied and their utility ignored.




_VOICES._


Far before the eyes or the mouth or the habitual gesture, as a
revelation of character, is the quality of the voice and the manner of
using it. It is the first thing that strikes us in a new acquaintance,
and it is one of the most unerring tests of breeding and education.
There are voices which have a certain truthful ring about them--a
certain something, unforced and spontaneous, that no training can
give. Training can do much in the way of making a voice, but it can
never compass more than a bad imitation of this quality; for the very
fact of its being an imitation, however accurate, betrays itself like
rouge on a woman's cheeks, or a wig, or dyed hair. On the other hand,
there are voices which have the jar of falsehood in every tone, and
which are as full of warning as the croak of the raven or the hiss of
the serpent. These are in general the naturally hard voices which make
themselves caressing, thinking by that to appear sympathetic; but the
fundamental quality strikes up through the overlay, and a person must
be very dull indeed who cannot detect the pretence in that slow,
drawling, would-be affectionate voice, with its harsh undertone and
sharp accent whenever it forgets itself.

But without being false or hypocritical, there are voices which puzzle
as well as disappoint us, because so entirely inharmonious with the
appearance of the speaker. For instance, there is that thin treble
squeak which we sometimes hear from the mouth of a well-grown portly
man, when we expected the fine rolling utterance which would have been
in unison with his outward seeming. And, on the other side of the
scale, where we looked for a shrill head-voice or a tender musical
cadence, we get that hoarse chest-voice with which young and pretty
girls sometimes startle us. This voice is in fact one of the
characteristics of the modern girl of a certain type; just as the
habitual use of slang is characteristic of her, or that peculiar
rounding of the elbows and turning out of the wrists--which gestures,
like the chest-voice, instinctively belong to men only and have to be
learned before they can be practised by women.

Nothing betrays feeling so much as the voice, save perhaps the eyes;
and these can be lowered, and so far their expression hidden. In
moments of emotion no skill can hide the fact of disturbed feeling by
the voice; though a strong will and the habit of self-control can
steady it when else it would be failing and tremulous. But not the
strongest will, nor the largest amount of self-control, can keep it
natural as well as steady. It is deadened, veiled, compressed, like a
wild creature tightly bound and unnaturally still. One feels that it
is done by an effort, and that if the strain were relaxed for a moment
the wild creature would burst loose in rage or despair--and that the
voice would break into the scream of passion or quiver down into the
falter of pathos. And this very effort is as eloquent as if there had
been no holding down at all, and the voice had been left to its own
impulse unchecked.

Again, in fun and humour, is it not the voice even more than the face
that is expressive? The twinkle of the eye, the hollow in the under
lip, the dimples about the mouth, the play of the eyebrow, are all
aids certainly; but the voice! The mellow tone that comes into the
utterance of one man; the surprised accents of another; the fatuous
simplicity of a third; the philosophical acquiescence of a fourth when
relating the most outrageous impossibilities--a voice and manner
peculiarly Transatlantic, and indeed one of the American forms of
fun--do we not know all these varieties by heart? have we not veteran
actors whose main point lies in one or other of these varieties? and
what would be the drollest anecdote if told in a voice which had
neither play nor significance? Pathos too--who feels it, however
beautifully expressed so far as words may go, if uttered in a dead and
wooden voice without sympathy? But the poorest attempts at pathos will
strike home to the heart if given tenderly and harmoniously. And just
as certain popular airs of mean association can be made into church
music by slow time and stately modulation, so can dead-level
literature be lifted into passion or softened into sentiment by the
voice alone.

We all know the effect, irritating or soothing, which certain voices
have over us; and we have all experienced that strange impulse of
attraction or repulsion which comes from the sound of the voice alone.
And generally, if not absolutely always, the impulse is a true one,
and any modification which increased knowledge may produce is never
quite satisfactory. Certain voices grate on our nerves and set our
teeth on edge; and others are just as calming as these are irritating,
quieting us like a composing draught, and setting vague images of
beauty and pleasantness afloat in our brains.

A good voice, calm in tone and musical in quality, is one of the
essentials for a physician--the 'bedside voice' which is nothing if
not sympathetic by constitution. Not false, not made up, not sickly,
but tender in itself, of a rather low pitch, well modulated and
distinctly harmonious in its notes, it is the very opposite of the
orator's voice, which is artificial in its management and a made
voice. Whatever its original quality may be, the orator's voice bears
the unmistakeable stamp of art and is artificial. It may be admirable;
telling in a crowd; impressive in an address; but it is overwhelming
and chilling at home, partly because it is always conscious and never
self-forgetting.

An orator's voice, with its careful intonation and accurate accent,
would be as much out of place by a sick-bed as Court trains and
brocaded silk for the nurse. There are certain men who do a good deal
by a hearty, jovial, fox-hunting kind of voice--a voice a little
thrown up for all that it is a chest-voice--a voice with a certain
undefined rollick and devil-may-care sound in it, and eloquent of a
large volume of vitality and physical health. That, too, is a good
property for a medical man. It gives the sick a certain fillip, and
reminds them pleasantly of health and vigour. It may have a mesmeric
kind of effect upon them--who knows?--so that it induces in them
something of its own state, provided it be not overpowering. But a
voice of this kind has a tendency to become insolent in its assertion
of vigour, swaggering and boisterous; and then it is too much for
invalided nerves, just as mountain-winds or sea-breezes would be too
much, and the scent of flowers or of a hayfield oppressive.

The clerical voice again, is a class-voice--that neat, careful,
precise voice, neither wholly made nor yet natural--that voice which
never strikes one as hearty nor as having a really genuine utterance,
but which is not entirely unpleasant if one does not require too much
spontaneity. The clerical voice, with its mixture of familiarity and
oratory as that of one used to talk to old women in private and to
hold forth to a congregation in public, is as distinct in its own way
as the mathematician's handwriting; and any one can pick out blindfold
his man from a knot of talkers, without waiting to see the square-cut
collar and close white tie. The legal voice is different again; but
this is rather a variety of the orator's than a distinct species--a
variety standing midway between that and the clerical, and affording
more scope than either.

The voice is much more indicative of the state of the mind than many
people know of or allow. One of the first symptoms of failing brain
power is in the indistinct or confused utterance; no idiot has a clear
nor melodious voice; the harsh scream of mania is proverbial; and no
person of prompt and decisive thought was ever known to hesitate nor
to stutter. A thick, loose, fluffy voice too, does not belong to the
crisp character of mind which does the best active work; and when we
meet with a keen-witted man who drawls, and lets his words drip
instead of bringing them out in the sharp incisive way that should be
natural to him, we may be sure there is a flaw somewhere, and that he
is not 'clear grit' all through.

We all have our company voices, as we all have our company manners;
and, after a time, we get to know the company voices of our friends,
and to understand them as we understand their best dresses and state
service. The person whose voice absolutely refuses to put itself into
company tone startles us as much as if he came to a state dinner in a
shooting-jacket. This is a different thing from the insincere and
flattering voice, which is never laid aside while it has its object to
gain, and which affects to be one thing when it means another. The
company voice is only a little bit of finery, quite in its place if
not carried into the home, where however, silly men and women think
they can impose on their house-mates by assumptions which cannot stand
the test of domestic ease. The lover's voice is of course _sui
generis_; but there is another kind of voice which one sometimes hears
that is quite as enchanting--the rich, full, melodious voice which
irresistibly suggests sunshine and flowers, and heavy bunches of
purple grapes, and a wealth of physical beauty at all four corners.
Such a voice is Alboni's; such a voice we can conceive Anacreon's to
have been; with less lusciousness and more stateliness, such a voice
was Walter Savage Landor's. His was not an English voice; it was too
rich and accurate; yet it was clear and apparently thoroughly
unstudied, and was the very perfection of art. There was no greater
treat of its kind than to hear Landor read Milton or Homer.

Though one of the essentials of a good voice is its clearness, there
are certain lisps and catches which are pretty, though never
dignified; but most of them are painful to the ear. It is the same
with accents. A dash of brogue; the faintest suspicion of the Scotch
twang; even a little American accent--but very little, like red-pepper
to be sparingly used, as indeed we may say with the others--gives a
certain piquancy to the voice. So does a Continental accent generally;
few of us being able to distinguish the French accent from the German,
the Polish from the Italian, or the Russian from the Spanish, but
lumping them all together as 'a foreign accent' broadly. Of all the
European voices the French is perhaps the most unpleasant in its
quality, and the Italian the most delightful. The Italian voice is a
song in itself; not the sing-song voice of an English parish
schoolboy, but an unnoted bit of harmony. The French voice is thin,
apt to become wiry and metallic; a head-voice for the most part, and
eminently unsympathetic; a nervous, irritable voice, that seems more
fit for complaint than for love-making; and yet how laughing, how
bewitching it can make itself!--never with the Italian roundness, but
_câlinante_ in its own half-pettish way, provoking, enticing,
arousing. There are some voices which send you to sleep and others
which stir you up; and the French voice is of the latter kind when
setting itself to do mischief and work its own will.

Of all the differences lying between Calais and Dover, perhaps nothing
strikes the traveller more than the difference in the national voice
and manner of speech. The sharp, high-pitched, stridulous voice of the
French, with its clear accent and neat intonation, is exchanged for
the loose, fluffy utterance of England, where clear enunciation is
considered pedantic; where brave men cultivate a drawl and pretty
women a deep chest-voice; where well-educated people think it no shame
to run all their words into each other, and to let consonants and
vowels drip out like so many drops of water, with not much more
distinction between them; and where no one knows how to educate his
organ artistically, without going into artificiality and affectation.
And yet the cultivation of the voice is an art, and ought to be made
as much a matter of education as a good carriage or a legible
handwriting. We teach our children to sing, but we never teach them to
speak, beyond correcting a glaring piece of mispronunciation or so. In
consequence of which we have all sorts of odd voices among us--short
yelping voices like dogs; purring voices like cats; croakings and
lispings and quackings and chatterings; a very menagerie in fact, to
be heard in a room ten feet square, where a little rational
cultivation would have reduced the whole of that vocal chaos to order
and harmony, and would have made what is now painful and distasteful
beautiful and seductive.




_BURNT FINGERS._


An old proverb says that a burnt child dreads the fire. If so, the
child must be uncommonly astute, and with a power of reasoning by
analogy in excess of impulsive desire rarely found either in children
or adults. As a matter of fact, experience goes a very little way
towards directing folks wisely. People often say how much they would
like to live their lives over again with their present experience.
That means, they would avoid certain specific mistakes of the past, of
which they have seen and suffered from the issue. But if they retained
the same nature as now, though they might avoid a few special
blunders, they would fall into the same class of errors quite as
readily as before, the gravitation of character towards circumstance
being always absolute in its direction.

Our blunders in life are not due to ignorance so much as to
temperament; and only the exceptionally wise among us learn to correct
the excesses of temperament by the lessons of experience. To the mass
of mankind these lessons are for the time only, and prophesy nothing
of the future. They hold them to have been mistakes of method, not of
principle, and they think that the same lines more carefully laid
would lead to a better superstructure in the future, not seeing that
the fault was organic and in those very initial lines themselves. No
impulsive nor wildly hopeful person, for instance, ever learns by
experience, so long as his physical condition remains the same. No one
with a large faculty of faith--that is, credulous and easily imposed
on--becomes suspicious or critical by mere experience. How much soever
people of this kind have been taken in, in times past, they are just
as ready to become the prey of the spoiler in times to come; and it
would be sad, if it were not so silly, to watch how inevitably one
half of the world gives itself up as food whereon the roguery of the
other half may wax fat.

The person of facile confidence, whose secrets have been blazed abroad
more than once by trusted friends, makes yet another and another safe
confidant--quite safe this time; one of whose fidelity there is no
doubt--and learns when too late that one _panier percé_ is very like
another _panier percé_. The speculating man, without business faculty
or knowledge, who has burnt his fingers bare to the bone with handling
scrip and stock, thrusts them into the fire again so soon as he has
the chance. The gambler blows his fingers just cool enough to shuffle
the cards for this once only, sure that this time hope will tell no
flattering tale, that ravelled ends will knit themselves up into a
close and seemly garment, and heaven itself work a miracle in his
favour against the law of mathematical certainty. In fact we are all
gamblers in this way, and play our hazards for the stakes of faith and
hope. We all burn our fingers again and again at some fire or another;
but experience teaches us nothing; save perhaps a more hopeless,
helpless resignation towards that confounded ill-luck of ours, and a
weary feeling of having known it all before when things fall out amiss
and we are blistered in the old flames.

In great matters this persistency of endeavour is sublime, and gets a
wealth of laurel crowns and blue ribands; but in little things it is
obstinacy, want of ability to profit by experience, denseness of
perception as to what can and what cannot be done; and the apologue of
Bruce's spider gets tiresome if too often repeated. The most
hopelessly inapt people at learning why they burnt their fingers last
time, and how they will burn them again, are those who, whatever their
profession, are blessed or cursed with what is called the artistic
temperament. A man will ruin himself for love of a particular place;
for dislike of a certain kind of necessary work; for the prosecution
of a certain hobby. Is he not artistic? and must he not have all the
conditions of his life exactly square with his desires? else how can
he do good work? So he goes on burning his fingers through
self-indulgence, and persists in his unwisdom to the end of his life.
He will paint his unsaleable pictures or write his unreadable books;
his path is one in which the money-paying public will not follow; but
though his very existence depends on the following of that paying
public, he will not stir an inch to meet it, but keeps where he is
because he likes the particular run of his hedgerows; and spends his
days in thrusting his hand into the fire of what he chooses to call
the ideal, and his nights in abusing the Philistinism of the world
which lets him be burnt.

And what does any amount of experience do for us in the matter of
friendship or love? As the world goes round, and our credulous morning
darkens into a more sceptical twilight, we believe as a general
principle--a mere abstraction--that all new friends are just so much
gilt gingerbread; and that a very little close holding and hard
rubbing brings off the gilt, and leaves nothing but a slimy, sticky
mess of little worth as food and of none as ornament. And yet, if of
the kind to whom friendship is necessary for happiness, we rush as
eagerly into the new affection as if we had never philosophized on the
emptiness of the old, and believe as firmly in the solid gold of our
latest cake as if we had never smeared our hands with one of the same
pattern before. So with love. A man sees his comrades fluttering like
enchanted moths about some stately man-slayer, some fair and shining
light set like a false beacon on a dangerous cliff to lure men to
their destruction. He sees how they singe and burn in the flame of her
beauty, but he is not warned. If one's own experience teaches one
little or nothing, the experience of others goes for even less, and no
man yet was ever warned off the destructive fire of love because his
companions had burnt their fingers there before him and his own are
sure to follow.

It is the same with women; and in a greater degree. They know all
about Don Juan well enough. They are perfectly well aware how he
treated A. and B. and C. and D. But when it comes to their own turn,
they think that this time surely, and to them, things will be
different and he will be in earnest. So they slide down into the
alluring flame, and burn their fingers for life by playing with
forbidden fire. But have we not all the secret belief that we shall
escape the snares and pitfalls into which others have dropped and
among which we choose to walk? that fire will not burn our fingers, at
least so very badly, when we thrust them into it? and that, by some
legerdemain of Providence, we shall be delivered from the consequences
of our own folly, and that two and two may be made to count five in
our behalf? Who is taught by the experience of an unhappy marriage,
say? No sooner has a man got himself free from the pressure of one
chain and bullet, than he hastens to fasten on another, quite sure
that this chain will be no heavier than the daintiest little thread of
gold, and this bullet as light and sweet as a cowslip-ball. Everything
that had gone wrong before will come right this time; and the hot bars
of close association with an uncomfortable temper and unaccommodating
habits will be only like a juggling trick, and will burn no one's
heart or hands.

People too, who burn their fingers in giving good advice unasked,
seldom learn to hold them back. With an honest intention, and a strong
desire to see right done, it is difficult to avoid putting our hands
into fires with which we have no business. While we are young and
ardent, it seems to us as if we have distinct business with all fraud,
injustice, folly, wilfulness, which we believe a few honest words of
ours will control and annul; but nine times out of ten we only burn
our own hands, while we do not in the least strengthen those of the
right nor weaken those of the wrong. We may say the same of
good-natured people. There was never a row of chestnuts roasting at
the fire for which your good-natured oaf will not stretch out his hand
at the bidding and for the advantage of a friend. Experience teaches
the poor oaf nothing; not even that fire burns. To put his name at the
back of a bill, just as a mere form; to lend his money, just for a few
days; or to do any other sort of self-immolating folly, on the
faithful promise that the fire will not burn nor the knife cut--it all
comes as easy to men of the good-natured sort as their alphabet.
Indeed it is their alphabet, out of which they spell their own ruin;
but so long as the impressionable temperament lasts--so long as the
liking to do a good-natured action is greater than caution, suspicion,
or the power of analogical reasoning--so long will the oaf make
himself the catspaw of the knave, till at last he has left himself no
fingers wherewith to pluck out the chestnuts for himself or another.

The first doubt of young people is always a source of intense
suffering. Hitherto they have believed what they saw and all they
heard; and they have not troubled themselves with motives nor facts
beyond those given to them and lying on the surface. But when they
find out for themselves that seeming is not necessarily being, and
that all people are not as good throughout as they thought them, then
they suffer a moral shock which often leads them into a state of
practical atheism and despair. Many young people give up altogether
when they first open the book of humanity and begin to read beyond the
title-page; and, because they have found specks in the cleanest parts,
they believe that nothing is left pure. They are as much bewildered as
horror-struck, and cannot understand how any one they have loved and
respected should have done this or that misdeed. Having done it, there
is nothing left to love nor respect further. It is only by degrees
that they learn to adjust and apportion, and to understand that the
whole creature is not necessarily corrupt because there are a few
unhealthy places here and there. But in the beginning this first
scorching by the fire of experience is very painful and bad to bear.
Then they begin to think the knowledge of the world, as got from
books, so wonderful, so profound; and they look on it as a science to
be learned by much studying of aphorisms. They little know that not
the most affluent amount of phrase knowledge can ever regulate that
class of action which springs from a man's inherent disposition; and
that it is not facts which teach but self-control which prevents.

After very early youth we all have enough theoretical knowledge to
keep us straight; but theoretical knowledge does nothing without
self-knowledge, or its corollary, self-control. The world has never
yet got beyond the wisdom of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes; and Solomon's
advice to the Israelitish youth lounging round the gates of the Temple
is quite as applicable to young Hopeful coming up to London chambers
as it was to them. Teaching of any kind, by books or events, is the
mere brute weapon; but self-control is the intelligent hand to wield
it. To burn one's fingers once in a lifetime tells nothing against a
man's common-sense nor dignity; but to go on burning them is the act
of a fool, and we cannot pity the wounds, however sore they may be.
The Arcadian virtues of unlimited trust and hope and love are very
sweet and lovely; but they are the graces of childhood, not the
qualities of manhood. They are charming little finalities, which do
not admit of modification nor of expansion; and in a naughty world, to
go about with one's heart on one's sleeve, believing every one and
accepting everything to be just as it presents itself, is offering
bowls of milk to tigers, and meeting armed men with a tin sword. Such
universal trust can only result in a perpetual burning of one's
fingers; and a life spent in pulling out hot chestnuts from the fire
for another's eating is by no means the most useful nor the most
dignified to which a man can devote himself.




_DÉSOEUVREMENT._


Perhaps we ought to apologize for using a foreign label, but there is
no one English word which gives the full meaning of _désoeuvrement_.
Only paraphrases and accumulations would convey the many subtle shades
contained in it; and paraphrases and accumulations are inconvenient as
headings. But if we have not the word, we have a great deal of the
thing; for _désoeuvrement_ is an evil unfortunately not confined to
one country nor to one class; and even we, with all our boasted
Anglo-Saxon energy, have people among us as unoccupied and purposeless
as are to be found elsewhere. Certainly we have nothing like the
Neapolitan lazzaroni who pass their lives in dozing in the sun; but
that is more because of our climate than our condition, and if our
_désoeuvrés_ do not doze out of doors, it by no means follows that
they are wide awake within.

No state is more unfortunate than this listless want of purpose which
has nothing to do, which is interested in nothing, and which has no
serious object in life; and the drifting, aimless temperament, which
merely waits and does not even watch, is the most disastrous that a
man or woman can possess. Feverish energy, wearing itself out on
comparative nothings, is better than the indolence which folds its
hands and makes neither work nor pleasure; and the most microscopic
and restless perception is more healthful than the dull blindness
which goes from Dan to Beersheba, and finds all barren.

If even death itself is only a transmutation of forces--an active and
energizing change--what can we say of this worse than mental death?
How can we characterize a state which is simply stagnation? Not all of
us have our work cut out and laid ready for us to do; very many of us
have to seek for objects of interest and to create our own employment;
and were it not for the energy which makes work by its own force, the
world would still be lying in barbarism, content with the skins of
beasts for clothing and with wild fruits and roots for food. But the
_désoeuvrés_ know nothing of the pleasures of energy; consequently
none of the luxuries of idleness--only its tedium and monotony. Life
is a dull round to them of alternate vacancy and mechanical routine; a
blank so dead that active pain and positive sorrow would be better for
them than the passionless negation of their existence. They love
nothing; they hope for nothing; they work for nothing; to-morrow will
be as to-day, and to-day is as yesterday was; it is the mere passing
of time which they call living--a moral and mental hybernation broken
up by no springtime waking.

Though by no means confined to women only, this disastrous state is
nevertheless more frequently found with them than with men. It is
comparatively rare that a man--at least an Englishman--is born with so
little of the activity which characterizes manhood as to rest content
without some kind of object for his life, either in work or in
pleasure, in study or in vice. But many women are satisfied to remain
in an unending _désoeuvrement_, a listless supineness that has not
even sufficient active energy to fret at its own dullness.

We see this kind of thing especially in the families of the poorer
class of gentry in the country. If we except the Sunday school and
district visiting, neither of which commends itself as a pleasant
occupation to all minds--both in fact needing a little more active
energy than we find in the purely _désoeuvré_ class--what is there for
the unmarried daughters of a family to do? There is no question of a
profession for any of them. Ideas travel slowly in country places, and
root themselves still more slowly, even yet; and the idea of woman's
work for ladies is utterly inadmissible by the English gentleman who
can leave a modest sufficiency to his daughters--just enough to live
on in the old house and in the old way, without a margin for luxuries,
but above anything like positive want. There is no possibility then of
an active career in art or literature; of going out as a governess, as
a hospital nurse, or as a Sister. There is only home, with the
possible and not very probable chance of marriage as the vision of
hope in the distant future. And that chance is very small and very
remote; for the simple reason--there is no one to marry.

There are the young collegians who come down in reading parties; the
group of Bohemian artists, if the place be picturesque and not too far
from London; the curate; and the new doctor, fresh from the hospitals,
who has to make his practice out of the poorer and more outlying
_clientèle_ of the old and established practitioners of the place. But
collegians do not marry, and long engagements are proverbially
hazardous; Bohemian artists are even less likely than they to trouble
the surrogate; and the curate and the doctor can at the best marry
only one apiece of the many who are waiting. The family keeps neither
carriages nor horses, so that the longest tether to which life can be
carried, with the house for the stake, is simply the three or four
miles which the girls can walk out and back. And the visiting list is
necessarily comprised within this circle. There is then, absolutely
nothing to occupy nor to interest. The whole day is spent in playing
over old music, in needlework, in a little desultory reading, such as
is supplied by the local book society; all without other object than
that of passing the time. The girls have had nothing like a thorough
education in anything; they are not specially gifted, and what brains
they have are dormant and uncultivated. There is not even enough
housework to occupy their time, unless they were to send away the
servants. Besides, domestic work of an active kind is vulgar, and
gentlemen and gentlewomen do not allow their daughters to do it. They
may help in the housekeeping; which means merely giving out the week's
supplies on Monday and ordering the dinner on other days, and which is
not an hour's occupation in the week; and they can do a little amateur
spudding and raking among the flower-beds when the weather is fine, if
they care for the garden; and they can do a great deal of walking if
they are strong; and this is all that they can do. There they are,
four or five well-looking girls perhaps, of marriageable age, fairly
healthy and amiable, and with just so much active power as would carry
them creditably through any work that was given them to do, but with
not enough originative energy to make them create work for themselves
out of nothing.

In their quiet uneventful sphere, with the circumscribed radius and
the short tether, it would be very difficult for any women but those
few who are gifted with unusual energy to create a sufficient human
interest; to ordinary young ladies it is impossible. They can but
make-believe, even if they try--and they don't try. They can but raise
up shadows which they would fain accept as living creatures if they
give themselves the trouble to evoke anything at all, and they don't
give themselves the trouble. They simply live on from day to day in a
state of mental somnolency--hopeless, _désoeuvrées_, inactive; just
drifting down the smooth slow current of time, with not a ripple nor
an eddy by the way.

Quiet families in towns, people who keep no society and live in a
self-made desert apart though in the midst of the very vortex of life,
are alike in the matter of _désoeuvrement_; and we find exactly the
same history with them as we find with their country cousins, though
apparently their circumstances are so different. They cannot work and
they may not play; the utmost dissipation allowed them is to look at
the outside of things--to make one of the fringe of spectators lining
the streets and windows on a show day, and this but seldom; or to go
once or twice a year to the theatre or a concert. So they too just
lounge through their life, and pass from girlhood to old age in utter
_désoeuvrement_ and want of object. Year by year the lines about their
eyes deepen, their smile gets sadder, their cheeks grow paler; while
the cherished secret romance which even the dullest life contains gets
a colour of its own by age, and a firmness of outline by continual
dwelling on, which it had not in the beginning. Perhaps it was a dream
built on a tone, a look, a word--may be it was only a half-evolved
fancy without any basis whatever--but the imagination of the poor
_désoeuvrée_ has clung to the dream, and the uninteresting dullness of
her life has given it a mock vitality which real activity would have
destroyed.

This want of healthy occupation is the cause of half the hysterical
reveries which it is a pretty flattery to call constancy and an
enduring regret; and we find it as absolutely as that heat follows
from flame, that the mischievous habit of bewailing an irrevocable
past is part of the _désoeuvrée_ condition in the present. People who
have real work to do cannot find time for unhealthy regrets, and
_désoeuvrement_ is the most fertile source of sentimentality to be
found.

The _désoeuvrée_ woman of means and middle age, grown grey in her want
of purpose and suddenly taken out of her accustomed groove, is perhaps
more at sea than any others. She has been so long accustomed to the
daily flow of certain lines that she cannot break new ground and take
up with anything fresh, even if it be only a fresh way of being idle.
Her daughter is married; her husband is dead; her friend who was her
right hand and manager-in-chief has gone away; she is thrown on her
own resources, and her own resources will not carry her through. She
generally falls a prey to her maid, who tyrannizes over her, and a
phlegmatic kind of despair, which darkens the remainder of her life
without destroying it. She loses even her power of enjoyment, and gets
tired before the end of the rubber which is the sole amusement in
which she indulges. For _désoeuvrement_ has that fatal reflex action
which everything bad possesses, and its strength is in exact ratio
with its duration.

Women of this class want taking in hand by the stronger and more
energetic. Many even of those who seem to do pretty well as
independent workers, men and women alike, would be all the better for
being farmed out; and _désoeuvrées_ women especially want extraneous
guidance, and to be set to such work as they can do, but cannot make.
An establishment which would utilize their faculties, such as they
are, and give them occupation in harmony with their powers, would be a
real salvation to many who would do better if they only knew how, and
would save them from stagnation and apathy. But society does not
recognize the existence of moral rickets, though the physical are
cared for; consequently it has not begun to provide for them as moral
rickets, and no Proudhon has yet managed to utilize the _désoeuvrés_
members of the State. When they do find a place of retreat and
adventitious support, it is under another name.

The retired man of business, utterly without object in his new
conditions, is another portrait that meets us in country places. He is
not fit for magisterial business; he cannot hunt nor shoot nor fish;
he has no literary tastes; he cannot create objects of interest for
himself foreign to the whole experience of his life. The idleness
which was so delicious when it was a brief season of rest in the midst
of his high-pressure work, and the country which was like Paradise
when seen in the summer only and at holiday time, make together just
so much blank dullness now that he has bound himself to the one and
fixed himself in the other. When he has spelt over every article in
the _Times_, pottered about his garden and his stables, and irritated
both gardener and groom by interfering in what he does not understand,
the day's work is at an end. He has nothing more to do but eat his
dinner and sip his wine, doze over the fire for a couple of hours, and
go to bed as the clock strikes ten.

This is the reality of that long dream of retirement which has been
the golden vision of hope to many a man during the heat and burden of
the day. The dream is only a dream. Retirement means _désoeuvrement_;
leisure is tedium; rest is want of occupation truly, but want of
interest, want of object, want of purpose as well; and the prosperous
man of business, who has retired with a fortune and broken energies,
is bored to death with his prosperity, and wishes himself back to his
desk or his counter--back to business and something to do. He wonders,
on retrospection, what there was in his activity that was distasteful
to him; and thinks with regret that perhaps, on the whole, it is
better to wear out than to rust out; that _désoeuvrement_ is a worse
state than work at high pressure; and that life with a purpose is a
nobler thing than one which has nothing in it but idleness:--whereof
the main object is how best to get rid of time.




_THE SHRIEKING SISTERHOOD._


We by no means put it forward as an original remark when we say that
Nature does her grandest works of construction in silence, and that
all great historical reforms have been brought about either by long
and quiet preparation, or by sudden and authoritative action. The
inference from which is, that no great good has ever been done by
shrieking; that much talking necessarily includes a good deal of
dilution; and that fuss is never an attribute of strength nor
coincident with concentration. Whenever there has been a very deep and
sincere desire on the part of a class or an individual to do a thing,
it has been done not talked about; where the desire is only
halfhearted, where the judgment or the conscience is not quite clear
as to the desirableness of the course proposed, where the chief
incentive is love of notoriety and not the intrinsic worth of the
action itself--personal _kudos_, and not the good of a cause nor the
advancement of humanity--then there has been talk; much talk;
hysterical excitement; a long and prolonged cackle; and heaven and
earth called to witness that an egg has been laid wherein lies the
germ of a future chick--after proper incubation.

Necessarily there must be much verbal agitation if any measure is to
be carried the fulcrum of which is public opinion. If you have to stir
the dry bones you must prophesy to them in a loud voice, and not leave
off till they have begun to shake. Things which can only be known by
teaching must be spoken of, but things which have to be done are
always better done the less the fuss made about them; and the more
steadfast the action, the less noisy the agent. Purpose is apt to
exhale itself in protestations, and strength is sure to exhaust itself
by a flux of words. But at the present day what Mr. Carlyle called the
Silences are the least honoured of all the minor gods, and the babble
of small beginnings threatens to become intolerable. We all 'think
outside our brains,' and the result is not conducive to mental vigour.
It is as if we were to set a plant to grow with its heels in the air,
and then look for roots, flowers and fruit, by the process of
excitation and disclosure.

One of our quarrels with the Advanced Women of our generation is the
hysterical parade they make about their wants and their intentions. It
never seems to occur to them that the best means of getting what they
want is to take it, when not forbidden by the law--to act, not to
talk; that all this running hither and thither over the face of the
earth, this feverish unrest and loud acclaim are but the dilution of
purpose through much speaking, and not the right way at all; and that
to hold their tongues and do would advance them by as many leagues as
babble puts them back. A small knot of women, 'terribly in earnest,'
could move multitudes by the silent force of example. One woman alone,
quietly taking her life in her own hands and working out the great
problem of self-help and independence practically, not merely stating
it theoretically, is worth a score of shrieking sisters frantically
calling on men and gods to see them make an effort to stand upright
without support, with interludes of reproach to men for the want of
help in their attempt. The silent woman who quietly calculates her
chances and measures her powers with her difficulties so as to avoid
the probability of a fiasco, and who therefore achieves a success
according to her endeavour, does more for the real emancipation of her
sex than any amount of pamphleteering, lecturing, or petitioning by
the shrieking sisterhood can do. Hers is deed not declamation; proof
not theory; and it carries with it the respect always accorded to
success.

And really if we think of it dispassionately, and carefully dissect
the great mosaic of hindrances which women say makes up the pavement
of their lives, there is very little which they may not do if they
like--and can. They have already succeeded in reopening for themselves
the practice of medicine, for one thing; and this is an immense
opportunity if they know how to use it. A few pioneers, unhelped for
the most part, steadily and without shrieking, stormed the barricades
of the hospitals and dissecting-rooms; heroically bearing the shower
of hard-mouthed missiles with which they were pelted, and
successfully forcing their way notwithstanding. But the most
successful of them are those who held on with least excitement and who
strove more than they declaimed; while others, by constitution
belonging to the shrieking sisterhood, have comparatively failed, and
have mainly succeeded in making themselves ridiculous. After some
pressure but very little cackle--for here too the work was wanted, the
desire real, and the workers in earnest--female colleges on a liberal
and extended system of education have been established, and young
women have now an opportunity of showing what they can do in brain
work.

It is no longer by the niggardliness of men and the fault of an
imperfect system if they prove intellectually inferior to the stronger
sex; they have their dynamometer set up for them, and all they have to
do is to register their relative strength--and abide the issue. All
commerce, outside the Stock Exchange, is open to them equally with
men; and there is nothing to prevent their becoming merchants, as they
are now petty traders, or setting up as bill-brokers, commission
agents, or even bankers--which last profession, according to a
contemporary, they have actually adopted in New York, some ladies
there having established a bank, which, so far as they have yet gone,
they are said to conduct with deftness and ready arithmetic.

In literature they have competitors in men, but no monopolists.
Indeed, they themselves have become almost the monopolists of the
whole section of light literature and fiction; while nothing but
absolute physical and mental incapacity prevents their taking the
charge of a journal, and working it with female editor, sub-editor,
manager, reporters, compositors, and even news-girls to sell the
second edition at omnibus doors and railway stations. If a set of
women chose to establish a newspaper and work it amongst themselves,
no law could be brought to bear against them; and if they made it as
philosophical as some, or as gushing as others, they might enter into
a formidable rivalry with the old-established. They would have a fair
hearing, or rather reading; they would not be 'nursed' nor hustled,
and they would get just as much success as they deserved. To be sure,
they do not yet sit on the Bench nor plead at the Bar. They are not in
Parliament, and they are not even voters; while, as married women with
unfriendly husbands and no protection-order, they have something to
complain of, and wrongs which are in a fair way of being righted if
the shrieking sisterhood does not frighten the world prematurely. But,
despite these restrictions, they have a very wide circle wherein they
can display their power, and witch the world with noble deeds, if they
choose--and as some have chosen.

Of the representative 'working-women' in England, we find none who
have shrieked on platforms nor made an hysterical parade of their
work. Quietly, and with the dignity which comes by self-respect and
the consciousness of strength, they have done what it was in their
hearts to do; leaving the world to find out the value of their
labours, and to applaud or deride their independence. Mrs. Somerville
asked no man's leave to study science and make herself a distinguished
name as the result; nor did she find the need of any more special
organization than what the best books, a free press and first-rate
available teaching offered. Miss Martineau dived with more or less
success into the forbidding depths of the 'dismal science,' at a time
when political economy was shirked by men and considered as
essentially unfeminine as top-boots and tobacco; and she was
confessedly an advanced Liberal when to be a high Tory was part of the
whole duty of woman. Miss Nightingale undertook the care of wounded
soldiers without any more publicity than was absolutely necessary for
the organization of her staff, and with not so much as one shriek.
Rosa Bonheur laughed at those who told her that animal painting was
unwomanly, and that she had better restrict herself to flowers and
heads, as became the _jeune demoiselle_ of conventional life; but she
did not publish her programme of independence, nor take the world into
her confidence and tell them of her difficulties and defiance. The
Lady Superintendents of our own various sisterhoods have organized
their communities and performed their works of charity with very faint
blare of trumpets indeed; and we might enumerate many more who have
quietly lived the life of action and independence of which others
have only raved, and who have done while their sisters shrieked. These
are the women to be respected, whether we sympathize with their line
of action or not; having shown themselves to be true workers, capable
of sustained effort, and therefore worthy of the honour which belongs
to strength and endurance.

Of one thing women may be very sure, though they invariably deny it;
the world is glad to take good work from any one who will supply it.
The most certain patent of success is to deserve it; and if women will
prove that they can do the world's work as well as men, they will
share with them in the labour and the reward; and if they do it better
they will distance them. The appropriation of fields of labour is not
so much a question of selfishness as of (hitherto) proved fitness; but
if, in times to come, women can show better harvesting than men, can
turn out more finished, more perfected, results of any kind, the
world's custom will flow to them by the force of natural law, and they
will have the most to do of that which they can do the best. If they
wish to educate public opinion to accept them as equals with men, they
can only do so by demonstration, not by shrieks. Even men, who are
supposed to inherit the earth and to possess all the good things of
life, have to do the same thing.

Every young man yet untried is only in the position of every woman;
and, granting that he has not the deadweight of precedent and
prejudice against him, he yet has to win his spurs before he can wear
them. But women want theirs given to them without winning; and
moreover, ask to be taught how to wear them when they have got them.
They want to be received as masters before they have served their
apprenticeship, and to be put into office without passing an
examination or submitting to competition. They scream out for a clear
stage and favour superadded; and they ask men to shackle their own
feet, like Lightfoot in the fairy tale, that they may then be
handicapped to a more equal running. They do not remember that their
very demand for help vitiates their claim to equality; and that if
they were what they assume to be, they would simply take without leave
asked or given, and work out their own social salvation by the
irrepressible force of a concentrated will and in the silence of
conscious strength.

While the shrieking sisterhood remains to the front, the world will
stop its ears; and for every hysterical advocate 'the cause' loses a
rational adherent and gains a disgusted opponent. It is our very
desire to see women happy, noble, fitly employed and well remunerated
for such work as they can do, which makes us so indignant with the
foolish among them who obscure the question they pretend to elucidate,
and put back the cause which they say they advance. The earnest and
practical workers among women are a very different class from the
shriekers; but we wish the world could dissociate them more clearly
than it does at present, and discriminate between them, both in its
censure and its praise.




_OTHERWISE-MINDED._


Every now and then we receive from America a word or a phrase which
enriches the language without vulgarizing it--something, both
more subtle and more comprehensive than our own equivalent,
which we recognize at once as the better thing of the two. Thus
'otherwise-minded,' which some American writers use with such quaint
force, is quite beyond our old 'contradictious' expressing the full
meaning of contradictious and adding a great deal more. But if we have
not hitherto had the word we have the thing, which is more to the
purpose; and foremost among the powers which rule the world may be
placed 'otherwise-mindedness' in its various phases of active
opposition and passive immobility--the contradictiousness which must
fight on all points and which will not assent to any. At home,
otherwise-mindedness is an engine of tremendous power, ranking next to
sulks and tears in the defensive armoury of women; while men for the
most part use it in a more aggressive sense, and seldom content
themselves with the passive quietude of mere inertness.

An otherwise-minded person, if a man, is almost always a tyrant and a
bully, with decided opinions as to his right of making all about him
dance to his piping--his piping never giving one of their own
measures. If a woman, she is probably a superior being subjected to
domestic martyrdom while intended by nature for a higher intellectual
life,--doomed to the drudgery of housekeeping while yearning for the
æsthetic and panting after the ideal. She is generally dignified in
her bearing and of a cold, unappeasable discontent. She neither scolds
nor wrangles, though sometimes, no rule being without its exception,
she is peevish and captious and degenerates into the commonplace of
the _Naggleton_ type. But in the main she bounds herself to the
expression of her otherwise-mindedness in a stately if dogged manner,
and shows a serene disdain for her opponents, which is a trifle more
offensive than her undisguised satisfaction with herself. Nothing can
move her, nothing beat her off her holding; but then she offers no
points of attack. She is what she is on principle; and what can you
say to an opposition dictated by motives all out of reach of your own
miserable little groundling ideas? Where you advocate expediency, she
maintains abstract principles; if you are lenient to weaknesses, she
is stern to sin; if you would legislate for human nature as it is, she
will have nothing less than the standard of perfection; and when you
speak of the absolutism of facts, she argues on the necessity of
keeping the ideal intact, no matter whether any one was ever known to
attain to it or not. But if she finds herself in different company
from your own looser kind--say with Puritans of a strongly ascetic
caste--then she veers round to the other side, on the ground of
fairness; and for the benefit of fanatics propounds a slip-shod
easygoing morality which shuffles beyond your own lines. This she
calls keeping out of extremes and discouraging exaggeration. This
latter manifestation however, is not very frequently the case with
women: the otherwise-minded among them being almost always of the
rigid and ascetic class who despise the pleasant little vanities, the
graceful frivolities, the loveable frailties which make life easy and
humanity delightful, and who take their stand on the loftiest, the
most unelastic, not to say the grimmest, ethics. They have had it
borne in on them that they are to defy Baal and withstand;
consequently they do defy him, and they do withstand, at all four
corners stoutly.

To be otherwise-minded naturally implies having a mind; and of what
use is intellect if it cannot see all through and round a subject, and
pick the weak places into holes? Hence the otherwise-minded are
uncompromising critics and terrible fellows at scenting their prey. As
is the function of certain creatures--vultures, crows, flies, and
others--so is that of these children of Zoilus when dealing with
subjects not understood, or only guessed at with more or less
blundering in the process.

Take one of the class at a lecture on the higher branches of a science
of which he has not so much as thoroughly mastered the roots, and
wherein this higher analysis offers certain new and perhaps startling
results. It would seem that the sole thing possible to him who is
ignorant of the matter in hand is to listen and believe; but your
otherwise-minded critic is not content with the tame modesty of
humbleness. What if the subject be over his head, cannot he crane his
neck and look? has he not common-sense to guide him? and may he not
criticize in the block what he cannot dissect in detail? At the least
he can look grave, and say something about the danger of a little
knowledge; and fallen man's dangerous pride of intellect; and his
absolute and eternal ignorance; and the lecturer not making his
meaning clear--as how should he when he probably does not understand
his own subject nor what he wanted to say?--and what becomes of
accepted truths if such things are to be received? Be sure of this,
that otherwise-mindedness must sling its stone, whether it knows
exactly what it is aiming at or not. It not unfrequently happens that
the stone is after the pattern of a boomerang, and comes back on the
slinger's own pate with sounding effect, convicting him of ignorance
if of nothing worse, and a love of opposition so great that it
destroys both his power of perceiving truth and the sense of his own
incapacity.

But the otherwise-minded is nothing if not superior to his company;
and truth is after all relative as well as multiform, and needs
continual nice adjustment to make it balance fairly. The great
representative assembly of humanity must have its independent members
below the gangway who vote with no party; and if we were all on the
right side the devil's advocate would have no work to do; so that even
otherwise-mindedness on the wrong side has its uses, and must not be
wholly condemned. For the world would fare badly without its natural
borers and hole-pickers, its finders-out of weak places, its stone
walls to resist assertion and advance; and ants and worms make good
mould for garden flowers.

The constitutionally otherwise-minded are the worst partizans in the
world and never take up a cause heartily--never with more than one
hand, that they may leave the other free for a bit of intellectual
prestidigitation if need be, when their audience changes its character
and complexion. The only time when they are devoted adherents is if
their own family is decidedly in the opposite ranks, when they come
out from among them with scrip and spear, and go over to the enemy
without failing a single button of the uniform. This is specially true
of young people and of women; both of whom call their natural love of
opposition by the name of religious principle or moral duty. Youths
just fresh from the schools, bent on the regeneration of mankind and
thinking that they can do in a few years what society has been
painfully labouring to accomplish ever since the first savage clubbed
his neighbour for stealing his hoard of roots or carrying off his own
private squaw, are sure to be intensely otherwise-minded and to
understand nothing of harmonious working with the old plant. Red
Republicans under the family flag of purple and orange; free-thinkers
in the church where the paternal High and Dry holds forth on Sundays
on the principle of the divine inspiration of the English translation
bound in calf and lettered _cum privilegio_; Romanists worshipping
saints and relics in the very heart of the Peculiar People who put no
trust in man nor works--we know them all; ardent, enthusiastic,
uncompromising and horribly aggressive; with the down just shading
their smooth young chins, and the great book of human life barely
turned at the page of adolescence. Yet this is a form of
otherwise-mindedness which, though we laugh at and are often annoyed
by it, we must treat gently on the whole. We cannot be cruel to a
fervour, even when insolently expressed, which we know the world will
tame so soon, and which at the worst is often better than the dead
level of conformity; even though its zeal is not unmixed with conceit,
and a burning desire for the world's good is not free from a few
slumbering embers of self-laudation and the 'last infirmity.'

In a house inhabited by the otherwise-minded--and one member of a
family is enough to set the whole ruck awry--nothing is allowed to go
smoothly or by default; nothing can be done without endless
discussion; and all the well-oiled casters of compromise, good-nature,
'it does not signify,' &c., by which life runs easily in most places
are rusted or broken. At table there is an incessant cross-fire of
objections and of arguments, more or less intemperately conducted and
never coming to a satisfactory conclusion. There are so many places
too, which have been rubbed sore by this perpetual chafing, that a
stranger to the secrets of the domestic pathology is kept not only in
a fever of annoyance, but in an ague of dread, at the temper shown
about trifles, and the deadly offence that seems to lurk behind quite
ordinary topics of conversation. Not knowing all that has gone before,
he is not prepared for the present uncomfortable aspect of things, and
in fact is like a boy reading algebra, understanding nothing of what
he sees, though the symbolizing letters are familiar enough to him.
The family quarrel about everything; and when they do not quarrel they
argue. If one wants to do something that must be done in concert, the
others would die rather than unite; and days, seasons and wishes can
never be got to work themselves into harmonious coalition. When they
are out 'enjoying themselves'--language is arbitrary and the sense of
words not always clear--they cannot agree on anything; and you may
hear them fire off scornful squibs of otherwise-mindedness across the
rows of prize flowers or in the intervals of one of Beethoven's
sonatas. And if they cannot find cause for disagreement on the merits
of the subject before them, they find it in each other. For
otherwise-mindedness is like the ragged little princess in the German
fairy tale, who proved her royal blood by being unable to sleep on the
top of seven feather-beds--German feather-beds--beneath all of which
one single bean had been placed as the test of her sensibility. Give
it but the chance of a scuffle, the ghost of a coat-tail to tread on,
an imaginary chicken-bone among the down, and you may be sure that the
opportunity will not be lost. When we are on the look-out for beans we
shall find them beneath even seven feather-beds; and when shillelahs
abound there will never be wanting the trail of a coat-tail across the
path. So we find when we have to do with the otherwise-minded who will
not take things pleasantly, and can never be got to see either beauty
or value in their surroundings. Let one of these have a saint for a
wife, and he will tell you saints are bores and sinners the only
house-mates to be desired. Let him change his state, and this time
pick up the sinner in longing for whom he has so often vexed the poor
saint's soul, and he will find domestic happiness to consist in the
companionship of a seraph of the most exalted kind. If he has Zenobia,
he wants Griselda; if Semiramis, King Cophetua's beggar-maid. The dear
departed, who was such a millstone in times past, becomes the emblem
of all that is lovely in humanity when a shaft has to be thrown at the
partner of times present; and the marriage that was notoriously
ill-assorted is painted in gold and rose-colour throughout, and its
discords are mended up into a full score of harmony when the new wife
or the new husband has to be snubbed, for no other reason than the
otherwise-mindedness which cannot agree with what it has.

Children and servants come in for their share of this uncomfortable
temper which reverses the old adage about the absent, and which, so
far from making these in the wrong, transfers the burden of blame to
those present and conveniently forgets its former litany of complaint.
No one would be more surprised than those very absent if they heard
themselves upheld as possessors of all possible virtues when,
according to their memory, they had been little better than
concretions of wickedness and folly in the days of their subjection to
criticism. They need not flatter themselves. Could they return, or if
they do return, to the old place, they will be sure to return to the
old conditions; and the praise lavished on them when they are absent,
by way of rebuke to those unlucky ones on the spot, will be changed
for their benefit into the blame and the rebuke familiar to them. In
fact no circumstances whatever touch the central quality of the
otherwise-minded. They must have something to bite, to grumble at, to
rearrange, at least in wish, if not in deed. If only they had been
consulted, nothing would have gone wrong that has gone wrong; and 'I
told you so' is the shibboleth of their order. It is gall and wormwood
to them when they are obliged to agree, and when, for very decency's
sake, they must praise what indeed offers no points to condemn. But
even when they get caught in the trap of unanimity they contrive to
say something quite unnecessary about evils which no one was thinking
of, and which have nothing to do with the case in point. 'But' is
their mystic word, their truncated form of the Tetragrammaton which
rules the universe; and whatever their special private denomination,
they all belong in bulk to the

    Sect whose chief devotion lies
    In odd perverse antipathies;
    In falling out with that or this,
    And finding somewhat still amiss.




_LIMP PEOPLE._


Vice is bad and malignant wickedness is worse, but beyond either in
evil results to mankind is weakness; which indeed is the pabulum by
which vice is fed and the agent by which malignity works. If every one
in this world had a backbone, there would not be so much misery nor
guilt as there is now; for we must give each individual of the 'cruel
strong' a large following of weaker victims; and it would be easy to
demonstrate that the progress of nations has always been in proportion
to the number of stiff backbones among them. Yet unfortunately limp
people abound, to the detriment of society and to their own certain
sorrow; molluscs, predestined to be the food of the stronger, with no
power of self-defence nor of self-support, but having to be protected
against outside dangers if they are to be preserved at all;--and
perhaps when you have done all that you can do, not safe even then,
and most likely not worth the trouble taken about them. Open the gates
for but a moment, and they are swept up by the first passer-by. Let
them loose from your own sustaining hand, and they fall abroad in a
mass of flabby helplessness, unable to work, to resist, to
retain--mere heaps of moral protoplasm, pitiable as well as
contemptible; perhaps pitiable because so contemptible. See one of
these poor creatures left a widow, if a woman--turned out of his
office, if a man--and then judge of the value of a backbone by the
miserable consequences of its absence. The widow is simply lost in the
wilderness of her domestic solitude, as much so as would be a child if
set in the midst of a pathless moor with no one to guide him to the
safe highway. She may have money and she may have relations, but she
is as poor as if she had nothing better than parish relief; and unless
some one will take her up and manage everything for her
conscientiously, she is as lonely as if she were an exile in a strange
land. She has been so long used to lean on the stronger arm of her
husband, that she cannot stand upright now that her support has been
taken from her. Her servants make her their prey; her children
tyrannize over her and ignore her authority; her boys go to the bad;
her girls get fast and loud; all her own meek little ideas of modesty
and virtue are rudely thrust to the wall; and she is obliged to submit
to a family disorder which she neither likes nor encourages, but which
she has not the strength to oppose nor the wisdom to direct. She may
be the incarnation of all saintly qualities in her own person, but by
mere want of strength she is the occasion by which a very pandemonium
is possible; and the worst house of a community is sure to be that of
a quiet, gentle, molluscous little widow, without one single vicious
proclivity but without the power to repress or even to rebuke vice in
others.

A molluscous man too, suddenly ejected from his long-accustomed
groove, where, like a toad embedded in the rock, he had made his niche
exactly fitting to his own shape, presents just as wretched a picture
of helplessness and unshiftiness. In vain his friends suggest this or
that independent endeavour; he shakes his head, and says he can't--it
won't do. What he wants is a place where he is not obliged to depend
on himself; where he has to do a fixed amount of work for a fixed
amount of salary; and where his fibreless plasticity may find a mould
ready formed, into which it may run without the necessity of forging
shapes for itself. Many a man of respectable intellectual powers has
gone down into ruin, and died miserably, because of this limpness
which made it impossible for him to break new ground or to work at
anything whatsoever with the stimulus of hope only. He must be
bolstered up by certainty, supported by the walls of his groove, else
he can do nothing; and if he cannot get into this friendly groove, he
lets himself drift into destruction.

In no manner are limp people to be depended on; their very central
quality being fluidity, which is a bad thing to rest on. Take them in
their family quarrels--and they are always quarrelling among
themselves--you think they must have broken with each other for ever;
that surely they can never forget or forgive all the insolent
expressions, the hard words, the full-flavoured epithets which they
have flung at one another; but the next time you meet them they are
quite good friends again, and going on in the old fluid way as if no
fiery storms had lately troubled the domestic horizon. Perhaps they
have induced you to take sides; if so, you may look out, for you are
certain to be thrown over and to have the enmity of both parties
instead of only one. They are much given to this kind of thing, and
fond of making pellets for you to shoot; when, after the shot, they
disclaim and disown you. They speak against each other furiously, tell
you all the family secrets and make them worse and greater than they
really are. If you are credulous for your own part you take them
literally; and if highly moral, you probably act on their accusations
in a spirit of rhadamanthine justice, and the absolute need of
rewarding sin according to its sinfulness. Beware; their accusations
are baseless as the wind, and acting on them will lead to your certain
discomfiture. The only safe way with limp people is never to believe
what they say; or, if you are forced to believe, never to translate
your faith into deeds nor even words; never to commit yourself to
partizanship in any form whatever. They do not intend it, in all
probability, but by very force of their weakness limp people are
almost invariably untruthful and treacherous. By the force too, of
this same weakness, they are incapable of anything like true
friendship, and in fact make the most dangerous friends to be found.
They are so plastic that they take the shape of every hand which holds
them; and if you do not know them well, you may be deceived by their
softness of touch, and think them sympathetic because they are fluid.
They leave you full of promises to hold all you have told them sacred,
and before an hour is out they have repeated to your greatest enemy
every word you have said. They had not the faintest intention of doing
so when they left you, but they 'slop about,' as the Americans say;
and sloppy folk cannot hold secrets. The traitors of life are the
limp, much more than the wicked--people who let things be wormed out
of them rather than intentionally betray them. They repent likely
enough; Judas hanged himself; but of what good is their repentance
when the mischief is done? Not all the tears in the world can put out
the fire when once lighted, and to hang oneself because one has
betrayed another will make no difference save in the number of victims
which one's own weakness has created.

Limp men are invariably under petticoat government, and it all depends
on chance and the run of circumstance whose petticoat is dominant. The
mother's, for a long period; then the sisters'. If the wife's, there
is sure to be war in the camp belonging to the invertebrate commander;
for such a man creates infinitely more jealousy among his womankind
than the most discursive and the most unjust. He is a power, not to
act, but to be used; and the woman who can hold him with the firmest
grasp has necessarily the largest share of good things belonging. She
can close or draw his purse-strings at pleasure. She can use his name
and mask herself behind his authority at pleasure. He is the undying
Jorkins who is never without a Spenlow to set him well up in front;
and we can scarcely wonder that the various female Spenlows who shoot
with his bow and manipulate his circumstances are jealous of each
other to a frantic pitch--regarding his limpness, as they do, as so
much raw material from which they can spin out their own strength.

As the mollusc has to become the prey of some one, the question simply
resolves itself into whose? the new wife's or the old sisters'? Who
shall govern, sitting on his shoulders? and to whom shall he be
assigned captive? He generally inclines to his wife, if she is younger
than he and has a backbone of her own; and you may see a limp man of
this kind, with a fringe of old-rooted female epiphytes, gradually
drop one after another of the ancient stock, till at last his wife and
her relations take up all the space and are the only ones he supports.
His own kith and kin go bare while he clothes her and hers in purple
and fine linen; and the fatted calves in his stalls are liberally
slain for the prodigals on her side of the house, while the dutiful
sons on his own get nothing better than the husks.

Another characteristic of limp people is their curious ingratitude.
Give them nine-tenths of your substance, and they will turn against
you if you refuse them the remaining tenth. Lend them all the money
you can spare, and lend in utter hopelessness of any future day of
reckoning, but refrain once for your own imperative needs, and they
will leave your house open-mouthed at your stinginess. To be grateful
implies some kind of retentive faculty; and this is just what the limp
have not. Another characteristic of a different kind is the rashness
with which they throw themselves into circumstances which they
afterwards find they cannot bear. They never know how to calculate
their forces, and spend the latter half of their life in regretting
what they had spent the former half in endeavouring to attain, or to
get rid of, as it might chance. If they marry A. they wish they had
taken B. instead; as house-mistresses they turn away their servants at
short notice after long complaint, and then beg them to remain if by
any means they can bribe them to stay. They know nothing of that clear
incisive action which sets men and women at ease with themselves, and
enables them to bear consequences, be they good or ill, with dignity
and resignation.

A limp backboneless creature always falls foul of conditions, whatever
they may be; thinking the right side better than the left, and the
left so much nicer than the right, according to its own place of
standing for the moment; and what heads plan and hands execute, lips
are never weary of bemoaning. In fact the limp, like fretful babies,
do not know what they want, being unconscious that the whole mischief
lies in their having a vertebral column of gristle instead of one of
bone. They spread themselves abroad and take the world into their
confidence--weep in public and rave in private--and cry aloud to the
priest and the Levite passing by on the other side (maybe heavily
laden for their own share) to come over and help them, poor sprawling
molluscs, when no man but themselves can set them upright.

The confidences of the limp are told through a trumpet to all four
corners of the sky, and are as easy to get at, with the very gentlest
pressure, as the juice of an over-ripe grape. And no lessons of
experience will ever teach them reticence, or caution in their choice
of confidants.

Not difficult to press into the service of any cause whatever, they
are the very curse of all causes which they assume to serve. They
collapse at the first touch of persecution, of misunderstanding, of
harsh judgment, and fall abroad in hopeless panic at the mere tread of
the coming foe. Always convinced by the last speaker, facile to catch
and impossible to hold, they are the prizes, the decoy ducks, for
which contending parties fight, perpetually oscillating between the
maintenance of old abuses and the advocacy of dangerous reforms; but
the side to which they have pledged themselves on Monday they forsake
on Tuesday under the plea of reconversion. Neither can they carry out
any design of their own, if their friends take it in hand to
over-persuade them.

If a man of this stamp has painted a picture he can be induced to
change the whole key, the central circumstance and the principal
figure, at the suggestion of a confident critic who is only a pupil in
the art of which he is, at least technically, a master. If he is
preaching or lecturing, he thinks more of the people he is addressing
than of what he has to say; and, though impelled at times to use the
scalping-knife, hopes he doesn't wound. Vehement advocates at times,
these men's enthusiasm is merely temporary, and burns itself out by
its own energy of expression; and how fierce soever their aspect when
they ruffle their feathers and make believe to fight, one vigorous
peck from their opponent proves their anatomy as that of a creature
without vertebræ, pulpy, gristly, gelatinous, and limp. All things
have their uses and good issues; but what portion of the general good
the limp are designed to subserve is one of those mysteries not to be
revealed in time nor space.




_THE ART OF RETICENCE._


Among other classifications we may divide the world into those who
live by impulse and the undirected flow of circumstance, and those who
map out their lives according to art and a definite design. These last
however, are rare; few people having capacity enough to construct any
persistent plan of life or to carry it through if even begun--it being
so much easier to follow nature than to work by rule and square, and
to drift with the stream than to build up even a beaver's dam. Now, in
the matter of reticence;--How few people understand this as an art,
and how almost entirely it is by the mere chance of temperament
whether a person is confidential or reticent--with his heart on his
sleeve or not to be got at by a pickaxe--irritatingly silent or
contemptibly loquacious. Sometimes indeed we do find one who, like
Talleyrand, has mastered the art of an eloquent reticence from alpha
to omega, and knows how to conceal everything without showing that he
conceals anything; but we find such a person very seldom, and we do
not always understand his value when we have him.

Any one not a born fool can resolve to keep silence on certain points,
but it takes a master-mind to be able to talk, and yet not tell.
Silence indeed, self-evident and without disguise, though a safe
method, is but a clumsy one, and to be tolerated only in very timid or
very young people. "Le silence est le parti plus sûr pour celui qui se
défie de soi-même," says Rochefoucauld. So is total abstinence for him
who cannot control himself. Yet we do not preach total abstinence as
the best order of life for a wise and disciplined person, any more
than we would put strong ankles into leg-irons, or forbid a rational
man to handle a sword. Besides, silence may be as expressive, as
tell-tale even, as speech; and at the best there is no science in
shutting one's lips and sitting mute; though indeed too few people
have got even so far as this in the art of reticence, but tell
everything they know so surely as water flows through a sieve, and are
safe just in proportion to their ignorance.

But there is art, the most consummate art, in appearing absolutely
frank, yet never telling anything which it is not wished should be
known; in being pleasantly chatty and conversational, yet never
committing oneself to a statement nor an opinion which might be used
against one afterwards--_ars celare artem_ being a true maxim in
keeping one's own counsel as well as in other things. It is only after
a long acquaintance with this kind of person that you find out he has
been substantially reticent throughout, though apparently so frank.
Caught by his easy manner, his genial talk, his ready sympathy, you
have confided to him not only all that you have of your own, but all
that you have of other people's; and it is only long after, when you
reflect quietly, undisturbed by the magnetism of his presence, that
you come to the knowledge of how reticent he has been in the midst of
his seeming frankness, and how little reciprocity there has been in
your confidences together. You know such people for years, and you
never really know more of them at the end than you did in the
beginning. You cannot lay your finger on a fact that would in any way
place them in your power; and though you did not notice it at the
time, and do not know how it has been done now, you feel that they
have never trusted you, and have all along carefully avoided anything
like confidence. But you are at their mercy by your own rashness, and
if they do not destroy you it is because they are reticent for you as
well as towards you; perhaps because they are good-natured; perhaps
because they despise you for your very frankness too much to hurt you;
but above all things not because they are unable. How you hate them
when you think of the skill with which they took all that was offered
to them, yet never let you see they gave back nothing for their own
part--rather by the jugglery of manner made you believe that they were
giving back as much as they were receiving! Perhaps it was a little
ungenerous; but they had the right to argue that if you could not
keep your own counsel you would not be likely to keep theirs, and it
was only kind at the time to let you hoodwink yourself so that you
might not be offended.

In manner genial, frank, conversational, sympathetic--in substance
absolutely secret, cautious, never taken off their guard, never
seduced into dangerous confidences, as careful for their friends as
they are for themselves, and careful even for strangers unknown to
them--these people are the salvation as they are the charm of society;
never making mischief, and, by their habitual reticence, raising up
barriers at which gossip halts and rumour dies. No slander is ever
traced to them, and what they know is as though it were not. Yet they
do not make the clumsy mistake of letting you see that they are better
informed than yourself on certain subjects, and know more about the
current scandals of the day than they choose to reveal. On the
contrary, they listen to your crude mistakes with a highly edified
air, and leave you elated with the idea that you have let them behind
the scenes and told them more than they knew before. If only they had
spoken, your elation would not have been very long-lived.

Of all personal qualities this art of reticence is the most important
and most valuable for a professional man to possess. Lawyer or
physician, he must be able to hold all and hear all without betraying
by word or look--by injudicious defence no more than by overt
treachery--by anger at a malicious accusation no more than by a smile
at an egregious mistake. His business is to be reticent, not
exculpatory; to maintain silence, not set up a defence nor yet
proclaim the truth. To do this well requires a rare combination of
good qualities--among which are tact and self-respect in about equal
amount--self-command and the power of hitting that fine line which
marks off reticence from deception. No man was ever thoroughly
successful as either a lawyer or physician who did not possess this
combination; and with it even a modest amount of technical skill can
be made to go a long way.

Valuable in society, at home the reticent are so many forms of living
death. Eyes have they and see not; ears and hear not; and the faculty
of speech seems to have been given them in vain. They go out and they
come home, and they tell you nothing of all they have seen. They have
heard all sorts of news and seen no end of pleasant things, but they
come down to breakfast the next morning as mute as fishes, and if you
want it you must dig out your own information bit by bit by
sequential, categorical questioning. Not that they are surly nor
ill-natured; they are only reticent. They are really disastrous to
those who are associated with them, and make the worst partners in the
world in business or marriage; for you never know what is going on,
nor where you are, and you must be content to walk blindfold if you
walk with them. They tell you nothing beyond what they are obliged to
tell; take you into no confidence; never consult you; never arrest
their own action for your concurrence; and the consequence is that you
live with them in the dark, for ever afraid of looming catastrophes,
and more like a captive bound to the car of their fortunes than like
the coadjutor with a voice in the manner of the driving and the right
to assist in the direction of the journey. This is the reticence of
temperament, and we see it in children from quite an early age--those
children who are trusted by the servants, and are their favourites in
consequence, because they tell no tales; but it is a disposition that
may become dangerous unless watched, and that is always liable to
degenerate into falsehood. For reticence is just on the boundary of
deception, and it needs but a very little step to take one over the
border.

That obtrusive kind of reticence which parades itself--which makes
mysteries and lets you see there are mysteries--which keeps silence
and flaunts it in your face as an intentional silence brooding over
things you are not worthy to know--that silence which is as loud as
words, is one of the most irritating things in the world and can be
made one of the most insulting. If words are sharp arrows, this kind
of dumbness is paralysis, and all the worse to bear because it puts it
out of your power to complain. You cannot bring into court a list of
looks and shrugs, nor make it a grievance that a man held his tongue
while you raved, and to all appearance kept his temper when you lost
yours. Yet all of us who have had any experience that way know that
his holding his tongue was the very reason why you raved, and that if
he had spoken for his own share the worst of the tempest would have
been allayed. This is a common manner of tormenting with reticent
people who have a moral twist; and to fling stones at you from behind
the shield of silence by which they have sheltered themselves is a
pastime that hurts only one of the combatants. Reticence, though at
times one of the greatest social virtues we possess, is also at times
one of the most disastrous personal conditions.

Half our modern novels turn on the misery brought about by mistaken
reticence; and though novelists generally exaggerate the circumstances
they deal with, they are not wrong in their facts. If the waters of
strife have been let loose because of many words, there have been
broken hearts before now because of none. Old proverbs, to be sure,
inculcate the value of reticence, and the wisdom of keeping one's own
counsel. If speech is silvern, silence is golden, in popular
philosophy; and the youth is ever enjoined to be like the wise man,
and keep himself free from the peril of words. Yet for all that, next
to truth, on which society rests, mutual knowledge is the best working
virtue, and a state of reticent distrust is more prudent than noble.

Many people think it a fine thing to live with their most intimate
friends as if they would one day become their enemies, and never let
even their deepest affections strike root so far down as confidence.
They rearrange La Bruyère's famous maxim, 'L'on peut avoir la
confiance de quelqu'un sans en avoir le coeur,' and take it quite the
contrary way; but perhaps the heart which gives itself, divorced from
confidence, is not worth accepting; and reticence where there is love
sounds almost a contradiction in terms. Indeed, the certainty of
unlimited confidences where there is love is one of the strongest of
all the arguments in favour of general reticence. For in nine cases
out of ten you tell your secrets and open your heart, not only to your
friend, but to your friend's wife, or husband, or lover; and
secondhand confidence is rarely held sacred if it can be betrayed with
impunity.

By an apparent contradiction, reticent people who tell nothing are
often the most charming letter-writers. Full of chit-chat, of
descriptions dashed off with a warm and flowing pen, giving all the
latest news well authenticated and not scandalous, and breathing just
the right amount of affection according to the circumstances of the
correspondents--a naturally eloquent person who has cultivated the art
of reticence writes letters unequalled for charm of manner. The first
impression of them is superb, enchanting, enthralling, like the
bouquet of old wine; but, on reconsideration, what have they said?
Absolutely nothing. This charming letter, apparently so full of
matter, is an answer to a great, good, honest outpour wherein you laid
bare that foolish heart of yours and delivered up your soul for
anatomical examination; and you looked for a reply based on the same
lines. At first delighted, you are soon chilled and depressed by such
a return, and you feel that you have made a fool of yourself, and that
your correspondent is laughing in his sleeve at your insane propensity
to gush. So must it be till that good time comes when man shall have
no need to defend himself against his fellows; when confidence shall
not bring sorrow nor trust betrayal; and when the art of reticence
shall be as obsolete as the art of fence, or the Socratic method.




_MEN'S FAVOURITES._


We often hear women speak with a certain curious disdain of one of
themselves as a 'gentlemen's favourite;' generally adding that
gentlemen's favourites are never liked by their own sex, and giving
you to understand that they are minxes rather than otherwise, and
objectionable in proportion to their attractiveness. They never can
understand why they should be so attractive, they say; and hold it as
one of the unfathomable mysteries of men's bad taste--the girls to
whom no man addresses half a dozen words in the course of the evening
being far prettier and nicer than the favourite with whom everybody is
talking, and for whom all men are contending. Yet see how utterly they
are neglected, while she is surrounded with admirers. But then she is
an artful little flirt, they say, who lays herself out to attract,
while the others are content to stay quietly in the shade until they
are sought. And they speak as if to attract men's admiration was a
sin, and not one of the final causes of woman as well as one of her
chief social duties.

There is always war between the women who are gentlemen's favourites
and those who are not; and if the last dislike the first, the first
despise the last, and go out of their way to provoke them; a thing not
difficult to do when a woman gives her mind to it. A gentlemen's
favourite is generally attacked on the score of her morality, not to
speak of her manners, which are pronounced as bad as they can be;
while, how pretty soever men may think her, her own sex decry her, and
pick her to pieces with such effect that they do not leave her a
single charm. She is assumed to be incapable of anything like real
earnestness of feeling; of anything like true womanliness of
sentiment; to be ignorant of the higher rules of modesty; to be fast
or sly, according to her speciality of style; and if you listen to her
dissector you will find in time that she has every fault incidental to
a frail humanity, while her noblest virtue is in all probability a
'kind of good nature' which does not count for much. In return, the
favourite sneers at the wallflower, whom she calls stupid and
spiteful, and whom she rejoices to annoy by the excess of her
popularity; nothing pleasing her so much as to make herself look worse
than she is in the way of men's liking--except it be to carry off the
one tup lamb belonging to a wallflower, and brand him as of her own
multitudinous herd. The quarrel is a deadly one as regards the
combatants, but it has very little effect on the 'ring;' for,
notwithstanding the faults and frailties of which they hear so much,
the men flock round the one and make her the public favourite of the
set. But, as the valid result, probably the prize match of the circle
chooses a stupid wallflower for life; and the favourite who has
ridiculed the successful prizeholder scores of times, and who would
give ten years of her life to be in her place, has to swallow her
confusion as she best can, and accept her discomfiture as if she liked
it.

If a men's favourite begins her career unmarried, she most frequently
remains unmarried to the end; fulfilling her mission of charming all
and fixing none till she comes to the age when her sex has no mission
at all. If she is married she has developed after the event; in her
nonage having been a shy if observant wallflower, quietly watching the
methods which later she has so ably applied, and taking lessons from
the very girls who queened it over her with that insolent supremacy
which, more than all else, she noted, envied and profited by. If she
marries while a favourite and in the full swing of her triumphs, she
probably gets pulled up by her husband (unless she is in India, or
wherever else women are at a premium and mistresses of the situation),
and subsides into the best and most domestic kind of 'brooding hen.'
However that may be, marriage, which is the great transforming agent
of a woman's character, seldom leaves her on the same lines as before;
though sometimes of course the foolish virgin developes into the
frisky matron, and the girl who begins life as a men's favourite ends
it as a mature siren.

There are two kinds of men's favourites--the bright women who amuse
them and the sympathetic ones who love them. But these last are of a
doubtful, what country people call 'chancy,' kind; women who show
their feelings too openly, who fall in love too seriously, or perhaps
unasked altogether, being more likely to irritate and repel than to
charm. But the bright, animated women who know how to talk and do not
preach; who say innocent things in an audacious way and audacious
things in an innocent way; who are clever without pedantry; frank
without impudence; quick to follow a lead when shown them; and who
know the difference between badinage and earnestness, flirting and
serious intentions--these are the women who are liked by men and whose
social success in no wise depends on their beauty.

Of one thing the clever woman who wants to be a men's favourite must
always be careful--to keep that half step in the rear which alone
reconciles men to her superiority of wit. She must not shine so much
by her own light as by contact with theirs; and her most brilliant
sallies ought to convey the impression of being struck out by them
rather than of being elaborated by herself alone--suggested by what
had gone before, if improved on for their advantage. Else she offends
masculine self-love, never slow to take fire, and gains an element of
hardness and self-assertion incompatible with her character of
favourite. Not that men dislike all kinds of self-assertion. The
irrepressible little woman with her trim waist and jaunty air, pert,
pretty, defiant, who laughs in the face of the burly policeman able to
crush her between his finger and thumb, and to whom ropes and barriers
are things to be skipped over or dived under, as the case may be--she
who is all cackle and self-assertion like a little bantam, is also
most frequently a men's favourite, and encouraged in her saucy
forwardness.

Then there is the graceful, fragile, swan-necked woman, who, a
generation ago, would have been one of the Della Cruscan school, all
poetry and music and fine feelings, and of a delicacy so refined that
broad-browed Nature herself had to be veiled and toned down to the
subdued key proper for the graceful creature to accept--but nowadays
this graceful creature plunges boldly into the midst of the most
tremendous realism, is an ardent advocate for woman's rights, and
perhaps goes out 'on the rampage,' on platforms and the like to
advocate doctrines as little in harmony with the kind of being she is
as would be a diet of horseflesh and brandy. She gets her following;
and men who do not agree with her delight to set her off on her
favourite topics, just as women like to see their little girls play
with their dolls and repeat to the harmless dummy the experiences
which have been real to themselves.

These two classes of self-assertion are mere plays which amuse men;
but when it comes to a reality, and is no longer a play--when a man is
made to feel small, useless, insignificant by the side of a woman--he
meets them with something he neither likes nor easily forgives; and if
such a woman had the beauty of Venus, she would not be a men's
favourite of the right sort; though some of course would admire her
and do their best to spoil and make a fool of her.

A men's favourite of the right sort must, among other things, be well
up in the accidence of flirting, and know how to take it at exactly
its proper value. She must be able to accept broad compliments, or
more subtle love-making, without either too serious an acceptance or
too grave a deprecation. This is a great art, and one that, more than
any other, puts men at their ease and sets the machinery of pleasant
intercourse in harmonious action. Never to show whether she is really
hit or not; never to give a fop occasion for a boast nor an enemy room
for a pitying sneer; to take everything in good part and to be as
quick in giving as in receiving; never to be off her guard; never to
throw away her arms; to conceal any number of foxes that may be
gnawing at her beneath her cloak--this kind of flirting, in which most
men's favourites are adepts, is an art that reaches almost the
dimensions of a science. And it is just that in which your very
intense, your very earnest and sincere, women are utter failures. They
know nothing of badinage, but take everything _au grand sérieux_; and
when you mean to be simply playful and complimentary, imagine you in
tragic earnest, and think themselves obliged to frown down a
compliment as a liberty; or else they accept it with a passionate
pleasure that shows how deeply it has struck.

These intense and very sincere women are not as a rule men's
favourites, unless they have other qualities of such a pleasant and
seductive kind as to excuse the enormous blunder they make of wearing
their hearts on their sleeves for drawing-room daws to peck at, and
the still greater blunder of confounding love-making with love. They
may be, and if they have nice manners and are good-tempered they
probably are, of the race of popular women; that is, liked by both men
and women; but they are not men's favourites _par excellence_, who
moreover are never liked by women at all.

Women are quite right in one thing, hard as it seems to say it:--men's
favourites, whom women dislike and distrust, are not usually good for
much morally. They are often false, insincere, superficial, and
possibly with a very low aim in life. And the men know all this, but
forgive it for the sake of the pleasantness and charm which is the
grace that shadows, or rather brightens, all the rest; having
oftentimes indeed a half-contemptuous tolerance for the sins of their
favourites as not expecting anything better from them. Grant that they
are false, that they sail perilously near the wind, are shifty and
untrustworthy--what of that? They are not favourites because of their
good qualities, only because of their pleasant ones; because of that
subtle _je ne sais quoi_ of old writers which stands one in such good
stead when one is at a loss for an analysis, and which is the only
term that expresses the strong yet indefinite charm which certain
women possess for men. It is not beauty; it is not necessarily
cleverness taken in the sense of education, though it must be a
keenness if not depth of intellect, and smartness if not the power of
reasoning; it certainly is not goodness; it is not always youth, nor
yet warmth of feeling--though all these things come in as
characteristics in their turn; but it is companionship and the power
of amusing. Still, what is it that creates this power, this
companionship? A smart, pert, flippant little minx, as women call her,
with a shrill voice and a saucy air, may be the men's favourite of one
set; a refined, graceful woman, speaking softly, and with pleading
eyes, may be the favourite of another; a third may be a blunt,
off-handed young person, given to speaking her mind so that there
shall be no mistake; a fourth may be a silent and seemingly a shy
woman, fond of sitting out in retired places, and with a reputation
for flirting of a quiet kind that sets the woman's fingers tingling.

There is no settled rule anyhow, and all kinds have their special
sphere of shining, according to circumstances. But whatever they may
be, they are useful in their generation and valuable for such work as
they have to do. Society is a miserably dull affair to men when there
are no favourites of any sort; where the womanhood in the room is of
the kind that herds together as if for protection, and looks askance
over its shoulder at the wolves in coats and beards who prowl about
the sheepfold of petticoats; where conversation is monosyllabic in
form and restricted in substance; where pleasant men who talk are
considered dangerous, and fascinating women who answer immoral; where
the matrons are grim and the maidens still in the bread-and-butter
stage of existence; and where young wives take matrimonial fidelity to
mean making themselves disagreeable to every man but their husband, on
the plea that one never knows what may happen, and that you cannot go
on with what you never begin.




_WOMANLINESS._


There are certain words, suggestive rather than descriptive, the value
of which lies in their very vagueness and elasticity of
interpretation, by which each mind can write its own commentary, each
imagination sketch out its own illustration. And one of these is
Womanliness; a word infinitely more subtle in meaning, with more
possibilities of definition, more light and shade, more facets, more
phases, than the corresponding word manliness. This indeed must
necessarily be so, since the character of women is so much more varied
in colour and more delicate in its many shades than that of men.

We call it womanliness when a lady of refinement and culture overcomes
the natural shrinking of sense, and voluntarily enters into the
circumstances of sickness and poverty, that she may help the suffering
in their hour of need; when she can bravely go through some of the
most shocking experiences of humanity for the sake of the higher law
of charity; and we call it womanliness when she removes from herself
every suspicion of grossness, coarseness, or ugliness, and makes her
life as dainty as a picture, as lovely as a poem. She is womanly when
she asserts her own dignity; womanly when her highest pride is the
sweetest humility, the tenderest self-suppression; womanly when she
protects the weaker; womanly when she submits to the stronger. To bear
in silence and to act with vigour; to come to the front on some
occasions, to efface herself on others, are alike the characteristics
of true womanliness; as is also the power to be at once practical and
æsthetic, the careful worker-out of minute details and the upholder of
a sublime idealism--the house-mistress dispensing bread and the
priestess serving in the temple. In fact, it is a very Proteus of a
word, and means many things by turns; but it never means anything but
what is sweet, tender, gracious and beautiful. Yet, protean as it is
in form, its substance has hitherto been considered simple enough, and
its limits have been very exactly defined; and we used to think we
knew to a shade what was womanly and what was unwomanly--where, for
instance, the nobleness of dignity ended and the hardness of
self-assertion began; while no one could mistake the heroic sacrifice
of self for the indifference to pain and the grossness belonging to a
coarse nature:--which last is as essentially unwomanly as the first is
one of the finest manifestations of true womanliness. But if this
exactness of interpretation belonged to past times, the utmost
confusion prevails at present; and one of the points on which society
is now at issue in all directions is just this very question--What is
essentially unwomanly? and, what are the only rightful functions of
true womanliness? Men and tradition say one thing, certain women say
another thing; and if what these women say is to become the rule,
society will have to be reconstructed _ab initio_, and a new order of
human life must begin. We have no objection to this, provided the new
order is better than the old, and the modern phase of womanhood more
beautiful, more useful to the community at large, more elevating to
general morality than was the ancient. But the whole matter hangs on
this proviso; and until it can be shown for certain that the latter
phase is to be undeniably the better we will hold by the former.

There are certain old--superstitions must we call them?--in our ideas
of women, with which we should be loth to part. For instance, the
infinite importance of a mother's influence over her children, and the
joy that she herself took in their companionship--the pleasure that it
was to her to hold a baby in her arms--her delight and maternal pride
in the beauty, the innocence, the quaint ways, the odd remarks, the
half-embarrassing questions, the first faint dawnings of reason and
individuality, of the little creatures to whom she had given life and
who were part of her very being--that pleasure and maternal pride were
among the characteristics we used to ascribe to womanliness; as was
also the mother's power of forgetting herself for her children, of
merging herself in them as they grew older, and finding her own best
happiness in theirs. But among the advanced women who despise the
tame teachings of what was once meant by womanliness, maternity is
considered a bore rather than a blessing; the children are shunted to
the side when they come; and ignorant undisciplined nurses are
supposed to do well for wages what mothers will not do for love.

Also we held it as womanliness when women resolutely refused to admit
into their presence, to discuss or hear discussed before them, impure
subjects, or even doubtful ones; when they kept the standard of
delicacy, of purity, of modesty, at a high level, and made men
respect, even if they could not imitate. Now the running between them
and men whose delicacy has been rubbed off long ago by the intimate
contact of coarse life is very close; and some of them go even beyond
those men whose lives have been of a quiet and unexperimental kind.
Nothing indeed, is so startling to a man who has not lived in personal
and social familiarity with certain subjects, and who has retained the
old chivalrous superstitions about the modesty and innocent ignorance
of women, as the easy, unembarrassed coolness with which his fair
neighbour at a dinner-table will dash off into thorny paths, managing
between the soup and the grapes to run through the whole gamut of
improper subjects.

It was also an old notion that rest and quiet and peace were natural
characteristics of womanliness; and that life had been not unfairly
apportioned between the sexes, each having its own distinctive duties
as well as virtues, its own burdens as well as its own pleasures. Man
was to go out and do battle with many enemies; he was to fight with
many powers; to struggle for place, for existence, for natural rights;
to give and take hard blows; to lose perhaps this good impulse or that
noble quality in the fray--the battle-field of life not being that
wherein the highest virtues take root and grow. But he had always a
home where was one whose sweeter nature brought him back to his better
self; a place whence the din of battle was shut out; where he had time
for rest and spiritual reparation; where a woman's love and gentleness
and tender thought and unselfish care helped and refreshed him, and
made him feel that the prize was worth the struggle, that the home was
worth the fight to keep it. And surely it was not asking too much of
women that they should be beautiful and tender to the men whose whole
life out of doors was one of work for them--of vigorous toil that they
might be kept in safety and luxury. But to the advanced woman it seems
so; consequently the home as a place of rest for the man is becoming
daily more rare. Soon, it seems to us, there will be no such thing as
the old-fashioned home left in England. Women are swarming out at all
doors; running hither and thither among the men; clamouring for arms
that they may enter into the fray with them; anxious to lay aside
their tenderness, their modesty, their womanliness, that they may
become hard and fierce and self-asserting like them; thinking it a
far higher thing to leave the home and the family to take care of
themselves, or under the care of some incompetent hireling, while they
enter on the manly professions and make themselves the rivals of their
husbands and brothers.

Once it was considered an essential of womanliness that a woman should
be a good house-mistress, a judicious dispenser of the income, a
careful guide to her servants, a clever manager generally. Now
practical housekeeping is a degradation; and the free soul which
disdains the details of housekeeping yearns for the intellectual
employment of an actuary, of a law clerk, of a banker's clerk. Making
pills is held to be a nobler employment than making puddings; while,
to distinguish between the merits of Egyptians and Mexicans, the
Turkish loan and the Spanish, is considered a greater exercise of mind
than to know fresh salmon from stale and how to lay in household
stores with judgment. But the last is just as important as the first,
and even more so; for the occasional pill, however valuable, is not so
valuable as the daily pudding, and not all the accumulations made by
lucky speculation are of any use if the house-bag which holds them has
a hole in it.

Once women thought it no ill compliment that they should be considered
the depositaries of the highest moral sentiments. If they were not
held the wiser nor the more logical of the two sections of the human
race, they were held the more religious, the more angelic, the better
taught of God, and the nearer to the way of grace. Now they repudiate
the assumption as an insult, and call that the sign of their
humiliation which was once their distinguishing glory. They do not
want to be patient, self-sacrifice is only a euphemism for slavish
submission to manly tyranny; the quiet peace of home is miserable
monotony; and though they have not come to the length of renouncing
the Christian virtues theoretically, their theory makes but weak
practice, and the womanliness integral to Christianity is by no means
the rule of life of modern womanhood. But the oddest part of the
present odd state of things is the curious blindness of women to what
is most beautiful in themselves. Granting even that the world has
turned so far upside down that the one sex does not care to please the
other, still, there is a good of itself in beauty, which some of our
modern women seem to overlook. And of all kinds of beauty that which
is included in what we mean by womanliness is the greatest and the
most beautiful.

A womanly woman has neither vanity nor hardness. She may be
pretty--most likely she is--and she may know it; for, not being a
fool, she cannot help seeing it when she looks at herself in the
glass; but knowing the fact is not being conscious of the possession,
and a pretty woman, if of the right ring, is not vain, though she
prizes her beauty as she ought. And she is as little hard as vain. Her
soul is not given up to ribbons, but neither is she indifferent to
externals, dress among them. She knows that part of her natural
mission is to please and be charming, and she knows that dress sets
her off, and that men feel more enthusiastically towards her when she
is looking fresh and pretty than when she is a dowdy and a fright.
And, being womanly, she likes the admiration of men, and thinks their
love a better thing than their indifference. If she likes men she
loves children, and never shunts them as nuisances, nor frets when
forced to have them about her. She knows that she was designed by the
needs of the race and the law of nature to be a mother; sent into the
world for that purpose mainly; and she knows that rational maternity
means more than simply giving life and then leaving it to others to
preserve it. She has no newfangled notions about the animal character
of motherhood, nor about the degrading character of housekeeping. On
the contrary, she thinks a populous and happy nursery one of the
greatest blessings of her state; and she puts her pride in the perfect
ordering, the exquisite arrangements, the comfort, thoughtfulness and
beauty of her house. She is not above her _métier_ as a woman; and she
does not want to ape the manliness she can never possess.

She has always been taught that, as there are certain manly virtues,
so are there certain feminine ones; and that she is the most womanly
among women who has those virtues in greatest abundance and in the
highest perfection. She has taken it to heart that patience,
self-sacrifice, tenderness, quietness, with some others, of which
modesty is one, are the virtues more especially feminine; just as
courage, justice, fortitude, and the like, belong to men.

Passionate ambition, virile energy, the love of strong excitement,
self-assertion, fierceness, an undisciplined temper, are all qualities
which detract from her ideal of womanliness, and which make her less
beautiful than she was meant to be. Consequently she has cultivated
all the meek and tender affections, all the unselfishness and thought
for others which have hitherto been the distinctive property of her
sex, by the exercise of which they have done their best work and
earned their highest place. She thinks it no degradation that she
should take pains to please, to soothe, to comfort the man who, all
day long, has been doing irksome work that her home may be beautiful
and her life at ease. She does not think it incumbent on her, as a
woman of spirit, to fly out at an impatient word; to answer back a
momentary irritation with defiance; to give back a Roland to his
Oliver. Her womanliness inclines her to loving forbearance, to
patience under difficulties, to unwearied cheerfulness under such
portion of the inevitable burden as may have been laid on her. She
does not hold herself predestined by nature to receive only the best
of everything, and deem herself affronted where her own especial cross
is bound on her shoulders. Rather, she understands that she too must
take the rough with the smooth; but that, as her husband's way in
life is rougher than hers, his trials are greater, his burden is
heavier, it is her duty--and her privilege--to help him all she can
with her tenderness and her love; and to give back to him at home, if
in a different form, some of the care he has expended while abroad to
make her path smooth.

In a word, the womanly woman whom we all once loved and in whom we
have still a kind of traditional belief, is she who regards the wishes
of men as of some weight in female action; who holds to love rather
than opposition; to reverence, not defiance; who takes more pride in
the husband's fame than in her own; who glories in the protection of
his name, and in her state as wife; who feels the honour given to her
as wife and matron far dearer than any she may earn herself by
personal prowess; and who believes in her consecration as a helpmeet
for man, not in a rivalry which a few generations will ripen into a
coarse and bitter enmity.




_SOMETHING TO WORRY._


A humane condescension to instinct has lately supplied ladies' lapdogs
with an ingenious instrument of mock torture, in the shape of an
india-rubber head which hops about the room on the smallest
persuasion, and squeaks shrilly when caught and worried. The animal
has thus the pleasure of mauling something which seems to suffer from
the process; while in reality it hurts nothing, but expends its
tormenting energy on a quite unfeeling creature, whose _raison d'être_
it is to be worried and made to squeak. It would be well for some of
us if those people who must have something to worry would be content
with a creature analogous to the lapdog's india-rubber head. It would
do just as well for them, and it would save us who feel a great deal
of real pain. Tippoo Sahib was a wise man when he caused his automaton
to be made, in which a tiger seemed to be tearing at the prostrate
figure of a wooden European, and the group gave out mingled growls and
groans at the turning of a handle in its side. It might have been a
dismal fancy perhaps; but the fancy was better than the reality, and
did quite as well for the purpose, which was that the monarch should
keep himself in good humour by the charm of something to worry.

There are few pains in life greater than the companionship of one of
those ill-conditioned people who must have something to worry, and who
are only happy with a grievance. No fortune, no fair possessions of
love nor beauty, nor what one would think must be the sources of
intense happiness, are spells to exorcise the worrying spirit--opiates
to allay the worrying fever. If in the midst of all they have to make
them blessed among the sons of men, there hops the squeaking ball, in
an instant every good thing belonging to them is forgotten, and there
is nothing in heaven and earth but that one obtruding grievance, that
one intolerable annoyance. Nothing is too small for them to make into
a gigantic evil and be offended at accordingly. They will not endure
with patience the minutest, nor the most inevitable, of the crosses of
life--things which every one has to bear alike; which no one can help;
and concerning which the only wisdom is to meet them with
cheerfulness, tiding over the bad time as quietly as possible till
things take a turn. Not they. They know the luxury of having something
to complain of; and they like to feel wronged. The wind is in the east
and they are personally injured; the rain has come on a pleasure day,
or has not come in a seed-sowing week, and they fret grimly and make
every one about them uncomfortable, as if the weather were a thing to
be arranged at will, and a disappointing day were the result of wilful
mismanagement. Life is a burden to them and all about them because the
climate is uncertain and the elements are out of human control. They
make themselves the most wretched of martyrs too, if they are in a
country they do not like; and they never do like the country they are
in. If down in a valley, they are suffocated; if in the plains or on a
table-land, they hate monotony and long for undulations; if they are
in a wooded district, they dread the damp and worry about the autumn
exhalations; if on a moor, who can live without green hills and
hedgerow birds? They are sorely exercised concerning clay and gravel;
and they find as many differences in the London climate within a
half-hour's walk as those who do not worry would find between St.
Andrews and Mentone. But they are no nearer the right thing wherever
they go; and the people belonging to them may as well bear the worry
at Brompton as at Hampstead, in Cumberland as in Cornwall, and so save
both trouble and expense.

These worrying folk never let a thing alone. If they have once found a
victim they keep him; crueller in this than cats and tigers which play
with their prey only for a time, but finally give the _coup de grâce_
and devour it, bones and all. But worrying folk never have done with
their prey, be it person or thing, and have an art of persistence--a
way of establishing a raw--that drives their poor victims into
temporary insanity. This persistency indeed, and the total
indifference to the maddening effect they produce, are the oddest
parts of the performance. They begin again for the twentieth time,
just where they left off; as fresh as if they had not done it all
before, and as eager as if you did not know exactly what was coming.
And it makes no kind of difference to them that their worrying has no
effect, and that things go on exactly as before--exactly as they would
have done had there been no fuss about them at all.

Granting however, that the old proverb about constant dropping and
inevitable wearing is fulfilled, and that worrying accomplishes its
end, it had better have been let alone; for no one was ever yet
worried into compliance with an uncongenial or abandonment of a
favourite habit, who did not make the worrier wish more than once that
he had let matters remain where he had found them. Imbued with the
unfortunate belief that all things and persons are to be ordered to
their liking, the worriers think themselves justified in flying at the
throat of everything they dislike, and in making their dislikes
peculiar grievances. The natural inclination of boys to tear their
clothes and begrime their hands, to climb up ladders at the peril of
their necks, and to make themselves personally unpleasant to every
sense, is a burden laid specially on them, if they chance to be the
parents of vigorous and robust youth. The cares of their family are
greater than the cares of any other family; and no one understands
what they go through, though every one is told pretty liberally. Hint
at the sufferings of others, and they think you unfeeling and
unsympathetic; try to cheer them, and you affront them; unless you
would offend them for life, you must listen patiently to the
repetition of their miseries continually twanged on one string, and
feign the commiseration you cannot feel.

It is impossible for these people to go through life in amity with all
men. They may be very good Christians theoretically; most likely they
are; according to the law of compensation by which theory and practice
so seldom go together; but the elementary doctrines of peace and
goodwill are beyond their power of translation into deeds. They have
always some one who is Mordecai to them; some one connected with them,
whose habits, nature, whose very being is a decided offence, and whom
therefore they worry without mercy. You never know these people to be
without a grievance. It may be husband or brother, friend or servant,
as it happens; but there is sure to be some one whose existence puts
them out of tune, and on whom therefore they revenge the discord by
continual worrying. Yet they would be miserable if their grievance
were withdrawn, leaving them for the time without a victim. It would
be only for a time indeed; for the exit of one would be the signal for
the entrance of another. The millennium to these people would be
intolerable dullness; and if they were translated into heaven itself,
they would of a certainty travesty the child's desire, and ask for a
little devil to worry, if not to play with. Women are sad sinners in
this way. Men who stay at home and potter about get like them, but
women, who are naturally nervous, and whose lives are spent in small
things, are generally more worrying than men; at least in daily life
and at home. Indeed, the woman who is more cheerful and hopeful than
easily depressed, and who does not worry any one, is the exception
rather than the rule, and to be prized as one would prize any other
rarity.

Children come in for a good deal of domestic worrying; and under
pretence of good management and careful education are used as mamma's
squeaking heads, which lie ever handy for a chase. Any one who has
been in a family where the mother is of a naturally worrying temper,
and where a child has a peculiarity, can appreciate to the full what
the propensity is. With substantial love at heart, the mother leads
the wretched little creature a life worse than that of the typical
dog; and makes of its peculiarity, whatever that may be, a personal
offence which she is justified in resenting and never leaving alone.
And if it be so with her children, much more is it with her husband,
for whom her tenderness is naturally less. Though concerning him she
evidently does not know her own mind; for when she has worried into
his grave the man who all his life was such a trial to her, such a
cross, perhaps such a brute, she puts on widow's weeds of the deepest
hue, and worries her sons and daughters with her uncomfortable
reaction in favour of 'poor papa,' whose virtues come to the front
with a bound. Or may be she continues the old song in a different key,
substituting compassion and a sublime forgiveness in place of her
former annoyance, but harping all the same on the old strain and
rasping the old sores.

Infelicitous at home, these worrying people are almost more than flesh
and blood can bear as travelling companions abroad. Always sure that
the train is going to start and leave them behind; that their landlord
is a robber and in league with brigands; that they will be dashed down
the precipice which tens of thousands have passed in safety before;
worrying about the luggage; and where is that trunk? and are you
_sure_ you saw the portmanteau safe? and have you the keys? and the
custom-house officers will find that bottle of eau-de-cologne and
charge both fine and duty for it; and have you changed the money? and
are you sure you have enough? and what are the fares? and you have
been cheated; and what a bill for only one breakfast and one
night!--and so on.

The person who undertakes a journey with constitutional worriers ought
to have nerves of iron and a head of ice. They will leave nothing to
the care of ordinary rule, let nothing go by faith. The luggage is
always being lost, according to them; accidents are certain to happen
half a dozen times a day; and the beds are invariably damp. Their
mosquito bites are worse than any other person's; and no one is
plagued with small beasts as they are. They worry all through the
journey, till you wish yourself dead twenty times at least before the
month is out; and when they come home, they tell their friends they
would have enjoyed themselves immensely had they been allowed, but
they were so much annoyed and worried they lost half the pleasure of
the trip. So it will be to the end of time. As children, fretful; as
boys and girls, impatient and ill-tempered; as men and women,
worrying, interfering, restless; as old people, peevish and
exacting--they will die as they have lived; and the world about them
will draw a deep breath of relief when the day of their departure
comes, and will feel their atmosphere so much the lighter for their
loss. Poor creatures! They are conscious of not being loved as they
love, and as perhaps theoretically, they deserve to be loved; but it
would be impossible, even by a surgical operation, to make them
understand the reason why; and that it is their own habit of
incessantly worrying which has chilled the hearts of their friends,
and made them such a burden to others that their removal is a release
and their absence the promise of a life of peace.




_SWEETS OF MARRIED LIFE._


Marriage, which most girls consider the sole aim of their existence
and the end of all their anxieties, is often the beginning of a set of
troubles which none among them expect, and which, when they come, very
few accept with the dignity of patience or the reasonableness of
common sense. Hitherto the man has been the suitor, the wooer. It has
been his _métier_ to make love; to utter extravagant professions; to
talk poetry and romance of an eminently unwearable kind; and to swear
that feelings, which by the very nature of things it is impossible to
maintain at their present state of fever heat, will be as lasting as
life itself and never know subsidence nor diminution. And girls
believe all that their lovers tell them. They believe in the
absorption of the man's whole life in the love which at the most
cannot be more than a part of his life; they believe that things will
go on for ever as they have begun, and that the fire and fervour of
passion will never cool down to the more manageable warmth of
friendship. And in this belief of theirs lies the rock on which not a
few make such pitiful shipwreck of their married happiness. They
expect their husbands to remain always lovers. Not lovers only in the
best sense, which of course all happy husbands are to the end of time,
but lovers as in the old fond, foolish, courting days. They expect a
continuance of the romance, the poetry, the exaggeration, the _petits
soins_, the microscopic attentions, the absorption of thought and
interest, the centralization of his happiness in her society, just as
in the days when she was still to be won, or, a little later, when,
being won, she was new in the wearing. And as we said before, a wife's
first trial, and her greatest, is when her husband begins to leave off
this kind of fervid love-making and settles down into the tranquil
friend.

As with children so is it in the nature of most women to require
continual assurances. Very few believe in a love which is not
frequently expressed; while the ability to trust in the vital warmth
of an affection that has lost its early feverishness is the mark of a
higher wisdom than most of them possess. To make them thoroughly happy
a man must be always at their feet; and they are jealous of
everything--even of his work--that takes him away from them, or gives
him occasion for thought and interest outside themselves. They are
rarely able to rise to the height of married friendship; and if they
belong to a reticent and quiet-going man--a man who says 'I love you'
once for all, and then contents himself with living a life of loyalty
and kindness and not talking about it--they fret at what they call
his coldness, and feel themselves shorn of half their glory and more
than half their dues. They refuse to believe in that which is not
daily repeated. They want the incense of flattery, the excitement of
love-making; and if these desires are not ministered to by their
husbands, the danger is that they will get some one else to
'understand' them and feed the sentimentality which dies of inanition
in the quiet serenity of home. Moonlights; a bouquet of the earliest
flowers carefully arranged and tenderly presented; the changing lights
on the mountain tops; the exquisite song of the nightingale at two
o'clock in the morning; all the rest of those vague and suggestive
delights which once made the meeting-places of souls, and furnished
occasion for delicious ravings, become by time and use and the wearing
realities of business and the crowding pressure of anxieties, puerile
and annoying to the ordinary Englishman, who is not a poet by nature.
When all the world was young by reason of his own youth, and the fever
of the love-making time was on him, he was quite as romantic as his
wife. But now he is sobering down; life is fast becoming a very
prosaic thing to him; work is taking the place of pleasure, ambition
of romance; he pooh-poohs her fond remembrances of bygone follies, and
prefers his pipe in the warm library to a station by the open window,
watching the sunset because it looks as it did on _that_ evening, and
shivering with incipient catarrh. All this is very dreadful to her;
women, unfortunately for themselves, remaining young and keeping hold
much longer than do men.

The first defection of this kind is a pang the young wife never
forgets. But she has many more and yet more bitter ones, when the
defection takes a personal shape, and some pretty little attention is
carelessly received without its due reward of loving thanks. Perhaps
some usual form of caress is omitted in the hurry of the morning's
work; or some gloomy anticipation of professional trouble makes him
oblivious of her presence; or, fretted by her importunate attentions,
he buries himself in a book, more to escape being spoken to than for
the book's own merits.

Many a woman has gone into her own room and had a 'good cry' because
her husband called her by her baptismal name, and not by some absurd
nickname invented in the days of their folly; or because, pressed for
time, he hurried out of the house without going through the
established formula of leave-taking. The lover has merged in the
husband; security has taken the place of wooing; and the woman does
not take kindly to the transformation. Sometimes she plays a dangerous
game, and tries what flirting with other men will do. If her scheme
does not answer, and her husband is not made jealous, she is revolted,
and holds herself that hardly-used being, a neglected wife. She cannot
accept as a compliment the quiet trust which certain cool-headed men
of a loyal kind place in their wives; and her husband's tolerance of
her flirting manner--which he takes to be manner only, with no evil in
it, and with which, though he may not especially like it, he does not
interfere--seems to her indifference rather than tolerance. Yet the
confidence implied in this forbearance is in point of fact a
compliment worth all the pretty nothings ever invented; though this
hearty faith is just the thing which annoys her, and which she
stigmatizes as neglect. If she were to go far enough she would find
out her mistake. But by that time she would have gone too far to
profit by her experience.

Nothing is more annoying than that display of affection which some
husbands and wives show to each other in society. That familiarity of
touch, those half-concealed caresses, those absurd names, that
prodigality of endearing epithets, that devoted attention which they
flaunt in the face of the public as a kind of challenge to the world
at large to come and admire their happiness, is always noticed and
laughed at; and sometimes more than laughed at. Yet to some women this
parade of love is the very essence of married happiness and part of
their dearest privileges. They believe themselves admired and envied
when they are ridiculed and scoffed at; and they think their husbands
are models for other men to copy when they are taken as examples for
all to avoid.

Men who have any real manliness however, do not give in to this kind
of thing; though there are some, as effeminate and gushing as women
themselves, who like this sloppy effusiveness of love and carry it on
into quite old age, fondling the ancient grandmother with grey hair as
lavishly as they had fondled the youthful bride, and seeing no want of
harmony in calling a withered old dame of sixty and upwards by the pet
names by which they had called her when she was a slip of a girl of
eighteen. The continuance of love from youth to old age is very
lovely, very cheering; but even 'John Anderson my Jo' would lose its
pathos if Mrs. Anderson had ignored the difference between the raven
locks and the snowy brow.

All that excess of flattering and petting of which women are so fond
becomes a bore to a man if required as part of the daily habit of
life. Out in the world as he is, harassed by anxieties of which she
knows nothing, home is emphatically his place of rest--where his wife
is his friend who knows his mind; where he may be himself without the
fear of offending, and relax the strain that must be kept up out of
doors; where he may feel himself safe, understood, at ease. And some
women, and these by no means the coldest nor the least loving, are
wise enough to understand this need of rest in the man's harder life,
and, accepting the quiet of security as part of the conditions of
marriage, content themselves with the undemonstrative love into which
the fever of passion has subsided. Others fret over it, and make
themselves and their husbands wretched because they cannot believe in
that which is not for ever paraded before their eyes.

Yet what kind of home is it for the man when he has to walk as if on
egg-shells, every moment afraid of wounding the susceptibilities of a
woman who will take nothing on trust, and who has to be continually
assured that he still loves her, before she will believe that to-day
is as yesterday? Of one thing she may be certain; no wife who
understands what is the best kind of marriage demands these continual
attentions, which, voluntary offerings of the lover, become enforced
tribute from the husband. She knows that as a wife, whom it is not
necessary to court nor flatter, she has a nobler place than that which
is expressed by the attentions paid to a mistress.

Wifehood, like all assured conditions, does not need to be buttressed
up; but a less certain position must be supported from the outside,
and an insecure self-respect, an uncertain holding, must be
perpetually strengthened and reassured. Women who cannot live happily
without being made love to are more like mistresses than wives, and
come but badly off in the great struggles of life and the cruel
handling of time. Placing all their happiness in things which cannot
continue, they let slip that which lies in their hands; and in their
desire to retain the romantic position of lovers lose the sweet
security of wives. Perhaps, if they had higher aims in life than those
with which they make shift to satisfy themselves, they would not let
themselves sink to the level of this folly, and would understand
better than they do now the worth of realities as contrasted with
appearances. And yet we cannot but pity the poor, weak, craving souls
who long so pitifully for the freshness of the morning to continue far
into the day and evening--who cling so tenaciously to the fleeting
romance of youth. They are taken by the glitter of things--love-making
among the rest; and the man who is showiest in his affection, who can
express it with most colour, and paint it, so to speak, with the
minutest touches, is the man whose love seems to them the most
trustworthy and the most intense. They make the mistake of confounding
this show with the substance, of trusting to pictorial expression
rather than to solid facts. And they make that other mistake of
cloying their husbands with half-childish caresses which were all very
well in the early days, but which become tiresome as time goes on and
the gravity of life deepens. And then, when the man either quietly
keeps them off or more brusquely repels them, they are hurt and
miserable, and think the whole happiness of their lives is dead, and
all that makes marriage beautiful at an end.

What is to be done to balance things evenly in this unequal world of
sex? What indeed, is to be done at any time to reconcile strength with
weakness, and to give each its due? One thing at least is sure. The
more thoroughly women learn the true nature of men, the fewer mistakes
they will make and the less unhappiness they will create for
themselves; and the more patient men are with the hysterical
excitability, the restless craving, which nature, for some purpose at
present unknown, has made the special temperament of women, the fewer
_femmes incomprises_ there will be in married homes and the larger the
chance of married happiness. All one's theories of domestic life come
down at last to the give-and-take system, to bearing and forbearing,
and meeting half way idiosyncrasies which one does not personally
share.




_SOCIAL NOMADS._


As there are wandering tribes which neither build houses nor pitch
their tents in one place, so there are certain social nomads who never
seem to have a home of their own, and who do not make one for
themselves by remaining long in any other person's. They are always
moving about and are to be met everywhere; at all sea-side places; at
all show places; in Switzerland, France, Italy and Germany; where they
live chiefly in _pensions_ at moderate charges, or in meagre lodgings
affiliated to a populous _table d'hôte_ much frequented by the
English. For one characteristic of social nomads is the strange way in
which they congregate together, expatiating on the delights of life
abroad, while seeing nothing but the outside of things from the centre
of a dense Britannic circle.

Another characteristic is their chronic state of impecuniosity, and
the desire of looking like the best on a fixed income of slender
dimensions. Hence they are obliged to organize their expenditure on a
very narrow basis, and therefore live in boarding-houses, _pensions_,
or wherever good-sized rooms, a sufficient table, and a constant
current of society are to be had at small individual cost. As they
are people who travel much, they can speak two or three languages, but
only as those who have learnt by ear and not by book. They know
nothing of foreign literature, and but little of their own, save
novels and the class which goes by the name of 'light.' Indeed all the
reading they accomplish is confined to newspapers, magazines and
novels. But at home, and among those who have not been to Berlin, who
have never seen Venice, and to whom Paris is a dream still to be
realized, they assume an intimate acquaintance with both the
literature and the politics of the Continent--especially the
politics--and laugh at the English press for its blindness and
onesidedness. They happen to know beyond all doubt how this
Correspondent was bought over with so much money down; how that one is
in the toils of such or such a Minister's wife; why a third got his
appointment; how a fourth keeps his; and they could, if they chose,
give you chapter and verse for all they say.

If they chance to have been in India some twenty or thirty years ago,
they will tell you why the Mutiny took place, and how the change of
Government works; and they can put their fingers on all the sore
places of the Empire, beginning with the distribution of patronage and
ending with the deficiency of revenue, as aptly as if they were on the
spot and had the confidence of the ruling officials. But in spite of
these little foibles they are amusing companions as a rule, if
shallow and radically ill-informed; and as it is for their own
interest to be good company, they have cultivated the art of
conversation to the highest pitch of which they are capable, and can
entertain if not instruct. When they aim at instruction indeed, they
are pretty sure to miss the mark; and the social nomad who lays down
the law on foreign statesmen and politics, and who speaks from
personal knowledge, is just the one authority not to be accepted.

Always living in public, yet having to fight, each for his own hand,
the manners of social nomads in _pensions_ are generally a strange
mixture of suavity and selfishness; and the small intrigues and crafty
stratagems going on among them for the possession of the favourite
seat in the drawing-room, the special attention of the head-waiter at
table, the earliest attendance of the housemaid in the morning, is in
strange contrast with the ready smiles, the personal flatteries, the
affectation of sympathetic interest kept for show. But every social
nomad knows how to appraise this show at its just value, and can weigh
it in the balance to a grain. He does not much prize it; for he knows
one characteristic of these communities to be that everybody speaks
against everybody else, and that all concur in speaking against the
management.

Still, life seems to go easily enough among them. They are all
well-dressed and for the most part have their tempers under control.
Some of the women play well, and some sing prettily. There are always
to be found a sufficient number of the middle-aged of either sex to
make up a whist-table, where the game is sound and sometimes
brilliant; and there are sure to be men who play billiards creditably
and with a crisp, clean stroke worth looking at. And there are very
often lively women who make amusement for the rest. But these are
smartly handled behind backs, though they are petted in public and
undeniably useful to the society at large.

The nomadic widow is by some odd fatality generally the widow of an
officer, naval or military, to whose rank she attaches an almost
superstitious value, thinking that when she can announce herself as
the relict of a major or an admiral she has given an unanswerable
guarantee and smoothed away all difficulties. She may have many
daughters, but more probably she has only one;--for where
olive-branches abound nomadism is more expensive than housekeeping,
and to live in one's own house is less costly than to live in a
boarding-house. But of this one daughter the nomadic widow makes much
to the community; and especially calls attention to her simplicity and
absolute ignorance of the evils so familiar to the girls of the
present day. And she looks as if she expects to be believed. Perhaps
credence is difficult; the young lady in question having been for some
years considerably in public, where she has learnt to take care of
herself with a skill which, how much soever it may be deserving of
praise, can scarcely claim to be called ingenuous. She has need of
this skill; for, apparently, she and her mother have no male relations
belonging to them, and if flirtations are common with the nomadic
tribe, marriages are rare. Poor souls; one cannot but pity them for
all their labour in vain, all their abortive hopes. For though there
is more society in the mode of life they have chosen than they would
have had if they had lived quietly down in the village where they were
known and respected, and where, who knows? the fairy prince might one
day have alighted--there are very few chances; and marriages among
'the inmates' are as rare as winter swallows.

The men who live in these places, whether as nomadic or permanent
guests, never have money enough to marry on; and the flirtations
always budding and blossoming by the piano or about the billiard-table
never by any chance fructify in marriage. But in spite of their
infertile experience you see the same mother and the same daughter
year after year, season after season, returning to the charge with
renewed vigour, and a hope which is the one indestructible thing about
them. Let us deal tenderly with them, poor impecunious nomads;
drifting like so much sea-wrack along the restless current of life;
and wish them some safe resting-place before it is too late.

A lady nomad of this kind, especially one with a daughter, is strictly
orthodox and cultivates with praiseworthy perseverance the society of
any clergyman who may have wandered into the community of which she is
a member. She is punctual in church-going; and the minister is
flattered by her evident appreciation of his sermons, and the
readiness with which she can remember certain points of last Sunday's
discourse. As a rule she is Evangelically inclined, and is as
intolerant of Romanism on the one hand as of Rationalism on the other.
She has seen the evils of both, she says, and quotes the state of Rome
and of Heidelberg in confirmation. She is as strict in morals as in
o

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